The Tender Bar

by J.R. Moehringer

While I fear that we’re drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we’re defined by what embraces us.

He knew that Americans invest their bars with meaning and turn to them for everything from glamour to succor, and above all for relief from that scourge of modern life—loneliness.

My grandmother told me that Manhasset was one of those places where an old wives’ tale was accepted as fact—namely, that drinking at home was the mark of an alcoholic. So long as you drank publicly, not secretly, you weren’t a drunk. Thus, bars. Lots and lots of bars.

I used to say I’d found in Steve’s bar the fathers I needed, but this wasn’t quite right. At some point the bar itself became my father, its dozens of men melding into one enormous male eye looking over my shoulder, providing that needed alternative to my mother, that Y chromosome to her X.

Life is all a matter of choosing which voices to tune in and which to tune out, a lesson I learned long before most people, but one that took me longer than most to put to good use.

phone. I could hear the smoke in his voice, and thought his voice was smoke. This was how I pictured my father—as talking smoke.

Even at seven years old I understood that my mother’s silences and blank faces concealed an emotional cauldron. What seemed a lack of feeling was an overflow, a surge. My mother would slip behind her mask of feigned calm for the sake of discretion, as someone might step behind a screen when changing.

Over time there would be more security blankets, people and ideas and particularly places to which I would form unhealthy attachments. Whenever life snatched one from me, I would recall how gently my mother pared away my first.

Grandpa’s house sapped her energy to such an extent that she couldn’t take any pleasure in the compensations it held for me. She was so tired, she said. So terribly tired.

Though I kept my feelings bottled tight, eventually those feelings fermented, then fizzed to the surface in the form of odd behavior.

You were “Gaelic or garlic,” as one schoolmate told me, and I couldn’t admit, to him or myself, that I had both Irish and Italian ancestors.

Grandpa credited his etymological passion to his Jesuit schoolteachers, who, when they couldn’t make him memorize a word, beat it into him. Though the beatings worked, Grandpa believed they also caused his stutter. Priests made him love words, and made it hard for him to say words. My first example of irony.

Her words would be clipped, her movements hurried, as if there were something contagious in that room and we were both at risk. I didn’t give it much thought, because Grandma was always afraid of something. She set aside time each day for dread.

I didn’t understand why Grandma allowed Grandpa to mistreat her, because I didn’t understand the depth of her dependence on him, emotional and financial. Grandpa understood, and exploited it, keeping her in rags to match his own.

The bait shack shook with their guffaws and I could see the hangovers lifting from them like the morning fog lifting off the ocean.

Everything the men taught me that summer fell under the loose catchall of confidence. They taught me the importance of confidence. That was all. But that was enough. That, I later realized, was everything.

Tommy led me to the dugout and told me to sit down, he’d be right back. I perched on the edge of the bench, beside some players. I said hello. The players didn’t answer. I said I was allowed to be there, because my uncle’s friend was in charge of security. The players said nothing. Tommy returned and sat beside me. I told him those players were mad at me. “Them?” he said. “They’re from Puerto Rico. No habla inglés, kid.

“You must do everything that frightens you, JR. Everything. I’m not talking about risking your life, but everything else. Think about fear, decide right now how you’re going to deal with fear, because fear is going to be the great issue of your life, I promise you. Fear will be the fuel for all your success, and the root cause of all your failures, and the underlying dilemma in every story you tell yourself about yourself. And the only chance you’ll have against fear?

Follow it. Steer by it. Don’t think of fear as the villain. Think of fear as your guide, your pathfinder—your Natty Bumppo.”

Crawling into bed I clung to the mattress, which was rising slowly like a soufflé.

I didn’t confess that while riding the train some mornings I couldn’t stop imagining something bad happening to my mother, that I’d try to replace these fears with my old mantra, then berate myself for adhering to my boyhood superstitions, then tell myself that it was better to be safe than sorry, because maybe the mantra still had some magic left in it, and if I abandoned the mantra I might cause something bad to befall my mother.

Undoubtedly the admissions committee dropped applications like mine into a special basket with a little sign: WHITE TRASH.

Rushing to my first class, a literature seminar, I thought of all the times Uncle Charlie had told me to stop the clock, stay right there, freeze, usually at just those moments when I wanted life to hurry up. Now at last had come a time to savor.

I understood that my drinks were free, while drinks I bought for others were not. I was glad. I wanted to pay for Cager’s drink. I realized that the same rule must apply when a man offered to buy me a drink. Uncle Charlie would charge the man a dollar as a token. Money wasn’t the issue. It was the gesture, the timeless gesture. Buying another man a drink. The whole barroom was an intricate system of such gestures and rituals. And habits. Cager explained it all. He told me, for instance, that Uncle Charlie always worked the west end of the bar, under the stained-glass penis, because Uncle Charlie didn’t like to deal with waitresses putting in drink orders from the dining room at the east end. Joey D liked the waitresses, however, and therefore Joey D always worked the east end, under the stained-glass vagina. Somehow, Cager said, the conversation at each end of the bar reflected the stained-glass backdrop: bawdier and more aggressive at Uncle Charlie’s end, mellower and less linear at Joey D’s. I also noticed that everyone in the place had his or her own unique way of asking for a drink. Joey D, can you build on this concept? Goose, would you freshen up my martini once more before I go home to my miserable excuse for a husband? One man would ask for a refill by merely flicking his eyes at his empty glass, as if checking the speedometer while driving down a highway. Another would extend his hand and touch pointer fingers with Uncle Charlie, reenacting Michelangelo’s Creation...

I realized that the same rule must apply when a man offered to buy me a drink. Uncle Charlie would charge the man a dollar as a token. Money wasn’t the issue. It was the gesture, the timeless gesture. Buying another man a drink. The whole barroom was an intricate system of such gestures and rituals. And habits. Cager explained it all. He told me, for instance, that Uncle Charlie always worked the west end of the bar, under the stained-glass penis, because Uncle Charlie didn’t like to deal with waitresses putting in drink orders from the dining room at the east end. Joey D liked the waitresses, however, and therefore Joey D always worked the east end, under the stained-glass vagina.

This was big, this was going to change me forever, and this might just kill me if I wasn’t careful, because I was already desperate. Already I felt that I’d give anything to hold on to this feeling, this primal energizing force I’d been lacking for nineteen years.

“Make yourself happy,” the priest said. “That’s the way to make Mother happy.”

“People just don’t understand how many men it takes to build one good man. Next time you’re in Manhattan and you see one of those mighty skyscrapers going up, pay attention to how many men are engaged in the enterprise. It takes just as many men to build a sturdy man, son, as it does to build a tower.”

One was my mother, who wrote beautiful letters in which she promised there would be other Sidneys, but never another Yale. If I believed in love, she wrote, and she knew that I did, then I shouldn’t abandon my first love, Yale, to mourn my second, Sidney. I would look back on this time, my mother wrote, and remember remarkably little of it, except the extent to which I tried or did not try.

through the newsroom. He examined my shiner

They enjoyed having a couple of dozen desperate-to-please Ivy Leaguers running around the newsroom. It flattered their vanity to have us fetching their sandwiches and separating their carbons. Thus they simply pretended there was a training program, continued to entice copykids with the false hope of a promotion, then each month or so told another copykid that the secret committee had met and decided he or she wasn’t Times material. You’re welcome to stay, the copykid would be told, so long as you understand we’re never going to promote you. Upon hearing that they were “unpromotable,” the other word bandied about, most copykids quit. Ambitious and embittered, they left for other newspapers or embarked on new careers. The editors counted on this steady exodus to stave off mutiny and keep the charade fresh. Whenever another copykid left, scores of new candidates applied for the open slot, and in this way the corps of sandwich fetchers and carbon separators was perpetually replenished. The “training program” rolled on. No one was supposed to know about any of this, but there are no secrets in a newsroom.

Though proud of me when I succeeded, the men celebrated me when I failed.

I was the ideal candidate for writer’s block. All the classic defects converged in me—inexperience, impatience, perfectionism, confusion, fear. Above all I suffered from a naïve view that writing should be easy. I thought words were supposed to come unbidden. The idea that errors were stepping-stones to truth never once occurred to me, because I’d absorbed the ethos of the Times, that errors were nasty little things to be avoided, and misapplied that ethos to the novel I was attempting. When I wrote something wrong I always took it to mean that something was wrong with me, and when something was wrong with me I lost my nerve, my focus, and my will.

The first step in learning, I decided, was unlearning, casting off old habits and false assumptions. No one had ever explained this to me, but during my tryout it became obvious. On deadline there was no time for old habits, no time to do what I normally did before writing—making lists of big words and worrying about how I would sound. There was only time for facts, and so the unlearning happened by necessity, almost by force. Before writing a story for the Times I’d take a deep breath and tell myself to tell the truth, and I would find the words, or they would find me. I didn’t have any illusions. I wasn’t writing poetry. I wasn’t writing very well at all. But at least what I saw each morning under my byline was different. There was a clarity about it, an authority, which I’d never managed to achieve before, certainly not while working on my Publicans novel.

The summer heat had lifted and it was one of those August afternoons that seems like a trailer for the movie of fall.

I didn’t know why the storm obsessed me, why I dreaded it as much as people who lived on stilt houses in the Outer Banks. Maybe it was lack of sleep, maybe it was living in a water closet, maybe it was being forced to shower in terror, but I let Hurricane Hugo become a metaphor for my life, and then I let it consume my life. As if its low-pressure system had collided with my high pressure, the storm gathered up all my unhappiness about McGraw and Aunt Ruth and Sidney and the Times and focused it into one tight eye. From morning until night I could think of nothing but Hugo.

saw that we must lie to ourselves now and then, tell ourselves that we’re capable and strong, that life is good and hard work will be rewarded, and then we must try to make our lies come true. This is our work, our salvation, and this link between lying and trying was one of my mother’s many gifts to me, the truth that always lay just beneath her lies.

All this searching and longing for the secret of being a good man, and all I needed to do was follow the example of one very good woman.