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.

My mother and the men believed that being a good man is an art, and being a bad man is a tragedy, for the world as much as for those who depend on the tragic man in question.

I heard them say again and again that the differences among them were great, but the reasons they had come to be so different were slight.

The only new objects in the house were the drinking glasses, “borrowed” from Dickens, and the Sears living room sofa, upholstered in a hypnotically hideous pattern of Liberty Bells, bald eagles, and faces of the Founding Fathers. We called it the bicentennial sofa. We were a few years ahead of ourselves, but Grandpa said the name was right and fitting, since the sofa looked as if George Washington had used it to cross the Delaware.

Life is all a matter of choosing which voices to tune in and which to tune out,

I felt ashamed to be so excited about my father’s visit. I knew it was wrong to welcome him, to think about him, to love him. As the man of my family, as my mother’s protector, I should have been prepared to demand money from my father the moment he showed his face. But I didn’t want to scare him off. I longed to see him even more than I longed to see my beloved Mets in person for the first time.

She walked quickly toward me and I wrapped my arms around her, startled by how much I loved her and how intensely I needed her. As I held my mother, clung to her, cried against her legs, it struck me that she was all I had, and if I didn’t take good care of her I’d be lost.

I spent hours with Mowgli and his adopted fathers, Baloo, the kindly bear, and Bagheera, the wise panther, both of whom wanted Mowgli to become a lawyer. At least that’s how I read it. They were always nagging Mowgli to learn the Law of the Jungle.

I didn’t hear the rest of what Colt said. I was too spellbound by his Yogi Bear impression. Every singsong sentence sounded to my ear like, “Hey, Boo Boo, let’s go find us some pic-a-nic baskets.”

Fuckembabe laughed and patted me on the head. “Chip off the old fooking blocker blick,” he said.

That was the day everything changed. I’d always thought there had to be a secret password into the men’s circle. Words were the password. Language legitimized me in the men’s eyes.

The men didn’t include me in every conversation, certainly, but they no longer treated me as a seagull that had wandered into their midst.

I knew that my mother was searching for romantic love, and though I didn’t understand what that was, I suspected it was similar to what I was searching for, a connection of some sort, and I worried that, as much as we cared for each other, loneliness was our true common bond.

“Every book represents a moment when someone sat quietly—and that quiet is part of the miracle, make no mistake—and tried to tell the rest of us a story.”

“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.”

Staring into the barroom, watching Uncle Charlie pour drinks, I felt suddenly at ease, knowing that as surely as Yale would reject me, Publicans would accept me. If I couldn’t have the light and truth of Yale, I could always count on the dark truth of the bar. And only occasionally, when I’d had too much to drink, or not enough, would I let myself wonder how it all might have been different if Yale had let me in.