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Most of all we went there when we needed to be found.
Long before it legally served me, the bar saved me. It restored my faith when I was a boy, tended me as a teenager, and when I was a young man the bar embraced me. 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. Naturally I embraced the bar right back, until one night the bar turned me away, and in that final abandonment the bar saved my life.
Manhasset quickly came to see Steve’s bar as the bar. Just as we said The City to mean New York City, and The Street to mean Wall Street, we always said The Bar, presumptively, and there was never any confusion about which bar we meant.
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.
Had I grown up beside a river or an ocean, some natural avenue of self-discovery and escape, I might have mythologized it. Instead I grew up 142 steps from a glorious old American tavern, and that has made all the difference.
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.
Rolling onto my side, away from my mother, I promised her that with my first paycheck as a lawyer I would send her to college. I heard a gasp, or a gulp, as if she were fighting her way up from the bottom of the ocean, and then I felt her lips on the back of my head.
Manhood is mimesis. To be a man, a boy must see a man.
Somewhere in that white noise is your old man.
I couldn’t help seeing the men as exotic animals, when I wasn’t seeing them as different archetypes of dangerous men. When they carried their beach chairs under their arms, I saw gangsters carrying violin cases. When flashes of light went off around their heads, the sun glinting off the ocean, I saw a platoon of soldiers walking into a burst of artillery. I knew that morning that I’d follow the men anywhere. Into battle. Into the jaws of hell.
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. After decoding the Wordy Gurdy I was no longer the group mascot. 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 went from being a vague presence to a real person. Uncle Charlie no longer jumped a foot in the air every time he found me standing beside him, and the other men took more careful notice of me, talked to me,
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what’s going on, they said, when you can demand, “What the fuck?” They demonstrated the many verbal recipes in which “fuck” was the main ingredient. A burger at Gilgo, for instance, was twice as tasty when it was a “Gilgo fucking burger.”
I wanted to tell Jedd about my fights in school, my crush on a girl named Helen, my hatred of my name and how no one would talk to me or eat lunch with me because I was new and sounded like a member of the Gambino crime family.
My days were controlled by teachers, my future was in the hands of heredity and luck. Bill and Bud promised, however, that my brain was my own and always would be.
But it was the other way around. They had ripped the cover off me.
There couldn’t be too many bars in the world, I thought, where a man acted out a scene from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel when he wanted an Amstel Light.
Curiously, the men didn’t think twice about my note taking. They acted as though they had been wondering when someone was going to start recording their hard-won wisdom.
