The Tender Bar

by J.R. Moehringer

Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart Push in their tides —Dylan Thomas, “Light breaks where no sun shines”

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. My mother didn’t know she was competing with the men of the bar, and the men didn’t know they were vying with her.

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. Though my mother first introduced me to this idea, Steve’s bar was where I saw its truth demonstrated daily.

A lesson, a gesture, a story, a philosophy, an attitude—I took something from every man in Steve’s bar. I was a master at “identity theft” when that crime was more benign. I became sarcastic like Cager, melodramatic like Uncle Charlie, a roughneck like Joey D. I strived to be solid like Bob the Cop, cool like Colt, and to rationalize my rage by telling myself that it was no worse than the righteous wrath of Smelly.

The bar fostered in me the habit of turning each person who crossed my path into a mentor, or a character, and I credit the bar, and blame it, for my becoming a reflection, or a refraction, of them all.

For me the bar was both. My most luxuriant cave, my most perilous mountain. And its men, though cavemen at heart, were my Sherpas. I loved them, deeply, and I think they knew. Though they had experienced everything—war and love, fame and disgrace, wealth and ruin—I don’t think they ever had a boy look at them with such shining, worshipful eyes. My devotion was something new to them, and I think it made them love me, in their way, which was why they kidnapped me when I was eleven.

At a tender age, standing in Dickens, I decided that life is a sequence of romances, each new romance a response to a previous romance. But I was only one of many romantics in Steve’s bar who had reached this conclusion, who believed in this chain reaction of love. It was this belief, as much as the bar, that united us, and this is why my story is just one strand in the cord that braided all our love stories together.

Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For it is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice. —Elias Canetti, Notes from Hampstead

If a man can chart with any accuracy his evolution from small boy to barfly, mine began on a hot summer night in 1972. Seven years old, driving through Manhasset with my mother, I looked out the window and saw nine men in orange softball uniforms racing around Memorial Field, the silhouette of Charles Dickens silk-screened in black on their chests. “Who is that?” I asked my mother. “Some men from Dickens,” she said. “See your Uncle Charlie? And his boss, Steve?”

“Why do those men act so silly?” I asked my mother. “They’re just—happy.” “About what?” She looked at the men, thinking. “Beer, sweetheart. They’re happy about beer.”

From then on, whenever I smelled a keg of Schaeffer, a bottle of Aqua Velva, a freshly oiled Spalding baseball glove, a smoldering Lucky Strike, a flask of Vitalis, I would be there again, beside my mother, gazing at those beery giants stumbling around the diamond.

My mother and I would have left, gladly, but we had nowhere else to go. She made very little money, and she got none from my father, who wanted no part of his wife and only child. He was a hard case, my father, an unstable mix of charm and rage, and my mother had no choice but to leave him when I was seven months old. He retaliated by disappearing, and withholding all help.

I didn’t know what my father looked like. I only knew what he sounded like, and this I knew too well. A popular rock ’n’ roll disc jockey, my father would speak each day into a large microphone somewhere in New York City, and his plummy baritone would fly down the Hudson River, tack across Manhasset Bay, zoom up Plandome Road and burst a millisecond later from the olive green radio on Grandpa’s kitchen table. My father’s voice was so deep, so ominous, it made my ribs vibrate and the utensils tremble.

I became a prodigy at selective listening, which I thought was a gift, until it proved to be a curse. 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.

Grandpa changed. He wasn’t on his best behavior, he was on someone’s else’s behavior. He got out of the Pinto as though stepping from a limousine at the Academy Awards, and walked into the school as if he’d endowed the joint. I fell in alongside him and as we met the first wave of teachers and fathers, Grandpa put a hand lightly on my shoulder and turned into Clark Gable. His stutter disappeared, his manner softened.

I introduced him to Mrs. Williams and thought within minutes that she might have a crush on the old gent. “We’re expecting big things from JR,” she gushed. “He’s got his mother’s brains,” Grandpa said, clasping his hands behind his back, standing ramrod straight, as if a medal were about to be pinned on his chest. “I’d rather see him concentrate on the baseball. You know, this boy has a rifle for an arm. He could play third base for the Mets someday.

They taught me how to grip a curveball, how to swing a nine iron, how to throw a spiral, how to play seven-card stud. They taught me how to shrug, how to frown, how to take it like a man. They taught me how to stand and promised me that a man’s posture is his philosophy. They taught me to say the word “fuck,” gave me this word as if it were a pocketknife or a good suit of clothes, something every boy should have.

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.

I heard rustling, scurrying, and the door flew open. Before me stood a man in corduroy pants and a checked shirt, his black knit tie at half-mast. His eyeglasses were covered with the same fine dust that covered everything in the store, and he was holding an unlit cigarette. “Help you?” he said. “I just thought I should let you know that some customers were waiting to pay.” “Really?” We turned and looked at the cash register. “I don’t see anyone,” he said. “They left.”

At the mention of “us” a second man appeared. He was taller than the first, thinner, and his glasses were much cleaner. They were thick black Buddy Holly glasses, and their lenses sparkled under the fluorescent lights. He wore a tennis shirt with a tie wider and more outdated than the first man’s. I’d never seen anyone wear a tie with a tennis shirt. “Who’s that?” he said, looking at me.

I asked if there might be a position open for someone to stand at the cash register and take money in the afternoons. “How old are you?” the first man said. “Thirteen. I’ll be fourteen next—” “Ever work in a bookstore?” the second man said. “That doesn’t matter,” the first man said. “Hold on.” He shut the door and I heard them whispering furiously. When the door opened again they were smiling. “Can you be here by two o’clock?” the first man said. “School lets out at three.” “Fine. We’ll work out your schedule later.”

We all shook hands and the first man introduced himself as Bill, the manager, the second as Bud, the assistant manager. Bill said he could give me twenty hours each week, at $2.65 an hour—a fortune. I thanked him profusely and shook his hand again, then went to shake Bud’s hand, but he’d disappeared behind the door.

“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.”

That night over dinner I told my mother two things. I wanted to save up and buy Bill a new lawn chair for Christmas. And I’d decided to apply to Yale. I tried to make it sound like my own decision, but she got me to recount my discussion with Bill and Bud. “You charmed them,” she said with a half smile. “What do you mean?” “I knew you would.” But it was the other way around. They had ripped the cover off me.

Before we saw Yale we heard it. As we pulled into New Haven the bells were ringing in Harkness Tower. I almost couldn’t bear how beautiful they sounded. I stuck my head out of the car and thought, Yale has a voice, and it’s speaking to me. Something inside me answered to those bells, some explosive mix of poverty and naïveté. I was already prone to see everything I admired as sacred, and the bells exploited this delusion, casting a hallowed aura over the campus.

My mother asked me to speak, to put into words what was upsetting me. I didn’t want to say aloud that I would give anything to go to Yale, that life wouldn’t be worth living if I couldn’t get in, but that I surely would not get in, because we weren’t the “getting in” kind. I didn’t have to say. My mother squeezed my hand. “We’ll get in,” she said.

My mother was concerned for my mental state. She handed me a gift she’d bought me in a souvenir shop, a letter opener with the Yale insignia. “To open your acceptance letter with,” she said.

My father—as a grown man, as a father—understood better than I what he’d done. I saw this in his face, and heard it in his voice, without recognizing it for what it was. I would recognize it years later, when I knew much more about guilt and self-loathing, and how they make a man look and sound.

I heard a knock on the window. My father was peering in, making a motion for me to roll down the window. Obviously he too felt something profound should be said. I leaned over and cranked the handle. “JR,” he said, as the glass lowered, “I just need to tell you one thing.” “Yes?” “You drive like nuns fuck.”

To spite her, I went back into my bedroom and batted out a slapdash essay with not one big word, just a plain and simple description of working at the bookstore with Bill and Bud, how they taught me to read by giving me bagfuls of books and talking with me patiently about literature and language. I wrote about how they transmitted their enthusiasm for books, and how I saw Yale as an enlargement of this experience.

I grabbed her and danced her around the living room, in and out of the kitchen, and then we sat side by side at the table and read the letter over and over. I shouted the letter, she sang the letter, and finally we fell silent. We couldn’t say anything else. We didn’t dare, and we didn’t need to. We both believed in words, but there were only three words for this day, this feeling. We got in.

“For the true author of the subjugation of a people is not so much the immediate agent as the power which permits it having the means to prevent it.” No matter how many times I read that sentence it didn’t make any sense, and now I just walked around chewing on it, muttering it to myself, like Joey D.

“Sorry. Bad form, I guess, talking to a priest about a girl.” “Nonsense. That’s all I hear about. Love and death.” “Oh. Right. Priests and bartenders.” “And hairdressers.” He ran his hand across his scalp. “Or so I’m told. Let me guess. First love?” “Yes.”

“I’d rather write other people’s stories.” “Why not your own?” “I wouldn’t know where to start.” “Well there is something to that. And there is a magic about newspapers, I’ll grant you. I do love picking up the Times each morning and seeing all that teeming life.” “Tell that to my mother.” “She’ll be happy if you follow your heart. And if you graduate.”

“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.”

Cager tapped me on the shoulder. He asked what subject I’d chosen for a major. History, I said. He asked why. I told him one of my professors had said that history is the narrative of people searching for a place to go, and I liked that idea.

In one of the mirrored music boxes for sale in Home Fashions I caught a glimpse of myself. That looks like me, but it can’t be me, because I’m wearing an apron and holding a feather duster and standing in the subbasement of Lord & Taylor. Yale in May, Home Fashions in June.

I thought of my fellow Yalies, like Jedd Redux and Bayard. I imagined the careers they were launching, the exciting lives they were beginning to build. The way my luck was going one of them was bound to get a flat on Shelter Rock Road and stop into Lord & Taylor to use the phone, and there I’d be, aproned, gelded, up to my neck in scented soaps.

I told her that the methods used by the Waterford factory in Ireland dated to the time of the Druids. I told her about the bells that chimed each day at the Waterford Castle (I was describing Harkness Tower) and assured her that each piece of Waterford was unique, like a snowflake, like a human soul. I didn’t know what would come out of my mouth next, and I was just as anxious as the customer to find out.

I lied eloquently, profligately, shamelessly. I lied my ass off, lied my apron off, and through lying I felt that I reclaimed some portion of my dignity. The customer bought six hundred dollars’ worth of Waterford, making me high seller for the day in Home Fashions. Apparently this was a feat without precedent.

But there was something more worrisome about Home Fashions, more horrible. More shameful. I liked it. All those nights peering into windows around Manhasset, all that pining after fine homes and nice things, had turned me into some kind of Home Fashions savant. In the deepest recesses of my subconscious I’d developed a fetish for Home Fashions, a nauseating innate talent.

Even when I didn’t try I sold the stuff like no one else. In fact, not trying was the key. The less I tried, the better I did, and the more sick pleasure I got from it. I took to that apron like a dirt mule to a plow.

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.

I’d vowed to avoid Publicans during my tryout. I tried not to think too much about this vow. I didn’t want to admit that the bar could be an obstacle to success, just as I didn’t want to examine too closely my difficulty unwinding at the end of a long day. Lying awake at four in the morning, listening to Louie fire up the griddle, I’d ask myself why I was so hot-wired. It wasn’t just the absence of alcohol, and it wasn’t just stress. Something else was going on. I wondered if it was hope.

I learned to relax on deadline. I even began to enjoy myself, and gained some insight into what had gone wrong at Yale. The first step in learning, I decided, was unlearning, casting off old habits and false assumptions.

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 ...

I needed the quiet times at Publicans. Some of my fondest memories are those dreary, rainy Sunday afternoons, just after my tryout, the barroom empty, a few people having brunch in the back. I’d eat a plate of eggs and read the book review while Mapes, the Sunday bartender, rinsed glasses in soapy water. I’d feel as if I’d walked into my favorite Hopper painting, Nighthawks.

“I hate when people ask what a book is about. People who read for plot, people who suck out the story like the cream filling in an Oreo, should stick to comic strips and soap operas. What’s it about? Every book worth a damn is about emotions and love and death and pain. It’s about words. It’s about a man dealing with life. Okay?”

Dalton walked in. He was waving a first edition of The Ginger Man, which he’d borrowed from Uncle Charlie. “‘Today a rare sun of spring,’” he shouted in my ear. “That’s the opening line of this novel. That’s poetry, Asshole. That’s the English goddamn language. I love you, Asshole, but honestly, you’ll never write a sentence that good.” “No argument here,” I said.

Steve’s true character was revealed at his funeral, and it was Jimbo’s eulogy that made me see. Steve had been a father to Jimbo, and one way or another he was a father to us all. Even I, who didn’t know Steve all that well, was a son in his extended family. A publican by trade, Steve was a patriarch at heart, and maybe that was why he was so intent on naming us. Maybe that was why Uncle Charlie lay propped against a headstone, and why every man from Publicans looked less like a mourner that day than an orphan.