The Tender Bar

by J.R. Moehringer

In the time it took a man to fall down, Publicans had devolved from a sanctuary to a prison, as sanctuaries so often do.

I 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.

I’d been so focused on getting in, I’d failed to appreciate my mother’s genius for getting out. Sitting forward on the bicentennial sofa and looking into her green-brown eyes I understood that every virtue I associated with manhood—toughness, persistence, determination, reliability, honesty, integrity, guts—my mother exemplified.

I grasped the idea fully and put it into words for the first time. 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.

I was on my own. No one to worship, no one to imitate. I didn’t regret all my illusions, and I surely didn’t shed them all in that airport men’s room. Some would take years to pare away, others were permanent. But the work had begun. Your father is not a good man, but you are not your father. Saying this to the young man in the mirror with the shaving-cream beard, I felt independent. Free.

While Sinatra’s voice echoed off the sheer slopes of rock, I was perfectly content to sit on the roof of this unavailing star and savor the sun. I didn’t care how much time we had until it disappeared behind the mountains. For one beautiful moment—and who could ask anything more of life?—I needed and wanted for nothing.

I wondered if he’d died for our sins. Had Steve lived, I’d have gone on living in his bar, and maybe a bar in Manhasset wasn’t the best place for me after all. An old-timer at Publicans used to tell me that drinking is the only thing you don’t get better at the more you do it, and when I left Publicans the sensibleness of that statement came home to me at last.

I didn’t start with the question, Who am I? Mainly because it looked unanswerable. The science is scary: We’re almost certainly not who we think we are. At best, the self is a useful construct, at worst it’s a psychotic delusion; either way, it’s a fiction, because it’s based largely on memory, which is hugely unreliable and prey to the ebb of various forces, like time and health, to name just two.

I’m no longer the man who wrote The Tender Bar, and he was no longer the young man, nor the boy, he described, but I claim those J. R.s, embrace them, invite them (and other J. R.s) over for holidays and birthdays, all for the sake of unity and sanity. I’ve spent much of my life brooding on this mystery of identity, how it plays out in my own story, and in the stories of others, and I often feel as if I’m only getting further from the answer.

I tried instead to organize The Tender Bar around the more answerable question: Who are we? I tried to explore ideas of community, to portray, in Auden’s phrase, the “faces along the bar,” and the faces around my grandfather’s dinner table, and the faces on the Yale campus, and the faces up and down Plandome Road, the main street of my hometown, Manhasset, New York. Whoever I was, those faces made me, saved me; whenever I looked over my shoulder, peered into the darkness of my youth, I saw them shining brightly, and it made me ache with love.