“Too bad about the rain,” I said again.
“I like it,” he said, not looking away from the newspaper. “Suits my mood.”
I rubbed my hands together nervously.
“Bobo going to be at Dickens tonight?” I asked.
“False.” Still looking at his newspaper. “Bobo is on the disabled list.”
“What does Bobo do at the bar?”
“Cook.”
“Wilbur going to be there?”
“Wilbur’s on the wagon.”
“I like Wilbur.”
No answer.
“Colt going to be there?”
“False. Colt’s going to the Yankee game.”
Silence.
“Colt is funny,” I said.
“Yes,” Uncle Charlie said solemnly. “Colt is funny.”
“Uncle Charlie, could I watch the next demolition derby on Plandome Road?”
“Every night is a demolition derby on Plandome Road,” he said. “Whole town’s inebriated. You don’t mind if I say ‘inebriated,’ do you?”
I thought. I tried to decide how best to answer. After a full minute I said, “No.”
He turned away from the newspaper and looked at me. “What?” he asked.
“I don’t mind if you say ‘inebriated.’”
“Oh.” He turned back to his newspaper.
“Uncle Charlie?” I said. “How come Steve named the bar Dickens?”
“Because Dickens was a great writer. Steve must like writers.”
“Why’s he so great?”
“He wrote about people.”
“Don’t they all write about people?”
“Dickens wrote about eccentric people.”
“What’s eccentric?”
“Unique. One of a kind.”
“Isn’t everyone unique?”
“God no, kid! That’s the whole goddamned problem.”
He turned to me again. He looked at me hard. “How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“Sure ask a lot of questions for an eleven-year-old.”
“My teacher says I’m like Joe Friday. Ha.”
“Hm.”
“Uncle Charlie?”
“Yeah?”
“Who’s Joe Friday?”
“A cop.”
Long silence.
“Eleven,” Uncle Charlie said. “Ach, that’s a great age.” He poured ketchup on his T-bone. “Stay right there. Whatever you do, stay eleven. Don’t budge. Follow?”
“I follow.”
If Uncle Charlie had told me to run and fetch him something from the moon, I’d have done it, no questions asked, but how was I supposed to stay eleven? I rubbed my hands together harder.
“The Mets going to win tonight?” he asked, looking over his betting sheet.
“Koosman is pitching,” I said.
“So?”
“Bet Koos, you lose.”
He stopped chewing his steak and stared at me. “You don’t miss a trick, do you?” He swallowed, folded his newspaper in half, and rose from the table, looking at me the whole time. Then he walked down the hall to his bedroom. I gulped the beer in his glass just before Grandma came into the dining room.
“How about a nice piece of gushy cake?” she asked.
“False. Cookies. You follow?”
Her mouth fell open.
If Uncle Charlie was too hungover for Gilgo, Grandma wouldn’t say he was hungover. She’d say he’d eaten too many potato chips at the bar and his stomach was upset. One morning she didn’t even bother with the potato-chip story, because Uncle Charlie was in a bad way, and the smell of whiskey from his bedroom was overpowering. I rocked in the backyard hammock, sulking.
“What’s shakin’, kid?”
I sat up. Bobo stood in the breezeway, Wilbur at his side. They had come to “rescue” me, he announced. “Why should Uncle Goose spoil everyone’s fun?” he said. “Screw Goose. Today it’s just you, me and Wilbur. The three amigos.”
I couldn’t imagine why Bobo would make such an offer, unless he didn’t know the way to Gilgo and needed my help finding it. Or maybe he actually liked having me around. Or maybe Wilbur did? Grandma was more mystified than I. She came outside and looked at Bobo and seemed on the verge of calling the cops. Only because Bobo was a friend of Uncle Charlie, and because Wilbur gazed at her so imploringly, did she say yes.
As we pulled onto Plandome Road I thought Bobo must be very sleepy. I didn’t understand that he was drunk and stoned. He finished a Heineken in three gulps and sent me into the backseat to fetch him another from a Styrofoam ice chest. I found Wilbur hiding in the well back there and remembered what Joey D had said about Wilbur knowing when Bobo was over his limit.
About two miles from Gilgo, as I was climbing into the front seat with yet another Heineken, Bobo’s car went into a tailspin. We flew sideways, helicoptered across three lanes, and Wilbur and I slammed against a back door. Beer went everywhere. Ice cubes rattled around the car like beads in a maraca. I heard tires squealing, glass shattering, Wilbur whimpering. When the car came to a rest I opened my eyes. Wilbur and I were bruised, and soaked with beer, but grateful, because we both knew we should have been dead. We’d been saved by a large, soft dune, which absorbed the impact of the crash.
That night I had a dream. (Or a nightmare, I couldn’t decide.) I was at the beach. Darkness was coming on and I needed to get home. Bobo, however, was in no condition to drive. Wilbur will have to drive, he told me. While Bobo slept in the backseat I rode shotgun and watched Wilbur steering us down the expressway. Every now and then the dog would fiddle with the radio, then turn to me with a toothy, demonic grin, his expression saying—What of it?
Aunt Ruth got wind of my Gilgo excursions and decided McGraw should go too. She dropped him off at Grandpa’s one morning and I’d never seen him so excited. As the morning wore on and Uncle Charlie didn’t stir, he lost heart. “Guess we’re not going,” he said, picking up a bat and walking out to the backyard. I followed.
Just then we heard Uncle Charlie slamming doors, coughing, demanding Coke and aspirin. Grandma hurried down the hall and asked Uncle Charlie if he was going to the beach. “No,” he snapped. “Maybe. I don’t know. Why?”
She dropped her voice. McGraw and I could hear only a few muttered words. “Ruth wondered . . . take McGraw . . . good for the boys . . .”
Then we heard Uncle Charlie. “Bartenders, not baby-sitters . . . enough room in the Cadillac . . . responsible for two little . . .”
After a few more exchanges we couldn’t hear, Uncle Charlie came into the backyard and found McGraw and me on the stoop, each of us wearing our swim trunks under our dungarees and holding an A&P bag with our version of travel provisions—one sports magazine, one banana, one towel. Uncle Charlie, wearing just boxers, stood in the middle of the yard. “You two mopes want to go to Gilgo?”
“Sure,” I said casually.
McGraw nodded.
Uncle Charlie looked at the treetops, as he often did when irritated. I sometimes thought he dreamed about living up there, in a tree house high atop Grandpa’s tallest pine, a fortress more remote and secure than his bedroom. “Two minutes,” he said.
McGraw and I sat in the backseat as Uncle Charlie drove around town. We stopped first for Bobo. When Bobo and Wilbur got into the front seat they looked at McGraw, then turned and looked at Uncle Charlie. “Goose,” Bobo said, “our little family is growing.”
“Yeah,” Uncle Charlie said, clearing his throat. “That’s my other nephew. McGraw, say hello to Bobo and Wilbur.”
“Exactly how many nephews you got, Goose?” Bobo said.
No answer.
“Goose,” Bobo said, “one of these days, I think you’re going to pick me up in a freaking school bus.”
As we pulled into Joey D’s driveway Bobo was still giving Uncle Charlie the business. “Goose,” he said, “I think I’m going to call you Mother Goose. Lived in a shoe, had so many nephews he didn’t know what to
do.”
“Mother Goose,” McGraw said, giggling. I shoved him. No giggling at Uncle Charlie.
“Who’s that?” Joey D said, sliding into the backseat and pointing at McGraw.
“My nephew,” Uncle Charlie said.
“Ruthy’s kid?”
“Mm-hm.”
Only Colt seemed happy to see us. “What?” he said, squeezing into the backseat, forcing McGraw halfway onto my lap. “Another kid? More the merrier, huh, fellas?”
McGraw opened and closed his mouth, and I knew why. Yogi Bear.
Uncle Charlie drove extra fast, maybe because the car was cramped and he felt everyone was eager to get out. At Gilgo he bought McGraw and me hamburgers. He’d never bought me a hamburger, in all my times at Gilgo, but McGraw always looked so hungry. Wolfing down his burger in three bites, McGraw asked if they had any milk behind that bar. I shook my head. Then Bobo belched and I told McGraw that was the signal. To the sea.
McGraw and I followed the men across the sand, and like them we dropped our stuff and stripped to our bathing suits as we walked, hitting the surf in stride. McGraw, however, kept going. He swam past me, past the men, even past Bobo’s sandbar. Only Joey D noticed. As McGraw’s head grew smaller and smaller in the distance, Joey D yelled, “Bring it in, McGraw!”
McGraw ignored him.
“Believe this kid?” Joey D said as I treaded water beside him. He was speaking to me, ostensibly, but I didn’t answer, because I knew he was talking to his pet mouse. I wondered where he was hiding the mouse, since he was bare-chested. “Kid thinks he’s Johnny Weismuller. Mile from shore. Keep going, kid—next stop, Madrid. Get a cramp now and you’re fish food.” Joey D turned and saw Uncle Charlie on the beach, stretched out in his chair, calmly reading the newspaper. “Great,” he told his mouse. “Goose don’t give a shit.” Goosedon’tgiveashit. “I gotta keep an eye on his fucking nephew while he reads the paper. Fucking great. I’m not going to get any fucking relaxation today.”
I was furious with McGraw for irritating Joey D. If any of the men complained about our going to Gilgo—really complained, not like Bobo’s teasing—we’d never be welcome again. There were rules of conduct with the men, and when McGraw didn’t follow those rules to the letter I wanted to punch him. At the same time I found myself envying him. He was swimming to Madrid, while I was still heeding Grandma’s warnings and staying close to shore. It wasn’t just that McGraw had no fear. He seemed to want that riptide, to seek it, as if he longed to be carried away. He had a touch of crazy, which made him more like the men.
When McGraw came out of the water I gave him the evil eye and he pretended not to notice. He joined me in the center of the men’s circle and started to build a sand castle. I told him we shouldn’t do anything that might annoy the men, but Joey D said to go ahead, “knock yourselves out.” He turned to the other men and added, “Anything to keep Flipper out of the fucking water.”
Alongside the sand castle McGraw and I built a sundial, which he helped me monitor after the men passed out. The jet-engine whine of their snores—and the sight of Joey D talking to his pet mouse in his sleep—made McGraw roll onto his back and giggle, which made me giggle, and we had to clap our hands over our mouths to avoid waking the men.
It was later than usual when we returned to Manhasset. There was no time for a stop at the bar. Everybody needed to get home. McGraw hung his head as we walked to Grandpa’s. I gloated silently. Ha! Serves you right. You went to the sandbar, but I got to go to the bar that matters. Then I remembered the many bars McGraw had seen, the bars he’d been sent inside to ambush his father, and I knew he didn’t feel cheated about not seeing one more. He just felt sad about saying good-bye to the men.
McGraw and I sat on the bicentennial sofa that night, playing cards, watching The Odd Couple, and he couldn’t stop talking about Gilgo. He wanted to go every day. He wanted to live at Gilgo. He said Jack Klugman looked like Bobo. I warned him against getting his hopes up. There were variables, I explained. Weather and hangovers. You never knew from one day to the next which might flare up. In McGraw’s case there was a third variable. Some days Aunt Ruth wouldn’t let him go. Either he had to practice his baseball or else he was being punished. Sometimes Aunt Ruth didn’t give a reason.
When McGraw couldn’t go to Gilgo I found myself sitting in the men’s circle and missing him, wishing he’d never gone in the first place, because now the whole experience felt diminished without him. Everything was more fun with McGraw. He was someone I could share the men with, and giggle with at the astonishing things they said and did. A horsefly bit Bobo’s thigh, then flew away in drunken loops, plummeting to its death, and I wished McGraw were there to see it.
Though the men were unfailingly kind to me, they tended to ignore me, and in McGraw’s absence I went hours without hearing my own voice. When the men did speak to me directly, it could be awkward. One typical exchange went like this: Joey D looked at me. I looked at him. He looked harder at me. I continued looking at him. Finally he said, “Who the White Sox play tonight?” “Rangers,” I said. He nodded. I nodded. End of discussion.
Missing McGraw made me think of my mother, whom I also missed, more all the time. I stared out across the ocean one day, wondering what she was doing. Since we couldn’t afford long-distance phone calls, we exchanged audio letters, recorded on cassettes. I would play her tapes over and over, analyzing her voice for signs of stress or fatigue. In her most recent tape she sounded happy. Too happy. She said she’d rented a sofa, with a pretty brown and gold pattern—no faces of Founding Fathers. “We’ve never had a sofa before!” she said proudly. But I worried. What if we couldn’t afford the sofa? What if she couldn’t make the payments? What if she started to peck at her calculator and cry? What if I wasn’t there to distract her with some jokes? I will not worry about something that will not happen. My mantra didn’t seem to work at Gilgo. The worrisome thoughts came too fast. Why am I here? I should be in Arizona, helping my mother. She’s probably driving through the desert right now, alone, singing. With each wave that slapped the shore another unhappy thought crashed in my head.
To distract myself I turned to the men. Uncle Charlie was upset. “Can’t think straight today,” he said, putting his hand to his temple. “Goddamned Wordy Gurdy has me stumped.”
“The fuck is a Wordy Gurdy?” Bobo said.
“Puzzle in the newspaper,” Uncle Charlie said. “They give you a half-assed clue, and the answer is two words that rhyme. Like Hot Spot. Or Hell’s Bells. It’s child’s play. The first one I got right off. Jane’s Vehicles. Answer? Fonda’s Hondas. But the others, I don’t know. I must be suffering from Acute Sambuca Brain.”
“With a touch of vodka-itis.”
“That’s a chronic condition.”
“Give us one.”
“Okay,” Uncle Charlie said. “Let’s see how smart you dopes are. Richard’s Ingredients.”
Bobo closed his eyes. Joey D poked the sand with a stick. Colt rubbed his chin.
“Fucking puzzles,” Bobo said. “Life’s confusing enough as it is.”
“Nixon’s Fixin’s,” I said.
Silence fell over me like a shadow. I looked up from the sand and the men were staring, frozen. They couldn’t have looked more surprised if Wilbur had spoken. Even Wilbur looked surprised.
“The kid,” Colt said.
“Holy shit,” Bobo said.
“Give him another,” Joey D said to his mouse. Givehimanother!
Uncle Charlie looked at me, then back at the newspaper. He read: “Terrific Gary.”
I thought. “Super Cooper?” I said.
The men threw their hands in the air and cheered.
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 tre
ated 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, taught me things. 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. They showed me the many ways “fuck” could release anger, scare off enemies, rally allies, make people laugh in spite of themselves. They taught me to pronounce it forcefully, gutturally, even gracefully, to get my money’s worth from the word. Why inquire meekly 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.”
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.
Besides the random lessons the men also gave me specific tasks. They would send me to the Gilgo bar for drinks and cigarettes, or have me read them Jimmy Breslin’s column, or dispatch me as their emissary to a blanket of attractive girls. I relished these tasks as a show of their trust, and threw myself into accomplishing them. When the men played poker at Gilgo, for instance, the wind whipping off the water was always a problem, and it was my responsibility to hold the face cards and the pot onto the blanket. It was a job for an octopus, but I managed, and when a card flew away I flew after it. I still remember with fierce pride the looks on the men’s faces when I chased the jack of diamonds fifty yards and snared it just before it flipped into the ocean.
thirteen | PAT
I woke to dark skies, an unseasonably cool July day. No Gilgo. I lay on the bicentennial sofa and opened Minute Biographies. When Uncle Charlie woke, however, he told me to get dressed. “Gilgo?” I said.
The Tender Bar Page 11
