The Tender Bar

by J. R. Moehringer

  “I don’t think Aladdin was the one who granted the wishes,” Uncle Charlie said dubiously, pulling on his earlobe. “I think Aladdin was the guy who wrote the story of the lamp and the genie.”

  At last I went to the Manhasset library and checked out a copy of Arabian Nights. I sat at Uncle Charlie’s end of the bar, reading, and learned that Aladdin is the name of the rootless boy who is the hero of the story; that one day a sorcerer, who the boy believes to be his uncle, sends the boy into a cave to fetch a “wonderful lamp”; that the sorcerer seals the boy in the cave with the lamp; that the boy rubs his hands together nervously and, in doing so, summons a genie who offers to provide whatever the boy needs.

  I relayed all this to Uncle Charlie and we got into an intense back-and-forth about whether Steve was more like the lamp or the genie. I held firmly that Publicans was the lamp, Steve was the genie, as well as the source of the light. Without Steve we were hanging out in a lightless, genieless lamp.

  Later I talked to Dalton and DePietro about my theory and told them excitedly that Aladdin might be the key to my Publicans novel. I would write a modern version of Arabian Nights and call it Publican Nights. DePietro wasn’t listening, because he was trying to score with a woman known around town to be a loon. He wasn’t listening to her either, just pretending to listen, a remarkable piece of acting since she was as boring as she was loony, and ended every sentence with the phrase, “like you read about.” Dalton was only half listening, his nose buried in a collection of Emily Dickinson. On the bar was a folder of poems Dalton had written about Publicans, including several about Uncle Charlie, who was to Dalton what the blackbird was to Wallace Stevens. “Fuck Aladdin,” Dalton said. “Listen to this.” He read me “It might be lonelier.” We talked about Dickinson, then women poets, then women in general. I told Dalton that I’d noticed his way of eyeing a beautiful woman who walked into the bar—not with lust but delight. Very observant, he said. Women don’t like being leered at, but they love being looked at with delight.

  “Do they?” Uncle Charlie said. “Because I find it a burden.”

  I mentioned Sidney, and I was shocked to learn that Dalton had his own Sidney, a woman in his past who broke his heart and now was the benchmark by which all subsequent women were judged. Every man, Dalton assured me, has a Sidney. It was the only time I’d ever heard him sound sad.

  “Emily knew,” he said, wagging the book. “Daffy bitch hid in the attic because she preferred loneliness to the horrors of love.”

  DePietro looked away from his date and considered Dickinson’s picture on the book cover. “Not exactly a looker,” he said.

  “She’s got a sourpuss like you read about,” said his date.

  “She was an angel,” Dalton said. “Think of the sensitivity. Think of the pent-up passion. What I wouldn’t give to go back in time and nail that little hellcat. Give her a good enjambment. Know what I mean?”

  “If anyone could score with a virgin spinster hermit in nineteenth-century New England,” I said, “it would be you. And, come to think of it, if Publicans were Aladdin’s lamp, I’d wish for just a little of your power with women.”

  “The power,” Dalton said, “is realizing that we’re all powerless against them, Asshole.”

  Besides, he added, you’ve got it all wrong: Most likely we tell the bar what we want, and the bar, like a magic lamp, shines a light on what we need.

  “Steve is the lamp,” I said.

  “I thought Steve was the genie,” DePietro said.

  “Steve’s the light,” Dalton said.

  We all looked at each other, confused. DePietro turned back to his date, Dalton turned back to Emily, and I turned to face the door, to await the bar’s next gift—a woman. I prayed it would be a woman. I knew it would be a woman. The ideal woman. The woman who was going to save me. I had an unwavering faith in the bar and in my theory. And in women.

  But Dalton was right. The bar didn’t grant wishes, it filled needs, and what I needed at that moment was not a woman but a certain kind of friend. Days later a large man walked into Publicans, said hello to no one, and stationed himself beside the cigarette machine. He was two feet taller than the machine and his shoulders were several inches wider. I put him in his late thirties. He ordered a Screwdriver and stared straight ahead, making eye contact with no one, as if he were Secret Service and the president’s motorcade was on its way. “Who’s the mameluke?” I whispered to Uncle Charlie.

  “Mameluke,” Uncle Charlie said. “Good word.”

  I agreed, though I wasn’t sure what it meant.

  Uncle Charlie narrowed his eyes and looked toward the cigarette machine. “Oh—yeah—he’s on the job.” I shook my head, not familiar with the term. “Copper,” Uncle Charlie said. “Fuzz. NYPD. Just bought a house at the bottom of one of the hills. He’s a good man. Very good man.” He lowered his voice. “There’s a story there.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not at liberty. But it’s a doozy.”

  The man walked over. “Hey Chas,” he said.

  “Ah,” Uncle Charlie said. “Bob the Cop, I’d like you to meet my nephew, JR.”

  We shook hands. Uncle Charlie excused himself and ducked into the phone booth.

  “So,” I said to Bob the Cop, noticing that my mouth was suddenly dry, “my uncle says you’re a police officer?”

  He nodded, an economical nod, as though telling a blackjack dealer, Hit me.

  “What precinct?” I asked.

  “Harbor.”

  Neither of us said anything for a full minute.

  “What do you do?” he asked.

  I cleared my throat. “I’m a copyboy.”

  He frowned. I’d called myself a copyboy hundreds of times, but this was the first time I heard how ridiculous it sounded. Not many job titles ended with “boy.” Bellboy, paperboy, stable boy. Standing before Bob the Cop, seeing his reaction, I wished I could say I was a copyman. Or, at least, Carbon Separator.

  But it wasn’t my job title that Bob the Cop found distasteful. “I’m not too crazy about newspapers,” he said.

  “Oh?” I said. “Well, I’m scared of cops, so I guess we’re made for each other.”

  No reaction. Another full minute passed. Again I cleared my throat.

  “Why don’t you like newspapers?” I asked.

  “My name was in the papers once. Didn’t enjoy the experience.”

  “What were you in the papers for?”

  “Long story. Look me up sometime.”

  He went to make a donation to the Don Fund. Uncle Charlie returned. “Your friend,” I said to him, “is a mite terse.”

  “Man of few words,” Uncle Charlie said.

  “Man of no words,” I said.

  “I like it. People talk too much.”

  Bob the Cop returned. I smiled. He didn’t.

  It took me half the night to figure out which movie star Bob the Cop looked like. (I had plenty of time to think, since the silences yawned on for minutes at a time.) With a jolt, I realized—John Wayne. It wasn’t the face so much as the physique and phrenology. He had Wayne’s body—that wide hipless torso—and Wayne’s oversize rectangular head, which seemed made expressly for a cowboy hat. If you put a cowboy hat on Bob the Cop’s head, I thought, he wouldn’t flinch. He’d just reach up and touch the brim and say, “Howdy.” He even held his body like Wayne, that slightly swaying stance that proclaimed, All the Apaches in the world won’t take this fort. I half expected him to saddle up his barstool before he sat on it.

  Once he’d obtained the right amounts of alcohol and undivided attention, the Quiet Man actually made some noise that night. In fact he told some of the finest stories I’d ever heard in Publicans. Bob the Cop loved stories, and he was in the right line of work for finding them. Stories floated past the prow of his police boat every day, especially in the spring, when the water turned warm and corpses bobbed to the surface like corks. Floaters, Bob the Cop called them. During those first balmy days
of April, when everyone’s mind was on rebirth and renewal, it was Bob the Cop’s job to take a grappling hook and fish stiffs from the murky ooze. Mob hits, suicides, missing persons—the harbors and rivers were apple bobs of tragedies, and telling stories was how Bob the Cop coped.

  Publicans was wall-to-wall storytellers, but none had Bob the Cop’s ability to hold our attention. Part of it was fear. If we stopped listening, would he punch us? But part of it was his delivery, which worked along the same principle as Hemingway’s spare style. Bob the Cop wasted no time, no energy. He painted scenes and characters with the fewest possible words, inflections and facial expressions, because like Hemingway he didn’t need any frills. Unshakably confident in his story’s interest, Bob the Cop spoke in a steady monotone and maintained a card sharp’s deadpan, which also created a sense of uncertainty as to genre. You didn’t know if Bob the Cop was doing tragedy or comedy until he wanted you to know. Then, his thick New York accent was the crowning touch. It was the right voice for describing that underworld through which he moved, peopled with hookers and grifters, sleazy politicians and contract killers, a comic book hell in which someone was always making a mistake that cost someone else dearly. Whether describing a plane crashing into the East River because of pilot error, or an undercover detective’s boneheaded blunder that let a perp go free, Bob the Cop’s accent always seemed to fit the accident.

  My favorite stories, however, were the ones about his kids. He told me about taking his five-year-old son with him on his police boat. It was supposed to be a slow day, but a helicopter went down in the river and Bob the Cop raced to the scene, pulling survivors from the water. Later that night, when Bob the Cop was tucking his son into bed, the boy was upset. “I don’t want to go with you to work no more,” his son said. “How come?” Bob the Cop asked. “Because I can’t save the people.” Bob the Cop thought. “How about we make a deal?” he told his son. “You come with me to work, and if anything bad happens, you let me save the big people, and you save the little people.”

  When Bob the Cop stopped telling stories, when he turned to listen to someone else’s story, I leaned into Uncle Charlie’s chest. “Bob the Cop is a good guy,” I said. “A really good guy.”

  “I tell no lies,” he said.

  “What’s his story?”

  Uncle Charlie put a finger to his lips.

  thirty-two | MARVELOUS

  Uncle Charlie owed somebody a bundle, an amount so large, I heard, he could barely pay the vigorish. “What’s a vigorish?” I asked Cager.

  He took off his visor and scratched his red hair. “The vig is like the interest on a Visa card,” he said. “Except this Visa will break your fucking kneecaps if you miss a payment.”

  Uncle Charlie already walked like a flamingo with sore knees. I couldn’t imagine how he’d walk if he got crossways with his creditors. According to Sheryl, who had been asking questions along the bar, Uncle Charlie owed the mob a hundred thousand dollars. Joey D said it was more likely half that amount, and Uncle Charlie’s creditors weren’t mobsters, just a local syndicate. I wondered what was the difference. I wondered if Mr. Sandman was still in the picture.

  I worried about Uncle Charlie’s debt, and I particularly worried about the way he refused to worry. He would strut back and forth behind the bar, singing to the doo-wop music on the bar stereo. I watched one night as he danced out from behind the bar and across the floor, a tangoing flamingo, and I thought I understood him. After losing his hair, and Pat, Uncle Charlie had given up on sustained happiness—career, wife, kids—and was trying only for short bursts of joy. Any worry, any prudent thought, which interfered with his bursts of joy, he ignored.

  This strategy of joy at all costs, besides being delusional, led him to be careless. Two undercover cops, acting on a tip, sat at the bar for a week and watched Uncle Charlie transacting business more boisterously than a commodities trader. While mixing drinks Uncle Charlie was taking bets, parlaying bets, working the phones. At week’s end the two cops came to Grandpa’s house, this time in uniform. Uncle Charlie was lying on the bicentennial sofa. He saw them coming up the walk and met them at the screen door. “Remember us?” one cop said through the screen.

  “Sure,” Uncle Charlie said, calmly lighting a cigarette with his Zippo. “Scotch and soda, Seagram’s and Seven. What’s up?”

  They took him away in handcuffs. Over the next few days they sweated Uncle Charlie for the names of his bosses and associates. When word got out that he wasn’t saying anything, that he hadn’t given the cops a single name, presents began to arrive at the jail. Marlboros, newspapers, goose-down pillows. A high-priced lawyer also arrived, his services paid for by someone who preferred to remain nameless. The lawyer told the cops that Uncle Charlie would die before cooperating, and he persuaded them to reduce the charges from gambling to vagrancy. When word reached Publicans we all went limp with laughter. Only Uncle Charlie could get arrested for vagrancy—in his own living room.

  I wish I could say that Uncle Charlie’s arrest jolted me, or embarrassed me, or made me worry more about his safety. If anything it made me proud. He returned to the bar a conquering hero, having shown toughness and fortitude in a tight spot, and no one hailed him more adoringly than I. The mobsters who monitored Uncle Charlie’s vigorish—who “held his paper,” as the men said—worried me, but the cops didn’t, because I believed the barroom myth that cops and gamblers played a game of cat and mouse, which no one took seriously. On some level I knew that my thinking was warped, my pride in Uncle Charlie misplaced, and this was probably why I didn’t tell my mother about Uncle Charlie’s arrest. I didn’t want her to worry about her younger brother, or me.

  Soon after his release from jail there was a change in Uncle Charlie. He started gambling more, risking more, maybe because his narrow escape made him feel invincible. He then started losing more, so much that he had no choice but to take his losses seriously. At the bar he would complain bitterly about various athletes and coaches who had cost him money that day with their miscues and errors. He claimed he could retire to the tropics if not for Oakland manager Tony LaRussa. He could buy a Ferrari if not for Miami quarterback Dan Marino. He was compiling a mental list of athletes who had screwed him, and he included those play-by-play announcers who didn’t sufficiently castigate his blacklisted athletes.

  Though I couldn’t learn the exact size of Uncle Charlie’s debt, his individual losses were legend. Colt told me that Uncle Charlie lost fifteen thousand dollars in one night, playing Liars’ Poker with Fast Eddy. Joey D said Uncle Charlie was addicted to underdogs, “the more under, the more canine, the better.” Cager backed this up by telling me about the night Uncle Charlie let it slip that he was “intrigued” by the line on Saturday’s Nebraska-Kansas game. Nebraska was laying sixty-nine points. “Imagine,” Uncle Charlie said to Cager, “you take Kansas and at the opening kickoff you’re up sixty-nine to nothing.”

  “No,” Cager said. “I’d steer clear of that game, Goose. With a spread like that, the oddsmakers must know something, and what they probably know is that Kansas couldn’t beat St. Mary’s girls’ lacrosse team. Junior varsity.”

  Next time Cager walked into the bar he asked the inevitable question.

  “I took Kansas and the sixty-nine points,” Uncle Charlie said, bowing his head.

  “And?”

  “Nebraska seventy, Kansas oogatz.”

  Cager blew air slowly through the gaps in his teeth.

  “But Cager,” Uncle Charlie said achingly, imploringly, “I was in it the whole way.”

  After telling me about this conversation, Cager asked me, “What can you do with a man like that?”

  Cager was a savvy gambler, who won more than he lost, and actually supported himself by gambling, so he offered to help Uncle Charlie. “Only way you’ll ever make a dent in your number,” Cager told him, “is come with me to the track and we’ll pick out some long shots.”

  Uncle Charlie glared at Cager. “The fuck do I know
about horses?” he said.

  “The fuck do you know about horses?” Cager said. “The fuck do you know about horses?”

  In March 1987, I saw firsthand how far things had deteriorated for Uncle Charlie, when I woke to find him standing over me. “Hey,” he said. “You ’wake? Hey?” The bedroom was filled with Sambuca fumes. I checked the clock: 4:30 A.M. “Come on,” he said. “I wan’ talk you.”

  Wrapping a robe around myself I followed him out to the kitchen. Normally in that condition he wanted to talk about Pat, but this time it was money. He was worried. He didn’t give me a hard number, but he left no doubt that it was a number he could no longer ignore. The delusional joy was gone. His only hope, he said, his last chance, was Sugar Ray Leonard.

  I was well aware of the upcoming middleweight title fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and “Marvelous” Marvin Hagler. The “Super Fight,” as it was being billed, had been the main topic of conversation for weeks at Publicans. Every bar has some affinity for boxing, because drinkers and boxers sit on stools and feel woozy and measure time in rounds. But at Publicans boxing was a sacred bond that all the men shared. Old-timers still recalled fondly when Rocky Graziano was a regular, decades before the bar was Publicans, and I’d once seen two men in the back room nearly come to blows, arguing about whether or not Gerry Cooney was a legit contender or a tomato can. The imminent clash between two superb fighters like Leonard and Hagler was viewed by such men as the approach of a rare comet would be viewed by NASA scientists. Drunken NASA scientists.

  Leonard, retired three years, his hair sharply receding at the temples, was an elder statesman of the sport at just thirty years old. He’d been pretty when he was a young Olympian—now he looked distinguished, like a diplomat. He’d always had a thoughtful glimmer in his eye, which made him seem deceptively demure, but now he also had a detached retina, suffered in one of his last fights, and doctors said one good blow, landed flush, could leave him blind. He was no match for the reigning champion, Hagler, who was ornery, homely, bald, in the full flower of his violent prime. Like Godzilla with a grudge Hagler had been mauling every comer. He hadn’t lost in eleven years, and yet he considered all his victims, including fifty-two knockouts, mere appetizers before the main course—Leonard. Hagler hungered for Leonard. He wanted to prove himself the fighter of the decade, and to do this he needed to lure Leonard out of retirement and humiliate him, dethrone the media darling. He also disliked Leonard personally, and so he wanted to destroy him. He didn’t care if he caused Leonard to go blind, deaf, or dead. Given Hagler’s rage, and Leonard’s rust, the fight wasn’t so much a fight as an arranged execution. Vegas was making Hagler the prohibitive favorite, but as the sun peered through the window over the kitchen sink Uncle Charlie told me that Vegas was wrong. The fight was a mismatch all right, but not the mismatch Vegas perceived. He was betting heavy timber, more timber than in the Pacific Northwest, on Sugar Ray Leonard.