The Tender Bar

by J. R. Moehringer

  As skies over South Carolina cleared the next morning, as the damage was revealed, I grieved for all who had lost their lives and homes. But while compassion is healthy, what I felt was something else, something disproportionate and irrational. It occurred to me that my thinking was skewed, that I might be on the verge of some kind of breakdown. Then this thought was quickly overtaken by new images from Hugo’s swath.

  Days after Hugo hit I was watching TV again with Magdalena’s mother, both of us drinking whiskey and chain-smoking, and I noticed we were running low on smokes. I went to the market for a pack, stopping into a bar along the way. It was raining hard, the remnants of Hugo now drenching New York City. Returning to the apartment I found the living room in shambles, furniture broken, sofa cushions ripped open, broken glass strewn across the wood floors. I called out for Magdalena’s mother and heard whimpering from the bedroom. I ran down the hall. The mother lay on her stomach in the bedroom, which had been ransacked. I knelt beside her and asked if she was all right. “I call everybody,” she said. “No one home! No one love me!”

  She held the phone in one hand, her address book in the other, and kicked her feet like a child having a tantrum.

  “You—did this?” I asked. “You trashed the apartment?”

  “I call everyone!” she cried, mascara cascading down her cheeks. She threw the address book at the wall. “No one give a shit about me!”

  Relieved that she hadn’t been assaulted, I went to the kitchen to get each of us a glass of water. I heard the mother breaking more glass and realized that she might harm herself. On the refrigerator was the number of Magdalena’s boyfriend. I phoned and told her that her mother wasn’t well and suggested she come home. She didn’t bother to ask what was wrong, and I surmised that this wasn’t the first time her mother had done something like this.

  Magdalena arrived, with the boyfriend, who stood passively in a corner while she crept toward her mother. “Mother?” she said. “Mother, what’s wrong?” By now her mother was babbling. Magdalena dialed 911 and the apartment soon filled with cops and paramedics. They looked around and maybe noticed, as I did, that the devastated apartment evoked images that had been flickering on TV for days. “Who are you?” a cop asked me.

  “I rent the bath—spare bedroom.”

  Everyone gathered around the prostrate mother, who was tearing her address book into pieces, and tearing the pieces into smaller pieces. A cop asked the mother what was wrong and she repeated what she’d told me. She’d phoned everyone she knew, looking for someone to talk to about Hurricane Hugo, but no one answered.

  “You want us to take her to a hospital?” a cop asked Magdalena.

  “Hospital?” the mother screamed. “You no taking me to no hospital, you motherfucking nigger assholes!”

  And that was that. The cops took one giant step backward and the paramedics fell upon the mother with a straitjacket. She thrashed, scratched, fought them, but within ten seconds they had her trussed tight. Hugo cawed, Magdalena wept, the boyfriend said nothing, and I jumped aside as the paramedics hoisted the mother over their heads and carried her out the door like a Christmas tree on the day after New Year’s. She was on her way to Bellevue.

  Magdalena and the boyfriend and I sat at the kitchen table. I told her I was sorry for her troubles, and didn’t bother saying I was going to leave. She knew. Boyfriend knew. Hugo knew.

  “Seriously?” she asked. “Where will you go? Bebe said you had nowhere to go.”

  forty-two | STEVE

  I slept on Bebe’s couch for a few weeks before going back to Manhasset, back to Grandpa’s. By then Hurricane Aunt Ruth had been downgraded to a squall. My aunt was relatively calm and left me alone, and I was calmer too. The sight of Magdalena’s mother in a straitjacket had a sobering effect.

  Also, it was soothing to be within 142 steps of Publicans again. The bar had never been better than it was that fall, every night another office party or family reunion or just an unusually entertaining ensemble of characters and personalities. On the first night of November I could barely squeeze inside the door. A solid wall of people. A steady roar of laughter. The only one not laughing was Steve, who stood in the middle of the barroom, just back from bowling. I saw him leaning against the bar as though he or it were about to collapse, and I must have stared too hard, because he looked up as if I’d called his name. He smiled, not his Cheshire smile. Something was wrong with his smile, though I couldn’t tell what from across the barroom. He waved me over.

  We discussed McGraw, whom we both missed, and McGraw’s arm, which hadn’t healed after the surgery. The question of McGraw continuing to play baseball had been rendered moot. We lamented the loss of Jimbo, who had just moved to Colorado days earlier. I could tell how much Steve missed Jimbo. He’d made a bid to keep Jimbo in Manhasset, offering to find him a job on Wall Street. One phone call to any of fifty men who hung out in Publicans would have set Jimbo up for life. But Jimbo wanted to be a ski bum. Steve understood.

  While talking with Steve I held myself rigid, afraid he might bring up our meeting of a week earlier, the last time I’d seen him. Just after I returned from the Hugo apartment Steve had summoned me down to his basement office. We sat across from each other at his desk and he handed me a stack of checks I’d cashed at the bar over the summer, each one stamped Insufficient Funds. Steve feared I’d deliberately passed bad checks across his bar, and he feared this for my sake, not his. His distress had nothing to do with his money problems. Steve believed in trusting people. Every ticket in his restaurant was handwritten, every drink called by voice. There were no computers, no records, and customers and employees alike abided by a rough-and-tumble honor system. When a busboy got caught taking a bottle of expensive champagne from the bar, Steve’s staff handled it “internally.” They beat the shit out of the busboy.

  I told Steve the truth. I hadn’t been thinking clearly, and didn’t know from one day to the next how much money was in my checking account. I was disorganized, not dishonest. “Junior,” he said, leaning back in his creaky old desk chair, “we all miss the float once in a while. But this is no good. No good at all. This isn’t the kind of man you want to be.” His words echoed in the basement, and in my head. “No sir,” I said. “It isn’t.” I waited for him to say something more, but nothing more needed to be said. I looked into Steve’s watery gray-blue eyes. He held my gaze, the longest we’d ever made eye contact, and when Steve saw what he wanted to see—what I suppose he needed to see—he sent me back upstairs to the barroom. The next day I left an envelope at the bar, filled with cash, to cover my bad checks and any penalties he’d incurred from his bank. I was officially broke, but I was square with Steve, and that was all that counted.

  Now, that first night in November, Steve made no mention of that awkward business. Ancient history as far as he was concerned. When we finished talking about “the boys,” as he called McGraw and Jimbo, he patted my shoulder, told Colt to “buy Junior a drink,” then stumbled away. “Kid,” Colt said, “you’re backed up on Chief.” I felt a surge of love for Steve, and for Colt, and for all the men in Publicans, because I finally figured something out. I’d always assumed the men hadn’t heard Steve call me Junior, but of course they had. They simply hadn’t adopted the nickname, because they sensed its significance to me. Steve didn’t understand, and they didn’t explain—the men of Publicans never explained. They just let Steve continue calling me Junior, and they never did. Not once. It was a break with protocol, an act of tenderness, which I’d failed to recognize. Until that night.

  I sat at Uncle Charlie’s end of the bar, trying to tell him about Steve and my bounced checks. Yuh, he said, as if in a trance. He was staring at the TV. Suddenly he let out an awful wail. His team—the Celtics, I think—had blown an easy three-on-one fast break. He covered his eyes. Earlier in the week, he said, he had heavy timber on a football game, and all his team needed to do was take a knee and run out the clock. Inexplicably they threw a pass, which was intercep
ted and run back for a cover-blowing touchdown. Uncle Charlie poured himself a Sambuca and said, “Everyone is fucking me.”

  Down the bar I heard Steve growing louder. His face looked like the Grand Canyon, striated layers of red, orange and purple, accentuated by the gaping purple hole of his mouth. That was the thing I’d noticed earlier about his smile, but hadn’t been able, or willing, to acknowledge. Years of drinking had damaged Steve’s teeth, and he was due to have oral surgery. In the meantime he was supposed to wear dentures, but the dentures made his gums bleed, so that night he went without them, setting them on the bar beside his Heineken. He was talking with Dalton, who was drinking a bottle of wine. Dalton poured Steve a glass, the last thing Steve needed. The wine, mixed with ten or twelve Heinekens and twenty-four months of stress, sent Steve over the edge. He grew so unintelligible and belligerent that Uncle Charlie cut him off. Steve couldn’t believe it. Here now—cutting me off at my own bar? You’re done, Uncle Charlie said. Sweet dreams, Chief.

  Joey D offered Steve a ride home. Steve refused. Joey D slinked away, muttering dejectedly to his mouse. A busboy offered Steve a ride. Steve accepted. The busboy led Steve through the dining room. As they tottered out the back door Colt spotted Steve’s teeth on the bar. “You forgot your chompers!” Colt yelled. But Steve was gone. Someone remarked that Steve had left his smile at the bar. It sat before us, smiling. You couldn’t help but think of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, appearing and disappearing without warning, its smile always the first thing visible, and the last.

  Minutes later the phone rang. Steve’s wife, Georgette, said Steve had come home without his teeth. “We’ve got them right here,” Uncle Charlie told her. The phone rang again. Georgette again. Steve fell, she said. He hit his head. They were taking him to North Shore Hospital.

  People fall down a lot in Publicans, I thought, saying good night to Uncle Charlie and wobbling back to Grandpa’s.

  Early the next morning I woke to Uncle Charlie’s voice coming from the living room. I wrapped a robe around myself and went to find out why he was up at that hour. He was sitting on the edge of the bicentennial sofa. His face was white as a bone. The veins in his skull were visibly pulsating. He took deep, harsh drags of a Marlboro and stared at me, through me, through the wall behind me, as he repeated what he’d been telling Grandma. Steve was in a coma and wasn’t expected to live.

  It happened this way: When Steve got home Georgette heated up a plate for him. He ate, drank a glass of milk, and talked with her about the disaster Publicans on the Pier had become. Disconsolate, Steve left the table, headed off to bed. Georgette heard a thud. She ran to find Steve in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.

  “How old is he?” Grandma said.

  “Forty-seven,” Uncle Charlie said. “One year older than I.”

  The sidewalks on both sides of Plandome Road were three-deep, as if for a parade. Car traffic was backed up for miles. Mourners descended from every direction on Christ Church at the top of Plandome Road, which sat catty-corner from St. Mary’s. The church was large, with room for two hundred, but five times that many converged on its doors. Joey D served as usher, though there was no ushering to be done. Hours before the funeral began every pew was filled.

  I wedged myself through a side door in time to see Georgette come in, leaning against her children, Brandy and Larry. I spotted Uncle Charlie against a far wall, talking to someone. Suddenly his eyes rolled skyward as though he were doing Billy Budd. He fell backward. “Man down!” someone shouted. Several people helped Uncle Charlie out of the church. I followed and watched them laying Uncle Charlie on the grass, propping him against a headstone with a full head of furry green moss. Nearby was a headstone from the early 1700s, its epitaph faintly legible: HE GIVETH HIS BELOVED SLEEP.

  Back inside the church I pushed into the crowd and caught a glimpse of Steve’s casket. There was a whoosh like crashing surf as people sniffled and gasped and wept. A procession of large men ascended the altar and read aloud from the Bible, followed by Jimbo, who fought back tears as he spoke. Watching Jimbo, hurting for him, I realized something, with such force, such staggering clarity, that I wanted to go outside and lie down in the grass beside Uncle Charlie.

  I’d always thought of Steve as our Gatsby—rich and mysterious and throwing wild parties for hundreds of strangers on the Gold Coast of Long Island. And this idea was only reinforced by his violent and untimely death. But as with Gatsby, 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.

  As the service ended we filed outside, mumbling prayers, hugging each other, then drove to the cemetery. The funeral cortege moved slowly past Publicans. Though the bar wasn’t on the way, there was a feeling that Steve needed to go past the place one last time. After Steve was lowered into the ground we returned to Publicans, en masse, hundreds upon hundreds of people. Some had urged Georgette to close for the day, in honor of Steve, but she said Steve wouldn’t have wanted that. Steve always vowed that Publicans would remain open—through renovations, recessions, blackouts, blizzards, ice storms, market crashes, and wars. Staying open was Steve’s mission. Shutting down was his darkest fear, the fear that some blamed for his death. With so many question marks surrounding Steve while he was alive, his death was inevitably shrouded in mystery. Most people thought he died from a fall down the stairs, and some in Manhasset would always think so, no matter what. Georgette thought so too, at first. But doctors assured her that an aneurysm had killed Steve, not a fall.

  In Steve’s honor Georgette didn’t merely keep Publicans open after his funeral. She declared the bar—open. No one would pay, no one would dare speak the words “Last call,” and the drinking would continue until no one was left standing. A lavish, extravagant gesture, it was also alarming. An open bar in Manhasset? A town that guzzled liquor like seltzer? It struck me and others as a reckless and dangerous idea. Like building a bonfire in a town of pyromaniacs. Georgette, however, wouldn’t brook any arguments. She hired bartenders from the other bars on Plandome Road to work that day, so Steve’s bartenders wouldn’t need to, and she invited—ordered—the town to drink. Manhasset was backed up on Georgette.

  Publicans had never been so packed, so loud, so happy and sad at the same time. As the liquor flowed, and the grief grew, and the laughter mounted, a type of hysteria set in, though some of the hysteria may have been caused by lack of oxygen. The air was so thick and hot with sweat and smoke that breathing was an effort. The barroom looked like Dante’s Manhasset. Eyes bulged. Tongues lolled. Every five minutes someone dropped a bottle, and large sparkling lagoons of booze and crushed glass began to form. Tables of food were set up along the walls, but no one went near them. Everyone was too intent on drinking. “They’re drinking like they’re going to the chair in the morning,” Colt said. And yet I also heard someone complain that the liquor wasn’t working. In such a sea of sadness, it seemed, all the free whiskey in the world was but a drop.

  I wended my way through the barroom, feeling as if I were in a wax museum crowded with sallow replicas of the most important people in my life. I saw Uncle Charlie, or some waxen version of Uncle Charlie, his necktie askew, his back hunched, still limp from his fainting spell. He was drunker than he’d been after Pat died, drunker than I’d ever seen him. He’d achieved a new plateau of drunkenness, a transcendent drunkenness, and it was the first time his drunkenness ever scared me. I saw Don and Fast Eddy talking in conspiratorial whispers, and Tommy just behind them, a stupendous frown on his face, his features plunging down the drain of his chin. He looked seventy-five years older than he had th
e day he escorted me onto the field at Shea Stadium. I saw Jimbo consoling McGraw, who was sobbing. I saw Bob the Cop in the center of the barroom, talking to Cager, and just beyond them was Dalton, leaning against a pole, seemingly lost without a book of poems to read or a woman to flirt with. Joey D was talking to Josie, a détente brought on by Steve’s death, and his cousin General Grant stood nearby, in a black suit, needing only the solace of his cigar. Fuckembabe, also wearing a suit, his face scrubbed and his hair combed, may have been the soberest person in the place. I heard him talking with a few stockbrokers and he sounded almost articulate. The eloquence of grief. I saw Colt and Smelly leaning against each other, and DePietro near them in a booth talking with some fellow Wall Streeters. I saw Thumbelina and avoided her gaze—and her thumb. I saw Michelle, lovely as always, eager to leave. I saw Crazy Jane, designer of the stained-glass genitalia behind the bar, emerging from the basement, trailing the smell of pot. I saw people I recognized, whose names escaped me, and people I had never seen before, talking about favors Steve had done them, charities he’d supported, meals he’d provided, loans he’d floated, wisecracks he’d made, pranks he’d orchestrated, students he’d secretly put through college. I thought, We’ve learned more about Steve in the last few hours than in all our years of talking with him and standing with him at his bar.

  I saw Peter and rushed toward his side, relieved. I planted myself next to Peter, my editor, my friend, needing his special brand of kindness and sanity. I plotted how I might contrive to stay by Peter’s side all night without annoying him. He asked how I was doing and I started to answer, but Bobo pulled me away. I hadn’t seen Bobo in years. He was telling a Steve story, but I couldn’t understand. He was drunk and still suffering the aftereffects of his fall down the stairs of the bar, his face still partly paralyzed. I wondered if he equated Steve’s fall with his own. When Bobo released me I said something to Peter about how often people fell down in Publicans. Before Peter could respond we both heard Georgette, near the back door. She was crying and saying over and over, “We lost our Chief. What are we going to do without our Chief?”