The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  Grandma wrote me long letters, stressing the obvious. “Take care of your mother,” she wrote. “Do anything you can, whatever she needs at this difficult time. Your mother tries so hard, JR, and it’s up to you to see that she eats right and takes time to relax. Make sure she relaxes.” Real men take care of their mothers.

  I would sit on the canal after school, so tense and worried about my mother that I thought I might die. I would wish that I could relax on cue, like Joey D in the ocean, and then mentor my mother in relaxation. If I was especially tense I’d walk to a desolate shopping mall on the other side of the canal, in the shadow of Camelback Mountain. Though the mall looked condemned, though half its stores were vacant, I found its gloomy atmosphere soothing. Dark, quiet, cavelike, the mall reminded me of Grandpa’s basement. And it too held a secret trove of books.

  Deep in the mall’s core was a bookstore with a highly eclectic selection. There was a wide array of classics—but few best sellers. There were many works on Eastern religions—but few Bibles. There was a newsstand spilling over with newspapers and periodicals from Europe—but not one local paper. Since I had no money for books I became a prodigious browser. I taught myself to read a novel in five visits, scan a magazine in half an hour. No one ever scolded me for loitering or tried to shoo me away, because no one was ever there. The cash register was forever unmanned.

  Ogling the models in a French magazine one day I looked up and saw a line of customers snaking from the cash register to the children’s section. The customers were looking around for someone to take their money. When no one materialized they gave up and left. In the far back of the store I spotted a pair of birdlike eyes peering out from behind an unmarked door, which was open just a crack. I made contact with the eyes, and the door slammed shut. I walked back and knocked lightly. 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.”

  “Okay. Thanks for letting us know.”

  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 stammered that I was nobody. The three of us looked at each other, having a staring contest, and then I got an idea. 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.

  I raced home to tell my mother.

  “My God!” she cried, hugging me. “That will make such a difference!”

  I tried to temper her excitement, warning her that the men at the bookstore were “unusual.” I couldn’t think of another word.

  “They’ll love you,” she said. “You’re great with unusual men.”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant.

  I was nervous about getting along with Bill and Bud, but for the first few weeks of my employment I hardly ever saw them. I’d knock at the stockroom door when I arrived, to say hello, and wouldn’t have any more contact with them until I knocked to say good-bye. The bookstore was part of a national chain, but I assumed that Bill and Bud had either seceded from the chain or been forgotten by the home office. They ran the store as their private library, ordering books and magazines that suited and expressed their view of the world, and seldom emerging from the stockroom, which doubled as Bill’s bedroom. Some nights he would fall asleep reading on a lawn chair behind the watercooler.

  Shy, reserved, Bill and Bud could not have been more different from the men at the bar, and those first weeks at the bookstore were so disorientingly quiet, and lonely, that I wanted to quit. Then, suddenly, Bill and Bud became curious about me, and when there weren’t any customers in the store, which was almost always, they invited me to stand in the doorway to the stockroom and chat.

  At first I had trouble following the conversation, because I was so intrigued by Bill’s and Bud’s many quirks. Bill, for instance, chain-smoked but wouldn’t buy an ashtray. He stood his smoldering butts upright along the edges of desks and tables throughout the stockroom, and let them burn out, until he’d created a diorama of a forest fire. His eyes were burned out too, from reading so much, and his glasses were thicker than his beloved Russian novels. He adored the Russians, and spoke of Tolstoy with disarming familiarity, as if he owed the great writer a phone call. He owned exactly two ties, one black, one green, both knits, and when he removed one at the end of the workday he’d keep the knot tied and hang it from a peg in the wall, like a tool belt.

  Bud, when excited, would sniff his fist, as if it were a prizewinning rose. He also had a habit of straightening his dandruff-flecked hair by bringing his left hand all the way over to the right side of his head, like an orangutan, a maneuver that exposed the perennial, sizable wet spot in his armpit. He clipped his fingernails compulsively, and the parings lay scattered everywhere. I once found myself handing a customer two quarters and a crescent of Bud’s thumbnail.

  Bill and Bud both seemed to fear people, all people, except each other, which was one reason they hid in the stockroom. The other reason was that they read. Constantly. They had read everything ever written and were hell-bent to read everything new published each month, which required that they cloister themselves like medieval monks. Though in their mid-thirties, both men lived with their mothers, had never been married, and seemed to have no aspirations to move on or marry. They had no aspirations beyond reading, and no interests outside the store, though their interest in me was growing daily. They questioned me about my mother, my father, Uncle Charlie and the men, and they were fascinated by my relationship with Dickens. They asked about Steve and his motivation in giving the bar such a literary name, which led to a conversation about books generally. Bill and Bud quickly gleaned that I loved books and knew nothing about them. Through a series of rapid, probing questions they ascertained that I was intimately familiar with only The Jungle Book and Minute Biographies. They were appalled, and angry with my teachers.

  “What are you reading in school right now?” Bill asked.

  “Scarlett’s Letter,” I said.

  He put a hand over his eyes. Bud sniffed his fist. “It’s—The Scarlet Letter,” Bud said. “Not Scarlett’s. It’s not the sequel to Gone With the Wind.”

  “Do you like it?” Bill asked.

  “Kind of boring,” I said.

  “Of course,” Bud said. “You have no frame of reference. You’re thirteen.”

  “I actually turned fourteen last—”

  “You know all about lust and nothing about shame,” Bud said.

  “He needs
a nice healthy dose of Jack London,” Bill said to Bud.

  “Maybe Twain?” Bud said.

  “Maybe,” Bill said. “But the boy’s from the East Coast—he should read New York writers. Dos Passos. Wharton. Dreiser.”

  “Dreiser! You want to turn him into a cynic like you? And no one reads Dos Passos anymore. Dos Passos is Dos Passé. If he wants to read about the East Coast, let him read Cheever.”

  “Who’s Cheever?” I asked.

  They turned slowly toward me.

  “That settles that,” Bud said.

  “Come with me,” Bill said.

  He took me to the fiction section and pulled down every title by John Cheever, including the thick collection of short stories that had just been published. He brought the books into the stockroom and quickly ripped the cover off each one. It seemed to cause him pain, like ripping off a bandage. I asked what he was doing. He said bookstores couldn’t return every unsold paperback to the publishers—the publishers didn’t have room for them all—so they returned only the covers. When Bill and Bud wanted a book they simply ripped off the cover and mailed it to the publisher, who reimbursed the chain, “and everyone is happy.” He assured me this wasn’t stealing. I couldn’t have cared less.

  I spent that weekend reading Cheever, swimming in Cheever, falling in love with Cheever. I didn’t know sentences could be made like that. Cheever did with words what Seaver did with fastballs. He described a garden full of roses as smelling like strawberry jam. He wrote about longing for a more “peaceable world.” He wrote about my world, the suburbs outside Manhattan, scented with woodsmoke (his favorite word) and peopled with men hurrying from train stations to bars and back again. Each story revolved around cocktails and the sea, and each one therefore seemed as though it were set in Manhasset. One actually was. The first story in the collection mentioned Manhasset by name.

  On Friday afternoons Bill and Bud would quiz me about what I’d read that week in school. They would then cluck with disgust and take me around the bookstore, filling a shopping bag with coverless books. “Every book is a miracle,” Bill said. “Every book represents a moment when someone sat quietly—and that quiet is part of the miracle, make no mistake—and tried to tell the rest of us a story.” Bud could talk ceaselessly about the hope of books, the promise of books. He said it was no accident that a book opened just like a door. Also, he said, intuiting one of my neuroses, I could use books to put order to chaos. At fourteen I felt more vulnerable than ever to chaos. My body grew, sprouted hair, shuddered with urges I didn’t understand. And the world beyond my body seemed equally volatile and capricious. My days were controlled by teachers, my future was in the hands of heredity and luck. Bill and Bud promised, however, that my brain was my own and always would be. They said that by choosing books, the right books, and reading them slowly, carefully, I could always retain control of at least that one thing.

  Books were the main part of Bill and Bud’s lesson plan, but not the only part. They tackled how I talked, teaching me to modify my Long Island accent. When I said I was going for “cawffee,” they made me stop and say it again. They tried to improve how I dressed. Though hardly fashion plates themselves, they had learned a thing or two from scouring the Italian and French magazines they ordered for the store, and they often asked salesgirls from boutiques in the mall to advise me about stretching my “trousseau.” They broke me of my habit of wearing nothing but jeans and white T-shirts, and Bud gave me Lacoste shirts he’d “outgrown,” though I suspected the shirts were gifts from his mother and actually too big for him. They supplied me with basic information about art, architecture, and especially music. Sinatra was fine, Bud said, but there were other “immortals.” Sniffing his fist he made a list of records “every cultured young man must own.” Dvorák. Schubert. Debussy. Mozart. Especially Mozart. Bud was devoted to Mozart. I folded his list and put it in my pocket and saved it for years, because it was such a touching and earnest recipe for betterment. I told Bud, however, that I couldn’t afford records. The next day he brought in all the records on the list from his own collection. Call it a loan, he said. We sat in the stockroom, Bud playing the records on a portable turntable, conducting with a pencil, explaining why Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C Major was perfection, why Beethoven’s trios were sublime, why Holst’s Planets Suite was frightening. While Bud tutored me in music Bill made the greater sacrifice. He manned the cash register all afternoon. For me, he said, and only me, he would deal with the “madding crowd.”

  Not long before the end of my freshman year, Bill and Bud asked what colleges I was considering. The subject of college always depressed me, because my mother and I had no money. In that case, Bill and Bud said, you need to get into one of the best colleges, because only the best pay your tuition. I told them jokingly about my mother’s bedtime lullaby when I was younger: “Harvard and Yale, babe, Harvard and Yale.”

  “Not Harvard,” Bud said. “What do you want to be—an accountant? Ha.”

  “No. A lawyer.”

  “Dear God.” He fell onto his stool and sniffed his wrist furiously. Bill lit a cigarette and stretched out on his lawn chair. “How about Yale?” he said.

  “Yes,” Bud said. “Yale.”

  I told them in a wounded voice that they were cruel to be kidding me like that. “Yale is for rich kids,” I said. “Smart kids. Other kids.”

  “No,” Bud said. “Yale is for all kinds of kids. That’s the great thing about Yale.”

  They were suddenly talking over each other, rhapsodizing about Yale, recounting its history, its roll call of famous graduates, from Noah Webster to Nathan Hale to Cole Porter. They sang a few bars of the Yale fight song, praised the professors in Yale’s English department—the finest in the world, they assured me. I was shocked by how much they knew. Later I realized that they must have once dreamed of attending Yale themselves.

  “Yalies are smart,” Bill said, “but not geniuses.”

  “A Yalie doesn’t know everything about one thing,” Bud said, holding up one finger. “A Yalie knows one thing about everything.”

  “A Yalie is urbane,” Bill said. “You know what ‘urbane’ means, right?”

  “Yes,” I said, laughing.

  They waited.

  “It means you live in a city.”

  Bud handed me a dictionary.

  “A Yalie is a man of the world,” Bill said. “A Renaissance man. That’s what you want to be. A Yalie can shoot a gun, dance a fox-trot, mix a martini, tie a bow tie, conjugate a French verb—though he doesn’t go so far as to speak the whole language—and tell you which of Mozart’s symphonies were written in Prague, and which in Vienna.”

  “A Yalie is so very F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Bud said. “You’ll remember that every character in Fitzgerald is a Yale man. Nick Carraway, for one.”

  I averted my eyes. With a groan Bill rose from his lawn chair and went out to the sales floor to rip the cover off The Great Gatsby.

  Not wanting to explain to Bill and Bud that my mother and I were the kind of people who didn’t get in, I simply said, “It’s just too frightening to think about—Yale.” It was the wrong thing to say, and the right thing.

  “Then it’s decided,” Bud said. He rose from his stool and came toward me, sniffing his fist, adjusting his Buddy Holly glasses. “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.”

  I thought this an odd speech from a man who hid in the stockroom of a bookstore in a semiabandoned mall. But it struck me that Bud might have b
een so passionate on the subject because he was giving me the advice no one had given him. I saw that this was a pivotal moment between us, that something profound should be said, but I couldn’t think of anything, so I smiled tentatively and said, “Who’s Natty Bumppo?”

  He breathed loudly through his nose. “What are they teaching you in that school?”

  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.

  Somehow, months after declaring bankruptcy, my mother was able to get another credit card. She used it to buy me a plane ticket to New York that May—she was determined I spend every summer in Manhasset, because I enjoyed the men so much—and a ticket for herself that August, so that we could drive up to Yale together and have a look around before I started my sophomore year of high school. We borrowed Uncle Charlie’s Cadillac, and Grandma and Sheryl came along for the ride.

  As my mother drove I sat beside her and cringed at the conversation swirling around the Cadillac. Instead of Colt and Bobo talking about who was “boning” whom at Dickens, the women were clucking about fashion and cooking and hairstyles. Sacrilege. To provide a corrective to the conversation I interjected random items from the Yale brochure in my lap. “Did you know Yale was founded in 1701? That means it’s almost as old as Manhasset. Did you know Yale’s motto is Lux et Veritas? That means ‘Light and Truth’ in Latin. Did you know the first Ph.D. ever was awarded by Yale?”

  “Does it say in your little book there how much the whole shebang costs?” Sheryl asked from the backseat.

  I read aloud. “‘A reasonable estimate of the total cost of a year at Yale is eleven thousand three hundred and ninety dollars.’”