The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  There was no planning, no premeditation, no thought whatsoever: My hand was reaching for the phone and my finger was dialing Lana, the high-school glamour girl I’d described to Sheryl. Before I’d left for the summer Lana and I had talked briefly at a party, and even made vague promises to get together. I didn’t think she was serious, and I’d never expected to work up the courage to phone her. But now, with my mother in limbo and my psyche in freefall, I felt an urge that transcended teenage lust, if anything can be said to transcend teenage lust. I felt a longing for Lana that was like the longing for Publicans, and I knew dimly that it had something to do with the need for protection and distraction.

  We met at a Mexican restaurant near her house. Lana wore her shortest shorts and a flowery blouse, the shirttails knotted at her waist. A summer in the sun had given her skin an astonishing luster, while lightening her hair with streaks of honey and buttermilk. I told her about my mother. She was very sweet and sympathetic. I ordered a bottle of wine, almost as a lark, and we both smirked when the waiter didn’t ask for identification. After dinner Lana seemed tipsy as we walked to the parking lot. “Is this your new car?” she asked.

  “Yes. It’s a Hornet.”

  “I see that. Nice racing stripe.”

  “It’s orange.”

  “Yes. Orange.”

  I asked if she needed to be home early.

  “Not really,” she said. “What did you have in mind?”

  “We’ve got two options. We can go to a movie. Or we can get some Löwenbräu and drive to the top of Camelback?”

  “Camelback. Definitely.”

  A buddy had once shown me the many lovers’ lanes that honeycombed the first hump of Camelback Mountain. He liked to go up there and spy on couples when he was bored and horny. But that had been months ago, and it had been broad daylight, and now it was a dark moonless night. Nothing looked familiar as I drove up and down and around the hump, searching, hoping that Lana wouldn’t sober up or grow restless. She fiddled with the radio while I told her that I was determined to find one special spot, which afforded a breathtaking view and total privacy, neglecting to mention that it sat on a cliff atop a steep slope of rock. At last, after forty-five minutes, I found the familiar dirt road that ran up the side of the hump and dead-ended at the slope that led to the special spot.

  “Ready to climb?” I said, shutting off the Hornet.

  “Climb?”

  I held the bag of Löwenbräu in one hand and Lana’s arm in the other. The slope grew steeper with every step. Lana, panting, asked how much farther. “Not much,” I said, though I had no idea. I hadn’t actually climbed with my buddy. I’d simply taken his word for what was up there. Eventually the slope became a wall, a nearly perfect vertical. “Ouch!” Lana said. She’d brushed a cactus and scraped her thigh. She was bleeding. At the top the wall curved back toward us. I threw the bag of Löwenbräu up, pulled myself over with a chin-up, then reached back for Lana. When we had both reached the summit we lay on our backs, gasping, laughing, inspecting her injury. We then crawled forward to the far edge of the cliff and there was the view my buddy had described, a million lights shimmering below us, as if the valley were a still lake reflecting the stars.

  “Damn,” Lana said.

  I opened two beers and handed one to her. A breeze blew her dirty blond hair into her eyes and I pushed it back. She leaned forward to kiss me. I closed my eyes. Her bottom lip was plump, like a marshmallow. She pushed her tongue inside my mouth. I opened my eyes. She opened hers. I could discern the edges of her contact lenses, the clots of mascara at the tips of her eyelashes. She closed her eyes again and kissed me harder, forcing my mouth open wider. I undid the top button of her shirt. No bra. Impossibly firm. I squeezed, and tried to look without staring. I didn’t want to be ungentlemanly. She pulled away and undid the knot at her waist, then opened her shirt, inviting me to stare. She reached into my pants. I took off her shorts.

  “Are we going to do this?” she said.

  “I hope so.”

  “You need to wear something.”

  “I’ll keep my shirt on.”

  “No. Like a condom.”

  “I don’t have a condom.”

  “Then we can’t.”

  “Right, right. Of course not.” Pause. “Why not?”

  “Do you want a little JR Junior running around?”

  I stood. I took a long swig of Löwenbräu and stared at the stars, chastising myself. Why didn’t I think of birth control? Simple. Because I didn’t know anything about birth control.

  Lana lay at my feet, her shorts off, stretched out in the starlight like a sunbather. Her legs were apart and she was glistening between them. No star overhead glistened more brightly, and suddenly no star seemed as far away. If I let this moment pass, I thought, if I let Lana put on her clothes and then walked her down the slope to the Hornet, this night would haunt me forever and possibly determine the course of my life. At the very least I’d have to move. I wouldn’t be able to face Lana, or my schoolmates, or drive each day past Camelback Mountain. Thereafter, for me, Camelback would be Mount Virgin, mocking me and my inability to reach the top. I had to do something, and fast, because Lana looked as if she were seconds from standing and putting her shorts back on.

  “Wait here,” I said.

  “Wait—where?”

  Before she could say another word I dove over the side of the cliff and went sprinting down the slope. Racing to reach the bottom before she could protest, or follow, I miscalculated the angle and severity of the incline. I tripped, then rolled. A cactus stopped me, its stickers sinking like knitting needles into my knee. I screamed.

  “What happened!” Lana yelled.

  “Nothing!”

  She must have assumed I had condoms in the car. She certainly couldn’t have foreseen what I was about to do. She would have screamed if she’d known that I was going to start up the Hornet and peel away, leaving her on that windblown mountain.

  In Scottsdale, in 1981, nothing was open after midnight. The desert was dark, desolate, closed until morning. My only hope was an all-night convenience store. I sped down the hump and swerved onto Scottsdale Road. With every shuttered store and darkened strip mall I thought about giving up. But fifteen miles from Camelback I spotted a neon sign. Circle K.

  I didn’t have the vaguest idea what a condom looked like. I’d never held one, seen one, or talked to anyone about one. I went up and down the aisles, looking for the Condom Section. I checked the toiletries aisle. I checked the office-supplies aisle. I checked the cooler. Maybe condoms are perishable and need to be kept fresh. Ice cream, soda, milk—no condoms.

  Eventually I realized that condoms, like skin magazines and cigarettes, were naughty, and therefore must be kept behind the counter. I looked up and there they were, on pegs above the clerk, small boxes with pictures of silhouetted couples preparing to engage in the physical act of love. I slouched with relief, then tensed up. If condoms are tools of vice there must be some age requirement. Better do something to make myself look older. I grabbed a copy of the New York Times.

  “That all?” the clerk asked.

  “Yes. Um, no, actually. Throw in a box of them condoms there, why doncha?”

  “What kind?”

  “Medium, I guess.”

  “What brand, stud?”

  I pointed. He set a box of Trojans atop the Times. I slid a twenty across the counter. “Keep the change,” I said. He scowled and handed me the change.

  Fifty minutes had passed since I left Lana. She was either terrified or furious. As I raced back to the mountain I pictured her up there, which made me think about the special spot where I’d left her, and I remembered then that I’d found that spot by trial and error, and that it had taken forty-five minutes of driving up and down and around the hump, in the dark. I didn’t know how I’d ever find it again. Fishtailing onto the long road that led to the base of the mountain I checked the speedometer. I was doing seventy-five and both the Hornet an
d I were shaking. I thought the Hornet might throw a piston rod. I thought I might throw a piston rod. Nothing looked familiar. How could anything look familiar on the side of a mountain in the pitch dark? I told myself to slow down, take it easy, I was going to kill myself in a car accident on the same day my mother was nearly killed in a car accident. I imagined her coming out of limbo, the doctor giving her the bad news. Your son is dead. “What was he doing on Camelback Mountain?” she’d ask weakly.

  I came to a familiar fork in the road, but couldn’t remember if Lana and I had gone left or right. I turned left, mashed the accelerator and noticed that my foot had gone numb. The cactus stickers in my knee were oozing their poison into my bloodstream, which meant my leg would require amputation. I tried to pick the stickers out of my kneecap as I drove, and at the same time I began rehearsing what I would say to Lana’s father. He would either kill me—I remembered he’d played defensive end for the Chicago Bears—or have me arrested.

  A more ghoulish scenario took shape in my mind. Lana, deciding that I was crazy, and that I’d abandoned her, might have wandered away, gotten lost, stumbled in the dark, and fallen down a ravine filled with snakes and lizards and wild bobcats. Did they even have wild bobcats in Scottsdale? Probably. And like sharks they were probably attracted to the smell of blood. I remembered the cut on Lana’s leg. When the police found Lana’s mauled body, no one would believe she’d agreed to wait for me on top of the mountain while I went for condoms. Everyone would think I’d asked for sex and Lana refused, so I’d killed her. I drove faster, feeling the numb sensation in my knee spread to my hip. Not only would I go to jail for murder, not only would I lose my leg, but each day in the yard the other prisoners would ask the same question: How’d you lose your leg? It would be poetic justice, divine retribution for all my whining about people asking what JR stood for, just as this night was divine retribution for trying to get laid while my mother lay in a hospital bed, bandaged and broken and adrift in some heavily medicated limbo.

  I was passing the same houses, the same cacti, over and over. I was driving in circles, going around and around the hump. I couldn’t even say for sure if I was on the right hump. Was it the first or second hump? I turned on the radio to steady my nerves and thought of my father. I cursed him. I punched the radio. If my father had been around when I was growing up I’d know about condoms and none of this would be happening! If he’d used a condom none of this would be happening! I pulled to the side of the road, put my head on the steering wheel and wept. From someplace deep inside me I brought up great shuddering sobs for my mother, for myself, and for Lana, who at that moment was being eaten alive by wild bobcats.

  I thought of the Hemingway story Bill and Bud had made me read, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and the opening line about the summit of the mountain, called the House of God, where lay the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. “No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude,” Hemingway wrote. What was the point of that goddamned story? Was it that curiosity had killed the cat? Was the leopard trying to get laid? Did leopards look anything like bobcats? Why read stories unless they could provide some practical help in emergencies like this? I considered phoning Bill and Bud, but I didn’t know their home numbers. Then I thought of phoning Publicans. Of course! Publicans! Surely Uncle Charlie or Steve would know what to do. Then I heard them asking me why I was on top of Camelback Mountain when my mother was in the hospital, and I also heard them laughing. The kid tried to lose his virginity—but instead he lost the girl! I would take my chances with Lana’s father and the homicide detectives before I’d face the men at Publicans.

  Ahead was a mailbox that looked like a red barn. Lana commented on that red mailbox when we drove past it. How cute, she’d said, pointing, and I remembered turning left. Now I turned left again and saw a familiar house with a wagon wheel in the front yard. Then a cactus with more than the usual number of arms, which had made me think of Jedd—and then the dirt road that dead-ended at the slope beside the special spot.

  Leaping out of the car I yelled up at the stars. “Lana!” No answer. “Lannnaaa!” I tried to sound like Tarzan. I tried to sound like Brando yelling, “Stelllaaa,” but I sounded more like Costello yelling, “Hey Abbott!” Maybe she was refusing to answer. It was my only hope. Please God let her be angry but alive. Before beginning to climb I had another thought, one I would always remember with equal parts astonishment and shame. If Lana is still there, still alive, I might be able to explain and apologize and maybe we can still—do it. In which case I’d better put on the condom now. Since I’d never seen a condom I’d need light to slip it on, and the only light on that dark mountaintop was in the Hornet. I got back in the car, turned on the dome light and opened the box of condoms. No instructions. I placed one condom on my finger. How could such a little cap stay put during sex? I didn’t know and I didn’t have time to figure it out. I placed the rolled-up condom on my flaccid penis, like a beret, then struck out for the summit.

  “Lana!”

  My voice echoed across the mountain.

  “Lana!”

  Nearly two hours had passed since I left her.

  “Laaaaaana!”

  The pain in my leg was blinding, and my knee wouldn’t bend, which made the climb take longer. At the top I chinned myself up and peered forward. I saw Lana at the far edge of the cliff, curled in the fetal position, asleep. I crawled toward her. She woke, reached for me. Her breath smelled like Juicy Fruit and Löwenbräu. “Have you been crying?” she asked, kissing me. She pulled me on top of her. I could barely support myself on my numb leg, but she helped me, guided me. “It’s right—here,” she whispered. Inside. Then deeper. She rocked me back and forth, showed me how, until I understood. I looked out across the valley, all those lights, all those houses, all those windows I’d peered into as a boy. Finally someone was letting me in.

  After, Lana and I lay on our backs, shoulder to shoulder. “Your first time?” she said.

  We both laughed.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be. It’s exciting when it’s someone else’s first time.”

  I told her about my hunt for condoms. “I never had anyone go to such—lengths,” she said.

  She fell asleep with her head on my chest while I counted stars. Turning my head I saw, in the dirt nearby, gleaming in the moonlight like a clam, the unused and rolled-up condom. Had I become a man and a father in the same heedless moment? I didn’t care. Either way I was no longer a boy.

  My best guess was that I was neither boy nor man, but something in between. In limbo. Even Sheryl would have to admit that much. I wondered if shedding boyhood was something like amnesia, if you forgot yourself and your old life, forgot all the familiar things you thought you would never forget, and started fresh. I hoped so. I wished it were so on the brightest star I could see. And I wished there were someone I could ask.

  nineteen | FUTURE ME

  My mother came home from the hospital after a week, her arm in a large cast. Upon waking each morning she would move from her bed to the couch and sleep on and off throughout the day, because of the pain medication. The good news was, her doctors had concluded that she’d suffered no brain damage. And her memory had returned. But she didn’t speak much, and when she did her voice was a faint, far-away rasp, without any inflections. Her voice, it seemed, like her face, had gone blank. After school, after my shift at the bookstore, I would sit in the chair opposite the couch, alternating between watching my mother sleep and filling out my Yale application.

  The first page was a minefield, full of loaded questions, like Father’s Legal Name. I thought about typing “Johnny Michaels.” I typed “John Joseph Moehringer.” Next question: Father’s Address. I mulled several possibilities. “Not sure.” “Unknown.” “Missing.” I typed “Not Applicable” and stared hopelessly at the words.

  Bill and Bud had been crazy, or callous, persuading me to apply to Yale. The finest school in the nation wasn’t about
to let its students be contaminated by the likes of me, a low-rent loser, a gypsy who didn’t know his father’s whereabouts. Undoubtedly the admissions committee dropped applications like mine into a special basket with a little sign: WHITE TRASH.

  Yale doesn’t care if you know where your father is, Bill and Bud said when I confronted them.

  I snorted.

  “But if it bothers you so much,” Bill said, “find him.”

  As if it were that simple. Then I thought, Maybe it is.

  Time had passed. I was almost seventeen, a different person—my father probably was too. Maybe he was curious about me. Maybe he’d phoned Grandpa’s house, looking for me, only to have someone hang up on him. What if my father would be pleased to hear my voice? It was possible, especially since I didn’t want anything from him anymore. Though I was ashamed to admit it, I no longer hoped to sue my father. That plan had fallen away and in its place was an aching desire to meet him, to find out who he was, so I could start deciding who I might be.

  Finding him would be easy, I figured. After all, I was taking journalism classes in school, writing for the school newspaper—my first story was a transparently fawning profile of a local disc jockey—and I was delighted to learn that one of the primary things reporters did was find people. My search for my father would be my first try at investigative journalism. And if I found that he was dead, so be it. There would be peace in knowing, and I would be able to type “Deceased” under Father’s Address, an improvement over “Not Applicable.”

  I couldn’t tell my mother about my search. She’d feel betrayed that I wanted to meet the man who had tried to kill her, especially after a drunk driver had nearly killed her. So I conducted my search in secret, after school, using the phone in the journalism office to call radio stations and comedy clubs across the nation. No one knew where my father was living, or if he was living. I went to the library and checked phone books from scores of cities, but there were always too many Johnny Michaelses and no John Moehringers. After a month I hadn’t turned up a single lead.