The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  By the end of the semester I’d worn a footpath between the classrooms and my elm, and I’d come to a gloomy conclusion: Getting into Yale had been a lucky break, but getting through Yale, getting a diploma, would be a miracle. I was a good student from a bad public school, meaning I was woefully unprepared. My schoolmates, meanwhile, were coasting. Nothing took them by surprise, because they had prepared for Yale all their lives, at world-famous prep schools I’d never heard of before arriving in New Haven. I’d done my prepping in the stockroom of a bookstore with two mad hermits. Some days I suspected that my schoolmates and I didn’t even speak the same language. I saw two boys walking through the courtyard and overheard one proclaim to the other, “That’s so very recondite!” The other boy laughed uproariously. Later that week I saw the same two boys. “Wait just a minute,” said the recondite one. “Teleological arguments hold no water with me!”

  Philosophy was the only class where I did well, because there were no right answers. Even there I was astonished by my schoolmates’ confidence—or arrogance. While discussing Plato in seminar I looked to the right and saw that the boy beside me had scribbled rejoinders to Socrates in the margins of his text. “No!” “Wrong again, Soc!” “Ha—not likely!” In a million years I wouldn’t disagree with Socrates, and if I did, I’d keep it to myself.

  Just before finals, sitting under my elm and observing its spidery roots as they radiated from me in every direction, I concluded that this was what I lacked—roots. To do well at Yale you needed a foundation, some basic knowledge to draw upon, as the elm drew water through its roots. I had none. Frankly I wasn’t even sure this tree was an elm.

  As the first semester drew to a close, I did manage to reach one small goal. I turned eighteen. In December 1982, eighteen was the legal drinking age in New York. Which meant that at long last I could take shelter somewhere other than my spreading elm.

  twenty-two | CAGER

  Uncle Charlie was behind the bar, drying a highball glass and watching the Knicks. From the way he held the glass, as though he might break it over someone’s head, and the way he glared at the TV, as though he might break it over someone’s head, I could tell he had heavy timber on the wrong team.

  It was Friday night, dusk. The place wasn’t crowded yet. Families were eating dinner in the restaurant and a crew of early drinkers stood along the bar, each in a posture of extraordinary repose, like New England farmers in a field leaning against a stone wall. Entering from the restaurant I stopped at the edge of the barroom, put a foot on the brick footrest along the base of the bar and stared at the back of Uncle Charlie’s head. Feeling my stare he turned slowly.

  “Look. Who’s. Here,” he said.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello yourself.”

  “What’re the Knicks doing?”

  “Taking years off my life. What’re you doing—here?”

  Like a jury the men along the bar swiveled their heads toward me. I didn’t know what to say. I set down my suitcase and Uncle Charlie set down the highball glass. He plucked his cigarette from the ashtray and took a long drag, squinting at me through the cirrus clouds of smoke. He’d never looked more like Bogart, and Publicans had never felt more like Rick’s Café Americain, which may have been why, placing my driver’s license on the bar, I said something about the “letters of transit.” Without picking up my license Uncle Charlie stared at it and pretended to count the years since my birth. Then he let out a long rolling sigh.

  “So this is the day,” he said. “D-Day. Or should I say B-Day? You’ve come to have your first legal drink.” The men along the bar chortled. “My nephew,” he said to them. “Is he beautiful?” There was a deeper murmur of masculine approbation, like a neighing of horses. “According to the laws of the sovereign state of New York,” he continued, louder, “my nephew is a man today.”

  “Then the law is fucked,” said a voice in the shadows to my right.

  I turned and saw Joey D stomping down the bar. He was fighting to keep a frown on his big Muppet face, though I could see a grin behind the frown, like the sun trying to break through clouds. He snatched my driver’s license from the bar and scrutinized it under the dim lights. “This can’t be,” Joey D said. “Chas—the kid? Isn’t a kid?”

  Uncle Charlie gave his head a what’s-this-world-coming-to shake.

  “Well, the law is the law,” Joey D said. Wellthelawisthelaw! “I guess we have no choice. Let me buy the kid his first drink.”

  “Nephew, you’re backed up on Joey D,” Uncle Charlie said.

  “Backed up?” I’d heard this expression before, but I wasn’t quite sure what it meant.

  “You have a drink coming on Joey D. What’ll it be?”

  The magic words. I shot a foot taller. “What to drink?” I said, staring at the bottles behind Uncle Charlie. “Big decision.”

  “The biggest,” he said.

  He wasn’t exaggerating. Uncle Charlie believed that you are what you drink, and he classified people by their cocktail. Once you were Sea Breeze Jack or Dewars-and-Soda Jill, that was the book on you, that was what Uncle Charlie would pour as you walked through the door at Publicans, and good luck trying to “reinvent” yourself with Uncle Charlie.

  Together we ran our eyes along the row of bottles.

  “I think a Yale man should drink gin,” he said, reaching out and tapping a bottle of Bombay. “Nice gin martini. I make the finest in New York, by the by. I add a few drops of scotch, my secret recipe. Got it from a British butler who came in the joint one night. He worked at one of the estates on Shelter Rock Road.”

  “For the love of Mike!” someone shouted. “A gin martini? The juice of the evil juniper berry? You just took off the kid’s training wheels and you’re going to strap him to a fucking Kawasaki?”

  “Well put,” Uncle Charlie said, pointing at this man’s chest.

  “Stick a nipple on a Budweiser,” someone mumbled, “and shove it in his fucking mouth.”

  “How about a Sidecar?” a woman asked. “Sidecars are delish. And Chas, you make the best in the biz.”

  “That’s true,” Uncle Charlie said. He turned to me and cupped a hand to one side of his mouth so only I could hear. “I use cognac instead of brandy,” he said, “and Cointreau instead of triple sec. The best. But we don’t get much call for them anymore. It was a big drink in the thirties.” He turned back to the woman. “Don’t make me squeeze a lemon, sweetheart, I don’t even know where the goddamned squeezer is.”

  A rollicking argument broke out about difficult-to-mix drinks, which led to a debate about what the passengers on the Titanic were drinking when the ship hit the iceberg. Uncle Charlie insisted it was Pink Squirrels and bet ten dollars with a man who insisted it was Old-Fashioneds. I asked if Bobo was around. Bobo could tell me what to drink. Uncle Charlie frowned. Bobo had a little accident, he said. Fell down the stairs to the basement of the bar. Hit his head. “If you’re hungry,” he said, “Smelly will make you something.”

  “Smelly?” I said.

  “The cook.”

  “No,” I said. “I just wanted to see Bobo. Is he all right?”

  Uncle Charlie grimaced. Joey D was the first to reach Bobo at the bottom of the stairs, he said. Joey D turned Bobo’s head and cleared his airway, probably saved his life. A lot of blood, Uncle Charlie said. I shot a look at Joey D, who looked away, bashful. I remembered the way Joey D had acted as self-appointed lifeguard to McGraw and me at Gilgo, and I felt a surge of love for him and his heroic nature. Seeing my loving gaze he turned red. “Fucking Bobo,” he muttered to his pet mouse.

  “Was Bobo drunk when he fell?” I asked.

  Uncle Charlie and Joey D looked at each other, not sure how to answer. I realized how stupid the question was.

  “The sad part,” Uncle Charlie said, “is that the fall caused some kind of nerve damage. Bobo’s face is partly paralyzed on one side.”

  People fall down a lot at Publicans, I said. Joey D reminded me about Uncle Cha
rlie’s recent spill. While demonstrating for everyone along the bar how to play the Green Monster at Fenway Park, Uncle Charlie had stepped awkwardly and fallen into the liquor bottles, cracking three ribs. Steve rushed him to the hospital, where the doctor asked how in God’s name he’d done this to himself. Uncle Charlie—drunk, wearing a paper gown and dark glasses—moaned, “Playing the wall at Fenway,” a line that raced up and down the bar the next day. It had since become a catchphrase, cited whenever someone was suffering delusions of grandeur. Or any other kinds of delusions.

  Uncle Charlie was now ignoring at least a dozen thirsty customers, trying to help me decide if I was Gin-and-Tonic JR or Scotch-and-Soda Moehringer. “Maybe I should have one of those Sidecars?” I said.

  He put his hand over his eyes. “False,” he said. “My nephew is not fucking David Niven.”

  “I hope to hell he’s not fucking David Niven,” said a man climbing onto the stool to my left. “If he’s fucking David Niven, he’s got some explaining to do.”

  Uncle Charlie chuckled and set a Budweiser before the man. He explained that I’d just turned eighteen and we were trying to select my first legal cocktail. The man shook my hand and congratulated me. “Chas,” he said, “let me buy your newly legal nephew a drink.”

  “JR, you’re backed up on Cager,” Uncle Charlie said.

  While Cager lit a cigarette I looked at him closely. He had curly, carroty hair, which tumbled out of his golf visor like a houseplant that had outgrown its pot. He looked a bit like a van Gogh self-portrait—the haunted eyes, the orange coloring—though his smile was jolly, with gaps between his teeth. Despite his loose jogging suit I could make out the physique of a former athlete. Linebacker, I guessed. Maybe a power forward. His arms were massive.

  From my right side a man in a tweed Irish walking cap came elbowing his way up to the bar and into the conversation. “Goose,” he said, “speaking of British actors, I think your nephew looks a bit like—Anthony Newley.”

  Cager laughed and put a hand on my shoulder. I looked nothing like Anthony Newley, but Tweed Cap was baiting Uncle Charlie, who instantly took the bait, throwing back his head and erupting into song. Cager and Tweed Cap explained to me that whenever someone mentioned Anthony Newley, Uncle Charlie automatically belted out a chorus or two of “What Kind of Fool Am I?” My uncle couldn’t help himself, they said. Some kind of crazy reflex.

  “Like Pavlov meets Pavarotti,” I joked.

  They stared at me, uncomprehending.

  “Who’s Anthony Newley?” I asked.

  Uncle Charlie stopped. He lifted Cager’s Budweiser off the bar and slammed it down, which startled me more than his singing. “Who’s Anthony Newley?” he said. “Only one of the greatest troubadours of all time.”

  “Like Sinatra?”

  “Troubadour, not crooner. Holy Mother of—Anthony Newley! JR! ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’ From the classic Broadway show, Stop the World I Want to Get Off!”

  I stared.

  “What are they teaching you at that college?”

  I continued staring, not sure what to say. He threw his arms out and resumed.

  What kind of fool am I,

  Who never fell in love?

  What kind of man is this?

  An empty shell,

  A lonely cell

  In which an empty heart must dwell?

  Applause rippled down the bar.

  “Something about that song,” Joey D told his mouse, “really turns Chas’s crank.”

  “That song tears me up,” Uncle Charlie said. “What kind of fool—beautiful sentiment, don’t you think? Beautiful. And Newley. What a voice. What a life.”

  Uncle Charlie began to build me a gin martini. Tired of deliberating, he’d made an executive decision. He told me that I was an “autumn type,” as was he, and good British gin, ice cold, tastes like autumn. Hence, I would drink gin. “Every season has its poison,” he said, explaining that vodka tastes like summer, scotch tastes like winter, and bourbon tastes like spring. While measuring and mixing and stirring he circled back and told me Newley’s life story. Grew up poor. Didn’t know his father. Became a Broadway star. Married Joan Collins. Suffered depressions. Searched for his father. I enjoyed the story, but I was spellbound by the teller. I always thought Uncle Charlie had a narrow emotional range, which went from melancholy to surly, except for those nights when he came home from the bar full of rage. Now, at Publicans, in the early part of the evening, surrounded by friends, buzzing from his first drink, he was an entirely different man. Chatty. Charming. Capable of the kind of steady attention I’d sought from him for years. We talked a long time, more than we’d ever talked, and I marveled that even his voice was different. His customary Bogart impression veered now and then into something richer, more complex. He used more outrageous mixtures of big words and gangster slang, and he enunciated more precisely, with more flourishing rolls of the tongue. He sounded like William F. Buckley in C Block.

  The only drawback to this new Uncle Charlie was that I had to share him. My pathologically self-conscious, semireclusive Uncle Charlie, I discovered that night, was a performer at heart, with a devoted following. He also had a well-honed routine, the centerpiece of which was a flamboyant rudeness. He told customers to pipe down, shut the hell up, hold their horses, keep their goddamned fucking shirts on. I thought he might take out a seltzer bottle and spray it in someone’s face. When the bar got really busy Uncle Charlie would tell a customer, “The most important and beautiful thing we can do in an orderly and civilized society—is patiently wait our turn.” Then he would turn back to the conversation he was having with his friends, telling them why Steve McQueen was a real movie star, illuminating for them the intricacies and complexities in the poetry of Andrew Marvell. Sometimes, while half the customers were trying to get his attention, he would be reciting “To His Coy Mistress” to the other half. It was an act, and Uncle Charlie was an actor to the core. A method actor. Before he made a drink you could see him asking himself, “Why am I doing this—what’s my motivation?” The more methodical he became, the more impatient some customers grew, which made him that much more methodical, and ruder, which made his fans in the barroom cheer and egg him on.

  As an actor, Uncle Charlie would transform himself instantly, effortlessly, into a preacher, monologist, matchmaker, bookmaker, philosopher, provocateur. He played many roles, too many to catalog, but my favorite was The Maestro, and the music he conducted was the conversation along the bar. His baton was a Marlboro Red. No less than everything else he did at Publicans, Uncle Charlie smoked with a sense of theater. He’d hold an unlit cigarette an exceedingly long time, until it became fixed in the minds of his audience, like a handgun. Then he’d make a grand production of striking a match and bringing the flame to the cigarette tip. The next rounded phrase that fell from his mouth would be encased within a dollop of smoke. Then, when he flicked his ash—tap, tap—everyone leaned forward and watched closely, as if Willie Mays were tapping his bat on home plate. Something interesting was about to happen. At last, as he dropped the burned match into the glass ashtray with a light plink, he delivered the punch line or came to the crucial point, and I was tempted to yell, “Bravo!”

  Uncle Charlie finished his Newley story and my martini at the same time. He pushed the glass toward me. I sipped. He waited. Fantastic, I told him. He smiled, like a sommelier approving my palate, then glided away to serve three men in suits who had just walked through the front door.

  Before I could take another sip I heard a voice behind me. “Junior!” I froze. Who but my father or mother knew my secret name? I wheeled and saw Steve, arms folded across his chest, face set in a frown, like the famous photo of Sitting Bull. “What’s the meaning of this? Drinking? At my bar?”

  “I’m eighteen, Chief.”

  “Since when?”

  “Five days ago.”

  I handed him my license. He looked it over. Then he broke into that wide Cheshire smile, so vivid in my boyhood
memory. “God I must be getting old,” he said. “Welcome to Publicans.”

  He smiled still wider. I smiled too, and held it until my cheeks ached. Neither of us said anything. I rubbed my hands together, wondering if there was something I should say, some traditional thing one said upon drinking legally for the first time. I wanted to say the perfect thing, to make myself worthy of Steve. And of his smile.

  Uncle Charlie came back.

  “Junior’s a man now,” Steve told him. “I remember he’d come in here when he was this high.” He held his hand at his waist.

  “Time’s winged fuckin’ chariot,” Uncle Charlie said.

  “Get Junior a drink on me.”

  “Nephew, you’re backed up on Chief,” Uncle Charlie said.

  Steve smacked me hard between the shoulders, as though I were choking on a crouton, then walked away. I looked at Uncle Charlie, Joey D, Cager, all the men, praying no one had heard Steve call me Junior. The only thing more permanent than your choice of cocktail in Publicans was the nickname Steve bestowed on you, and his baptisms could be brutal. Not everyone was as lucky as Joey D, who was named after one of Steve’s favorite musical groups, Joey Dee and the Starliters. No-Drip hated his bar name. Sooty would have preferred to be called something else. But too bad. Sooty made the mistake of walking into Publicans right after quitting time at the garage where he was a mechanic. When Steve saw him and yelled, “Get a load of Sooty,” the poor man was never called anything else. Eddie the Cop didn’t mind his nickname, until he rolled his car on the expressway and became paralyzed from the waist down. Thereafter he was Wheelchair Eddie. In Publicans you were who Steve said you were, and God have mercy on those who complained. One poor guy demanded that the men at the bar stop calling him Speed, because he didn’t want people thinking he had a drug habit. So the men christened him Bob Don’t Call Me Speed, and called him by that nickname every chance they got.