The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  Satisfied that no one had heard Steve—the men were already jabbering about other subjects—I relaxed against the bar. Uncle Charlie freshened my martini. I finished it. He freshened it again. He complimented me on my metabolism. Hollow leg, he said. Must run in the family. I finished what was in my glass and before I set it down the glass was full again. Glasses at Publicans magically refilled themselves, as did the barroom. Whenever five people left, ten more filed in.

  Fuckembabe arrived and welcomed me home, I think. “Flopsum when you humbled me with a dropsy back in the day,” he said, punching me playfully. “Remember how I flummed your peepee with a wugwop? And your uncle said he figgered you were a boyboy Johnny wonny smack jack.”

  “You said it, Fuckembabe,” I exclaimed.

  After my third martini I put a twenty on the bar to pay for my next. Uncle Charlie slid the bill back toward me. “On the house,” he said.

  “But—”

  “Nephews of bartenders drink free. Always. Follow?”

  “Follow. Thanks.”

  “Speaking of dough.” He took a wad of cash from his pocket and peeled off five twenties. He tossed them on top of my twenty. “Happy birthday. Buy some diaphanous coed a malted. You don’t mind if I say ‘diaphanous,’ do you?”

  I made a move to take the money. Uncle Charlie waved me off. False, he said. He looked down the bar. I followed his gaze. Before each man and woman sat a pile of bills. When you walk into the joint, Uncle Charlie instructed, put up your money, all your money, and let the bartender take what he needs as the night goes on. Even if the bartender is your uncle and never takes your money. “It’s tradition,” he said. “Protocol.”

  By midnight more than one hundred people were crammed into the barroom, as tightly as the bricks in the walls. Smelly came out from the kitchen and Uncle Charlie introduced me. He was a powerful man, though short, with fiery orange hair and an orange mustache twirled at the ends. I thought he looked like a weight lifter in an old-time carnival. Uncle Charlie said he was an “artiste” in the kitchen, and that he did to steak what Picasso did to stone. A man named Fast Eddy showed up and I told him I’d been hearing his name for years. He was a nationally renowned skydiver, and when I was a boy he’d vowed publicly to parachute into Grandpa’s backyard, as part of a bet he’d lost to Uncle Charlie. It was the talk of Manhasset for weeks, and I used to keep a vigil in the backyard, waiting for Fast Eddy to appear above the treetops. I noticed now that he sat on his barstool as if landing on it from a height of three thousand feet. He seemed flattered that I knew so much about him, and he asked Uncle Charlie if he could buy me a drink.

  “JR,” Uncle Charlie said, “you are backed up on Fast Eddy.”

  Fast Eddy was seated next to Cager, who seemed to be his best friend, though also his archnemesis. I gathered that the two had been trying for decades to best each other at bowling, bridge, billiards, tennis, golf, and especially Liars’ Poker, which they explained to me was like Go Fish for adults, played with the serial numbers on dollar bills. Cager was said to have the advantage in their two-man tournament, because nothing rattled him. Nerves of steel, Fast Eddy said, with a kind of affection. Cager never got nervous lining up the final shot on a nine ball, Fast Eddy told me, because once you’ve lined up the enemy in the crosshairs of your M60, everything else is pretty easy.

  “Cager?” I said. “Went to war?”

  “ ’Nam,” Fast Eddy said.

  Cager seemed too cheerful and lovable for a man who had been to war. At the first lull in the conversation I moved closer to him. “Do you mind if I ask how long you were in the army?” I asked.

  “One year, seven months, five days.”

  “And how long were you in Vietnam?”

  “Eleven months, twelve days.”

  He drank his beer and fixed his eyes on Crazy Jane’s stained-glass genitalia panels behind the bar. He seemed to be looking straight through the glass, as if it were a window onto Southeast Asia. What he hated most, he said, was being wet all the time, slogging back and forth through the swamps. “We were never ever dry. And then there was all this elephant grass, tall shoots that cut your skin like razor blades. So you were constantly wet and your skin was covered with cuts.”

  As Cager talked about Vietnam all other voices along the bar faded. I felt as if everyone else had gone home and the lights had been turned off, except the one directly over Cager’s head. He said his time in ’Nam started with weeks and weeks of waiting. He’d been in-country six months, mostly in the Mekong Delta, and still nothing had happened, so he let himself relax. Maybe this won’t be that bad, he thought. Then, around Cu Chi, his unit walked into an open field and it felt as if the world had exploded. Ambush, they thought. But in fact the field was booby-trapped. Cager was hit in the neck and fingers. Just scrapes, he added quickly, embarrassed to mention it, because nine of the fifteen men with him were killed. “Choppers wouldn’t even fly in to help us,” he said. “Too dicey.”

  When the smoke cleared and the choppers did come, Cager helped load the wounded. One soldier asked Cager to go back and find his feet. Please, he kept saying—my feet, my feet. Cager waded into the elephant grass and found the soldier’s feet, still in their blood-soaked boots. He handed them to the soldier just before the chopper lifted off.

  “Nixon got me out,” Cager said. “Your Uncle Chas hates Nixon because of that Watergate bullshit, but Nixon promised to get me home by Christmas, and he made good on that promise.”

  Promises were big with Cager, I saw. I promised myself I’d never break a promise to Cager.

  Hours before shipping home, Cager said, he walked through a trip wire. He heard the click, felt the wire tight across his shin, and shut his eyes, preparing to see the face of God. But the mine hadn’t been set right. After the telltale click, nothing. Terror, then relief.

  “Anyway,” he said, “when I finally got home I wanted two things. Just two things. A tuna fish sandwich and a cold beer on Plandome Road. I could taste it. But wouldn’t you know—there was a taxi strike. Here I am just off the plane from hell and I can’t get home from fucking La Guardia.”

  We both laughed.

  If Cager felt any lingering bitterness about what he’d endured, he didn’t show it, though he did confess to a recurring nightmare. Sitting in Publicans, drinking a cold Budweiser, he looks up and sees some officers coming through the door. Time to report, soldier. You got the wrong guy, he tells them—I did my time. One year seven months five days. They don’t believe him. On your feet, grunt. Time to hump that M60 across the Mekong. Time to leave this bar.

  “Did you ever think about Canada?” I asked.

  He frowned. His father was regular army, a veteran of World War II, and Cager worshipped the old man. They went to Army-Navy football games together when Cager was a boy, and his father took him into the Army locker room. His father introduced him to Eisenhower and MacArthur. “You don’t forget a thing like that,” Cager said. So when his father died at the start of Vietnam, he added, what else could a devoted son do but go to war?

  I asked Uncle Charlie if I could buy Cager a beer.

  “Cager,” he said, “you’re backed up on the birthday boy.”

  Uncle Charlie slammed the bar and pointed at my chest, the first time he’d ever given me this signal of official approval, which felt like having Excalibur tapped on each shoulder. He pulled three dollars from my pile and winked at me. I understood that my drinks were free, while drinks I bought for others were not. I was glad. I wanted to pay for Cager’s drink. I realized that the same rule must apply when a man offered to buy me a drink. Uncle Charlie would charge the man a dollar as a token. Money wasn’t the issue. It was the gesture, the timeless gesture. Buying another man a drink. The whole barroom was an intricate system of such gestures and rituals. And habits. Cager explained it all. He told me, for instance, that Uncle Charlie always worked the west end of the bar, under the stained-glass penis, because Uncle Charlie didn’t like to deal with waitresses putting
in drink orders from the dining room at the east end. Joey D liked the waitresses, however, and therefore Joey D always worked the east end, under the stained-glass vagina. Somehow, Cager said, the conversation at each end of the bar reflected the stained-glass backdrop: bawdier and more aggressive at Uncle Charlie’s end, mellower and less linear at Joey D’s. I also noticed that everyone in the place had his or her own unique way of asking for a drink. Joey D, can you build on this concept? Goose, would you freshen up my martini once more before I go home to my miserable excuse for a husband? One man would ask for a refill by merely flicking his eyes at his empty glass, as if checking the speedometer while driving down a highway. Another would extend his hand and touch pointer fingers with Uncle Charlie, reenacting Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. There couldn’t be too many bars in the world, I thought, where a man acted out a scene from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel when he wanted an Amstel Light.

  I bummed one of Cager’s Merit Ultras and never wanted to leave his side. I wondered if he came to Publicans every night. I wished he’d been part of the Gilgo Beach crew when I was a boy, but I couldn’t imagine a man like Cager lounging on the sand or bodysurfing. I couldn’t imagine a man like Cager anywhere but the bar, late at night. He seemed too big, too mythic to simply be walking down the street in broad daylight. I realized that for the first time in months I felt no fear, as if Cager’s courage were rubbing off. Cager was contagious. He had been through the fires of hell and come back with his mind and sense of humor intact, and just standing by his side made me confident about my own small battles. The euphoria I felt was the same I’d experienced reading the Iliad. In fact the bar and the poem complemented each other, like companion pieces. Each smacked of ageless verities about men. Cager was my Hector. Uncle Charlie was my Ajax. Smelly was my Achilles. Lines from Homer came back to me and I heard them in new ways. “There is a strength,” Homer wrote, “in the union even of very sorry men.” How could you hope to fully appreciate such a line unless you’d bought Cager a Budweiser and listened to his war story? The best part was, when Cager stopped talking, I wouldn’t have to prove to some satanic professor that I’d absorbed every word and learned what I was supposed to learn.

  And yet I was very much a student that night, jotting notes of what Cager and others said, their stories and snappy remarks. I took more notes than in Professor Lucifer’s class, because I didn’t want to forget. Curiously, the men didn’t think twice about my note taking. They acted as though they had been wondering when someone was going to start recording their hard-won wisdom.

  At three in the morning the bar “closed,” though no one made any move to leave. Uncle Charlie locked the doors, poured himself a Sambuca and leaned. He looked beat. He asked how I was doing at school. He saw that something was wrong. Spill it, he said. Throughout the night I’d noticed that, besides the many jocular roles Uncle Charlie played behind the bar, there was one serious role. He was the Chief Justice of Publicans. He was Goose, the Lawgiver. People presented him with problems and questions, and he issued verdicts all night long. There might be an appeal. Then he’d issue his final ruling, slamming a bottle like a gavel, pointing a finger at the appellant’s chest. Case closed. So I presented my brief, or started to. A man with a mullet—a huge mullet, almost a double mullet—interrupted. He draped himself across the bar and mewled to Uncle Charlie, “One for the road, Goose?”

  “Hold the phone,” Uncle Charlie snarled. “I’m talking to my nephew who’s having problems in school.”

  Mullet turned to me. He looked concerned for my welfare. I wasn’t eager to bare my soul to Mullet, but I didn’t see that I had any choice. I didn’t want to be rude. I told him and Uncle Charlie about feeling inadequate compared to my schoolmates, especially my roommates, one of whom had already published his first book. Another had spent his summer working at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. “They named a kind of leukemia after him,” I said. “You can die from something named after my roommate.” Then there was the boy who’d memorized most of Shakespeare’s tragedies. He had a pithy line from the Bard for every occasion, whereas I was lucky if I could remember that Hamlet was from Denmark. Lastly there was Jedd Redux, who seemed to grow more confident as the year went on.

  “I get it,” Uncle Charlie said. “You feel intimidated because you started life with a seven-two, different suits.”

  “A what?”

  “A seven and a two, different suits, worst poker hand possible.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I just feel like—a fish out of water.”

  “Me too,” Mullet said. We both looked at him. “I feel like a man out of beer. Goose—please.”

  Uncle Charlie puffed out his cheeks and stared at Mullet. Slowly he reached into the ice and removed a bottle of beer. “On the house,” he said, slamming the bottle in front of Mullet. “Now kick the bricks.”

  Mullet disappeared into the crowd, his hair reminding me of the fluke of a whale as it submerges.

  Uncle Charlie leaned close to me and asked, “What did you expect? You’re at the best school in the country. You think they let dummies into Yale?”

  “Just one.”

  “Ach. What do you have to read this weekend?”

  “Aquinas.”

  “Medieval philosopher. What’s the problem?”

  How to boil it down into a few words? It was more than being intimidated, more than poor grades. I read and read, worked as hard as I could, but without Bill and Bud to translate, I was lost. Henry IV, Part One? I didn’t know what the fuck they were saying. And what made it really frustrating—they were all standing around in a bar. How could I fail to understand a bunch of bar talk? Then there was Thucydides. Christ. I wanted to crawl inside the book and slap the old bastard around. I wanted to scream at him, Just give me the bottom line, man! I’d memorized one sentence from Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, a sentence that dragged on longer than the war itself. “For the true author of the subjugation of a people is not so much the immediate agent as the power which permits it having the means to prevent it.” No matter how many times I read that sentence it didn’t make any sense, and now I just walked around chewing on it, muttering it to myself, like Joey D. Now there was Aquinas! He changed the world with his logical proof of the existence of God, but no matter how closely I followed his step-by-step argument I couldn’t see any proof. Where was the proof? I believed in God, but I couldn’t see the proof, or the point of trying to offer proof. Such a thing seemed the quintessential article of faith.

  And the worst part, the most galling thing of all, was that I always had twice as much work as my schoolmates, because I’d signed up for Directed Goddamned Studies.

  I must have been lost in these thoughts for quite a while, because Uncle Charlie was snapping his fingers in front of my face. I blinked and remembered he’d asked me a question. What’s the problem? I wanted to tell him, but couldn’t, not because I was embarrassed, but because I was drunk. Righteously, irredeemably drunk, and yet fully aware of the wonderful redundancy of being young and drunk. Though it was one of the drunkest moments of my life, I would always remember it vividly, that complete absence of fear and worry. I was talking about my problems, but I had no problems. Except one. I couldn’t form words. Uncle Charlie was still staring at me—What’s the problem?—so I said something about Aquinas, which came out, “Equine asses is hard.” Uncle Charlie grunted, I grunted, and each of us pretended, or honestly believed, we’d had a real man-to-man. “Closing time,” he said.

  I scooped up my money, retrieved my suitcase and made for the door. I was leaving with pockets full of notes about Cager and others, plus ninety-seven dollars more than when I’d arrived, and I’d been declared a man by the men of the bar, including Steve. A birthday to remember. Someone shadowboxed me toward the door. It might have been Cager. It might have been Cager’s shadow. As I walked out into the rosy-fingered dawn everyone said, “Come back soon, kid.” They didn’t hear—or didn’t und
erstand—my answer.

  “Owl ill,” I said. “Owl ill.”

  twenty-three | TROUBLE

  Sophomore year will be easier, my mother promised. Bear down, she said. Keep trying. Try, try again. With Directed Studies and Professor Lucifer behind me, she predicted, I’d surely bring up my grades.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell my mother that trying was futile, because my brain was broken. Trying only emphasized and exacerbated the problem, like pumping the gas pedal when the engine is flooded. I couldn’t tell my mother that I was probably going to fail out of Yale, that I would soon bungle this golden opportunity for which she’d have given her atrophied right arm.

  The classroom, I’d concluded, was not my arena. The barroom was. After turning eighteen I decided that barrooms were the only places I was as clever as my classmates, and my classmates thought so too. When we went out drinking I could feel myself rise in their estimation. Though I’d been admitted to Yale, acceptance was something more elusive, and it seemed to happen only while my new friends and I were having cocktails.

  Unlike Publicans, however, New Haven bars charged for drinks. I needed a source of income, fast, or I’d lose my new friends as quickly as I’d made them, an idea that frightened me more than the prospect of failing out. I considered taking a job in one of the dining halls, but the pay wasn’t good and I didn’t want to wear what one friend called the Paper Hat of Poverty. I applied to the libraries, but those jobs were the most coveted and the first to be filled. Then, a bolt of inspiration. I would start my own laundry service. (I still remembered what Grandma had taught me about handling a steam iron.) I would let it be known that a new entrepreneurial venture was opening on campus, offering same-day service and charging just fifty cents per shirt. I nearly called my business Moehringer ’Round the Collar, but a friend wisely dissuaded me.