The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  Yale had recently mailed my mother a catalog of rings, which for some reason captured her imagination. She’d become strangely obsessed with buying me a ring as a graduation present. She said I must have a ring. A ring, she said, was part of the Yale experience. Like a diploma, she believed, a ring would be proof that I’d gone to Yale. “Sparkling proof,” she said.

  I didn’t want a ring. I told my mother about my aversion to men’s jewelry, and I pointed out that Yale rings were expensive. She wouldn’t listen. You must have a ring, she insisted. Fine, I said, send me the catalog, I’ll order a ring. But I would pay for it myself, by working extra hours at the bookstore-café.

  Over dinner at Publicans my mother knew I hadn’t kept my word, that the money for the ring had gone the way of the money for the name change. “You promised you were going to order a ring,” she said in a disappointed voice.

  “And I did.”

  From the breast pocket of my blazer I removed a velvet box and slid it across the table. She cracked the box open. Inside was a Yale ring. A woman’s ring. I explained that Yale had been our dream, and our accomplishment. I told my mother that I couldn’t have gotten into Yale without her, and certainly couldn’t have gotten through without her. “As far as I’m concerned,” I said, “you graduated from Yale today too. And you should have some proof. Sparkling proof.”

  Her eyes welled with tears, and she tried to speak, but her voice caught in her throat.

  After dinner we moved into the barroom. Uncle Charlie was behind the stick and in my honor he played Sinatra all night. “This is your ‘Pomp and Circumstance,’” he said, cranking the volume on “My Way.” When a young hippie wannabe in a suede coat with fringes along the sleeves asked Uncle Charlie to please play something else, Uncle Charlie glared at him and slowly raised the volume.

  Steve gave my mother a big hello. He complimented her ring and flashed a chivalrous variation of the Cheshire smile. Cager tipped his visor to my mother and told Uncle Charlie he wanted to buy her a drink. “Dorothy,” Uncle Charlie said, “you’re backed up on The Cage.”

  I tried to whisper something to my mother about Cager’s time in Vietnam. I wanted her to know what an honor it was to have Cager buy her a drink. But Fuckembabe interrupted. “Your son,” he said to my mother, “splitches the sploozah like nobody else in this casbah, especially when he walla wallas the umpty boodles, I wanna tell you!”

  “Oh?” she said, looking to me for help. “Thank you.”

  While my mother was talking to Uncle Charlie and Fuckembabe, Cager tapped me on the shoulder. He asked what subject I’d chosen for a major. History, I said. He asked why. I told him one of my professors had said that history is the narrative of people searching for a place to go, and I liked that idea.

  “So how much do they get for a Yale education these days anyway?” he asked.

  “About sixty thousand,” I said. “But most of that was paid for by grants and loans and scholar—”

  “And what year was the Magna Carta signed?”

  “Magna—? I don’t know.”

  “Just as I thought. Sixty thou, down the drain.” He lit a Merit Ultra and took a swallow of Budweiser. “Magna Carta—1215. Foundation of English law. Bulwark against tyranny. They let you out of fucking Yale without knowing that?”

  He sounded as though my graduation had set his teeth on edge. And he wasn’t the only one. Colt sounded standoffish too, like Yogi Bear stealing a picnic basket that turns out to be empty. Were the men, like Sinatra, somehow intimidated by Yale? I couldn’t stand to think Yale might be a barrier to the bar, so I downplayed my diploma, talked up my shitty grades and my emasculation by Sidney, and sure enough their mood improved.

  When the kitchen closed, people in the restaurant drifted into the barroom for nightcaps, followed by the waiters and waitresses, now off duty, ready for their first cocktails of the night. Everyone congratulated me and flattered my mother and reminisced about their own graduations. My cousin Linda arrived and presented me with two gifts. The first was news that McGraw would be home next week. He’d just finished his first year at Nebraska, where he’d earned a baseball scholarship, and I was dying to see him. Her second gift was a silver pen from Tiffany. Linda knew I harbored indistinct notions of becoming a writer. My mother didn’t know, however, or didn’t want to know, so Linda’s pen pointed the way to the conversation we’d been dodging for years. At long last—nestled in Publicans, brazen with scotch—I admitted to my mother that I wasn’t going to be a lawyer. Law school wasn’t for me. School of any kind wasn’t for me. I’m sorry, I said. I’m so sorry.

  My mother held up her hand. Wait, she said. Slow down. Her heart wasn’t set on my being a lawyer. She only pushed me in that direction, she said, because she wanted me to make a contribution to the world, and to build a career, instead of just punching a clock. She’d be happy if I was happy, no matter what career I chose. “What is it you think you might like to do instead of law school?” she asked sweetly.

  The question swirled above our heads like the blue smoke. I averted my eyes. How to tell my mother that what I wanted to do next was pick out a barstool at Publicans and get comfortable? I wanted to play Liars’ Poker, watch baseball, gamble—read. I wanted to settle in at the bar and have a cocktail and enjoy the books I’d felt too intimidated and rushed to enjoy at Yale. At long last I wanted to sit on a chair and look up at the sky. . . .

  My mother was waiting, calmly holding her glass of zinfandel. What is it you think you might like to do? I contemplated opening with something blunt and direct. Mom, I just don’t see the point of this whole work-ethic thing. But I feared that this would knock her right off her barstool. I considered quoting Whitman. I want to “lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” But my mother didn’t give a damn about Whitman and she would find my song of myself off key.

  Of course I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know what I wanted. My inability to see life in anything but black or white prevented me from understanding my contradictory self. Yes, I wanted to loaf and lean against the bar, but I also wanted to strive and succeed, to make lots of money, to be able at last to take care of my mother. Failure was so painful to me, so frightening, that I was trying to appease it, make an accommodation with it, rather than fight it head-on. Shuttling back and forth all those summers between my mother and the men, I’d developed a dual personality. Half of me wanted to conquer the world, half of me wanted to hide from it. Unable to fathom my conflicting impulses, let alone explain them, and seeking an answer that would satisfy my mother, mollify my ambition, and still leave me free to lean against that bar, I announced loudly, impulsively, to myself as well as to her, that I was going to write a sprawling roman à clef about Publicans. I was going to be a novelist.

  “A novelist,” my mother said in her flattest monotone, as if I’d said I wanted to sell cheese sandwiches outside Grateful Dead concerts. “I see. And where will you live?”

  “Grandpa’s.”

  She recoiled. Aunt Ruth and the cousins were living at Grandpa’s again. Conditions at the house were wretched.

  “Until I can figure something out,” I added quickly. “Eventually I’ll get a room somewhere.”

  I felt quite proud. I thought I’d hit on a plan that meshed my mother’s dreams and mine. In fact my plan synthesized her worst fears. She twisted her new ring on her finger as though preparing to give it back, and she looked around the barroom, possibly rethinking her decision to send me there every summer. She’d always had a fixed idea of Publicans, based largely on my romanticized reports, and now I could see that she feared she’d misjudged the place, that it might not have been wise to let me become so enamored of it. She looked at the faces along the bar, the men and women who would have thought that writing a novel about them was a fine idea, and her expression was like Sidney’s when she first walked into Publicans.

  I looked around too. Down at the other end of the bar was a group of young men about my age, al
l of whom, I’d heard, had recently landed their first jobs on Wall Street. They were knocking down $150,000 a year, at least, and each looked like the kind of son who would make a mother proud. I wondered if my mother saw them too, if she was thinking she’d like to trade me for one of them.

  “This is your plan?” my mother said. “You want to be a starving writer living in a garret?”

  I wasn’t altogether sure what a garret was, but it sounded cool, maybe just the kind of starter apartment I needed.

  “You have to have a job,” my mother said. “End of story.”

  “I will have a job. Writing my novel.”

  I smiled. She didn’t.

  “A job job,” she said. “You have to earn a salary so you can pay for health insurance, and clothes, and if you’re determined to live at Grandpa’s, you need to give something to Grandma for meals.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since you turned twenty-one. Since you graduated from Yale University. You need money, JR. Money to live. Money for, for—if nothing else—your bar tab.”

  I didn’t explain that there was no bar tab, that nephews of bartenders drank free. I knew that this argument wouldn’t help my cause, or put my mother’s mind at ease. I drank my scotch and kept my mouth shut, the last wise decision I would make for a very long time.

  twenty-seven | RJ MOHINGER

  I went up and down Plandome Road, filling out applications, introducing myself to every store owner and manager. By the time I reached the top of Plandome Road I was beat. The day was scorching and I needed a drink. I checked my watch. Almost happy hour. I looked up. The next store was Lord & Taylor. I’ll fill out one more application, I told myself, and then head to Publicans for a beer and a Smelly Burger with Uncle Charlie.

  The personnel woman at Lord & Taylor said there were no openings in Men’s Fashions. I could taste that beer as I stood and thanked her for her time. “Wait now,” she said. “We do have something in Home Fashions.”

  “Home Fashions?”

  “Towels. Soaps. Candles. It’s a lovely department. And the position is full-time.”

  “I don’t know.” I thought of my diploma. I thought of my pride. Then I thought of the look on my mother’s face at Publicans. “When would I have to—When could I start?”

  “Right away.”

  The personnel woman and I rode the escalator down to Home Fashions, which was housed in the store’s subbasement. She introduced me to the staff of the department, four ladies who must have been among the original suffragettes. The manager of Home Fashions took me into a back room and guided me through orientation, which lasted ten minutes, since there wasn’t much to be oriented about. Lord & Taylor had no computers, no cash registers, no visible sign that the twentieth century was drawing to a close. Every sale was written on an order pad, receipts were made with carbon paper, and in the rare event of a cash sale, change was made from a metal strongbox. Customers found it quaint, she said, that Lord & Taylor hewed to the old ways. She handed me an apron, made me a name tag—RJ Mohinger—and sent me onto the sales floor. “You can start,” she said, “by dusting.”

  In one of the mirrored music boxes for sale in Home Fashions I caught a glimpse of myself. That looks like me, but it can’t be me, because I’m wearing an apron and holding a feather duster and standing in the subbasement of Lord & Taylor. Yale in May, Home Fashions in June. I thought of my fellow Yalies, like Jedd Redux and Bayard. I imagined the careers they were launching, the exciting lives they were beginning to build. The way my luck was going one of them was bound to get a flat on Shelter Rock Road and stop into Lord & Taylor to use the phone, and there I’d be, aproned, gelded, up to my neck in scented soaps.

  “Excuse me.”

  I turned. A customer.

  “RJ,” she said, peering at my name tag, “could you help me with the Waterford?”

  The woman pointed to various pieces of crystal she wanted to examine. I took them from a case and set them before her on a soft cloth. Lifting them to the light she asked me detailed questions, and though I didn’t know the answers, I realized that at Lord & Taylor there were no grades. I told her that the methods used by the Waterford factory in Ireland dated to the time of the Druids. I told her about the bells that chimed each day at the Waterford Castle (I was describing Harkness Tower) and assured her that each piece of Waterford was unique, like a snowflake, like a human soul. I didn’t know what would come out of my mouth next, and I was just as anxious as the customer to find out. I lied eloquently, profligately, shamelessly. I lied my ass off, lied my apron off, and through lying I felt that I reclaimed some portion of my dignity.

  The customer bought six hundred dollars’ worth of Waterford, making me high seller for the day in Home Fashions. Apparently this was a feat without precedent. No employee in the history of Home Fashions had ever been high seller on his or her first day, the manager said as she handed me a candy dish. “What’s this?” I asked.

  “High seller for the day wins a prize. Today’s prize is a silver candy dish.”

  “Congratulations,” said one of the suffragettes, a woman named Dora, who wore eyeglasses as big as TV screens. From her insincere tone I could tell that she’d been the second-highest seller, and that she’d had her eye on that candy dish.

  Next day, same thing. I sold about eight hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise, and was rewarded with a set of steak knives. All that first week I outsold the suffragettes by a wide margin, and Sunday I shattered some long-standing Home Fashions record, the store equivalent of Roger Maris’s sixty-one home runs. I was moving merchandise faster than Lord & Taylor could restock it, and not only Waterford. I was selling enough candles to light Shea Stadium for a night game, enough bath towels to soak up Manhasset Bay.

  The suffragettes in Home Fashions gave me dirty looks all day, as if I opposed their right to vote. I was their worst nightmare: young, full of energy, free of the foot maladies that plagued them after decades on the sales floor, and hogging the daily prize they counted on to augment their pay. I gave myself dirty looks too, every time I caught sight of myself in one of the mirrored music boxes. Things were bad enough when I believed I’d taken a job that was beneath me. Now I faced the possibility that I’d found my true calling. Like water I’d sought my own level. Was this why I’d bombed at Yale? Why Sidney had rejected me? Because I’d been aiming too high? Was it my destiny to be the best clerk in the history of Home Fashions? At different times I’d been worried about harboring some dark attraction to failure. Now I worried about my inexorable success in Home Fashions, and what it foretold.

  But there was something more worrisome about Home Fashions, more horrible. More shameful. I liked it. All those nights peering into windows around Manhasset, all that pining after fine homes and nice things, had turned me into some kind of Home Fashions savant. In the deepest recesses of my subconscious I’d developed a fetish for Home Fashions, a nauseating innate talent. Even when I didn’t try I sold the stuff like no one else. In fact, not trying was the key. The less I tried, the better I did, and the more sick pleasure I got from it. I took to that apron like a dirt mule to a plow.

  Tortured, confused, toting the latest prize I’d won for being the day’s top seller, I retreated each night to Publicans with two other salesclerks, women my age. One worked in cosmetics, the other in lingerie. They thought I was funny, and an audacious liar, not because they heard me bullshitting customers but because I kept insisting I’d graduated from Yale.

  “I always thought if I had a soul-killing job it would be as a lawyer,” I told them. “But maybe Home Fashions is what I’m supposed to do. I can’t ignore the fact that this is the first thing I’ve ever done well.”

  “Don’t worry,” Cosmetics said. “I’m sure this is just a phase.”

  “Really?” I said hopefully.

  “If everything you’ve told us about yourself is actually true,” Lingerie said, “then you’re bound to start fucking up again real soon.”

  Autum
n arrived. I spent my days at Lord & Taylor, smashing sales records, my nights at Publicans, learning from Cager and Fast Eddy how to play Liars’ Poker. In my free time I outlined my Publicans novel, watched Oprah with Grandma, and sat on the stoop, reading. I was there on a crisp, classic October afternoon when the mailman came up the drive with the fateful pink envelope. I recognized the architect handwriting from twenty feet away. Taking the envelope from the mailman’s hand I tore it into a half dozen pieces. A minute later I taped the pieces together. She missed me, loved me, wanted to meet me in the city for dinner.

  I vowed not to go. I read a few more pages of my book, made myself a cup of tea, phoned Sidney and told her I’d come that night. I spent the rest of the afternoon primping and rehearsing different facial expressions in the bathroom mirror. Cool. Calm. Collected.

  On my way to the train station I stopped into Publicans for some encouragement. The only person I knew at the bar was Fuckembabe. He asked where I was going all fancy.

  “Dinner with my ex-girlfriend,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “Ah, fuck ’em, babe.”

  “You said it, Fuckembabe.”

  “Fuck ’em, babe. Fuck ’em.”

  “Did you ever have a girl break your heart?” I asked.

  Fuckembabe put his face an inch from mine. He gave me a nine-beer smile and the smell of liquor on his breath almost made my necktie go up and down. Still, I didn’t back away, and he seemed touched, as if my steadiness were a show of loyalty. Then he imparted some fatherly advice I never forgot. “I once hooded a young wicky dixie,” he said. “And when she wugged my hookah I told her I wouldn’t fuggin’ stand for that, no sir, and I rama lama whipsawed her the whole livelong diggledy doo. See wahm come from?”

  Sidney was no longer living with her parents. She had an apartment on the top floor of a town house on the East Side. When she opened the door I felt weak. She was more beautiful than I remembered. The brown eyes, the autumnal yellow hair—it had been only two months, but I’d forgotten. I told myself that beauty can’t be remembered any more than it can be described.