The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  Rather than reassure me that this was all nonsense, the men concurred. In the war between men and women, they said, I didn’t have enough fear of the enemy. I protested that I had plenty of fear, a surfeit of fear, but they said I was confusing fear with awe. Also, they said, I had no plan. Never go to war without a plan. Most men in the bar conceived of romance in warlike terms, because they said it was all a matter of taking something that belonged to someone else, which was the basic dynamic of every military action. Seduction as destruction. All romantic advice from Cager, for instance, tended to be shaped by his experience fighting communism. Broads were like Reds, he said. Inscrutable. Ruthless. Committed to forcible redistribution of your money. Uncle Charlie, meanwhile, thought the Vikings, Huns, and other primitive marauders had it about right. “Just grab the broad by the hair and drag her from the fucking newsroom,” he said. He was speaking metaphorically, I guessed. Or hoped. Dalton urged me to adopt a strategy more like the assault on Dresden, and “carpet-bomb” Copygirl with love poems. He’d had great success hiccupping his alcoholic haikus to women. (“Nurses all dressed in white / Sit looking at Publicans tonight / All in a huddle / Like some athletic team / Each with her separate dream of requited desire . . .”) But he was handsome enough to compensate for such purple verse.

  In the end I decided to simply phone Copygirl from Publicans and ask her for a date. “Your funeral,” Uncle Charlie said, stubbing out a cigarette.

  Copygirl was surprised to get a call from me, since she didn’t know who I was. “Tell me again who you are,” she said.

  I told her my name again, pronouncing it slowly. I reminded her where I usually sat in the newsroom.

  “How did you get my number?”

  Since I’d stolen her number from Marie’s Rolodex, I pretended I hadn’t heard the question. I asked if she was free that Saturday. “I was thinking we might—”

  “Actually,” she said, “I was going to check out the new clay exhibit, the one everybody’s talking about.”

  “Right, the clay exhibit, sure. But actually I was thinking we might—”

  “If you want to meet me there, I guess that would be all right.”

  We arranged to meet outside “the museum.” I had no idea what exhibit she was talking about, nor what museum. I phoned my roommate from Yale, the law student, who now lived in New York, gave him a quick overview (beautiful copygirl, excruciating crush, imminent date), and asked what he knew about some big clay exhibit. “You are such a retard,” he said. “Paul Klee. K-l-e-e. A retrospective of his work is opening at the Met this weekend.”

  The next morning I borrowed a dozen books on Klee from the New York Public Library and read them furtively in the newsroom. After work I lugged them home to Publicans. Colt poured me a scotch and crooked an eyebrow as I opened one of the books. “I was afraid of this,” Cager said to Bob the Cop. “Yale found out he doesn’t know squat about the Magna Carta and now he has to go back and take summer school.”

  “It’s not for Yale,” I said. “It’s for—a girl.”

  Cager and Bob the Cop glanced at each other. Clearly they were going to have to take me out to the parking lot and beat some sense into me. Then Klee’s paintings caught their attention. They moved in for a closer look. Cager was intrigued by Klee’s shapes and lines, and fascinated when I told him about Klee’s experience as a soldier in World War I. Bob the Cop said he liked Klee’s use of color. “This one is pretty,” he said, pointing to Twittering Machine.

  I told them what I’d learned so far. About Klee’s relationship with Kandinsky. About his fascination with romanticism. About his use of childlike drawing. “This one,” Cager said, “looks like a hangover.”

  I studied Klee with them until last call, then continued studying at my apartment until Louie the Greek fired up the griddle at 4:00 A.M.

  I was asleep on my feet as I walked up to the museum, but confident that not even the curators knew more than I about Klee. Copygirl was at the entrance, wearing a trench coat cinched at her waist, twirling an umbrella like a parasol. She was a model whom Klee would have killed to paint, though he might have envisioned her as a pyramid of boobs and eyelashes. I sort of envisioned her that way myself.

  We got in line for tickets. I found it hard to make small talk while we waited, my brain both sluggish and overstuffed with facts about Klee. At last we were inside. We stood before the first painting. I pointed to a corner of the canvas, where a stick figure overlooked a fish. I expounded on this symbol of Klee’s view of mankind versus nature. We walked along and stood before a pencil drawing. I talked about Klee’s debt to primitives, his fondness for crude forms of media like crayon.

  “You sure know a lot about Klee,” Copygirl said.

  “I’m a big fan.”

  She was scowling at the Klee, her expression not unlike Cager’s.

  “Don’t you like Klee?” I asked.

  “Not really. I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”

  “I see.”

  We left. At a sushi bar we sat over a plate of California rolls and I felt so disappointed about the Klee exam being canceled that I was mute. After half an hour Copygirl said she needed to be somewhere else, and I didn’t blame her. If I could have gotten away from me, I’d have jumped at the chance. We parted with a vote-for-me-on-Election-Day handshake.

  Back at Publicans Cager asked how it went.

  “Not the way I’d hoped,” I said.

  “Serves you right. Studying for a date.”

  “What else should I have done?”

  He swiveled on his barstool to face me and he pushed his visor back so I could see his face. “Next time some broad tells you to take her to a museum,” he said, “take her to fucking Cooperstown.”

  thirty-four | PETER

  Hey Edward R. Murrow-Ringer,” a man at Publicans said to me. “How come I never see your name in the paper?”

  “I use a pen name. William Safire.”

  He laughed and slapped the bar. “Willie!” he said. “I don’t care for your politics.”

  This man knew why I was never in the paper. Everyone at Publicans knew. How could they not know? They saw me at the bar night after night, putting more effort into the Times crossword than I put into anything I wrote for the Times news pages. The man asked because he couldn’t understand why I’d stopped trying. I’d only begun to figure it out myself.

  Like “J.R. Moehringer,” the training program was something of a misnomer. There was no training and no program. Shortly after I joined the newspaper the editors decided that the training program didn’t make financial sense. Why promote a copykid to full-time reporter, they reasoned, when for the same salary the Times could hire any prizewinning reporter in the country? The editors couldn’t say this publicly, of course, because the training program was a venerable Times tradition, and had been the entrée into the newspaper for many of the editors themselves. How would it look if they pulled the ladder up behind them? Besides, the editors didn’t want to kill the program outright, they just wanted to “deemphasize” it. That was the word they used in their secret meetings, the word that leaked out into the newsroom. They enjoyed having a couple of dozen desperate-to-please Ivy Leaguers running around the newsroom. It flattered their vanity to have us fetching their sandwiches and separating their carbons. Thus they simply pretended there was a training program, continued to entice copykids with the false hope of a promotion, then each month or so told another copykid that the secret committee had met and decided he or she wasn’t Times material. You’re welcome to stay, the copykid would be told, so long as you understand we’re never going to promote you.

  Upon hearing that they were “unpromotable,” the other word bandied about, most copykids quit. Ambitious and embittered, they left for other newspapers or embarked on new careers. The editors counted on this steady exodus to stave off mutiny and keep the charade fresh. Whenever another copykid left, scores of new candidates applied for the open slot, and in this way the corps o
f sandwich fetchers and carbon separators was perpetually replenished. The “training program” rolled on.

  No one was supposed to know about any of this, but there are no secrets in a newsroom. Everyone knew, and midlevel editors therefore stopped giving copykids anything to write. Why invest time and energy in a bunch of copykids whom the top editors had come to regard with indifference? Why make a protégé of someone who wouldn’t be around much longer? Faced with all this sudden indifference and deemphasis, the copykids might have staged a slowdown, or a walkout, or set the building on fire. Instead we kept trying. We scavenged in wastebaskets for story ideas that reporters had discarded, and groveled for press releases and puff pieces we might turn into something good. When we did find something to write, we polished every sentence like Flaubert, and prayed that the editors might see some ray of promise in our work. None of us could stop hoping that he or she would be the chosen one, the single copykid, sui generis, who would make the editors forget their disdain for all.

  For months I tried as hard as anyone. Then, as at Yale, I stopped. This time, however, there was no threat of expulsion. The only consequence of not trying was a faint sense of regret and that old sinking feeling that failure was my fate. Any stronger misgivings about my decision to stop trying were quickly eased by Publicans, which was crowded with people who had stopped trying long ago. The more I moaned about the Times, the more popular I became at the bar. Though proud of me when I succeeded, the men celebrated me when I failed. I noted this, then ignored it, as I ignored the fact that my post-Publicans hangover sometimes soured my disposition, hindered my job performance, and reduced my slim chances of being promoted to absolute zero.

  Around the same time I stopped trying at the Times I did something even more confounding. I stopped phoning my mother. I was in the habit of phoning her every few nights from the newsroom, seeking her advice and encouragement, reading her the top of whatever I was writing. After we hung up I felt a sense of regret, not because she hadn’t helped, but because she had. Too much. I was twenty-three years old. I didn’t want to be dependent on my mother anymore. Moreover I didn’t want to be reminded that my mother was supposed to be dependent on me. By this time I’d intended to be helping her financially. I’d hoped that by 1988 she’d be moving into the house I’d bought for her, that her biggest worry would be what to wear to her morning golf lesson. Instead she was still selling insurance, still just getting by, and still struggling to regain her energy. I told myself that I wanted to see how well I could do with the men as my mentors instead of my mother, that it was healthy for a young man to distance himself from his mother, but in truth I was distancing myself from unfulfilled promises, from the awful guilt I felt over failing to take care of her.

  Embargoing my mother made it easier to rationalize not trying at the Times and to turn my full attention to my mother’s bête noir, the bar novel, which I was no longer calling Publican Nights. The Aladdin motif hadn’t panned out. I was now calling the novel Barflies and Silk Panties, when I wasn’t calling it Moonshine and Monkeyshine, when I wasn’t calling it Here Comes Everybody, a phrase from Finnegans Wake. I had loads of material. Over the years I’d filled shoe boxes with cocktail napkins on which I’d recorded random impressions, scraps of dialogue, exchanges overheard in the barroom, like when Colt’s brother, filling in for Colt behind the bar, yelled at a customer, “Don’t laugh at me! Do not laugh at me, pal. My mother laughed at me and I had her operated on needlessly.”

  Each night I’d overhear at least one line that would seem an ideal opening or ending for a chapter. “I’m not overwhelmed,” a man told his girlfriend. “Right,” she said dryly, “you’re just the right amount of whelmed.”

  “So did you fuck her?” Uncle Charlie asked a man. “No way, Goose,” the man said. “Honest—she fucked me.”

  I once heard two women talking about their boyfriends. “He told me I’m a triple threat,” the first woman said. “What does that mean?” the second woman asked. “It’s some kinda sports term,” the first woman said. “He told me I’m really smart, and I have great tits.” The second woman counted on her fingertips, then screamed with laughter.

  After I stopped trying at the Times, I began holding myself to a strict regimen, postponing my nightly trip to Publicans until after I’d spent at least one hour making a stab at my novel about Publicans. Every attempt, however, was doomed, because I didn’t understand why I wanted to write about Publicans, why I loved Publicans. I was afraid to understand, and so I was doing little more than rearranging words on the page, an exercise ultimately as meaningless as the Wordy Gurdy.

  When the meaninglessness became obvious I would sit and stare at the wall above my desk, where I’d pinned index cards with favorite passages from Cheever and Hemingway and Fitzgerald. I’d grow angry with Fitzgerald. Bad enough that he’d set an unreachable standard of perfection, that he’d already written the Greatest American Novel, but did he have to set it in my hometown? I’d think about my favorite novels—The Great Gatsby, David Copperfield, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye—and their brilliance would paralyze me. I never perceived the things they had in common, the thing that drew me to them in the first place: Each male narrator mentions his father in the first few pages. In Gatsby, the first sentence. That is where a troubled male narrator usually begins, where I might have begun.

  Of course, had I been trying for a debilitating case of writer’s block, the conditions above Louie the Greek’s couldn’t have been better—hot, loud, the walls vibrating with every train pulling into and out of the station, the air vibrating with the aroma of pickles, bacon fat, fried potatoes and cheese. But I wouldn’t have fared any better at a secluded writer’s colony in the woods, because I was the ideal candidate for writer’s block. All the classic defects converged in me—inexperience, impatience, perfectionism, confusion, fear. Above all I suffered from a naïve view that writing should be easy. I thought words were supposed to come unbidden. The idea that errors were stepping-stones to truth never once occurred to me, because I’d absorbed the ethos of the Times, that errors were nasty little things to be avoided, and misapplied that ethos to the novel I was attempting. When I wrote something wrong I always took it to mean that something was wrong with me, and when something was wrong with me I lost my nerve, my focus, and my will.

  What seems most remarkable in retrospect is how many pages I produced, how many drafts I finished, how hard I tried before I stopped. It wasn’t like me to be so persistent and it showed how much the bar mesmerized me, how strong was my compulsion to describe it. Night after night I sat at my desk above Louie the Greek’s, trying to write about the voices of the bar, the exhilarating laughter of men and women huddled together in a place they felt safe. I tried to write about the faces within clouds of smoke, how they often looked like ghosts in a foggy hereafter, and the scintillating talk, which could jump from horse racing to politics to fashion to astrology to baseball to historic love affairs, all in the span of one beer. I tried to write about Steve’s Cheshire smile, Uncle Charlie’s head, Joey D’s mouse, Cager’s visor, Fast Eddy’s way of parachuting onto a stool. I tried to write about the urinals overflowing with money, and the time I fell asleep in the men’s room and someone woke me by saying, “Hey! This room’s for crappin’, not nappin’.” I tried to write about the time Smelly brandished a knife at the legendary running back Jim Brown. No matter what I did—naming the character Stinky, changing the weapon from a knife to a lobster fork—the story made Smelly sound homicidal, rather than laughably ill-tempered.

  I spent a fair portion of 1988 trying to write about Cager fleecing Fast Eddy. The whole “caper,” as Bob the Cop liked to call it, began in the late seventies or early eighties, when “Strangers in the Night” came on the stereo in the bar. “Great song,” Fast Eddy said, snapping his fingers. “Guess that’s why it won the Oscar.” Cager said, “‘Strangers in the Night’ never won an Oscar.” They bet a hundred dollars, dug out the almanac and
found that Cager was right. Years passed. The song came on the stereo again one night and Fast Eddy said, “Great song, guess that’s why it won the Oscar.” Cager laughed. Surely Fast Eddy was joking. Seeing that Fast Eddy was serious, Cager proposed a bet of several hundred dollars. Fast Eddy lost again, and paid. More years passed. Cager buttonholed Uncle Charlie and told him he was behind with the bookies and needed to get even in one fell swoop. Fast Eddy was the swoop. “Fast Eddy has a ‘black hole’ on ‘Strangers,’” Cager said, “so I’m going for the big score. Tonight, when he comes in, you put ‘Strangers’ on, I’ll take it from there, and later I’ll give you a slice.” But Uncle Charlie wouldn’t do it. He didn’t want to get mixed up in anything dishonest, he said. Pretty highfalutin talk, Cager countered, for a man who treats Publicans as his own personal betting parlor. Later, when Fast Eddy arrived, Uncle Charlie looked at Cager. Cager looked at Uncle Charlie. Fast Eddy looked at Uncle Charlie. Uncle Charlie served Fast Eddy a beer and started to hum. Scooby dooby doo. “‘Strangers in the Night,’” Fast Eddy said, snapping his fingers. “Great song. Guess that’s why it won the Oscar.” Cager was masterly. He teased Fast Eddy, mocked him, proclaimed to the bar that Fast Eddy didn’t know oo-gatz about music, until Fast Eddy had no choice but to insist on a bet sizable enough to salvage his manhood. Neither man ever told anyone how much they bet, but it was a boodle, and when Fast Eddy lost and reached for his checkbook, something clicked. The black hole in his brain flew open and closed like a camera shutter. He didn’t remember losing the same bet twice before, but he did remember Uncle Charlie singing, and it wasn’t “What Kind of Fool Am I?” Fast Eddy wondered what kind of fool he’d been.