The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  “Steve doesn’t look good,” I told Uncle Charlie a few days before my tryout began.

  We both turned to watch Steve, who stood at the end of the bar, angry, wobbly, addled. No Cheshire smile. No trace of the Cheshire smile.

  “He looks,” Uncle Charlie said, “like Hagler in the late rounds.”

  Wearing a new pair of suspenders and matching necktie—Christmas gifts from my mother—I was the first one in the newsroom on the first day of 1989. My shoes were polished, my hair was slicked, my pencils were sharp as spikes. The editors gave me a story about a zoning dispute on the East Side, which I attacked as though it were the Watergate break-in. I filed eight hundred words just before deadline, and because I was so nervous the story was a disorganized mess. It read as if it had been written by Fuckembabe. The editors made many changes—sweeping, radical, Professor Lucifer-type changes—and buried the story inside the local section.

  On the train back to Manhasset I told myself that I had to find a way to calm down on deadline. I thought of Cager lining up the last shot in a high-stakes game of nine ball. I thought of McGraw throwing a change-up with the bases loaded and the game on the line. I thought of Bob the Cop when confronted with another floater, and Uncle Charlie doing the flamingo tango while mobsters plotted his demise, and Joey D’s serene face while beating a drunk senseless. Relaxkidjustfuckingrelax. I thought of them all and it helped.

  At week’s end the editors sent me to Brooklyn, where a teenage girl had been killed, caught in the crossfire of what looked like a gang shooting. I spoke with her friends and teachers and neighbors. She was an aspiring writer, they said. She’d recently started college and dreamed of becoming the next Alice Walker. Her life, like mine, was just beginning, and I felt honored to write about her, and obligated to report her death, which left no time for tensing up. I wrote for an hour and hit the send button on my computer. The editors made a few minor changes and put the story on the front of the local section. Nice work, they said, sounding surprised.

  I wanted to stop into Publicans and tell the men about my good day, but I’d vowed to avoid Publicans during my tryout. I tried not to think too much about this vow. I didn’t want to admit that the bar could be an obstacle to success, just as I didn’t want to examine too closely my difficulty unwinding at the end of a long day. Lying awake at four in the morning, listening to Louie fire up the griddle, I’d ask myself why I was so hot-wired. It wasn’t just the absence of alcohol, and it wasn’t just stress. Something else was going on. I wondered if it was hope.

  As the month progressed I learned to relax on deadline. I even began to enjoy myself, and gained some insight into what had gone wrong at Yale. The first step in learning, I decided, was unlearning, casting off old habits and false assumptions. No one had ever explained this to me, but during my tryout it became obvious. On deadline there was no time for old habits, no time to do what I normally did before writing—making lists of big words and worrying about how I would sound. There was only time for facts, and so the unlearning happened by necessity, almost by force. Before writing a story for the Times I’d take a deep breath and tell myself to tell the truth, and I would find the words, or they would find me. I didn’t have any illusions. I wasn’t writing poetry. I wasn’t writing very well at all. But at least what I saw each morning under my byline was different. There was a clarity about it, an authority, which I’d never managed to achieve before, certainly not while working on my Publicans novel.

  Halfway through my tryout one of the top editors of the Times sent a note to the city editor, who passed it along to me. “Who is this J.R. Moehringer?” the top editor asked. “Please convey my compliments on his fine work.”

  When I’m promoted, I thought, when I become a full-fledged reporter, Sidney will be sorry. When my byline appears every day in the Times, she’ll notice, and realize she misjudged me. She’ll phone and beg me to take her back.

  And maybe I would. After all, I’d changed—maybe she had. In one year I’d gone from barfly to reporter. Who knew what might have become of Sidney?

  I went into the men’s room at the Times and stood before the mirror. I looked different. Wiser? More confident? I couldn’t be sure, but it was a distinct improvement. I told my reflection: Soon you’ll be earning decent money. Maybe enough to get a real apartment, odor-free, with a kitchen. Maybe enough to send your mother to college. After that—who knows? Maybe enough to court Sidney. And one day buy her a ring.

  thirty-six | STEPHEN JR.

  Days before the end of my tryout an editor handed me a small clipping from that morning’s Times. A man named Stephen Kelley had been gunned down outside his Brooklyn apartment. Police said it looked like a case of road rage. The article was only three hundred words long, but the editor underscored the five or six most important words. Kelley was black, the shooter was white. Worse, the shooter was an off-duty cop. Racial tensions were already high in the city, with memories of Howard Beach and Tawana Brawley still fresh. This shooting had the potential to become another firestorm. The editor asked me to look into it, find out who Stephen Kelley was and write something about him.

  I went to Brooklyn with a photographer and we knocked at the door of Kelley’s apartment. When it opened we were face-to-face with three McGraw-size men—Kelley’s grown sons, including Stephen Jr. I said we were from the Times and they invited us in. We sat in their darkened living room, the shades drawn, and the sons told me in gruff, raw voices about their father, who had apparently raised them by himself. He was a tough guy, they said, but also a mother hen, a real worrier, constantly fretting about his “boys.” Recently the sons had been planning a get-together for the old man’s sixtysecond birthday. The sons—there were six in all—lived all over the world, and it was to be a grand reunion, all the Kelley boys returning home for the party. Instead the reunion would take place at their father’s graveside.

  When it was time to go I promised the sons I’d write a truthful account of everything they had told me about their father. “Listen,” Stephen Jr. said, walking me to the door. “Several newspaper stories have misspelled my family’s name.”

  “K-e-l-l-e-y,” I said. “Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Believe me, I’ll make sure to spell it right. I know how important names are.”

  I was in the newsroom early the next morning, reading my story over a cup of coffee. I looked up to see the weekend editor on the edge of my desk. “Hell of a job,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I mean it. Very nice work. I heard them talking about your story on the radio this morning.”

  “Really?”

  “Keep this up and I see bright things in your future.”

  He walked away and I tipped back in my chair. Who could have imagined—me, a reporter at the New York Times? I wondered if Sidney had seen the story, and if she’d read it. I wanted to phone my mother and read it to her. First I needed to phone the Kelley family.

  A man answered on the first ring. I recognized the voice as Stephen Jr.

  “Mr. Kelley? J.R. Moehringer from the Times. I just wanted to call and thank you for being so generous with your time yesterday. I hope the article was okay.”

  “Yes. It was fine. But you know, I have to tell you, you spelled our name wrong.”

  “What?”

  “You spelled it wrong. It’s spelled K-e-l-l-y.”

  “I don’t understand. At the door, when I said ‘K-e-l-l-e-y,’ you said, ‘Right.’”

  “I said, ‘Right,’ meaning that’s how other papers had misspelled it.”

  “Oh.”

  My heartbeat was so loud that I was afraid he could hear it. I’d thought my heartbeat was abnormal when Bob the Cop took me to the hospital, but now my heart was knocking against my chest as if it meant to get out.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so terribly sorry. I didn’t understand what you were saying.”

  “It’s all right. But if you could make sure there’s a correction
.”

  “Yes. A correction. Of course. I’ll talk to the editors. Good-bye, Mr. Kelly.”

  I went to the men’s room and smoked four cigarettes. Then I pulled the towel dispenser off the wall and kicked dents in the metal garbage can and punched the door of a toilet stall until I thought I’d probably broken my knuckles. I locked myself in the stall and tried to decide what to do next. I considered going to the bar across the street and throwing back a half dozen scotches. But there would be plenty of time for drinking later at Publicans. I considered saying nothing, hoping the editors wouldn’t notice. But I’d promised the son. Stephen Junior.

  Walking back into the newsroom I saw the weekend editor. I went over to his desk. He put a hand on my arm and asked the other editors milling around, “How about this Moehringer, eh?”

  He pronounced my name melodically, almost made me like it.

  “Well done,” the others said.

  “Nice job.”

  “Did you see that the wires tried to match your story?” the weekend editor asked me. “But they couldn’t. They didn’t get the family. They didn’t even spell the family’s name right. They spelled it K-e-l-l-y.” He laughed mockingly.

  “Actually,” I said. “I just got off the phone with the family.” My voice was shaky. “Apparently, K-e-l-l-y is how they spell their name.”

  The editor stared. I forged on.

  “The son told me yesterday that newspapers had been misspelling the family’s name—including this newspaper, by the way. In our first brief about the shooting we spelled the name K-e-l-l-e-y. So I said to the son, ‘K-e-l-l-e-y, right?’ Meaning, you know, ‘That’s how you spell your name, right?’ And he said, ‘Yes,’ meaning, ‘That’s how the other papers have been misspelling it.’ It was all a big mix-up.”

  The editor picked up a pencil, dangled it a foot off his desk, then dropped it. He looked as if he’d like to do the same thing to me. His eyes were screaming, You’re dead, kid. I held his gaze for as long as I could, then lowered my head. I noticed that he was wearing the most beautiful suspenders. They were beige, with pictures of hula girls. I’d recently seen them in the window of an exclusive men’s shop on the East Side.

  “We’ll have to run a correction,” he said quietly.

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll write one up and send it to you. Look it over and tell me if it’s right.”

  I returned to my desk and waited for my daily assignment, which never came. The only thing that came my way was the correction. “A picture caption and article on Saturday, about a gathering in remembrance of a Brooklyn man killed in a parking dispute, gave his name incorrectly. He was Stephen Kelly.”

  Later, sitting at Publicans for the first time in twenty-seven days, I told Uncle Charlie what I’d done. He slammed a bottle on the bar. “How could that happen?” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or just disappointed.

  I wanted to phone my mother, but there was a line to use the phone, and no one in line had noticed that someone was passed out in the phone booth. Just as well. Only hours earlier I’d been imagining a triumphant phone call, telling my mother to start picking out classes, that I was going to send her to Arizona State University. I needed time to adjust to this new reality.

  I was good and drunk when Bob the Cop plodded in. “I’ve fished floaters out of the harbor that looked better than you,” he said.

  I told him the story.

  “How could that happen?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  He sighed. “Ah well,” he said, “forget it. Honest mistake. That’s why they put erasers on pencils.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said angrily. “Those poor sons. First, their father is gunned down by some cop, and then I come along with my stupid notebook and make it all worse. And there’s no living this down. A million copies are printed. They’re out there, everywhere, a million town criers of my stupidity. And when they’re all gone, the mistake will live on. Microfilm. Nexus. And I didn’t just make a mistake at the Sacramento Bee. I made it at The Newspaper of Record. Thanks to my stupidity the record will need to be corrected. And the worst part of all is that I didn’t make a mistake about the guy’s age or skin color. I made a mistake about his name. Of all things, I should be able to get a man’s name right.”

  I’d been aware of Bob the Cop staring at me hard. I’d assumed he was listening intently, but now I realized that my monologue had made him mad. He looked wounded, wronged, and his stare was so intense that it nearly sobered me up. He had something to say, something important. But whatever it was, he swallowed the words. I saw him mentally choose a different tack.

  “Why ‘of all things’ should you get a man’s name right?” he asked.

  “Because—”

  Now it was my turn to swallow words. I might have told him why names were important to me, but I felt exposed enough for one day. When I shook my head and said forget it, we both faced forward and stared at Crazy Jane’s stained-glass genitalia, saying nothing. Finally Bob the Cop put a hand on my shoulder. “Go in tomorrow,” he said, “and act like nothing happened. No. Don’t act like nothing happened. They’ll think you’re crazy. Act like something happened, but that you’re bigger than that something.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Trust me. It’s no big deal, J.R. You don’t know what a mistake is.”

  thirty-seven | BOB THE COP

  With the end of my tryout, I ended my dry-out. I returned to Publicans full-time, with a vengeance. I burrowed into the bar, barricaded myself into the bar, became a fixture at the bar, like the jukebox and Fuckembabe. I ate my meals at Publicans, paid my bills at Publicans, made my phone calls from Publicans, celebrated holidays at Publicans, read and wrote and watched TV at Publicans. On letters I sometimes put Publicans as the return address. I did it as a lark, but it wasn’t a lie.

  I needed, no less than food and water, that daily hello at the bar, everyone turning and huzzahing as if nothing were wrong, with me or the world. “Well bust my buttons,” one bartender would say. “Look what the cat coughed up!” “How are things in Glocca Morra this fine day?” another always said. “Look. Who’s. Here,” Uncle Charlie would say, my favorite greeting of all. Walking through the door one night I saw Joey D behind the bar. He looked up from his newspaper. “This place is like a lint trap,” he said, smirking. “Catches whatever flies through the air.” I pointed to Bob the Cop. “Must be why there’s so much fuzz.” Bob the Cop chuckled, Joey D clapped his hands. “Nice fucking comeback!” he said—Nicefuckingcomeback!—and my night was made.

  Sometimes the bar felt like the best place in the world, other nights it felt like the world itself. After one especially grueling day at the Times, I found the men in a circle at Uncle Charlie’s end of the bar. They had arranged cocktail garnishes in the shape of the solar system, a lemon as the sun, and they were moving the olive around the lemon, explaining to each other why New York gets dark before California, why seasons change, how many millennia we have before the whole thing falls apart. I stood behind them, letting their conversation orbit around me. What’s a black hole anyway? A thing that sucks up everything in its path. So it’s like my ex? Yeah only smaller. I’ll tell her you said that. A black hole’s like the Grand Canyon with extra gravy. Not gravy, dipshit—gravity. What’d I say? Think of it this way—the universe is held together with gravity, your ex is held together with gravy. Don’t use an olive for the earth, I hate olives. Whaddya got against olives? Pits—I don’t like food that fights me. Who the fuck ate Mars? Sorry, I see a cherry, I eat a cherry. How big is the fucking earth anyways? It’s twenty-five thousand miles around. That sounds almost walkable. You don’t even like to walk to the corner for the Daily News. You mean to say everyone in this joint is going sixty-seven thousand miles an hour right now? No wonder I feel so fucking dizzy.

  The men stopped talking and gazed in wonder at their condiment solar system. The only sounds were a dry cough, a match being struck, Ella Fitzgerald scatting on
the stereo, and for a split second I thought I could actually feel Publicans plowing through the cosmos.

  I needed the unpredictability of Publicans. One night a famous actor wandered in. His mother lived nearby and he was home for a visit. None of us could stop staring. The Actor had starred in classic films with the best leading men of his generation, and here he was, at Publicans, asking for a glass of buttermilk. He told Uncle Charlie that he always coated his stomach with buttermilk before getting down to some serious drinking. As the night wore on Uncle Charlie teased The Actor about his buttermilk, saying he was the least macho of all the leading men with whom he’d worked. The Actor didn’t understand Uncle Charlie’s sense of humor. His feelings were hurt. He climbed onto the bar and did military push-ups until Uncle Charlie took it all back and conceded that The Actor was as manly as any man alive.