The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  He hung up and folded his hands on his desk and asked about my holiday weekend. I told him about visiting Yale. “I’d forgotten you were a Yalie,” he said. “Yes,” I said. He smiled again. A Steve smile, almost. I smiled.

  “Well then,” he said. “As you’ve probably suspected the editors have had a chance to carefully review your work—and it’s terrific. Truly, some of the pieces you’ve done for us have been outstanding. That’s why I wish I had better news. As you know, when the committee meets to consider a trainee, some editors voice support, others do not. A vote is taken. I’m prevented from telling you who voted how, or why, but I’m afraid the end result is that I cannot offer you a position as a reporter.”

  “I see.”

  “The feeling is that you need more experience. More seasoning. A smaller newspaper, perhaps, where you can learn and grow.”

  He made no mention of pretzel fires and Kelly misspellings. He didn’t cite my ebb-and-flow productivity, didn’t refer to my I’m-sorry-I’m-such-an-idiot letter. He was a model of compassion and tact. He stressed that I could stay at the Times as long as I liked. If I chose to leave, however, if I wanted the kind of gritty writing experience that could be gotten only through daily deadline writing, the Times would certainly understand, and the editors would wish me well and send me off with glowing letters of recommendation.

  He was right of course. It had been preposterous, and presumptuous, to think I was qualified to be a reporter for the Times. I did need seasoning, plenty of it, more than he knew. I thanked him for his time and reached across the desk to shake his hand. I noticed his fingers as they came toward me. They were slender and manicured. His clasp was firm, the skin soft, but not too soft, not effeminate. They were the hands of a concert pianist, or a magician, or a surgeon. They were the hands of a mature man, unlike my hands, with their split cuticles and tobacco-stained fingertips. Mine were the hands of an urchin. His hands had tapped out whistling dispatches from war zones, and fondled the breasts of movie stars. Mine had committed appalling errors, ludicrous misspellings, and had routinely turned to claws with a kind of creative rigor mortis. I wished we could trade hands for one day. And hair. Then I despised myself for this wish. The man had just told me I wasn’t good enough, and yet I couldn’t stop liking him, and coveting his body parts. As he offered me a few final words of encouragement, I wasn’t listening. I was telling myself, Get mad! There would be something healthier, I thought, in shouting at the editor, or cold-cocking him. Joey D would lunge at this guy, I thought, right over the desk, feet first. Joey D would take the editor by that yellow hair, that silky, luminous fringe—how much did the man spend on conditioner?—and swab the desktop with him. I wished I were Joey D. I wished I were this editor, who was now guiding me out of his office and closing the door in my face.

  I walked around Manhattan, trying to think, for hours. Eventually I phoned my mother from a bar in Penn Station. She said she was proud of my efforts. “Why don’t you come to Arizona?” she said. “Get a fresh start.”

  “I’m going to Publicans.”

  “I meant in the future.”

  But Publicans was as far into the future as I could see.

  forty | SECRETARIAT

  I took a week off from the Times and locked myself in my apartment. I left just twice a day, to get breakfast at Louie the Greek’s and to pad down to Publicans at dusk. The rest of the time I sat in my boxer shorts, drinking beer and watching old Cary Grant movies on a handheld black-and-white TV. I never was so grateful for my two rooms above the diner. I no longer minded the smells, nor the fact that Dalton took naps in my bed when I was out. For all its shortcomings the apartment was my home, and it came as a heavy blow, therefore, when Don and Dalton told me they were expanding their practice and needed the space. For the price of a few books Bob the Cop helped me move back to Grandpa’s.

  The house was crowded—Aunt Ruth and several cousins were living there again—but I told myself it wouldn’t be bad. I’d save money on rent. I’d be a few steps closer to Publicans. And I’d see more of McGraw, who would soon be home from Nebraska for the summer. We’d share a bedroom again, for the first time since we were boys.

  Best of all, McGraw was finally legal. The New York State Legislature had done everything possible to keep McGraw out of Publicans, raising the drinking age every time he was on the verge of another birthday. But in 1989 the lawmakers finally stopped at twenty-one, leaving McGraw, who had just turned twenty-one, free at last to visit the bar. His first night home, a week after I’d moved back in, we coated our stomachs with one of Grandma’s gelatinous casseroles, doused ourselves with cologne, and sprinted to the bar. I held the door for McGraw.

  “After you.”

  “No, after you.”

  “Please.”

  “I insist.”

  “Age before beauty.”

  We walked in side by side. A cheer went up along the bar.

  “Look. Who’s. Here.”

  “Oh brother,” Cager said. “Adult swim is over. The kiddies are in the pool.”

  The men pulled bills from their piles and waved them at Uncle Charlie. It looked like a run on the bank. “Nephews!” Uncle Charlie said. “You’re backed up on everybody.”

  The men shouted questions at McGraw. How’s the arm, stud? What kind of season you have? Bang any farmers’ daughters lately? McGraw answered each question smoothly, deftly, as though giving a locker-room press conference. I stepped aside, into the barroom shadows, which seemed a shade darker that night because of the golden aura surrounding McGraw. He was a star at Nebraska, and everyone knew he had set a school record for most appearances by a pitcher in a single season. Uncle Charlie wanted to know all the details of this record. How many appearances? What was the previous record for appearances? Uncle Charlie said McGraw would be a pro within three years. He’d get a fat signing bonus, buy a sports car, burn up the minor leagues, and before long we’d all be meeting at Publicans to catch the train to Shea, where we’d watch McGraw mow down major-league hitters.

  Despite the warm reception they gave him, the men weren’t quite sure how to take this new McGraw. Like me, they were proud and intimidated at the same time. They went back and forth between kidding him as if he were still ten, and deferring to him as if he were their king. At times I thought they might weave him a crown of cherry stems and swizzle sticks. Cager had marched through minefields in Cu Chi, Bob the Cop had dodged bullets in Brooklyn, Fast Eddy had plummeted to earth at 150 miles an hour, but they all stepped aside for McGraw that night, because becoming a professional baseball player was the summit. Only if McGraw were poised to become the next heavyweight champ would the men have shown him more respect.

  No one gave McGraw a bigger tumble than Steve. He shouted when he saw McGraw at the other end of the bar, and rushed toward him like a linebacker chasing a fullback in the open field. “Look at the size of this kid!” Steve yelled. Steve had always loved McGraw. From the time he was a small boy, McGraw’s distinctive giggle had delighted Steve, and that summer of 1989 Steve needed all the giggles he could get. He was becoming incoherent with worry. Many of the men were talking about how much Steve was drinking. You had to drink a lot for people in Publicans to notice, and even more for them to talk about it.

  Besides hailing McGraw, however, Steve was also ushering him into the Big Man’s Club. A big man himself, Steve liked other big men, related better to big men, and his easy way with McGraw made me think about the conspiracy and primacy of big men. I was average size, but standing that night near Steve and McGraw, flanked by Cager and Bob the Cop, Smelly and Jimbo, I felt like a blade of grass in a redwood forest.

  Steve asked McGraw if the star athlete ever went to class. McGraw blanched. He loved class, he said. He talked about his studies, his reading, with a passion and defensiveness that reminded me of Bob the Cop. “I read The Sound and the Fury this semester,” McGraw said. “The whole book. That book’s hard. That book’s fucked up. Like this one part where Benjy
catches Caddy doing it on a tire swing. The professor calls on me in class, and he says, ‘What do you think this scene means?’ So I told him, ‘Sex in a tire swing—that does not sound easy,’ and the professor said he’d never heard that take on Faulkner before.”

  Two simultaneous discussions broke out, one about Faulkner, one about steel-belted radials.

  That Faulkner was some kind of drunk huh? I really ought to put some new snow tires on the Chevy. All writers are drunks. How much are they getting for new tires nowadays? Maybe I should be a writer then, if all you got to do is drink. You got to know how to read before you can write, dipshit. What’s that title mean anyway, The Sound and the Fury? I think I saw Michelins on sale at Sears. McGraw says it’s from Shakespeare. If they’re having all this sex in tires maybe the book should be called The Sound and the Firestone. How can Firestone just rip off Shakespeare like that? You mean Faulkner. What’d I say? You said Firestone, Einstein. That would be a good alias—Firestone Einstein. If you’re ever in the Witness Protection Program, that’s what you can call yourself. He isn’t ripping off Shakespeare—it’s a literary illusion. I need to stop drinking. I’m going to Sears tomorrow and look at those Michelins. I don’t remember any fucking Shakespeare play titled The Sound and the Fury.

  “It’s from Macbeth!” I nearly shouted, but I didn’t want to be the undersize nerd in the corner, spouting Shakespeare. The men cared about McGraw, not Macbeth, so I smoked and sulked and signified nothing.

  When his coronation was over, McGraw found me at the other end of the bar, talking to Bob the Cop. “So this guy comes along on his yacht,” Bob the Cop was saying, “and he sees the corpses strapped to my police boat, and he shouts, ‘Hey—what’d you use for bait?’”

  McGraw and I laughed. Bob the Cop went off to donate to the Don Fund and McGraw asked what was new in my life. I gave him the unhappy recap, from the Mr. Salty Incident to the Kelly Debacle, ending with Sidney’s wedding and my unpromotion.

  “Brutal,” McGraw said. “Especially Sidney. She’s your Daisy Bohannon.”

  “Buchanan.”

  “Whatever.”

  I was shocked that McGraw had read Gatsby, and remembered it, and referenced it. He told me that he had a Daisy too, a girl back in Nebraska who had been toying with his heart. “She’s so beautiful—she’s ugly,” he said. “Know what I mean?”

  We asked Bob the Cop when he returned if he had a Daisy in his past. He looked baffled. I made a note to bring my copy of The Great Gatsby to the bar for Bob the Cop. I thought, God knows I’m not using it.

  I’d been looking forward to spending time with McGraw that summer, but I never expected he’d be my shadow. Instead of lifting weights, getting his rest, staying in shape for his final season, McGraw was leaning against the bar at Publicans night after night, right alongside me. When I asked why he was challenging my record for most appearances at Publicans in a single season, he grinned, then winced. He rubbed his shoulder and looked as if he were about to cry. Something was wrong.

  He first noticed it while tossing a baseball earlier in the year. A twinge. The baseball went sideways, and he knew. He ignored the twinge, and all twinges that followed, and pitched through the pain, and set the record, but now the pain was unbearable. He couldn’t raise his arm. He couldn’t sleep. Aunt Ruth had taken him to several specialists, he told me, and they all had diagnosed a torn rotator cuff. McGraw’s only hope of pitching again was surgery, which he didn’t want. Too risky, he said. He might lose the use of his arm altogether.

  Then McGraw shocked me by confessing the main reason he didn’t want the surgery. He’d lost his love for the game. “I’m tired,” he said. “Tired of practicing, tired of traveling, tired of the pain. Tired. I’m not sure I ever want to pick up a baseball again.”

  With his last two semesters of college, McGraw said, he wanted to read, think, bring up his grades and maybe go to law school.

  Law school? I tried to conceal my shock. When I was able to collect myself, I promised McGraw I’d support him, no matter what he wanted to do.

  “Thanks,” he said. “But you’re not the problem.”

  “Your mother?”

  He took a swig of beer. “Ruth’s on the warpath.”

  McGraw said he’d told his mother earlier that day what he’d just told me, and she had come unhinged. As soon as we went back to Grandpa’s I saw that McGraw hadn’t exaggerated. Aunt Ruth was sitting up, waiting for us. She cornered us in the kitchen and asked if McGraw had told me about his arm.

  “He did.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “That I support him no matter what he wants to do.”

  Wrong answer. She raised her hand and brought it down on the kitchen counter, rattling the Publicans glasses in the cupboards. Her eyes darted left and right, as if she were looking for something to throw. Then she threw words, the sharpest words I’d ever heard from her. All Aunt Ruth’s screaming of the last twenty-four years seemed a warm-up for that night. She screamed that McGraw and I were cowards, the most despicable kind of cowards, because we didn’t fear failure, but success. We were like all the men in the family, she said, and even in my fear of her, I felt for her, because it was clear how many men had disappointed her, from her father to her brother to her husband and now her only son. Her heart was broken. Though I shrank from her, I sympathized with her, and understood her, because she wanted the best for McGraw, as did I. She didn’t want him to stop playing simply because he was in pain. She wanted him to push through that pain, keep trying. Like my mother, Aunt Ruth had pushed through pain all her life. She’d endured years of bad jobs and poverty and disappointments, and the misery of constantly sliding back to Grandpa’s house, and the only thing that kept her going sometimes was the hope that life would be different for her children, that her children would be different. Now she felt that McGraw was going to be the same, and this caused her a pain at least as excruciating as the pain in his shoulder. When McGraw said he wanted to quit baseball, Aunt Ruth didn’t hear his voice. She heard a chorus of male voices saying, “I quit,” and it made her cut loose with screams of anguish and rage that ultimately sent me running from the kitchen, McGraw a half step behind.

  McGraw’s mother blocked his path. He ducked under her outstretched arm but she backed him against a wall. He lowered his head like a fighter, doing a kind of rope-a-dope, but you couldn’t rope-a-dope Aunt Ruth. She rained words down upon him. She called him a louse, a fool, a failure, a freak, and worse. I tried to step between them, to beg her to stop, but I’d forgotten, after being out of that house, that Aunt Ruth’s fury was like the wind. It blew when it blew, stopped when it stopped. And though there had never been anyplace to hide when we were boys, we felt especially exposed now. My apartment was gone, Publicans was closed for the night, neither of us owned a car. Also, we couldn’t look for any help from Grandma or Grandpa. They had never been eager to take on Aunt Ruth when they were younger, but now that they were older they stayed well out of her way.

  McGraw and I had no choice but to crawl into our beds in the back bedroom and ride out the storm. For a half hour straight Aunt Ruth screamed at us from the doorway, then abruptly stopped and slammed the door. We lay on our backs, trying to steady our breathing and bring down our heart rates. I closed my eyes. Five minutes passed. I heard McGraw still breathing heavily. Then the door flew open and Aunt Ruth started up again.

  In the morning we found her at the kitchen table, waiting, ready to go again.

  Every night was the same. Aunt Ruth would wait for us to return from Publicans and she would be screaming as we walked through the door. There was only one option. We never left Publicans. We hid at the bar until dawn, and even Aunt Ruth couldn’t stay awake that long. Our strategy was foolproof. Aunt Ruth knew we were hiding from her, and knew where, but she was powerless. Even in her turbulent emotional state she recognized the barroom’s inviolate neutrality, like a Swiss embassy. She knew that Uncle Charlie and the men wouldn’t stan
d for a mother ambushing her son at the bar, though some nights Aunt Ruth would send one of McGraw’s younger sisters into the bar to speak to him, to embarrass him. At such times McGraw’s sense of shame and déjà vu, his fear that he’d now officially become his father, was palpable, and it made us all drink a little more.

  By midsummer McGraw and I were hatching plans for a more permanent and radical escape than Publicans. He would quit Nebraska, I would quit the Times, and we’d backpack across Ireland, staying in hostels when we had money, sleeping in the lush green fields under the stars when we were broke. We’d work odd jobs, preferably in pubs, which would lead to full-time jobs, and we’d never come back. We sketched out the details of our plan on cocktail napkins, with much solemnity, as if it were something nobler and more complicated than a pub crawl. We told the men and they thought it a fine idea. It reminded them of their travels when they were younger. Joey D told us about going to the Caribbean with Uncle Charlie. A voodoo lady took one look at Uncle Charlie and said, “Him bad magic.” The memory made Joey D so weepy with laughter that he had to wipe his eyes with one of the cocktail napkins on which we’d drawn up our Ireland plan.

  I phoned my mother and told her about Ireland. She sighed. You don’t need a vacation, she said, you need to get back on the horse. Apply to small newspapers, do as the Times recommended, then reapply to the Times in a couple of years. This sounded like the same old try-try-again nonsense that had gotten me nowhere, and I was saying good-bye to all that. I explained to my mother that I was “tired,” consciously borrowing McGraw’s line, while forgetting that it was a word charged with meaning for her. She’d been tired for twenty years, she said. Since when was being tired an excuse to stop trying?