The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  The stereo was playing dirgelike classical music. Someone shouted that we should be listening to Steve’s kind of music. Elvis. Fats Domino. Johnny Preston. One of the bartenders dug out a tape with all Steve’s favorites. The songs made everyone feel cheerful, and awful, because they brought Steve to life. Surely Chief was there. We’d have a big belly laugh with him about how weird all this was, if only we could find him in that crush of drunken humanity.

  I got another scotch and stood beside Bob the Cop, who was drinking Rusty Nails.

  “How long do you think this joint will last?” he asked me.

  “You think Publicans will close? God. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Which wasn’t quite true. The thought had been eating at me, I just hadn’t wanted to face it. When Bob the Cop said it aloud, however, I understood my grief better, and everyone else’s. There was an element of selfishness about it all. We missed Steve, and mourned him, but we also knew that without him Publicans might die too.

  My legs buckled. I looked for a place to collapse but there wasn’t a seat to be had. I was going to be sick. Everything in the place suddenly repulsed me. Even the long polished wood bar made my stomach lurch, because it reminded me of Steve’s casket. I shouldered my way out the front door and stumbled to Grandpa’s, where I collapsed in the back bedroom. When I opened my eyes hours later I had no idea where I was. Yale? Arizona? Sidney’s? My place above Louie the Greek’s? The Hugo Apartment? Gradually the pieces of my mind fell into place, and I remembered that I was at Grandpa’s. Again.

  After a long hot shower I put on fresh clothes and returned to Publicans. By now it was three or four in the morning, but everyone was right where I’d left them, though they were melting and imploding, as if the heat had been turned up too high in the wax museum. I fought my way to the center of the crowd and found Bob the Cop and Cager in the same spot at the bar. They didn’t realize I’d gone home and come back. They didn’t know what time it was, or what day, and they didn’t really care. I drank with them until sunrise. Still they made no sign of leaving, but I needed air and food.

  I walked up to Louie the Greek’s. The counter was filled with commuters, all sharp-eyed and eager to start the day after eight hours of sleep. I saw the British au pair I’d dated, the one who talked like Margaret Thatcher. Her hair was wet. Her cheeks were russet apples. She was nibbling a muffin and drinking a hot cup of tea. She gawked at me. “Where are you coming from?” she asked.

  “Funeral.”

  “Bloody hell, love, whose? Your own?”

  forty-three | SMELLY

  Walking down Plandome Road weeks later I saw a pale, bloated moon rising from Publicans. The moon was wobbling, as if it had been overserved. Always watchful for signs, hypersensitive to their meaning, I should have had no trouble interpreting this one. Even the moon is leaving the bar. But I ignored it. In the weeks after Steve’s death I ignored everything, treating all signs and unpleasant facts as Joey D treated loudmouths. I simply refused to serve them.

  And yet Steve’s death—the squalor of it, the waste—couldn’t be ignored for long. At least once a day I’d think of Steve, of the way he’d died, and I’d wonder what he might say, now that he had all the answers, about the way we were living. I’d always held to the romantic notion that we were hiding from life in Publicans. After Steve’s death I couldn’t stop hearing his voice asking: Are we hiding from life or courting death? And what’s the difference?

  Many times that November I would look down the bar, at all the hollow-eyed and ashen faces, and I’d think maybe we already were dead. I’d think of Yeats: “A drunkard is a dead man, / And all dead men are drunk.” I’d think of Lorca: “Death / is coming in and leaving / the tavern, / death / leaving and coming in.” Was it a coincidence that my two favorite poets depicted death as a barroom regular? Sometimes I would catch my own hollow-eyed and ashen reflection in one of the silver cash registers. My face was like the moon, pale and bloated, but unlike the moon I never left. I couldn’t. I’d always seen Steve’s bar metaphorically, as a river, an ocean, a raft, a ship, a train carrying me to some far-off city. Now I saw the bar as a submarine trapped on the ocean floor, and we were running out of air. This claustrophobic image was chillingly reinforced when someone gave Uncle Charlie a tape of whale songs, which he played incessantly on the bar stereo, cranking the volume as high as it would go. The screeches and clicks were so earsplitting that the humpbacks seemed to be just outside, floating along Plandome Road, as if the front window of the bar were a porthole. “Isn’t this mellifluous!” Uncle Charlie would say. “You don’t mind if I say ‘mellifluous,’ do you? Isn’t it beautiful how they communicate with each other?”

  We weren’t communicating half so well among ourselves. A bar full of virtuoso talkers was now an echo chamber of long and uncomfortable silences, because there was only one thing to say and none of us was brave enough to say it: Everything had changed. Steve’s death had set off a chain reaction of change, the thing we were least equipped to cope with. His death had changed us in ways we didn’t understand, and changed the bar in ways we couldn’t deny. The laughter was shriller, the crowds thinner. People didn’t go to Publicans anymore to forget their problems or ease their sadness, because Publicans reminded them of death, Steve’s death, the saddest event in Manhasset history. Bob the Cop had questioned if the bar could survive Steve’s death, but what was already gone, forever, was our notion of Publicans as sanctuary. In the time it took a man to fall down, Publicans had devolved from a sanctuary to a prison, as sanctuaries so often do.

  The more these thoughts would nag at me, and unnerve me, the more I would drink. The binge drinking of Steve’s funeral lasted two days for most of Manhasset, but I was still in binge mode a month later. Riding the train to the Times, suffering another paralyzing hangover, I’d talk to myself, question myself, grill myself. Invariably these self-interviews ended with the same hard question. Am I a drunk? I didn’t think so. If I was dependent on anything it was the bar. I couldn’t imagine life without it. I couldn’t conceive of ever leaving. Where would I go? And if I went, who would I be? Who I was had gotten mixed up with where I was, and the idea of throwing it all away, the bar and my image of JR-in-the-Bar, terrified me. After thinking along these lines on the morning train, then working all day at a job in which I had failed and had no future, I couldn’t wait to get back to Publicans, to drink away my ambivalence about Publicans. Sometimes I’d get a head start, slurping cocktails in Penn Station and then grabbing two or three tallboys of Budweiser for the ride home. Occasionally I’d pass out on the train, sleep through my stop, and a conductor would wake me in the middle of the night after the train had parked in the freight yard. Shaking my shoulder the conductors always said the same thing: End of the line, pal.

  I no longer made any pretense of drinking to bond with the men, or to blunt the cares of the day, or to participate in male rituals. I drank to get drunk. I drank because I couldn’t think what else to do. I drank the way Steve drank at the end, to achieve oblivion. I was a few sips from oblivion on a cold night in December 1989—I don’t remember if it was days before or days after my twenty-fifth birthday—when the bar finally decided it had seen enough. The bar had filled every need I’d ever had, and needs I didn’t know I had, and now I needed one more thing.

  I was standing with Cager and Smelly. General Grant was behind the stick. It was around three in the morning and we were talking about war. I mentioned how often we seemed to talk about war, even when we were ostensibly talking about something else. Cager said it was only natural, since war is the Big Topic. Life, he said, is war. An endless sequence of battles, conflicts, ambushes, skirmishes, with all-too-brief interludes of peace. Or maybe General Grant said this. Then Cager said something about the Middle East, and I took issue with his opinion, not because I disagreed but because I worried that if I didn’t keep talking my forehead would hit the bar.

  “Why don’t you shut the fuck up?” Smelly said.

&
nbsp; Everyone stopped talking. Cager, standing between Smelly and me, told Smelly to take it easy.

  “No,” Smelly said. “I’m sick of this punk thinking he knows everything. He went to Yale so he’s Mr. Fucking Know-It-All? He don’t know shit.”

  “Settle down,” General Grant said.

  “Fuck that!” Smelly said. Bull-necked, swag-bellied, he walked around Cager and came toward me.

  What wire in Smelly’s mental fuse box had I accidentally cut? I tried to say something in my own defense, but at that moment words couldn’t stop Smelly. Bullets couldn’t stop Smelly. He covered the six feet between us in two steps, surprisingly lithe for a man of his girth. Reaching out with both hands he grabbed my neck as if it were a rope he intended to climb. He squeezed hard and I felt my throat close. I thought that Smelly might crumple my larynx and permanently damage my voice, that thereafter I’d sound raspy or hoarse, like Mr. Sandman, and this scared me more than the prospect—the likelier prospect—of strangulation.

  Smelly pushed me backward, twisting my neck harder now. His hands reeked of garlic and meat. Smelly’s hands are smelly. I hoped this wouldn’t be my last thought ever. I reached up and tried to pull his hands from my neck but they were also slippery, and his grip was iron. I thought about pasting him one, but I didn’t want to make him angrier. I looked deep into his eyes—there was no deep in Smelly’s eyes. They were black dots, the eyes of a cartoon character. Between them, forming a perfect V, his orange eyebrows were vibrating, and like his orange mustache and the orange hair on his head, those eyebrows were glistening with sweat. He was overweight, overwrought, overserved, and as orange as a glass of Minute Maid. He was a cross between Yosemite Sam and Son of Sam, and this, I was sure, would be my last thought ever, because Smelly was determined to kill me.

  Even as Smelly wrung my neck I didn’t hate him. I loved Smelly no less than I loved all the men in that bar, and as I began to lose consciousness I felt hatred only for myself, because I loved him, loved any man who paid attention to me, even when that attention took the form of murder.

  Smelly rose. He floated toward the ceiling like an avenging angel, and I thought this vision was surely the first sign of encroaching death. Then, over Smelly’s shoulder, I saw Cager. He had Smelly by the waistband of his pants and was lifting him with a classic clean and jerk. Smelly let go of my neck and air rushed into my lungs. My vocal cords twanged. I fell to the ground, followed a second later by Smelly, who landed much harder, because Cager jabbed him into the wood floor like a spear.

  Cager stood over Smelly, pushing up his sleeves. “Touch him again,” he said to Smelly, “and I’ll kill you.”

  Lying on my back, holding my neck, I looked up at Cager. I’d never loved a man more. He adjusted his visor, strolled back to the bar and took a swig of his Budweiser.

  “Now,” he said. “Where was I?”

  I walked to Grandpa’s, head down, counting my steps—170. That’s 28 more than normal, which means I’m zig-zagging. On Grandpa’s dining room table I found a present waiting for me. It was from Sheryl. She’d recently gotten married, and starting her own family had inspired her to think about our family, and to rummage through Grandpa’s home movies, converting the most interesting ones to video. She’d left me a tape with a note attached. Thought you’d get a kick out of this.

  I pushed the tape into the VCR and lay back on the bicentennial sofa, holding a can of beer against my neck, where I could still feel Smelly’s fingers. The screen went white, then a picture formed. Grandpa’s house. The image was so clean and bright I thought it must have been filmed that morning. But the roof didn’t sag, the paint wasn’t peeling, the trees were saplings and the driveway didn’t have a lightning crack. Now Uncle Charlie walked across the screen with a pompadour and the time frame seemed prehistoric.

  The camera wavered crazily, left to right, back again, before settling on a pretty slip of a woman seated on the stoop. She had a baby on her lap. She bounced him, cradled him, whispered something in his ear. A secret. He jerked his head toward her. My mother and me, twenty-four years before. My mother looked at her nine-month-old son, then gazed straight ahead, at me, her drunken twenty-five-year-old son. I felt caught, as if she were peering into the future and seeing what became of me.

  Clearly this had been filmed right after my mother had come to live at Grandpa’s, shortly after my father had tried to kill her, but that wasn’t possible, because there was no trace of fear in my mother’s eyes. She looked happy, confident, like a woman with money in the bank and a bright future on the horizon. Hiding her feelings from Grandma and Grandpa, I thought. She didn’t want to worry them. Then I understood. It wasn’t them she was trying to fool.

  My mother’s first lie to me, caught on tape.

  How did she do it? With no education, no money, no prospects, how did my mother manage to look so fierce? She’d just survived my father clamping a pillow over her face until she couldn’t breathe, and lunging at her with a razor, and though she must have been relieved to escape him, she must also have been aware of what lay ahead—loneliness, money worries, the Shit House. But you wouldn’t know it to look at her. She was an inspired liar, a brilliant liar, and she was also lying to herself, which made me perceive her lies in a whole new light. I saw that we must lie to ourselves now and then, tell ourselves that we’re capable and strong, that life is good and hard work will be rewarded, and then we must try to make our lies come true. This is our work, our salvation, and this link between lying and trying was one of my mother’s many gifts to me, the truth that always lay just beneath her lies.

  My mother fussed with her nine-month-old son, then held him up, admiring him, and twenty-four years later I admired her in brand new ways. I’d always believed that being a man meant standing your ground, but this was something my mother had done better than anyone. And yet she’d also known when it was time to go. She’d left my father, left Grandpa’s, left New York, and I was always the beneficiary of her restless courage. I’d been so focused on getting in, I’d failed to appreciate my mother’s genius for getting out. Sitting forward on the bicentennial sofa and looking into her green-brown eyes I understood that every virtue I associated with manhood—toughness, persistence, determination, reliability, honesty, integrity, guts—my mother exemplified. I’d always been dimly aware, but at that moment, with my first glimpse of the warrior behind my mother’s blank face, I grasped the idea fully and put it into words for the first time. All this searching and longing for the secret of being a good man, and all I needed to do was follow the example of one very good woman.

  I looked away from my mother, at my nine-month-old self. How did that helpless baby turn into this helpless sot? How did I travel so far and wind up only 142 steps away, having my neck wrung by Smelly? And what was I going to do about it? The tape was ending. My mother told her nine-month-old son something else, something important, and his face contorted into a questioning scowl. I knew that scowl. I stood and checked the mirror over the fireplace—there it was. I looked back at the screen, where my mother was holding her son’s hand and waving it at the camera. Again she whispered in his ear, again he scowled. Though he heard her voice, her words, he couldn’t make out her meaning.

  But I did. Twenty-four years later I read my mother loud and clear.

  “Say bye-bye.”

  Each man reacted differently when I told him on New Year’s Day, 1990, that I’d quit the Times and was leaving New York. Fast Eddy was nonchalant. Don was kind. Colt was cool. General Grant puffed his cigar and told me to give ’em hell. Cager was proud. Peter asked me to send him a chapter now and then. Joey D was worried and looked at me the way he’d looked at McGraw swimming to the sandbar: I was going out too far, too deep. I told him I’d be fine, and thanked him for everything, and he said a bunch of sentimental things about “you boys” to his mouse, things I would have liked to have heard.

  If Smelly reacted at all, I didn’t notice.

  Bob the Cop looked down at his b
ig feet and shook his big head. “Place won’t be the same without you,” he said. But we both knew, with or without me, the place would never be the same, and that was the whole point.

  Fuckembabe hugged me and said, “You’d better leggerish your terpsichore, you hear, my young fiendish? And always go easy on your lackey. And take care that your mindy is always screwed on strape. Your harken will be down some days, and others days it’ll be upstarch. Cozening? But whatever cumbles—you lessening?—don’t let me hear that you hopped a wabash or slitched your licklechick in a flammery, all for your blooey grubstake! Right? And rememberize, always rememberize: Fuck ’em, babe. Fuck ’em.”

  Dalton’s reaction was the most unexpected. “You have no idea what horrors await you out there,” he said, pointing to the window. “Did you know that in some parts of this country, last call is at one in the morning? One! Out there, in places like Atlanta, and Dallas, they come up to you and take the martini glass right out of your hand—with booze still in it.”

  “I’ll try to remember,” I said.

  He wasn’t kidding. And he was angry that I wasn’t taking him seriously.

  “Laugh all you want,” he said. “But you know that saying ‘People are the same wherever you go?’ Well they aren’t.”

  “‘But they are difficult things with which we have been charged,’” I said. “Rilke.”

  Dalton’s face lit up. “You’ll be okay,” he said, giving me a shove. For emphasis, for old times’ sake, he added tenderly, “Asshole.”