“Talk about it?” she said.
“No.”
“You never say how you feel.”
“You either.”
She blanched. I hadn’t meant to be so abrupt. Tears started to run down my cheeks. I thought my mother was telling me the whole truth about my father, which was why it hurt so much, but of course she was editing, holding back the worst. Over the next few years she would gradually reveal the facts, gently paring away the illusion I’d conjured from The Voice, one piece at a time. Still, I always remember the whole story there on the stoop, on that bleak afternoon, because that was when she made the first painful cut.
My father was an improbable combination of magnetic and repellent qualities. Charismatic, mercurial, sophisticated, suicidal, hilarious, short-tempered—and dangerous from the start. He got into a fistfight at their wedding. Drunk, my father shoved my mother, and when his best man objected to such treatment of the bride, my father decked him. Several guests jumped my father, trying to restrain him, and when the cops arrived they found my father running up and down the sidewalk, assaulting passersby.
For their honeymoon my father took my mother to Scotland. When they returned she discovered that the trip was supposed to have been the grand prize in a contest for listeners at his radio station. My father was lucky not to be arrested. In the two years they were married he was always verging into lawlessness, befriending mobsters, threatening cabdrivers and waiters, beating up one of his bosses. Toward the end he turned his outlaw ways on my mother. When I was seven months old my father threw my mother on their bed and tried to suffocate her with a pillow. She broke free. Two weeks later he did it again. She broke free again, but this time he chased her and cornered her in the bathroom with his straight razor. He described in gruesome detail how he was going to carve up her face. He lunged for her and only my crying in the next room broke the spell of his rage. That was the day we left him. That was the day we arrived at Grandpa’s house, with nowhere else to go.
“Why did you marry him?” I asked her that day on the stoop.
“I was young,” she said. “I was dumb.”
I didn’t want her to say another word. There was just one more thing I needed to know before I dropped the subject of my father for good.
“Why does my father have a different name than us?”
“He uses an alias on the radio.”
“What’s an alias?”
“A pretend name.”
“What’s his real name?”
“John Joseph Moehringer.”
“My father called me Junior,” I said. “Why?”
“Oh.” She frowned. “Okay. Your legal name is John Joseph Moehringer, Jr. But I didn’t like the name John, and I didn’t want to call you Joseph. Or Junior. So your father and I agreed to call you JR. As in Junior.”
“You mean, my real name is the exact same as my father’s?”
“Yes.”
“And JR stands for—Junior?”
“Yes.”
“Does anyone know?”
“Well, Grandma. And Grandpa. And—”
“Can we not tell anyone else? Ever? Can we please just tell people that my real name is JR? Please?”
She looked at me with the saddest look I’d ever seen on her face.
“Sure,” she said.
She hugged me, and we linked pinkies. Our first mutual lie.
six | MR. SANDMAN
I was only trying to replace a voice, so I didn’t need much. Just another masculine entity, another pretend father. Still, I realized that even a pretend father would be better if I could see him. Manhood is mimesis. To be a man, a boy must see a man. Grandpa hadn’t panned out. Naturally I turned next to the only other man in my vicinity, Uncle Charlie—and Uncle Charlie was something to see.
When he was in his early twenties, the hair on Uncle Charlie’s head began to fall out, first in small tufts, then clumps, then divots, followed by the hair on his chest and legs and arms. Finally his eyelashes and eyebrows and pubic hair blew away one day like dandelion spores. Doctors diagnosed alopecia, a rare disease of the immune system. The disease devastated Uncle Charlie, but its ravages were more internal than external. After denuding his body, alopecia stripped his psyche clean. He became pathologically self-conscious, unable to leave the house without a hat and dark glasses, a disguise that actually made him more conspicuous. He looked like the Invisible Man.
Personally I loved the way Uncle Charlie looked. Long before bald became fashionable, long before Bruce Willis, Uncle Charlie was sleek—cool. But Grandma told me that Uncle Charlie hated the sight of himself, that he recoiled from every mirror as if it were a loaded gun.
To me, the unique thing about Uncle Charlie wasn’t the way he looked, but the way he talked, a crazy, jazzy fusion of SAT words and gangster slang that made him sound like a cross between an Oxford don and a Mafia don. Stranger yet, after blithely issuing a torrent of vulgar words he would apologize for using one fancy word, as though his erudition were more shocking than his profanity. “You don’t mind if I say ‘verisimilitude,’ do you?” he’d ask. “You don’t mind if I say ‘perspicacious’?” Uncle Charlie had inherited Grandpa’s love of words, but unlike Grandpa he pronounced each word precisely, with a flourishing roll of the tongue. I thought sometimes that Uncle Charlie might be showing off, rubbing Grandpa’s nose in the fact that he didn’t stutter.
Just after The Voice disappeared I began taking more notice of Uncle Charlie. When he came to the dinner table I would stop chewing and stare, hanging on his every word. He sometimes went a whole meal in silence, but when he did talk, it was always the same topic. Finishing dinner he would push his plate forward, light a Marlboro Red, and give us a story about Dickens to go with dessert. He told us about two men at Dickens who made a “life-or-death” wager on an arm-wrestling match: The loser had to wear a Boston Red Sox cap for nine full innings at Yankee Stadium. “That’s the last we’ll ever hear of that guy,” Uncle Charlie said, chuckling. He told us one night about Steve and the men from the bar “hijacking” an Entenmann’s truck. They heisted hundreds of pies and waged a pitched battle in and around the bar, hurling custards and meringues at each other and at innocent bystanders on Plandome Road. An Entenmann’s Gettysburg, Uncle Charlie called it—the wounded bled jelly. Another time Uncle Charlie described how Steve and the gang bought a fleet of old jalopies and tricked them out as stock cars. They filled the trunks with cement, welded the doors shut, and parked the cars along Plandome Road. They were going to find a field the next day and stage their own demolition derby, but they got to drinking and Steve couldn’t wait. At three in the morning they went careering up and down Plandome Road, ramming into one another at breakneck speeds. The cops were not amused. Cops were seldom amused by goings-on at Dickens, Uncle Charlie boasted. The men at the bar had a running feud with one cop in particular, a tight-ass who manned a police booth near Memorial Field. Late one night they got up a posse and attacked the empty police booth with flaming arrows, burning it to the ground.
Flaming arrows? Demolition derbies? Pie fights? Dickens sounded both silly and sinister, like a children’s birthday party on a pirate ship. I wished my mother would go there once in a while, and bring my grandparents, since they all needed a dose of silly. But my mother hardly drank at all, and Grandma only drank daiquiris on her birthday, and Grandpa drank two generic beers with dinner, never more, never less. He was too cheap to be an alcoholic, my mother said, though he also had no tolerance. On holidays, after a glass of Jack Daniel’s, he’d start to sing, “Chicky in the car and the car won’t go—that’s how you spell Chicago!” Then he’d pass out on the bicentennial sofa, his snores louder than the T-Bird.
On the surface Uncle Charlie didn’t seem like someone who would go in for the silliness of Dickens. He was too melancholy, too full of long rolling sighs. Like my mother, he was a mystery to me. And the more I studied him the deeper that mystery grew.
Every afternoon a man with a sandpapery
voice would phone the house for Uncle Charlie. “Chas there?” the man would say, speaking rapidly, as if he were being chased. Uncle Charlie slept most of the day, and my cousins and I knew the rule. If someone from Dickens calls for Uncle Charlie, take a message. If Mr. Sandman calls, wake Uncle Charlie immediately.
It usually fell to me. I liked answering the phone—thinking it might be The Voice—and when it was Mr. Sandman I would ask him to wait, please, then hurry down the hall to Uncle Charlie’s bedroom. Knocking softly I would open the door a crack. “Uncle Charlie?” I’d say. “That man is on the phone.”
From the humid darkness I’d hear the creak of his bedsprings. Then a groan, then a loud sigh. “Tell him I’m coming.”
By the time Uncle Charlie came to the phone—pulling on his robe, clenching an unlit cigarette in his teeth—I’d be crouched behind the bicentennial sofa. “Hey,” Uncle Charlie would say to Mr. Sandman. “Yeah, yeah, here goes. Rio wants Cleveland five times. Tony wants Minnesota ten times. Everybody’s doing the Jets fifteen times. Give me the Bears with the points. They’re due to cover. Yeah. Eight and a half, right? Right. And what’s the under on the Sonics? Two hundred? Uh-huh. Give me the under. Good. See you at Dickens.”
My older cousins told me Uncle Charlie was a “gambler,” that he was doing something illegal, but I didn’t think it could be all that illegal—probably like jaywalking, I figured—until I discovered that the world of gambling, and the special myopia of the gambler, were beyond my comprehension. It happened when I called on my friend Peter. His mother answered the door. “Guess you can’t wear that anymore,” she said, pointing to my chest. I looked down. I was wearing my favorite sweatshirt—WORLD CHAMPION NEW YORK KNICKS—which I loved nearly as much as my security blanket.
“Why not?” I asked, aghast.
“The Knicks lost last night. They’re not the champs.”
I burst into tears. I ran home and crashed through Grandpa’s back door, then stormed into Uncle Charlie’s bedroom, an unthinkable breach, barging into the sanctum sanctorum even though Mr. Sandman wasn’t on the phone. Uncle Charlie shot up in bed. “Who’s there!” he shouted. He was wearing a Lone Ranger mask, except it had no eyeholes. I told him what Peter’s mother had said. “The Knicks didn’t lose last night!” I cried. “Did they? They couldn’t have lost! Could they?”
He flipped up his mask, lay back in bed and reached for the box of Marlboros that was always on his nightstand. “It’s worse than that,” he said with a sigh. “They didn’t cover.”
In the summer Uncle Charlie and the men from Dickens would commandeer Grandpa’s garage and stage high-stakes poker games that lasted for days. Men would play cards for six hours, walk down to Dickens for food, go home, make love to their wives, sleep, shower, and return to find the game still roaring. I liked to lie in bed late at night, the windows open, listening to the voices raising, calling, and folding. I’d hear cards shuffling, poker chips clicking, bushes rustling as players looked for someplace to pee. The voices were more soothing than a lullaby. For a few days, at least, I would not have to worry about being the last one awake.
While I observed Uncle Charlie’s gambling with growing interest, adults in Grandpa’s house pretended it didn’t exist. Especially Grandma. The phone rang one day and I didn’t reach it in time, so she answered. Since it wasn’t Mr. Sandman, she refused to wake Uncle Charlie. The caller pleaded. Grandma held firm. “Message?” she said, reaching into the pocket of her housecoat for her grocery list and a pencil stub. “Go ahead. Yes. Uh-huh. Boston ten times? Pittsburgh—five times? Kansas City—how many times?” Of course it’s possible she had no idea what the message meant. But I suspect she simply didn’t want to know.
In Grandma’s eyes Uncle Charlie could do no wrong. He was her only son, and they had a bond that looked familiar to me. Unlike my mother, however, Grandma didn’t insist on respect and courtesy from her son. No matter how Uncle Charlie spoke to Grandma—and when hungover he could be vicious—she coddled him, doted on him, called him her “poor boy,” because his bad luck evoked in her an inexhaustible pity. Thank God for Steve, she often said. Steve gave Uncle Charlie a job in that nice dark bar when Uncle Charlie was getting dozens of painful and ultimately useless injections in his scalp. Uncle Charlie needed a place to hide, and Steve came to the rescue. Steve saved Uncle Charlie’s life, Grandma said, and I gathered that she was doing the same thing by letting Uncle Charlie hide in his boyhood bedroom, with the wallpaper—cartoon baseball players—that had been hung when Uncle Charlie was my age.
Many nights when Uncle Charlie was down at Dickens I’d hang out in his bedroom, looking through his stuff. I’d sift through his betting slips, smell his Dickens T-shirts, tidy up his dresser, which was blanketed with cash. Fifties and hundreds lay everywhere, in a house where Grandma didn’t always have enough money for milk. I’d think about taking some money and giving it to my mother, but I knew that my mother would refuse it and be mad at me. I’d stack the bills in neat piles, noticing that Ulysses Grant looked like one of the men I’d seen at the Dickens softball game. Then I’d stretch out in Uncle Charlie’s bed, propped up on his goose-feather pillows, and be Uncle Charlie. I’d watch the Mets and pretend I had what Uncle Charlie called “heavy timber” on the game. I’d wonder if Uncle Charlie ever bet heavy timber against the Mets. A thing like that would bother me more than knowing he was breaking the law.
During a rain delay one night I changed the channel, hoping for an old Abbott and Costello movie, and happened upon Casablanca. “I’m shocked—shocked—to find that gambling is going on in here.” I sat up. That man in the tuxedo—he was Uncle Charlie. That hound-dog face, that wistful squint, that furrowed brow. And not only was Humphrey Bogart a dead ringer for Uncle Charlie—except with hair—he also talked like Uncle Charlie, lips never wider than the width of a cigarette. When Bogart said, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” the hairs on the back of my neck tingled, because it sounded as if Uncle Charlie were in the room with me. Bogart even walked like Uncle Charlie, that flamingo-with-sore-knees gait. Then the topper: Bogart spent every waking hour in a bar. He too had suffered a run of bad luck, apparently, and a bar was where he chose to lie low, along with scores of other refugees playing hide-and-seek with the world. I didn’t need much help romanticizing Dickens, but after discovering Casablanca I became a hopeless case. At eight years old I began to dream of going to Dickens as other boys dream of visiting Disneyland.
seven | NOKOMIS
Whenever she found me in Uncle Charlie’s room, Grandma would try to lure me out. Walking in with a stack of clean Dickens T-shirts for Uncle Charlie’s dresser, she’d see me stretched across his bed and give me a look. Then she’d scan the room—stacks of money, betting slips, hats and dice and cigarette butts—and her ice blue eyes would darken. “I’ve got Entenmann’s coffee cake,” she’d say. “Come have a piece with me.”
Her words would be clipped, her movements hurried, as if there were something contagious in that room and we were both at risk. I didn’t give it much thought, because Grandma was always afraid of something. She set aside time each day for dread. And not nameless dread. She was quite specific about the various tragedies stalking her. She feared pneumonia, muggers, riptides, meteors, drunk drivers, drug addicts, serial killers, tornadoes, doctors, unscrupulous grocery clerks, and the Russians. The depth of Grandma’s dread came home to me when she bought a lottery ticket and sat before the TV as the numbers were called. After her first three numbers were a match, she began praying feverishly that she wouldn’t have the next three. She dreaded winning, for fear her heart would give out.
I pitied Grandma, and rolled my eyes at her, and yet when we spent time together I found myself dreading right along with her. On my own I was a terrible worrier—I knew this about myself and worried about it—and now and then I worried that if I spent too much time with Grandma, added her dreads to my worries, I’d eventually become paralyzed by fear. Also, Grandma was always teaching me girly things
, like how to iron and needlepoint, and while I liked to learn anything new, I worried what these skills would make me.
Still, no matter how much I feared Grandma’s influence, I craved her attention, because she was the kindest person in that house. So when she invited me to the kitchen for cake I always abdicated my throne on Uncle Charlie’s bed and followed close on her heels.
Before the first bite of cake was in my mouth she’d be well into a story. Uncle Charlie was a superb storyteller, as was my mother, but Grandma was the master. She’d learned her craft as a young girl, haunting movie houses in Hell’s Kitchen. After watching over and over whichever western or romance was playing, she’d walk home at dusk and be set upon by poorer kids in the neighborhood who couldn’t afford a ticket. Surrounded by this mob—whom I pictured as a mix of Bowery Boys and Little Rascals—Grandma would re-create dialogue and reenact scenes, and the kids would ooh and aah and applaud, making little Margaret Fritz feel momentarily like a movie star.
Grandma knew her audience. She always stressed a moral sure to have special meaning for her listeners. With me, for instance, she talked about her brothers, three beefy Irishmen straight out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. “Those boys didn’t take any crap,” Grandma would say, her version of “Once upon a time . . .” Her classic story about the Brothers Fritz concerned the night they came home and caught their father punching their mother. They were just young boys, my age, but they took their old man by the throat and told him, “Touch Momma again and we’ll kill you.” Moral: Real men take care of their mothers.
From her brothers Grandma would segue to stories about my other set of cousins, the Byrnes, who lived farther east on Long Island. (I couldn’t keep straight in my head how they were related to me—they were the grandchildren of Grandma’s sister.) There were ten Byrne kids—one daughter and nine sons, whom Grandma put on the same pedestal as her brothers. The Byrne Boys had that same combination of brawn and grace, she said, holding them up to me as “perfect gentlemen,” which I resented. Easy for them to be perfect, I’d think—they have a father. Uncle Pat Byrne was dark and Black Irish handsome and played touch football with his boys every night after work.
The Tender Bar: A Memoir Page 5