Sheryl settled my nerves by making lots of jokes, and by mocking everyone who gave us candy. As we walked away from a house she’d mutter, “Could you turn down the volume on those pants, mister?” If the porch lights came on as we approached a front door, she’d call out, “Don’t put on the coffee—we’re not staying!” I was cackling, having a wonderful time, though every now and then I checked over my shoulder to see if anyone was following us.
“Jeez,” Sheryl said. “You’re making me jumpy. Relax.”
“Sorry.”
We were holding hands and rounding Chester Drive when Aunt Ruth’s station wagon pulled up alongside us. Glaring at Sheryl, ignoring me, Aunt Ruth hissed, “Get. In. This. Car.”
Sheryl hugged me good-bye and told me not to worry. I walked to Grandpa’s, but stopped halfway. What would Hiawatha do? I had to make sure Sheryl was all right. She needed my protection. I circled back up Plandome Road and as I got close to Aunt Ruth’s house I crept through alleys and backyards until I reached her back fence. Standing on a trash can I saw shadows in a window and heard Aunt Ruth screaming. I heard Sheryl say something, then more screaming, then glass shattering. I wanted to rush the house and save Sheryl, but I was too scared to move. I wondered if McGraw would come to his sister’s defense, and if he’d then be in trouble. It would all be my fault.
I walked slowly to Grandpa’s, rubbing off my mustache, stopping now and then to peer in the windows of houses. Happy families. Glowing fireplaces. Children dressed as pirates and witches, sorting and counting their candy. I was willing to lay heavy timber that not one of those kids knew anything about ambushes or embargoes.
nine | DICKENS
My mother landed a better job as a secretary at North Shore Hospital, and her salary was just enough for us to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Great Neck, a few miles from Grandpa’s. I would still attend fifth grade at Shelter Rock, she explained, and after school the bus would still drop me at Grandpa’s, but when my mother finished work each night we’d go to our new—home. I noticed that she didn’t trip over the word, but emphasized it.
More than any previous apartment to which we’d escaped, my mother adored that place in Great Neck. Its hardwood floors, its high-ceilinged living room, its tree-lined street—every detail was precious to her. She furnished the apartment the best she could, with castoff items from the hospital’s recently redecorated waiting rooms, junk the hospital had been ready to throw out. Sitting in those hard plastic chairs, we’d wear the same tight faces as the people who had previously occupied them. We too were braced for bad news, but in our case it would be an unexpected car repair or an increase in rent. I worried that when it came, when my mother realized we would have to give up the Great Neck apartment and return to Grandpa’s, this disappointment would be different. This one might destroy her.
I was becoming a chronic, constant worrier, unlike my mother, who still fended off worry by singing and speaking in positive affirmations (“Everything’s going to be fine, babe!”). Sometimes I’d let her lull me into thinking that nothing frightened her, until I’d hear a scream from the kitchen and run to find her standing on a chair, pointing at a spider. As I killed the spider and carried it down the hall to the trash chute I’d remind myself that my mother wasn’t so brave, that I was the man of the house, and thereafter I’d redouble my worrying.
Roughly once a year my mother would drop all pretense of optimism, cover her face with her hands and sob. I’d put my arms around her and try to cheer her up, by repeating her positive affirmations back to her. I didn’t believe them, but they seemed to help my mother. “That’s very true, JR,” she’d say, snuffling. “Tomorrow is another day.” Not long after we moved to Great Neck, however, her annual crying jag was unusually severe, and I went to Plan B. I broke out a monologue I’d seen a comedian deliver on The Merv Griffin Show. I’d written it down on a sheet of loose-leaf paper and tucked it into my schoolbook for just such an occasion.
“Hey folks!” I said, reading from the sheet. “Glad to be here, glad to be here. Not lying either. No sir, I hate a liar. My father was a liar. He told me he had a hand in transportation—he thumbed his way cross-country!”
My mother slowly lowered her hands from her face and stared at me.
“Yep,” I continued. “My father told me our living room furniture went back to Louis the XIV. It would have gone back to Louie if we hadn’t paid by the fourteenth!”
My mother pulled me to her and said she felt horrible about frightening me, but she couldn’t help herself. “I’m so tired,” she said. “Tired of worrying and struggling and being so—so—alone.”
Alone. I wasn’t offended. No matter how close my mother and I were, the lack of a man in our lives made each of us feel, at times, alone. Sometimes I felt so alone that I wished there were a bigger, longer word for alone. I tried to tell Grandma about this feeling, about my suspicion that life was nicking away pieces of me, first The Voice, then McGraw, but she misunderstood. She said it was a sin to complain about being bored when so many people in the world would kill to have boredom be their biggest problem. I said I wasn’t bored, I was lonely. She said I wasn’t being the strong man she’d asked me to be. “Go sit on a chair and look at the sky,” she said, “and thank God you don’t have a pain.”
I went upstairs and rummaged in a crawl space, where I found a record player and a 1940s manual typewriter. Using these items to offset my isolation, I began listening to Frank Sinatra records while creating something I called the Family Gazette. The inaugural issue rolled in early 1974, with a front-page “profile” of my mother and a four-line analysis of the Nixon administration. There was also a short editorial decrying the international trade in “marrowanna” and a brief, muddled summary of the rift in the family. I handed the first copy to Grandpa. “Family Gazette?” he said. “Hah! This is no fam, fam, family.”
With tomorrow’s edition of the Family Gazette put to bed, I’d often go for a ride on my bike, up the steep slope of Park Avenue, site of Manhasset’s oldest and, for my money, best houses. Riding back and forth outside some splendid old pile, I’d peer in the windows, contemplating the secret of life—getting in. I’d smell the woodsmoke curling from the chimney, so deliciously intoxicating. Rich people, I decided, must shop at some secret store, where they bought extra-fragrant firewood. And that same store must sell magic lamps. Rich people had the best china and drapes and teeth, of course, but they also had lamps that cast an excruciatingly cozy glow. By contrast every lamp at Grandpa’s threw off the brain-scalding glare of a prison searchlight. Even moths avoided the lamps at Grandpa’s.
Returning to Grandpa’s house I’d complain again to Grandma about being lonely. “Go sit on a chair and look up at the sky. . . .”
Finally I went down to the basement.
Like the bar, Grandpa’s basement was dark and remote and strictly off-limits to children. The basement was where the furnace rumbled, the cesspool backed up, and cobwebs grew as big as tuna nets. As I ventured down its rickety stairs I was ready to bolt at the first sound of something scuttling across the cement floor, but within minutes I determined that the basement was the ideal hiding place, the only part of Grandpa’s house that offered quiet and privacy. No one could find me down there, and the furnace was better than The Voice at drowning out all the adult fury upstairs.
Pushing boldly into the basement’s far-flung corners, I discovered its greatest attraction, its hidden treasure. Stuffed in boxes, stacked on tables, spilling from suitcases and steamer trunks, were hundreds of novels and biographies, textbooks and art books, memoirs and how-to manuals, all abandoned by successive generations and severed branches of the family. I remember gasping.
I loved those books at first sight, and it was my mother who had predisposed me to love them. Beginning when I was nine months old, and continuing until I started school, my mother had taught me to read, using fancy flash cards she’d ordered through the mail. I always remembered those flash cards with the clarity and v
ividness of banner headlines, their crimson letters against a field of cream, and behind them my mother’s face, composed of the same lovely colors, her roses-and-milk complexion wreathed by auburn hair. I loved the look of those words, the shapes of them, the subliminal association of their typeface with the pretty face of my mother, but it may have been their functionality that won my heart. Like nothing else, words organized my world, put order to chaos, divided things neatly into black and white. Words even helped me organize my parents. My mother was the printed word—tangible, present, real—while my father was the spoken word—invisible, ephemeral, instantly part of memory. There was something comforting about this rigid symmetry.
Now, in the basement, I felt as if I were standing up to my chest in a tidal pool of words. I opened the largest and heaviest book I could find, a history of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Given my mother’s warnings about my father I felt a connection with this Lindbergh baby. I stared at photos of his little corpse. I learned the word “ransom,” which I thought must be something like child support.
Many of the basement books were too advanced for me, but I didn’t care. I was content to revere them before I could read them. Stacked in one cardboard box was a magnificent leather-bound set, the complete Dickens, and because of the bar I valued these books above all the others, and hungered to know what they said. I gazed longingly at the sketches, especially one of David Copperfield, my age, in a bar. The caption read: “My first purchase in the Public House.”
“What’s this about?” I asked Grandpa, handing him Great Expectations.
We were eating breakfast with Grandma.
“A boy who has great ex, ex, expectations,” he said.
“What are—expectations?”
“They’re a cur, cur, curse.”
I ate a spoonful of oatmeal, confused.
“For instance,” he said. “When I mar, mar, married your grandmother, I had great ex, ex, expectations.”
“Fine way to talk to your grandson,” Grandma said.
Grandpa laughed bitterly. “Never marry for sex,” he said to me.
I ate another spoonful of oatmeal, sorry I’d asked.
Two books from the basement became my constant companions. The first was Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, in which I met Mowgli, my cousin as much as McGraw. I spent hours with Mowgli and his adopted fathers, Baloo, the kindly bear, and Bagheera, the wise panther, both of whom wanted Mowgli to become a lawyer. At least that’s how I read it. They were always nagging Mowgli to learn the Law of the Jungle. The second book was a crumbling old volume from the 1930s called Minute Biographies. Its butterscotch pages were filled with thumbnail life stories and pen-and-ink portraits of great men through history. I loved its lavish use of exclamation marks. Rembrandt—Painter Who Played with Shadows! Thomas Carlyle—The Man Who Dignified Work! Lord Byron—The Playboy of Europe! I cherished its reassuring formula: Every life began in hardship and led inexorably to glory. For hours I would look deeply into the eyes of Caesar and Machiavelli, Hannibal and Napoleon, Longfellow and Voltaire, and I committed to memory the page devoted to Dickens, patron saint of abandoned boys. His portrait in the book was the same silhouette Steve had nailed above the bar.
I was so engrossed in Minute Biographies one day that I failed to notice Grandma standing above me, holding a dollar. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said. “Uncle Charlie’s having a nicotine fit. Run down to the bar and get him a box of Marlboro Reds.”
Go to Dickens? Go inside Dickens? I grabbed the money, tucked Minute Biographies under my arm and ran to the corner.
When I reached the bar, however, I stopped. With one hand on the doorknob I felt my heart racing, and I didn’t know why. I was drawn to the bar, but the draw was so powerful, so irresistible, I thought it might be dangerous, like the ocean. Grandma was always reading me articles from the Daily News about swimmers being dragged out to sea by riptides. This must be what a riptide feels like. I took a deep breath, opened the door, and dove in. The door slammed behind me and I was engulfed in darkness. An alcove. Ahead was a second door. I pulled its handle and the rusty hinges squeaked. Stepping forward again I found myself in a long narrow cave.
As my eyes adjusted I saw that the air was actually a beautiful pale yellow, though I couldn’t see any lamps or other possible source of light. The air was the color of beer, and smelled of beer, and each breath tasted like beer—malted, foamy, thick. Cutting through the beer smell was an odor of corruption and decay, though not unpleasant, more like that of an old forest, in which rotting leaves and mold refresh your faith in life’s endless cycle. There were also faint notes of perfumes and colognes, hair tonics and shoe creams, lemons and steaks and cigars and newspapers, and an undertone of brine from Manhasset Bay. My eyes watered, as they did at the circus, where the air had a similar animal musk.
Also reminiscent of the circus were all the white-faced men with orange hair and red noses. There was the man who owned the clock-repair shop, who always gave me chocolate cigarettes. There was the cigar-chawing owner of the stationery store, who gaped at my mother in a way that made me want to kick his shin. There were dozens of men I didn’t recognize, who looked as if they had just stepped off the train from the city, and several I did recognize, who wore orange Dickens softball jerseys. Many of the men sat in captain’s chairs along the bar, a brick wall topped with a slab of golden blond oak, but they weren’t confined to the bar area. There were men in the corners, men in the shadows, men in and around the phone booth, men in the back room—a vast mingling herd of the rare beast I’d been stalking.
There were also women in Dickens, astonishing women. The one nearest to me had long yellow hair and frosted pink lips. I watched her run a painted fingernail along the neck of a man and lean against the pillar of his arm. I shivered. The first time I ever witnessed physical affection between a man and a woman. As if feeling my shiver, she turned. “Uh-oh,” she said.
“What’s the matter?” the man beside her said.
“A kid.”
“Where?”
“Over there. By the door.”
“Hey, whose kid is that?”
“Don’t look at me.”
From the shadows Steve stepped forward.
“Help you, son?”
I recognized him from the softball game. He was easily the biggest man in the place. His hair was tightly curled, his face was a dark red, almost mahogany, and his eyes were blue slits. He smiled at me with teeth that were big and crooked and the barroom seemed to grow brighter. Now I knew the secret source of its light.
“Hey Steve!” said a man down the bar. “Get that kid a drink on me ha ha.”
“Okay,” Steve said. “Kid, you’re backed up on Bobo.”
Pink Lips said, “Shut up you assholes, can’t you see how scared he is?”
“What do you need, son?”
“Box of Marlboro Red.”
“Damn.”
“Kid smokes the real shit.”
“How old are you?”
“Nine. I’ll be ten on—”
“Stunt your growth.”
“They’re for my uncle.”
“Who’s your uncle?”
“Uncle Charlie.”
Gales of laughter.
“Get a load of that!” a man screamed. “Uncle Charlie! Oh that’s rich!”
More laughter. So much laughter. If you combined all the laughter in the world, I thought, this is how it would sound.
“Sure,” Steve said. “This is Chas’s nephew!”
“Ruth’s kid?”
“Naw, the other sister,” Steve said. “Your mother is Dorothy, right?”
I nodded.
“What’s your name, son?”
He had a gorgeous voice. Warm and gravelly.
“JR,” I said.
“JR?” He squinted. “What’s that stand for?”
“Nothing. It’s just my name.”
“Is that so?” He cocked an eyebrow at the bartender. “E
verybody’s name stands for something.”
My eyes opened wider. I’d never thought of it that way.
“Got to have a nickname if you’re going to come into Dickens,” Steve said. “Next time you come in, either have a nickname or we’ll have to give you one.”
“Whatcha reading?” Pink Lips said.
I handed her my book.
“MY-noot Biographies,” she said.
“It’s all about famous men,” I said.
“I thought you wrote the book on men,” Steve said to the woman. She cackled.
The bartender reached under the bar for a box of Marlboros. He held them out and I stepped forward. Everyone watched me set the dollar on the bar, take the cigarettes, then back away slowly.
“Come again, kid,” Bobo said.
Laughter, laughter. The laughter was so loud that no one heard my answer.
“I will.”
ten | PINCH RUNNER
Aunt Ruth lifted her embargo around the time the Arabs lifted theirs. Once again I was allowed to visit McGraw and Sheryl and the cousins. After school I’d run up Plandome Road to call for McGraw and we’d race off to Memorial Field to play catch, or to the duck pond to fish, delirious about being reunited. A few weeks later we were hit with something worse than an embargo. It was a combination embargo-ambush-kidnapping. Aunt Ruth and the cousins were moving to Arizona. Aunt Ruth dropped the news offhandedly, while having coffee with Grandma in the kitchen. “Out west” was where the cousins needed to be, she said. Mountains. Blue skies. The air was like wine, and the winters were like spring.
I never understood why adults did any of the things they did, but even I knew that the real reason for Aunt Ruth’s move to Arizona must be Uncle Harry. My suspicions were confirmed days later, when Grandma told me that Aunt Ruth and Uncle Harry were going to try a reconciliation, and Aunt Ruth hoped a change of scenery would make Uncle Harry mend his ways and be a father to the cousins.
It was all a sick joke. No sooner had McGraw and I been reunited than he was loaded in the back of Aunt Ruth’s Ford station wagon with all the suitcases and hauled away to a place so far and unknown that I couldn’t picture it. As Aunt Ruth steered the station wagon onto Plandome Road, the last thing I saw was McGraw in his Mets helmet waving to me through the back window.
The Tender Bar: A Memoir Page 7