Only the oldest three girls met us at the airport. It was late at night. Driving to Aunt Ruth’s house, where my mother and I were to stay until we could find our own place, Sheryl promised that we’d love Arizona. “We live in paradise,” Sheryl said. “Literally! Says so on all the signs. ‘Welcome to Paradise—Valley.’ It’s a ritzy suburb of Scottsdale. Kind of like the Manhasset of Arizona.”
I peered out into the darkness, which was twice as dark as nighttime in New York. All I saw were vague outlines of ominous mountains, a shade blacker than the night itself. I’d read that there were mountains in Arizona, but I’d expected something different, something on the order of the mountains in Heidi and The Sound of Music, lush and green, with sun-dappled meadows where aproned women and cherubic kids gathered daffodils. These mountains were barren, pointy triangles rising abruptly from the flat desert, like the pyramids. I stared at the biggest, which Sheryl said was called Camelback. “How come?” I asked. “Because it looks like a camel’s back,” she said, as though I were a dope. I turned to look at the mountain again. I couldn’t see any camel. To me it looked like the pinch runner from Dickens sprawled on his back, and the two humps were his knees and paunch.
My mother found a job immediately, as a secretary at a local hospital. Finding an apartment proved more difficult. With so many senior citizens in Arizona, most apartment complexes, especially affordable ones, didn’t allow children. Finally she lied to a landlord, saying she was a divorced woman, alone. After we moved in she told the landlord that her ex-husband had custody of me, but he’d been transferred out of state and she was taking care of me until he got settled. The landlord didn’t like it, but he didn’t want to go to the trouble of evicting us.
With the money we got from selling our waiting-room furniture and the T-Bird, my mother and I rented two beds, a dresser, a kitchen table and two dinette chairs. For the living room we bought two folding beach chairs at a drugstore. After buying a junky 1968 Volkswagen Bug we had $750 left, which my mother kept in the freezer.
Not long after our arrival Aunt Ruth and the cousins took us to Rawhide, a pretend town in the middle of the desert, which featured a pretend gold mine, a pretend jail, even pretend people. At the front gate, within a circle of authentic Conestoga wagons, was a group of huge mechanical mannequin cowboys gathered around a campfire. Their hushed voices crackled from speakers in the cacti. They were worried about Apaches. And snakes. And weather. And the Great Unknown, which lay beyond the Rio Grande. “If we don’t get across the Rio Grande by August,” the head mannequin said, “we’re goners fer sure.” The others nodded gravely. McGraw and I nodded too. Far from home, surrounded by desert—the difference between a Conestoga wagon and Aunt Ruth’s station wagon seemed slight.
We walked through the pretend town, down its one main road, which started at the saloon. The smoke from the mannequins’ campfire followed us down the street. I’d thought the woodsmoke in Manhasset was intoxicating, but Arizona woodsmoke was even more fragrant, more magical, with flavors I couldn’t identify, which Sheryl said were hickory, sagebrush, piñon, and mesquite. The stars in the desert were better too. Closer. Each one was a penlight held before my face. I looked up, filled my lungs with clean desert air, and decided Sheryl was right. This was paradise. The mountains and cacti and roadrunners, everything that had seemed so strange at first, now gave me hope. My mother and I had needed something new, and this was as new as we could get. I felt the difference already. My mind was clearer, my heart lighter. My habitual worry was lessening. Best of all I could see the difference in my mother. She hadn’t given me a blank face in weeks, and she seemed to have twice the energy.
Shortly after our trip to Rawhide my mother phoned Aunt Ruth to see if McGraw wanted to play with me. “No answer—again,” my mother said, setting down the phone. “How can there be no answer in a house with eight people?”
We drove to Aunt Ruth’s house and knocked at the door. We put our faces against the window. No sign of anybody. When we got back to our apartment my mother phoned Manhasset, an unprecedented extravagance. It may have been the first long-distance call in the history of our family. After speaking briefly with Grandma, my mother hung up. She was white. “They’re gone,” she said.
“What?”
“Aunt Ruth and the cousins are on their way back to Manhasset.”
“For good?”
“I think so.”
“When did they leave?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did they?”
Blank face.
We never did find out. Our best guess was that Aunt Ruth and Uncle Harry had fought, he went back to New York, and she went after him. But we could never be sure, and Aunt Ruth wasn’t the type to explain.
Without the cousins Arizona changed overnight from paradise to purgatory. It started to get hot, scary hot, and summer was still months off. The Volkswagen had no air conditioning, and when my mother and I drove to the store for cold drinks, in every direction would be wavy heat, nothing moving along the sere horizon except dust devils and tumbleweeds. In a photo of me then, waiting for the school bus, I look like the first boy on Mars.
To take our minds off things, my mother and I would go for long drives at sunset. In Arizona, however, there were no waterfront houses for distraction, no Shelter Rocks. Just flat desert and more flat desert. “Let’s go back to Manhasset,” I said.
“We can’t,” she said. “We sold everything. I quit my job. We’re here.” She looked around and shook her head. “This is—home.”
One Saturday, helping my mother unpack the last boxes of our belongings sent by Grandma, I found a two-foot blue device that looked like a piston with a handle at each end. It was a Miracle Chest Enhancer, according to the package in which it came. I gave it a try. “What the heck are you doing?” my mother said when she saw me, shirtless, squeezing the device in front of a mirror.
“Enhancing my chest.”
“That’s for ladies,” she said. “It doesn’t give you the kind of enhancement you want. Hand it over.” She took the device and frowned. I saw in her face that I could occasionally be as much a mystery to my mother as she was to me.
“You’re bored, aren’t you?” she said.
I looked away.
“Let’s go to that pretend town,” she said.
At the entrance to Rawhide we said hello to the mechanical mannequin cowboys. “If we don’t get across the Rio Grande by August . . .” We stopped into the saloon and my mother bought two sarsaparillas and a bag of popcorn. The barroom smell of beer and cigars made me think of Dickens. I wondered if there had been any more pie fights. We sat on a bench in the shade outside the saloon and passed the popcorn back and forth. A gunfight broke out in front of us, in the middle of the street. Four men told the sheriff they were taking over this here town. They drew. The sheriff drew. Bang. The sheriff fell. “Outnumbered,” my mother said, “and outgunned.”
As the dead sheriff got up and dusted himself off, my mother turned to face me. She had an idea, she said. I should go back to Manhasset for the summer. “It’s our only option,” she said. “I can’t leave you alone in the apartment all summer. A few hours after school is one thing, but I can’t have you alone by yourself, all day, every day, for three months. And with you in Manhasset I can work overtime, take a second job, maybe save up for furniture.”
“How will you get along without me?” I asked.
She laughed, until she realized I wasn’t kidding.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “The time will fly by, because you’ll be having fun, and I’ll know you’re having fun, and that you’re with people you love.”
“How will we afford a plane ticket?” I asked.
“I’ll put it on a credit card and think about it later.”
We’d never been apart for three days, and now my mother was proposing three months? I started to argue but the subject wasn’t open to debate. Our two-person democracy had reverted to a benevolent dictatorshi
p. It was just as well. I couldn’t convince my mother that the prospect of seeing McGraw and the cousins didn’t excite me. I wasn’t that good a liar yet.
The night before I left, while I slept, my mother wrote me a letter, which she gave me to read on the plane. She wrote that I should take good care of Grandma, and play nice with the cousins, and that she would miss me terribly, but that she knew Manhasset was the place for me. “I can’t afford summer camp for you,” she wrote. “So Manhasset will be your summer camp.”
Neither of us dreamed that she was sending me to Camp Dickens.
twelve | COLT, BOBO, AND JOEY D
I’d been back in Manhasset about two weeks when it happened. I was throwing my rubber ball at the garage, Tom Seaver snapping another slider on the outside corner to win Game Seven, when above the roar of the crowd—the wind whooshing in the branches of the trees—I heard my name. I looked up.
“Don’t you hear me calling you?” Uncle Charlie said. “Christ.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Gilgamesh.”
“Excuse me?”
He sighed and spoke with exaggerated slowness, enunciating each syllable more precisely than usual. “Gilgo. Beach. Do you want to go to Gilgo Beach?”
“Who?”
“You.”
“With who?”
“With your uncle. What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.”
“How soon can you be ready?”
“Five minutes.”
“False.”
“Two?”
He nodded.
The house was empty. Grandma was shopping, Grandpa had gone for a walk, and the cousins, though they lived nearby, were never around, due to another fight between Aunt Ruth and Grandma. Could I possibly go to the beach without telling anyone? My mother had warned me several times before I left Arizona: Don’t go anywhere without permission. Kidnapping still concerned her, and Grandma frequently underscored her warnings. I didn’t know that my mother and Grandma had asked Uncle Charlie to “do something” with me, because I’d been spending too much time alone, and because I’d complained about missing my mother. They had turned to Uncle Charlie for help, assuming he’d explain it all to me. They didn’t understand that Uncle Charlie, like Aunt Ruth, never explained.
I put on my swim trunks under my dungarees and packed a grocery bag with a towel and a banana, then sat on the stoop to think. There was no time to think. Uncle Charlie was crossing the lawn, dressed in his version of beachwear: Bing Crosby golf hat, Foster Grants, jeans. He was sliding behind the wheel of his massive old black Cadillac, which he’d just bought from a friend of Steve’s. He adored that car. I watched him straighten the rearview, tenderly, as if pushing a lock of hair from the face of someone he loved. Then he adjusted the brim of his hat, lit a Marlboro, and started the engine. The Caddy lurched as he put it into drive. Time was up. I held my breath and ran. As I opened the door on the passenger side and dove in, Uncle Charlie jumped, startled to see me there. “Oh,” he said. “Right.” We stared at each other. “Better hop in the back.”
“How come?” I asked.
“We’re going to have passengers.”
I sat on the high middle bump of the backseat, like a prince being pulled in a rickshaw, as we cruised down Plandome Road, past Dickens, past Memorial Field. On the south side of town we came to a stop outside a house with all the drapes and shutters closed. Uncle Charlie tapped the horn. From a side door emerged a man about ten years younger than Uncle Charlie, with shiny black hair and droopy black eyes. Solidly built, with broad shoulders and a deep chest, he looked like a young Dean Martin. I thought he might be one of the softball players I’d seen years before, though he was acting different now. He wasn’t laughing, and he wasn’t being silly. He was in pain, shielding his eyes like a prisoner being released from solitary confinement. Bending down at Uncle Charlie’s window he rasped, “Hey, Chas, what do you say?” His voice was weak, like mine the morning after my tonsils were removed, but this wasn’t nearly the most notable thing about how he talked. He sounded exactly like Yogi Bear.
“Morning,” Uncle Charlie said.
The man nodded, as if that were all the conversation he felt up to. He walked around the car and got in on the passenger side. “Mother of God,” he said, letting his head fall back against the seat. “The hell did I drink last night?”
“Your usual,” Uncle Charlie said.
Uncle Charlie glanced in the rearview. Again he was startled to see me. “Oh,” he said. “Colt, meet my nephew. He’s coming with us today.”
Colt turned and peered at me over the seat.
Within minutes the Cadillac was crammed with a half ton of men. I thought we were going to the beach, but we had enough muscle to pull a bank job. Uncle Charlie introduced me formally, stiffly, to each man. Pleased to meet you, kid, said Joey D, a giant with a tuft of gingery hair atop his spongy orange head, and features glued to the head at odd angles. He seemed to be made of spare parts from different Muppets, like a Sesame Street Frankenstein—head of Grover, face of Oscar, thorax of Big Bird. Like Colt he was ten years younger than Uncle Charlie, and treated my uncle with extreme deference, like an irreproachable older brother. Though hulking and slouch-shouldered, Joey D had the manic energy of a small man. He speedwalked, fluttered his hands, spoke in word spasms that left him winded. Like hay-fever sneezes, whole sentences exploded from his mouth in one burst: Ocean’sgoingtoberoughtoday! Most often Joey D aimed these word spasms at himself, more precisely at the breast pocket of his tennis shirt. He was so absorbed and animated with his breast pocket that I thought he must be keeping a pet mouse in there.
Next I met Bobo, whose age was impossible to guess, though I put him closer to my uncle—mid-thirties. Bobo was the handsomest member of the group, with a surfer’s thatch of corn-yellow hair and arms that popped out of his shirtsleeves, but he gave the impression that he could be a lot handsomer if he would get a good night’s sleep. He oozed the smell of last night’s whiskey, a scent I liked, though Bobo tried to cover it up with a quart of drugstore aftershave. Whereas Colt and Joey D deferred to my uncle, Bobo deferred to no one but his companion, Wilbur, a black mutt with wide disdainful eyes.
I listened to the conversations of the men, my head whipping back and forth as though I were watching four tennis matches at once. Reading between the lines I gathered that they all worked at Dickens, as bartenders and cooks and bouncers, and therefore Steve was The Boss. They revered Steve. When speaking of him they sounded less like employees than apostles. It wasn’t always clear that they were speaking about Steve, however, because he had a number of nicknames, including Chief and Rio and Feinblatt. Each of the men also went by a nickname Steve had bestowed, except Uncle Charlie, who had two—Chas and Goose. After ten minutes I was juggling so many nicknames that I felt as if there were a dozen men in the car instead of the four I counted. The men then confused me further by rattling off a list of other nicknames, people who had stopped into Dickens the night before, like Sooty and Sledge and Rifleman and Skeezix and Tank and Fuckembabe.
“Who’s Fuckembabe?” I asked. I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk, but the question flew out of my mouth.
The men looked at each other.
“Fuckembabe’s the porter,” Uncle Charlie said. “Sweeps up the joint. Does odd jobs.”
“How come you call him Fuckembabe?”
“That’s all he ever says,” Colt explained. “Or I should say, it’s the only thing he says that anyone can understand. How’d the Yankees do today? Ah, fuck ’em, babe. How’s the world treating you? Ah, fuck ’em, babe, fuck ’em.”
I didn’t hear the rest of what Colt said. I was too spellbound by his Yogi Bear impression. Every singsong sentence sounded to my ear like, “Hey, Boo Boo, let’s go find us some pic-a-nic baskets.”
Joey D recalled for everyone the time Fuckembabe lived behind Dickens, in his car. Steve put a stop to that, Joey D said, when Fuckembabe started doing his laundry in t
he Dickens dishwasher. It wasn’t the washing Steve minded so much, Colt interjected, as the fact that Fuckembabe hung his clothes to dry in the trees out back. The men chuckled at the memory, and Bobo told a related Steve story. Everything reminded the men of another Steve story. The time Steve stole a police car and drove around Manhasset, lights flashing, siren blaring, pulling over his friends and giving them heart attacks. The time Steve went up and down the aisle of an airplane with a carry-on full of champagne bottles, getting all the passengers roaring drunk. The time Steve took a crew of Dickens regulars out to Montauk in his boat, Dipsomania, but drank too much and got lost in the fog and wound up halfway to “Nova Fucking Scotia.”
Uncle Charlie talked about meeting Steve for the first time when they were seniors at Manhasset High School. Steve had just been kicked out of the Cheshire Academy, in Connecticut, a school where all the boys wore blue blazers and smirks. Cheshire’s loss was Manhasset’s gain, Uncle Charlie said. I wanted to ask if the Cheshire Academy was where Steve learned to smile like that. In my memory Steve looked something like the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland.
The men hotly debated the renovation Steve was threatening to launch at Dickens, an elaborate and expensive undertaking. Besides remodeling the barroom and fancying up the menu, Steve was considering doing away with the rock bands that performed on weekends. More shocking, he was talking about possibly renaming the place—Publicans. The men didn’t approve. Not one bit. They didn’t like change, ever, but especially when it came to the bar.
“The fuck’s a publican anyway?”
“Bird with a double chin.”
“That’s a pelican, dipshit.”
“A publican’s a bartender.”
“Then why don’t Chief just call the place Bartenders?”
“Who the hell’s going to drink in a place called Bartenders?”
The Tender Bar: A Memoir Page 9