Someone else might have bridled at Sheryl’s endless exhortations. Stand up straight. Tuck in your shirt. What are we going to do about getting you some muscles? But I did whatever she said, without question, because Sheryl seemed to understand how the world worked. She was the only person, for instance, who pointed out when the third rail popped three seconds before the train appeared, and she was the first to warn me never to touch that third rail, ever. “Like me,” she said, “it’s always—electrified!” No one but Sheryl could tell me the proper way to read a newspaper on a crowded train, folding the entire paper once, longwise, then peeling back one half page at a time, to avoid disturbing the men on either side. More important, Sheryl explained that the newspaper I read was a sandwich board proclaiming my social status, income, genealogy, IQ. Working stiffs read the Daily News. Housewives, Newsday. Crazies, the Post.
“Grandpa reads the Post,” I protested.
She batted her eyelashes at me, as if to say, Any more stupid questions?
We were standing on the crowded platform when Sheryl pointed out a man fifteen feet away. “See that guy?” she said. Leaning against a lamppost was a businessman in a charcoal gray suit who looked like Cary Grant’s better-looking older brother. I’d seen him going into Publicans many times, and I’d always marveled at his suavity. “Notice what he’s reading?”
It was the New York Times, folded longwise.
“Bluebloods and mucky-mucks read the Times,” she said. “No matter how boring it might be.”
I didn’t tell Sheryl that I liked reading the Times, that one of the best things about working at the firm was having that half hour on the train to read it. I thought the Times a miracle, a mosaic of minute biographies, a daily masterpiece. I was starved for information about the world—I hadn’t been anywhere and didn’t know anyone who had—and the Times, like Yale, seemed expressly designed for my special brand of ignorance. Also, I loved how the Times made life appear containable. It satisfied my mania for order, for a world separated into black and white. It slotted all the madness into seventy pages of six skinny columns. I did everything I could to hide my love of the Times from Sheryl, who believed that a real man read the Times and only a hopeless nerd enjoyed it. But Sheryl had a sharp eye. She saw how closely I concentrated on the Times and took to calling me JR Muckraker.
The two critical tests of a man’s mettle, Sheryl believed, were women and liquor. How you reacted to each, how you managed each, went a long way to determining your manliness quotient. I told her about Lana, a girl back in Arizona who was many tiers above me in the high-school hierarchy. Lana’s hair was dirty blond, in both color and cleanliness. She didn’t wash it every day, which gave her a tousled, greasy sex appeal. The strands flicked her shoulders as she walked down the halls, chest out, like a cadet. Her breasts, I assured Sheryl, never moved, and she wore short-shorts that revealed the taut upper parts of her long caramel thighs. “If her leg were the United States,” I told Sheryl, “you could see all the way up to Michigan.”
“Battle Creek!” Sheryl said, and I laughed, though I wasn’t sure what she meant. I don’t think Sheryl was sure either.
Overall Sheryl was blasé about Lana. Without meeting her, she said, it wasn’t possible to know if the girl justified all my heavy breathing. On the subject of whiskey, however, Sheryl had plenty to say. She liked to drink and she took pleasure in teaching me how. After work each night we’d stop at a grungy bar in the bowels of Penn Station, where the smoke and darkness made everyone look like Charles Bronson, so the bartenders never questioned my age. Sheryl would treat me to a couple of cold mugs of beer, after which we’d buy large plastic cups of double gin and tonics for the ride home. By the time we stepped onto Plandome Road, our feet weren’t quite touching the pavement.
On a steamy Friday night in the middle of August, Sheryl proposed that we stop at Publicans for a last drink before heading to Grandpa’s house. I said that I didn’t think Uncle Charlie would approve.
“You go to Publicans all the time,” she said.
“In the day. Nighttime at Publicans is different.”
“Says who?”
“It’s just understood. Nighttime is different.”
“Uncle Charlie won’t care. He wants you to be a man. Be a man.”
Reluctantly I followed her through the door.
I’d been more right than I knew. Publicans was a completely different place after dark. Racier. Everyone laughing, talking at once, and it all seemed to be about sex. People were saying things they would regret tomorrow, I could just tell.
There was such a pageant of characters, in such a variety of costumes, that I felt as if Sheryl and I had snuck backstage at a grand opera. There were priests and softball players and executives. There were men in tuxedoes and women in gowns, on their way to charity functions. There were golfers just off the links, sailors just off the water, construction workers just off the jobsite. The bar was as crowded as the rush-hour train Sheryl and I had just ridden from Manhattan, and in fact could have been an extension of the train, another car coupled to the caboose, because it was long, narrow, filled with many of the same faces, and seemingly rocking from side to side. We edged deeper into the crowd and Sheryl bummed a cigarette from a young man, touching his arm, placing a hand on his shoulder, throwing back her hair. I remembered that she had a brand-new pack of Virginia Slims in her purse, and I suddenly understood. All her talk about making me a man was a cover for her master plan. Finding herself a man. She only wanted to make me a man so she’d have an escort to Publicans, where all the eligible men were. She couldn’t go alone, of course. She didn’t want to look desperate.
Feeling used, I ditched her. I bored into the crowd, tunneling toward the restaurant. After ten feet, however, my progress was halted. Unable to go forward, or back, I leaned against a pole. Beside me was a girl in her mid-twenties. She had a pretty face and wore a plaid dress with darts in the side that accentuated her figure. “All right if I lean here?” I asked.
“Free country.”
“Hey, my grandfather says that all the time. Have you been hanging out with Grandpa?”
She started to answer, then saw that I was joking. “What’s your name?”
“JR.”
“Ewing?”
“Right.”
“Guess you hear that a lot.”
“You’re the first.”
“What does JR stand for?”
“It’s my legal name.”
“Really? And what do you do, JR Ewing, when you’re not at Southfork?”
“Work at a law firm. In the city.”
“A lawyer?”
I stood up straighter. No one had ever called me a lawyer before. I couldn’t wait to write and tell my mother. Plaid Dress took a cigarette from her purse and fumbled with a matchbook. I took the matches and lit her cigarette exactly as I’d seen it done in Casablanca. “How about you?” I asked, in Uncle Charlie’s voice. “What’s your story?”
Sheryl had instructed me to ask this question of women. Women like questions about themselves more than they like jewelry, Sheryl had said. So I followed up my question with another, and another, assailed Plaid Dress with questions, learning that she worked as a salesgirl, that she hated it, that she wanted to be a dancer, that she lived with a roommate in Douglaston. And that the roommate was away in Barbados. “Won’t be back for a whole week,” Plaid Dress said. “My apartment is sooo empty.”
Grinding my jaws, I saw that her beer had a sip left. “Speaking of empty,” I said, “let me buy you another.” I headed for the bar. Sheryl intercepted me. “We’re out of here,” she said, grabbing my necktie.
“Why?”
“Uncle Charlie saw you and he’s mad.”
Uncle Charlie had never been mad at me in my life. I said something about wanting to run away to Alaska. “Oh Christ,” Sheryl said. “Be a man.”
Walking home, Sheryl had an idea. Since we were already in trouble with Uncle Charlie, we might as well go fo
r broke. She suggested a nightcap in Roslyn. Bars there were more lax. She took the keys to Uncle Charlie’s Cadillac and we went to an infamous joint, where an eight-year-old could order a Tequila Sunrise without anyone blinking. “Go get us some cocktails,” she said, pushing me toward the bar. I fought my way through the crowd and when I returned with two gin and tonics Sheryl was surrounded by five marines. They looked as if they were detaining her at a checkpoint. “Here he is!” she cried as I came into view.
“You the baby-sitter?” one marine asked Sheryl.
“Cousin,” Sheryl said. “I’m trying to make a man out of him.”
“Looks like a mighty big job,” another marine said. Seeing me flinch, he extended his hand to me. “Only kidding, man. What’s your name?”
“JR.”
“What! Naw! Hey, everybody, this guy’s name is JR!”
His buddies wheeled away from Sheryl and gawked at me.
“Who shot him?”
“Ask who shot him.”
“Who shot you?”
Sheryl wasn’t about to surrender the spotlight without a fight. “Did someone say shots?” she shouted.
“Whoo!” the marines roared. “Yeah! Shots for JR! Let’s shoot JR!”
A marine handed me a shot glass and ordered me to drink. I did. It burned. A different marine handed me another glass. I drank it faster. It burned more. The marines then lost interest in me and went back to scrumming over Sheryl. She lit a cigarette. I watched her hold the first puff of smoke in her open mouth like a ball of cotton before sucking it down, and I thought, Of course—smoking. Casually I lit one of Sheryl’s cigarettes, as if it were my twentieth that day, not the first of my life. I took a drag. Nothing. I looked at the cigarette and smirked. Is that all you got? I took another drag. Deeper. The smoke hit my sternum like a short, hard right. After an initial burst of euphoria came hysteria, then nausea, then classic symptoms of malaria. Sweating. Shaking. Delirium. I levitated above the marines. Looking down on the bald spots in their crew cuts I thought, Fresh air now. Freshairnow.
I did a Frankenstein walk to the rear exit. Jammed. I pushed. The door gave and I fell into a narrow alley. A brick wall. I pressed my back against the wall. Oh wall. Dependable wall. Hold me, wall. I slid down. Sitting against the wall I tipped my head back and tried to breathe. The air felt refreshing. Like a waterfall. I held my face to the air a long time before realizing that I was directly beneath a pipe spurting some kind of greenish liquid. I rolled onto my side. The streetlights made multicolored pinwheels on the oily surfaces of the puddles in the alley. I don’t know how much time passed as I watched the pinwheels—an hour? five minutes?—but when I summoned the strength to stand and go back inside Sheryl was not pleased. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said.
“Alley.”
“You do not look good.”
“Don’t feel good. Where’s Bravo Company?”
“They retreated when they realized I wasn’t Iwo Jima.”
On the way back to Manhasset I noticed for the first time that Sheryl was a horrible driver. She sped up, slowed down, switched lanes, came to lurching stops at red lights. By the time we reached Grandpa’s house I felt seasick. I didn’t wait for Sheryl to come to a complete stop in the driveway. I leaped from the moving car, ran inside and vomited in the bathroom. Crawling into bed I clung to the mattress, which was rising slowly like a soufflé. Sheryl came and somehow sat on the edge of the mattress, even though it was ten feet off the ground. She told me I was going to wake the whole house. Stop groaning, she said. I didn’t know I was groaning.
“Well, congratulations!” she said, or tried to. It came out: Congratcha-ma-lations! “Snuck into Publicans. Got thrown out of Publicans. Drank with m’reens. Smoked your fersh smigarette. I’m s’proud of you. S’proud.”
“Are you the devil?”
She left the room.
“Hey,” I called. “Why did you break up with Jedd?”
If she answered, I didn’t hear.
Somewhere in the house a radio was playing. Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump.” Beautiful song, I thought. Then the bouncy rhythm started to make me more nauseous. Would I ever be well enough to enjoy music again? I tried to fall asleep, but words and ideas leaped around in my head. I thought I was experiencing penetrating flashes of insight, and I wanted to write them down. I couldn’t get out of bed, however, because the mattress was still rising. How much farther could it go before my back would be pressed against the ceiling? I felt like a car on a hydraulic lift. Sprawled on my stomach, my head hanging over the side of the bed, I committed my flashes of insight to memory. I thought, My mother is the printed word, my father is the spoken word, Sheryl is the slurred word. Then all was blackness.
In the morning I woke from a nightmare in which marines were storming Grandpa’s house and using the chevrons from their sleeves to retape the bicentennial sofa. I took a long hot shower and sat on the stoop with a cup of black coffee. Uncle Charlie came outside and glared at me. I braced myself, but he saw my bloodshot eyes and must have concluded that I’d suffered enough. He shook his head and looked at the treetops.
“Now I can drive us home from the bars in Roslyn,” I said to Sheryl, showing her my new driver’s license, which my mother had forwarded to me. We were on the early-morning train, near the end of August, and Sheryl held the license up to the light from the window, to get a better look. She read: “‘Height, five-ten. Weight, one-forty. Hair, auburn. Eyes, hazel.’” She laughed. “Nice photo,” she said. “You look about twelve. No. Strike that. Eleven. What does your mother say in her letter?”
I read: “‘I’m attaching your insurance card, sweetheart, because if you’re ever in an accident, you must show that you have insurance.’” I looked down, embarrassed. “My mom’s kind of a worrywart,” I mumbled.
In the same letter my mother reported that she’d gotten a new job at an insurance company, which she was enjoying. “I don’t have such pressure at work or such a workload that I come home dead tired,” she wrote. “I think you will see a big change in me when you come home in that even though I am tired at the end of a day, when I come home now I do have something left of me.”
Folding the letter and tucking it into my pocket I told Sheryl about the clunker my mother had bought for me, a 1974 AMC Hornet with an orange racing stripe, which cost four hundred dollars. I didn’t tell Sheryl how the letter made me miss my mother, or how I looked forward to seeing her in two weeks, or how I worried about her all the time. I didn’t confess that while riding the train some mornings I couldn’t stop imagining something bad happening to my mother, that I’d try to replace these fears with my old mantra, then berate myself for adhering to my boyhood superstitions, then tell myself that it was better to be safe than sorry, because maybe the mantra still had some magic left in it, and if I abandoned the mantra I might cause something bad to befall my mother. I knew Sheryl would say that real men don’t think that way. Real men don’t have mantras, and real men certainly don’t miss their moms.
Sheryl came searching for me in the file room later that morning. She had a cross look on her face, and I assumed it was because I didn’t have any money for lunch and I’d asked her to float me a loan. “It’s your mom,” she said. “There’s been an accident. They’re waiting for us at home.”
We ran to Penn Station. Sheryl bought a six-pack and we drank them all before we reached Bayside. “I’m sure it will be fine,” she said. But already it wasn’t fine. My mantra had failed, and I had failed my mother.
Walking past Publicans I looked in the window, heard the laughter, saw the happy faces along the bar. I almost suggested to Sheryl that we stop for a quick one. Uncle Charlie would understand. I hated myself for this impulse, for letting my thoughts stray one second from my mother, but I was frightened and I regarded Publicans as the best available antidote to fear. I longed for the bar in a new and desperate way, a portentous way.
At Grandpa’s house I threw some things int
o a bag and Sheryl kissed me good-bye. “Be a man,” she said, not in her typical way, but in a tender, encouraging way, as if she believed I would be.
Grandpa bought me a plane ticket and Uncle Charlie drove me to the airport. Along the way he told me what he knew. My mother had been returning home from work when a drunk driver going the wrong way, with no headlights, hit her head-on. She had a broken arm and a concussion. The doctors were concerned that she might have suffered brain damage. “She has amnesia,” Uncle Charlie said.
I asked Uncle Charlie what would happen if my mother couldn’t remember me. He said he wasn’t sure what I meant. I wasn’t sure either. I think I was asking him who I would be if my mother didn’t know me.
eighteen | LANA
There were jagged cuts on her face and clumps of matted blood in her hair. Her eyes were half open, a new and terrible kind of blank face. I leaned over her. “Mom?” I said. From somewhere behind me a nurse said my mother was on powerful pain medication and would be in “limbo” for some time.
“You’re pretty big for a ten-year-old,” the doctor said.
“Excuse me?”
“Your mom told me she had a ten-year-old son.”
“Oh.”
“And when I asked if she knew where she was, she said New York.”
“We moved here from New York.”
“I thought as much. I even took her to the window and showed her the palm trees and cacti, but she insisted. New York.”
When visiting hours ended I left the hospital and went back to our apartment. I tried to calm down by reading a book. No chance. I turned on all the lights, then turned them all off. I sat in the dark, thinking. I sat on the bank of the canal, watching the water. I was exhausted, but couldn’t go to bed, because whenever I closed my eyes I pictured the moment of impact. Frightened, lonely, I thought about what my mother had told the doctor. She was right, in a way. I was ten years old.
The Tender Bar: A Memoir Page 16