While my mother was at the market one day I quickly dialed a former colleague of my father’s at WNBC in New York City. I’d spent weeks trying to coax the colleague to the phone, and this was the only time his secretary said he’d be available. As he checked to see if he had a number for my father, my mother returned. She’d forgotten her grocery list. “Who are you talking to?” she asked. I shrugged. The man came on the line and said my father had left specific instructions that his whereabouts were not to be given out. I argued, but he hung up. My mother sat beside me and we both stared at the phone. She asked if I wanted her help. “No,” I said. She touched her arm, the one that had been broken in the car accident. The cast had only recently been removed, and the arm had atrophied. It gave her frequent pain, and now I was giving her more pain. Also, while recovering, my mother hadn’t been able to work, and our bills had piled up. She was stressed about money, more stressed than usual, and I was adding to her stress.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t apologize. A boy needs a father.” She smiled sadly. “Everyone needs a father.”
My mother went through her papers and pulled out an old address book. She thought she might have a number for my father’s sister in Florida. She put on her glasses and reached for the phone with her atrophied arm. Not wanting to listen I went to my bedroom and worked on my Yale essay.
My mother did reach my father’s sister, though it might have been better if she hadn’t. The sister said my father didn’t want to be found. That was that. “Anyway,” my mother said, standing at the stove, making dinner, “I left a message for her to give to him. We’ll see.”
The phone rang early the next morning. I recognized The Voice right away.
“Dad?” I said.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. He sounded sad.
“Fine,” I said.
“Fine?”
“Yes.”
“But when—how—?”
My mother grabbed the phone. With her hand cupped over the receiver and her back to me, she whispered to my father. Later she confessed to me the message she’d left with my father’s sister: JR is very sick and he would like to meet his father—before it’s too late. One of her finest lies.
When my mother gave me back the phone my father sounded amused. He asked what was new, and seemed interested to hear that I was applying to Yale. I was flattered, because I was a sap. He wasn’t interested, he was suspicious. He knew that Yale was expensive and thought I was calling to put the touch on him for tuition. After I mentioned the financial-aid forms scattered across our kitchen table, he changed his tone, and even said he’d consider coming to Arizona to see me, so long as my mother promised not to have him thrown in jail. She had to promise several times, with me relaying each promise, before he believed her. Fine, fine, he said at last. He was living in Los Angeles, working at a rock station—he would fly to Phoenix that weekend.
I asked my mother how I would spot my father at the airport. I had no memory of him.
“It’s been a long time,” she said. “He used to look a bit like—I don’t know.”
“Like what?”
“You.”
“Oh.”
She was having a cup of coffee. She looked into the cup and pondered. “He liked to eat,” she said. “He was a chef once.”
“He was?”
“So I’ll bet he’s heavier. He liked to drink too, which can affect how a person looks. And he was starting to lose his hair. I imagine he’s lost more.”
“You’re saying I should look for a fat, drunk, bald version of me?”
She put her hand over her mouth and laughed. “Oh JR,” she said. “You’re the only one who can make me laugh.” Then abruptly she stopped laughing. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I think that probably is about right.”
I stood near the gate, gazing into every man’s face as if it were a crystal ball. Is that me in thirty years? Could that be me? Is that—Future Me? Each man stared back, though none showed any recognition. When I saw the flight attendants walk off the plane I kicked the ground. He’d done it again. I thought my father had changed, but no one changes.
Off the plane came one last passenger. A pugnacious fireplug of a man, he was three inches shorter than I, but with my nose and chin. He looked like me with an extra thirty years and another seventy-five pounds, plus several more layers of muscle. Our eyes met. I felt his gaze connect as if he’d hurled a baseball across the terminal and hit me in the middle of the forehead. He strode toward me and I took a step back, thinking he might strike me, but he folded me carefully into a hug, as though I were breakable, which I was.
The feel of my father, the thrilling width of him, the scent of his hair spray and cigarettes and the whiskey he drank on the plane, made me weak. More than his feel and smell, the fact of him staggered me. I was hugging The Voice. I’d forgotten that my father was flesh and bone. Over time I’d grouped him with all my imaginary fathers, and now, struggling to reach around his shoulders, I felt as if I were hugging Baloo or Bagheera.
At a coffee shop near Sky Harbor we sat across from each other at a wobbly table, each of us staring, seeing the resemblance. He told me about his life, or the life he wanted me to think he’d led, full of adventure and danger and glamour. He made his past sound romantic, to distract us both from his present, which was grim. He’d squandered his talent, blown through his money, and was at the start of a long decline. He told story after story, a Scheherazade in dark shades and a leather jacket, and I said nothing. I listened intently and believed every word, every lie, even while I knew they were lies, and believed that he noticed and appreciated my rapt attention and credulity, that this was why he was telling me so many stories. Later I realized he noticed nothing. My father was nervous also, more nervous than I, and telling stories was how he steadied his nerves. I thought he was there before me at last, but as always he was hiding behind that voice.
I remember few details of my father’s oral autobiography. I remember him telling me about famous beauties he’d bedded, but I don’t remember who, and celebrities he’d known, though I can’t recall which. What I remember best is what neither of us said. My father offered no explanation or apology for disappearing, and I didn’t ask for one. Maybe we felt that the time wasn’t right. Maybe we didn’t know where to begin. Most likely neither of us had the guts. Whatever the reason, we fell into a conspiracy of silence, each of us pretending that the fact of my father’s abandonment of me and his mistreatment of my mother wasn’t sitting there on the table between us, like a dead rat.
It was easier for me to pretend. My father—as a grown man, as a father—understood better than I what he’d done. I saw this in his face, and heard it in his voice, without recognizing it for what it was. I would recognize it years later, when I knew much more about guilt and self-loathing, and how they make a man look and sound.
Of the many stories my father told that night, one did manage to lodge itself in my memory. When I asked where he got his radio alias, and why he used one, he said that Moehringer wasn’t our real name. His late father was a Sicilian immigrant named Hugh Attanasio, who couldn’t find work because all the factories on the Lower East Side were run by “Italian-hating Krauts.” To fool the Krauts, Hugh took the name of his recently deceased German neighbor, Franz Moehringer. My father never liked the name Moehringer, and he didn’t like his old man, so when he broke into show business he became Johnny Michaels.
“Wait,” I said, pointing to my chest. “I’m named after your father’s dead German neighbor?”
He laughed and shifted into a German accent. “Yah vell,” he said, “eet zounds funny ven you put eet like zat.”
We met for coffee the next morning at my father’s hotel. He had a gray complexion and his eyes were pink. Apparently he’d stopped into the hotel bar after I left him. His hangover rendered him unable to resume his monologue of the night before, and therefore I could no longer sit back and listen. Someone had to talk. I sputtered abo
ut Bill and Bud, Uncle Charlie, Publicans, Lana, Sheryl, my life’s ambitions.
“Still with the lawyer thing?” my father said, lighting one cigarette with the dying end of another.
“Why not?”
He frowned.
“How do you rate your chances of getting into Yale?” he said.
“Heavy underdog,” I said.
“I think you’re going to get in,” he said.
“Really?”
“They can’t get many applications from this wasteland,” he said. “You’ll give them geographical diversity.”
His flight back to Los Angeles left at noon. Driving him to the airport I tried to think of something profound to say. Before we parted I thought we should address the topic we’d been avoiding. But how? My father turned up the volume on the car stereo and sang along with my Sinatra cassette as I ran through different speeches in my head. I thought I might confront him. Why did you leave my mother and me without a penny? Or I might take a forgiving tone, suggest we start over. Look, the past is past, and I hope we can put it all behind us. Whatever I said needed to be clever, but also serious, and struggling to find the right words, to strike the exact tone, I stopped paying attention to the road. I ran yellow lights, swerved in and out of lanes, narrowly dodged a truck backing out of a driveway. Squealing up to the airport curb I threw the Hornet into park and turned to my father. Looking him straight in the eye I said—nothing. He reached into the backseat for his garment bag, hugged me, then climbed out and slammed the door. Disgusted with myself, ashamed of my cowardice, I gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. I thought how disappointed Bud would be when I told him I’d let fear get the best of me.
That night I would realize exactly what I’d wanted to say to my father, and I would write it down. I’d wanted to tell him that I understood he hadn’t been cut out for fatherhood, hadn’t ever wanted the job in the first place, so there was no point in my regretting his not being around while I was growing up. What I regretted was my own lost opportunity. I felt that I would have enjoyed being a father’s son.
I heard a knock on the window. My father was peering in, making a motion for me to roll down the window. Obviously he too felt something profound should be said. I leaned over and cranked the handle.
“JR,” he said, as the glass lowered, “I just need to tell you one thing.”
“Yes?”
“You drive like nuns fuck.”
twenty | MY MOTHER
It had to be simple but complex, sparse but lyrical, Hemingwayesque and Jamesian at the same time. It had to be careful and conservative, but also fresh and bold, evidence of a young mind teeming with insights. It would determine the course of my life, and my mother’s life, and either make up for the mistakes of all the men in my family or perpetuate their tradition of failure. And it could be no longer than three-quarters of a page.
Before beginning my essay for Yale I made a list of big words. Only the biggest words, I felt, would force the Admissions Committee to overlook my many deficiencies. At seventeen years old, I’d developed a philosophy on big words that was no different than my philosophy on cologne. The more the better.
My word list:
Provisional
Strident
Bucolic
Fulcrum
Inimical
Behemoth
Jesuitical
Minion
Eclectic
Marquis de Sod
Esthetic
I loved words—their sound, their power—without understanding or appreciating their precision, and this led to one jaw-dropping sentence after another. “Try as I might,” I wrote, addressing the Admissions Committee directly, “I feel unable to truly convey the emphatic pangs of hungry ignorance that attend this my seventeenth year, for I fear that my audience is well fed!”
As my fingers flew across the keys of the secondhand typewriter my mother had bought me, I could hear the Dean of Admissions summoning everyone into his office. “I think we’ve got something here,” he’d say, before reading a few choice passages aloud.
My mother, however, after reading my essay, chose three small words to express her opinion. “You sound—insane.”
I ripped the essay from her hands and stormed into my bedroom to try again.
I began a new essay, a wordier essay, about my “ambition” to attend Yale. I was quite taken with this word. “I have ambition,” I proclaimed, “in the sense that one would describe the man who wishes to outrun a speeding train as ambitious. And the behemoth bearing down on me? Ignorance!” I thought it sounded brilliant, but again my mother flatly rejected my effort.
Over the next few weeks, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, my mother and I shouted and slammed doors and shoved my notebook back and forth, arguing about words. She would stare at me and I could almost hear her wishing she’d never taught me to love words, had never shown me those flash cards when I was a boy. I would stare back at her and wonder if her car accident had caused some brain damage the doctors hadn’t detected—or was the woman simply unable to appreciate topflight writing? I brought my many drafts to Bill and Bud, who told me that my mother had been far too kind in her appraisal.
With the December 31 deadline just days away I walked out of my bedroom, brandishing another essay. “Worse than the last,” my mother said, handing it back.
“That essay will get me accepted!”
“That essay will get you committed.”
To spite her, I went back into my bedroom and batted out a slapdash essay with not one big word, just a plain and simple description of working at the bookstore with Bill and Bud, how they taught me to read by giving me bagfuls of books and talking with me patiently about literature and language. I wrote about how they transmitted their enthusiasm for books, and how I saw Yale as an enlargement of this experience. Dull as yesterday’s dishwater. I thrust it at my mother. “Perfect,” she said. I was never so confused.
On New Year’s Eve my mother and I drove to the post office. The day was windy and bright. She kissed her fingertips and touched the envelope before I dropped it into the mailbox. At home we ate a pizza and when my mother went to bed I climbed up to the canal and looked at the water and listened to some drunken Arizonans across the way singing “Auld Lang Syne.”
Every day thereafter I watched the mail, though of course I knew that the Admissions Committee wouldn’t make its decision for months. The only letter that arrived was from Sheryl. I was touched, because I thought she’d decorated the page with Yale’s logo, that majestic-looking Y, but on closer inspection I saw that Sheryl had drawn martini glasses at the end of every sentence, a pictograph of how she’d been spending her time. She was dating So-and-So, who liked to (martini glass), and she’d bumped into What’s His Name, and they stayed out very late (martini glasses), and the gang at Publicans (martini glasses) sent me their love. In closing she signed off, “Have a cocktail. I am! XOXO, Sheryl.”
Spring came. I spent every warm night on the canal, wondering if the Admissions Committee had decided about me that day, or if they would decide in the morning, or perhaps the following afternoon. I looked at the stars reflected on the water’s surface and wished on each one. Please. Please. I didn’t know what I would do if I didn’t get in. As a backup I’d applied to Arizona State, but I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for going there. If Yale rejected me, I thought, I’d probably just light out for Alaska. Sometimes I let my mind run with this fantasy, pretending the canal was a wild river in the Yukon, where I lived in a log cabin, fishing and reading, subsisting on grizzly-bear meat, hardly ever thinking about Yale, except on snowy nights, sitting by the fire, combing the lice out of my beard and petting my dog—Eli.
Whenever I climbed down from the bank of the canal and returned to the apartment I’d find my mother awake, working at the kitchen table. We would talk awhile, about everything but Yale, and then I’d go to bed and listen to Sinatra until I fell asleep.
On April 15 a letter ar
rived. My mother put it in the middle of the kitchen table. We might have stared at it all day if she hadn’t begged me to open it. I took the letter opener she’d bought me when we visited Yale and slit the envelope. I removed the one sheet of onionskin, unfolded it, read silently.
“Dear Mr. Moehringer: It is a great pleasure to inform you that the Admissions Committee has voted to offer you a place in the Yale Class of 1986.”
“What is it?” my mother said.
I continued to read in silence. “I am also pleased to notify you that your financial need has been met.”
“Tell me,” my mother said.
I handed her the letter. Oh dear God, she said, reading, tears filling her eyes. She held the letter against her heart. I grabbed her and danced her around the living room, in and out of the kitchen, and then we sat side by side at the table and read the letter over and over. I shouted the letter, she sang the letter, and finally we fell silent. We couldn’t say anything else. We didn’t dare, and we didn’t need to. We both believed in words, but there were only three words for this day, this feeling. We got in.
I phoned Grandpa’s house and told them. Then the phone call that counted. Publicans. I’d never phoned Uncle Charlie at the bar before, so he assumed the worst. “Who died?” he said.
“Just thought you might be interested to know that your nephew got accepted to Yale.”
Pause. I heard fifty voices in the background, a baseball game on TV, glasses clinking. “No shit,” he said. “Hey everyone! My nephew got into Yale!” He held up the phone and I heard cheers, followed by a riotous, boozy chorus of “Boola Boola.”
At the bookstore I walked calmly into the stockroom, as though I were there to pick up my paycheck. Bill and Bud were reading. I remember—I will always remember—that Bud was sitting on his stool, listening to Mahler’s Symphony no. 1. “Any word?” he said.
The Tender Bar: A Memoir Page 18