The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  “Good. How soon can you get me some more samples of your work?”

  “More? I sent you everything I wrote for my college paper.”

  “Huh, that is a problem. The editors feel they need to see more before they can make a decision.”

  “I suppose I could go to New Haven and look through the microfilms at the library. Maybe I missed something.”

  “Why don’t you do that. And if you find anything, let me know.”

  After hanging up the phone I was delirious with adrenaline. I danced back to the customer and sold her a box of jasmine-scented candles, eight or twelve hand towels, and a Waterford cigarette lighter, which helped me edge out Dora for high seller that day. The prize was dinner for two at an Italian restaurant. When I gave Dora the gift certificate she put her hand on my cheek. “Such a good boy,” she said. “I don’t know why all the other ladies hate you.”

  Waiting to pull out of Grand Central, leaning my head against the window, I saw her walk through my reflection. She wore a tan linen skirt and a sheer ivory short-sleeved top, and she was carrying a slice of pizza on a paper plate. Trying to find a car that wasn’t crowded, she stooped to peer into my window, then continued down the platform. Moments later she came back. This time I waved. She jumped, then smiled. She came into the train car and sat beside me. “Hello, Trouble,” she said. “Where you heading?”

  “Yale. To get some more clips to show the New York Times.”

  “No!”

  “I sent them my stuff and they want to see more.”

  She squeezed my knee.

  “You?” I said.

  “Home to see my parents.”

  As the train clacked north I talked about fate. Fate kept throwing us together, I argued. From Constitutional Law to Grand Central our paths were forever crossing. Obviously fate was trying to tell us something. How else to explain this chance encounter? Especially when I was going back to Yale on an errand inspired by her. The universe, I said, wants us together.

  She let me plead my case while she ate her pizza. When she finished she patted her hands together, to get rid of the crumbs, and said, “Maybe I was wrong.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Maybe you should have gone to law school after all.”

  I frowned. She stroked my arm. She said that she agreed with everything I said, but she didn’t want to risk hurting me again. “That’s what I was trying to tell you when we had dinner last month,” she said. “I’m confused. I’m fucked up. I need—”

  “I know. Time.”

  “You’re always so sure about people,” she said. “Everything is so black or white with you. You don’t have any trouble letting people in.”

  “I wish I knew how to let people out.”

  She patted her lips with a paper napkin. “My stop,” she said. “Good luck with the Times. Let me know how it goes.”

  She kissed me and hurried off the train.

  When I reached New Haven all I wanted to do was find a bar and call my mother. I had to force myself to sit in Sterling Library and look through microfilms of old newspapers, which did not improve my mood. Though there were indeed articles I’d forgotten, there had been good reason for forgetting them. They were insignificant briefs about nothing, a few hundred words here and there about this speaker or that event. Marie at the Times wouldn’t deign to use them to wrap up her unfinished sandwich after lunch.

  Now I really needed a drink. I phoned my former roommate, who had stayed in New Haven to attend law school. We met another friend and two women at a bar. After a few drinks we all piled into the friend’s car and headed for a restaurant. Along the way my friend accidentally cut off a car full of young men our age. They were wearing muscle shirts and gold chains and they were not appeased by our apologetic wave. At the next red light they rushed our car and threw open the doors. I was in the front passenger seat with a woman on my lap. I leaned across her, to shield her from the blows, which made me a stationary target. One man, wearing rings or brass knuckles, punched me six times, rapidly, in the side of my face, saying something like, “Yalie dick,” while another man exchanged punches with my friend, the driver. When the light turned green my friend managed to get the car into gear and sped away.

  My lip was gushing blood. A bump on my forehead felt like a budding antler. Something was wrong with my eye. We went to a hospital but the wait was several hours. “We’ll self-medicate,” my friend said, leading me to a bar around the corner. I wondered why the bells in Harkness were ringing so late. I asked the bartender. “They’re only ringing in your personal belfry there, ace,” he said. “You prolly got some kinda concussion. Tequila’s the best thing for that.” I looked at him. He was familiar. The bar was familiar. Was this the bar where I drank up the seventy-five dollars my mother had sent me to become JR Maguire? I told my friends that JR Maguire wouldn’t have gotten mugged. JR Maguire was too smart to let something like this happen to him. They had no idea what I was talking about.

  I slept a few hours on my roommate’s sofa and at dawn I caught the first train to New York. From Grand Central I took a cab to the Times. Standing across the street from the newspaper I marveled at how grand and august the building looked, the globe lights along its front wall with their Old English lettering: . The same typeface as the sign above Publicans. I wanted to sneak closer and peer through the windows, but there were no windows. I thought of the great reporters who passed through that front door each day, then thought of my pathetic clips in the folder under my arm. I wished those muscle-shirted thugs in New Haven had beaten me to death.

  A man stood ten feet from me. He wore a checked blazer, white shirt, regimental necktie, and his thick shock of white hair reminded me of Robert Frost. Though he had no teeth he was eating what appeared to be a baloney sandwich, and beaming at me, as if he were about to offer me a bite, as if he knew me. I smiled back, trying to place him, before noticing that he was wearing nothing from the waist down. His “personal” baloney, in the glaring early-morning sunlight, was white as scrimshaw. When I looked at it, he looked at it, then looked up, smiling still wider, delighted that I’d noticed.

  Now there could be no doubt. Clearly the universe was speaking to me, and it was saying that I was not meant to work at the Times. The signs were everywhere, from my encounter with Sidney to my assault in New Haven. Now this. The universe was telling me that I would have been to the Times what Naked Frost was to Times Square—an obscene intruder. As cops descended on Naked Frost and dragged him off, I wanted to rush to his defense, to tell the cops that Naked Frost wasn’t to blame, he was only an unwitting messenger of the universe. I felt more kinship with the man than pity or contempt for him. Between the two of us, I probably had more alcohol in my bloodstream.

  In a way, I was relieved. Had I landed the job at the Times I couldn’t have summoned the courage to walk into that building each day. It was all I could do now to walk across the street and push my way through the revolving doors, into the marble lobby, up to the security guard. I told him my name and handed him my folder and asked him to give it to Marie in personnel. Hold on, he said. He picked up a phone, spoke to someone, hung up. “Thoid flaw,” he said to me.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Thoid flaw.”

  “Third—me? No, no, I just came to drop off this folder. I don’t need to see her. I don’t want to see her.”

  “What can I tell you? She’s waitin’ fawya.”

  The only sensible thing to do was run. Catch the next train to Manhasset, hide in Publicans, never look back. But how could I disappear now that I’d been announced? Marie would think I was a kook, and that was something I could not abide. Better that she see me disheveled and half drunk than that she think me unstable.

  Rising to the third floor I studied my reflection in the brass doors of the elevator. I’d always imagined striding into the newsroom of the New York Times in a brand-new suit, with polished black lace-ups, an English spread collar, a gold necktie, and matching suspenders.
Instead I was wearing torn jeans, scuffed loafers, a T-shirt flecked with blood. And my right eye was swollen shut.

  Heads turned as I stepped off the elevator. I looked like a deranged reader come to settle a score with a reporter. An editor near the mailboxes chewed an unlit cigar and gawked. His cigar made me think of my breath, which must have been Fuckembabe-esque. I’d have traded ten years of my life for a mint.

  The newsroom was one whole city block long, a fluorescent prairie of metal desks and men. Presumably there were women working at the Times in 1986, but I didn’t see any. I saw nothing but men stretching to the horizon, dapper men, bookish men, distinguished men, wizened men, all milling about beneath rain clouds of smoke. I’ve been here before. One man I recognized from TV. He had been in the news recently for going to jail to protect a source, and he was known for his ubiquitous pipe, which he was puffing that morning. I wanted to approach him and tell him how much I admired him for going to jail in defense of the First Amendment, but I couldn’t because I looked as if I’d been in jail also, and not for defending any amendments.

  At the far end of the newsroom, at last, I saw a woman, one lone woman, sitting at a tiny desk. Marie, no doubt. The walk toward her took a week. Everyone I passed was on the phone, and I was certain they were all talking with one another about me. I wanted to apologize to each of them for profaning this place. I wanted to apologize to Marie, who now rose and received me with such a look of distress that I wondered if she’d have the guard in the lobby fired five minutes after I left. “Jay?” she said.

  “JR.”

  “Right.”

  We shook hands.

  She pointed me to a chair and seated herself behind her desk. She straightened a few envelopes, put a pencil in a pencil cup and a sheaf of papers in an out-basket. I felt sure she was equally quick when judging people, putting them into their proper places. She then turned to me and waited for me to explain myself. I considered lying, but didn’t have the energy. I considered simply smiling, but I didn’t want to cause my split lip to start bleeding again. Also, I thought a tooth might be loose. There was nothing to do but tell her about the mugging, concisely. I almost made the case that I’d actually been mugged twice, if you counted Sidney, but decided against trying to be clever. When I finished Marie tapped a long fingernail on her desk. “You can tell a story,” she said. “I’ll give you that.”

  I assured her that I meant no disrespect, showing up in this condition. I explained the mix-up with the guard. I told her that I loved the Times, worshipped the Times, read every book I could get my hands on about the history of the Times, including out-of-print memoirs by fusty old editors. In trying to explain my feelings for the Times I suddenly understood them better myself. It dawned on me why I’d been fascinated with the Times since I was a teenager. Yes, the newspaper offered a clearly delineated, black-and-white vision of the world, but what it also offered was that elusive bridge between my mother’s dreams and mine. Journalism was just the right blend of respectability and rebelliousness. Like lawyers, Times reporters wore Brooks Brothers suits and read books and crusaded for the downtrodden—but they also drank hard and told stories and hung out in bars.

  This wasn’t the opportune moment for an epiphany. The exertion of explaining myself, understanding myself, and profusely apologizing for myself—and all the while trying to aim my tequila breath wide of Marie’s nose—made me pale. And my lip was bleeding again. Marie handed me a tissue and asked if I’d like a glass of water. She told me to relax. Just relax. A young man so obviously unconcerned with appearances, she said, so open to adventure, so enamored of the Times and knowledgeable about its traditions, would make a very fine reporter indeed. In fact, she added, I looked as though I had the makings of a war correspondent. She saw in that chair beside her desk something more than a twenty-one-year-old screwup from Long Island with a black eye and a hangover and a folder full of dreadful writing. Whatever else I might be, she said, I was “refreshing.”

  A long time passed while Marie stared at me, thinking. I could see that she was weighing two options. She blinked her eyes, twice, and clearly chose Option B. She said there was a protocol to hiring people. She didn’t have the power to offer me the job right then. Editors would have to be consulted. Procedure would have to be followed. “However,” she said, “I do like the cut of your jib.”

  I’d never heard this expression. I thought she’d said, “I’d like to cut off your jib.” I tried to think how to respond but Marie was on her feet, offering her hand again. Barring something unforeseen, she said, she’d soon be able to welcome me to the New York Times.

  When I barreled into Publicans two hours later with my news, the place went berserk. Finally, the men said, I was doing something with my life. Getting into college, that was fine. Graduating, that was all well and good. But this was a real accomplishment. Newspapermen—Jimmy Cannon, Jimmy Breslin, A. J. Liebling, Grantland Rice—were barroom gods, and my being admitted to their ranks merited booming hurrahs and bear hugs.

  Uncle Charlie gave my hand a bone-crushing pump, then decided that wasn’t enough. He came around from behind the bar and kissed my cheek. “The New York Motherfucking Times,” he said. The last time I’d seen him that proud was when he explained the over and under to me, when I was eleven, and I got it right away. Colt bowed at the waist and said the same thing he’d said when I got into Yale, the same thing he said whenever I did anything right. “Must have been all those Wordy Gurdys.”

  Steve roared. He made me retell certain parts of the interview, describe again and again Naked Frost, and the security guard, and the horrified faces as I walked through the newsroom. He examined my shiner under the bar light, and I thought he might produce a jeweler’s eyepiece for a better look. I couldn’t decide which impressed him more, my black eye or my new job. But he was more than impressed. He was vindicated. His innate optimism was confirmed. Steve believed that everything works out in the end, that comedy always follows tragedy, that good things happened to all bad boys from Publicans, and now something very good had happened to the nephew of his senior bartender.

  “Extra! Extra!” he said. “Junior is a Timesman!”

  Then it was enough already about me. Steve and the men turned back to the TV, where the Mets were locked in a sixteen-inning nail-biter with the Houston Astros in the National League Championship Series. While everyone drank and watched the game I ducked into the phone booth and dialed my mother.

  The Mets won Game Six of the World Series a few days before I started at the Times. Down to their last strike, given up for dead, they came storming back and stunned the Boston Red Sox in the bottom of the tenth. Now the Mets were going to win the whole thing, everyone at Publicans knew. “Those poor bastards in Boston,” Uncle Charlie said to me, just after Ray Knight crossed home plate with the winning run. “Think of the bars like this one across New England. Ach. My heart breaks for them.” Uncle Charlie loved underdogs, and no underdog was more tragic than the Sox. For a moment he made me ashamed of my unalloyed happiness about the Mets winning.

  By my calculations the Mets’ victory parade would march through Manhattan on the same morning, at the same moment, I was marching into the Times for my first day of work. Of all the signs I’d ever gotten from the universe, this was the loudest and clearest. Against all odds, my team and I were no longer losers. My new life, my real life, my life as a winner, was under way at last. I was moving beyond all previous failure, beyond the dangerous lure of failure, outgrowing my boyish indecision about whether to try or not to try.

  There was only one slender thread connecting me to my old life, to my sense of myself as a lost cause. Sidney. I’d received another letter from her that week. Still loved me, still missed me, still needed time. Enclosed was a photo of herself. I stood at Publicans just after Game Six ended, rereading her letter and gazing at her photo as the celebration raged all around me. The bar was bedlam. We were all full of whiskey, full of an unreasonable faith in ourselves and the fut
ure, inferred from the good fortunes of our Mets, and I got an idea. I asked Fuckembabe to bring me a pen and a stamp from Steve’s basement office. He either told me to check the lower shelf or go fuck myself. I got the pen and stamp from Uncle Charlie, then scratched out my address on Sidney’s envelope and readdressed it back to her. I resealed the envelope, her letter and photo inside, and pushed my way through the crowd, through the front door, to the mailbox just outside. My lucky mailbox. The same mailbox from which I’d sent my clips to the Times.

  It was vividly clear to me. If I wrote Sidney to take all the time she needed, I’d win her in the end. I would outlast Trust-Funder, and whoever else came along, and Sidney and I would marry. We would live in a house near her parents and have two towheaded children, and every time she yawned or took a phone call in the other room my stomach would lurch. That life waited for me, meticulously planned, prearranged. I could see it towering before me like a drive-in movie screen. But there was another life waiting, a Sidneyless life, also prearranged. I couldn’t see it yet, but I could sense it, believe in it, thanks to the Times and the Mets and Publicans. I could hear the voices of that other life as distinctly as the voices at my back, inside the bar. I remembered Professor Lucifer lecturing us about free will versus fate, the riddle that had vexed great minds through the ages, and I wished I’d paid more attention, because leaning against my lucky mailbox, dangling Sidney’s letter above the slot, I didn’t know why fate and free will needed to be mutually exclusive. Maybe, I thought, when we come to our crossroads, we choose freely, but the choice is between two fated lives.