The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  When Cager was able to catch his breath, when he’d dried his eyes and taken a swig of cold beer, he told me to relax. Relax, kid, just fucking relax. There are mistakes, he said, and then there are mistakes. In the army he once accidentally blew up a chopper. Come on, I said. God’s truth, he said. He was firing mortar rounds, target practice, and something went wrong. A mortar jammed. He jimmied the thing and there was a fizzing noise—the gun fired. An unmanned Chinook was sitting on a helipad nearby. “Boom,” Cager said. “Still owe Uncle Sam about six mil for that one.”

  The time had come to set aside all these irrelevant topics and talk about the only thing that mattered, the evening’s main event, the softball game. Other players gathered ’round and we all hung on Cager like ornaments on a Christmas tree as he recounted the victory. Someone complimented his nifty glove work at third base. Second coming of Brooks Robinson, someone said. Shucks, Cager said, feigning modesty. More than his play in the field he was proud of one moment of horseplay with Steve. Several home runs had been hit, Cager said, and each one splashed down in the pond beyond the fence. Cager shouted to Steve, “We’re running out of balls, we’re going to have to fish some out of that pond—did you bring the pole?” “Naw,” Steve said, “she’s coming down later with the kids.” Steve was referring to his wife, Georgette, née Zaleski. Cager had to call time-out until he and Steve could compose themselves.

  I left Cager and drifted back up the bar to General Grant. He was now engrossed in conversation with an investment banker in a blue pinstripe suit, a prosperous-looking man in his fifties, whose pepper-and-salt mustache seemed grown specifically to match his black-and-white tie. They were both smoking cigars, discussing the Civil War, and I thought the conversation must have been prompted by how much General Grant looked like General Grant. But it turned out that Banker was a hard-core Civil War buff. He told me and General Grant a few little-known facts about Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg. He also told us that Lincoln ran a bar as a young man and slept in the back room.

  “Did you know that?” I asked General Grant.

  “Who doesn’t know that?” General Grant said. “Lincoln also was in the distillery business. Made a very smooth Kentucky bourbon.”

  Colt spun me away. “You think you’re so smart,” he said. “Suck on this. How many Batman villains can you name? There are supposedly three dozen and I can only come up with ten.” He thrust a sheet of paper at me.

  I almost said something about the absurdity of Yogi Bear making a list of Batman villains, but Colt was so earnest, so solicitous of my help, that I held my tongue and looked over what he had so far. Joker, Riddler, Puzzler, King Tut. It reminded me of the list of names no one was allowed to call Uncle Charlie. “How about Bookworm?” I said.

  “Bookworm!” Colt said, slapping his forehead. “Forgot about Bookworm.”

  Uncle Charlie arrived. Unwrapping a new box of Marlboros, he asked General Grant for a vodka with a cranberry splash, then put a hand to his temple. “JR,” he said, “I was reading today and came across the word ‘nidifugous.’ What does it mean?”

  I shrugged.

  Uncle Charlie asked for the Book of Words. General Grant reached behind the bar and brought down from a shelf a beautiful old volume, which everyone called the Book of Words, often with a whispery reverence, as though it were the Book of Kells. General Grant set the book before Uncle Charlie, who leafed through the pages and announced that “nidifugous” meant “leaving the nest shortly after hatching.” He was delighted by this definition. Now I was wedged between Uncle Charlie and Banker, the beer was cold, the subject was words, and I was so happy that I didn’t ever want to move. But I needed to pee.

  In the men’s room I thought I might be hallucinating. Both urinals were overflowing with cash. Fives, singles, quarters. Returning to the barroom I asked Uncle Charlie about it. He frowned. “Don started that nonsense,” he said.

  Don, a Princeton-educated lawyer in town, was one of Uncle Charlie’s oldest friends. A few nights earlier, Uncle Charlie said, Don decided it would be good karma to pay tribute every time he went to the head. “Something about appeasing the pee gods,” Uncle Charlie said, sighing. “Anyway, now everybody’s doing it. New tradition.”

  “Do people make a wish when they throw money in? Like coins in a fountain?”

  “Do I know what people do in the head? Christ, what a question. But I’ll tell you this. Don keeps careful track, a written record, of how much money accumulates before some sicko reaches in and scoops it out. And someone always reaches in, eventually. Human nature, you know. Talk about your ‘filthy lucre.’”

  Bartenders weren’t happy about the Don Fund, Uncle Charlie added. They were all paranoid about getting paid with urinal money, and since everyone knew that the bartenders were wary of wet cash, cheapskates and con men were running fivers under the faucet before setting them on the bar. “Pay with a wet five,” Uncle Charlie said out of the side of his mouth, “and the chances are good your drink will be on the house.”

  I laughed and threw an arm around Uncle Charlie’s neck and told him I felt great. No, better than great. Grrreat. I told him I had not been feeling great a short while ago, but now I felt—great. Why? Because Publicans had distracted me. Distraction, I said. We all need it, and Publicans provides it, like no place else. But Uncle Charlie didn’t hear, because suddenly standing before us was Don. Jesus Christ, Uncle Charlie said, speak of the goddamned devil. We were just talking about you. He introduced me to Don, who was Uncle Charlie’s age and height. The resemblance ended there. Uncle Charlie had mentioned that Don was a wrestler when younger, and it still showed. He had that solidity, that thickness, that permanently low center of gravity. He also had the most open and friendly face in the bar, with upswept eyebrows and a bright pat of red veins on each cheek, like a toy wooden soldier. He was immediately likable, lovable, and I could see why he rated so high in Uncle Charlie’s book.

  I told Don what I’d just been telling Uncle Charlie, about Publicans satisfying that underrated human need—distraction. Distraction was the name of the game, I told Don, and he said that he couldn’t agree more. He told me how the bar had helped him through many a bad time in his life, how it had become particularly important to him a few years earlier, just after he got divorced, when distraction was the best hedge against depression. Then suddenly we were all distracted by Banker, who was giving a very interesting talk about Lincoln’s obsession with Macbeth. “The play spoke to his sense of foreboding,” Banker said.

  “Lincoln believed in omens,” General Grant said.

  “Who doesn’t?” Uncle Charlie said.

  “Lincoln read Macbeth days before he was assassinated,” Banker said. “Did you know that? Can’t you just picture him in his stovepipe, reading about ‘murder most foul,’ right before he’s going to be murdered?”

  “You think he wore his hat when he read?” Don said. “No way Lincoln wore that big stovepipe hat when he read.”

  “You’d look good in a stovepipe,” Banker said to Uncle Charlie.

  The image of Uncle Charlie in a stovepipe got a huge laugh.

  “God I miss my hair,” Uncle Charlie said to Don, apropos of nothing. Don patted him on the arm.

  “Hey Colt!” someone yelled from across the bar. “Just thought of another Batman villain! Clock King!”

  “Nice work,” Colt said, adding the name to his list.

  “How about Mr. Salty?” I said.

  “False,” Uncle Charlie said. “There was no Mr. Salty.”

  Exactly, I said. Exactly.

  thirty-one | ALADDIN

  I worked a double shift that Thanksgiving, and by the time I got to Grandpa’s there wasn’t a crumb left from dinner. The house was dark, the cousins asleep. I walked down to Publicans and found it mobbed. Thanksgiving was always the best and busiest night at the bar, when everyone in town stopped by after dinner, and everyone who ever lived in town returned, looking to reunite with former flames and old friends.


  Just inside the door I ran into DePietro, a schoolmate from Shelter Rock. I hadn’t seen him in years. He was working at the World Trade Center, he said, brokering treasury bonds. He asked about my Thanksgiving.

  “What Thanksgiving?” I said.

  “No turkey?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “You look bad, pal. You look like a man who could use some Silk Panties.”

  Colt was behind the stick, and DePietro asked him to whip up a batch of Silk Panties. When I asked what Silk Panties were, both DePietro and Colt waved their hands as if I shouldn’t concern myself with such trifling details. “Salud,” Colt said, draining a pitcher of clear liquid into a shot glass. Though clear, the liquid poured slowly, like syrup.

  “Tastes like frozen peaches,” I said, sipping.

  “It’ll freeze your peaches all right,” Colt said.

  “I need to eat something,” I said. “Is it too late to have Smelly make me a burger?”

  DePietro insisted I go with him to his parents’ house, right now. He had a surprise for me. I didn’t have the energy to argue. The Silk Panties were hitting me like a Valium smoothie. He drove at dangerous speeds through Manhasset Woods, lurching to a stop outside a tall Tudor house that looked familiar. I thought I might have peered in its front window when I was a kid. He brought me through a back door into a spotless kitchen and piled a plate high with leftovers—turkey, walnut stuffing, a slab of pumpkin chiffon pie. As I inhaled the food DePietro told me stories, unforgettable stories, including one about a kid he knew who broke the course record at Plandome Country Club when he was one week shy of his eighteenth birthday. Puffing out his chest, the kid presented his scorecard to the pro, who told him to piss off—you had to be eighteen to set the course record. One week later, the morning of his eighteenth birthday, the kid returned at dawn, hired a caddie, then went out and broke the course record again. Submitting his scorecard, he told the pro to shove it up his water hazard. “His blade work on the back nine was a thing of beauty,” DePietro said. “Someone told me he jarred the last putt from about forty, cocky motherfucker.”

  I told DePietro I’d give anything—except the plate of leftovers before me—to have that kind of confidence.

  Stuffed, happy, I returned with DePietro to Publicans, and drank more Silk Panties, and by three in the morning I was falling from DePietro’s BMW convertible onto Grandpa’s driveway, shouting all the things for which I was thankful, like DePietro, and Silk Panties, and Publicans, which DePietro later swore I pronounced “Pumpkin Cans.”

  Weeks later I sat at the bar with Cager and told him I was working up a new theory about Publicans. I was hungry and lonely on Thanksgiving? Publicans fed me. I was depressed about being Mr. Salty? Publicans distracted me. I’d always thought of Publicans as a sanctuary, but now I believed it was something else altogether. “Publicans is the Aladdin’s Lamp of Long Island,” I said. “Make a wish, give the bar a rub—and presto. Aladdin, aka Publicans, provides.”

  “Now wait,” Cager said. “Was Aladdin the guy who rubbed the lamp, or the genie in the lamp?”

  “Either way,” I said.

  “Publicans grants wishes?” Cager looked up and addressed the rafters. “I want the four horse in the seventh race at Belmont.”

  Uncle Charlie chortled.

  A man in a gorgeous camel-hair topcoat walked up to the bar and asked what we were talking about. Aladdin, Cager said. “Yes,” the man said agreeably, smiling. “He was great in Shane.”

  “You’re thinking of Alan Ladd,” Cager said.

  A woman, whose hair was a shocking police-tape yellow, overheard. “I loved that show!” she cried.

  “What show is that?” Cager said.

  “Password.”

  “That was Allen Ludden,” Cager said.

  “Allen Ludden grants wishes?” the first man said.

  “Sure he does,” Cager said. He leaned into me and muttered, “The password is—morons.”

  I asked Uncle Charlie what he thought of my Publicans-Aladdin theory. “The only Aladdin I care about is in Vegas,” he said.

  As people came rolling into the bar that night I remarked to Uncle Charlie that Publicans seemed more crowded all the time. Every night was like Thanksgiving.

  “You have no idea,” he said. “You cannot believe how much booze we’re going through per week. A Mississippi of Michelob. A Lake Huron of Heineken.”

  “Huron or Pontchartrain?” Cager said.

  “Which is bigger?” Uncle Charlie said.

  “The biggest is Pontchartrain. I think you meant to say Pontchartrain?”

  “In my whole life I’ve never meant to say Pontchartrain.”

  Some of the credit for the record-setting receipts that fall went to Wall Street. The stock market was on fire, which translated into a boon for every bar within the tristate metropolitan area. But the real reason for Publicans’ runaway success, according to Uncle Charlie and other sages along the bar, was Steve. Steve continued to draw people to the bar in ever greater numbers, for reasons that were hard to put into words.

  “That’s why Chief’s expanding,” Uncle Charlie said. “Between us. Sotto voce. Kapish? Deal’s not done yet. He’s opening a joint in the city, a second Publicans, on the South Street Seaport.” He folded his arms and opened his eyes wide. “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” he said.

  I wasn’t sure where South Street Seaport was, and my ignorance played to Uncle Charlie’s strength. Few things gave him more joy than drawing a map on a cocktail napkin. He was the bar cartographer, and he made for me an elaborate diagram of lower Manhattan, with the Seaport here, the financial district there, a blue X marking the spot where Steve’s new joint—Publicans on the Pier—would be. It would sit at the end of Pier 17, with a vast wall of glass facing the Brooklyn Bridge. Spectacular view, Uncle Charlie said. Great location. Heavy foot traffic. Right next door was a popular restaurant owned by quarterback Doug Flutie, and not twenty feet away was a majestic hundred-year-old twin-masted schooner that was a floating maritime museum. “It’s a half block—not even—from Wall Street,” Uncle Charlie said, “and maybe half a mile from the Trade Center. If that. As far from the towers as we are right now from St. Mary’s.”

  Not everyone thought Publicans on the Pier such a good idea. As word got out about Steve’s new venture, many in Manhasset said they didn’t understand why Steve wanted the headaches, the hassles. He already owned the entire block of Plandome Road where Publicans was located. He was the most popular publican in the history of Manhasset, which was saying something, given Manhasset’s status as the Valhalla of Alcohol. According to these isolationists, Steve was like America—big, rich, powerful, admired. He should stay home, they said, count his money, play it safe. If the outside world had anything for Steve, let the outside world come to him.

  I got the sense that what the naysayers really didn’t like was the idea of sharing Steve with the outside world. They were jealous in advance of the throngs in Manhattan who would soon discover Steve, the swells and hotshots and high rollers who might turn Steve’s head, woo him from us. When Steve became another Toots Shor, a world-famous restaurateur carousing with celebrities and hobnobbing with mayors, he’d have no use for the peons he’d left behind. As Publicans on the Pier became a hit, Publicans in Manhasset would be relegated to an afterthought.

  In those first months of 1987, the naysayers seemed to be right. Steve wasn’t around anymore. He was always dashing into the city, negotiating deals, signing contracts, overseeing the start of construction. “More and more we see less and less of Chief,” Uncle Charlie said dolefully.

  The barroom, without Steve’s Cheshire smile, was noticeably dimmer.

  In Steve’s absence we talked a lot about him, eulogized him as if he’d died. But the more we talked about Steve, the less I felt that we knew him. The most beloved person in Manhasset, the most studied, Steve was the least understood. People always mentioned his effect on them, but I never heard anyone describe
his essential qualities. Everyone seemed to feel that he or she had a claim on Steve—but everyone shared the same few threadbare facts about him. He loved hockey. He loved Heineken. He lived for softball. His spirits soared the second he heard doo-wop music. He’d split his sides over a good pun. We all knew—and repeated—the familiar Steve stories. The time he stayed up all night drinking and then drove his red ’51 Chevy to the end of Long Island for a drag race with some punks—Manhasset’s own James Dean. We laughed about his stock phrases. Whenever he was asked what he did for a living, especially at the end of a fourteen-hour workday, he’d say wryly, “I’m independently wealthy.” Whenever he was asked the secret of running a bar he’d say, “People come to a gin mill to be abused and I provide them with that service!” Whenever a bartender asked if his new girlfriend could drink free, Steve would say, “She ain’t earned her wings yet.”

  But that was all we knew, and when we added it all up, it felt like much less than the sum of its parts.

  During one discussion about Steve, I heard Uncle Charlie say what I’d always suspected, that the key to Steve was his smile. Whenever Steve walked into Publicans, Uncle Charlie said, he bestowed that smile like a gift. People would wait all day, saving up stories about funny things that happened to them, dying to tell Steve, to get one of those smiles. “It’s never like—Oh brother, here comes the boss,” Uncle Charlie said. “It’s like—hey, what took you so long?”

  I put forward my theory again. When it came to the Aladdin-Publicans metaphor, I was a dog with a rag. I suggested to Uncle Charlie that everyone reacted so strongly to Steve because he was Aladdin. He gave people what they wanted.