The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  In converting this story to fiction I’d changed the names. Cager was Killer, Fast Eddy was Speedy Eduardo, Uncle Charlie was Uncle Butchie. I’d made Cager a veteran of the Korean War, Fast Eddy an ex-con who may or may not have killed his wife, Agnes, whose name I changed to Delilah. I made the song “Blue Velvet” and the wager a hundred thousand dollars. The story didn’t ring true, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why.

  While I was toiling on yet another draft of “Strangers in the Bar,” my phone rang. It was DePietro. “Get down here!” he yelled above the sound of two hundred voices. “The place is crawling with women and I’ve got primo real estate. Boardwalk and Park Place!” He was referring to the two most coveted barstools, just inside the Plandome Road door, which offered clear views of everyone who came in the front, plus the best chance of getting the bartender’s attention.

  “Can’t,” I said. “I’m writing.”

  “Writing? The fuck about?”

  “The bar.”

  “So? Come down and do some research. Boardwalk and Park Place.”

  “Can’t.”

  He hung up.

  A short time later I heard Louie the Greek shut off the griddle. A low honk, followed by a soft hiss. I went to the window and smoked a cigarette. A light rain was falling. I opened the window and smelled the rain, or tried to above Louie’s Dumpsters. Seagulls dove into the Dumpsters. Louie came out the back door and shooed them away. The moment Louie went back inside the seagulls returned. Persistence, I thought. Seagulls have it—I don’t. I shut off my computer. A low honk, a soft hiss.

  I walked to Publicans, my chapter in a folder tucked under my arm, and consoled myself the whole way with the idea that every writer spends as much time at bars as at his writing desk. Drinking and writing go together like scotch and soda, I assured myself as I walked through the front door. DePietro was there, as promised, atop Boardwalk, and beside him, seated atop Park Place, was Uncle Charlie. “My beautiful nephew,” he said, kissing me on the cheek. He’d had a couple. Fast Eddy was there, and beside him was his wife, Agnes, who waited tables for Louie the Greek. She was drinking her usual Irish coffee. (She never suspected that the bartenders made her Irish coffees with decaf, “to inhibit her inherent loquaciousness,” Uncle Charlie said.) Fast Eddy was telling about the time he’d pitted Agnes against Uncle Charlie in a footrace. Fast Eddy had boasted that Agnes could run circles around Uncle Charlie, and Uncle Charlie had promised to put a bullet in his head if he couldn’t beat a “chain-smoking hash slinger,” so they tromped to the cinder track at the high school with half the bar in tow. Agnes, draped in towels like a prizefighter, stomped out a cigarette seconds before Fast Eddy fired his starter’s pistol. (Why Fast Eddy had a starter’s pistol with him, no one thought to ask.) Uncle Charlie beat Agnes but paid a steep price. He lay in the grass, puking, and wasn’t right for days thereafter.

  I thought that story might be easier to write than “Strangers.” I made a note.

  Peter the bartender saw me writing on a napkin. Of all the bartenders at Publicans, Peter was the kindest. Ten years older than I, Peter always looked at me with a sort of wince, like a goodhearted older brother who knew I’d done something wrong but hadn’t yet figured out what. He had a soft voice, soft brown eyes, soft brown hair, but a hard inner core of something—honesty? sincerity?—that made people lean in close when he talked. No matter how happy he was—and I often saw Peter laughing himself sick—there was always an air of sadness about him. When he looked you full in the eye, even if he was smiling, you could hear him thinking, It’s all fucked, kid. We don’t need to go into it right now, we don’t need to hash out the details, but I’m not going to lie to you about it either—it’s all fucked. In a bar full of loud and charismatic men, Peter was the quiet one, which made his charisma the most compelling.

  “What’s that you’re writing?” he asked, pouring me a scotch.

  “Notes,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “Nothing. Stuff about the bar.”

  He let it go. We talked instead about his new job on Wall Street, which he’d found through a customer at Publicans. I was happy for him, but sad that one of my favorite bartenders was now working less. He was selling bonds full-time, tending bar only part-time, mostly Saturday nights, to pick up a few extra bucks for his family. His growing family. His wife, he told me, was pregnant. “Yeah,” he said shyly, “we found out it works.”

  “You’re going to be a father?” I said. “Congratulations.”

  I bought him a drink.

  “So you’re writing about this joint?” he said, pointing to my folder. “May I?”

  We traded my chapter for a scotch. “Barflies and Silk Panties?” he said. “Catchy title.”

  “Colt was the inspiration.”

  “Colt wears silk panties?”

  “No! Jesus, I mean, I don’t know.”

  I watched Peter read, analyzing every twitch in his face, every flick of his eyebrows. When he’d finished he handed me the pages and leaned on the bar. He winced, and looked a little sadder than usual. “It’s not good,” he said. “But there’s something there.”

  I told Peter that ideas and themes swirled around my head the way smells from Louie’s griddle swirled around my apartment, impossible to ignore, impossible to identify. I told him I was giving up.

  “That would be a mistake,” he said.

  “Why?”

  I gave him an opening to say I had talent. He didn’t. He said simply, “Because giving up is always a mistake.”

  “What have you got there?” Uncle Charlie asked.

  “Did you know your nephew is writing about Publicans?” Peter said.

  “I thought everything we said in here was off the record,” Uncle Charlie growled, joking, kind of.

  “Kid’s a scribbler,” Colt said. “I blame those damned Wordy Gurdys.”

  “Hand it down,” Uncle Charlie said.

  “Yeah, let’s have a look,” Bob the Cop said.

  Peter handed Uncle Charlie my pages, and as Uncle Charlie finished reading one he would pass it to Bob the Cop, who would hand it to Cager, and so on.

  “I’m missing page six,” Cager said.

  “Who’s got page nine?” Uncle Charlie called out.

  “I do,” Peter said. “Hold your horses.”

  Watching the men form a bucket brigade and pass my pages up and down the bar, I made an important decision. The men of Publicans would be my new editors. If the editors at the Times were going to deemphasize me, I would emphasize the bar. Every Saturday night I would submit my stuff to Peter and the men. I would set my own deadline, start my own training program.

  The decision marked a change in my relationship to the bar, and it brought about a change in the tenor of the bar itself. It had always been true that we brought our stories together at Publicans and shared them, shuffled them, causing a transference of experience, so that in the morning you’d wake feeling momentarily as if you’d fought in ’Nam or fished floaters out of the harbor or owed the mob a hundred grand. But now we shuffled and shared my versions of everyone’s story, and storytelling—the tricks, the risks and rewards—became the bar’s chief topic that summer. The men were exacting readers, and they demanded to be entertained. Words and plots had to be sharp enough, simple enough, to penetrate the penumbra of whatever they were drinking—invaluable training for a young writer. If they weren’t as knowledgeable about the rules of writing as the editors at the Times, at least they never belittled me for my malapropisms and misspellings.

  “The bar is ‘like a fart in the badlands?’” Cager said, pointing to one of my pages. “Why is the bar like a fart in the badlands?”

  “That’s a typo,” I said. “Should say ‘fort.’ Fort in the badlands.”

  “I think I like it this way. Fart in the badlands. Think about it.”

  I looked over his shoulder and pondered his suggestion.

  “And what’s this?” he said. “You wished o
n a tsar?”

  “That should say ‘star.’”

  “Boy you really can’t type. Anyway it’s a cliché. Especially in Russia.”

  Mistakes were treated very differently in the Publicans Training Program than in the training program at the Times. The difference was brought home to me when I misused the word “panache” in a story for the newspaper. The copy editor who caught it made me feel a foot tall. Later that night I told Uncle Charlie and Peter how the copy editor had dressed me down. “So what does ‘panache’ mean?” Uncle Charlie asked. “I’m not sure,” I said. He set the Book of Words on the bar. “Find out.” He walked off to discuss something with Fast Eddy. I flipped to “panache.” The definition read “Dashing elegance of manner.” Someone had circled the word and written in giant red letters: “SEE CHAS.” I showed Peter. He laughed. When Uncle Charlie came back I showed him. “How do you like that?” he said.

  “You’ve never seen this page before?” I asked him.

  “You didn’t know someone had circled the definition and written your name beside it?” Peter said.

  “Nope.” Uncle Charlie read the definition out loud. “But it fits, don’t it?”

  thirty-five | MAJOR LEAGUERS

  Walking into Grandpa’s house I saw a strange man sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of milk. “McGraw?” I said.

  He jumped up. He was three inches taller than the last time I’d seen him, thirty pounds heavier. He was six-four, at least 220 pounds, and all his baby fat had turned to solid beef. When he hugged me it felt as if he were wearing a shield under his shirt, and his hands, smacking my back, were bigger than Grandma’s oven mitts. I was reminded of hugging my father when I was a boy, that sense of being unable to get a grip.

  “What are they feeding you in Nebraska?” I asked.

  Grandma held up the empty milk container and the bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies he’d just devoured. “Whatever it is,” she said, “it’s not enough.”

  I took a beer from the refrigerator and sat across from him. He told me and Grandma about his misadventures on the Great Plains, and had us both laughing. He also told us about learning to be a relief pitcher, the pressure, the intensity, the crowds. I noticed that his stutter had gone from slight to all but unnoticeable.

  He asked me about my life. “How’s the New York Times?” he said. “You a reporter yet?” He asked casually, as if my advancement were as unavoidable as the expansion of his shoulders. I mumbled that it was a long story.

  Listening to McGraw, admiring his height and wingspan, and the incredible width of his trunk and legs, I experienced that familiar abandoned feeling, which would come over me whenever McGraw and the cousins moved away. This time it wasn’t Aunt Ruth who had kidnapped McGraw, but manhood. McGraw was big and hulking like a man was supposed to be, and I thought of those visits to Rawhide when we were boys, watching the mechanical mannequin cowboys through the chain-link fence. McGraw had joined the mannequins. I was still on the outside, peering in.

  Of all the people I loved, I’d said good-bye most often to McGraw. Now it was time to say good-bye again. Good-bye to the chubby-cheeked boy with the buzz cut, hello to this blond superman, who was going to be a problem. By nature, by habit, I looked up to men, but I didn’t want to look up to McGraw. He was supposed to look up to me, his older brother, his protector. The only way McGraw could look up to me now was if he lifted me over his head.

  Days later I was in my apartment, working on the Publicans novel, when McGraw walked through the door without knocking. “I need to throw,” he said. “Keep my arm loose. You up for it?”

  He’d brought an extra glove for me. We walked up Plandome Road to Memorial Field, where we spread out, putting about eighty feet between us, then started lobbing the ball back and forth, groaning like arthritics as our shoulders got warm. McGraw rubbed sweat from his brow into the ball. “Slider!” he yelled. The ball sprayed moisture like a sponge as it flew toward me. It veered right, then dipped hard. I barely managed to snare it. He threw another, which seemed to back up and speed forward in midair several times. The thought crossed my mind that McGraw had devised a way to transfer his stutter to the seams of a baseball. As his velocity increased, the ball exploded into my glove with such violence that the bones in my palm felt broken. I stepped into one fastball I threw him, putting everything I could into it, and when McGraw fired the ball back I was embarrassed. His ball had five times the zip. His slider looked like a comet, his curve cut an arc from eleven o’clock to five. Stabbing at his forkball, missing it by a foot, I realized: McGraw is going to be a professional baseball player.

  In the back of my mind I’d always known this, at least since McGraw was sixteen and his high-school games were scouted by the California Angels. But that day I saw, and felt in my throbbing palm, that the boy with whom I’d grown up playing catch and worshipping the Mets had raced ahead and stood poised on the verge of achieving our boyhood dream. He’d soon be drafted into the major leagues, probably by the Mets, and his name would be a household word. He’d be the first Met in history to throw a no-hitter. He’d be the next Tom Seaver, while I, Edward R. Murrow-ringer, Mr. Salty, would be the oldest copyboy at the Times. McGraw would one day go into the Hall of Fame, and at the induction ceremony the men from the bar would talk in whispers about the two cousins and how different they’d turned out.

  I felt a pang of envy, and a rush of pride, but mainly shame. Watching McGraw go through his repertoire of pitches, observing his seriousness and diligence, I understood that my cousin was more than a budding major leaguer. He was a dedicated craftsman, and the rewards he’d gained from hard work went far beyond mastering a slider and a change. He’d mastered himself. He didn’t work hard merely because he was talented, but because he knew that hard work was the right path for a man, the only path. He wasn’t paralyzed, as I was, by the fear of making a mistake. When he bounced a pitch in front of me, or threw it over my head, he didn’t care. He was experimenting, exploring, finding himself, and finding his way by trial and error to a kind of truth. No matter how foolish he looked on a pitch, no matter how badly he missed the target, with the next pitch he was focused, confident, relaxed. He never once that afternoon lost the look on his face that he’d worn when we were boys. He was working hard, but he’d never stopped playing.

  Our catch, nothing more than a tune-up for McGraw, was a turning point for me. In one hour he taught me more than all the editors at the Times had taught me in the last twenty months. When McGraw returned to Nebraska I returned to the newsroom and became the best copyboy I could be. I drove myself, stretched myself, and by year’s end the editors decided I’d earned a tryout. For one month—January 1989—I’d be a full-fledged reporter. Then there would be a formal appraisal of my work. After that, one editor hinted, I might be that one copyboy who emerged from the fake training program. I was overjoyed. Then stricken.

  “I’m wigging out,” I told Bob the Cop. “My heart is pounding.”

  “Everyone’s heart is pounding,” he said.

  “Mine’s pounding too hard.”

  “Let me know when it stops pounding altogether.”

  “There’s something wrong with my heart.”

  “Have a cigarette. Relax.”

  “Something’s wrong, I tell you.”

  Bob the Cop drove me to the hospital. An emergency-room doctor put an IV in my arm and ran several tests, including an EKG, which came back negative. “Stress,” the doctor said as I buttoned my shirt. “Cut down on the stress.”

  By late 1988, however, my fortress against stress had become a stress factory. The stock market had crashed, suffering its worst single-day slide since the Depression, and Wall Streeters were setting a very different tone at Publicans. Brokers and traders who used to breeze into the bar, putting everyone in a good mood, now sat alone in booths, muttering about their “positions.” A meeting place for millionaires had become a refuge for the cash poor. One bright young couple, who used to float into the bar
every other night in formal wear, on their way to Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center, the Gerald and Sara Murphy of Manhasset, now stumbled in, got drunk, bickered. I was there when she threw an ashtray at his head and screamed at him for sleeping with the au pair, and he screamed back at her for spending them into the poorhouse.

  For me the crash would always be represented by Mr. Weekend. During the week he wore bespoke suits, starched white shirts and Hermès neckties. From Monday to Friday he never raised his voice or had a hair out of place, and when I saw him on the train he was always reading the Wall Street Journal, intently, as if there would be a test later. But every Friday night, without fail, after five days spent vainly trying to recapture his lost fortune, the poor man would walk into Publicans and the bartenders would shout, “Holy shit, everybody—it’s Mr. Weekend!” They would seize his car keys while he undid his necktie and for the next forty-eight hours Mr. Weekend would jump on chairs and swing from poles and lounge across tables, singing “Danny Boy,” and at some point, for some reason, he would do squat thrusts before passing out in the third booth from the door, as if it were his private berth on an overnight train. I thought many times of introducing myself to him—Mr. Weekend? I’m Mr. Salty—but you couldn’t really speak to Mr. Weekend. You could set your watch by him, however, and just as sure as he would arrive Friday night, you could count on seeing him Monday morning, marching smartly up Plandome Road to catch the early train. It was hard to say in that moment if he looked like Mr. Weekend sleepwalking, or like Mr. Weekday just woken from a nightmare.

  Few at Publicans were aware, but the one person among us who had been hit hardest by the crash was Steve. His bar in lower Manhattan was in trouble. Steve dreamed up the concept of a high-end Publicans on the Pier when people were using Cristal as Listerine—now everyone was back to clipping coupons. The last thing on people’s minds was a juicy overpriced steak and a fancy bottle of overpriced wine. He stood to lose millions. He might lose his house if the banks played hardball. But he’d already lost his most valuable asset. His confidence. The bar in Manhasset had been fine, but Steve had wanted to succeed on the big stage, to be a player, to break into the major leagues. Most likely all the wealth he witnessed in his bar made him think this way. He’d been corrupted by his own customers. He’d watched hundreds and hundreds of people push into Publicans to celebrate their good fortune, and somewhere along the line he’d decided it would be fun to join the party, rather than always be the host. Publicans on the Pier was his chance. Thinking it would be easy, he’d overextended himself, and now for the first time in his charmed life, Steve was failing, and failing big, and Publicans on the Pier was a monument to his failure. There it sat, at the end of the pier, empty as a tomb. A very well-lighted tomb, for which Steve was paying forty-five thousand dollars a month in rent.