Now McGraw and I had something else in common. Besides coming to the end of our careers at the same moment, we’d both run afoul of our mothers. Again and again that summer we turned to the men at Publicans, and like an underground railroad for prodigals, they hid us, not just in the bar, but at Shea, Gilgo, Steve’s house, and especially Belmont, where we got a crash course in the sport of kings from the King of Belmont—Cager.
Cager loved the track. Cager lived for the track. Cager spoke about the track in a romance language that McGraw and I longed to learn, and sometimes I would take notes on the back of my racing form, trying to capture Cager’s vocabulary, his cadence, his voice. “See the trainer on this five horse? He’s good with two-year-olds, so I love the five, I might put twenty on his schnoz, but that seven, boys, he’s going off at eight to one, and that’s a sweet price for such a speed demon, let me tell you. Now that little railbird inside me says take the seven, take the seven, but then I look down here at the morning workouts on the four and he ran a forty-nine while we were still sleeping off the effects of last night at Publicans, and that’s flying. On the other hand, or the other hoof, nine is probably going to get away like a bandit, because he loves the slop, he’s always loved the slop, and see how it’s starting to rain? He could be having a Budweiser at the finish line when all these other little piggies come home. So. I’m thinking I might do a ten-dollar exacta, nine-four, or else box the five and the nine and put ten dollars to win on the seven. What do you say, boys, let’s hit the windows, ’cause you know what they say: The track’s the only place where the windows clean the people!”
We got a late start to the track one day and McGraw was nervous that we might miss the first race. Walking up to the front gate Cager stopped at the giant statue of Secretariat to pay his respects. McGraw hopped from foot to foot as if he needed to pee. “First race starts any minute,” McGraw said. Cager, not looking away from the statue, told McGraw calmly that there were two rules every horse player must always heed, and the first of these rules was: “Never hurry to lose money.”
“What’s the second rule?” McGraw asked.
“Always make sure you have enough at the end of the day for a hot pretzel.”
After three races Cager was ahead a few hundred dollars. McGraw and I were down one hundred. We watched Cager fold his wad into the breast pocket of his shirt. “What are you going to do with all that money?” McGraw asked.
“Invest it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. In Budweiser.”
Between races Cager propped his feet on the seat in front of him and asked what we were thinking we might do with our lives, now that we’d been spurned by our mothers and careers. We mentioned Ireland. We told Cager we were hoping to win enough at the track to make a pilgrimage to our ancestral homeland. “Then what?” Cager said. “Can’t sit in a pub the rest of your lives. Wait—what the hell am I saying?”
McGraw said he was thinking about law school, or maybe the army. I mentioned the Yukon. I’d heard the Alaska Daily News was looking for reporters and I’d sent them my clips. I’d gotten an encouraging letter from the editor. Cager rocked forward and struggled not to spit beer through his nose. Then he said very gently that I wouldn’t last ten minutes in the Yukon.
We watched the horses being led to the starting gate and loaded in. The jockeys, all in a row, leaning over the horses’ withers, looked like busboys sitting at the bar. I asked Cager if he remembered when Secretariat galloped to his spectacular win at Belmont. “Like it was this morning,” he said. “I was here.” He described the race, every thrilling furlong, and though I’d read stories and seen film, nothing rivaled Cager’s account. He made the hair stand up on my neck. He spoke of Secretariat in the reverent tone he reserved for two people—Steve and Nixon. “Secretariat’s statue could beat these other horses,” Cager said. He pointed to the exact spot where Secretariat had separated himself from the pack. I could see the horse’s ghost racing for home, putting a few football fields between himself and the others. I could hear the crowd and feel those thousands of eyes trained on one striving thumping beast. “People had tears in their eyes,” Cager said, tears in his eyes. “He was thirty-one lengths ahead at the wire! Thirty-one. He was there—the rest were down there. What a performance. Anytime one athlete separates himself from the pack like that, it sends chills down your arms. What heart.”
I noted how Cager stressed that word—heart—and thought about how heart can compensate for other things. All the details at the track, speed and talent and weight and weather, all the factors that decided who wins and who loses, were swept away by heart. I wished I had a Secretariat kind of heart. I felt ridiculous, envying a horse, and yet, man or beast, it would be fine to earn the respect of a man like Cager. To do that, I asked myself, would I have to be a winner? Or was it more a matter of separating myself from the pack?
By the last race McGraw and I had lost all our money. “You hoped to win enough for Ireland,” Cager said, “and you don’t have enough for an Irish coffee. That’s racing, boys.”
“But we do have enough for a hot pretzel,” McGraw said proudly, holding up three crumpled dollar bills. At the pretzel cart outside the track McGraw turned to me. “That one looks burned,” he said, pointing to a smoking pretzel. “You want to phone it in to the Times?”
“Ouch,” Cager said.
Later that night, after closing time, McGraw and I tried to win back some of our money playing Liars’ Poker at Publicans. The other players were Cager, Colt, Don, Fast Eddy, Jimbo, and Peter, who was tending bar. “How’s the writing?” Peter asked me.
“Never better.”
“Really?”
“No—but this is Liars’ Poker. Get it?”
He and McGraw looked at me with pity.
Pulling a bill from the pile Uncle Charlie would put it to his forehead like Carnac the Magnificent. “Without looking,” he’d say, “I bid three fours.” Then he would look at the bill, and light a match to see it by, because all the lights in the bar were off.
“Four fives.”
“Five eights.”
“Challenge.”
At dawn the milk truck pulled up to the back door. “Last hand,” Cager said. McGraw and I tipped Peter, counted our money and found that we were the big winners. We didn’t have enough for Ireland, but we did have enough to go back to Belmont. Walking home I carried our winnings, hundreds of singles, like a clump of dead leaves. I looked at the moon. That moon is beautiful, I told McGraw. Whatever, he said. We need to tip that moon for being so beautiful, I said. I threw all the bills at the moon, chucked them as high as I could into the sky, then stood in the middle of Plandome Road, arms wide open, twirling as they cascaded down.
“What the fuck,” McGraw said, running circles around me, scooping up the bills. As he went darting after a dollar that was fluttering down the double yellow line, the milk truck almost hit him. “McGraw killed by a milk truck,” I said. “Now that would be ironic.”
Hours later McGraw found me on the back stoop, drinking a cup of coffee, holding my head. “Dude,” he said, lighting a cigarette, “that’s as drunk as I’ve ever seen you.”
He hadn’t seen anything yet.
forty-one | HUGO
Thwarted by our strategy of hiding all night in Publicans, Aunt Ruth opened a second front. She began calling in sick to her job as a receptionist in the city. Now she could scream at McGraw all morning and afternoon. McGraw begged her to leave him alone, but she promised not to stop until he agreed to have that operation on his shoulder and continue playing baseball. McGraw told his mother that he couldn’t take any more screaming, he wanted to go back to school. She said he was never going back. She wouldn’t buy him a plane ticket until he had that operation.
At the start of August McGraw surrendered. Anything to stop the screaming, he moaned, sitting between me and Jimbo at the bar. She wins, he said, and Jimbo and I both noticed that his stutter had returned.
Aunt Ruth took
McGraw to the hospital days later, a stifling-hot morning. He looked numb when he left, and frightened when he returned that afternoon. He was certain that he’d never regain the use of his arm. I was more worried about him regaining his giggle. He wanted to lie down and rest, but Aunt Ruth had one more task for him. She insisted that he go to some fleabag bar in Port Washington and get his father to sign some papers.
We met Jimbo at Publicans that night for dinner. McGraw, groggy from pain pills, nearly weeping from the stress of the day, could barely raise the fork to his mouth. I thought of Jedd telling me why cacti add arms. “Losing” an arm had definitely cost McGraw his balance. Go home, I told him. Go to bed. He wouldn’t, and he was candid about why. He needed to be in that bar. Now that he’d had the surgery, he said, Aunt Ruth would be after him about the rehab. She’d nag him about getting ready for the baseball season. She’d never stop. He had to leave Manhasset, he kept muttering. Right away. Tonight. Now. He talked again about the army. He talked about hitchhiking to Nebraska.
That won’t be necessary, I told him. I hated the idea of saying good-bye again to McGraw, but I promised to buy him a plane ticket back to school first thing in the morning.
McGraw started packing ten minutes after his mother left for work. Jimbo came for us in his Jeep and we sped away, looking nervously out the plastic back window, as if Aunt Ruth might be waiting behind the bushes, poised to leap out and give chase like a cheetah after three gazelles. Three very hungover gazelles.
We had six hours before McGraw’s plane left, and we decided to kill the time at Shea. A day game against the Padres. The summer heat had lifted and it was one of those August afternoons that seems like a trailer for the movie of fall. We bought seats behind third base and summoned the beer man. Don’t stay away too long, I told him, hearing the echo of Uncle Charlie in my voice. The first cold beers went down like milk shakes. By the sixth inning we were feeling fine and the Mets were rallying. The crowd rose, roaring, and it was good to hear people scream in happiness, rather than rage. We better go, McGraw said sadly, looking at the clock on the scoreboard. His flight. As we walked up the steps McGraw turned for one last look. Saying good-bye. Not to the Mets. To baseball.
That night, at Grandpa’s, I lay in bed, looking at McGraw’s empty bed, feeling desolate. The door flew open. Aunt Ruth, the hall light behind her, was screaming. “You won’t get away with this! Sneaks! Cowards! Meddlers! You and Jimbo think you’re helping him? You’re ruining his life!”
She went for more than an hour.
It was the same every night. No matter when I came home from the bar, no matter how quietly I crept into the back bedroom, the door would fly open a minute later and the screaming would start. After a week my nerves were shot. I phoned Bebe from Publicans and told her I needed help. Within hours Bebe had located a friend on the Upper East Side with a room to rent. It’s small, Bebe said, but it’s in your price range.
I couldn’t ask Bob the Cop to move me again. Besides, this felt like a job for Jimbo. I found him at the bar, halfway through his Rock à l’Orange, a cocktail he’d invented (Rolling Rock, Grand Marnier chaser). He claimed it had magical and medicinal properties that cured heartbreak. Jimbo had his own Sidney, a girl at college who had wrecked him.
“Jimbo,” I said, a hand on his shoulder, “I need a big one.”
“Name it.”
“I can’t take another night of the screaming. I need to evacuate.”
Without hesitation, leaving his drink unfinished, he walked with me to Grandpa’s.
Along the way I peeked at Jimbo out of the corner of my eye. I’d spent a lot of time with him that summer, and I’d come to know him, to rely on him. I wanted to thank Jimbo for always coming to the rescue in his trusty Jeep, and to tell him there should be a big red cross painted on its side. I wanted to say how much he’d come to mean to me, that he was like a brother to me, that I loved him, but I’d missed my chance. Only at the bar could such things be said between men.
Walking into the back bedroom Jimbo looked around and asked, “How you want to tackle this?”
“Pack like the house is on fire.”
Jimbo drove me to the address Bebe gave me and helped me run my stuff upstairs to the apartment. Since he was double-parked, there wasn’t time for a long good-bye. We stood in the street and hugged, that contagious-disease hug that young men give each other.
“Come home soon,” Jimbo said, peeling away from the curb.
I watched his Jeep disappear in traffic.
“I will,” I said. “I will.”
Bebe’s friend was a Columbia law student named Magdalena, who started almost every sentence with one-word rhetorical questions. “Actually?” she said, opening the door to my room. “It’s not really a room, per se, but a converted water closet.”
“What’s a water closet?”
“Frankly? It’s a bathroom. But there’s a bed, and a—well, a bed. But it’s really cozy, as you can see.”
I assured her it was a very cozy bathroom.
She explained that she’d be at her boyfriend’s apartment most nights. She turned and motioned to her boyfriend, as if he were Exhibit A. He was so quiet that I’d forgotten he was there.
“You mean I’ll have the apartment all to myself?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course, my mother might drop in now and then.”
Her mother lived in Puerto Rico, but sometimes flew to New York, to shop and see friends. She slept on Magdalena’s sofa. “Honestly?” Magdalena said. “She’s quiet as a mouse.”
I thanked Magdalena for renting to me on such short notice, and told her I was going to take a hot shower and go to bed.
“Seriously?” she said. “Make yourself at home. If you need anything we’ll be studying in the kitchen.”
The working bathroom was on the other side of the apartment. To get there from my bathroom-qua-bedroom I had to walk through the kitchen. Wrapped in a towel I smiled shyly at Magdalena and joked with the boyfriend. “Just passing through,” I said. He made no reply.
I ran the hot water full blast and sat on the edge of the tub as steam filled the bathroom. Jimbo would be at Publicans by now, I thought. Uncle Charlie would be breaking out the Sambuca. General Grant would be lighting his first cigar of the night, and Cager would be flipping channels on the TV, looking for a good game. Colt would be in the phone booth, Fast Eddy and Agnes would be ordering dinner, Smelly would be throwing meat cleavers at lazy busboys. I looked at myself in the mirror over the sink. Just before my face disappeared in the steam I asked myself: Is it possible—is it wise—to feel homesick for a bar?
I stepped into the shower. The hot spray instantly opened my pores and soothed my mind. I held my face to the water and sighed with pleasure. A scream cut through the roar of the water. Aunt Ruth. She’d followed Jimbo and now she was there in the bathroom. I screamed too, like Janet Leigh. I jumped back, slipped, and reached for the shower curtain to steady myself. I pulled it off the hooks and fell out of the tub, onto the floor, bending the shower curtain rod and, I felt sure, breaking my elbow. Looking up through the clouds of steam I saw, perched on the showerhead, a parrot the size of a chimpanzee. It spread its wings, a sound like an umbrella opening.
I wrapped a towel around myself and ran into the kitchen.
“I forgot to tell you about Hugo,” Magdalena said, biting her thumbnail.
“Hugo?” I said.
“Hugo lives in the bathroom. He likes the steam.”
Dripping wet, clutching the towel around my waist, I asked her to remove Hugo from the bathroom. I didn’t feel comfortable, I said, being naked in close quarters with any wild animal that had a Ginsu knife for a nose.
“Frankly?” she said. “I can’t do that. Hugo lives in the bathroom.”
I looked to the boyfriend for help. Nothing.
I went for a walk and when I returned Magdalena and the boyfriend were gone. Hugo, however, was still there. I poked my head into the bathroom and he eyed m
e ominously. I could tell he was mad as a wet hen that I’d tried to have him evicted. I went to bed, but couldn’t sleep, beset by nightmares of screaming parrots and aunts.
As I walked into the newsroom with a box full of sandwiches I heard the weatherman on TV say a major storm was brewing in the Atlantic. Hurricane Hugo, he said. I laughed at myself. I must have misheard. I had Hugo on the brain. Then the weatherman said it again. Hurricane Hugo was gaining strength as it churned across the Atlantic. Exactly what was the universe trying to tell me now?
I slept badly that night, and when I woke a strange woman was making coffee in the kitchen. Magdalena’s mother, I gathered. Her English was poor, but I managed to learn that she’d left Puerto Rico in a hurry. Fleeing Hugo, she said. “Aren’t we all?” I said.
Over the next several days I read about Hugo, tracked its path, worried about the havoc it might wreak. I didn’t know why the storm obsessed me, why I dreaded it as much as people who lived on stilt houses in the Outer Banks. Maybe it was lack of sleep, maybe it was living in a water closet, maybe it was being forced to shower in terror, but I let Hurricane Hugo become a metaphor for my life, and then I let it consume my life. As if its low-pressure system had collided with my high pressure, the storm gathered up all my unhappiness about McGraw and Aunt Ruth and Sidney and the Times and focused it into one tight eye. From morning until night I could think of nothing but Hugo.
When Hugo blasted ashore in late September 1989, I was at the Times, reading wires, monitoring TVs, like a copyboy for the National Weather Service. I stayed in the newsroom and watched CNN until after midnight, and when the janitors started vacuuming I went to Magdalena’s apartment and watched TV with her mother, who appeared to be just as traumatized as I. Even Hugo seemed traumatized by Hugo. Hearing his name repeated again and again on TV the parrot would caw frantically, and with his cawing, and the wind howling, and Magdalena’s mother wailing in Spanish, it was a long and harrowing night.
The Tender Bar: A Memoir Page 39