The Tender Bar (2 page)

Like love affairs, bars depend on a delicate mix of timing, chemistry, lighting, luck and—maybe above all—generosity. From the start Steve declared that no one at Dickens would feel slighted. His burgers would be three-inch soufflés of filet mignon, his closing time would be negotiable, no matter what the law said, and his bartenders would give an extra—
extra
—long pour. A standard drink at Dickens would be a double anywhere else. A double would leave you cross-eyed. A triple would “cream your spinach,” according to my mother’s younger brother, my Uncle Charlie, the first bartender Steve ever hired.

A true son of Manhasset, Steve believed in booze. Everything he was, he owed to booze. His father, a Heineken distributor, died and left Steve a small fortune when he was young. Steve’s daughter was named Brandy, his speedboat was named
Dipsomania,
and his face, after years of homeric drinking, was that telltale shade of scarlet. He saw himself as a Pied Piper of Alcohol, and the pie-eyed residents of Manhasset saw him that way, too. Through the years he developed a fanatic following, a legion of devotees. A Cult of Steve.

Everyone has a holy place, a refuge, where their heart is purer, their mind clearer, where they feel closer to God or love or truth or whatever it is they happen to worship. For better or worse my holy place was Steve’s bar. And because I found it in my youth, the bar was that much more sacred, its image clouded by that special reverence children accord those places where they feel safe. Others might feel this way about a classroom or playground, a theater or church, a laboratory or library or stadium. Even a home. But none of these places claimed me. We exalt what is at hand. Had I grown up beside a river or an ocean, some natural avenue of self-discovery and escape, I might have mythologized it. Instead I grew up 142 steps from a glorious old American tavern, and that has made all the difference.

I didn’t spend every waking minute in the bar. I went into the world, worked and failed, fell in love, played the fool, had my heart broken and my threshold tested. But because of Steve’s bar each rite of passage felt linked to the last, and the next, as did each person I met. For the first twenty-five years of my life everyone I knew either sent me to the bar, drove me to the bar, accompanied me to the bar, rescued me from the bar, or was in the bar when I arrived, as if waiting for me since the day I was born. Among this last group were Steve and the men.

I used to say I’d found in Steve’s bar the fathers I needed, but this wasn’t quite right. At some point the bar itself became my father, its dozens of men melding into one enormous male eye looking over my shoulder, providing that needed alternative to my mother, that Y chromosome to her X. My mother didn’t know she was competing with the men of the bar, and the men didn’t know they were vying with her. They all assumed that they were on the same page, because they all shared one antiquated idea about manhood. My mother and the men believed that being a good man is an art, and being a bad man is a tragedy, for the world as much as for those who depend on the tragic man in question. Though my mother first introduced me to this idea, Steve’s bar was where I saw its truth demonstrated daily. Steve’s bar attracted all kinds of women, a stunning array, but as a boy I noticed only its improbable assortment of good and bad men. Wandering freely among this unlikely fraternity of alphas, listening to the stories of the soldiers and ballplayers, poets and cops, millionaires and bookies, actors and crooks who leaned nightly against Steve’s bar, I heard them say again and again that the differences among them were great, but the reasons they had come to be so different were slight.

A lesson, a gesture, a story, a philosophy, an attitude—I took something from every man in Steve’s bar. I was a master at “identity theft” when that crime was more benign. I became sarcastic like Cager, melodramatic like Uncle Charlie, a roughneck like Joey D. I strived to be solid like Bob the Cop, cool like Colt, and to rationalize my rage by telling myself that it was no worse than the righteous wrath of Smelly. Eventually I applied the mimicry I’d learned at Dickens to those I met outside the bar—friends, lovers, parents, bosses, even strangers. The bar fostered in me the habit of turning each person who crossed my path into a mentor, or a character, and I credit the bar, and blame it, for my becoming a reflection, or a refraction, of them all.

Every regular at Steve’s bar was fond of metaphors. One old bourbon drinker told me that a man’s life is all a matter of mountains and caves—mountains we must climb, caves where we hide when we can’t face our mountains. For me the bar was both. My most luxuriant cave, my most perilous mountain. And its men, though cavemen at heart, were my Sherpas. I loved them, deeply, and I think they knew. Though they had experienced everything—war and love, fame and disgrace, wealth and ruin—I don’t think they ever had a boy look at them with such shining, worshipful eyes. My devotion was something new to them, and I think it made them love me, in their way, which was why they kidnapped me when I was eleven. But now I can almost hear their voices.
Whoa, kid, you’re getting ahead of yourself
.

Steve would have me say it like this: I fell in love with his bar, and it was reciprocal, and it was this romance that shaped all my others. At a tender age, standing in Dickens, I decided that life is a sequence of romances, each new romance a response to a previous romance. But I was only one of many romantics in Steve’s bar who had reached this conclusion, who believed in this chain reaction of love. It was this belief, as much as the bar, that united us, and this is why my story is just one strand in the cord that braided all our love stories together.

PART I

Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For it is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice.

—
Elias Canetti,
Notes from Hampstead

one
| THE MEN

I
F A MAN CAN CHART WITH ANY ACCURACY HIS EVOLUTION
FROM
small boy to barfly, mine began on a hot summer night in 1972. Seven years old, driving through Manhasset with my mother, I looked out the window and saw nine men in orange softball uniforms racing around Memorial Field, the silhouette of Charles Dickens silk-screened in black on their chests. “Who is that?” I asked my mother.

“Some men from Dickens,” she said. “See your Uncle Charlie? And his boss, Steve?”

“Can we watch?”

She pulled over and we found seats in the stands.

The sun was setting, and the men cast long shadows, which seemed made of the same black ink as the silhouettes on their chests. Also, the men sported cummerbunds of blubber that stretched their XXL jerseys until those silhouettes looked like splatter stains caused by the men stomping in their own shadows. Everything about the men had this surreal, cartoonish quality. With their scant hair, giant shoes, and overdeveloped upper bodies, they looked like Blutos and Popeyes and steroidal Elmer Fudds, except my lanky Uncle Charlie, who patrolled the infield like a flamingo with sore knees. I remember that Steve wielded a wooden bat the size of a telephone pole, and every home run he clouted hovered in the sky like a second moon.

Standing at the plate, the Babe Ruth of the beer league, Steve dug at the dirt and growled at the pitcher to give him something he could pulverize. The pitcher looked scared and amused at the same time, because even while barking at him, Steve never stopped smiling. His smile was like the strobe from a lighthouse, making everyone feel a little safer. It was also a command. It bade everyone to smile also. It was irresistible, and not just to those around him. Steve himself seemed unable to stop baring his teeth.

Steve and the men of Dickens were fierce competitors, but the game never once got in the way of their main goal in life—laughter. Regardless of the score, they never stopped laughing, they couldn’t stop laughing, and the fans in the stands couldn’t either. I laughed harder than anyone, though I didn’t get the joke. I laughed at the sound of the men’s laughter, and at their comic timing, as fluid and quicksilver as their turning of a double play.

“Why do those men act so silly?” I asked my mother.

“They’re just—happy.”

“About what?”

She looked at the men, thinking.

“Beer, sweetheart. They’re happy about beer.”

Each time the men ran past, they left a scented cloud. Beer. Aftershave. Leather. Tobacco. Hair tonic. I inhaled deeply, memorizing their aroma, their essence. From then on, whenever I smelled a keg of Schaeffer, a bottle of Aqua Velva, a freshly oiled Spalding baseball glove, a smoldering Lucky Strike, a flask of Vitalis, I would be there again, beside my mother, gazing at those beery giants stumbling around the diamond.

That softball game marked for me the beginning of many things, but particularly time. Memories before the softball game have a disjointed, fragmentary quality; after, memories move forward, smartly, single file. Possibly I needed to find the bar, one of the two organizing principles of my life, before I could make a linear, coherent narrative of my life. I remember turning to the other organizing principle of my life and telling her I wanted to watch the men forever. We can’t, babe, she said, the game is over. What? I stood, panicked. The men were walking off the field with their arms around each other. As they faded into the sumacs around Memorial Field, calling to one another, “See you at Dickens,” I started to cry. I wanted to follow.

“Why?” my mother asked.

“To see what’s so funny.”

“We’re not going to the bar,” she said. “We’re going—home.”

She always tripped over that word.

My mother and I lived at my grandfather’s house, a Manhasset landmark nearly as famous as Steve’s bar. People often drove by Grandpa’s and pointed, and I once heard passersby speculating that the house must suffer from some sort of “painful house disease.” What it really suffered from was comparisons. Set among Manhasset’s elegant Gingerbread Victorians and handsome Dutch Colonials, Grandpa’s dilapidated Cape Cod was doubly appalling. Grandpa claimed he couldn’t afford repairs, but the truth was, he didn’t care. With a touch of defiance and a perverse pride he called his house the Shit House, and paid no attention when the roof began to sag like a circus tent. He scarcely noticed when paint peeled away in flakes the size of playing cards. He yawned in Grandma’s face when she pointed out that the driveway had developed a jagged crack, as if lightning had struck it—and in fact lightning had. My cousins saw the lightning bolt sizzle up the driveway and just miss the breezeway. Even God, I thought, is pointing at Grandpa’s house.

Under that one sagging roof my mother and I lived with Grandpa, Grandma, my mother’s two grown siblings—Uncle Charlie and Aunt Ruth—and Aunt Ruth’s five daughters and one son. “Huddled masses yearning to breathe rent-free,” Grandpa called us. While Steve was creating his public sanctuary at 550 Plandome Road, Grandpa was running a flophouse at 646.

Grandpa could have nailed a silhouette of Charles Dickens above his door too, since the conditions were comparable to a Dickensian workhouse. With one usable bathroom and twelve people, the waits at Grandpa’s were often excruciating, and the cesspool was constantly backed up (“Shit House” was sometimes more than a flippant nickname). The hot water ran out each morning in the middle of Shower Number Two, made a brief cameo during Shower Number Three, then teased and cruelly abandoned the person taking Shower Number Four. The furniture, much of which dated to Franklin Roosevelt’s third term, was held together with duct tape and more duct tape. The only new objects in the house were the drinking glasses, “borrowed” from Dickens, and the Sears living room sofa, upholstered in a hypnotically hideous pattern of Liberty Bells, bald eagles, and faces of the Founding Fathers. We called it the bicentennial sofa. We were a few years ahead of ourselves, but Grandpa said the name was right and fitting, since the sofa looked as if George Washington had used it to cross the Delaware.

The worst thing about life at Grandpa’s house was the noise, a round-the-clock din of cursing and crying and fighting and Uncle Charlie bellowing that he was trying to sleep and Aunt Ruth screaming at her six kids in the nerve-shredding key of a seagull. Just beneath this cacophony was a steady percussion, faint at first, louder as you became more aware of it, like the heartbeat deep inside the House of Usher. In the House of Grandpa the heartbeat was supplied by the screen door opening and closing all day long as people came and went
—squeak bang, squeak bang—
and also by the peculiar thudding way that everyone in my family walked, on their heels, like storm troopers on stilts. Between the screaming and the screen door, the fighting and the stomping feet, by dusk you’d be barking and twitching more than the dog, who ran off every chance she got. But dusk was the crescendo, the loudest and most tension-filled hour of the day, because dusk was dinnertime.