The Tender Bar (52 page)

By midsummer McGraw and I were hatching plans for a more permanent and radical escape than Publicans. He would quit Nebraska, I would quit the
Times,
and we’d backpack across Ireland, staying in hostels when we had money, sleeping in the lush green fields under the stars when we were broke. We’d work odd jobs, preferably in pubs, which would lead to full-time jobs, and we’d never come back. We sketched out the details of our plan on cocktail napkins, with much solemnity, as if it were something nobler and more complicated than a pub crawl. We told the men and they thought it a fine idea. It reminded them of their travels when they were younger. Joey D told us about going to the Caribbean with Uncle Charlie. A voodoo lady took one look at Uncle Charlie and said, “Him bad magic.” The memory made Joey D so weepy with laughter that he had to wipe his eyes with one of the cocktail napkins on which we’d drawn up our Ireland plan.

I phoned my mother and told her about Ireland. She sighed. You don’t need a vacation, she said, you need to get back on the horse. Apply to small newspapers, do as the
Times
recommended, then reapply to the
Times
in a couple of years. This sounded like the same old try-try-again nonsense that had gotten me nowhere, and I was saying good-bye to all that. I explained to my mother that I was “tired,” consciously borrowing McGraw’s line, while forgetting that it was a word charged with meaning for her. She’d been tired for twenty years, she said. Since when was being tired an excuse to stop trying?

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

T
HWARTED 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.