The Tender Bar (6 page)

I didn’t answer. He blew a cloud of smoke at the windshield and we both watched it curl up the glass and roll back upon itself like a wave.

I have only hazy memories of my father’s face that day. I was too nervous to look at him for more than a second at a time, and I was too captivated by his voice. Also, I was too focused on the speech I was about to deliver. I was going to demand that my father give me money. If I could choose the perfect words, if I could say them just right, I would return to my mother with a fistful of cash and we could escape Grandpa’s house and she would never again have to sing in anger or peck at her calculator. I rehearsed in my head, while taking deep breaths and steeling myself. It’s like diving off the high board at the public swimming pool, I told myself, closing my eyes. One. Two. Three.

I couldn’t. I didn’t want to say anything that would make The Voice disappear again. Instead I stared out the window, at the slums and liquor stores and snowdrifts of paper along the side of the road. We must be a long way from Manhasset, I thought, wondering vaguely what I would do if my father kept driving and never brought me back, and feeling guilty that this scenario caused a shiver of excitement.

We arrived at someone’s brick town house, which smelled of stewed tomatoes and grilled sausages. I was put in a corner of the kitchen, where I stared up at a row of enormous female rumps. Five women, including one called Aunt Fatty, stood at a stove, fixing lunch. After bolting several helpings of Aunt Fatty’s eggplant my father took me to a nearby apartment to meet his “gang.” Again I was put in a corner and told to amuse myself. Instead I watched my father and three couples sit around a table, playing cards and drinking. Soon they began to take off their clothes.

“You’re bluffing,” someone said.

“You’re right! Glad I wore my clean underwear today.”

“Glad I’m wearing
any
underwear today,” my father said, to peals of laughter.

My father was down to his boxer shorts and one black sock. Then he lost the sock. He studied his cards, crooked an eyebrow, made everyone gasp with laughter as he pretended to be in a panic about losing his last article of clothing.

“Johnny,” someone said to him, “what you got?”

“Momma, I ain’t wearing any clothes—you can see what I got!”

“Johnny’s got nothing.”

“Aw, shit, I don’t want to see Johnny’s thing.”

“Absolutely. I second that. Johnny’s out.”

“Wait!” my father said. “The boy! I’ll bet the boy!” He called to me and I stepped forward. “Look at this fine young specimen. Wouldn’t you rather have this nice little boy than a look at my manhood? Wouldn’t you rather have this fruit of my loins than my Fruit of the Looms! I’ll see your bet and raise you—Junior!”

My father lost the hand. His friends slid off their chairs, whooping with laughter, and there was some breathless discussion of who would pay for my education, and who would explain things to my mother when my father didn’t bring me home.

I don’t remember anything after my father bet me, which felt worse than if he’d beaten me. I don’t remember him sobering up, putting on his clothes, or driving me home, and I don’t remember what I said to my mother about the visit. I know only that I didn’t tell her the truth.

Some weeks later I was warming up the radio, waiting for my father’s show to start. I planned to tell The Voice about a troubling rumor that the Mets were going to trade my idol, Tom Seaver. Handsome, clean-cut, a former marine who was the ace of the Mets pitching staff, Seaver began his windup with his hands under his chin, as if praying, then drove his powerful body forward, kneeling on his right knee, as if he were going to propose to the batter. That the Mets might trade Seaver was too awful to contemplate. I wondered what The Voice would say. But the time came for The Voice and The Voice wasn’t there. My father had switched shifts or changed stations again. I took the radio to the stoop and slowly turned the dial back and forth. Nothing. I went and found my mother and asked if she knew what had happened to The Voice. She didn’t answer. I asked again. Blank face. I asked urgently. She exhaled and looked at the clouds.

“You know I’ve been asking your father for years to help us,” she said. “Right?”

I nodded.

She’d hired lawyers, filed court papers, appeared before judges, and still my father hadn’t paid. So she’d made one last effort. She’d sworn out a warrant for my father’s arrest. The next day two cops handcuffed and dragged my father away from a live microphone while a stunned audience listened on. When they released my father from jail the following day, my mother said, he was insane with anger. He paid a fraction of what he owed us and failed to appear in court a week later. His lawyer told the judge that my father had fled the state.

My mother waited for all this to sink in. She then told me that within the last twenty-four hours she’d gotten a call from my father. He wouldn’t say where he was, and he threatened that if she didn’t stop dunning him for money, he’d have me kidnapped. Years later I would learn that my father had also threatened to put a contract on my mother’s life, and his voice was so menacing she didn’t dare call his bluff. For weeks she couldn’t start the T-Bird without her hands shaking.

My father didn’t want to see me, but he might kidnap me? It didn’t make any sense. I squinted at my mother.

“He’s probably just trying to scare me,” she said. “But if your father shows up at Shelter Rock, or if someone says he’ll take you to see your father, you mustn’t go with them.” She took me by the shoulders and turned me toward her. “Do you hear?”

“Yes.”

I pulled away and walked back to the stoop, back to the radio. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe my father was working at a new station, doing one of his funny voices so he couldn’t be recognized. I turned the dial, wiggled the antenna, analyzed each voice, but none was funny like my father, none was deep enough to make my ribs vibrate or utensils tremble. My mother came and sat beside me.

“Talk about it?” she said.

“No.”

“You never say how you feel.”

“You either.”

She blanched. I hadn’t meant to be so abrupt. Tears started to run down my cheeks. I thought my mother was telling me the whole truth about my father, which was why it hurt so much, but of course she was editing, holding back the worst. Over the next few years she would gradually reveal the facts, gently paring away the illusion I’d conjured from The Voice, one piece at a time. Still, I always remember the whole story there on the stoop, on that bleak afternoon, because that was when she made the first painful cut.

My father was an improbable combination of magnetic and repellent qualities. Charismatic, mercurial, sophisticated, suicidal, hilarious, short-tempered—and dangerous from the start. He got into a fistfight at their wedding. Drunk, my father shoved my mother, and when his best man objected to such treatment of the bride, my father decked him. Several guests jumped my father, trying to restrain him, and when the cops arrived they found my father running up and down the sidewalk, assaulting passersby.

For their honeymoon my father took my mother to Scotland. When they returned she discovered that the trip was supposed to have been the grand prize in a contest for listeners at his radio station. My father was lucky not to be arrested. In the two years they were married he was always verging into lawlessness, befriending mobsters, threatening cabdrivers and waiters, beating up one of his bosses. Toward the end he turned his outlaw ways on my mother. When I was seven months old my father threw my mother on their bed and tried to suffocate her with a pillow. She broke free. Two weeks later he did it again. She broke free again, but this time he chased her and cornered her in the bathroom with his straight razor. He described in gruesome detail how he was going to carve up her face. He lunged for her and only my crying in the next room broke the spell of his rage. That was the day we left him. That was the day we arrived at Grandpa’s house, with nowhere else to go.

“Why did you marry him?” I asked her that day on the stoop.

“I was young,” she said. “I was dumb.”

I didn’t want her to say another word. There was just one more thing I needed to know before I dropped the subject of my father for good.

“Why does my father have a different name than us?”

“He uses an alias on the radio.”

“What’s an alias?”

“A pretend name.”

“What’s his
real
name?”

“John Joseph Moehringer.”

“My father called me Junior,” I said. “Why?”

“Oh.” She frowned. “Okay. Your legal name is John Joseph Moehringer, Jr. But I didn’t like the name John, and I didn’t want to call you Joseph. Or Junior. So your father and I agreed to call you JR. As in Junior.”

“You mean, my real name is the exact same as my father’s?”

“Yes.”

“And JR stands for—Junior?”

“Yes.”

“Does anyone know?”

“Well, Grandma. And Grandpa. And—”

“Can we not tell anyone else? Ever? Can we please just tell people that my real name is JR? Please?”

She looked at me with the saddest look I’d ever seen on her face.

“Sure,” she said.

She hugged me, and we linked pinkies. Our first mutual lie.

six
| MR. SANDMAN

I
WAS ONLY TRYING TO REPLACE A VOICE, SO I DIDN’T NEED MUCH.
Just another masculine entity, another pretend father. Still, I realized that even a pretend father would be better if I could see him. Manhood is mimesis. To be a man, a boy must see a man. Grandpa hadn’t panned out. Naturally I turned next to the only other man in my vicinity, Uncle Charlie—and Uncle Charlie was something to see.

When he was in his early twenties, the hair on Uncle Charlie’s head began to fall out, first in small tufts, then clumps, then divots, followed by the hair on his chest and legs and arms. Finally his eyelashes and eyebrows and pubic hair blew away one day like dandelion spores. Doctors diagnosed alopecia, a rare disease of the immune system. The disease devastated Uncle Charlie, but its ravages were more internal than external. After denuding his body, alopecia stripped his psyche clean. He became pathologically self-conscious, unable to leave the house without a hat and dark glasses, a disguise that actually made him more conspicuous. He looked like the Invisible Man.

Personally I loved the way Uncle Charlie looked. Long before bald became fashionable, long before Bruce Willis, Uncle Charlie was sleek—cool. But Grandma told me that Uncle Charlie hated the sight of himself, that he recoiled from every mirror as if it were a loaded gun.

To me, the unique thing about Uncle Charlie wasn’t the way he looked, but the way he talked, a crazy, jazzy fusion of SAT words and gangster slang that made him sound like a cross between an Oxford don and a Mafia don. Stranger yet, after blithely issuing a torrent of vulgar words he would apologize for using one fancy word, as though his erudition were more shocking than his profanity. “You don’t mind if I say ‘verisimilitude,’ do you?” he’d ask. “You don’t mind if I say ‘perspicacious’?” Uncle Charlie had inherited Grandpa’s love of words, but unlike Grandpa he pronounced each word precisely, with a flourishing roll of the tongue. I thought sometimes that Uncle Charlie might be showing off, rubbing Grandpa’s nose in the fact that
he
didn’t stutter.

Just after The Voice disappeared I began taking more notice of Uncle Charlie. When he came to the dinner table I would stop chewing and stare, hanging on his every word. He sometimes went a whole meal in silence, but when he did talk, it was always the same topic. Finishing dinner he would push his plate forward, light a Marlboro Red, and give us a story about Dickens to go with dessert. He told us about two men at Dickens who made a “life-or-death” wager on an arm-wrestling match: The loser had to wear a Boston Red Sox cap for nine full innings at Yankee Stadium. “That’s the last we’ll ever hear of that guy,” Uncle Charlie said, chuckling. He told us one night about Steve and the men from the bar “hijacking” an Entenmann’s truck. They heisted hundreds of pies and waged a pitched battle in and around the bar, hurling custards and meringues at each other and at innocent bystanders on Plandome Road. An Entenmann’s Gettysburg, Uncle Charlie called it—the wounded bled jelly. Another time Uncle Charlie described how Steve and the gang bought a fleet of old jalopies and tricked them out as stock cars. They filled the trunks with cement, welded the doors shut, and parked the cars along Plandome Road. They were going to find a field the next day and stage their own demolition derby, but they got to drinking and Steve couldn’t wait. At three in the morning they went careering up and down Plandome Road, ramming into one another at breakneck speeds. The cops were not amused. Cops were seldom amused by goings-on at Dickens, Uncle Charlie boasted. The men at the bar had a running feud with one cop in particular, a tight-ass who manned a police booth near Memorial Field. Late one night they got up a posse and attacked the empty police booth with flaming arrows, burning it to the ground.

Flaming arrows? Demolition derbies? Pie fights? Dickens sounded both silly and sinister, like a children’s birthday party on a pirate ship. I wished my mother would go there once in a while, and bring my grandparents, since they all needed a dose of silly. But my mother hardly drank at all, and Grandma only drank daiquiris on her birthday, and Grandpa drank two generic beers with dinner, never more, never less. He was too cheap to be an alcoholic, my mother said, though he also had no tolerance. On holidays, after a glass of Jack Daniel’s, he’d start to sing, “Chicky in the car and the car won’t go—that’s how you spell Chicago!” Then he’d pass out on the bicentennial sofa, his snores louder than the T-Bird.