The Tender Bar (10 page)

As my eyes adjusted I saw that the air was actually a beautiful pale yellow, though I couldn’t see any lamps or other possible source of light. The air was the color of beer, and smelled of beer, and each breath tasted like beer—malted, foamy, thick. Cutting through the beer smell was an odor of corruption and decay, though not unpleasant, more like that of an old forest, in which rotting leaves and mold refresh your faith in life’s endless cycle. There were also faint notes of perfumes and colognes, hair tonics and shoe creams, lemons and steaks and cigars and newspapers, and an undertone of brine from Manhasset Bay. My eyes watered, as they did at the circus, where the air had a similar animal musk.

Also reminiscent of the circus were all the white-faced men with orange hair and red noses. There was the man who owned the clock-repair shop, who always gave me chocolate cigarettes. There was the cigar-chawing owner of the stationery store, who gaped at my mother in a way that made me want to kick his shin. There were dozens of men I didn’t recognize, who looked as if they had just stepped off the train from the city, and several I did recognize, who wore orange Dickens softball jerseys. Many of the men sat in captain’s chairs along the bar, a brick wall topped with a slab of golden blond oak, but they weren’t confined to the bar area. There were men in the corners, men in the shadows, men in and around the phone booth, men in the back room—a vast mingling herd of the rare beast I’d been stalking.

There were also women in Dickens, astonishing women. The one nearest to me had long yellow hair and frosted pink lips. I watched her run a painted fingernail along the neck of a man and lean against the pillar of his arm. I shivered. The first time I ever witnessed physical affection between a man and a woman. As if feeling my shiver, she turned. “Uh-oh,” she said.

“What’s the matter?” the man beside her said.

“A kid.”

“Where?”

“Over there. By the door.”

“Hey, whose kid is that?”

“Don’t look at me.”

From the shadows Steve stepped forward.

“Help you, son?”

I recognized him from the softball game. He was easily the biggest man in the place. His hair was tightly curled, his face was a dark red, almost mahogany, and his eyes were blue slits. He smiled at me with teeth that were big and crooked and the barroom seemed to grow brighter. Now I knew the secret source of its light.

“Hey Steve!” said a man down the bar. “Get that kid a drink on me ha ha.”

“Okay,” Steve said. “Kid, you’re backed up on Bobo.”

Pink Lips said, “Shut up you assholes, can’t you see how scared he is?”

“What do you need, son?”

“Box of Marlboro Red.”

“Damn.”

“Kid smokes the real shit.”

“How old are you?”

“Nine. I’ll be ten on—”

“Stunt your growth.”

“They’re for my uncle.”

“Who’s your uncle?”

“Uncle Charlie.”

Gales of laughter.

“Get a load of that!” a man screamed. “Uncle Charlie! Oh that’s rich!”

More laughter. So much laughter. If you combined all the laughter in the world, I thought, this is how it would sound.

“Sure,” Steve said. “This is Chas’s nephew!”

“Ruth’s kid?”

“Naw, the other sister,” Steve said. “Your mother is Dorothy, right?”

I nodded.

“What’s your name, son?”

He had a gorgeous voice. Warm and gravelly.

“JR,” I said.

“JR?” He squinted. “What’s that stand for?”

“Nothing. It’s just my name.”

“Is that so?” He cocked an eyebrow at the bartender. “Everybody’s name stands for something.”

My eyes opened wider. I’d never thought of it that way.

“Got to have a nickname if you’re going to come into Dickens,” Steve said. “Next time you come in, either have a nickname or we’ll have to give you one.”

“Whatcha reading?” Pink Lips said.

I handed her my book.

“MY-noot Biographies,” she said.

“It’s all about famous men,” I said.

“I thought
you
wrote the book on men,” Steve said to the woman. She cackled.

The bartender reached under the bar for a box of Marlboros. He held them out and I stepped forward. Everyone watched me set the dollar on the bar, take the cigarettes, then back away slowly.

“Come again, kid,” Bobo said.

Laughter, laughter. The laughter was so loud that no one heard my answer.

“I will.”

ten
| PINCH RUNNER

A
UNT RUTH LIFTED HER EMBARGO AROUND THE TIME THE
Arabs lifted theirs. Once again I was allowed to visit McGraw and Sheryl and the cousins. After school I’d run up Plandome Road to call for McGraw and we’d race off to Memorial Field to play catch, or to the duck pond to fish, delirious about being reunited. A few weeks later we were hit with something worse than an embargo. It was a combination embargo-ambush-kidnapping. Aunt Ruth and the cousins were moving to Arizona. Aunt Ruth dropped the news offhandedly, while having coffee with Grandma in the kitchen. “Out west” was where the cousins needed to be, she said. Mountains. Blue skies. The air was like wine, and the winters were like spring.

I never understood why adults did any of the things they did, but even I knew that the real reason for Aunt Ruth’s move to Arizona must be Uncle Harry. My suspicions were confirmed days later, when Grandma told me that Aunt Ruth and Uncle Harry were going to try a reconciliation, and Aunt Ruth hoped a change of scenery would make Uncle Harry mend his ways and be a father to the cousins.

It was all a sick joke. No sooner had McGraw and I been reunited than he was loaded in the back of Aunt Ruth’s Ford station wagon with all the suitcases and hauled away to a place so far and unknown that I couldn’t picture it. As Aunt Ruth steered the station wagon onto Plandome Road, the last thing I saw was McGraw in his Mets helmet waving to me through the back window.

My response to the loss of McGraw was to hurl myself deeper into my three hobbies—baseball, the basement, and the bar—and combine them into one three-headed obsession. After an hour throwing the ball against the garage, pretending to be Tom Seaver, I’d go down to the basement and read about Mowgli or great men. (
Dante—He Glorified Hell!
) Then, with
The Jungle Book
and
Minute Biographies
in my basket, my mitt slung on the handlebar, I’d ride my bike to Dickens and do figure eights across the street, observing who came and went, particularly the men. Rich and poor, natty and decrepit, all manner of men stopped at Dickens, and each walked through the door with a heavy tread, as though laboring under an invisible weight. They walked as I walked when my backpack was full of schoolbooks. But when they walked out, they floated.

After a while I’d pedal from the bar to the field down the street, where boys played pickup games of baseball every afternoon. If the game went late we’d invariably have a visitor. Twilight was that witching hour when drinkers at Dickens checked their watches, drained their cocktails and hurried home. Leaving the bar they would often spot our game and undergo powerful flashbacks to their childhoods. Salesmen and lawyers would toss aside their briefcases and beg for one swing of the bat. I was pitching when such a man appeared, grinning, shooting his cuffs. He marched toward me like a manager intending to pull me for a reliever. A foot away he stopped. “The fuck are you supposed to be?” he said.

“Tom Seaver.”

“Why’s it say ‘P I’ on your shirt?”

I looked down at my white undershirt, on which I’d drawn “41” with a Magic Marker. “That’s forty-one,” I said. “Tom Seaver’s number.”

“Says P I. Wha’s that—Pi? You a math whiz or sumpin’?”

“That’s a four, that’s a one. See? Tom Terrific.”

“Nice to meet you, Tom T’rific, I’m Dead Drunk.”

He explained that he needed to “sweat off the booze” before going home to “the lil’ missus.” Therefore he’d be our pinch runner. All the boys looked at each other. “You dopes,” he said. “Haven’t you ever hurr of a pinch runner? The pinch runner stands nexa home plate and runsa bases erry time a batter makes contact!”

“What if nobody makes contact?” I said.

“Ho!” he said. “Cocky! I like that. Just throw the fucking ball, Tom.”

I waited for the pinch runner to get set. Then I fired a speedball at the batter, who hit a slow dribbler to third. The pinch runner sprinted toward first, his limbs spastic, his necktie streaming behind him like a ribbon tied to a car antenna. He was out by a mile. He kept running. He headed for second. Out again. He ran to third. Out. No matter how many times we threw him out or tagged him out, the pinch runner wouldn’t stop. He sprinted for home. Head lowered, he dove through the air, belly-flopping onto the plate, where he lay motionless as we all gathered around him, Lilliputians gathering around Gulliver. We discussed whether or not he was dead. At last he rolled onto his back and started to laugh like a maniac. “Safe,” he said.

All the boys laughed with him, none more than I. I was a serious boy—my mother was serious, our situation was serious—but this man at my feet was the opposite of serious, and I noted that he’d come from Dickens. I couldn’t wait to join him. I couldn’t wait to become him.

Instead I became more serious. Everything became more serious.

I’d assumed that sixth grade would be a cinch, like all grades before it, but for some reason the workload doubled and turned dramatically harder. Also, my schoolmates all at once seemed much smarter than I, and more aware of how the world worked. My friend Peter told me that when you applied to college, you had to present a list of all the books you’d ever read. He already had fifty books on his list, he bragged. I don’t remember all the books I’ve read, I told him, panicking. In that case, Peter said, you probably won’t be allowed into college.

“What about law school?” I asked.

He shook his head slowly from side to side.

In Mrs. Williams’s sixth-grade science class we had to sign a contract, binding us to do our best. What Mrs. Williams intended as a clever motivational device, I saw as a death warrant. I scrutinized that contract, wishing I were a lawyer already, so I could find a loophole. Each morning, the contract in my backpack, I would board the bus for school as if headed for labor camp. Shortly after I got on, the bus would pass a retirement home. I’d press my face against the window and envy those old people, sitting in their rockers, free to watch TV and read all day. When I mentioned this to my mother, she said very quietly, “Get in the T-Bird.”

Steering us around Manhasset my mother told me that I needed to stop worrying. “Just try your
best,
babe,” she said.

“That’s the same thing Mrs. Williams’s contract says,” I complained. “How do I know what my best is?”

“Your best is whatever you can do comfortably without having a breakdown.”

She didn’t understand. According to my black-or-white view of the world, it wasn’t enough to do my best. I had to be perfect. To take care of my mother, to send her to college, I needed to eliminate all mistakes. Mistakes had led to our predicament—Grandma marrying Grandpa, Grandpa denying my mother’s wish to go to college, my mother marrying my father—and they continued to cost us. I needed to correct those mistakes by avoiding new ones, and by getting perfect grades, then getting into a perfect college, then a perfect law school, then suing my imperfect father. But with school getting harder, I couldn’t see how I was going to be perfect, and if I were imperfect, then my mother and Grandma would be disappointed with me, and I’d be no better than my father, and then my mother would sing and cry and peck at her calculator—this was how my mind raced on the playground as I watched the other kids playing tetherball.

My mother sat me down one night in the dining room, Grandma by her side. “Mrs. Williams phoned me at work today,” she said. “Mrs. Williams tells me that at recess you sit on the playground, staring off into space, and when she asked what you were doing, you told her you were—
worrying
?”

Grandma made her tsk-tsk sound.

“Now look,” my mother said. “When I feel myself starting to worry, I just tell myself,
I will not worry about something that will not happen,
and that always calms me, because most of the things we worry about will never happen. Why don’t you give that a try?”

Like Mrs. Williams with her contract, my mother thought her affirmation would motivate me. Instead it hypnotized me. I converted it into an incantation, a mantra, and chanted it on the playground until I induced a trancelike state. I used my mantra as both a spell, to ward off disasters, and a club, to beat back the onslaught of worrisome thoughts about disasters. I’m going to be left back and have to repeat sixth grade.
I will not worry about something that will not happen.
I’m going to fail out of school and then I won’t be able to take care of my mother.
I will not worry about something that will not happen.
I’m just like my father.
I will not worry . . .

It worked. After I’d repeated my mantra a few thousand times Mrs. Williams announced that we’d be taking a break from our many assignments. All the kids cheered, and I cheered the loudest. “Instead,” Mrs. Williams said, “we’ll be planning the annual Sixth-Grade Father-Son Breakfast!” I stopped cheering. “Today,” she continued, holding up construction paper and glue, “we’re going to design and make our own invitations, which you’ll bring home to your fathers after school. Saturday morning we’ll cook our fathers breakfast and read to them from our schoolwork and everyone will get a chance to know each other better.”