The Tender Bar (20 page)

At New Haven Green I sat under a spreading elm and stared at the hundred-foot ramparts that rimmed the Old Campus, trying to picture myself on the other side. I couldn’t. Of all the grand houses I’d admired from afar, Yale was the most impregnable. After an hour I heaved myself to my feet and walked slowly back to the sandwich shop. Sheryl and Grandma were annoyed that I’d been gone so long. My mother was concerned for my mental state. She handed me a gift she’d bought me in a souvenir shop, a letter opener with the Yale insignia. “To open your acceptance letter with,” she said.

Back in Manhasset my mother and I went to the bar for dinner. Steve’s renovation was complete and the bar was now officially Publicans, a different place, more sophisticated, with lobster on the menu. Uncle Charlie was tending bar, wearing khakis and a cashmere V-neck. He too had been renovated. He came by our table to say hello. “What’s with him?” he asked my mother, jerking his head in my direction.

“He fell in love with Yale today,” my mother said, “and assumes it’s unrequited.”

“Is Bobo here?” I asked him. Bobo and Wilbur could cheer me up.

“Missing in action,” Uncle Charlie said.

I dropped my head.

Uncle Charlie shrugged and walked back to the barroom, diving through a curtain of smoke. Men cheered his reappearance and clamored for refills. “Keep your goddamned shirts on!” he said. “I’ve got phone calls to make.” Everyone laughed. I laughed in spite of myself, and revised my dreams. After Yale rejected me, I decided, I’d attend some tiny, anonymous college. I’d get decent grades, finagle my way into some law school, then con some half-assed law firm into hiring me. I’d earn less than I hoped—
be
less than I hoped—but if I lived frugally I might still be able to take care of my mother and send her to college and sue my father. And, as a consolation for my disappointments, when I came home from the law firm each night I’d stop by Publicans for a few belts. I’d talk with the men, laugh off the cares of the day and the regrets of my life. Staring into the barroom, watching Uncle Charlie pour drinks, I felt suddenly at ease, knowing that as surely as Yale would reject me, Publicans would accept me. If I couldn’t have the light and truth of Yale, I could always count on the dark truth of the bar. And only occasionally, when I’d had too much to drink, or not enough, would I let myself wonder how it all might have been different if Yale had let me in.

sixteen
| JR

T
WO SHOTS TO THE CHEST AT POINT-BLANK RANGE, AND THEN
the faceless culprit ran away. My mother and I saw the whole thing, along with millions of other people. The attempted murder of J.R. Ewing was the season-ending cliffhanger of
Dallas,
the most-watched TV show on earth, and when J.R. Ewing hit the floor, clutching his wounds, JR Moehringer knew he was in for a long hot summer.

The identity of J.R.’s attacker became a national obsession, and my teenage identity crisis became a daily crucible. My first name, which I hated slightly more than my last, was suddenly a household word, emblazoned on T-shirts, bumper stickers and magazine covers. Russian tanks were overrunning Afghanistan, fifty-two Americans were being held hostage in Iran, but J.R. Ewing was Topic A in the summer of 1980. Everyone I met would stammer in their haste to blurt out The Question: Who shot you? I’d smile as if no one had thought to ask me that before, then say something inane.
Sorry—the producers swore me to secrecy
. Sometimes I’d just make my best belly-full-of-lead face. People loved that.

Manhasset was malarial with J.R. Fever by the time I arrived for my summer visit. I looked forward to some mindless chatter and the Wordy Gurdy, but Uncle Charlie and the men were fixated on Ewing Doings. “Had to be Bobby,” Uncle Charlie said, stretched out in his chair, sun and cocoa butter making his head shine like a conch shell. “The Cain and Abel thing. Oldest story in the book.”

“No way,” Colt said. “Bobby’s a pussy.”

“Sue Ellen offed the motherfucker,” Bobo said.

“I read that Vegas is giving odds on the different suspects,” Joey D said.

“Wonder how you’d get a bet down on that?” Uncle Charlie said.

“If there’s a way,” Joey D said, “you’ll find it.”

Being named JR had always been complicated. Long before J.R. Ewing was shot, my name had been an infallible Pavlovian prompt, triggering the same response every time I met someone new.
What does JR stand for?
Embarrassed to be named after a father who disappeared, I answered for years with evasions. Then, gradually, I developed more cosmetic reasons to fear being called Junior. Junior was an overgrown simpleton who wore bib overalls and played checkers on a cracker barrel outside a general store. Junior was the opposite of everything I hoped to become. To distance myself from this image, to fend off would-be nicknamers, to obscure the specter of my absent father, I switched from evasions to one whopping lie. “JR doesn’t stand for anything,” I’d tell people. “It’s my
legal
first name.”

This was partly true. JR, without dots, was how I signed my name to all legal documents. My birth certificate did bear a
J
next to an
R
. I simply didn’t mention that these letters were an abbreviation at the end of my name, signifying the great void in my life.

For years the lie had worked beautifully, efficiently shutting down every questioner, until
Dallas.
People now weren’t so easily put off—meeting someone named JR was too delicious, like meeting someone named FDR—and when they interrogated me, harassed me, I was forced to craft an even bigger lie. “I was conceived right after John F. Kennedy was assassinated,” I would say, “and my parents couldn’t decide which Kennedy to name me after—John or Robert. They were caught up in that whole Camelot thing. So they invented a name that would stand for both. JR. No dots.”

As the hype around
Dallas
grew into hysteria, I went on autopilot, telling my bigger lie in the zombie monotone of a schoolchild reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Again I found sanctuary in my lie—until Yale presented yet another challenge. After sending for the application I wrote my mother and declared to her that I intended to type JR Moehringer, no dots, at the top of the first page. She fired back a letter. “You may not apply to Yale under an assumed name.” You’re the one who made me assume it, I thought. But she was right. I didn’t want to do anything that would hurt my chances. For Yale, for Yale only, I agreed to be John Joseph Moehringer Jr., a name that felt no more mine than Engelbert Humperdinck.

With each mention of my name that summer, with each discussion of what JR “stands for,” the memory of my father resurfaced. I wondered where he might be. I wondered if he was still alive, and how I would ever know if he wasn’t. Many nights, long after Grandma and Grandpa had gone to bed, I would find myself at the kitchen table, my ear to the radio. After thinking I’d conquered this old addiction, I’d fallen off the wagon, and my relapse made me feel weak and ashamed. I wanted to talk with someone about it, but there wasn’t anyone. I didn’t dare raise the subject with Grandma, who would scold me and then write my mother. I tried to talk with McGraw, but the older he got, the less willing he was to discuss fathers. “I’m afraid if I start,” he said, “I’ll never stop.”

I would have liked to speak with Uncle Charlie, but he was haunted that summer by his own voices. Sitting in the kitchen late one night, listening to the radio and reading, I heard the breezeway door open, then heavy footsteps, as if someone were killing cockroaches in the dining room. With a crash Uncle Charlie appeared in the kitchen doorway. From six feet away I smelled the whiskey. “Look who’s here,” he said. “Look who’s here, look who’s here. Whatcha say, sport? Didn’t ’spect anyone wake.”

He pulled a chair from the table, scraping it loudly across the floor. I clicked off the radio. “How’s it going?” I asked.

He sat, put a cigarette between his lips. Thinking. Lit a match. Thinking more. “JR,” he said, pausing to touch the flame to the cigarette, “people are scumbags.”

I laughed. He jerked up his head and stared. “Think I’m joking?”

“No sir.”

“JR, JR, JR. Your uncle is a very perceptive man. You follow?”

“Yes sir.”

“Who’s more perceptive than me?”

“No one.”

“Excuse me, poor grammar. Who is more perceptive—than I?”

“No one.”

“Bet your ass. I studied psychology, buddy boy. I’ve read everything. Don’t you forget it. No one pulls the wool over these eyes.” He pointed at his eyes, which were like two drops of dried blood, then launched into a long unintelligible story about someone—he wouldn’t name names—who hadn’t shown the proper sympathy for how much Pat had suffered at the end. Uncle Charlie hated this person, hated everyone, hated the whole goddamned world, and he was going to give everyone a piece of his mind one of these days. He slammed the table, pointed at the window, at the unfeeling world beyond, as he described this “scumbag bastard” who had dishonored Pat’s memory. I was frightened, but fascinated. I didn’t know that Uncle Charlie was capable of rage, and I didn’t know that Publicans was a place you could bring rage. I thought people went to the bar when sad, and got happy, period. A simple transaction. While I thought Uncle Charlie’s rage might lead him to toss me into the wall at any moment, I also felt that rage was something we had in common. I was always in a rage—about my mother’s health, about my name—and I’d been in a rage about my father just before Uncle Charlie walked in the door. That I couldn’t
tell
anyone about my rage served to triple my rage, and some days I felt that I might burst into flames of rage. Yes, I wanted to say, yes, let’s both give way to our rage!
Let’s bust up this whole goddamned kitchen!

“JR, do you hear me?”

I started. Uncle Charlie was glowering at me.

“Yes,” I lied. “I hear you. I follow.”

The ash on his cigarette needed flicking. He didn’t notice. He took a drag and the ash fell down his chest. “Ach, no one cares,” he said. He started to cry. Tears slipped from behind his dark glasses and skidded down his cheeks. I felt rotten and selfish for thinking of my own rage and not giving my full attention to Uncle Charlie’s.

“
I
care,” I said.

He looked up. A wan smile. Drying his tears he told me about the first time he met Pat, in a bar on Plandome Road. She walked across the barroom and reproached him for his hat and dark glasses. “You son of a bitch,” she said. “You have the nerve to feel self-conscious about having no hair when boys are coming home from Vietnam with no legs?”

“Mind your own business,” he told her, though he liked her style. Ballsy. A gun moll. A dame straight out of Raymond Chandler. They started talking and found a number of things in common, foremost a quasi-religious regard for barrooms. Also, Pat was an English teacher, and Uncle Charlie loved words, so they talked about books and writers. Days later she sent him a telegram.
CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT YOU—MUST SEE YOU
. She asked him to meet her at a roadhouse outside town. “I got there early,” he said. “Sat at the bar. Had a cocktail. Thought about leaving. Got up to leave.”

He acted it out. “I made for the door,” he said, lunging toward the stove, knocking over his chair. “Can you imagine how everything would be different? JR, for Christ’s sake. Do you see? How everything would be different—if I’d
left
? Do you follow? How things turn on a dime? You follow?”

“I follow,” I said, picking up his chair.

“She comes sailing through the door. Herself. Beautiful. A ten. No, fuck it, an eleven point five. Summer dress. Lipstick. What a beauty.” He sat again. He stubbed out his cigarette, which was already out. He closed his eyes, laughing to himself. He was there again at the roadhouse with Pat. I felt as if I were intruding. “Right behind her,” he whispered, “comes her husband. She’s—
married
. The husband’s been following her for weeks.
Weeks,
JR. Thinks she’s cheating on him. Which she isn’t. Though she’s about to. With me.”

“Did you know him?”

“Who?”

“The husband?”

“JR, you’re not listening. He was the most feared son of a bitch who ever walked the face of the earth. He’s the reason you can’t drink alcohol at Jones Beach anymore. But that’s another story. The husband sits down next to Pat and tells the bartender, ‘Get them a drink on me.’ Then he says, ‘Chas, if it was anybody else, they’d be dead.’ ” He paused. “Pat was divorced six months later. She and I have been together ever since. Excuse me. Bad grammar again. She and I
had been
together. Until . . .”

The clock above the stove sounded like someone banging a pot with a spoon. Uncle Charlie lit another cigarette. He smoked with his eyes closed and neither of us said anything until I couldn’t bear the silence. “We had a good time at Shea,” I said.

He opened his eyes and looked at me, no idea what I was talking about.

“We couldn’t find her,” I said. “Remember?”

“Oh right.” He sighed. Two long plumes of smoke shot from his nose, which made me think of a dragon. “Now we’ll never find her.”

I’d managed to say exactly the wrong thing.

“She loved Publicans,” he said. “She loved to laugh—she laughed all the time—and just when I’d think she couldn’t laugh any more, she’d come into Publicans and laugh twice as much. And she loved Steve to pieces.”