The Tender Bar (21 page)

“What did Steve—”

“Time to turn in,” he said. He stood, knocking over the chair again. I picked it up again.

“How old are you?” he said.

“Fifteen. I’ll be—”

“That’s a great age. Jesus, what a great age! Stay right there. Don’t get any older.”

I led him down the hall, his arm around my neck. Standing inside the door to his bedroom I watched him climb under the covers with all his clothes on. He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. “JR, JR, JR,” he said. He kept saying my name, as though the air were full of JRs and he were counting them.

“Good night, Uncle Charlie.” As I shut the door, however, he had one more thing he needed to get off his chest.

“Who shot J.R.?” he said. “Had to be the brother-in-law. No one hated J.R. more than Cliff.”

seventeen
| SHERYL

S
OMEONE HAS TO MAKE A MAN OUT OF YOU,
”
SHERYL SAID
wearily. “I guess it’ll have to be me.”

It was 1981, the summer before my senior year, and we were riding the train into Manhattan, where Sheryl had gotten me a job as a file clerk at the law firm where she was a secretary. I looked at her, confused. I was sending my mother real money, buoying her hope that I’d soon be a lawyer—what could be more manly than that? Also, at sixteen years old I defined myself by the company I kept, and commuting to Manhattan meant I was keeping company with hundreds of men. Perforce and ergo, as they said at the firm, I was a man.

Not hardly, Sheryl said. Manhood wasn’t a feeling, in her view, but a performance. Having just graduated from a small junior college with a degree in interior design, Sheryl was obsessed with surfaces. How you dressed, what you wore and smoked and drank—these externals determined a person’s inner self. It didn’t matter that I felt like a man—I didn’t act or look like one. “That’s where I come in,” Sheryl said.

Sheryl had moved into Grandpa’s house just before I arrived that summer. (She was saving up for an apartment of her own, and in the meantime she was trying to break free of her nomadic mother.) Living with Sheryl, commuting with her and working with her, I found myself receiving manhood lessons around the clock. As a bonus, when Sheryl wasn’t talking about manhood she was attracting swarms of men eager to sit with us on the train. She looked like a young Ingrid Bergman, with dark blond hair and a pert, slender nose.

Someone else might have bridled at Sheryl’s endless exhortations. Stand up straight. Tuck in your shirt. What are we going to do about getting you some muscles? But I did whatever she said, without question, because Sheryl seemed to understand how the world worked. She was the only person, for instance, who pointed out when the third rail popped three seconds before the train appeared, and she was the first to warn me never to touch that third rail, ever. “Like me,” she said, “it’s always—
electrified
!” No one but Sheryl could tell me the proper way to read a newspaper on a crowded train, folding the entire paper once, longwise, then peeling back one half page at a time, to avoid disturbing the men on either side. More important, Sheryl explained that the newspaper I read was a sandwich board proclaiming my social status, income, genealogy, IQ. Working stiffs read the
Daily News
. Housewives,
Newsday
. Crazies, the
Post
.

“Grandpa reads the
Post,
” I protested.

She batted her eyelashes at me, as if to say, Any more stupid questions?

We were standing on the crowded platform when Sheryl pointed out a man fifteen feet away. “See that guy?” she said. Leaning against a lamppost was a businessman in a charcoal gray suit who looked like Cary Grant’s better-looking older brother. I’d seen him going into Publicans many times, and I’d always marveled at his suavity. “Notice what he’s reading?”

It was the
New York Times,
folded longwise.

“Bluebloods and mucky-mucks read the
Times,
” she said. “No matter how boring it might be.”

I didn’t tell Sheryl that I liked reading the
Times,
that one of the best things about working at the firm was having that half hour on the train to read it. I thought the
Times
a miracle, a mosaic of minute biographies, a daily masterpiece. I was starved for information about the world—I hadn’t been anywhere and didn’t know anyone who had—and the
Times,
like Yale, seemed expressly designed for my special brand of ignorance. Also, I loved how the
Times
made life appear containable. It satisfied my mania for order, for a world separated into black and white. It slotted all the madness into seventy pages of six skinny columns. I did everything I could to hide my love of the
Times
from Sheryl, who believed that a real man read the
Times
and only a hopeless nerd enjoyed it. But Sheryl had a sharp eye. She saw how closely I concentrated on the
Times
and took to calling me JR Muckraker.

The two critical tests of a man’s mettle, Sheryl believed, were women and liquor. How you reacted to each, how you
managed
each, went a long way to determining your manliness quotient. I told her about Lana, a girl back in Arizona who was many tiers above me in the high-school hierarchy. Lana’s hair was dirty blond, in both color and cleanliness. She didn’t wash it every day, which gave her a tousled, greasy sex appeal. The strands flicked her shoulders as she walked down the halls, chest out, like a cadet. Her breasts, I assured Sheryl, never moved, and she wore short-shorts that revealed the taut upper parts of her long caramel thighs. “If her leg were the United States,” I told Sheryl, “you could see all the way up to Michigan.”

“Battle
Creek
!” Sheryl said, and I laughed, though I wasn’t sure what she meant. I don’t think Sheryl was sure either.

Overall Sheryl was blasé about Lana. Without meeting her, she said, it wasn’t possible to know if the girl justified all my heavy breathing. On the subject of whiskey, however, Sheryl had plenty to say. She liked to drink and she took pleasure in teaching me how. After work each night we’d stop at a grungy bar in the bowels of Penn Station, where the smoke and darkness made everyone look like Charles Bronson, so the bartenders never questioned my age. Sheryl would treat me to a couple of cold mugs of beer, after which we’d buy large plastic cups of double gin and tonics for the ride home. By the time we stepped onto Plandome Road, our feet weren’t quite touching the pavement.

On a steamy Friday night in the middle of August, Sheryl proposed that we stop at Publicans for a last drink before heading to Grandpa’s house. I said that I didn’t think Uncle Charlie would approve.

“You go to Publicans all the time,” she said.

“In the day. Nighttime at Publicans is different.”

“Says who?”

“It’s just understood. Nighttime is different.”

“Uncle Charlie won’t care. He wants you to be a man. Be a man.”

Reluctantly I followed her through the door.

I’d been more right than I knew. Publicans was a completely different place after dark. Racier. Everyone laughing, talking at once, and it all seemed to be about sex. People were saying things they would regret tomorrow, I could just tell.

There was such a pageant of characters, in such a variety of costumes, that I felt as if Sheryl and I had snuck backstage at a grand opera. There were priests and softball players and executives. There were men in tuxedoes and women in gowns, on their way to charity functions. There were golfers just off the links, sailors just off the water, construction workers just off the jobsite. The bar was as crowded as the rush-hour train Sheryl and I had just ridden from Manhattan, and in fact could have been an extension of the train, another car coupled to the caboose, because it was long, narrow, filled with many of the same faces, and seemingly rocking from side to side. We edged deeper into the crowd and Sheryl bummed a cigarette from a young man, touching his arm, placing a hand on his shoulder, throwing back her hair. I remembered that she had a brand-new pack of Virginia Slims in her purse, and I suddenly understood. All her talk about making me a man was a cover for her master plan. Finding herself a man. She only wanted to make me a man so she’d have an escort to Publicans, where all the eligible men were. She couldn’t go alone, of course. She didn’t want to look desperate.

Feeling used, I ditched her. I bored into the crowd, tunneling toward the restaurant. After ten feet, however, my progress was halted. Unable to go forward, or back, I leaned against a pole. Beside me was a girl in her mid-twenties. She had a pretty face and wore a plaid dress with darts in the side that accentuated her figure. “All right if I lean here?” I asked.

“Free country.”

“Hey, my grandfather says that all the time. Have you been hanging out with Grandpa?”

She started to answer, then saw that I was joking. “What’s your name?”

“JR.”

“Ewing?”

“Right.”

“Guess you hear that a lot.”

“You’re the first.”

“What does JR stand for?”

“It’s my legal name.”

“Really? And what do you do, JR Ewing, when you’re not at Southfork?”

“Work at a law firm. In the city.”

“A lawyer?”

I stood up straighter. No one had ever called me a lawyer before. I couldn’t wait to write and tell my mother. Plaid Dress took a cigarette from her purse and fumbled with a matchbook. I took the matches and lit her cigarette exactly as I’d seen it done in
Casablanca
. “How about you?” I asked, in Uncle Charlie’s voice. “What’s your story?”

Sheryl had instructed me to ask this question of women. Women like questions about themselves more than they like jewelry, Sheryl had said. So I followed up my question with another, and another, assailed Plaid Dress with questions, learning that she worked as a salesgirl, that she hated it, that she wanted to be a dancer, that she lived with a roommate in Douglaston. And that the roommate was away in Barbados. “Won’t be back for a whole week,” Plaid Dress said. “My apartment is sooo empty.”

Grinding my jaws, I saw that her beer had a sip left. “Speaking of empty,” I said, “let me buy you another.” I headed for the bar. Sheryl intercepted me. “We’re out of here,” she said, grabbing my necktie.

“Why?”

“Uncle Charlie saw you and he’s mad.”

Uncle Charlie had never been mad at me in my life. I said something about wanting to run away to Alaska. “Oh Christ,” Sheryl said. “Be a man.”

Walking home, Sheryl had an idea. Since we were already in trouble with Uncle Charlie, we might as well go for broke. She suggested a nightcap in Roslyn. Bars there were more lax. She took the keys to Uncle Charlie’s Cadillac and we went to an infamous joint, where an eight-year-old could order a Tequila Sunrise without anyone blinking. “Go get us some cocktails,” she said, pushing me toward the bar. I fought my way through the crowd and when I returned with two gin and tonics Sheryl was surrounded by five marines. They looked as if they were detaining her at a checkpoint. “Here he is!” she cried as I came into view.

“You the baby-sitter?” one marine asked Sheryl.

“Cousin,” Sheryl said. “I’m trying to make a man out of him.”

“Looks like a mighty big job,” another marine said. Seeing me flinch, he extended his hand to me. “Only kidding, man. What’s your name?”

“JR.”

“What! Naw! Hey, everybody, this guy’s name is JR!”

His buddies wheeled away from Sheryl and gawked at me.

“Who shot him?”

“Ask who shot him.”

“Who shot you?”

Sheryl wasn’t about to surrender the spotlight without a fight. “Did someone say shots?” she shouted.

“Whoo!” the marines roared. “Yeah! Shots for JR! Let’s shoot JR!”

A marine handed me a shot glass and ordered me to drink. I did. It burned. A different marine handed me another glass. I drank it faster. It burned more. The marines then lost interest in me and went back to scrumming over Sheryl. She lit a cigarette. I watched her hold the first puff of smoke in her open mouth like a ball of cotton before sucking it down, and I thought, Of course—smoking. Casually I lit one of Sheryl’s cigarettes, as if it were my twentieth that day, not the first of my life. I took a drag. Nothing. I looked at the cigarette and smirked. Is that all you got? I took another drag. Deeper. The smoke hit my sternum like a short, hard right. After an initial burst of euphoria came hysteria, then nausea, then classic symptoms of malaria. Sweating. Shaking. Delirium. I levitated above the marines. Looking down on the bald spots in their crew cuts I thought, Fresh air now.
Freshairnow
.

I did a Frankenstein walk to the rear exit. Jammed. I pushed. The door gave and I fell into a narrow alley. A brick wall. I pressed my back against the wall. Oh wall. Dependable wall. Hold me, wall. I slid down. Sitting against the wall I tipped my head back and tried to breathe. The air felt refreshing. Like a waterfall. I held my face to the air a long time before realizing that I was directly beneath a pipe spurting some kind of greenish liquid. I rolled onto my side. The streetlights made multicolored pinwheels on the oily surfaces of the puddles in the alley. I don’t know how much time passed as I watched the pinwheels—an hour? five minutes?—but when I summoned the strength to stand and go back inside Sheryl was not pleased. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said.