The Tender Bar (42 page)

Publicans was wall-to-wall storytellers, but none had Bob the Cop’s ability to hold our attention. Part of it was fear. If we stopped listening, would he punch us? But part of it was his delivery, which worked along the same principle as Hemingway’s spare style. Bob the Cop wasted no time, no energy. He painted scenes and characters with the fewest possible words, inflections and facial expressions, because like Hemingway he didn’t need any frills. Unshakably confident in his story’s interest, Bob the Cop spoke in a steady monotone and maintained a card sharp’s deadpan, which also created a sense of uncertainty as to genre. You didn’t know if Bob the Cop was doing tragedy or comedy until he wanted you to know. Then, his thick New York accent was the crowning touch. It was the right voice for describing that underworld through which he moved, peopled with hookers and grifters, sleazy politicians and contract killers, a comic book hell in which someone was always making a mistake that cost someone else dearly. Whether describing a plane crashing into the East River because of pilot error, or an undercover detective’s boneheaded blunder that let a perp go free, Bob the Cop’s accent always seemed to fit the accident.

My favorite stories, however, were the ones about his kids. He told me about taking his five-year-old son with him on his police boat. It was supposed to be a slow day, but a helicopter went down in the river and Bob the Cop raced to the scene, pulling survivors from the water. Later that night, when Bob the Cop was tucking his son into bed, the boy was upset. “I don’t want to go with you to work no more,” his son said. “How come?” Bob the Cop asked. “Because I can’t save the people.” Bob the Cop thought. “How about we make a deal?” he told his son. “You come with me to work, and if anything bad happens, you let me save the big people, and you save the little people.”

When Bob the Cop stopped telling stories, when he turned to listen to someone else’s story, I leaned into Uncle Charlie’s chest. “Bob the Cop
is
a good guy,” I said. “A really good guy.”

“I tell no lies,” he said.

“What’s his story?”

Uncle Charlie put a finger to his lips.

thirty-two
| MARVELOUS

U
NCLE CHARLIE OWED SOMEBODY A BUNDLE, AN AMOUNT SO
large, I heard, he could barely pay the vigorish. “What’s a vigorish?” I asked Cager.

He took off his visor and scratched his red hair. “The vig is like the interest on a Visa card,” he said. “Except this Visa will break your fucking kneecaps if you miss a payment.”

Uncle Charlie already walked like a flamingo with sore knees. I couldn’t imagine how he’d walk if he got crossways with his creditors. According to Sheryl, who had been asking questions along the bar, Uncle Charlie owed the mob a hundred thousand dollars. Joey D said it was more likely half that amount, and Uncle Charlie’s creditors weren’t mobsters, just a local syndicate. I wondered what was the difference. I wondered if Mr. Sandman was still in the picture.

I worried about Uncle Charlie’s debt, and I particularly worried about the way he refused to worry. He would strut back and forth behind the bar, singing to the doo-wop music on the bar stereo. I watched one night as he danced out from behind the bar and across the floor, a tangoing flamingo, and I thought I understood him. After losing his hair, and Pat, Uncle Charlie had given up on sustained happiness—career, wife, kids—and was trying only for short bursts of joy. Any worry, any prudent thought, which interfered with his bursts of joy, he ignored.

This strategy of joy at all costs, besides being delusional, led him to be careless. Two undercover cops, acting on a tip, sat at the bar for a week and watched Uncle Charlie transacting business more boisterously than a commodities trader. While mixing drinks Uncle Charlie was taking bets, parlaying bets, working the phones. At week’s end the two cops came to Grandpa’s house, this time in uniform. Uncle Charlie was lying on the bicentennial sofa. He saw them coming up the walk and met them at the screen door. “Remember us?” one cop said through the screen.

“Sure,” Uncle Charlie said, calmly lighting a cigarette with his Zippo. “Scotch and soda, Seagram’s and Seven. What’s up?”

They took him away in handcuffs. Over the next few days they sweated Uncle Charlie for the names of his bosses and associates. When word got out that he wasn’t saying anything, that he hadn’t given the cops a single name, presents began to arrive at the jail. Marlboros, newspapers, goose-down pillows. A high-priced lawyer also arrived, his services paid for by someone who preferred to remain nameless. The lawyer told the cops that Uncle Charlie would die before cooperating, and he persuaded them to reduce the charges from gambling to vagrancy. When word reached Publicans we all went limp with laughter. Only Uncle Charlie could get arrested for vagrancy—
in his own living room
.

I wish I could say that Uncle Charlie’s arrest jolted me, or embarrassed me, or made me worry more about his safety. If anything it made me proud. He returned to the bar a conquering hero, having shown toughness and fortitude in a tight spot, and no one hailed him more adoringly than I. The mobsters who monitored Uncle Charlie’s vigorish—who “held his paper,” as the men said—worried me, but the cops didn’t, because I believed the barroom myth that cops and gamblers played a game of cat and mouse, which no one took seriously. On some level I knew that my thinking was warped, my pride in Uncle Charlie misplaced, and this was probably why I didn’t tell my mother about Uncle Charlie’s arrest. I didn’t want her to worry about her younger brother, or me.

Soon after his release from jail there was a change in Uncle Charlie. He started gambling more, risking more, maybe because his narrow escape made him feel invincible. He then started losing more, so much that he had no choice but to take his losses seriously. At the bar he would complain bitterly about various athletes and coaches who had cost him money that day with their miscues and errors. He claimed he could retire to the tropics if not for Oakland manager Tony LaRussa. He could buy a Ferrari if not for Miami quarterback Dan Marino. He was compiling a mental list of athletes who had screwed him, and he included those play-by-play announcers who didn’t sufficiently castigate his blacklisted athletes.

Though I couldn’t learn the exact size of Uncle Charlie’s debt, his individual losses were legend. Colt told me that Uncle Charlie lost fifteen thousand dollars in one night, playing Liars’ Poker with Fast Eddy. Joey D said Uncle Charlie was addicted to underdogs, “the more under, the more canine, the better.” Cager backed this up by telling me about the night Uncle Charlie let it slip that he was “intrigued” by the line on Saturday’s Nebraska-Kansas game. Nebraska was laying sixty-nine points. “Imagine,” Uncle Charlie said to Cager, “you take Kansas and at the opening kickoff you’re up sixty-nine to nothing.”

“No,” Cager said. “I’d steer clear of that game, Goose. With a spread like that, the oddsmakers must know something, and what they probably know is that Kansas couldn’t beat St. Mary’s girls’ lacrosse team.
Junior
varsity.”

Next time Cager walked into the bar he asked the inevitable question.

“I took Kansas and the sixty-nine points,” Uncle Charlie said, bowing his head.

“And?”

“Nebraska seventy, Kansas oogatz.”

Cager blew air slowly through the gaps in his teeth.

“But Cager,” Uncle Charlie said achingly, imploringly,
“I was in it the whole way.”

After telling me about this conversation, Cager asked me, “What can you do with a man like that?”

Cager was a savvy gambler, who won more than he lost, and actually supported himself by gambling, so he offered to help Uncle Charlie. “Only way you’ll ever make a dent in your number,” Cager told him, “is come with me to the track and we’ll pick out some long shots.”

Uncle Charlie glared at Cager. “The fuck do I know about horses?” he said.

“The fuck do you know about horses?” Cager said. “The fuck do you know about
horses
?”

In March 1987, I saw firsthand how far things had deteriorated for Uncle Charlie, when I woke to find him standing over me. “Hey,” he said. “You ’wake? Hey?” The bedroom was filled with Sambuca fumes. I checked the clock: 4:30
A.M.
“Come on,” he said. “I wan’ talk you.”

Wrapping a robe around myself I followed him out to the kitchen. Normally in that condition he wanted to talk about Pat, but this time it was money. He was worried. He didn’t give me a hard number, but he left no doubt that it was a number he could no longer ignore. The delusional joy was gone. His only hope, he said, his last chance, was Sugar Ray Leonard.

I was well aware of the upcoming middleweight title fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and “Marvelous” Marvin Hagler. The “Super Fight,” as it was being billed, had been the main topic of conversation for weeks at Publicans. Every bar has some affinity for boxing, because drinkers and boxers sit on stools and feel woozy and measure time in rounds. But at Publicans boxing was a sacred bond that all the men shared. Old-timers still recalled fondly when Rocky Graziano was a regular, decades before the bar was Publicans, and I’d once seen two men in the back room nearly come to blows, arguing about whether or not Gerry Cooney was a legit contender or a tomato can. The imminent clash between two superb fighters like Leonard and Hagler was viewed by such men as the approach of a rare comet would be viewed by NASA scientists. Drunken NASA scientists.

Leonard, retired three years, his hair sharply receding at the temples, was an elder statesman of the sport at just thirty years old. He’d been pretty when he was a young Olympian—now he looked distinguished, like a diplomat. He’d always had a thoughtful glimmer in his eye, which made him seem deceptively demure, but now he also had a detached retina, suffered in one of his last fights, and doctors said one good blow, landed flush, could leave him blind. He was no match for the reigning champion, Hagler, who was ornery, homely, bald, in the full flower of his violent prime. Like Godzilla with a grudge Hagler had been mauling every comer. He hadn’t lost in eleven years, and yet he considered all his victims, including fifty-two knockouts, mere appetizers before the main course—Leonard. Hagler hungered for Leonard. He wanted to prove himself the fighter of the decade, and to do this he needed to lure Leonard out of retirement and humiliate him, dethrone the media darling. He also disliked Leonard personally, and so he wanted to destroy him. He didn’t care if he caused Leonard to go blind, deaf, or dead. Given Hagler’s rage, and Leonard’s rust, the fight wasn’t so much a fight as an arranged execution. Vegas was making Hagler the prohibitive favorite, but as the sun peered through the window over the kitchen sink Uncle Charlie told me that Vegas was wrong. The fight was a mismatch all right, but not the mismatch Vegas perceived. He was betting heavy timber, more timber than in the Pacific Northwest, on Sugar Ray Leonard.

I saw that Joey D was right. Uncle Charlie was addicted to underdogs. And he didn’t just bet them, he became them. All of us were guilty of giving our hearts to athletes. Uncle Charlie gave them his soul. Seeing him foam at the mouth about Leonard, I was struck by the danger of identifying with anyone, let alone underdogs. And yet I couldn’t worry about Uncle Charlie anymore, because it was five-thirty in the morning and I had my own problems.

After nearly five months at the
Times
I was still fetching sandwiches, still separating carbons, still the infamous and laughable Mr. Salty. I’d written a few microscopic briefs, and I’d contributed notes for a humdrum roundup of fan celebrations after the New York Giants won the Super Bowl. An “inauspicious debut,” Uncle Charlie called it. I’d expected that the
Times
would restore my self-confidence, but it was stripping away the little I had left. And to make everything worse the newspaper was threatening to strip me of my name.

A top editor called me into his office. He was a big man with big glasses, a big bow tie, and a big problem with me. He’d heard from the copydesk that I’d been insisting my byline should read JR Moehringer, without dots. A copyboy
insisting
? It was heresy.

“Is this true?” he asked.

“Yes sir,” I said.

“No dots? You want your byline to read JR Moehringer, without dots?”

“Yes sir.”

“What does JR stand for?”

Easy does it, I told myself. The editor was asking me to reveal my darkest truth, and I knew what would happen if I did. He’d decree that henceforth my byline read as my birth certificate: John Joseph Moehringer Jr. The men at Publicans would then know my real name, and I’d never be JR or Kid again. I’d be Johnny, or Joey—or Junior. Whatever meager identity I’d been able to forge in Publicans would disappear. Moreover, every time I was lucky enough to earn a byline in the
Times
it would be someone else’s name. It would be my father’s name, a reminder of him and a credit to him. I couldn’t let that happen.

“JR,” I told the editor, feeling sick, “doesn’t stand for anything.”

“JR is not your initials?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

Dodged a bullet there. It was no lie to say JR wasn’t my initials.

“JR is your legal first name? Just a J and an R?”

“Yes, sir.”

Why did I drink that seventy-five dollars my mother sent me to change my name?

“I need to study this,” the editor said. “It just doesn’t look right. JR. No dots. I’ll get back to you.”