The Tender Bar (57 page)

I phoned McGraw and Jimbo in Colorado. As I told McGraw about my fight with my father, he giggled. McGraw had gotten his giggle back. The sound of him giggling made me giggle, and I knew just where I wanted to be.

“Junior!” he said, hugging me as I stepped off the plane.

“Jimbo,” I said, “you’re saving my life.”

Only eight months had passed since I’d seen him, but he was barely recognizable. Bigger, older, redder, he no longer looked like a young Babe Ruth, but like a young Steve. He had that familiar swagger, that take-charge quality, and he was developing his own Cheshire smile.

“Where’s McGraw?” I asked.

“Working. Your cousin is the newest towel boy at the local hotel.”

I laughed, then caught myself. “What am I laughing at? Do they need another towel boy?”

It was a brilliant June afternoon. The sky was a hard sheet of blue, the air tasted like ice water. Jimbo had the top off his Jeep and as we climbed into the foothills outside Denver our hair whipped around crazily. Coming over a steep ridge the Jeep made a jarring, thunderous noise. I looked to the right and saw that it wasn’t the Jeep making that noise but a herd of buffalo rumbling alongside the highway. Then, straight ahead, I caught my first sight of the Rockies. Camelback was a pimple by comparison. I howled, and Jimbo smiled as if he’d put the mountains there. I hoped those mountains, like certain men, weren’t more impressive when viewed from a distance.

Over the Jeep engine Jimbo shouted a question about the gang at Publicans. I was all set to tell him about Smelly, but I felt as if I’d been in darkness a long time, and now I wanted to bask in this glittering mountain sunlight and say nothing to cast a shadow over the moment. Besides, we were meeting McGraw later at a bar. I’d tell them both then.

I sat back and listened to Jimbo’s tape in the stereo. Allman Brothers. “Blue Sky.”

You’re my blue sky.

You’re my sunny day.

Lord you know it makes me high

When you turn your love my way, yeah

Jimbo picked an air guitar, steering with his knees, and we both sang as the Jeep ascended into alpine meadows. Rams, perched like haughty ballerinas on the high rocks, looked down on us. My head started to feel like a balloon on a string. Jimbo said it was the altitude. The Jeep groaned as it crested a steep pass, which I assumed was the Great Divide.

“Got a surprise for you,” Jimbo said. He pulled out his Allman Brothers tape and slammed in another. Sinatra’s voice burst from the speakers. Jimbo laughed and I slugged him on the shoulder.

A few miles farther the Jeep sputtered. Jimbo looked at the gauges. “Shit,” he said, throwing the wheel to the right and bouncing onto the shoulder. He jumped out and popped the hood. Smoke billowed from the engine.

“We may be here awhile,” he said, peering at the sun lowering on the horizon.

He sounded worried. For once I wasn’t. While Sinatra’s voice echoed off the sheer slopes of rock, I was perfectly content to sit on the roof of this unavailing star and savor the sun. I didn’t care how much time we had until it disappeared behind the mountains. For one beautiful moment—and who could ask anything more of life?—I needed and wanted for nothing.

EPILOGUE

Keep me away from porter or whiskey

Don’t play anything sentimental it’ll make me cry

I’ve got to go back my friend

Is there really any need to ask why

—
Van Morrison,“Got to Go Back”

epilogue
| ONE OF MANY

O
N SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, MY MOTHER PHONED ME FROM ARIZONA
with the news. We stayed on the phone together, watching TV, and when we were able to speak we wondered with dread how many people from Manhasset must be in those towers.

It was worse than we feared. Nearly fifty people from Manhasset died in the attacks on the World Trade Center, among them Peter Owens, the bartender who had been such a kind editor and friend to me. Also, my cousin Tim Byrne, the strong, charismatic son of my mother’s first cousin, Charlene. A broker at Sandler O’Neill, Tim was in his office on the 104th floor of the south tower when the first plane hit the north tower. He phoned his mother and said he was fine, not to worry. Then the second plane hit his tower and no one heard from him again.

I was in Denver at the time. I drove to New York for the funerals and memorials. Along the way I listened to radio call-in shows, stunned by how many people were calling not to talk but to sob. Outside St. Louis I tried to tune in McGraw, who was a talk show host for KMOX, one of the largest stations in the United States. I wanted to hear what he’d have to say about the attacks, and simply to hear his voice, which I felt would give some comfort. I’d lost touch with McGraw. When Grandma and Grandpa got sick, several years after I left New York, my mother and McGraw’s mother battled over their care, and the bitterness of that fight, which landed in court and didn’t end until both grandparents died in 1997, split the family in two. McGraw and his sisters, Sheryl included, no longer spoke to me, because they sided with their mother, and I sided with mine. Driving across Missouri in the middle of the night, I turned the dial back and forth, and thought for a second I had found McGraw in that welter of sobs and voices. But then I lost him.

I shut off the radio and phoned everyone I knew in New York. My college roommate told me that Dave Berray—the supremely confident Yale student I’d dubbed Jedd Redux—had been killed in the attacks. He had a wife and two young children. I phoned Jimbo, who was living outside New York City. “Remember Michelle?” he asked. I hadn’t talked to Michelle in years, but I could see her face as plainly as the Coca-Cola billboard up ahead. “Her husband is missing,” Jimbo said.

“Does she have any children?” I asked.

“A son.”

When I arrived in Huntington, Long Island, at the condo that Tim had bought for his mother, Aunt Charlene was crying, the kind of crying I could tell would last for years. I spent the week with her, trying to help, but the only way I could help Aunt Charlene and the Byrnes was to put their loss into words. I wrote a story for my newspaper, the
Los Angeles Times,
about Tim, about how he’d led his family after his father died. I still remembered his father’s funeral, when Tim shouldered more of the weight of his father’s casket, and more of the responsibility for his mother’s comfort. He’d continued in that role, helping and guiding Aunt Charlene, financially and emotionally, being the kind of son I’d strived to be. Above all he’d been a patriarch to his siblings. He’d filled in for their father, then become their father, and among the many chilling coincidences surrounding Tim’s death, the most improbable was that his father’s birthday had been September 11.

At the close of that cruel week I met up with Jimbo and we went to the memorial service for Peter. When Jimbo pulled up to my hotel I was speechless. I’d lost touch with him, as I had with everyone from Publicans, and after not seeing him for years I could barely believe his metamorphosis into a red-faced Steve Redux. He seemed, in fact, to be wrestling with where Steve’s identity ended and his began. He told me he’d already opened one bar called Dickens, which failed, and he was thinking of trying again.

Driving up to the church we talked about Steve, because the scene was so reminiscent of Steve’s funeral. Mourners converged from every direction, many more than the church could hold. I recognized dozens of faces, including one man who looked like an older version of Colt. Of course it
was
an older version of Colt. For some reason he was walking down the middle of the street. Jimbo and I waved, and a gray-haired Colt waved back as if in a dream.

Jimbo parked and we ran to the church. There was no point in running. Every seat was already filled, and people were spilling out of the doors. The top step of the church looked like the bar at Publicans, circa 1989—Cager, Joey D, Don. I hugged them and shook their hands. Inside we heard Peter’s father struggling through his eulogy. We stood on our toes to see. When Peter’s father became too distraught to continue, we looked away and wiped our eyes.

Afterward Jimbo and I met Steve’s widow, Georgette, at the former site of Publicans. Steve had been deeper in debt than we knew, and business had dropped off faster than we feared, but Georgette had held on longer than anyone thought she could. She tried everything, including live rock ’n’ roll bands, before finally letting the place go in 1999. Long before selling, however, she’d had to fire Uncle Charlie. He couldn’t work for anyone but Steve, she said. His flamboyant rudeness had become something else, not funny, just disagreeable.

He’d become a poor caretaker of Grandpa’s house too, worse than Grandpa. While living there alone, he’d set fire to the house by accident, or else one of his creditors had done it on purpose. I heard all kinds of rumors around town. When the fire-damaged house was sold, Uncle Charlie left New York, drifted into a restless retirement, then disappeared altogether. I suppose that in the back of my mind I always feared that Uncle Charlie might disappear, that he’d be another member of my family to make a mysterious and dramatic exit. But when it happened, when he just dropped out of sight one day, it still came as a shock.

The new owners of Publicans had renamed the place Edison’s and remodeled the barroom in dozens of subtle ways. I felt as if I were encountering an old friend who had undergone needless plastic surgery. “At least the long bar is still here,” Jimbo said, rubbing the wood.

“And the same stools,” I said.

We sat at Peter’s end, toasting his memory. I toasted with ginger ale.

“You’re not drinking?” Jimbo said.

“No.”

“Since when?”

“Ten years. Give or take.”

I didn’t go into a long explanation. I didn’t want to list all the reasons that drinking—along with smoking and gambling and most other vices—had lost its appeal after I left Publicans. I didn’t want to tell Jimbo that sobering up had felt like growing up, and vice versa. I didn’t want to say that
drinking
and
trying
felt like opposite impulses, that when I stopped the one I automatically started the other. I didn’t want to say that sometimes, late at night, remembering Steve, I got a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach, because I wondered if he’d died for our sins. Had Steve lived, I’d have gone on living in his bar, and maybe a bar in Manhasset wasn’t the best place for me after all. An old-timer at Publicans used to tell me that drinking is the only thing you don’t get better at the more you do it, and when I left Publicans the sensibleness of that statement came home to me at last. I didn’t say any of this to Jimbo because I didn’t know how. I still don’t. Deciding to quit drinking was the easiest thing I ever did. Describing how I did it, and why, and whether or not I will drink again, is much harder.

But the main reason I didn’t say anything to Jimbo was that I didn’t want to profane Publicans. In the wake of September 11, I felt grateful for every minute I’d spent in that bar, even the ones I regretted. I knew this was a contradiction, but it was no less true for being so. The attacks complicated my already contradictory memories of Publicans. With public places suddenly described as soft targets, I felt only fondness for a bar that had been founded on the antiquated notion that there is safety in numbers. In my black suit, sitting amid the ruins of Publicans, I loved the old gin mill more than ever.

I asked Georgette to tell me about the last official night of Publicans. “Oh, everyone cried,” she said, especially Joey D, who was so distraught that he had to leave early. He went on to become a public-school teacher in the Bronx. Fourth grade. On his first day in class, Joey D would tell me later, he wrote his name on the blackboard, then wheeled around. “All these faces were looking at me,” he said. “And I thought, Okay, I can do this.”
Icandothis
. He’d spent his life staring out at a sea of thirsty faces, and now he was confronted with a wall of faces hungry for knowledge. He would make a fine teacher, I thought. The children would be fascinated by his pet mouse. And woe to any little hooligan who started a brawl on Joey D’s playground.

Fast Eddy insisted that he be the one to buy the last round at Publicans, Georgette told us. When the last glass was washed, the last cigarette extinguished, General Grant shut off the lights and locked the doors. I could picture his cigar floating through the pitch-dark barroom like the brake light of a motorcycle on a country road. I looked at the booths and stools—they were all empty, but I could
hear
the laughter. I could hear the voices from that last night, from every night, going back decades. I thought, We used to haunt this place, and now it will always haunt us.