I am reading The Tender Bar. It is a memoir written by J.R. Moehringer, a young man who grew up in Manhasset, NY, south of Manhattan on Long Island. His father left him and his mother when he was a baby and so he lacked and craved male company and relationship. Eventually he would go to Yale, become a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the NY Times, screw up that job (don’t know how yet. I haven’t gotten that far) and now he works for a paper in LA. Anyway, as a boy he attached himself to the neighborhood bar where the regulars took him in, became his surrogate fathers and shared with him their life experiences and most importantly, their masculinity, their wisdom and their love. It's a beautiful book; a lot of wisdom here.
But for me it is especially poignant because my dad owned a neighborhood corner bar in Rhode Island and so, as a little girl, I spent many moments seated on a bar stool. When I could barely reach the door handle, I’d punch that screen door open in the summertime like I owned the joint. My father would spot me and say, “Well now, what will it be today young Lady?” And I’d shimmy up the stool and eat my cheese popcorn and drink my orange soda while the old regulars threw back their shots. They needed no justification for drinking but just in case, they rationalized that beer cooled them off in the summer and whisky warmed them up in the winter. I would try to avoid looking at the questionable delicacies that sat in jars behind the bar; lambs’ tongues and pigs’ feet and the hard-boiled eggs, cooked and pickled by String every week. I’d watch my father pour from the taps and learned how to pour a beer with just the right amount of head when I was 6. There were no Cosmos or Mojitos or Frozen Strawberry Daiquiris ordered there. This was beer, whisky, high ball and screwdriver territory.
Most of the time when I strutted in, there would be just me and THE MEN. And I felt no shyness or discomfort in being the only girl there or the only child. They might have been a little annoyed that once I entered they had to watch their language or their topics of conversation, but they didn’t seem to hold it against me. In some ways I felt more valued and honored there than in church. Though I loved both bar and church equally and felt safe in either one, when the men at the bar would say to someone who had not met me before, “That’s AL’S daughter,” they said it as if they might have been saying, “That’s the Queen of England,” or “That’s Nefertiti.” So, they were a bit gentler with me and stumbled over their words to try to say things to me. And they were generous with me, I think in part, because my father had been generous with them so the kindness was not so much a kindness extended to me but to my father. They’d slide nickels and dimes my way along the bar and I realize now that they were sharing with me what probably would have been my father’s tip money. I’d pick up the nickels and dimes with my greasy little orange fingers and slip them into my pocket with a smile and a “thank you.” Then, I’d shimmy back down the bar stool and out the door to play hopscotch or jacks.
The litany of men’s names rolls off my tongue like a litany of saints; String (who pickled the eggs), and Pat (at one time sought by the New England mafia…his whereabouts known only by my father); JP (Jean-Paul) the French-Canadian who couldn’t be bothered to speak English and who, upon my father’s death 19 years ago was so aggrieved that he could not attend the services. There was Gus the cop whose services and squad car would one afternoon be commandeered by my father to transport my toddler son and me to the hospital emergency room where he received his first stitches from a fall. And then there was Gene and the other Gene and my Uncle Gene, the quiet bachelor (who eventually married) who would tend bar some evenings and into the early morning, and Mr. Rondeau, one of my friend’s uncles (Diane was an only child who was not allowed to enter the bar even though her father went there every day after work). There were one or two of the men who scared me a little, but I suspect it is because they had no idea what to say to a little girl and were as afraid of me as I of them. We lived across the street from the bar and sometimes I’d sit on the front porch steps and peel my orange with a spoon (I liked to eat orange things then)and watch the men as they went in and out. I thought some of them were very, very handsome.
To my mind, my father’s generosity was legendary. I suspect that his tendency to lend money to the indigent without expecting repayment, or to extend a bar tab until all lost track of the sum were major issues of contention between my two parents. I imagine that my mother could visualize her grocery money sliding down the throat of a thirsty patron. One day, as I was about to punch the screen door open a huge, bear of a man stopped me in my tracks. He stood before me. I could not pass. I looked up into the face that towered over me. I’d never seen him before. But he knew who I was. He looked me dead in the eye and said, “Your father would give a man the shirt off his back.” And even in my child’s innocence and ignorance of adult things, I knew that my father had just done something remarkable for this man.
On Sunday afternoons there would be marathon games of pitch and pinochle taken so seriously that every Sunday the seals would ceremoniously be opened on new decks of cards. It was the stuff of Sunday afternoon male-bonding rituals. And I pity the man (if ever there was one) who was caught cheating. There were ethical standards inside my father’s bar that were uncompromised. 1) You didn’t cheat at cards. 2) You didn’t betray a friend. 3) If your wife called and asked if you were there, my father would not lie for you. 4) The secrets that were shared at the bar, stayed at the bar. 5) Everyone was welcomed. 6) You never went away thirsty.
I realize that I have alluded to a church/bar analogy throughout this little memoir of mine. And perhaps I have stretched the analogy too far. But there are some similarities that cannot be denied. For the men who frequented my father’s bar sought and found the things that the faithful seek in church, without perhaps the fear of Judgment Day. The bar was a welcoming place for the stranger; a friendly place for the lonely; a place of belonging for the estranged; a comforting and predictable familiarity for those whose lives were in chaos; a place to lay one’s head and rest. It was a place where a little girl could see her father’s face light up as she entered and a place where she would receive a different and orange kind of Communion.
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