The Tender Bar Read Free

where we hide when we can’t face our mountains. For me the bar was both. My most luxuriant cave, my most perilous mountain. And its men, though cavemen at heart, were my Sherpas. I loved them, deeply, and I think they knew. Though they had experienced everything—war and love, fame and disgrace, wealth and ruin—I don’t think they ever had a boy look at them with such shining, worshipful eyes. My devotion was something new to them, and I think it made them love me, in their way, which was why they kidnapped me when I was eleven. But now I can almost hear their voices.
Whoa, kid, you’re getting ahead of yourself
.

    Steve would have me say it like this: I fell in love with his bar, and it was reciprocal, and it was this romance that shaped all my others. At a tender age, standing in Dickens, I decided that life is a sequence of romances, each new romance a response to a previous romance. But I was only one of many romantics in Steve’s bar who had reached this conclusion, who believed in this chain reaction of love. It was this belief, as much as the bar, that united us, and this is why my story is just one strand in the cord that braided all our love stories together.

     

 

    PART I

    Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For it is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice.

    —
Elias Canetti,
Notes from Hampstead

     

 

    one
| THE MEN

    I F A MAN CAN CHART WITH ANY ACCURACY HIS EVOLUTION FROM small boy to barfly, mine began on a hot summer night in 1972. Seven years old, driving through Manhasset with my mother, I looked out the window and saw nine men in orange softball uniforms racing around Memorial Field, the silhouette of Charles Dickens silk-screened in black on their chests. “Who is that?” I asked my mother.

    “Some men from Dickens,” she said. “See your Uncle Charlie? And his boss, Steve?”

    “Can we watch?”

    She pulled over and we found seats in the stands.

    The sun was setting, and the men cast long shadows, which seemed made of the same black ink as the silhouettes on their chests. Also, the men sported cummerbunds of blubber that stretched their XXL jerseys until those silhouettes looked like splatter stains caused by the men stomping in their own shadows. Everything about the men had this surreal, cartoonish quality. With their scant hair, giant shoes, and overdeveloped upper bodies, they looked like Blutos and Popeyes and steroidal Elmer Fudds, except my lanky Uncle Charlie, who patrolled the infield like a flamingo with sore knees. I remember that Steve wielded a wooden bat the size of a telephone pole, and every home run he clouted hovered in the sky like a second moon.

    Standing at the plate, the Babe Ruth of the beer league, Steve dug at the dirt and growled at the pitcher to give him something he could pulverize. The pitcher looked scared and amused at the same time, because even while barking at him, Steve never stopped smiling. His smile was like the strobe from a lighthouse, making everyone feel a little safer. It was also a command. It bade everyone to smile also. It was irresistible, and not just to those around him. Steve himself seemed unable to stop baring his teeth.

    Steve and the men of Dickens were fierce competitors, but the game never once got in the way of their main goal in life—laughter. Regardless of the score, they never stopped laughing, they couldn’t stop laughing, and the fans in the stands couldn’t either. I laughed harder than anyone, though I didn’t get the joke. I laughed at the sound of the men’s laughter, and at their comic timing, as fluid and quicksilver as their turning of a double play.

    “Why do those men act so silly?” I asked my mother.

    “They’re just—happy.”

    “About what?”

    She looked at the men, thinking.

    “Beer, sweetheart. They’re happy about beer.”

    Each time the men ran past, they left a