The Tender Bar Read Free Page A

scented cloud. Beer. Aftershave. Leather. Tobacco. Hair tonic. I inhaled deeply, memorizing their aroma, their essence. From then on, whenever I smelled a keg of Schaeffer, a bottle of Aqua Velva, a freshly oiled Spalding baseball glove, a smoldering Lucky Strike, a flask of Vitalis, I would be there again, beside my mother, gazing at those beery giants stumbling around the diamond.

    That softball game marked for me the beginning of many things, but particularly time. Memories before the softball game have a disjointed, fragmentary quality; after, memories move forward, smartly, single file. Possibly I needed to find the bar, one of the two organizing principles of my life, before I could make a linear, coherent narrative of my life. I remember turning to the other organizing principle of my life and telling her I wanted to watch the men forever. We can’t, babe, she said, the game is over. What? I stood, panicked. The men were walking off the field with their arms around each other. As they faded into the sumacs around Memorial Field, calling to one another, “See you at Dickens,” I started to cry. I wanted to follow.

    “Why?” my mother asked.

    “To see what’s so funny.”

    “We’re not going to the bar,” she said. “We’re going—home.”

    She always tripped over that word.

    My mother and I lived at my grandfather’s house, a Manhasset landmark nearly as famous as Steve’s bar. People often drove by Grandpa’s and pointed, and I once heard passersby speculating that the house must suffer from some sort of “painful house disease.” What it really suffered from was comparisons. Set among Manhasset’s elegant Gingerbread Victorians and handsome Dutch Colonials, Grandpa’s dilapidated Cape Cod was doubly appalling. Grandpa claimed he couldn’t afford repairs, but the truth was, he didn’t care. With a touch of defiance and a perverse pride he called his house the Shit House, and paid no attention when the roof began to sag like a circus tent. He scarcely noticed when paint peeled away in flakes the size of playing cards. He yawned in Grandma’s face when she pointed out that the driveway had developed a jagged crack, as if lightning had struck it—and in fact lightning had. My cousins saw the lightning bolt sizzle up the driveway and just miss the breezeway. Even God, I thought, is pointing at Grandpa’s house.

    Under that one sagging roof my mother and I lived with Grandpa, Grandma, my mother’s two grown siblings—Uncle Charlie and Aunt Ruth—and Aunt Ruth’s five daughters and one son. “Huddled masses yearning to breathe rent-free,” Grandpa called us. While Steve was creating his public sanctuary at 550 Plandome Road, Grandpa was running a flophouse at 646.

    Grandpa could have nailed a silhouette of Charles Dickens above his door too, since the conditions were comparable to a Dickensian workhouse. With one usable bathroom and twelve people, the waits at Grandpa’s were often excruciating, and the cesspool was constantly backed up (“Shit House” was sometimes more than a flippant nickname). The hot water ran out each morning in the middle of Shower Number Two, made a brief cameo during Shower Number Three, then teased and cruelly abandoned the person taking Shower Number Four. The furniture, much of which dated to Franklin Roosevelt’s third term, was held together with duct tape and more duct tape. The only new objects in the house were the drinking glasses, “borrowed” from Dickens, and the Sears living room sofa, upholstered in a hypnotically hideous pattern of Liberty Bells, bald eagles, and faces of the Founding Fathers. We called it the bicentennial sofa. We were a few years ahead of ourselves, but Grandpa said the name was right and fitting, since the sofa looked as if George Washington had used it to cross the Delaware.

    The worst thing about life at Grandpa’s house was the noise, a round-the-clock din of cursing and crying and fighting and Uncle Charlie