The Tender Bar

The Tender Bar Read Free Page B

Book: The Tender Bar Read Free
Author: J. R. Moehringer
Tags: General, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography
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bellowing that he was trying to sleep and Aunt Ruth screaming at her six kids in the nerve-shredding key of a seagull. Just beneath this cacophony was a steady percussion, faint at first, louder as you became more aware of it, like the heartbeat deep inside the House of Usher. In the House of Grandpa the heartbeat was supplied by the screen door opening and closing all day long as people came and went
—squeak bang, squeak bang—
and also by the peculiar thudding way that everyone in my family walked, on their heels, like storm troopers on stilts. Between the screaming and the screen door, the fighting and the stomping feet, by dusk you’d be barking and twitching more than the dog, who ran off every chance she got. But dusk was the crescendo, the loudest and most tension-filled hour of the day, because dusk was dinnertime.

    Seated around the lopsided dining room table, we’d all talk at once, trying to distract ourselves from the food. Grandma couldn’t cook, and Grandpa gave her almost no money for groceries, so what came out of that kitchen in chipped serving bowls was both toxic and comical. To make what she called “spaghetti and meatballs,” Grandma would boil a box of pasta until it was glue, saturate it with Campbell’s cream of tomato soup, then top it with chunks of raw hot dog. Salt and pepper to taste. What actually brought on the indigestion, though, was Grandpa. A loner, a misanthrope, a curmudgeon with a stutter, he found himself each night at the head of a table with twelve uninvited guests, counting the dog. A Shanty Irish reenactment of the Last Supper. As he looked us up and down we could hear him thinking,
Each of you has betrayed me tonight
. To his credit Grandpa never turned anyone away. But he never made anyone feel welcome either, and he often wished aloud that we’d all just “clear the hell out.”

    My mother and I would have left, gladly, but we had nowhere else to go. She made very little money, and she got none from my father, who wanted no part of his wife and only child. He was a hard case, my father, an unstable mix of charm and rage, and my mother had no choice but to leave him when I was seven months old. He retaliated by disappearing, and withholding all help.

    Because I was so young when he disappeared, I didn’t know what my father looked like. I only knew what he sounded like, and this I knew too well. A popular rock ’n’ roll disc jockey, my father would speak each day into a large microphone somewhere in New York City, and his plummy baritone would fly down the Hudson River, tack across Manhasset Bay, zoom up Plandome Road and burst a millisecond later from the olive green radio on Grandpa’s kitchen table. My father’s voice was so deep, so ominous, it made my ribs vibrate and the utensils tremble.

    Adults in Grandpa’s house would try to protect me from my father by pretending he didn’t exist. (Grandma wouldn’t even refer to him by name—Johnny Michaels—but simply called him The Voice.) They would lunge for the dial whenever they heard my father and sometimes hide the radio altogether, which made me wail in protest. Surrounded by women, and two remote men, I saw The Voice as my only connection to the masculine world. Moreover it was my only means of drowning out all the other hateful voices in Grandpa’s house. The Voice, hosting a party every night in the same olive green box as Stevie Wonder and Van Morrison and the Beatles, was the antidote to all the discord around me. When Grandma and Grandpa went to war over the grocery money, when Aunt Ruth threw something against the wall in anger, I’d press my ear close to the radio and The Voice would tell me something funny or play me a song by Peppermint Rainbow. I listened so ardently to The Voice, achieved such mastery at shutting out other voices, that I became a prodigy at selective listening, which I thought was a gift, until it proved to be a curse. Life is all a matter of choosing which voices to tune

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