Along with sanctuary, Steve provided nightly lessons in democracy, or the
special plurality of alcohol. Standing in the middle of his barroom, you could
watch men and women from all strata of society educating and abusing one
another. You could hear the poorest man in town discussing "market
volatility" with the president of the New York Stock Exchange, or the local
librarian lecturing a New York Yankees Hall of Famer about the wisdom of
choking up on the bat. You could hear a feebleminded porter say something so
off-the-wall, and yet so wise, that a college philosophy professor would jot
it on a napkin and tuck it in his pocket. You could hear bartenders—in
between making bets and mixing Pink Squirrels--talk like philosopher kings.
Steve believed the corner bar to be the most egalitarian of all American
gathering places, and he knew that Americans have always venerated their bars,
saloons, taverns, and "gin mills," one of his favorite expressions. He
knew that Americans invest their bars with meaning and turn to them for
everything from glamour to succor, and above all for relief from that scourge
of modern life--loneliness. He didn't know that the Puritans, upon landing in
the New World, built a bar even before they built a church. He didn't know
that American bars descend directly from the medieval inns of Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales, which descended from the Saxon alehouses, which descended
from the tabernae along the roads of ancient Rome. Steve's bar could trace its
lineage all the way back to the painted caves of Western Europe where Stone
Age elders initiated young boys and girls into the ways of the tribe nearly
fifteen thousand years ago. Though Steve didn't know these things, he sensed
them in his blood and enacted them in everything he did. More than most men,
Steve appreciated the importance of place, and on the cornerstone of this
principle he was able to build a bar so strange and shrewd and beloved and
wondrously in tune with its customers, that it came to be known well beyond
Manhasset.
My hometown was famous for two things—lacrosse and liquor. Year in, year
out, Manhasset produced a disproportionate number of superb lacrosse players
and a still-greater number of distended livers. Some people also knew
Manhasset as the backdrop for The Great Gatsby. While composing portions of
his masterpiece, F. Scott Fitzgerald sat on a breezy veranda in Great Neck and
gazed across Manhasset Bay at our town, which he turned into the fictional
East Egg, a historic distinction that gave our bowling alley and pizzeria a
certain archaeological grandeur. We strode each day across Fitzgerald's
abandoned stage set. We romanced one another among his ruins. It was a
kick—an honor. But like Steve's bar it was merely an offshoot of Manhasset's
famous fondness for drink. Anyone familiar with Manhasset understood why
liquor surged through Fitzgerald's novel like the Mississippi across a
floodplain. Men and women throwing raucous parties and boozing until they
blacked out or ran someone down with their car? Sounded to us like a typical
Tuesday night in Manhasset.
Manhasset, site of the largest liquor store in New York State, was the only
town on Long Island with a cocktail named after it (a Manhasset is a
Manhattan, with more alcohol). The town's half-mile-long main drag, Plandome
Road, was every drinker's street of dreams—bar after bar after bar. Many in
Manhasset likened Plandome Road to a mythical country lane in Ireland, a
gently winding procession of men and women brimming with whiskey and good
cheer. Bars on Plandome Road were as numerous as stars on Hollywood's Walk of
Fame, and we took a stubborn, eccentric pride in their number. When one man
torched his bar on Plandome Road to collect the insurance, cops found him in
another bar on Plandome Road and told him he was wanted for questioning. The
man put a hand over his heart like a priest accused of burning a cross. "How
could I," he asked, "how could anyone—burn down a bar?"
From The Tender Bar by
J.R. Moehringer. Copyright J.R. Moehringer 2005. All rights reserved. No
part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the
publisher.
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
read more
Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
read more
Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
read more
British Parliament asks Amazon to clarify why it pays $9 million in income tax on $23 billion of UK sales.(May 20 2013) Amazon will be called back to give further evidence to members of the British Parliament "to clarify how its activities in the U.K. justify its low corporate...
Full Story
