Excerpt of The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer
(Page 4 of 5)
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Everyone has a holy place, a refuge, where their heart is purer, their mind
clearer, where they feel closer to God or love or truth or whatever it is they
happen to worship. For better or worse my holy place was Steve's bar. And
because I found it in my youth, the bar was that much more sacred, its image
clouded by that special reverence children accord those places where they feel
safe. Others might feel this way about a classroom or playground, a theater or
church, a laboratory or library or stadium. Even a home. But none of these
places claimed me. We exalt what is at hand. Had I grown up beside a river or
an ocean, some natural avenue of self-discovery and escape, I might have
mythologized it. Instead I grew up 142 steps from a glorious old American
tavern, and that has made all the difference.
I didn't spend every waking minute in the bar. I went into the world,
worked and failed, fell in love, played the fool, had my heart broken and my
threshold tested. But because of Steve's bar each rite of passage felt linked
to the last, and the next, as did each person I met. For the first twenty-five
years of my life everyone I knew either sent me to the bar, drove me to the
bar, accompanied me to the bar, rescued me from the bar, or was in the bar
when I arrived, as if waiting for me since the day I was born. Among this last
group were Steve and the men.
I used to say I'd found in Steve's bar the fathers I needed, but this
wasn't quite right. At some point the bar itself became my father, its dozens
of men melding into one enormous male eye looking over my shoulder, providing
that needed alternative to my mother, that Y chromosome to her X. My mother
didn't know she was competing with the men of the bar, and the men didn't know
they were vying with her. They all assumed that they were on the same page,
because they all shared one antiquated idea about manhood. My mother and the
men believed that being a good man is an art, and being a bad man is a
tragedy, for the world as much as for those who depend on the tragic man in
question. Though my mother first introduced me to this idea, Steve's bar was
where I saw its truth demonstrated daily. Steve's bar attracted all kinds of
women, a stunning array, but as a boy I noticed only its improbable assortment
of good and bad men. Wandering freely among this unlikely fraternity of
alphas, listening to the stories of the soldiers and ballplayers, poets and
cops, millionaires and bookies, actors and crooks who leaned nightly against
Steve's bar, I heard them say again and again that the differences among them
were great, but the reasons they had come to be so different were slight.
A lesson, a gesture, a story, a philosophy, an attitude—I took something
from every man in Steve's bar. I was a master at "identity theft" when
that crime was more benign. I became sarcastic like Cager, melodramatic like
Uncle Charlie, a roughneck like Joey D. I strived to be solid like Bob the
Cop, cool like Colt, and to rationalize my rage by telling myself that it was
no worse than the righteous wrath of Smelly. Eventually I applied the mimicry
I'd learned at Dickens to those I met outside the bar—friends, lovers,
parents, bosses, even strangers. The bar fostered in me the habit of turning
each person who crossed my path into a mentor, or a character, and I credit
the bar, and blame it, for my becoming a reflection, or a refraction, of them
all.
Every regular at Steve's bar was fond of metaphors. One old bourbon drinker
told me that a man's life is all a matter of mountains and caves—mountains
we must climb, caves 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.
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.
