Excerpt of The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer
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Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides
-Dylan Thomas, "Light breaks where no sun shines"
Prologue
ONE OF MANY
We went there for everything we needed. we went there when thirsty, of
course, and when hungry, and when dead tired. We went there when happy, to
celebrate, and when sad, to sulk. We went there after weddings and funerals,
for something to settle our nerves, and always for a shot of courage just
before. We went there when we didn't know what we needed, hoping someone might
tell us. We went there when looking for love, or sex, or trouble, or for
someone who had gone missing, because sooner or later everyone turned up
there. Most of all we went there when we needed to be found.
My personal list of needs was long. An only child, abandoned by my father,
I needed a family, a home, and men. Especially men. I needed men as mentors,
heroes, role models, and as a kind of masculine counterweight to my mother,
grandmother, aunt and five female cousins with whom I lived. The bar provided
me with all the men I needed, and one or two men who were the last thing I
needed.
Long before it legally served me, the bar saved me. It restored my faith
when I was a boy, tended me as a teenager, and when I was a young man the bar
embraced me. While I fear that we're drawn to what abandons us, and to what
seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we're defined by what
embraces us. Naturally I embraced the bar right back, until one night the bar
turned me away, and in that final abandonment the bar saved my life.
There had always been a bar on that corner, by one name or another, since
the beginning of time, or the end of Prohibition, which were the same thing in
my hard-drinking hometown—Manhasset, Long Island. In the 1930s the bar was a
stop-off for movie stars on their way to the nearby yacht clubs and posh ocean
resorts. In the 1940s the bar was a haven for soldiers coming home from the
wars. In the 1950s the bar was a lounge for greasers and their poodle-skirted
girlfriends. But the bar didn't become a landmark, a patch of hallowed ground,
until 1970, when Steve bought the place and renamed it Dickens. Above the door
Steve hung a silhouette of Charles Dickens, and below the silhouette he
spelled out the name in Old English lettering: dickens. Such a blatant display
of Anglophilia didn't sit well with every Kevin Flynn and Michael Gallagher in
Manhasset. They let it slide only because they so thoroughly approved of
Steve's Cardinal Rule of the Barroom: Every third drink free. Also, it helped
that Steve hired seven or eight members of the O'Malley clan to bus his
tables, and that he took pains to make Dickens look as though it had been
shipped brick by brick from County Donegal.
Steve intended his bar to look like a European public house, but to feel
quintessentially American, an honest-to-god house for the public. His public.
In the heart of Manhasset, a pastoral suburb of eight thousand people,
seventeen miles southeast of Manhattan, Steve wanted to create a sanctuary
where his neighbors and friends and fellow drinkers, and especially his
high-school buddies coming home from Vietnam, could savor a feeling of safety
and return. In every venture Steve was confident of success—confidence was
his most attractive quality and his tragic flaw—but with Dickens he
surpassed his greatest expectations. Manhasset quickly came to see Steve's bar
as the bar. Just as we said The City to mean New York City, and The Street to
mean Wall Street, we always said The Bar, presumptively, and there was never
any confusion about which bar we meant. Then, imperceptibly, Dickens became
something more than The Bar. It became The Place, the preferred shelter from
all life's storms. In 1979, when the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island
melted down and fear of apocalypse swept the Northeast, many Manhassetites
phoned Steve to reserve space in the airtight basement below his bar. Of
course everyone had their own basements. But there was just something about
Dickens. People thought of it first whenever doomsday loomed.
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.
