The Tender Bar (45 page)

Each night I’d overhear at least one line that would seem an ideal opening or ending for a chapter. “I’m not overwhelmed,” a man told his girlfriend. “Right,” she said dryly, “you’re just the right amount of whelmed.”

“So did you fuck her?” Uncle Charlie asked a man. “No way, Goose,” the man said. “Honest—she fucked me.”

I once heard two women talking about their boyfriends. “He told me I’m a triple threat,” the first woman said. “What does that mean?” the second woman asked. “It’s some kinda sports term,” the first woman said. “He told me I’m really smart, and I have great tits.” The second woman counted on her fingertips, then screamed with laughter.

After I stopped trying at the
Times,
I began holdingmyself to a strict regimen, postponing my nightly trip to Publicans until after I’d spent at least one hour making a stab at my novel about Publicans. Every attempt, however, was doomed, because I didn’t understand why I wanted to write about Publicans, why I loved Publicans. I was afraid to understand, and so I was doing little more than rearranging words on the page, an exercise ultimately as meaningless as the Wordy Gurdy.

When the meaninglessness became obvious I would sit and stare at the wall above my desk, where I’d pinned index cards with favorite passages from Cheever and Hemingway and Fitzgerald. I’d grow angry with Fitzgerald. Bad enough that he’d set an unreachable standard of perfection, that he’d already written the Greatest American Novel, but did he have to set it in my hometown? I’d think about my favorite novels—
The Great Gatsby, David Copperfield, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye
—and their brilliance would paralyze me. I never perceived the things they had in common, the thing that drew me to them in the first place: Each male narrator mentions his father in the first few pages. In
Gatsby,
the first sentence. That is where a troubled male narrator usually begins, where I might have begun.

Of course, had I been trying for a debilitating case of writer’s block, the conditions above Louie the Greek’s couldn’t have been better—hot, loud, the walls vibrating with every train pulling into and out of the station, the air vibrating with the aroma of pickles, bacon fat, fried potatoes and cheese. But I wouldn’t have fared any better at a secluded writer’s colony in the woods, because I was the ideal candidate for writer’s block. All the classic defects converged in me—inexperience, impatience, perfectionism, confusion, fear. Above all I suffered from a naïve view that writing should be easy. I thought words were supposed to come unbidden. The idea that errors were stepping-stones to truth never once occurred to me, because I’d absorbed the ethos of the
Times,
that errors were nasty little things to be avoided, and misapplied that ethos to the novel I was attempting. When I wrote something wrong I always took it to mean that something was wrong with me, and when something was wrong with me I lost my nerve, my focus, and my will.

What seems most remarkable in retrospect is how many pages I produced, how many drafts I finished, how hard I tried before I stopped. It wasn’t like me to be so persistent and it showed how much the bar mesmerized me, how strong was my compulsion to describe it. Night after night I sat at my desk above Louie the Greek’s, trying to write about the voices of the bar, the exhilarating laughter of men and women huddled together in a place they felt safe. I tried to write about the faces within clouds of smoke, how they often looked like ghosts in a foggy hereafter, and the scintillating talk, which could jump from horse racing to politics to fashion to astrology to baseball to historic love affairs, all in the span of one beer. I tried to write about Steve’s Cheshire smile, Uncle Charlie’s head, Joey D’s mouse, Cager’s visor, Fast Eddy’s way of parachuting onto a stool. I tried to write about the urinals overflowing with money, and the time I fell asleep in the men’s room and someone woke me by saying, “Hey! This room’s for crappin’, not nappin’.” I tried to write about the time Smelly brandished a knife at the legendary running back Jim Brown. No matter what I did—naming the character Stinky, changing the weapon from a knife to a lobster fork—the story made Smelly sound homicidal, rather than laughably ill-tempered.

I spent a fair portion of 1988 trying to write about Cager fleecing Fast Eddy. The whole “caper,” as Bob the Cop liked to call it, began in the late seventies or early eighties, when “Strangers in the Night” came on the stereo in the bar. “Great song,” Fast Eddy said, snapping his fingers. “Guess that’s why it won the Oscar.” Cager said, “‘Strangers in the Night’ never won an Oscar.” They bet a hundred dollars, dug out the almanac and found that Cager was right. Years passed. The song came on the stereo again one night and Fast Eddy said, “Great song, guess that’s why it won the Oscar.” Cager laughed. Surely Fast Eddy was joking. Seeing that Fast Eddy was serious, Cager proposed a bet of several hundred dollars. Fast Eddy lost again, and paid. More years passed. Cager buttonholed Uncle Charlie and told him he was behind with the bookies and needed to get even in one fell swoop. Fast Eddy was the swoop. “Fast Eddy has a ‘black hole’ on ‘Strangers,’” Cager said, “so I’m going for the big score. Tonight, when he comes in, you put ‘Strangers’ on, I’ll take it from there, and later I’ll give you a slice.” But Uncle Charlie wouldn’t do it. He didn’t want to get mixed up in anything dishonest, he said. Pretty highfalutin talk, Cager countered, for a man who treats Publicans as his own personal betting parlor. Later, when Fast Eddy arrived, Uncle Charlie looked at Cager. Cager looked at Uncle Charlie. Fast Eddy looked at Uncle Charlie. Uncle Charlie served Fast Eddy a beer and started to hum. Scooby dooby doo. “‘Strangers in the Night,’” Fast Eddy said, snapping his fingers. “Great song. Guess that’s why it won the Oscar.” Cager was masterly. He teased Fast Eddy, mocked him, proclaimed to the bar that Fast Eddy didn’t know oo-gatz about music, until Fast Eddy had no choice but to insist on a bet sizable enough to salvage his manhood. Neither man ever told anyone how much they bet, but it was a boodle, and when Fast Eddy lost and reached for his checkbook, something clicked. The black hole in his brain flew open and closed like a camera shutter. He didn’t remember losing the same bet twice before, but he did remember Uncle Charlie singing, and it wasn’t “What Kind of Fool Am I?” Fast Eddy wondered what kind of fool he’d been.

In converting this story to fiction I’d changed the names. Cager was Killer, Fast Eddy was Speedy Eduardo, Uncle Charlie was Uncle Butchie. I’d made Cager a veteran of the Korean War, Fast Eddy an ex-con who may or may not have killed his wife, Agnes, whose name I changed to Delilah. I made the song “Blue Velvet” and the wager a hundred thousand dollars. The story didn’t ring true, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why.

While I was toiling on yet another draft of “Strangers in the Bar,” my phone rang. It was DePietro. “Get down here!” he yelled above the sound of two hundred voices. “The place is crawling with women and I’ve got primo real estate. Boardwalk and Park Place!” He was referring to the two most coveted barstools, just inside the Plandome Road door, which offered clear views of everyone who came in the front, plus the best chance of getting the bartender’s attention.

“Can’t,” I said. “I’m writing.”

“Writing? The fuck about?”

“The bar.”

“So? Come down and do some research. Boardwalk and Park Place.”

“Can’t.”

He hung up.

A short time later I heard Louie the Greek shut off the griddle. A low honk, followed by a soft hiss. I went to the window and smoked a cigarette. A light rain was falling. I opened the window and smelled the rain, or tried to above Louie’s Dumpsters. Seagulls dove into the Dumpsters. Louie came out the back door and shooed them away. The moment Louie went back inside the seagulls returned. Persistence, I thought. Seagulls have it—I don’t. I shut off my computer. A low honk, a soft hiss.

I walked to Publicans, my chapter in a folder tucked under my arm, and consoled myself the whole way with the idea that every writer spends as much time at bars as at his writing desk. Drinking and writing go together like scotch and soda, I assured myself as I walked through the front door. DePietro was there, as promised, atop Boardwalk, and beside him, seated atop Park Place, was Uncle Charlie. “My beautiful nephew,” he said, kissing me on the cheek. He’d had a couple. Fast Eddy was there, and beside him was his wife, Agnes, who waited tables for Louie the Greek. She was drinking her usual Irish coffee. (She never suspected that the bartenders made her Irish coffees with decaf, “to inhibit her inherent loquaciousness,” Uncle Charlie said.) Fast Eddy was telling about the time he’d pitted Agnes against Uncle Charlie in a footrace. Fast Eddy had boasted that Agnes could run circles around Uncle Charlie, and Uncle Charlie had promised to put a bullet in his head if he couldn’t beat a “chain-smoking hash slinger,” so they tromped to the cinder track at the high school with half the bar in tow. Agnes, draped in towels like a prizefighter, stomped out a cigarette seconds before Fast Eddy fired his starter’s pistol. (Why Fast Eddy had a starter’s pistol with him, no one thought to ask.) Uncle Charlie beat Agnes but paid a steep price. He lay in the grass, puking, and wasn’t right for days thereafter.

I thought that story might be easier to write than “Strangers.” I made a note.

Peter the bartender saw me writing on a napkin. Of all the bartenders at Publicans, Peter was the kindest. Ten years older than I, Peter always looked at me with a sort of wince, like a goodhearted older brother who knew I’d done something wrong but hadn’t yet figured out what. He had a soft voice, soft brown eyes, soft brown hair, but a hard inner core of something—honesty? sincerity?—that made people lean in close when he talked. No matter how happy he was—and I often saw Peter laughing himself sick—there was always an air of sadness about him. When he looked you full in the eye, even if he was smiling, you could hear him thinking,
It’s all fucked, kid. We don’t need to go into it right now, we don’t need to hash out the details, but I’m not going to lie to you about it either—it’s all fucked.
In a bar full of loud and charismatic men, Peter was the quiet one, which made his charisma the most compelling.

“What’s that you’re writing?” he asked, pouring me a scotch.

“Notes,” I said.

“What for?”

“Nothing. Stuff about the bar.”

He let it go. We talked instead about his new job on Wall Street, which he’d found through a customer at Publicans. I was happy for him, but sad that one of my favorite bartenders was now working less. He was selling bonds full-time, tending bar only part-time, mostly Saturday nights, to pick up a few extra bucks for his family. His growing family. His wife, he told me, was pregnant. “Yeah,” he said shyly, “we found out it works.”

“You’re going to be a father?” I said. “Congratulations.”

I bought him a drink.

“So you’re writing about this joint?” he said, pointing to my folder. “May I?”

We traded my chapter for a scotch.
“Barflies and Silk Panties?”
he said. “Catchy title.”

“Colt was the inspiration.”

“Colt wears silk panties?”

“No! Jesus, I mean, I don’t know.”

I watched Peter read, analyzing every twitch in his face, every flick of his eyebrows. When he’d finished he handed me the pages and leaned on the bar. He winced, and looked a little sadder than usual. “It’s not good,” he said. “But there’s something there.”

I told Peter that ideas and themes swirled around my head the way smells from Louie’s griddle swirled around my apartment, impossible to ignore, impossible to identify. I told him I was giving up.

“That would be a mistake,” he said.

“Why?”

I gave him an opening to say I had talent. He didn’t. He said simply, “Because giving up is always a mistake.”

“What have you got there?” Uncle Charlie asked.

“Did you know your nephew is writing about Publicans?” Peter said.

“I thought everything we said in here was off the record,” Uncle Charlie growled, joking, kind of.

“Kid’s a scribbler,” Colt said. “I blame those damned Wordy Gurdys.”

“Hand it down,” Uncle Charlie said.

“Yeah, let’s have a look,” Bob the Cop said.

Peter handed Uncle Charlie my pages, and as Uncle Charlie finished reading one he would pass it to Bob the Cop, who would hand it to Cager, and so on.

“I’m missing page six,” Cager said.

“Who’s got page nine?” Uncle Charlie called out.

“I do,” Peter said. “Hold your horses.”

Watching the men form a bucket brigade and pass my pages up and down the bar, I made an important decision. The men of Publicans would be my new editors. If the editors at the
Times
were going to deemphasize me, I would emphasize the bar. Every Saturday night I would submit my stuff to Peter and the men. I would set my own deadline, start my own training program.

The decision marked a change in my relationship to the bar, and it brought about a change in the tenor of the bar itself. It had always been true that we brought our stories together at Publicans and shared them, shuffled them, causing a transference of experience, so that in the morning you’d wake feeling momentarily as if you’d fought in ’Nam or fished floaters out of the harbor or owed the mob a hundred grand. But now we shuffled and shared
my
versions of everyone’s story, and storytelling—the tricks, the risks and rewards—became the bar’s chief topic that summer. The men were exacting readers, and they demanded to be entertained. Words and plots had to be sharp enough, simple enough, to penetrate the penumbra of whatever they were drinking—invaluable training for a young writer. If they weren’t as knowledgeable about the rules of writing as the editors at the
Times,
at least they never belittled me for my malapropisms and misspellings.