The Tender Bar (48 page)

The men stopped talking and gazed in wonder at their condiment solar system. The only sounds were a dry cough, a match being struck, Ella Fitzgerald scatting on the stereo, and for a split second I thought I could actually feel Publicans plowing through the cosmos.

I needed the unpredictability of Publicans. One night a famous actor wandered in. His mother lived nearby and he was home for a visit. None of us could stop staring. The Actor had starred in classic films with the best leading men of his generation, and here he was, at Publicans, asking for a glass of buttermilk. He told Uncle Charlie that he always coated his stomach with buttermilk before getting down to some serious drinking. As the night wore on Uncle Charlie teased The Actor about his buttermilk, saying he was the least macho of all the leading men with whom he’d worked. The Actor didn’t understand Uncle Charlie’s sense of humor. His feelings were hurt. He climbed onto the bar and did military push-ups until Uncle Charlie took it all back and conceded that The Actor was as manly as any man alive.

I needed the quiet times at Publicans. Some of my fondest memories are those dreary, rainy Sunday afternoons, just after my tryout, the barroom empty, a few people having brunch in the back. I’d eat a plate of eggs and read the book review while Mapes, the Sunday bartender, rinsed glasses in soapy water. I’d feel as if I’d walked into my favorite Hopper painting,
Nighthawks
. Mapes even resembled the birdlike soda jerk, stooped over his sink. Eventually Mapes would unfold the stepstool and polish the brass letters that spelled out “Publicans” above the bar, and I’d watch him, envying his concentration. If only I could concentrate on words the way you concentrate on those brass letters, I’d tell Mapes. He’d nod. It wasn’t until years later that I realized Mapes never said a single word to me.

On one of those quiet Sunday afternoons I heard someone behind me shout, “Junior!” I turned to see Jimbo, the laid-back waiter with the cherubic face, just home from college. Where did Jimbo get the idea to call me Junior? No one but Steve called me Junior. Then I remembered that Steve was like a father to Jimbo, whose parents divorced when he was young. Jimbo must have overheard Steve call me Junior, and whatever Steve said, Jimbo parroted. I looked at him threateningly—what else could I do? He was too big to deck. He looked like a young Babe Ruth.

He leaned sideways to see the book I was reading. “
A Fan’s Notes
?” he said. “What’s that about?”

Maybe it was because he’d called me Junior, or maybe it was because I’d had one too many of Mapes’s potent Bloody Marys, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I let fly at Jimbo. “I hate that question,” I said. “I hate when people ask what a book is about. People who read for
plot,
people who suck out the story like the cream filling in an Oreo, should stick to comic strips and soap operas. What’s it about? Every book worth a damn is about emotions and love and death and pain. It’s about words
.
It’s about a man dealing with life. Okay?”

Mapes looked at Jimbo, looked at me, shook his head.

Jimbo had worked at Publicans since he was fourteen. He’d grown up playing hide-and-seek with Steve’s son, Larry, in the tunnels below the bar. “Like Huck and Tom in the caves,” he often said proudly. Jimbo had even met McGraw, his best friend all through high school, at a pizza party in Publicans after one of their baseball games. He might have been the only young man in town who loved the bar more than I. He got the same things from it, the same kinds of emotional nourishment from Steve and the men. I’d been trying to write about the bar? Jimbo
was
the bar. He was as good and loyal a soul as you could hope to find there. Remembering all this, realizing that Jimbo was a son of Publicans, and therefore my brother, I felt rotten for berating him. I apologized.

Forget it, he said, and he meant it. That was one of the great things about Jimbo.

Dalton walked in. He was waving a first edition of
The Ginger Man,
which he’d borrowed from Uncle Charlie. “‘Today a rare sun of spring,’” he shouted in my ear. “That’s the opening line of this novel. That’s poetry, Asshole. That’s the English goddamn language. I love you, Asshole, but honestly, you’ll never write a sentence that good.”

“No argument here,” I said.

“Dude!” Jimbo said to Dalton reproachfully. “That’s harsh.”

I looked at Jimbo. Not one minute earlier I’d been berating him, and now he was defending me. That was another one of the great things about Jimbo.

Uncle Charlie arrived. He hopped behind the bar, relieving Mapes, and jumped headlong into our literary salon
.
He cited his favorite parts of
The Ginger Man,
and soon we were trading lines and passages from our favorite writers, Kerouac and Mailer and Hammett. Someone mentioned the cult classic
Nightwork,
by Irwin Shaw. Someone compared it to a short story by Melville.

“Melville!” Uncle Charlie said. “Oh he’s the best.
Billy Budd.
Ever read that one? See, Billy Budd is Christlike.” Uncle Charlie rolled his eyes skyward and spread his arms as if being crucified. “Billy goes willingly to the gallows because he knows he made a mistake. Follow? He killed Claggart by mistake and he must pay. ‘God bless Captain Vere,’ that’s what Billy says when they put his neck in the noose, because rules must be obeyed. Without rules you have anarchy. Billy made a mistake and pays with his life—pays willingly, because he believes in the rules, even though he broke them. You follow?”

“I think we read that one in high school,” Jimbo said. “Remind me—what’s it about?”

He shot an elbow to my ribs. I laughed. Then I spotted Bob the Cop beside the cigarette machine. He had a menacing look on his face, and I knew he must have come into the bar when I wasn’t looking, and he must have heard me berating Jimbo. And now he must have thought me a jackass.

The very next night Bob the Cop sought me out at the bar. He pulled me into the corner and practically pushed me up against the cigarette machine. I understood all at once how it would feel to be busted by Bob the Cop. “I was listening to you last night,” he said. “Talking about books.”

“Yeah. I wasn’t in the best mood. I should have cut Jimbo some slack but—”

“I didn’t go to college. You know. I went into the police academy right after high school. My father was a cop, my grandfather, so what else was I going to do, right? I don’t think about it much, but whenever I hear you guys talking about books I feel—I don’t know. Like I’m missing out.”

I started to apologize, but he held up his palm. Bob the Traffic Cop.

“I’m a cop,” he said. “I am what I am. I’m not kidding myself. But sometimes I think there must be more.
I
must be more. You notice how everyone always calls me Bob the Cop? Never Bob the Father, Bob the Fisherman. And sure as shit never Bob the Bookworm. It irks me. No one ever calls you J.R. the Copyboy.”

“Thank God for small mercies,” I said.

“Anyway,” Bob the Cop said, “I was thinking. I remembered lugging all those books up to your apartment when I helped you move, and I was just wondering if maybe—you know.” I shook my head. I didn’t know. “I was wondering,” he said haltingly, “if you might have any books you’re not using.”

My first thought was that, technically, I wasn’t using any of my books. I saw that Bob the Cop thought of books as tools. He thought of most things as tools. Even his drinks were tools: Screwdrivers and Rusty Nails. I wanted to explain that books didn’t have the same explicit purpose as tools, that there wasn’t a clear difference between when books were in use and when they weren’t. I took pleasure from their presence, enjoyed seeing them lined up on my shelves and floors. They were the only redeeming feature of my squalid apartment. My books kept me company, cheered me up. Furthermore, because every book I’d owned as a boy was mildewed from the basement or missing its front cover, I was fussy about my books. I didn’t write in the margins or dog-ear the pages, and I never loaned them, especially not the first editions given to me by the editors of the
Times Book Review
when I did my little author interviews. But I couldn’t say any of this to Bob the Cop because it would have sounded ungenerous, so I told him that he was welcome to stop by the next day and help himself to whatever books I wasn’t using.

Then I did a bad thing. I selected a painfully dense 842-page analysis of the Middle East, and a hopelessly dull 785-page history of explorers at the North Pole, and the following morning, when Bob the Cop came barging through my door (like McGraw, he never knocked—a big man’s prerogative) I told him I’d taken the liberty of choosing two books he was sure to enjoy. I knew that if I gave Bob the Cop those enormous, impenetrable tomes, he’d never ask for more.

Together the books weighed as much as a frozen turkey, and when I placed them on Bob the Cop’s outstretched hands he gave me a look of such gratitude and tenderness that I wanted to tell him to wait, I was only kidding, I’d find him some books he’d actually enjoy, books by London and Hemingway and Shaw. Here, take
Nightwork
. Take Nick Adams. Take them all, my friend. But it was too late. With both unreadable books wedged under his massive arm Bob the Cop was already skipping down the stairs.

I didn’t see Bob the Cop at Publicans for two weeks and I knew there could be only one explanation. He was cracking his head on those books. The man had reached out to me for help in educating himself, like Helen Keller or Booker T. Washington, and I’d sabotaged him. Why hadn’t I just bludgeoned him to death with the books and been done with it?

A heavy snowstorm shut down New York. Most stores and offices were closed. Publicans, however, was mobbed. Though the roads were impassable, whole families came to the bar on sleds, and stayed most of the night, because they had no lights or heat at home. I was standing at the bar, trying to shed the chill of my apartment, a long scarf wrapped around my neck, when Wheelchair Eddie arrived. “‘Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’,’” Colt sang. Colt always sang the theme from
Rawhide
when Wheelchair Eddie rolled his wheelchair through the barroom, and Wheelchair Eddie always hated it, which only made Colt sing more lustily. I laughed, then remembered that Wheelchair Eddie lived across the street from Bob the Cop. I asked if he’d seen his neighbor recently. “Yeah,” he said. “I just seen him. He’s out in his yard making one of them ice huts.”

“Say again?”

“One of them huts that them mooks live in at the North Pole.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I can’t think of the word—you know them people who live at the North Pole?”

“Eskimos?”

“Yeah! And what do you call them huts they live in?”

“Igloos?”

“Right! He’s building one of them igloo thingamajigs that them Eskimooks live in.”

“In his front yard?”

I was about to trudge downhill and investigate when Bob the Cop himself walked in. He took off his mittens, whapped them on the bar and ordered a drink.

I sidled up to him. “Wheelchair Eddie says you’ve been building an igloo?” I said.

He sniffed and blew into his fist. “Got the idea from that book you gave me,” he said.

“There were igloo blueprints in that book?”

“The book talks about all those British pansies who explored the North Pole in the 1800s and how they kept dropping like flies because they refused to do like the Eskimos did. The British treated the North Pole like it was Piccadilly Circus, and didn’t adapt to the, what do you call, environment. If they had learned to build an igloo, they wouldn’t have died. Dumb fucks.”

“So you read between the lines and figured out how to build an igloo and decided to give it a try?”

“I tell you, J.R., I cannot thank you enough for loaning me that book. It had me on the edge of my seat.”

“It—did?”

“I couldn’t put it down. That’s why I ain’t been around. I’ve been
reading.
”

“And the Middle East history?”

“Read that one first.”

He gave me a brief synopsis of the Palestinian crisis.

“I’m glad you weren’t inspired to build a refugee camp in your yard,” I said. “You finished
both
books? Sixteen hundred pages? In two weeks?”

Bob the Cop shrugged. No big deal. From that moment on I pledged to myself that Bob the Cop was welcome to whatever books I wasn’t using.

Bob the Cop was already my best friend at the bar, but the birth that winter of our two-man book club transformed our friendship. We began spending more time together outside the bar. He’d teach me things—how to change a tire, bait a hook, drink a Rusty Nail, a hellish concoction of scotch and Drambuie—and I’d reciprocate by teaching him to rewrite his police reports in clearer prose. It was not an even exchange. Our writing sessions benefited me far more than they did Bob the Cop. I never could convince him that it was better to write “The man said” rather than “The perpetrator stated.” And yet it always gave me pause when I heard myself telling Bob the Cop that it wasn’t such a good idea to lard his reports with big words.

When we both had the day off, Bob the Cop and I would take his vintage twenty-foot Penn Yan boat to the city. He’d loan me one of his NYPD jackets for warmth, and we’d drift around the Statue of Liberty, fishing for fluke, or float along South Street Seaport. I would stand in the prow of his boat, feeling the spray on my face, watching clouds snag themselves on the tops of the twin towers. Late in the day we’d dock at Pier 17 to get a sandwich or an ice cream. We’d always peek inside Publicans on the Pier, and it was always empty. Bob the Cop would shake his big head at the long row of vacant barstools. “Steve’s got trouble,” he’d say. “Trouble,” I’d say, feeling for Steve, but thinking of Sidney, as I always did when I heard that word.