The Tender Bar (18 page)

He shoved the sheet at me. I looked it over and remembered Uncle Charlie’s many rules. Green Bay never loses at home in December. Kansas City can’t cover a double-digit spread on the road. Washington’s quarterback likes to drink and usually isn’t at his best if the kickoff is early. I filled out the sheet and when my picks won Winston threw the fifty-dollar prize money at me. “Beginner’s luck,” he said, and I heard him say something nastier under his breath as I lateraled the money to my mother.

Tension ultimately ran so high between me and Winston that I would flee his house, take refuge at a playground up the street, where I would shoot baskets for hours. Invariably Winston would come find me, trailing an air of martyrdom, clearly dispatched by my mother. Basketball bored him almost as much as I did. Football was his game, he said, though he considered placekicking the centerpiece of the sport. While we played H-O-R-S-E he’d regale me with stories of his days as a kicker in college, “winning games single-handedly with my foot.” He considered this phrase the height of wit.

I don’t remember what finally made Winston snap. He may have noticed me smothering another yawn while he talked about placekicking. He may have felt humiliated after heaving another brick against the rim and losing at H-O-R-S-E yet again. “Let’s you and me play a new game,” he said, bouncing the basketball so hard that it made a scary twanging noise. “Bas-
kick
-ball.” He had me balance the ball on my toe while he counted ten steps backward and stuck his wet finger in the wind. Then he sprinted toward me and booted my basketball high over the fence, into the desert. “It’s up!” he shouted. “And it’s
good
!” We watched my basketball bouncing among the cacti like a pinball caroming off bumper cushions. When it struck one cactus flush, the ball exploded.

Shortly after that day my mother told me that Winston and she were “taking a break.” Her voice was hoarse, like the men from Dickens when Uncle Charlie picked them up in the morning to go to Gilgo. Her hair, I noticed, was no longer pouffy. And she looked exhausted. I didn’t say another word the rest of that morning. While my mother wandered around the apartment, listening to Burt Bacharach, I sat on the bank of the canal, trying to figure out how I felt. I was delighted that I wouldn’t have to deal with Winston anymore, but I was sad, because my mother was heartbroken. I knew that my mother was searching for romantic love, and though I didn’t understand what that was, I suspected it was similar to what I was searching for, a connection of some sort, and I worried that, as much as we cared for each other, loneliness was our true common bond. In the crawl space at Grandpa’s house I’d once found a diary my mother kept when she was fourteen. On the first page she’d written,
“Anyone that would dare turn beyond this page, may their conscience, if they have any, bother them the rest of their lives!”
Inside was a list of forty-two qualities she hoped to find in a man. My father possessed no more than two and a half, so I understood that my mother had compromised in her first search for love, and that she was trying in her second search to be more careful, for both our sakes. I further understood that her search was hindered by me. I remembered the lightbulb salesman in New York, whom she liked a lot. After meeting me, he suggested I be sent to boarding school in Europe. Immediately. I remembered the mechanic who threw a fit when I introduced McGraw to him as my brother. “I thought you had only one kid,” he told my mother angrily, and he didn’t believe her explanation that I merely considered McGraw a brother. Few men were eager to help raise my father’s son, which reduced my mother’s chances of finding love, and this reality, becoming clearer to me that day on the canal, filled me with guilt.
I should have done more to get along with Winston. I should have made him love me.
Somehow in my cold war with Winston I’d lost sight of my number one goal—taking care of my mother. Now I was just another man who made her life harder.

When I went back down to the apartment my mother suggested a movie. “Something to take our minds off things,” she said. She proposed
A Star Is Born,
and I didn’t complain. I wanted her to feel better and if that meant sitting through a romantic musical I was more than willing to make the sacrifice.

A sacrifice it was. For two hours Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson broke up and made up and broke up again, for no apparent reason, until Kristofferson mercifully died. In the end, unbowed, her permed hair prickly as a cactus, Streisand belted out the movie’s theme song, “Evergreen,” as if it were “Amazing Grace.” The lights in the theater came up. I turned to my mother, rolling my eyes, but she was covering hers, and crying. People turned and stared. I tried to comfort her, but she wouldn’t stop. She cried as we left the theater, and cried harder as I opened the door to the Volkswagen for her. I ran around to the other side and got in. She didn’t start the car. We sat and waited for her crying to subside, as if waiting for a monsoon to pass. Handing her one Kleenex after another I remembered what Jedd had said about cacti, how they right themselves, how they are always trying to stand up straight. This was what my mother and I were doing, I decided.

If only our arms would quit falling off.

fifteen
| BILL AND BUD

M
Y MOTHER AND I WEREN
’
T MAKING IT ON HER $160 A WEEK.
Even with her second job selling Avon, and my paper route, we were falling short each month, sliding deeper into debt. There was always an unexpected bill, an expense at school, a problem with the Volkswagen. “The T-Bird in New York cooperated with us,” my mother said, scowling at the Volkswagen. “This thing wants to break us.” I’d lie in bed at night, worrying about my mother’s finances, and her fatigue. Other than the short burst brought on by Winston, her energy had never rebounded after the surgery, and I feared she’d eventually grow too tired to work. Would we live in a shelter? Would I have to leave high school and take a job to support us? Getting up in the night for a glass of water I’d find my mother in the kitchen, pecking at her calculator. Just before I started high school in 1978 the calculator won. We filed for bankruptcy.

Grandma wrote me long letters, stressing the obvious. “Take care of your mother,” she wrote. “Do anything you can, whatever she needs at this difficult time. Your mother tries so hard, JR, and it’s up to you to see that she eats right and takes time to relax. Make sure she relaxes.” Real men take care of their mothers.

I would sit on the canal after school, so tense and worried about my mother that I thought I might die. I would wish that I could relax on cue, like Joey D in the ocean, and then mentor my mother in relaxation. If I was especially tense I’d walk to a desolate shopping mall on the other side of the canal, in the shadow of Camelback Mountain. Though the mall looked condemned, though half its stores were vacant, I found its gloomy atmosphere soothing. Dark, quiet, cavelike, the mall reminded me of Grandpa’s basement. And it too held a secret trove of books.

Deep in the mall’s core was a bookstore with a highly eclectic selection. There was a wide array of classics—but few best sellers. There were many works on Eastern religions—but few Bibles. There was a newsstand spilling over with newspapers and periodicals from Europe—but not one local paper. Since I had no money for books I became a prodigious browser. I taught myself to read a novel in five visits, scan a magazine in half an hour. No one ever scolded me for loitering or tried to shoo me away, because no one was ever there. The cash register was forever unmanned.

Ogling the models in a French magazine one day I looked up and saw a line of customers snaking from the cash register to the children’s section. The customers were looking around for someone to take their money. When no one materialized they gave up and left. In the far back of the store I spotted a pair of birdlike eyes peering out from behind an unmarked door, which was open just a crack. I made contact with the eyes, and the door slammed shut. I walked back and knocked lightly. I heard rustling, scurrying, and the door flew open. Before me stood a man in corduroy pants and a checked shirt, his black knit tie at half-mast. His eyeglasses were covered with the same fine dust that covered everything in the store, and he was holding an unlit cigarette. “Help you?” he said.

“I just thought I should let you know that some customers were waiting to pay.”

“Really?”

We turned and looked at the cash register.

“I don’t see anyone,” he said.

“They left.”

“Okay. Thanks for letting us know.”

At the mention of “us” a second man appeared. He was taller than the first, thinner, and his glasses were much cleaner. They were thick black Buddy Holly glasses, and their lenses sparkled under the fluorescent lights. He wore a tennis shirt with a tie wider and more outdated than the first man’s. I’d never seen anyone wear a tie with a tennis shirt. “Who’s that?” he said, looking at me.

I stammered that I was nobody. The three of us looked at each other, having a staring contest, and then I got an idea. I asked if there might be a position open for someone to stand at the cash register and take money in the afternoons.

“How old are you?” the first man said.

“Thirteen. I’ll be fourteen next—”

“Ever work in a bookstore?” the second man said.

“That doesn’t matter,” the first man said. “Hold on.”

He shut the door and I heard them whispering furiously. When the door opened again they were smiling. “Can you be here by two o’clock?” the first man said.

“School lets out at three.”

“Fine. We’ll work out your schedule later.”

We all shook hands and the first man introduced himself as Bill, the manager, the second as Bud, the assistant manager. Bill said he could give me twenty hours each week, at $2.65 an hour—a fortune. I thanked him profusely and shook his hand again, then went to shake Bud’s hand, but he’d disappeared behind the door.

I raced home to tell my mother.

“My God!” she cried, hugging me. “That will make such a difference!”

I tried to temper her excitement, warning her that the men at the bookstore were “unusual.” I couldn’t think of another word.

“They’ll love you,” she said. “You’re great with unusual men.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant.

I was nervous about getting along with Bill and Bud, but for the first few weeks of my employment I hardly ever saw them. I’d knock at the stockroom door when I arrived, to say hello, and wouldn’t have any more contact with them until I knocked to say good-bye. The bookstore was part of a national chain, but I assumed that Bill and Bud had either seceded from the chain or been forgotten by the home office. They ran the store as their private library, ordering books and magazines that suited and expressed their view of the world, and seldom emerging from the stockroom, which doubled as Bill’s bedroom. Some nights he would fall asleep reading on a lawn chair behind the watercooler.

Shy, reserved, Bill and Bud could not have been more different from the men at the bar, and those first weeks at the bookstore were so disorientingly quiet, and lonely, that I wanted to quit. Then, suddenly, Bill and Bud became curious about me, and when there weren’t any customers in the store, which was almost always, they invited me to stand in the doorway to the stockroom and chat.

At first I had trouble following the conversation, because I was so intrigued by Bill’s and Bud’s many quirks. Bill, for instance, chain-smoked but wouldn’t buy an ashtray. He stood his smoldering butts upright along the edges of desks and tables throughout the stockroom, and let them burn out, until he’d created a diorama of a forest fire. His eyes were burned out too, from reading so much, and his glasses were thicker than his beloved Russian novels. He adored the Russians, and spoke of Tolstoy with disarming familiarity, as if he owed the great writer a phone call. He owned exactly two ties, one black, one green, both knits, and when he removed one at the end of the workday he’d keep the knot tied and hang it from a peg in the wall, like a tool belt.

Bud, when excited, would sniff his fist, as if it were a prizewinning rose. He also had a habit of straightening his dandruff-flecked hair by bringing his left hand all the way over to the right side of his head, like an orangutan, a maneuver that exposed the perennial, sizable wet spot in his armpit. He clipped his fingernails compulsively, and the parings lay scattered everywhere. I once found myself handing a customer two quarters and a crescent of Bud’s thumbnail.

Bill and Bud both seemed to fear people, all people, except each other, which was one reason they hid in the stockroom. The other reason was that they read. Constantly. They had read everything ever written and were hell-bent to read everything new published each month, which required that they cloister themselves like medieval monks. Though in their mid-thirties, both men lived with their mothers, had never been married, and seemed to have no aspirations to move on or marry. They had no aspirations beyond reading, and no interests outside the store, though their interest in me was growing daily. They questioned me about my mother, my father, Uncle Charlie and the men, and they were fascinated by my relationship with Dickens. They asked about Steve and his motivation in giving the bar such a literary name, which led to a conversation about books generally. Bill and Bud quickly gleaned that I loved books and knew nothing about them. Through a series of rapid, probing questions they ascertained that I was intimately familiar with only
The Jungle Book
and
Minute Biographies.
They were appalled, and angry with my teachers.