The Tender Bar (38 page)

Heads turned as I stepped off the elevator. I looked like a deranged reader come to settle a score with a reporter. An editor near the mailboxes chewed an unlit cigar and gawked. His cigar made me think of my breath, which must have been Fuckembabe-esque. I’d have traded ten years of my life for a mint.

The newsroom was one whole city block long, a fluorescent prairie of metal desks and men. Presumably there were women working at the
Times
in 1986, but I didn’t see any. I saw nothing but men stretching to the horizon, dapper men, bookish men, distinguished men, wizened men, all milling about beneath rain clouds of smoke.
I’ve been here before.
One man I recognized from TV. He had been in the news recently for going to jail to protect a source, and he was known for his ubiquitous pipe, which he was puffing that morning. I wanted to approach him and tell him how much I admired him for going to jail in defense of the First Amendment, but I couldn’t because I looked as if I’d been in jail also, and not for defending any amendments.

At the far end of the newsroom, at last, I saw a woman, one lone woman, sitting at a tiny desk. Marie, no doubt. The walk toward her took a week. Everyone I passed was on the phone, and I was certain they were all talking with one another about me. I wanted to apologize to each of them for profaning this place. I wanted to apologize to Marie, who now rose and received me with such a look of distress that I wondered if she’d have the guard in the lobby fired five minutes after I left. “Jay?” she said.

“JR.”

“Right.”

We shook hands.

She pointed me to a chair and seated herself behind her desk. She straightened a few envelopes, put a pencil in a pencil cup and a sheaf of papers in an out-basket. I felt sure she was equally quick when judging people, putting them into their proper places. She then turned to me and waited for me to explain myself. I considered lying, but didn’t have the energy. I considered simply smiling, but I didn’t want to cause my split lip to start bleeding again. Also, I thought a tooth might be loose. There was nothing to do but tell her about the mugging, concisely. I almost made the case that I’d actually been mugged twice, if you counted Sidney, but decided against trying to be clever. When I finished Marie tapped a long fingernail on her desk. “You
can
tell a story,” she said. “I’ll give you that.”

I assured her that I meant no disrespect, showing up in this condition. I explained the mix-up with the guard. I told her that I loved the
Times,
worshipped the
Times,
read every book I could get my hands on about the history of the
Times,
including out-of-print memoirs by fusty old editors. In trying to explain my feelings for the
Times
I suddenly understood them better myself. It dawned on me why I’d been fascinated with the
Times
since I was a teenager. Yes, the newspaper offered a clearly delineated, black-and-white vision of the world, but what it also offered was that elusive bridge between my mother’s dreams and mine. Journalism was just the right blend of respectability and rebelliousness. Like lawyers,
Times
reporters wore Brooks Brothers suits and read books and crusaded for the downtrodden—but they also drank hard and told stories and hung out in bars.

This wasn’t the opportune moment for an epiphany. The exertion of explaining myself, understanding myself, and profusely apologizing for myself—and all the while trying to aim my tequila breath wide of Marie’s nose—made me pale. And my lip was bleeding again. Marie handed me a tissue and asked if I’d like a glass of water. She told me to relax. Just relax. A young man so obviously unconcerned with appearances, she said, so open to adventure, so enamored of the
Times
and knowledgeable about its traditions, would make a very fine reporter indeed. In fact, she added, I looked as though I had the makings of a war correspondent. She saw in that chair beside her desk something more than a twenty-one-year-old screwup from Long Island with a black eye and a hangover and a folder full of dreadful writing. Whatever else I might be, she said, I was “refreshing.”

A long time passed while Marie stared at me, thinking. I could see that she was weighing two options. She blinked her eyes, twice, and clearly chose Option B. She said there was a protocol to hiring people. She didn’t have the power to offer me the job right then. Editors would have to be consulted. Procedure would have to be followed. “However,” she said, “I do like the cut of your jib.”

I’d never heard this expression. I thought she’d said, “I’d like to cut off your jib.” I tried to think how to respond but Marie was on her feet, offering her hand again. Barring something unforeseen, she said, she’d soon be able to welcome me to the
New York Times
.

When I barreled into Publicans two hours later with my news, the place went berserk. Finally, the men said, I was
doing
something with my life. Getting into college, that was fine. Graduating, that was all well and good. But this was a real accomplishment. Newspapermen—Jimmy Cannon, Jimmy Breslin, A. J. Liebling, Grantland Rice—were barroom gods, and my being admitted to their ranks merited booming hurrahs and bear hugs.

Uncle Charlie gave my hand a bone-crushing pump, then decided that wasn’t enough. He came around from behind the bar and kissed my cheek. “The
New York Motherfucking Times,
” he said. The last time I’d seen him that proud was when he explained the over and under to me, when I was eleven, and I got it right away. Colt bowed at the waist and said the same thing he’d said when I got into Yale, the same thing he said whenever I did anything right. “Must have been all those Wordy Gurdys.”

Steve roared. He made me retell certain parts of the interview, describe again and again Naked Frost, and the security guard, and the horrified faces as I walked through the newsroom. He examined my shiner under the bar light, and I thought he might produce a jeweler’s eyepiece for a better look. I couldn’t decide which impressed him more, my black eye or my new job. But he was more than impressed. He was vindicated. His innate optimism was confirmed. Steve believed that everything works out in the end, that comedy always follows tragedy, that good things happened to all bad boys from Publicans, and now something very good had happened to the nephew of his senior bartender.

“Extra! Extra!” he said. “Junior is a
Times
man!”

Then it was enough already about me. Steve and the men turned back to the TV, where the Mets were locked in a sixteen-inning nail-biter with the Houston Astros in the National League Championship Series. While everyone drank and watched the game I ducked into the phone booth and dialed my mother.

The Mets won Game Six of the World Series a few days before I started at the
Times
. Down to their last strike, given up for dead, they came storming back and stunned the Boston Red Sox in the bottom of the tenth. Now the Mets were going to win the whole thing, everyone at Publicans knew. “Those poor bastards in Boston,” Uncle Charlie said to me, just after Ray Knight crossed home plate with the winning run. “Think of the bars like this one across New England. Ach. My heart breaks for them.” Uncle Charlie loved underdogs, and no underdog was more tragic than the Sox. For a moment he made me ashamed of my unalloyed happiness about the Mets winning.

By my calculations the Mets’ victory parade would march through Manhattan on the same morning, at the same moment, I was marching into the
Times
for my first day of work. Of all the signs I’d ever gotten from the universe, this was the loudest and clearest. Against all odds, my team and I were no longer losers. My new life, my real life, my life as a winner, was under way at last. I was moving beyond all previous failure, beyond the dangerous lure of failure, outgrowing my boyish indecision about whether to try or not to try.

There was only one slender thread connecting me to my old life, to my sense of myself as a lost cause. Sidney. I’d received another letter from her that week. Still loved me, still missed me, still needed time. Enclosed was a photo of herself. I stood at Publicans just after Game Six ended, rereading her letter and gazing at her photo as the celebration raged all around me. The bar was bedlam. We were all full of whiskey, full of an unreasonable faith in ourselves and the future, inferred from the good fortunes of our Mets, and I got an idea. I asked Fuckembabe to bring me a pen and a stamp from Steve’s basement office. He either told me to check the lower shelf or go fuck myself. I got the pen and stamp from Uncle Charlie, then scratched out my address on Sidney’s envelope and readdressed it back to her. I resealed the envelope, her letter and photo inside, and pushed my way through the crowd, through the front door, to the mailbox just outside. My lucky mailbox. The same mailbox from which I’d sent my clips to the
Times
.

It was vividly clear to me. If I wrote Sidney to take all the time she needed, I’d win her in the end. I would outlast Trust-Funder, and whoever else came along, and Sidney and I would marry. We would live in a house near her parents and have two towheaded children, and every time she yawned or took a phone call in the other room my stomach would lurch. That life waited for me, meticulously planned, prearranged. I could see it towering before me like a drive-in movie screen. But there was another life waiting, a Sidneyless life, also prearranged. I couldn’t see it yet, but I could sense it, believe in it, thanks to the
Times
and the Mets and Publicans. I could hear the voices of that other life as distinctly as the voices at my back, inside the bar. I remembered Professor Lucifer lecturing us about free will versus fate, the riddle that had vexed great minds through the ages, and I wished I’d paid more attention, because leaning against my lucky mailbox, dangling Sidney’s letter above the slot, I didn’t know why fate and free will needed to be mutually exclusive. Maybe, I thought, when we come to our crossroads, we choose freely, but the choice is between two fated lives.

I let the envelope go. I’d never rebuffed Sidney before. No one had ever rebuffed Sidney before. I knew that when she received her own letter and photo—return to sender, no comment—she’d never contact me again. I walked back inside Publicans, asked Uncle Charlie for another scotch and told him what I’d done. He pointed at my chest and we drank a toast. To me. To the Mets. On October 25, 1986, after I’d lost the great love of my life, Uncle Charlie declared to the bar—no one was listening, but it was nice to hear him declare it—that his nephew was a winner.

thirty
| MR. SALTY

B
EING A COPYBOY WASN’T MUCH MORE COMPLICATED THAN BEING
a clerk in Home Fashions. A copygirl explained the whole job to me in five minutes. I was responsible for “fetching sandwiches” and “separating carbons.” Since the editors didn’t have time to get their own meals, she said, I’d go around the newsroom throughout the day, taking orders, and then run across the street to Al’s All-Night Deli. The rest of my time I’d spend gathering and sorting paper from the wire room. The
Times
had computers, but the editors, especially the older editors, refused to use them. Thus, paper still flooded the newsroom. Articles, essays, bulletins, wires, memos, stories, and summaries of stories being offered for tomorrow’s front page—it all came spluttering and chattering off big printers, in thick sets of twelve carbon copies, which had to be pulled apart, folded a certain way, and distributed—fast. Many editors wouldn’t know about a breaking news event until they saw the bulletin land in their wire baskets, so copykids were a disproportionately critical link in the chain of information. Even more critical: Top editors got top copies, on which the ink was most legible, and bottom editors got bottom copies, which were faintest, and in some cases illegible. “It’s a status thing,” the copygirl said. “You’ll get yelled at if a bottom editor gets a top copy—but God help you if a top editor gets a bottom copy.”

She rolled her eyes and expected me to roll mine. I was so glad for the job, however, so awed by the
Times
, that I couldn’t wipe the look of exuberant joy off my face.
You mean it’s my responsibility to feed all these talented journalists? And to let these famous editors know what’s going on in the world? “
Sounds great!” I said.

From then on the copygirl avoided me, and I overheard her talking with another copygirl, referring to me as “that twit from Long Island.”

Friendlier copykids explained the big picture of the training program. It was, they said, a series of small indignities followed by exponentially larger rewards. You fetched sandwiches, you separated carbons, you worked nights, holidays, weekends, until an editor noticed you. Maybe he’d like the way you always remembered that he wanted spicy mustard on his pastrami. Maybe he’d appreciate the tight fold you gave his carbons. Suddenly you were his protégé, and whenever possible he’d pass you an author interview for the book review, or a roundup for the real estate section. If you handled these assignments reasonably well he’d give you better ones. A shooting, a train derailment, a gas leak in the Bronx. One of these would be your big chance, the story that would make or break your newsroom reputation. If you made the most of your big chance you’d get a tryout on the city desk. Thirty days straight, no time off, writing, writing, a test of endurance as much as talent. The tryout was the grail. The tryout was the whole point of being a copykid. If you survived the tryout, physically and mentally, without any mistakes—above all, without causing the newspaper to run a dreaded correction—then a secret committee would convene and decide once and for all if you were
Times
material. If so, you’d be promoted to full-time reporter and given a desk and a living wage. If not, you could stick around as long as you liked, fetching sandwiches and separating carbons until you turned sixty-five, but you’d always be a copykid, a drone, a newsroom nonperson.