The Tender Bar (53 page)

Walking into the back bedroom Jimbo looked around and asked, “How you want to tackle this?”

“Pack like the house is on fire.”

Jimbo drove me to the address Bebe gave me and helped me run my stuff upstairs to the apartment. Since he was double-parked, there wasn’t time for a long good-bye. We stood in the street and hugged, that contagious-disease hug that young men give each other.

“Come home soon,” Jimbo said, peeling away from the curb.

I watched his Jeep disappear in traffic.

“I will,” I said. “I will.”

Bebe’s friend was a Columbia law student named Magdalena, who started almost every sentence with one-word rhetorical questions. “Actually?” she said, opening the door to my room. “It’s not really a room, per se, but a converted water closet.”

“What’s a water closet?”

“Frankly? It’s a bathroom. But there’s a bed, and a—well, a bed. But it’s really cozy, as you can see.”

I assured her it was a very cozy bathroom.

She explained that she’d be at her boyfriend’s apartment most nights. She turned and motioned to her boyfriend, as if he were Exhibit A. He was so quiet that I’d forgotten he was there.

“You mean I’ll have the apartment all to myself?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course, my mother might drop in now and then.”

Her mother lived in Puerto Rico, but sometimes flew to New York, to shop and see friends. She slept on Magdalena’s sofa. “Honestly?” Magdalena said. “She’s quiet as a mouse.”

I thanked Magdalena for renting to me on such short notice, and told her I was going to take a hot shower and go to bed.

“Seriously?” she said. “Make yourself at home. If you need anything we’ll be studying in the kitchen.”

The working bathroom was on the other side of the apartment. To get there from my bathroom-qua-bedroom I had to walk through the kitchen. Wrapped in a towel I smiled shyly at Magdalena and joked with the boyfriend. “Just passing through,” I said. He made no reply.

I ran the hot water full blast and sat on the edge of the tub as steam filled the bathroom. Jimbo would be at Publicans by now, I thought. Uncle Charlie would be breaking out the Sambuca. General Grant would be lighting his first cigar of the night, and Cager would be flipping channels on the TV, looking for a good game. Colt would be in the phone booth, Fast Eddy and Agnes would be ordering dinner, Smelly would be throwing meat cleavers at lazy busboys. I looked at myself in the mirror over the sink. Just before my face disappeared in the steam I asked myself: Is it possible—is it wise—to feel homesick for a bar?

I stepped into the shower. The hot spray instantly opened my pores and soothed my mind. I held my face to the water and sighed with pleasure. A scream cut through the roar of the water. Aunt Ruth. She’d followed Jimbo and now she was there in the bathroom. I screamed too, like Janet Leigh. I jumped back, slipped, and reached for the shower curtain to steady myself. I pulled it off the hooks and fell out of the tub, onto the floor, bending the shower curtain rod and, I felt sure, breaking my elbow. Looking up through the clouds of steam I saw, perched on the showerhead, a parrot the size of a chimpanzee. It spread its wings, a sound like an umbrella opening.

I wrapped a towel around myself and ran into the kitchen.

“I forgot to tell you about Hugo,” Magdalena said, biting her thumbnail.

“Hugo?” I said.

“Hugo lives in the bathroom. He likes the steam.”

Dripping wet, clutching the towel around my waist, I asked her to remove Hugo from the bathroom. I didn’t feel comfortable, I said, being naked in close quarters with any wild animal that had a Ginsu knife for a nose.

“Frankly?” she said. “I can’t do that. Hugo lives in the bathroom.”

I looked to the boyfriend for help. Nothing.

I went for a walk and when I returned Magdalena and the boyfriend were gone. Hugo, however, was still there. I poked my head into the bathroom and he eyed me ominously. I could tell he was mad as a wet hen that I’d tried to have him evicted. I went to bed, but couldn’t sleep, beset by nightmares of screaming parrots and aunts.

As I walked into the newsroom with a box full of sandwiches I heard the weatherman on TV say a major storm was brewing in the Atlantic. Hurricane Hugo, he said. I laughed at myself. I must have misheard. I had Hugo on the brain. Then the weatherman said it again. Hurricane Hugo was gaining strength as it churned across the Atlantic. Exactly what was the universe trying to tell me now?

I slept badly that night, and when I woke a strange woman was making coffee in the kitchen. Magdalena’s mother, I gathered. Her English was poor, but I managed to learn that she’d left Puerto Rico in a hurry. Fleeing Hugo, she said. “Aren’t we all?” I said.

Over the next several days I read about Hugo, tracked its path, worried about the havoc it might wreak. I didn’t know why the storm obsessed me, why I dreaded it as much as people who lived on stilt houses in the Outer Banks. Maybe it was lack of sleep, maybe it was living in a water closet, maybe it was being forced to shower in terror, but I let Hurricane Hugo become a metaphor for my life, and then I let it consume my life. As if its low-pressure system had collided with my high pressure, the storm gathered up all my unhappiness about McGraw and Aunt Ruth and Sidney and the
Times
and focused it into one tight eye. From morning until night I could think of nothing but Hugo.

When Hugo blasted ashore in late September 1989, I was at the
Times
, reading wires, monitoring TVs, like a copyboy for the National Weather Service. I stayed in the newsroom and watched CNN until after midnight, and when the janitors started vacuuming I went to Magdalena’s apartment and watched TV with her mother, who appeared to be just as traumatized as I. Even Hugo seemed traumatized by Hugo. Hearing his name repeated again and again on TV the parrot would caw frantically, and with his cawing, and the wind howling, and Magdalena’s mother wailing in Spanish, it was a long and harrowing night.

As skies over South Carolina cleared the next morning, as the damage was revealed, I grieved for all who had lost their lives and homes. But while compassion is healthy, what I felt was something else, something disproportionate and irrational. It occurred to me that my thinking was skewed, that I might be on the verge of some kind of breakdown. Then this thought was quickly overtaken by new images from Hugo’s swath.

Days after Hugo hit I was watching TV again with Magdalena’s mother, both of us drinking whiskey and chain-smoking, and I noticed we were running low on smokes. I went to the market for a pack, stopping into a bar along the way. It was raining hard, the remnants of Hugo now drenching New York City. Returning to the apartment I found the living room in shambles, furniture broken, sofa cushions ripped open, broken glass strewn across the wood floors. I called out for Magdalena’s mother and heard whimpering from the bedroom. I ran down the hall. The mother lay on her stomach in the bedroom, which had been ransacked. I knelt beside her and asked if she was all right. “I call everybody,” she said. “No one home! No one love me!”

She held the phone in one hand, her address book in the other, and kicked her feet like a child having a tantrum.

“
You
—did this?” I asked. “You trashed the apartment?”

“I call everyone!” she cried, mascara cascading down her cheeks. She threw the address book at the wall. “No one give a shit about me!”

Relieved that she hadn’t been assaulted, I went to the kitchen to get each of us a glass of water. I heard the mother breaking more glass and realized that she might harm herself. On the refrigerator was the number of Magdalena’s boyfriend. I phoned and told her that her mother wasn’t well and suggested she come home. She didn’t bother to ask what was wrong, and I surmised that this wasn’t the first time her mother had done something like this.

Magdalena arrived, with the boyfriend, who stood passively in a corner while she crept toward her mother. “Mother?” she said. “Mother, what’s wrong?” By now her mother was babbling. Magdalena dialed 911 and the apartment soon filled with cops and paramedics. They looked around and maybe noticed, as I did, that the devastated apartment evoked images that had been flickering on TV for days. “Who are you?” a cop asked me.

“I rent the bath—spare bedroom.”

Everyone gathered around the prostrate mother, who was tearing her address book into pieces, and tearing the pieces into smaller pieces. A cop asked the mother what was wrong and she repeated what she’d told me. She’d phoned everyone she knew, looking for someone to talk to about Hurricane Hugo, but no one answered.

“You want us to take her to a hospital?” a cop asked Magdalena.

“Hospital?” the mother screamed. “You no taking me to no hospital, you motherfucking nigger assholes!”

And that was that. The cops took one giant step backward and the paramedics fell upon the mother with a straitjacket. She thrashed, scratched, fought them, but within ten seconds they had her trussed tight. Hugo cawed, Magdalena wept, the boyfriend said nothing, and I jumped aside as the paramedics hoisted the mother over their heads and carried her out the door like a Christmas tree on the day after New Year’s. She was on her way to Bellevue.

Magdalena and the boyfriend and I sat at the kitchen table. I told her I was sorry for her troubles, and didn’t bother saying I was going to leave. She knew. Boyfriend knew. Hugo knew.

“Seriously?” she asked. “Where will you go? Bebe said you had nowhere to go.”

forty-two
| STEVE

I
SLEPT ON BEBE’S COUCH FOR A FEW WEEKS BEFORE GOING BACK
to Manhasset, back to Grandpa’s. By then Hurricane Aunt Ruth had been downgraded to a squall. My aunt was relatively calm and left me alone, and I was calmer too. The sight of Magdalena’s mother in a straitjacket had a sobering effect.

Also, it was soothing to be within 142 steps of Publicans again. The bar had never been better than it was that fall, every night another office party or family reunion or just an unusually entertaining ensemble of characters and personalities. On the first night of November I could barely squeeze inside the door. A solid wall of people. A steady roar of laughter. The only one not laughing was Steve, who stood in the middle of the barroom, just back from bowling. I saw him leaning against the bar as though he or it were about to collapse, and I must have stared too hard, because he looked up as if I’d called his name. He smiled, not his Cheshire smile. Something was wrong with his smile, though I couldn’t tell what from across the barroom. He waved me over.

We discussed McGraw, whom we both missed, and McGraw’s arm, which hadn’t healed after the surgery. The question of McGraw continuing to play baseball had been rendered moot. We lamented the loss of Jimbo, who had just moved to Colorado days earlier. I could tell how much Steve missed Jimbo. He’d made a bid to keep Jimbo in Manhasset, offering to find him a job on Wall Street. One phone call to any of fifty men who hung out in Publicans would have set Jimbo up for life. But Jimbo wanted to be a ski bum. Steve understood.

While talking with Steve I held myself rigid, afraid he might bring up our meeting of a week earlier, the last time I’d seen him. Just after I returned from the Hugo apartment Steve had summoned me down to his basement office. We sat across from each other at his desk and he handed me a stack of checks I’d cashed at the bar over the summer, each one stamped
Insufficient Funds
. Steve feared I’d deliberately passed bad checks across his bar, and he feared this for my sake, not his. His distress had nothing to do with his money problems. Steve believed in trusting people. Every ticket in his restaurant was handwritten, every drink called by voice. There were no computers, no records, and customers and employees alike abided by a rough-and-tumble honor system. When a busboy got caught taking a bottle of expensive champagne from the bar, Steve’s staff handled it “internally.” They beat the shit out of the busboy.

I told Steve the truth. I hadn’t been thinking clearly, and didn’t know from one day to the next how much money was in my checking account. I was disorganized, not dishonest. “Junior,” he said, leaning back in his creaky old desk chair, “we all miss the float once in a while. But this is no good. No good at all.
This isn’t the kind of man you want to be
.” His words echoed in the basement, and in my head. “No sir,” I said. “It isn’t.” I waited for him to say something more, but nothing more needed to be said. I looked into Steve’s watery gray-blue eyes. He held my gaze, the longest we’d ever made eye contact, and when Steve saw what he wanted to see—what I suppose he needed to see—he sent me back upstairs to the barroom. The next day I left an envelope at the bar, filled with cash, to cover my bad checks and any penalties he’d incurred from his bank. I was officially broke, but I was square with Steve, and that was all that counted.

Now, that first night in November, Steve made no mention of that awkward business. Ancient history as far as he was concerned. When we finished talking about “the boys,” as he called McGraw and Jimbo, he patted my shoulder, told Colt to “buy Junior a drink,” then stumbled away. “Kid,” Colt said, “you’re backed up on Chief.” I felt a surge of love for Steve, and for Colt, and for all the men in Publicans, because I finally figured something out. I’d always assumed the men hadn’t heard Steve call me Junior, but of course they had. They simply hadn’t adopted the nickname, because they sensed its significance to me. Steve didn’t understand, and they didn’t explain—the men of Publicans never explained. They just let Steve continue calling me Junior, and they never did. Not once. It was a break with protocol, an act of tenderness, which I’d failed to recognize. Until that night.