The Tender Bar (54 page)

I sat at Uncle Charlie’s end of the bar, trying to tell him about Steve and my bounced checks. Yuh, he said, as if in a trance. He was staring at the TV. Suddenly he let out an awful wail. His team—the Celtics, I think—had blown an easy three-on-one fast break. He covered his eyes. Earlier in the week, he said, he had
heavy
timber on a football game, and all his team needed to do was take a knee and run out the clock. Inexplicably they threw a pass, which was intercepted and run back for a cover-blowing touchdown. Uncle Charlie poured himself a Sambuca and said, “Everyone is
fucking
me.”

Down the bar I heard Steve growing louder. His face looked like the Grand Canyon, striated layers of red, orange and purple, accentuated by the gaping purple hole of his mouth. That was the thing I’d noticed earlier about his smile, but hadn’t been able, or willing, to acknowledge. Years of drinking had damaged Steve’s teeth, and he was due to have oral surgery. In the meantime he was supposed to wear dentures, but the dentures made his gums bleed, so that night he went without them, setting them on the bar beside his Heineken. He was talking with Dalton, who was drinking a bottle of wine. Dalton poured Steve a glass, the last thing Steve needed. The wine, mixed with ten or twelve Heinekens and twenty-four months of stress, sent Steve over the edge. He grew so unintelligible and belligerent that Uncle Charlie cut him off. Steve couldn’t believe it.
Here now—cutting me off at my own bar?
You’re done, Uncle Charlie said. Sweet dreams, Chief.

Joey D offered Steve a ride home. Steve refused. Joey D slinked away, muttering dejectedly to his mouse. A busboy offered Steve a ride. Steve accepted. The busboy led Steve through the dining room. As they tottered out the back door Colt spotted Steve’s teeth on the bar. “You forgot your chompers!” Colt yelled. But Steve was gone. Someone remarked that Steve had left his smile at the bar. It sat before us, smiling. You couldn’t help but think of the Cheshire Cat in
Alice in Wonderland,
appearing and disappearing without warning, its smile always the first thing visible, and the last.

Minutes later the phone rang. Steve’s wife, Georgette, said Steve had come home without his teeth. “We’ve got them right here,” Uncle Charlie told her. The phone rang again. Georgette again. Steve fell, she said. He hit his head. They were taking him to North Shore Hospital.

People fall down a lot in Publicans, I thought, saying good night to Uncle Charlie and wobbling back to Grandpa’s.

Early the next morning I woke to Uncle Charlie’s voice coming from the living room. I wrapped a robe around myself and went to find out why he was up at that hour. He was sitting on the edge of the bicentennial sofa. His face was white as a bone. The veins in his skull were visibly pulsating. He took deep, harsh drags of a Marlboro and stared at me, through me, through the wall behind me, as he repeated what he’d been telling Grandma. Steve was in a coma and wasn’t expected to live.

It happened this way: When Steve got home Georgette heated up a plate for him. He ate, drank a glass of milk, and talked with her about the disaster Publicans on the Pier had become. Disconsolate, Steve left the table, headed off to bed. Georgette heard a thud. She ran to find Steve in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.

“How old is he?” Grandma said.

“Forty-seven,” Uncle Charlie said. “One year older than I.”

The sidewalks on both sides of Plandome Road were three-deep, as if for a parade. Car traffic was backed up for miles. Mourners descended from every direction on Christ Church at the top of Plandome Road, which sat catty-corner from St. Mary’s. The church was large, with room for two hundred, but five times that many converged on its doors. Joey D served as usher, though there was no ushering to be done. Hours before the funeral began every pew was filled.

I wedged myself through a side door in time to see Georgette come in, leaning against her children, Brandy and Larry. I spotted Uncle Charlie against a far wall, talking to someone. Suddenly his eyes rolled skyward as though he were doing Billy Budd. He fell backward. “Man down!” someone shouted. Several people helped Uncle Charlie out of the church. I followed and watched them laying Uncle Charlie on the grass, propping him against a headstone with a full head of furry green moss. Nearby was a headstone from the early 1700s, its epitaph faintly legible:
HE GIVETH HIS BELOVED SLEEP
.

Back inside the church I pushed into the crowd and caught a glimpse of Steve’s casket. There was a whoosh like crashing surf as people sniffled and gasped and wept. A procession of large men ascended the altar and read aloud from the Bible, followed by Jimbo, who fought back tears as he spoke. Watching Jimbo, hurting for him, I realized something, with such force, such staggering clarity, that I wanted to go outside and lie down in the grass beside Uncle Charlie.

I’d always thought of Steve as our Gatsby—rich and mysterious and throwing wild parties for hundreds of strangers on the Gold Coast of Long Island. And this idea was only reinforced by his violent and untimely death. But as with Gatsby, Steve’s true character was revealed at his funeral, and it was Jimbo’s eulogy that made me see. Steve had been a father to Jimbo, and one way or another he was a father to us all. Even I, who didn’t know Steve all that well, was a son in his extended family. A publican by trade, Steve was a patriarch at heart, and maybe that was why he was so intent on naming us. Maybe that was why Uncle Charlie lay propped against a headstone, and why every man from Publicans looked less like a mourner that day than an orphan.

As the service ended we filed outside, mumbling prayers, hugging each other, then drove to the cemetery. The funeral cortege moved slowly past Publicans. Though the bar wasn’t on the way, there was a feeling that Steve needed to go past the place one last time. After Steve was lowered into the ground we returned to Publicans, en masse, hundreds upon hundreds of people. Some had urged Georgette to close for the day, in honor of Steve, but she said Steve wouldn’t have wanted that. Steve always vowed that Publicans would remain open—through renovations, recessions, blackouts, blizzards, ice storms, market crashes, and wars. Staying open was Steve’s mission. Shutting down was his darkest fear, the fear that some blamed for his death. With so many question marks surrounding Steve while he was alive, his death was inevitably shrouded in mystery. Most people thought he died from a fall down the stairs, and some in Manhasset would always think so, no matter what. Georgette thought so too, at first. But doctors assured her that an aneurysm had killed Steve, not a fall.

In Steve’s honor Georgette didn’t merely keep Publicans open after his funeral. She declared the bar
—open.
No one would pay, no one would dare speak the words “Last call,” and the drinking would continue until no one was left standing. A lavish, extravagant gesture, it was also alarming. An open bar in Manhasset? A town that guzzled liquor like seltzer? It struck me and others as a reckless and dangerous idea. Like building a bonfire in a town of pyromaniacs. Georgette, however, wouldn’t brook any arguments. She hired bartenders from the other bars on Plandome Road to work that day, so Steve’s bartenders wouldn’t need to, and she invited—ordered—the town to drink. Manhasset was backed up on Georgette.

Publicans had never been so packed, so loud, so happy and sad at the same time. As the liquor flowed, and the grief grew, and the laughter mounted, a type of hysteria set in, though some of the hysteria may have been caused by lack of oxygen. The air was so thick and hot with sweat and smoke that breathing was an effort. The barroom looked like Dante’s Manhasset. Eyes bulged. Tongues lolled. Every five minutes someone dropped a bottle, and large sparkling lagoons of booze and crushed glass began to form. Tables of food were set up along the walls, but no one went near them. Everyone was too intent on drinking. “They’re drinking like they’re going to the chair in the morning,” Colt said. And yet I also heard someone complain that the liquor wasn’t working. In such a sea of sadness, it seemed, all the free whiskey in the world was but a drop.

I wended my way through the barroom, feeling as if I were in a wax museum crowded with sallow replicas of the most important people in my life. I saw Uncle Charlie, or some waxen version of Uncle Charlie, his necktie askew, his back hunched, still limp from his fainting spell. He was drunker than he’d been after Pat died, drunker than I’d ever seen him. He’d achieved a new plateau of drunkenness, a transcendent drunkenness, and it was the first time his drunkenness ever scared me. I saw Don and Fast Eddy talking in conspiratorial whispers, and Tommy just behind them, a stupendous frown on his face, his features plunging down the drain of his chin. He looked seventy-five years older than he had the day he escorted me onto the field at Shea Stadium. I saw Jimbo consoling McGraw, who was sobbing. I saw Bob the Cop in the center of the barroom, talking to Cager, and just beyond them was Dalton, leaning against a pole, seemingly lost without a book of poems to read or a woman to flirt with. Joey D was talking to Josie, a détente brought on by Steve’s death, and his cousin General Grant stood nearby, in a black suit, needing only the solace of his cigar. Fuckembabe, also wearing a suit, his face scrubbed and his hair combed, may have been the soberest person in the place. I heard him talking with a few stockbrokers and he sounded almost articulate. The eloquence of grief. I saw Colt and Smelly leaning against each other, and DePietro near them in a booth talking with some fellow Wall Streeters. I saw Thumbelina and avoided her gaze—and her thumb. I saw Michelle, lovely as always, eager to leave. I saw Crazy Jane, designer of the stained-glass genitalia behind the bar, emerging from the basement, trailing the smell of pot. I saw people I recognized, whose names escaped me, and people I had never seen before, talking about favors Steve had done them, charities he’d supported, meals he’d provided, loans he’d floated, wisecracks he’d made, pranks he’d orchestrated, students he’d secretly put through college. I thought, We’ve learned more about Steve in the last few hours than in all our years of talking with him and standing with him at his bar.

I saw Peter and rushed toward his side, relieved. I planted myself next to Peter, my editor, my friend, needing his special brand of kindness and sanity. I plotted how I might contrive to stay by Peter’s side all night without annoying him. He asked how I was doing and I started to answer, but Bobo pulled me away. I hadn’t seen Bobo in years. He was telling a Steve story, but I couldn’t understand. He was drunk and still suffering the aftereffects of his fall down the stairs of the bar, his face still partly paralyzed. I wondered if he equated Steve’s fall with his own. When Bobo released me I said something to Peter about how often people fell down in Publicans. Before Peter could respond we both heard Georgette, near the back door. She was crying and saying over and over, “We lost our Chief. What are we going to do without our Chief?”

The stereo was playing dirgelike classical music. Someone shouted that we should be listening to Steve’s kind of music. Elvis. Fats Domino. Johnny Preston. One of the bartenders dug out a tape with all Steve’s favorites. The songs made everyone feel cheerful, and awful, because they brought Steve to life. Surely Chief was there. We’d have a big belly laugh with him about how weird all this was, if only we could find him in that crush of drunken humanity.

I got another scotch and stood beside Bob the Cop, who was drinking Rusty Nails.

“How long do you think this joint will last?” he asked me.

“You think Publicans will close? God. I hadn’t thought of that.”

Which wasn’t quite true. The thought had been eating at me, I just hadn’t wanted to face it. When Bob the Cop said it aloud, however, I understood my grief better, and everyone else’s. There was an element of selfishness about it all. We missed Steve, and mourned him, but we also knew that without him Publicans might die too.

My legs buckled. I looked for a place to collapse but there wasn’t a seat to be had. I was going to be sick. Everything in the place suddenly repulsed me. Even the long polished wood bar made my stomach lurch, because it reminded me of Steve’s casket. I shouldered my way out the front door and stumbled to Grandpa’s, where I collapsed in the back bedroom. When I opened my eyes hours later I had no idea where I was. Yale? Arizona? Sidney’s? My place above Louie the Greek’s? The Hugo Apartment? Gradually the pieces of my mind fell into place, and I remembered that I was at Grandpa’s. Again.

After a long hot shower I put on fresh clothes and returned to Publicans. By now it was three or four in the morning, but everyone was right where I’d left them, though they were melting and imploding, as if the heat had been turned up too high in the wax museum. I fought my way to the center of the crowd and found Bob the Cop and Cager in the same spot at the bar. They didn’t realize I’d gone home and come back. They didn’t know what time it was, or what day, and they didn’t really care. I drank with them until sunrise. Still they made no sign of leaving, but I needed air and food.

I walked up to Louie the Greek’s. The counter was filled with commuters, all sharp-eyed and eager to start the day after eight hours of sleep. I saw the British au pair I’d dated, the one who talked like Margaret Thatcher. Her hair was wet. Her cheeks were russet apples. She was nibbling a muffin and drinking a hot cup of tea. She gawked at me. “Where are you coming from?” she asked.

“Funeral.”

“Bloody hell, love,
whose
? Your own?”

forty-three
| SMELLY

W
ALKING DOWN PLANDOME ROAD WEEKS LATER I SAW A PALE,
bloated moon rising from Publicans. The moon was wobbling, as if it had been overserved. Always watchful for signs, hypersensitive to their meaning, I should have had no trouble interpreting this one.
Even the moon is leaving the bar.
But I ignored it. In the weeks after Steve’s death I ignored everything, treating all signs and unpleasant facts as Joey D treated loudmouths. I simply refused to serve them.