Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J.R. Moehringer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2000, is a former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Moehringer is the author of the bestselling novel Sutton and collaborator on Open by Andre Agassi, Shoedog by Phil Knight, and Spare by Prince Harry.

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The Tender Bar

Hyperion Books

Chapter One

If a man can chart with any accuracy his evolution from small boy to barfly, mine began on a hot summer night in 1972. Seven years old, driving through Manhasset with my mother, I looked out the window and saw nine men in orange softball uniforms racing around Memorial Field, the silhouette of Charles Dickens silk-screened in black on their chests. "Who is that?" I asked my mother.

"Some men from Dickens," she said. "See your Uncle Charlie? And his boss, Steve?"

"Can we watch?"

She pulled over and we found seats in the stands.

The sun was setting, and the men cast long shadows, which seemed made of the same black ink as the silhouettes oil their chests. Also, the men sported cummerbunds of blubber that stretched their XXL jerseys until those silhouettes looked like splatter stains caused by the men stomping in their own shadows. Everything about the men had this surreal, cartoonish quality. With their scant hair, giant shoes, and overdeveloped upper bodies, they looked like Blutos and Popeyes and steroidal Elmer Fudds, except my lanky Uncle Charlie, who patrolled the infield like a flamingo with sore knees. I remember that Steve wielded a wooden bat the size of a telephone pole, and every home run he clouted hovered in the sky like a second moon.

Standing at the plate, the Babe Ruth of the beer league, Steve dug at the dirt and growled at the pitcher to give him something he could pulverize. The pitcher looked scared and amused at the same time, because even while barking at him, Steve never stopped smiling. His smile was like the strobe from a lighthouse, making everyone feel a little safer. It was also a command. It bade everyone to smile also. It was irresistible, and not just to those around him. Steve himself seemed unable to stop baring his teeth.

Steve and the men of Dickens were fierce competitors, but the game never once got in the way of their main goal in life-laughter. Regardless of the score, they never stopped laughing, they couldn't stop laughing, and the fans in the stands couldn't either. I laughed harder than anyone, though I didn't get the joke. I laughed at the sound of the men's laughter, and at their comic timing, as fluid and quicksilver as their turning of a double play.

"Why do those men act so silly?" I asked my mother.

"They're just-happy."

"About what?"

She looked at the men, thinking.

"Beer, sweetheart. They're happy about beer."

Each time the men ran past, they left a scented cloud. Beer. Aftershave. Leather. Tobacco. Hair tonic. I inhaled deeply, memorizing their aroma, their essence. From then on, whenever I smelled a keg of Schaeffer, a bottle of Aqua Velva, a freshly oiled Spalding baseball glove, a smoldering Lucky Strike, a flask of Vitalis, I would be there again, beside my mother, gazing at those beery giants stumbling around the diamond.

That softball game marked for me the beginning of many things, but particularly time. Memories before the softball game have a disjointed, fragmentary quality; after, memories move forward, smartly, single file. Possibly I needed to find the bar, one of the two organizing principles of my life, before I could make a linear, coherent narrative of my life. I remember turning to the other organizing principle of my life and telling her I wanted to watch the men forever. We can't, babe, she said, the game is over. What? I stood, panicked. The men were walking off the field with their arms around each other. As they faded into the sumacs around Memorial Field, calling to one another, "See you at Dickens," I started to cry. I wanted to follow.

"Why?" my mother asked.

"To see what's so funny."

"We're not going to the bar," she said. "We're going-home."

She always tripped over that word.

My mother and I lived at my grandfather's house, a Manhasset landmark nearly as famous as Steve's bar. People often drove by Grandpa's and pointed, and I once heard passersby speculating that the house must suffer from some sort of "painful house disease." What it really suffered from was comparisons. Set among Manhasset's elegant Gingerbread Victorians and handsome Dutch Colonials, Grandpa's dilapidated Cape Cod was doubly appalling. Grandpa claimed he couldn't afford repairs, but the truth was, he didn't care. With a touch of defiance and a perverse pride he called his house the Shit House, and paid no attention when the roof began to sag like a circus tent. He scarcely noticed when paint peeled away in flakes the size of playing cards. He yawned in Grandma's face when she pointed out that the driveway had developed a jagged crack, as if lightning had struck it-and in fact lightning had. My cousins saw the lightning bolt sizzle up the driveway and just miss the breezeway. Even God, I thought, is pointing at Grandpa's house.

Under that one sagging roof my mother and I lived with Grandpa, Grandma, my mother's two grown siblings-Uncle Charlie and Aunt Ruth-and Aunt Ruth's five daughters and one son. "Huddled masses yearning to breathe rent-free," Grandpa called us. While Steve was creating his public sanctuary at 550 Plandome Road, Grandpa was running a flophouse at 646.

Grandpa could have nailed a silhouette of Charles Dickens above his door too, since the conditions were comparable to a Dickensian workhouse. With one usable bathroom and twelve people, the waits at Grandpa's were often excruciating, and the cesspool was constantly backed up ("Shit House" was sometimes more than a flippant nickname). The hot water ran out each morning in the middle of Shower Number Two, made a brief cameo during Shower Number Three, then teased and cruelly abandoned the person taking Shower Number Four. The furniture, much of which dated to Franklin Roosevelt's third term, was held together with duct tape and more duct tape. The only new objects in the house were the drinking glasses, "borrowed" from Dickens, and the Sears living room sofa, upholstered in a hypnotically hideous pattern of Liberty Bells, bald eagles, and faces of the Founding Fathers. We called it the bicentennial sofa. We were a few years ahead of ourselves, but Grandpa said the name was right and fitting, since the sofa looked as if George Washington had used it to cross the Delaware.

The worst thing about life at Grandpa's house was the noise, a round-the-clock din of cursing and crying and fighting and Uncle Charlie bellowing that he was trying to sleep and Aunt Ruth screaming at her six kids in the nerve-shredding key of a seagull. Just beneath this cacophony was a steady percussion, faint at first, louder as you became more aware of it, like the heartbeat deep inside the House of Usher. In the House of Grandpa the heartbeat was supplied by the screen door opening and closing all day long as people came and went-squeak bang, squeak bang-and also by the peculiar thudding way that everyone in my family walked, on their heels, like storm troopers on stilts. Between the screaming and the screen door, the fighting and the stomping feet, by dusk you'd be barking and twitching more than the dog, who ran off every chance she got. But dusk was the crescendo, the loudest and most tension-filled hour of the day, because dusk was dinnertime.

Seated around the lopsided dining room table, we'd all talk at once, trying to distract ourselves from the food. Grandma couldn't cook, and Grandpa gave her almost no money for groceries, so what came out of...