The Tender Bar

“As the man of my family, as my mother’s protector, I should have been prepared to demand money from my father the moment he showed his face. But I didn’t want to scare him off. I longed to see him even more than I longed to see my beloved Mets in person for the first time.”

The author recalls his conflicted feelings about meeting his father for the first time as a seven-year-old boy. At this early age, he already conceived of himself as the “man of my family” and his mother’s “protector,” a part of his identity that he goes on to build and examine throughout the rest of his memoir.

“As I held my mother, clung to her, cried against her legs, it struck me that she was all I had, and if I didn’t take good care of her I’d be lost.”

The author shared his vivid childhood memory of expecting to meet his father for the first time, who never arrived. This immense disappointment prompted him to realize how much he depended on his mother, and it triggered a long-running anxiety about caring for her. This trauma played into the author’s eventual realization that it was his mother, and not his father, who embodied virtues he’d considered masculine.

“Though she was mysterious by nature, some of my mother’s mystery was by design. The most honest person I’ve ever known, she was a beautiful liar [...] Her lies were so well-crafted, so expertly told, that I never gave them a second thought. As a result, now and then, sorting through my childhood memories, I still come upon one of my mother’s lies, like an elaborately painted Easter egg that was hidden too well and forgotten.”

Moehringer remembers how lying was one of his mother’s ways of protecting him as a child. He recounts that the “mystery” she created helped make it seem like their situation was not as desperate as it really was, so he would not feel so stressed about their financial or family situation. For example, she claimed that food stamps were coupons and that she could not buy them a TV because the TV manufacturers were on strike; Moehringer believed both lies.

“Pressing my forehead against the car window as the mansions flew by, I’d think: So many beautiful places in the world, and we’re barred from them all. Obviously the secret of life was getting in. Why couldn’t my mother and I figure out how it was done?”

Growing up in Manhasset, Moehringer felt that the middle- and upper-class families lived comfortable, stable lives. Feeling both envious and perplexed, Moehringer longed to understand how to create such a life for both himself and his mother. This longing for the “secret of life” later magnified the author’s idealization of Yale, which he saw as a form of salvation.

“I walked slowly to Grandpa’s, rubbing off my mustache, stopping now and then to peer in the windows of houses. Happy families. Glowing fireplaces. Children dressed as pirates and witches, sorting and counting their candy. I was willing to lay heavy timber that not one of those kids knew anything about ambushes or embargoes.”

Moehringer remembers one childhood Halloween that was rudely interrupted by his Aunt Ruth forcing her daughter, Sheryl, to leave him to trick-or-treat by himself. He and his mother, as well as his grandparents, had been “embargoed” by Aunt Ruth, and she had barred her children from contact with Moehringer. The author, tired of the household dysfunction, wished he could have a happy family Halloween like the other kids in his neighborhood.

“According to my black-and-white view of the world, it wasn’t enough to do my best. I had to be perfect. To take care of my mother, to send her to college, I needed to eliminate all mistakes. Mistakes had led to our predicament—Grandma marrying Grandpa, Grandpa denying my mother’s wish to go to college, my mother marrying my father—and they continued to cost us.”

Moehringer suggests that his early traumas resulted in his dichotomous worldview and perfectionistic approach to life. This outlook meant that the author was a serious and anxious child, eager to achieve perfection at any task. In addition to painting a portrait of desperate perfectionism, this passage emphasizes the acutely backward burden the author felt: He was a child, and yet he felt the responsibility to take care of those who should have been his caretakers.

“You must do everything that frightens you, JR. Everything [...] Think about fear, decide right now how you’re going to deal with fear, because fear is going to be the great issue of your life, I promise you. Fear will be the fuel for all your success and the root cause of all your failures, and the underlying dilemma in every story you tell yourself about yourself. And the only chance you’ll have against fear? Follow it. Steer by it. Don’t think of fear as the villain.”

While a teenage Moehringer was working at a bookstore in Arizona, he was contemplating applying to Yale but admitted to his bosses Bill and Bud that the thought of it frightened him. This quotation is Bud’s passionate advice to the author’s teenage self, urging him to not allow fear to dissuade him from pursuing his life goals.

“Staring into the barroom, watching Uncle Charlie pour drinks, I felt suddenly at ease, knowing that as surely as Yale would reject me, Publicans would accept me. If I couldn’t have the light and the truth of Yale, I could always count on the dark truth of the bar.”

This quotation shows how important Publicans was to Moehringer as he came of age and faced uncertainty in the future. By this time, Publicans had become a kind of second home to him, whose support he relied on as he navigated his university years. Moehringer did not fit in well at his high school or university, making his feeling of belonging at Publicans even more important to him.

“Being named JR had always been complicated [...] What does JR stand for? Embarrassed to be named after a father who disappeared, I answered for years with evasions.”

Moehringer’s memoir often discusses his name and how it informed his conflicted sense of identity. This quotation shows Moehringer’s embarrassment at being so closely associated with his absent father, and the measures he took to avoid the sensitive subject.

“One confident boy stood out from all the rest. He smiled as if he had a winning lottery ticket in his pocket, and I supposed he did. His success was that assured. He looked like someone to whom nothing bad would ever happen.”

Moehringer remembers how he felt intimidated by his upper-class peers at Yale University, and shows how much he was amazed by one young man in particular. In his Epilogue, the author explains that this fellow alumnus was killed during the 9/11 attacks. Moehringer’s youthful perception of this man shows his teenage naivete and tendency to aggrandize people and situations. He uses the past tense—“supposed”—to show that he was wrong to assume that this person had a “winning lottery ticket” in life based on his first impression of him. His description of this fellow, and his note in the Epilogue, add to his subtle theme about both fate and the foolishness of romanticizing the lives of strangers.

“The euphoria I felt was the same I experienced reading The Iliad. In fact the bar and the poem complemented each other, like companion pieces. Each smacked of the ageless verities of men. Cager was my Hector. Uncle Charlie was my Ajax. Smelly was my Achilles.”

Even as a young adult, Moehringer romanticized the men he met at the bar, imbuing them with heroic masculinity. For him, the opportunity to connect with these men was not simply an everyday experience, but a euphoric one that brought him the inspiration and validation he had always sought from men.

“How to boil it down into a few words? It was more than being intimidated, more than poor grades. I read and read, worked as hard as I could, but without Bill and Bud to translate, I was lost.”

Moehringer’s transition from an average Arizona public high school to Yale University was a stressful one. Though he applied himself in his classes, he felt that he needed the mentorship of his old bosses, Bill and Bud, to truly appreciate what he was studying. Not accustomed to struggling in school, and now living his dream of attending Yale, Moehringer felt immense pressure to succeed.

“People just don’t understand how many men it takes to build one good man.”

A priest made this remark to Moehringer when they were discussing his fatherless childhood. The author remembered how the priest compared men to Manhattan’s towers, since each grown man was the result of many men’s efforts. The remark indirectly emphasizes the weight and, seemingly, the futility of intergenerational male violence.

“If I believed in love, she wrote, and she knew that I did, then I shouldn’t abandon my first love, Yale, to mourn my second, Sidney. I would look back on this time, my mother wrote, and remember remarkably little of it, except the extent to which I tried or did not try.”

The author remembers his most challenging year at Yale in which he battled his depression over his ex-girlfriend Sidney’s betrayal and his complete lack of motivation in his studies. His mother was his most committed supporter and compelled him to complete his classes despite his grief. She was a source of guidance as well as affirmation; she emphasized the importance of his efforts over the importance of his performance.

“When Sidney’s parents went up to bed, Sidney and I would stoke the fire and she’d read Proust while I studied. Sometimes I would look out the window and imagine some little boy watching from across the street. Once or twice I felt that part of me was still out there, in the woods, peering in.”

Despite being welcomed by Sidney’s family and spending time in their upscale home, the author still felt out-of-place there. He references previous scenes in the book in which, as a child, he would look enviously through his neighbors windows and imagine their lives. This quote demonstrates how although Moehringer’s material circumstances had changed dramatically by adulthood, he was haunted by his childhood feelings of being unable to “get in” to such beautiful places.

“But there was something more worrisome about Home Fashions, more horrible. More shameful. I liked it. All those nights peering into windows around Manhasset, all that pining after fine homes and nice things, had turned me into some kind of Home Fashions savant.”

Moehringer reminisces about his first job after university, selling Home Fashion products in a Lord and Taylor store. He notes that although he was embarrassed by his job, he also found that he enjoyed selling high-end items, which he attributes to his childhood longing to escape his impoverished environment and have fine things like the families he saw. His youth had a characteristic undercurrent of continual desperation for a life of beauty and security, which played into his social-class anxiety.

“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.”

Moehringer’s typical descriptive prose paints a scene of the New York Times office in the 1980s. This quote highlights that although there probably were women working there (indeed, he was interviewed by a woman that same day), Moehringer was focused on the many professional men, whom he immediately admired. Even this perception of his professional milieu reflects his thematic identity conflict; his selective notice of these men’s debonair, sophisticated qualities was part of his desire to emulate them.

“[W]hat 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.”

Moehringer explains that the journalistic profession appealed to him because it allowed him to please both his mother and himself. His mother had always encouraged him to plan to go to law school, though Moehringer never felt sure of this plan. In journalism, he realized he could marry some of the best qualities of both.

“I was madly happy. I put in long hours in the newsroom and volunteered to work overtime. I even dropped by the newspaper on days off, acting as if I belonged, pretending to be busy.”

Moehringer illustrates his enthusiasm for his first job in journalism—being a New York Times “copykid”—despite his tedious tasks. This passage suggests that of his zeal for the work involved a sense of communal identity, just as he sought through Publicans. He felt at home at the Times, happy to act “as if [he] belonged.”

“Sitting forward on the bicentennial sofa and looking into her green-brown eyes I understood that every virtue I associated with manhood—toughness, persistence, determination, reliability, honesty, integrity, guts—my mother exemplified. I’d always been dimly aware, but at that moment, with my first glimpse at the warrior behind my mother’s blank face, I grasped the idea fully and put it into words for the first time. All this searching and longing for the secret of being a good man, and all I needed to do was follow the example of one very good woman.”

In this moment of burgeoning maturity and self-awareness, a 25-year-old Moehringer realizes that while he had been preoccupied with latching onto father figures as a child, his mother had provided a consistent example of how to be a good man through her parenting and behavior. This realization was part of the author’s journey for identity. He now has a conscious, concrete model for how to form himself.

“Your father is not a good man, but you are not your father.”

Moehringer remembers coming to this realization by himself after being violently confronted by his father as a young adult. The author found this realization freeing, as it helped him dispense with many of the idealistic illusions or fantasies he had clung to about his father and men in general. The flashpoint was also an awakening, as this passage is a direct utterance of newfound identity—a central theme in the memoir.

“I didn’t want to list all the reasons that drinking—along with smoking and gambling and most other vices—had lost its appeal after I left Publicans. I didn’t want to tell Jimbo that sobering up had felt like growing up, and vice versa.”

The Epilogue explains that although Moehringer had relied on Publicans—and by extension, drinking—to cope with his young adulthood, he abstained from alcohol for 10 years since then. While the author does not express regret for his years indulging various “vices” at Publicans, he confesses that he felt he had grown up since then by becoming sober. This shows how his priorities and identity changed over that decade.

“I said goodbye to the gang from Publicans. In many ways it was harder saying goodbye this time than it had been years earlier.”

The author discusses the impact of 9/11 on Manhasset, which is very near New York City and lost over 50 people to the attacks. As Moehringer was reporting from Manhasset shortly after 9/11, he reconnected with many of his friends from Publicans, which had since closed. Moehringer confesses that, due to the years that passed and the tragedy of 9/11, leaving Manhasset was more painful than it was in his twenties.