Defining family and a sense of human connection can be challenging for American children when half of all marriages end in divorce. Half of all children miss one parent or another at least part of the time. Many grow up silently searching for answers to questions they never got close enough to ask.
Denver-based, Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times journalist J.R. Moehringer explores those complexities and his personal survival in his intimate and rewarding memoir, “The Tender Bar.”
After his father tried to smother his mother, Dorothy, with a pillow, she left the New York City disc jockey and moved with her only son to Manhasset, Long Island, a community F. Scott Fitzgerald allegedly used as a backdrop for “The Great Gatsby.” Moehringer – called J.R. after his dad – found himself living in the upscale home of his grandparents, but feeling desperately alone.
For most of his life, Moehringer’s contact with his father, “The Voice,” was largely imaginary; one-sided conversations between a lonely boy and the man who spoke volumes through the airwaves, but never really said a word.
Within that void, that garden of yearning, Moehringer craved the authenticity of familiar male bonding. Though he adored his hard-working mother, he found his sense of belonging – and sanctuary – at Manhasset’s legendary watering hole, the Dickens, where every third drink was free.
His Uncle Charlie, a bartender at the Dickens, took Moehringer with him to work, even as an 8-year-old, and the boy drank in the many faces of manhood he encountered there. Card shark Cager, short order cook Smelly, Bob the cop, barroom brawler Joey D and Steve, the owner of the bar, were transformed by the boy’s need into a fathering collective. And under their watchful eyes, Moehringer began to blossom.
With his mother’s encouragement and a vast circle of masculine support, Moehringer won a scholarship to Yale where he struggled with issues of class and belonging. He took comfort in returning to the Dickens and his adoptive family beneath its roof.
Barely graduating, he landed a job at the New York Times as a humble clerk – hoping to parlay it into a stint as a hard-hitting reporter. But it never happens. And his brotherhood – his fatherhood – offered words of comfort so reassuring that Moehringer realized they might be holding him back.
“The more I moaned about the Times,” he writes, “the more popular I became at the bar.” Misery loves company, and the family always welcomed the dejected would-be writer home. Moehringer eventually stepped away from his safe haven when he took a job at the Los Angeles Times in 1994, where he still works today, in the newspaper’s Denver office.
Hyperion calls Moehringer’s book, “a moving, vividly told memoir full of heart, drama, and exquisite comic timing, about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a bar.” Ordinarily, that might be hype in Big Apple proportions. But when it comes to this weave of personal reflections, it couldn’t be truer.
Moehringer somehow managed to capture the full spectrum of truth that unfolded through the haze of the Dickens, without judgments or bitter reflections. Like his essays, Moehringer proves he can reflect his own truth and concise, crisp skills he used to win the Pulitzer for feature writing while at the Los Angeles Times in 2000. He also worked at the Rocky Mountain News from 1990-94,
He barely knew, “The Voice,” his father who died in the heart of the boy long before his physical life ended. But reconnecting with him in his last weeks, and re-examining the paths that led him to challenge and compassionate self-awareness makes this a memoir beyond the pale. It is powerful storytelling at its true story best. It’s life-changing work about a changed life, a gentle giant not to be missed.
Kelly Milner Halls is a freelance writer in Spokane, Wash.
The Tender Bar
By J.R. Moehringer
Hyperion, 384 pages, $23.95
