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'Bar' a memoir worth toasting

Jenny Shank, Special to the News

Published September 9, 2005 at midnight

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The sitcom Cheers enjoyed an 11-year run, in part because of the appealing fantasy it offered millions of viewers. The regulars of Cheers exemplified an array of human foibles: narcissism (Sam), sloth (Norm), long-windedness (Cliff), irascibility (Carla), snobbishness (Diane), arrogance (Dr. Frasier Crane), ignorance (Woody) and whininess (Rebecca).

Yet inside Cheers, each of them was accepted, their personality defects converted into comically endearing gifts, the patrons welcomed with cold mugs of beer scooting down the bar before they'd even ordered.

For anyone who has ever felt out of place, lonely, more than usually burdened with shortcomings, or occupationally adrift, that bar was the dream, the home of the quintessential band of misfits transfigured into a loving, jovial community.

For Denver author J.R. Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has just written the exceptional memoir The Tender Bar, the Cheers fantasy must strike awfully close to home - only 142 steps away from home, to be exact. That is the precise distance from Moehringer's grandparents' house, where he grew up, to a Cheers-like bar in his native Manhasset, a hard-drinking Long Island town.

In The Tender Bar, Moehringer tells his life story in relation to this bar - called Dickens, then Publicans - which seems to have impacted him even more crucially than Cheers did Norm: "At some point the bar itself became my father, its dozens of men melding into one enormous male eye looking over my shoulder."

Moehringer proceeds chronologically, starting his story from the beginning - no, not at his birth, but from the first time he can remember becoming aware of Dickens. He was 7 years old and saw the bar's softball team playing "on a hot summer night in 1972." Struck by the laughter and evident joy of the men, J.R. and his mother share a formative exchange:

"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."

The men's happiness and kinship appeals to the young J.R. because his childhood, to this point, has been a lonely and difficult one. Moehringer's parents divorced when he was a baby, and his father abandoned his son all but completely. He sends no child support and doesn't visit, but he's still tantalizingly within reach because he's a local DJ, and J.R. spends many evenings searching the airwaves for his father's radio show, listening to the witty, absent man he calls "The Voice" and even talking back to him, trying to manufacture a conversation they never shared.

Moehringer's mother did not attend college because her cantankerous, chauvinistic father forbade it, and so she is forced to raise her son on whatever salary an uneducated woman could earn in the 1970s recession-era economy. She works double shifts, trying to maintain an apartment, but more often than not she can't make the rent, and so the pair ends up back in Grandpa's chaotic, dilapidated home, which is usually brimming with three grown children and their raucous progeny.

Through vivid, funny details like this, Moehringer suckers the reader in effortlessly, in part because the elements of his life are those that have suckered readers into books for ages: Take a lonely, fatherless child living in a state close to poverty and give him an appealing, longed-for outlet populated with larger-than-life characters. It's a formula that has worked for Great Expectations, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and countless other fine books over the years. It just happens that Moehringer's tale is true, and his outlet isn't London high society, the Mississippi River or a shady detective agency - it's a bar.

After years of yearning to be admitted to the Dickens community, J.R.'s chance finally arrives through his uncle Charlie, who is a bartender and emerges as one of the strongest characters in the book. Self-conscious about having lost all the hair on his body because of a condition called alopecia, Charlie lives in Grandpa's house and disguises himself in a hat and dark glasses.

But as Moehringer writes, "To me, the unique thing about Uncle Charlie wasn't the way he looked, but the way he talked, a crazy, jazzy fusion of SAT words and gangster slang that made him sound like a cross between an Oxford don and a Mafia don."

One day during a lonely summer for Moehringer - his mom is away, trying to establish a life for them across the country in Arizona - Uncle Charlie invites J.R. to come to the beach with him and the men from Dickens.

J.R. relishes their company and witty, rapid-fire banter, and after the beach trip ends, they all walk into Dickens together. Moehringer describes the place rapturously: "Hanging upside down from wooden slats above the bar were hundreds of cocktail glasses, which caught and reflected the light of the barroom like a vast chandelier . . . I ran my hand along the bar top. . . . The surface was a tawny orange-yellow, like the skin of a lion. I petted it tentatively."

Having won the bartenders' affections, from then on J.R. becomes part of the crowd. He spends years as their beach buddy and tagalong before he can ever legally drink. Uncle Charlie and the rest of the crowd are there for him during his social struggles in high school and his efforts to gain a college acceptance, trying to live up to the expectation his mother has half-jokingly set for him since he was a small child: "Harvard or Yale, babe."

The Dickens crowd supports him when he flounders at Yale, falls face-first into love, suffers through his first heartbreak, graduates and fails repeatedly in work and love.

As the years pass, Moehringer watches the men around him stare down the consequences of lifelong alcoholism or cope with grievous problems through drink. For one beloved figure, a decades-long relationship with the bottle ends in a premature death, and Moehringer renders his liquor-drenched, heartbreaking funeral in loving detail. When the Sept. 11 attacks occur, many of the bar's regulars are among its victims.

These sad events set the tone of the book's final pages, in which Moehringer turns away from the bar and the dissolute beginnings of his adult life to head across the country and onto a successful career as a journalist.

All told, Moehringer's life is only moderately more eventful than the average life, but it seems to have been peopled with a great many more vivid characters than most, and Moehringer's ability to conjure these people, fully fleshed, is impeccable. All the characters - from Uncle Charlie, to Moehringer's brave, bone-tired mother, to a pair of eccentric Arizona bookshop employees who foster his education - merit every page Moehringer has given them, and more.

A good memoir is a survivor's tale, the story of a person who has faced obstacles and made it through well enough to tell it. Moehringer's memoir, better than most, illuminates the fact that every life is a survivor's tale - we made it this far, didn't we?

Funny, frank, sad and bursting with life, The Tender Bar is irresistible.



Jenny Shank was recently named a semifinalist for the 2005 James Jones First Novel Fellowship. She lives in Boulder.

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