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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 .
Hyperion
September 2005
384 pages
ISBN: 1401300642
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
J.R. Moehringer grew up listening for a voice: It was the
sound of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared
before J.R. spoke his first words. As a boy, J.R. would
press his ear to a clock radio, straining to hear in that
resonant voice the secrets of masculinity, and the keys to
his own identity. J.R.’s mother was his world, his anchor,
but he needed something else, something more, something he
couldn’t name. So he turned to the bar on the corner, a
grand old New York saloon that was a sanctuary for all
types of men -- cops and poets, actors and lawyers,
gamblers and stumblebums. The flamboyant characters along
the bar -- including J.R.’s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey
Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; Joey D, a
soft-hearted brawler; and Cager, a war hero who raised
handicapping horses to an art -- taught J.R., tended him,
and provided a kind of fatherhood by committee. When the
time came for J.R. to leave home, the bar became a way
station -- from his entrance to Yale, where he floundered
as a scholarship student way out of his element; to his
introduction to tragic romance with a woman way out of his
league; to his stint as a copy boy at the New York Times,
where he was a faulty cog in a vast machine way out of his
control. Through it all, the bar offered shelter from
failure, from rejection, and eventually from reality --
until at last the bar turned J.R. away. Riveting, moving, and achingly funny, The Tender Bar is at
once an evocative portrait of one boy’s struggle to become
a man, and a touching depiction of how some men remain lost
boys.
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