The new movie “The Tender Bar,” about a boy who finds comfort and an escape from his chaotic family life in a neighborhood taproom, is based on the memoir of our first guest, J.R.
Two rules – I’m never going to let you win, ever.
He was quite well known at the time, so I grew up knowing what he sounded like, but not knowing what he looked like, which was…
And he had the most beautiful voice, which, you know, made it even more vexing that he wasn’t around ’cause this gorgeous baritone would be coming out of the radio.
And pretty early on, my mother kind of handed me off to my uncle and these guys from the bar, asked them to, you know, take me to the beach and to the ballgame.
And then, of course, when I was old enough to drink in the bar, you know, I really kind of embraced these guys, and I spent a lot of time at that bar learning different lessons about manhood, about courage, about character from those guys.
But I just felt, as so many young boys, young men do, that there were some secret knowledge that men had and that I wasn’t privy to it ’cause there was no man in my house.
And to these guys, it meant a certain kind of John Wayne aura.
I mean, I remember being around these guys from, you know, 11 years old until I was about 25, and I remember laughing a lot.
It was the young – it was my – you know, it was the young men among my classmates who noticed that I had come from a kind of a different world.
I mean, I’ve learned since then that I was not alone, that the most seemingly polished kids in my class felt the same sense of being out of place.
It was not the best training to grow up in a bar and in a tiny apartment with a single mom and to go to a bad public school.
MOEHRINGER: No, I was pretty conversant in the facts of life when I was in the bar and observing what the grown-ups were all doing.
And so if you weren’t observing, you know, overt displays of sexuality, you were observing couples breaking up or married couples deciding to end it.
And anyone else in the house would turn the radio off ’cause he had mistreated your mother so badly.
GROSS: And so you’d hear him on the radio and just, like, fantasize about who he was and read all kinds of things into his voice.
Can you describe a little bit what it was like? I know, like, when I was growing up and I listened to the radio, to me, it was, like, that place that no one could take away from me ’cause even alone in my bedroom, I could listen to the radio.
Every time I hear certain Stevie Wonder songs, certain Van Morrison songs, I just – you know, I can hear my father.
And I was turning the dial excruciatingly slowly, trying to find his voice, which, you know, really broke my mother’s heart.
And then what was strange is that when he died in 2002, a lot of his fans posted their favorite shows.
And it took a long time to unwind my sense that he was living this exotic party life – that, really, he was he was a lonely guy projecting a false image through that microphone.
And I was too emotionally overwrought by the moment to notice any disparity between the voice and the person.
But that didn’t happen to me when I met him because he was my father, and I was so excited to meet him.
In fact, it just took forever for me to gain any perspective on that moment and realize who he was and how eager to please me he was.
But then at a certain point, I had to keep him at arm’s length because he just wasn’t a healthy influence on my life.
It was just – it was horrifying because it wasn’t really an attempt to make up for all those birthdays and Christmases that he’d missed.
He just – he seemed incapable of being genuine and present and just a dad.
There’s actually a chapter in the book – I thought that – you know, I was 17 at the time, and I thought that writing meant using $20 words.
MOEHRINGER: It was one of the biggest arguments we’ve ever had, and we just went around and around.
And I just wrote about how these guys gave me books and talked to me about books and how much I looked up to them and how they’d opened the world to me.
And I thrust it at her like this will show you, you know, because I knew it was terrible because it was just simple words and nothing but the truth.
I mean, she brought them out when I was writing “The Tender Bar,” and I quote some of the worst – the most offensive sentences in the book.
It’s a – these are words that I was determined to shoehorn into my college essay – so provisional, strident, bucolic, fulcrum, inimical, behemoth, Jesuitical, minion, eclectic, Marquis de Sod – spelled S-O-D – and aesthetic.
Try as I might, I feel unable to truly convey the emphatic pangs of hungry ignorance that attend this, my 17th year, for I fear that my audience is well fed.
And she just stood there and bore the brunt of my hubris and my yelling and my sticking out my bottom lip and has done it since more times than I care to count.
And I wrote – you know, I did write a plain, simple essay about this bookstore where I worked and these two guys who were so good to me and gave me books and gave me a love of books.
After a break, we’ll remember novelist Anne Rice, best known for her bestseller “Interview With The Vampire,” and culture writer and critic Greg Tate.
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