Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“Hello,” I timidly call out — but only once — then, quick as a flash, beat it back to my freezing car.

It has somehow become four o’clock. Daylight’s sunk out of the invisible east. Sunset’s at a daunting 4:36. Brash wind and slashing rain sheets have begun whacking my windshield and beading moisture on the backseat. Headlights are now in use. It’s drive-time, the race home, the time no one but the doomed want to be on our nation’s roadways — including me, with nobody waiting at the doorway, no plans to make the hours resemble the true joy of living.

A drink’s what I require. I usually hold the line till six, a discipline well known to weary corporate accountants, single-handed sailors and hard-luck novelists in need of cheering. But six is a state of mind, and my state of mind says it’s six, which even out front of the spooky Glass? confers a jollying self-confirming certainty that positive elections can still be mine — not just refusals to drive Wade to the Grove or to romance the unspecified Ricki. I can have a drink. Some good things, warm sensations, await me.

I’m once again only a stone’s short throw from the old Manasquan Bar, below the river bridge, where I took the 34 cut-off earlier. There I can certainly have a drink (and a piss) in familiar, congenial surroundings. Save an Hour, Save an Evening — the late-occurring motto for the day.

The Manasquan, which I head straight toward, would ordinarily — as I said before — be off-limits to me due to its anchorage in the past and prone-ness to fumy nostalgias. In the middle eighties, it had its scheduled and amiable purpose. After a night’s chartered fishing excursion on the Mantoloking Belle, the Manasquan was the Divorced Men’s special venue for demonstrating residual rudimentary social, communicative and empathy skills (we actually weren’t very good at any of these things and not good at fishing, either), and we all fled to it the instant we stepped off our boat — our legs rubbery, arms weak from manning our rods, thirsts worked up. The charter captain’s mustachioed brother-in-law owned the place — an extended family of crafty Greeks. And it sat where it sat — hard by the dock — to make sure the Mouzakis family got all our money before sending us home happier but wiser. Which, as if by magic, is what happened — until it didn’t, at which point and by no agreed-upon signal, we all quit going and consigned it to the past and oblivion, where we wished our old marriages would go.

Though I sense I have nothing to fear now from the Manasquan, for reason of its prosaic, standard-dockside, snug-away character — the red BAR sign on its shingled roof, muted rose-blue accent lights, tar-ry nautical smells, plenty of cork buoys and shellacked swordfish husks on the walls alongside decades of dusty fishermen photos. It will be as it was years back: detoxified and inoculated by inauthenticity, with no negative juju powers to give me the creeps about not throwing my life over to become a second mate on a halibut hauler off the Grand Banks, and instead being a realtor — or a State Farm agent in Hightstown, or a garden supply owner-operator in Haddam, or a podiatrist in Rocky Hill — all those things we were back in ’83. Of course, I anticipated the same at the Johnny Appleseed last night, with sorry results.

I take the Manasquan jug-handle and loop down around to the small embarcadero fronting the River Marina, where banners are still up from the annual striper derby in September, an antique fair and last summer’s Big Sea Day on the beach. All is familiar — the Mouzakis Paramount Show Boat Dock and the lowly Manasquan itself, red BAR warmly glowing through the early-evening rain.

Although names have changed. The Paramount Dock is now Uncle Ben’s Excursions. The old Belle, with a fresh pink paint job, is dimly visible at the dock’s end, bearing the name Pink Lady. The shingled, barn-roofed Manasquan, once in neon above the portholed entry, has become Old Squatters, with a plain black-letter sign hung to the door itself.

And by a good stroke, across the puddled lot from the dock and bar, there’s now, outside the old Quonset shed where nautical gear was once stored for the charter business, a shingle that says BOAT, CARS, TRAILER REPAIRS. NO JOB TOO ABSURD. Lights are on in the garage and the tiny office. I swing around, stop in front and walk up to ask about a back-window repair.

Inside, a small black-haired man in need of a shave is seated behind the counter, close to a gas space heater, listening to a Greek radio station playing twiny bouzouki music while he eats an enormous sandwich. A long-legged, peroxided, pimpled kid with tattoos on his arms, possibly the son, sits in a tipped-back dinette chair across the tiny overheated office, bent over a foxed copy of The Great G atsby —the old green-gray-and-white Scribner Library edition I read in “American Existentialism and Beyond” in Ann Arbor in 1964. For decades, I reread it every year, exactly the way we’re all supposed to, then got sick of its lapidary certainties disguised as spoiled innocence — something I don’t believe in — and gave my last copy to the Toms River Shriners’ Xmas Benefit. Garage mechanics, of course, play a pivotal role in Fitzgerald’s denouement, transacted scarcely a hundred miles from here as the gull flies. It is this boy, I’m certain, who’s authored the sign outside, and he I address about my window.

His eyes raise above his book top and he smiles a perfectly receptive smile, though the older attendant never looks at me. He may only wait on other Greeks.

“Okay,” the boy says before I can explain the whole situation and how little I’ll be satisfied with. “I’ll do it. Duct tape okay?” He looks back with interest to his page. He’s near the end, where Meyer Wolfsheim says, “When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out.” Sound advice.

“Great,” I say. “I’ll head over to the Manasquan and try the cocktails.” I offer a nod of trust that promises a big tip.

“Leave me them keys.” He’s wearing a blue mechanic’s shirt with a white patch that says Chris in red cursives. Likely he’s a Monmouth College student on Thanksgiving break, the first of his immigrant family to blub, blub, blub. I’m tempted to poll his views about Jay Gatz. Victim? Ill-starred innocent? Gray-tinged antihero? Or all three at once, vividly registering Fitzgerald’s glum assessment of our century’s plight — now blessedly at an end. The “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” imagery is at odds with the three boats imagery of the old Nick Carraway doppelganger, Wade. It’s possible of course that as a modern student, Chris doesn’t subscribe to the author concept per se. I, however, still do.

Keys handed off, I head across the drizzly gravel lot to the Old Squatters né Manasquan, heartened that the time-honored shade-tree way of doing business “While-U-Wait” is still a tradition in this part of our state — among immigrants anyway — and hasn’t caved in to the franchise volume-purchasing-power mentality that only knows “that’s on back order” or “the manufacturer stopped making those”—the millennial free-enterprise canon in which the customer’s a bit-part player to the larger drama of gross accumulation (what the Republicans want for us, though the liars say they don’t).

Dense, good bar smell meets me when I step inside, surprising for being the exact aroma I remember — stale beer, cigarette smoke, boat tar, urinal soap, popcorn, wax for the leather banquettes, and floor-sweep granules — a positive, good-prospects smell, though probably best appreciated by men my age.

The dark-cornered, barny old room looks the same as when Ernie McAuliffe pounded his fists on the table and racketed on about Ruskies — the long-raftered ceiling, the long bar down the right side, back-lit with fuzzed red and blue low-lights and ranked rows of every kind of cheap hooch you’d dream of, all reflected in a smoky mirror on which the management has taped a smiling cartoon turkey with a cartoon Pilgrim pointing a musket at it. Two patrons sit at a table at the booth-lined rear wall. There’s a tiny square linoleum dance floor, where no one ever danced in my day, and hung above it a mirror-faceted disco ball useful when things are jumping, which I don’t remember ever being the case. Once the Manasquan served a decent broasted-chicken basket and a popcorn-shrimp platter. But no one’s eating, and no food smell’s in the atmosphere. The swinging chrome doors to the kitchen are barred and padlocked.