The Tender Bar

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 2005

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Chapters 20-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 20-22 Summary

The author begins Chapter 20, entitled “My Mother,” by recounting the experience of writing his application letter to Yale. After many attempts, he wrote a simple and honest essay, which his mother approved. Moehringer remembers the joyous moment when he and his mother opened his acceptance letter, which also informed him that the university would waive his tuition.

When he arrived at Yale, however, he immediately noticed how most of his fellow students came from much wealthier backgrounds than his own. The author recalls a peer’s mother who gave him a look of pity when she saw he was taking a taxi and had no parents with him. He felt self-conscious about his social background and lack of preparedness for the rigors of Yale academics. As school began, he was deeply discouraged about his poor grades and his professors’ impossible standards. Bill and Bud were no longer a source of support for him, since they were fired from their bookstore positions in Arizona, and Moehringer lost touch with them.

As New York’s legal drinking age was 18 years old at this time, Moehringer reflects on visiting Dickens for his first legal drink. Moehringer explains that, now an adult, he saw a different side to his Uncle Charlie. As a child he knew him as melancholy, or sometimes “surly” (172), however, visiting the bar as an adult, the author saw how theatrical, extroverted, and playful his uncle could be. Moehringer’s social circle continued to expand at Dickens, and he vividly remembers meeting a Vietnam war veteran named “Cager” whom he idolized as a macho warrior figure. The author remembers feeling that he learned more in his birthday visit to the bar than he did in his formal education at Yale—and he even took notes so he would remember the occasion.

Chapters 20-22 Analysis

In these happy chapters, Moehringer uses a jovial tone as he pokes fun at his adolescent self. He humorously quotes some of the early drafts of his Yale entry essays in which he relied on pretentious vocabulary and old-fashioned syntax. He remembers writing, “I have ambition [...] in the sense that one would describe the man who wishes to outrun a speeding train as ambitious. And the behemoth bearing down on me? Ignorance!” (152).

In another draft, he dramatically told the admissions committee that he could not “convey the emphatic pangs of hungry ignorance that attend this my seventeenth year” (151). His mother flatly rejected these attempts, saying he seemed over-the-top. These comical inclusions give Moehringer’s readers an insight into his adolescent desire to be intellectual enough for Yale. Beyond being merely entertaining, Moehringer’s self-deprecating stories further humanize him as a narrator.

As the author introduces a new set of characters he met at Yale, from students to professors; he refers to them by self-invented nicknames, much like the men at Publicans did with each other. This acquired nicknaming habit shows just how much the bar patrons impacted him. His concerns about not fitting in with his Yale classmates deepen his theme of belonging. He sprinkles references to class differences throughout the chapter and includes details about his peers and their families to recreate how unwelcome he felt on his first day. For instance, when a cab driver dropped him off for his first day at Yale, another parent assumed the driver was the author’s father. Moehringer recalls, “before she could ask the cab driver if he preferred to summer on the Vineyard or the Cape, I handed him his money” (161). This prompted the woman to give him a “fake smile,” which Moehringer supposed was due to pity. He notes that his second roommate arrived in a limousine with a father who had a foreboding facial expression. He remembers that most of his peers arrived in vehicles three times the cost of his own mother’s yearly salary. These details illuminate just how sorely the author stood out at 1980s Yale, and his consequent inner panic.