The tender bar : a memoir

Summary: J.R. Moehringer grew up listening for a voice: the sound of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before J.R. spoke his first words. As a boy, he would press his ear to a radio, straining to hear the keys to his own identity. His mother was his world, his anchor, but he needed something else, 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 taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fatherhood by committee. When the time came for him to leave home, the bar became a way station, offering shelter from failure, from rejection, and eventually from reality--until at last the bar turned J.R. away. A portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and a touching depiction of how some men remain lost boys.--From publisher description.