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.
