Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (16 page)

CRETE, 1997

(by Frances Stroh)

I
know my brothers will like you,” I assured my boyfriend. “They’ll like that you’re Russian, first of all, and they’ll definitely appreciate your cooking.”

We sped past Detroit, headed to Grosse Pointe on the Chrysler Freeway. We’d come from San Francisco, where we were living together. It was nearly our three-year anniversary, in fact. My family was gathering for an annual business meeting and, though Arkady had already met my parents on several occasions, I was taking the opportunity to introduce him to my brothers. Even Charlie would be there.

“I’ll cook them a great dinner,” said Arkady in his thick Russian accent.

Detroit had always looked bombed out, but now it seemed positively abandoned, with whole blocks of what appeared to be unoccupied houses. I knew many of the city’s inhabitants had fled as late-stage industrialization set in, but I’d had no idea just how bad things had become. This was the legacy of
Coleman Young’s twenty years in office. Young was a mayor who’d gloated as white businesses moved out, no matter how many black jobs were lost in the process. The desolation was the aftermath of shortsighted union leaders who had tailored their policies to bolster the faltering automotive industry and line their own pockets. And the consequence of the Big Three automakers themselves, who for too long had refused to build smaller, cheaper, more fuel-efficient cars to compete with their foreign counterparts.

Now, with the retreat of the automotive industry to the suburbs and abroad, all signs of manufacturing had finally vanished in Detroit, its smokestacks emitting no smoke. In many parts of the city, only footprints of manufacturing plants remained where the buildings themselves had been leveled. Defunct cement silos dotted the riverfront because the city was too broke to take them down. Crack cocaine, the cornerstone of the new economy, was a difficult commodity to tax.

Yet all the devastation had given birth to Eminem and the Detroit underground hip-hop scene, the first sign of life in a city that had been dying for decades. It had taken forty years, but Detroit now had its signature music scene again, one that reflected the hopelessness of the times, just as surely as sixties Motown had once mirrored the burgeoning black middle class’s sense of abundance and upward mobility.

The arrow-straight freeway suddenly looped around the city at exactly the spot where the Stroh Brewery had once stood, its pinkish-red letters lighting up the sky. When the Chrysler Freeway was built in the sixties, the city had man
dated that every building in the interstate’s path be razed, except the historic brewery. If only Coleman Young had shown us the same respect and level of consideration; seventeen years and $300 million later, the stampede of tenants he’d promised at Stroh River Place had never materialized. Our office building was half empty, our apartments and hotel lost in foreclosure. My family’s arc was eerily parallel to Detroit’s; we’d boomed together and now . . . we were failing together.

“That’s where Stroh’s Beer was made,” I told Arkady, pointing out the window.

He frowned at the weed-filled expanse of derelict land. “Unbelievable,” he said, in a single word deftly acknowledging all my family’s losses since the demolition of the brewery fifteen years before. “Too bad we can’t drink Stroh’s Beer with the dinner I’m going to cook for you,” he added cheerfully.

Arkady was a world-class amateur cook, one of the reasons I had fallen for him. We met on Crete in the summer of 1997, shortly after I’d left London. He was sleeping on the balcony of a partially built hotel, under the stars. I was intrigued.

“I cannot sleep in rooms,” he told me. “I need air—not
dust.
”

We cooked lamb on the beach and drank wine straight from the bottle. He did weight lifting with actual rocks, his Olympic muscles as chiseled as those of the ancient Greek statues I’d seen in Athens. When he brought me Mediterranean salt water to heal a sinus infection, I nicknamed him “The Bushman.” He’d lifted the jar of murky water to my nostrils. “Inhale,” he commanded.

For months, Arkady listened sympathetically to my family
saga. I told him about the family ski trip in Jackson just after Christmas, and how, with all the stress, I’d come down with the flu and had to extend my stay by three days, holed up in my hotel room and ordering French onion soup from room service. I convinced the airline to change my ticket back to London with no extra charges. My father appeared at the door of my room only once, holding his breath while dropping two Advil into the palm of my hand.

When Elisa, my father, and I checked out, my father told me, not a little sheepishly, that I would be responsible for covering the cost of my extra days—totaling about $900. “I agreed to pay for six nights,” he reminded me.

Elisa stood at my father’s side, looking on with what seemed a certain satisfaction.

Stunned, I pulled out my credit card. I had no idea how I would cover my rent back in London. I would move out of my flat, I decided, after using up my last month’s rent deposit.

“It’s a sad story,” Arkady would say with conviction as we sat in this or that taverna, sipping Greek coffee. “This would never happen in Russia.
Never
.”

“But that’s how I ended up in Greece, see?” I told him. “Because it’s dirt cheap.”

“A man’s daughter should always come first.
Always
.”

Arkady’s values and opinions were as solid as the rocks he lifted on the beach. When it seemed my family situation had toppled my flimsy house of cards, Arkady provided strength and sanity. Our days on Crete were filled with mountain hikes, dips in the Mediterranean, yoga, and the preparation of three organic meals. Arkady knew nothing about contem
porary art and had little money; still, I felt nurtured when I was with him. As the weeks passed, the complexities of the art world and my family supplanted by a program of rigorous self-care, I developed a bodily sense of well-being I had never before known. My newfound sense of calm felt totally unfamiliar, and I slept through the night for the first time in years, often after listening to Arkady play Russian gypsy songs on his balcony.

Some days I felt perfectly at peace with the simplicity of my life on Crete, and yet there were other days when my body and my mind seemed at odds, when I longed for the intellectual stimulation I’d left behind in London, the city’s frenetic sense of potential, even as the possibility of returning to that other life receded.

The change in me happened slowly, almost imperceptibly, like the leftover summer snow thawing on Crete’s distant peaks. It happened incrementally, taking hold as we traversed the arid landscape past tiny white chapels dotting the hillsides; or strolled along beaches fiercely drifted by the sirocco winds, our sun hats skipping across the sand in front of us, our skin whipped and welted. Somewhere inside the casual rhythm of our days, I began to understand: not just that my entire life would change, but that it
had
to. I needed more substance, less abstraction; more space in which to move around emotionally and physically; and fewer hang-ups about money, fewer preconceptions. I would somehow find the way to depend on myself, rather than others. While in my work, I would benefit perhaps from a medium in which to deal with real events and real feelings—filmmaking, say, or writing.

After Greece, Arkady and I lived around the world for almost two years—New York, Kauai, Turkey, Kauai again—before settling back in San Francisco, where I had just finished my first short story. I had also been trading technology stocks and doing remarkably well, capitalizing on the crazy possibility of the dot-com era, while helping Arkady establish his yoga business. We were talking about getting married and having a baby, so . . . the time felt right now to bring him home.

T
he contrast with Detroit as we drove into Grosse Pointe was more striking than ever. Immaculate houses suddenly lined the wide boulevards. The upscale shopping villages were flanked with Noah’s Bagels, Brooks Brothers, and Talbots. Mercedes and BMWs lined the streets, a clear sign that even the locals no longer bothered to buy American.

“Where’s the Whole Foods?” asked Arkady after we’d passed the A&P market.

“There isn’t one,” I told him. “We’ll have to drive out to Troy tomorrow for the turkey.” I didn’t attempt to explain the differences between old money and new money in suburban Detroit, or the fact that the old money Grosse Pointers would rather simply dine at their clubs than bother stocking their kitchens with locally sourced produce.

But Arkady planned to make a totally organic Thanksgiving-style dinner for my family the following day. It was March. By this point, my family rarely gathered over
the holidays, and always without Charlie. We had to seize the moment, Arkady felt.

“I can’t believe Charlie’s going to be there,” I mused. “He hasn’t come home in seven years.” Not since the Christmas just after I’d filmed the family piece.

“It will be great for you to see him,” Arkady said. “Family is
so
important.”

Like Detroit itself, Charlie had declined even further in recent years. After Bobby moved away from Dallas—first to Grosse Pointe, and then Tortola—Charlie got into crack and other hard drugs. Unable to hold down a job, he no longer even tried to. To keep him off the streets, my parents had appointed Bill Penner as Charlie’s trustee. It was Bill who paid the bills: rent, utilities, food, travel; Bill who controlled where Charlie went and what he did; and Bill who had succeeded, until now, at convincing Charlie to stay away from Grosse Pointe. Legally, my parents and Bill could not keep Charlie out of a shareholder meeting.

Arkady ran his hand over his shaved head. “Of all your brothers, Charlie will be my favorite,” he said. “I know it.”

M
y mother sat at the kitchen table knitting while Arkady stuffed the goose (there were no organic turkeys to be had in Michigan in March) and I peeled potatoes at the sink. My mother’s hair by now had gone completely gray, and her back was hunched from all the years of bending over backgammon tables and knitting projects—and she was bending
over her knitting right now, in fact. The knitting needles clicked rhythmically to the hum of the dishwasher just as the dice and backgammon pieces had once clicked across sun-warmed corkboard at the club. Did my mother use the basic rhythm in these activities as an antidote to anxiety? I wondered.

“Charlie can be at the house for dinner,” she said. “But he’ll have to stay at a hotel. His seedy friends have put him up to this, I know. The poor thing, getting sent here by those grubs to get his hands on some money.”

Arkady shot me an alarmed look, whereas I’d grown so used to my parents’ callousness toward Charlie, I barely shrugged.

“Maybe Charlie, you know, just wants to come home,” I offered. “It’s been years since he’s seen us.” Charlie and I often talked by phone. Recently, he had confided in me that he had hepatitis C. My parents knew about this, too, but it had not changed their attitude toward him.

My mother shook her head. “No, dear. It’s the meeting he’s coming for.”

Arkady seasoned the bird, his back to us. I loved his Old World values—good food, family bonds, and friends who mattered. He was deeply hospitable; he and his three brothers—talented musicians all—turned every gathering into a hearty celebration. How different they were from my family.

I hoped Arkady would understand the situation with Charlie—that my mother simply couldn’t handle this son of hers; if Charlie stayed at the house, the cascade of guilty
feelings would be too much. And so, it was her only defense, keeping Charlie at bay. Seeing how disturbed Arkady clearly was, however, I began to wonder if I should have brought him home for this particular weekend.

Among the only times we convened as a family, the annual Stroh business meetings were never happy occasions. Bobby, Whitney, and I always came home for the meeting, springing for expensive airline tickets only to be told just how badly the business was faring. After our acquisition of the bankrupt G. Heileman Brewing Company in 1996—landing another fifteen or so declining brands in our portfolio—sales had continued to plummet. In 1999, we finally sold our entire brewing business to Miller and Pabst, who divided up our labels like so many spare parts. The family was crestfallen, our 150-year brewing tradition gone, just like that. Miller Brewing bought our Henry Weinhard’s and Mickey’s brands. Pabst bought our forty or so remaining brands, including all the Stroh’s brands, which they soon buried, even as its own label picked up a hipster cred it parlayed into record profits. Internet chat rooms had filled up with conversations among our many loyal consumers about what had happened to Stroh’s Beer. No one knew.

Then, after the substantial business loans for the Heileman purchase had been paid off, the proceeds from the sale—just over a hundred million—went directly into the equities markets, only to take an instant nosedive with the “dot-bomb.” And since my father had sworn Bill Penner to secrecy about the terms of his postnuptial agreement with Elisa, my brothers and I weren’t even sure if a sliver of interest still remained.
Yet we still sprang for those airline tickets, if only because we knew these meetings would be the only chance we’d have to see each other.

T
he evening went badly. The goose Arkady had procured was not a success, its tasteless meat yielding no drippings for gravy.

“In Russia this would never happen,” he said over and over as he sweated over the steaming bird carcass. “Farm-raised
garbage
.”

Trying to help him save the dinner, Bobby’s blond Louisianian wife, Cheryl, spent hours in the kitchen with Arkady. But it was no use; the American goose was just a total failure.

Charlie came into the kitchen as soon as he arrived. It broke my heart to see how irretrievably his looks had been disfigured by the drugs and hard living. “How’s my princess?” he said, wrapping me in a big hug, as if entirely unaware of the shock I was registering. A moment later he was cheerful, chatting away with Arkady at the stove, bringing a can of Old Milwaukee Near Beer to his lips now and again. My mother had asked him to not have any alcohol, and he seemed agreeable enough about this. None of us would be drinking at dinner—“It would be cruel to drink in front of Charlie,” my mother had said earlier that day—which was why my father and Elisa had opted out of the gathering.