Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (9 page)

FENCE IN DETROIT, 1984

(by Frances Stroh)

W
hen I arrived home for Christmas after my first semester at Duke, where I’d been learning to balance the enormous workload with nightly—and often all-night—parties, my father was living temporarily in a two-bedroom house on Mapleton Road, known as the “maids’ road.” My mother, who’d recently become a small-time Grosse Pointe real estate baron, had rented the house to him while she kept the big house on Provencal Road.

Christmas Day my father came over in a jacket and tie, as my mother’s guest. Out of habit, he built the fire in the living room, welcomed the relatives at the door, took photographs of our group standing before the fireplace, the flames blazing behind us, but the tension of his dominance was gone, leaving in its wake an unsettling disorder.

By the fireplace, I watched Whitney set a glass down on an antique table without using a coaster. My father said nothing. Late the night before, after a party, I had come home long
past curfew without any concern about my father’s reaction. Bobby and Charlie talked loudly in the kitchen, drinking beer, after I’d gone to bed. And now our relatives’ cars were parked haphazardly outside in the driveway—not in the neat lines my father had always enforced.

It was Christmas, my father’s favorite day of the year, and everything was going to seed. He seemed distracted, smiling vaguely in the direction of laughter, changing lenses on his Leica more often than necessary. I wished I could comfort him. He appeared entirely unmoored.

“Let’s get one more shot,” he kept saying to the four of us. “Who knows when you’ll all be home together again.”

We lined up in front of the fireplace a third time. The heat burned into my back through my silk blouse. Charlie had recently been honorably discharged from the Marines and was sporting civilian clothes. Bobby and Whitney wore blue blazers and ties.

My father snapped the shutter. He lifted his cigarette from the ashtray and looked around the room for another background. The house felt empty without his guitars, his cameras, his mountains of pipes, books, and CDs.

The snow fell hard, thickly blanketing the roads within minutes of the snowplow’s last round of exertions. People kept arriving at the house—Aunt Mard plunging her walker into the snow, Grandmother Susie in her mink coat and chinchilla hair—and dinner was postponed in favor of more cocktails. My father took coats and mixed drinks while my mother checked the turkey in the roaster. Bobby and Charlie appeared momentarily in the kitchen and beckoned me out and up the back stairs.

Bobby opened the door to his room. Three finely cut lines of cocaine sat in a row on the glass top of his desk.

“Here, Franny,” Bobby said, handing me a rolled-up bill. “You go first.”

A bird’s wings fluttered inside my chest. My brothers had never offered me drugs. Bobby’s mystifying room, where as a child I had spied on him kissing his girlfriend on the bed, where I had learned about sex from the porn magazines stored in the top drawer of his desk, had now become the place where the gap between me and my much older brothers—of age, gender, untold worlds of experience—would forever close.

Charlie sat on the bed smiling at me. His Marine crew cut hadn’t yet grown out, underscoring the impossibly sharp angles of his face. He still lived in Southern California, where he was looking for a job. “Go ahead, Franny,” he said encouragingly. “You’ll like it. I promise.”

Once upon a time Charlie’s childhood room had been my refuge. “Sit down, Princess,” he would say, patting the bed. And after we’d strung our bead necklaces, he’d tie mine behind my neck with kind, gentle fingers, as if not to break me.

I took the bill from Bobby and inhaled a line in one swift motion. “Wow,” I said, feeling the searing heat spread through my sinuses. “That’s intense.”

“Don’t worry,” said Bobby. “That’s the worst part. Just hold on.”

I let them believe this was my first time.

Bobby did his line and Charlie followed. Bobby smeared his finger on the glass and rubbed the residue on his upper gums. He had a trim brown mustache and steely blue eyes
that revealed no emotion whatsoever. We could hear our mother calling us from downstairs, but we lingered, pretending we hadn’t heard her.

I sat down on the bed. The room was so cold I could see my breath.

Bobby leaned back in the swiveling desk chair. “Dad seems really out of it,” he said. “You see how he’d light a cigarette, put it down in the ashtray, then light up another?”

“I saw him drink, like, four Cokes in an hour,” said Charlie.

“Jesus Christ!
” said Bobby. He licked his gums. “That man has a death wish.” He unrolled the bill and slid it back into his wallet.

I felt a pang of protectiveness toward my father. All day he’d been going through the motions, trying to keep up appearances. “We can’t imagine the hell he’s been through in the last few months,” I said. “Anyway, at least it wasn’t four vodkas.”

“He’s just so screwed up,” said Charlie, shaking his head, his face darkening with anger. “He pulled me aside earlier and told me the divorce was
my
fault. You believe it? Bunch of bullshit—everyone knows it was his drinking.”

“Who the hell knows
what
it was . . .” Bobby trailed off, looking over at me.

I nodded silently. We all secretly believed that Charlie’s coke bust had been the catalyst that led to my parents’ marriage coming unraveled, if not exactly the cause. My parents had never known how to really talk to each other or comfort each other, and what little foundation they’d had sim
ply crumbled apart. Scripted conversations weren’t enough to sustain any real sense of connection. And so my father began drinking more, while my mother took refuge in real estate and backgammon tournaments, but the fact was they’d been headed their separate ways years before Charlie’s bust ever slammed it all home.

That fall, after my mother filed for divorce, my father went into rehab, in hopes of getting my mother back, and a monumental weight had lifted from all of us when he became sober.

“Mom and Dad haven’t gotten along in years,” I added. “That’s no one’s fault.”

Bobby looked over at Charlie. “Dad quitting his job didn’t help.”

“Whatever. He’s the same old prick he’s always been,” said Charlie. “Mom did the right thing, getting out.”

Everyone was gathered at the table when we came down, the coiffed, downy heads of great-aunts and grandmothers bobbing with the conversation. Plates had been piled with turkey, mashed potatoes, and French green beans.

My stomach turned at the mere sight of food. I sat down at my place, lifted my glass of wine, and took a generous sip. Everyone was talking at once, and I couldn’t make out the words. The coke was speedy, the shaking of my wineglass just barely perceptible. I looked out the window and across the snow-covered lawn to the forest where I’d first smoked pot with some friends back in eighth grade. The blizzard had stopped, and the sun suddenly broke through the clouds. The surface of the new snow shone like splinters of shattered glass. I emptied my wineglass and poured myself another drink.

My uncles were droning on about our family’s listing in the Forbes 400. I was aware of the fact, I guess, but I never really associated it with us. I’d bought a hundred-dollar bed for my college dorm room because the futon I wanted had been too expensive.
Forbes
must have done some interesting math if they thought we had that much money.

“The information in this issue is completely outdated,” said Uncle Peter. “Fact is, the riverfront project’s nearly
doubled
the business. Someone ought to write the editor a letter.”

“Why don’t
you
write the letter?” chimed in Aunt Nicole, her cropped blond hair tucked stylishly behind her ears, above a sleek black cashmere dress. “You
are
the CEO, aren’t you? They need to get it right. It’s ridiculous.”

Uncle Peter took a bite of turkey with stuffing, chewed and swallowed, while the table waited for his response. “I’ll write to them,” he said finally. “Send them the plans for the Parke-Davis site.”

It was a story I’d heard so many times. Uncle Peter and Coleman Young, Detroit’s mayor, had shaken hands one windy day in a parking lot on the Detroit River next to the former Parke-Davis Pharmaceutical Company. The mayor promised Peter a stampede of tenants and greater visibility if the Strohs would develop the site, just upriver from where the Uniroyal Tire plant had been, and thereby improve Detroit’s derelict riverfront. Coleman Young, who called himself the “MFIC”—Mother Fucker in Charge—certainly had the power to fulfill his promises, and Uncle Peter knew as much. Though personally I found it hard to believe anyone could ever revive Detroit. Seemed a little late to me.

Within a year of the famous handshake, the brewery had begun development on the site, launching a project that included a five-star hotel, a luxury three-hundred-unit apartment building, and a 1.8 million-square-foot office building. The development, renamed Stroh River Place when we’d bought the site, was the most ambitious development in Detroit since the seventies, when Henry Ford II built the Renaissance Center.

Soon afterward, Uncle Peter closed down the turn-of-the-century Detroit brewery and moved the corporate headquarters to Stroh River Place, saddening not a few Detroiters who took pride in Stroh’s Beer being brewed in their hometown. The subsequent demolition of the historic building was even more demoralizing, but the family had already lost a hundred million dollars in production costs by keeping it open. Now the Stroh brand was produced in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the newer Schaefer Brewing Company plant, where fire-brewing copper kettles had been installed, at enormous expense, to stay as true to our brand as possible.

“And send them that article from the
Detroit News
,” suggested Nicole.

“Which article?” asked my father.

Nicole folded her arms across her chest. “Announcing that it’s safe for whites to live in Detroit again. Because of the Strohs.”

Uncle Peter chuckled. “The article didn’t phrase it quite that way.”

My father, who now got all his company news at gatherings like these, shifted restlessly in his chair. “Nonsense. No
one gives a damn who lives in Detroit. No one’s cared since the 1967 riots—’cept maybe the drug cartels.”

Uncle Peter sipped his wine. “
We
do, Eric,” he said.

Nicole turned to my father, superior. “We’re in real estate now.”

Everyone knew that Nicole basically ran the company behind the scenes, but no one was complaining; dividends had recently doubled.

“I know that, Nicole,” said my father, controlling his temper. “I did work there until last summer.” He made a point not to look at his brother.

My mother went into the kitchen to take the pumpkin pies out of the oven, glancing at Charlie’s place on her way out of the room, monitoring his alcohol intake. Charlie ignored her. He reached over my grandmother’s plate for the wine bottle.

My father sipped his glass of water and watched Charlie pour the wine. “Keep it up, Chas,” he said bitterly. “You can handle it.”

Seeing that my glass was empty, Charlie passed me the bottle across the table as soon as he’d filled his glass.

I poured gingerly, watching the sunlight pass through the carved crystal onto the white linen tablecloth to create floating fields of red. I wouldn’t always be here, doing this; I wouldn’t go down with the ship. For the moment, though, the wine warmed my insides and made the whole thing bearable. I picked up my fork and took my first bite of turkey, with no particular appetite for it, but it hardly mattered; the food had already grown cold.

CHARLIE, WHITNEY, FRANCES, AND BOBBY—DALLAS, 1993

(by Cheryl Stroh)

C
harlie’s condo complex sat just off the freeway, sandwiched between a strip mall and a sprawling warehouse advertising storage units for rent.

“Park over by the gate,” Charlie said to Bobby, pointing to a chain-link fence with a pool on the other side. The condos were a forsaken collection of brown cardboard shoeboxes with mini balconies, each with its own laundry line.

“You live here?” asked Whitney from the backseat.

We all got out of Bobby’s Volkswagen and followed Charlie through the gate and up a cracked concrete path.

It had been a little over a year since I’d seen Charlie, but he had the skin of an old hobo—mottled and bumpy, unshaved and scorched red, as if he’d been drinking moonshine under the blazing sun for the last forty years.

At thirty-two, he’d failed three rehab programs within five years. After a series of scenes at various family events, including
Bobby’s wedding, my parents had banned him from coming home for holidays.

When I’d called about coming down to Dallas to film him, he was full of enthusiasm. “I love my family,” he gushed. “You know? I really miss everyone.”

My work had been selected as part of a group exhibition at San Francisco Camerawork Gallery entitled
The Family Seen
. Video screens of my family members talking would play in a darkened room simultaneously.

We’d all met in Dallas for a couple of days so I could shoot the interviews—the only time the four of us had ever met outside a family occasion. Whitney had come all the way from Missoula, where he was a senior at the University of Montana. I had come from San Francisco, where I lived and worked as an artist. Bobby and Charlie lived near each other in Dallas but hardly saw each other. I liked to think that art had brought us back together.

“Hold on a second,” said Charlie. We followed him past a small play area with a warped plastic slide and a jungle gym. A group of people sat at the pool smoking, complaining in raspy voices about their “asshole bosses.” Charlie leaned over the fence and greeted a shirtless man decorated with a collage of prison tattoos.

The man mumbled something to Charlie in a conspiratorial tone.

Charlie smiled. “Be over soon,” he said.

Whitney gave me an anguished look and Bobby just rolled his eyes. Like my parents, Bobby had given up on Charlie long ago.

The freeway hummed behind us as we took the cement stairs to the second floor. Almost every door had a few pairs of well-worn flip-flops strewn outside. A bag of garbage sat leaking in the hallway. The earthy scent of pot smoke wafted out from someone’s open door, and it occurred to me that this condo complex was likely the last stop, full of drifters like Charlie who’d lived in every condo complex in the Dallas area until this one, been kicked out each time for reckless behavior or failure to pay the rent.

Charlie opened the door. We stepped into a tiny living room that merged with a kitchenette. A beige sofa I recognized from the house on Grayton Road was the only furniture, other than a big Sony TV perched on some wine crates. The air smelled like sheets that hadn’t been changed.

“Anyone want a beer?” asked Charlie, opening the fridge to a shelf full of Coors. I realized how proud he was to be hosting us and, though I never drank during the day, took a can.

“What’s with the piss water?” asked Bobby.

“Got a case on special,” said Charlie, the old yearning for approval audible in his voice; his big brother had finally come over to see him.

“No, thanks,” Bobby said.

Bobby and Charlie’s relationship had soured in recent years. When Charlie had a warrant out for his arrest in California for reckless driving three years before, Bobby had stepped in and gotten him a job at the Herman’s Sporting Goods store he was managing then in Dallas. More than once, Charlie had come to work drunk, eventually losing his sales position,
and their friendship never recovered. Since then Charlie had worked in a string of mini-markets shelving merchandise, and once as a gas station attendant.

Charlie took Bobby out onto the balcony while Whitney sat on the sofa and flipped through TV channels. Through the sliding glass door I could see my brothers talking the way they used to and wondered if, deep down, Bobby felt somehow responsible for Charlie. Had Bobby been the one to turn Charlie on to drugs in high school? I doubted it. All I knew was that the further Charlie fell, the more compelled Bobby seemed to feel to look away.

I went into the bedroom and attached the video camera to the tripod. I arranged a chair in a corner by the window. The bed was barely made, so I straightened the blanket to create a sense of order in the room.

Outside, the tattooed man held court at the pool. He smoked and talked and moved his arms wildly while everyone laughed, and I understood that all these people played a greater role in Charlie’s life now than any of us did. All the missed holidays were adding up to Charlie’s not really knowing us anymore. Our family was no safe harbor, but without us he’d been set, it seemed, irretrievably adrift.

I
s the camera on?” asked Charlie.

“Not yet,” I said, as I adjusted the lens. Whenever he spoke, his left eye dipped into the viewfinder. “Try not to move your head.” I hoped to keep his identity obscured by training the
camera on the bottom half of his face. “All I want to see is your mouth.”

I turned on the camera and went through my list of questions:
What was it like for you growing up in our house? How were you affected by Dad’s drinking? Why do you think Mom and Dad got divorced?
and so on.

As he told his version of the family story, Charlie candidly discussed his coke bust in college, his years in the Marines, his downward spiral into drugs after his honorable discharge. “I made some bad mistakes,” he admitted. “But that doesn’t make me a bad person.” His face began to sweat, probably from the stress of talking about the past, and I didn’t want to go on for too long. I realized that while drugs had been a phase for me, they were a way of life for Charlie.

After I’d gone through my list, I paused. “What are you doing in Dallas?” I asked. It wasn’t one of my scripted questions.

“I’m thirty-two and currently unemployed,” he said to the camera, his lips spreading over yellowed teeth as he broke into a smile. “So let’s hope the family business picks up and I can take early retirement along with everyone else.” He nodded his head, still smiling.

I laughed. By “everyone else,” I imagined he was referring to our father.

“So, that’s your hope?” I asked.

“My number one hope and ambition is to come home for Christmas this year and see everybody,” he said with a note of optimism. Then more defiantly, “
Mother
, I can come home and have just as much fun with my family not drinking as I can drinking with my friends.”

He had rightly assumed that our mother would see the footage.

W
hen we arrived at Ruby Tuesday, the bar buzzed with the local singles scene. A soccer game played silently on two enormous flat-screen TVs while Eddie Vedder’s throaty, tortured voice bellowed over and over from the speakers, “Ohhh, ahhh, I’m still
alive
.”

“Table’s ready,” Bobby said over the din.

The four of us walked into the restaurant, slid into a booth, and picked up the vinyl-coated menus.

With his Ralph Lauren–model looks, Whitney seemed utterly displaced in the Formica-trimmed booth. He glanced across the table at Bobby. “What do you recommend?”

“The potato skins,” said Bobby. “With three-bean chili, highly recommend.”

I studied the potato-skins offerings. “Do they pour the chili right on the potato skins?”

“Well, if you want it poured on you can get a twice-baked potato with chili.”

“They also have great steaks,” Charlie said. He’d had two beers at the bar during the twenty minutes we’d been waiting for the table. Bobby had told me privately he wished Charlie weren’t coming to dinner. “He’s guaranteed to get drunk and make a scene.”

“He’s coming,” I’d insisted. “This is my one night in Dallas.” I was leaving in the morning to film my parents back in Michigan.

We ordered the food and two pitchers of beer. The conver
sation floated from Bobby’s vintage Volkswagen collection to his World War II uniform collection to the Stroh Brewery’s poor sales record in Texas, where Bobby now worked as an area business manager for the family company, interfacing with wholesalers.

“It’s pathetic,” said Bobby. He took a long draw from his beer, leaving a mustache of foam on his mustache. “We have a brewery in Longview. We
make
beer in Texas, for God’s sake, and we can’t even sell our products here?”

“It’s like the Busches not selling beer in St. Louis,” said Whitney.

Bobby smeared his potato skins with sour cream. “Well, more like the Busches not selling beer in Colorado, but . . . I take your point.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have gone national,” I said. “You know, by buying Schlitz. I mean, don’t you think the Detroit brewery and the Schaefer breweries in the East would have been enough?” I knew our troubles had begun when we got too big, when Great Uncle John could no longer walk the brewery floor, talking with his employees on a daily basis. There were just too many brewery floors now, and Uncle Peter was far less hands-on than Great Uncle John had been.

“No, Peter was right,” said Bobby. “The industry was changing. Every other viable brewery had already made the move from regional to national. It’s just, you know, that we grew too
fast
. We were underprepared. There was no strategy other than just to grow for the sake of it. And we borrowed too much to finance the Schlitz deal, of course. That’s what’s killing us.”

“Someone could have bought us out,” I said. “We must have been worth . . .
something
.”

“Not enough,” said Bobby. “Lot of mouths to feed in this family.”

“How many brands do we make, anyway?” asked Charlie. “I can’t keep up.”

Bobby dipped his potato skin into his chili. “About thirty?”

Whitney cut into his steak. “And are
any
of ’em doing well?”

“Not in the U.S.,” I said, through a mouth full of French fries. “Far as I can tell . . .”

“They have Stroh’s on tap at the bar here,” said Charlie. “So . . . sales can’t be
that
bad.”

I
slid past a row of four knees en route to my window seat. I took a Russian novel out of my bag and began the five-hour dissociative state that the flight to Detroit always called for.

I put the book down and gazed out the window. They were loading the luggage onto the conveyor belt. My camera equipment sat snugly in the overhead compartment, the tapes stored in the foil-lined bags my father had given me at Christmastime. “Never forget to put your film in here,” he’d said, handing me the bags unwrapped. “X-ray’ll destroy everything.”

He still thought of me as a photographer. “Why don’t you keep shooting pictures?” he’d asked when my work had taken
a new direction just after college. “You’re a damn good photographer.”

But I’d begun to feel limited working in two dimensions and had a feeling that becoming a master printer wasn’t in the cards. I didn’t have the patience. The truth was, I suspected I wasn’t very good.

I took classes at the San Francisco Art Institute after Duke, mostly in their New Genres Department, and there I entered the world of video, installation, and performance. I began to think in terms of narrative and space, context and concept, signs and signifiers. Later I joined the MFA program at Art Center in Pasadena but found that the making of art there was essentially peripheral to the reading and discussion of French critical theory.

As for my loft in downtown Los Angeles, with packs of wild dogs in the streets and Interstate 10 practically grazing my windows, it was a lot like a scene out of J. G. Ballard’s
Crash
. When the L.A. riots broke out after the Rodney King verdict, I could see seven different buildings burning within a mile, not to mention machine-gun armed militia roaming the streets of my neighborhood. L.A. felt like the end of the earth; and I missed San Francisco.

I dropped out after my first year at Art Center. The program felt soulless and the art derivative—my own in particular. As a farewell, I did a site-specific piece in the school’s Bauhaus-style building by silk-screening over the words
fire extinguisher
with
soul extinguisher
on the rectangular black extinguisher boxes lining the hallways. My boyfriend Marko—also an artist—pulled the squeegee while I’d held the screen.

Now I was back in San Francisco and single, with a well-paying job at an interior design firm and several shows of my installations scheduled over the next year, the family piece being the first. So far, my family members were cooperating. In fact, the combination of lights, a camera, and a list of open-ended questions seemed to open a Pandora’s box of responses that I never could have anticipated; everyone seemed to have a pent-up need to talk about the family.

As practice, I’d been experimenting with friends in San Francisco, filming their answers to questions, then editing together only the responses, one cut after another. The stream-of-consciousness, solipsistic effect was powerful, rather like the way it felt to be privy to interior thoughts of one of Tolstoy’s characters.

H
ow’s Charlie doing?” my father asked. Seated in his leather armchair watching a Western, he pointed a Colt 45 revolver at the TV screen every time John Wayne pulled his six-shooter from his holster. My mother had once told me of a similar scene when Charlie’s baby nurse came downstairs to the library. “Mr. Stroh,” the poor woman announced, standing at the entrance. “Charles has taken his bottle.” Sitting there in full Western regalia, replete with a cowboy hat, chaps, boots with spurs, leather holsters, and a revolver in each hand, my father kept his eyes on the TV. “Thank you, Ivy,” he said.

I attached my video camera to the tripod, aiming the lens
at my father. “Charlie wants to come home for Christmas,” I told him.