Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (10 page)

My father frowned. “He drinking during the day, or only at night?”

“Both,” I said. I moved the tripod and adjusted the height so that the viewfinder framed the bottom half of his face. “I’m worried about him.”

“Is he working?”

“Not right now.”

My father switched off the movie with a remote and set the gun down on a table. “You’ll have to talk with your mother about Christmas,” he said. “That’s her department.”

I scanned my father’s library for additional lights with which to better illuminate his face, but none were quite the right height. I walked through his entryway and down two steps into the sunken living room. The lushness of the garden flooded in through the picture windows. Out on the terrace, large ceramic ashtrays shaped like fish had been placed on glass-surfaced tables. Remembering these brightly painted ashtrays from the garden parties where, as a child, I often finished the cocktails left behind, I marveled that they had lasted all these years, through so many parties, so many moves.

My father had settled into this six-bedroom house five years before this. Looking around at his immaculately decorated rooms, a visitor could have been forgiven for assuming that our beer brands were thriving. But Uncle Peter’s late entry into the exploding light-beer market in the eighties had kept us from competing effectively. In 1989, after a deal to sell our business to Coors had fallen through, dividends had been
withheld, and the family had started attending annual shareholder meetings—something we’d never done—to be told how poorly the company was performing. Angered by our advertising cuts, wholesalers gave up on our brands, switching to rival labels, causing sales to drop precipitously. A sudden, panicked repackaging of the iconic Stroh’s brand—to block letter blue, contributing to a 40 percent sales decline within a single year—was the last nail in that brand’s coffin. The new packaging might have worked, had we not tried to market the very same beer formula as a higher-priced premium beer. As it turned out, my father hadn’t saved a thing, and my mother had to lend him his mortgage money until dividends were resumed a year later.

In 1990, in the aftermath of the failed Coors deal, management rallied to revive Old Milwaukee, our strongest brand, by committing an unprecedented $9 million to a new marketing blitz: the Swedish Bikini Team ad campaign. The celebrated Hal Riney Agency in San Francisco came up with the concept of svelte blond-wigged babes with cases of beer dropping out of the sky in parachutes, or coming downriver in a boat, to update the already popular “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This” Old Milwaukee ads. For the sake of variety, viewers saw a different Swedish Bikini Team commercial on TV every night. Many considered it the best beer campaign ever made. Ratings were off the charts.

Then the bomb dropped. A group of female workers in the Stroh’s plant in St. Paul, Minnesota, hired a powerful feminist lawyer, claiming sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace and linking it to the ad campaign. The controversy
sparked a national press debate over sexist themes in advertising. The fact that the Swedish Bikini Team had also just posed for the cover of
Playboy
magazine didn’t help. Feminist groups everywhere used the campaign as a scapegoat. Soon the media controversy landed on the cover of the
Wall Street Journal
, and the Minnesota lawsuit was headed for the Supreme Court.

Stroh’s finally pulled the campaign in its third month, spending minimally on advertising from that point on. It was impossible to compete with Anheuser-Busch’s deep advertising pockets. And so management switched to a strategy of managing our U.S. business down while making a big overseas push, particularly in India and Russia, where Stroh’s Beer was fast becoming an icon of the American way of life.

Out on the terrace a light rain began to fall, pelting the ceramic fish ashtrays. I pulled a plug out from the wall and carried a lamp from the living room into the library.

“I’m thinking of selling this house,” said my father.

I put the lamp down. “Already?”

“Business isn’t getting any better.” He helped me plug in the lamp under a table stacked with photography magazines. “And our real estate’s in the damn toilet.”

The riverfront development, he meant. Businesses were leaving the city in droves. We’d already lost the apartment building and the hotel to foreclosures. “It’s amazing,” I said. “General
Motors
is making cars in Mexico, and somehow the Strohs are still stuck in Detroit.”

“Damn right,” said my father. “And instead of advertising our core brands, your uncle Peter throws tens of millions into biotechnology. Nice move, hunh?”

On a recent family business weekend in Durham, North Carolina, I’d toured the impressive research center we had built in the Research Triangle Park. We were developing a drug, apparently, to treat septic shock, but I knew the likely success rate of such a venture was close to zero. “More money down the drain,” I agreed.

“We’ve been de-listed at
Forbes
,” added my father, his voice taut. “We’ll be broke before we know it.”

His stress was contagious—I could feel my own heart rate picking up. I tried to calm my breathing as I adjusted the light. My mother often worried about the fact that I was an artist; she still held out hope I would go get an MBA and get serious about my life, make some money, and drop all this art silliness. The chronically bad company news made me wonder suddenly if she was right.

“We’re headed for a big fall,” my father said with an air of finality. He sat back down in his chair and lit his pipe, drawing on the smoke with rhythmic breaths to get the embers going.

He’d been sober eight years now and seemed settled in his life, often seeing my mother for dinner and even traveling with her on occasion. In many ways, they still operated as a couple, my father maintaining my mother’s car, my mother doing his laundry. I found their continuing friendship as reassuring as the bad company news was persistently alarming, and I know my father did as well. After their divorce, my parents had managed to brick together another foundation that seemed to bolster all of us—or at least Whitney, Bobby, and me. As long as those bricks held firm, I imagined we
could live our lives productively and with resilience, even if the company itself fell apart.

I looked around at the room. Leather furniture with nail-head trim, antique chests of drawers, valuable volumes on the bookshelves, blackamoor figures flanking the fireplace mantel. How could we have been so clueless? Sexism and racism seemed to permeate everything, especially our beer ads. I’d watched our Schlitz Malt Liquor and St. Ides commercials targeted at inner-city African Americans and felt embarrassed about the stereotyping. These ads weren’t helping sales either.

No question, we were headed for a big fall. I imagined the repo man loading everything in my father’s library into a truck and driving away. The money had never been mine and probably never would be, yet the fear was as familiar as air; we’d always been on the precipice.

“Oh, well, enjoy it while it lasts, Dad,” I said, turning on the camera. “‘It doesn’t get any better than this, right?’”

My father smiled and exhaled a cloud of smoke.

SOUL EXTINGUISHER, 1992

(by Frances Stroh)

O
n a hot, windless day that everyone called “earthquake weather,” I sat in an editing room at the San Francisco Art Institute and pieced together my family’s answers to my interview questions, trying to imagine the psychological effect on the viewer when all six narratives overlapped. I knew the visual effect of six talking mouths in one room would be captivating. In the tapes, Whitney’s and Charlie’s veneers cracked quickly, their upper lips beading with sweat, voices leaking bitterness. Bobby and I were subdued, philosophical, bent on humor. My parents were distant and instructive, looking down on their children from lofty heights, particularly when talking about Charlie.

“The problem with Charlie is he never grew up.” My father paused and puffed on his pipe. “We wish it were different, but it isn’t. If you asked him today, he’d deny that he has any problems with drinking and drugs. He’d say, ‘Oh
no
,
I
don’t have a problem.’”

My father went on to share an exercise he himself had learned in rehab. “You make a list of things you like about yourself in one column, and in another column you list the things you don’t like. Then you study the list and figure out what you can change about the things you
don’t
like. Some things you can’t change, but most things you can.” He drew on his pipe with a certain satisfaction, talked about how he “took the cure,” then went on to admit that he still drank while on planes.

“Dad’s drinking was the catalyst that led to the divorce,” said Bobby. “And Charlie’s problems may have surfaced during a fragile time in their marriage, you know?—which only caused Dad to drink more.”

“There’s a myth in my family that Charlie’s alcoholism and drug addiction caused the breakup of my parents’ marriage,” I said.

“Charlie is a junkie, an alcoholic,” said Whitney. “He’s stolen from his family, he’s lied, he’s cheated, he’s shat all over them. It’s broken their hearts.”

“Dad blames me for the divorce,” said Charlie. “But that’s a bunch of bullshit. It was his drinking.”

“Each of my children has been deeply affected by Charlie’s problems,” said my mother, “but in different ways. My ex-husband’s been the most affected, to the point where—to the point where he can hardly talk about it.” She went on to say that my father had been ineffective at his job at the brewery, and that her sons were “procrastinators.”

“But I see myself in my daughter. She is striving to achieve, as I am in my own life. I think if I had those years of mother
ing to do over again it would turn out just the same. I’d like to have control over my children’s poor decisions, but I find I don’t.”

As I sat in the darkened editing room, something unexpected happened, something for which I was not prepared: I had my first conscious glimpse of just how profoundly screwed up we were, how detached, inhuman, even. Each of us discussed Charlie as if he were nothing more than a character in a novel we’d recently read. We had learned well the art of detachment, my siblings and I, from our parents and perhaps theirs before them. I had been skating along the surface of the pain for years, pretending to look deeper, outwardly dismissing my parents’ version of reality, even rebelling against it, all the while inwardly accepting it as fact.

Our family was like one of those hand-painted road signs that point in a multitude of directions at once: laziness and bad genes were the problem, according to my mother; according to my father and Whitney, Charlie himself was the problem; Charlie would have it that our father alone was the problem; while, according to Bobby and me, an unfortunate alchemy of both Charlie’s and our father’s problems was to blame.

The cognitive dissonance between my parents’ versions of the story and ours simply could not be reconciled. I had written a paper to be presented on a panel at the gallery discussing my piece in purely conceptual terms, yet now I was unearthing a truth that could not be bound by any intellectual discussion. Looking at the piece as an outsider, I liked the tension of the raw emotional material pressing up against
the cool, minimalist look I’d chosen—those six rectangular screens displaying enormous talking mouths—but these had nothing to do with me, with what went on inside of me when I myself watched the tapes: the horror, the shock of recognition. The emotional foundation I’d imagined was there, I realized, had been cobbled together out of repression and denial. Time was passing, things were falling apart, and we seemed unable to catch ourselves.

S
witching off the light in the editing suite, I pulled the door shut. When I came outside into the warm dusk, the sculpture students were piling debris into the parking lot Dumpsters. Clouds of white dust rose up into the air every time they hurled something in, and I had the sudden impression that art was nothing more than a gratuitous accumulation of clutter that would someday have to be thrown away. The sight of discarded ceramic heads, welded metal shapes, and cracked wooden pedestals heaped into the trash was demoralizing, and I briefly wondered if my work, too, would amount to this sort of “nothing,” the image of my father’s stacks of photographs flickering through my mind.

I walked down the hill on Chestnut to Columbus and up toward City Lights Bookstore. The street hummed with life, people sitting at outdoor tables, crowded Italian cafés. I crossed the street to Caffe Roma, taking the last table outside.

I gazed across the street at the Art Nouveau stained glass sign of Vesuvio Café, where the Beats had congregated back
in the fifties—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gary Snyder. Suddenly I found myself recalling an evening I’d spent with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs during my senior year at Duke. It was one of the most memorable of my life, that evening, though I rarely told anyone about it, lest I be expected to share some revelation of cosmic proportions, when in truth the conversation, and the poetry reading that followed, had been disappointing, certainly, as compared with the magnitude of their celebrity.

Like so many college students in the eighties, I’d been fixated on the counterculture of the fifties and sixties—from Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground to Bob Dylan and the Beats. A religion major with a focus on Buddhism, I was headed to San Francisco as soon as I graduated, with high hopes of establishing myself as an artist there. I’d read all the Beat writers and identified with their antiestablishment ethos; as a psychology minor, I’d been influenced by the writings of Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and Alan Watts, which had led to my research paper on the clinical use of LSD in the treatment of alcoholism. The local Hare Krishna chapter had been the subject of my photo essay for a documentary photography course; I’d even considered having the Hare Krishnas cook one of their famous vegetarian dinners to honor Ginsberg and Burroughs.

Instead, I organized the dinner at a local vegetarian restaurant before Ginsberg’s reading. At a table of twenty people, mostly Ginsberg’s posse, along with a few of my friends, I was the only woman. But in spite of the Beats’ notorious indifference toward my gender, I’d managed to seat myself next to Ginsberg and
directly across from Burroughs. Tommy, my four-year college boyfriend, with whom I’d finally disowned my virginity freshman year, was also seated next to me. A clean-cut prep school kid when we’d first met, he now sported shoulder-length hair and a beard, while my own hair hung down to my elbows, crowned by my signature Greek fisherman’s cap. We sat smoking Lucky Strikes, too shy to speak, completely awed by our dinner guests.

Ginsberg, with his wandering eye, was jovial and troll-like as he held court. Burroughs sat regally and silently in his dinner coat, lighting one cigarette after another with a dramatic sweep of his arm each time he struck the match. I’d half expected to meet the two youthful men I’d seen posed with Paul Bowles in a photograph,
Tangier, 1961
. But these men were old, Burroughs in particular.

Ginsberg showered Burroughs with doting attention and private jokes that made the rest of us feel like onlookers. They discussed the Lemur Center at Duke—one of the reasons Burroughs had desired to make the trip to Durham. He was a big fan, apparently, of lemurs.

When the salads arrived, Ginsberg praised the restaurant’s tofu-tahini dressing.

I seized my chance to join the conversation. “I know. I’ll miss this dressing when I’m in San Francisco,” I told him.

“Ah, San Francisco,” said Ginsberg with an ironic little twirl of his salad fork. “And what ’ill you be doing there?”

“I’m going to be an artist.”

Nodding vaguely, he encouraged me to spend time at the San Francisco Art Institute. “It’s a wonderful place,” he said. “I taught a writing workshop there once.”

After dinner we all drove to an auditorium on campus where Ginsberg would read. My friends and I sat on the edge of the stage, drinking red wine from the bottle, as the beatniks had once done at Ginsberg’s quixotic first reading of “Howl” in North Beach. But the mood wasn’t there, the sterile auditorium half empty. Ginsberg read a series of sexually explicit homoerotic poems, and people started filing out. His provocation of the mostly conservative-looking crowd appeared intentional, and perfectly in character; he read one lewd poem after another, a determined smile on his face, clearly getting a kick out of the audience’s reaction. Toward the end, he read “Sunflower Sutra” and a string of older work, rewarding those of us who’d stayed.

Afterward, we went into a brightly lit reception area with white tablecloths, wine, and platters of cheese. Ginsberg came up to me with his big grin. “How did you like the sphincter poems, Frances?”

I sensed he was making fun of me because I’d been the only woman at dinner, surrounded by male sphincters. “I thought they were great, Allen,” I replied witlessly. That was the power of the icon that was Allen Ginsberg: he’d lost the majority of his audience, and yet I would be the one to obsess over my unclever reply to him for years to come.

It didn’t matter that most everyone had walked out of the reading, or that I hadn’t known how to reply to Allen Ginsberg, or that William Burroughs couldn’t have been bothered to say a word to me or anyone else at dinner. They were two of the most legendary figures of the twentieth century, and I had spent an evening with them. I had made an important
discovery, too: they were only people. We all were. And some of us were also artists, or trying to be artists. Everything was happening on a continuum, I saw, and I allowed myself to believe that night that maybe I would be next, that perhaps a bit of magic dust had floated my way, off the stiff shoulders of these two old men.

I still had the signed copy of Ginsberg’s
Collected Poems
on my bookshelf in the Haight. It had survived the ’89 quake, when my bookshelf toppled over, crashing into my dresser, sending my books in every direction. Ginsberg had signed the book, his childish inscription the only evidence that still remained of my evening with the Beats.

S
an Francisco Camerawork Gallery was located just south of Market Street in a former warehouse boasting floor-to-ceiling windows, creaky hardwood floors, and a freight elevator that could carry a crowd, twenty at a time, two floors up to the opening reception.

I’d spent nearly twenty-four hours installing my piece, breaking for a short nap on the gallery couch sometime before dawn, and afterward heading to the airport to retrieve my parents. Now my mother stood paralyzed in my installation room while my father peeked in from the door, as if afraid to enter.

I picked up a plastic cup of wine and took in the rest of the exhibition, mostly innovative photographs of the artists’ interpretations of the show’s theme, which was family. On
one wall, enormous color murals of family beach scenes offset a black-and-white triptych of an African American family posed in front of their church. My piece was the only installation work.

“Good work, Franny,” said Anthony Aziz, the gallery board member who had proposed my piece for the show. “Powerful stuff. I spent thirty minutes with your piece—longest I’ve ever
spent
with a video installation.”

I’d met Anthony when he was a graduate student in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. Later, he’d teamed up with Sammy Cucher, a friend of mine from the New Genres Department, to form the collaborative artist team Aziz+Cucher.

Glancing across the crowded gallery, I thanked Anthony for including me in the show. I noticed a line forming at the entrance to my room. “I think my parents are hogging all the space,” I said. “God, maybe I should take them out for dinner.”

Just then, Anthony, always so well groomed and composed, shot an alarmed look in the direction of my room. “You’re kidding, right?” He stared at me. “Your
parents
are here? How are they . . . going to, you know,
react
?”

I had the sudden sensation of waking up out of a dream. After so much insight in the editing suite, I’d somehow gone completely numb again in those remaining weeks before the exhibition, focused as I was on the formal and technical aspects of the piece. I’d done an even cleaner edit and hired a technical assistant to help me with the wiring of the piece in the gallery. Alone in the editing room, I’d been overcome
with horror at my family’s collective dissociation from its own demise, only then to end up feeling nothing at all. I’d forgotten that stark epiphany, bottled it up as I’d always done, creating an emotional debt to be paid later.

“It’s nothing they don’t already know,” I told Anthony, more evenly than I felt now. “They lived it, right?”

He gave me a concerned look. “It’s just . . . your brothers’ monologues are so honest, you know? Everyone makes statements you’d imagine might be . . . just a little too painful for the others to hear.”

“I guess that’s my role in the family: can opener for the can of worms!” But I wondered if I’d opened something I shouldn’t have.

Anthony laughed and put his hand on my shoulder. “Anyway, good luck,” he said. “And keep going, you hear me?”

I
listened to every tape until it repeated,” said my mother. “I stood right next to the TV screens so I could hear everything.”