Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (11 page)

“Not
me
,” said my father gruffly. “Stick with photography, Frances. That’s
my
advice.”

My parents were staying at the Stanyan Park Hotel in the Haight, just across from Golden Gate Park. It was one of the many ways in which they still operated as a couple, traveling together, staying at the same hotel.

I took Fell Street from Zuni, where we’d had dinner, up to the Haight. A crowd had gathered in the Panhandle, en
circling a string of bongo players as they danced wildly to the discordant rhythms. With all the whirling tie-dye and dreadlocks, the scene had the feel of a Grateful Dead concert. I turned to my mother in the front seat. “Did you hear Charlie say he wants to come home for Christmas this year?”

“I heard that,” she said tentatively. “He looks like the devil, though, doesn’t he? He’s not taking good care of himself.”

“He’s a goddamn drunk!” trumpeted my father from the backseat.

I turned left onto Stanyan Street. The cherry-blossom trees in the park were flowering, the grass underneath them covered in pale-pink petals. The drifters and street people had gathered into clusters, some wrapped in old blankets, talking amiably in the last of the April light. The rough, red skin of these homeless people reminded me, of course, of Charlie.

“It’s his last stop,” I said.

“Whose?” asked my mother.

FRISK BOTTLE,
1995

(by Frances Stroh)

M
y friends and I walked up the King’s Road in the light September rain, headed for the 606 Club. We’d been drinking martinis at my new flat as a housewarming, the gin still dry on my tongue. I savored the rain pelting us, pelting the pavement.

“It’s down this way,” I said, turning onto Lots Road. Smoke-stained brick warehouses ran all the way down to the Thames. A crowd had gathered in front of an unmarked building. Supper club jazz floated up the stairs from the basement. We got in line.

“I never knew about this place,” said Hari. Charismatic, with movie-star looks, Hari was studying acting in London for a couple of years. We’d been friends back in San Francisco.

“It’s a hidden gem,” said my new friend Nino, paying for the tickets. He wore slicked back hair and a boxy suit from the forties. “Members only.” We’d met at Camden Market, where Nino sold me a vintage dining table and chairs for my flat.

Camilla, Hari’s tipsy red-haired girlfriend, slid her arm through his and smiled. “It’s
lovely
,” she said.

I’d been out every night for a solid month since arriving in August, raging on adrenaline ever since I’d been awarded a Fulbright for a year of study in London to complete my Master of Fine Arts. With the ascension of the Young British Artists—stars like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin—London was the epicenter of the art world. Some days I had Imposter Syndrome, unable to believe my good fortune. Then I reminded myself I was here to begin my life anew, put the past behind, and launch my career as an international artist. This was where I would make my name. Who knew? I might never return to the States.

Inside the smoke haze of the 606 Club, we were given a table near the stage. The keyboardist jammed while the female vocalist sang with a voice rather like Billie Holiday’s. The guitarist hummed the chords as he played. Nino ordered a round of drinks.

“Watch the guitarist closely,” he said seductively into my ear. “It’s like he’s making love to those strings, right?”

Nino and I only talked about sex. We’d been to swing dance clubs and martini bars all over London, but we were just friends. After a series of failed relationships in the States with men who’d been remarkably like my father—addicted, adoring, creative, yet essentially self-absorbed—I’d promised myself to stay single and focused on work for a year. Relationships only diffused my focus; months would pass, my attention fixed on the inevitable ebb and flow of closeness, my ideas rattling around in my head rather than taking con
crete shape, my creativity sapped. I was twenty-eight, and it all seemed such a chaotic time, those years I’d spent in San Francisco dating and having relationships, fitting in exhibitions here and there while trying to figure out how to make a living and still be an artist. Now, in London, looking ahead into the glaring light of my bright future, I was finally on the right path, and I wasn’t going to let anything get in my way.

Hari and Camilla sipped their drinks. They’d met in acting school. Back at my flat on Wandsworth Bridge Road, we’d sat in my conservatory, with the rain hitting the glass roof, pouring one drink after another. In the States I could hardly drink without feeling ill, but here it seemed I could drink as much as I wanted. It felt as if I’d somehow outrun myself.

Hari smiled over at me and tipped his drink back. I felt lucky to have such a good friend in London. We shared an extended network of friends back in San Francisco, the closest thing to family some of us had ever known. Everywhere I’d ever lived, my friends had been my surrogate family, but nowhere more than in San Francisco. Our crowd threw Mexican “family dinners” every Sunday night, with platters of catfish and black beans and tortillas—a tradition that Hari and I had decided to continue with our London friends.

“Tomorrow,” said Hari, “we’re going to get you a bike.”

A bike would help; I didn’t own a car. Only I was nervous about navigating London’s fitful traffic, riding on the opposite side of the road. “I won’t have to wear one of those masks for the fumes, will I?”

Camilla laughed. “With that amazing hair?” she said. “A crime!”

In celebration of my new expatriate identity, I’d cut off my long, blond hair in favor of a layered sixties bob. Together with the thick black eyeliner, fake lashes, and the high, lace-up boots I’d adopted, the effect was a throwback to Andy Warhol’s silver foil-lined Factory. Astride my new Raleigh three-speed, I’d be a cross between Edie Sedgwick and some rave-babe bike messenger.

Nino took my hand and led me onto the crowded dance floor, pulling me in close, his warm hands on my waist. I caught my reflection in the tilted mirror behind the stage—watching that London hipster with the shock of platinum hair groove—and thought for a moment I’d spotted someone else entirely.

It felt so liberating, leaving behind my family and the failing business, as if I’d shed a too-tight suit and could at last move freely. Walking down a London street, I sometimes imagined myself in the final jailbreak scene of
Midnight Express
, feeling as if at any moment I might bolt into a run, my sense of buoyancy too much to contain.

As if to test my resolve, my father had begun appearing in public with a young woman named Elisa Keys. He called me in London to tell me that his new girlfriend and I had attended Grosse Pointe South High School together. He seemed proud of this.

Not recognizing her name, I couldn’t recall her face.

I responded as I did with all bad family news. First I felt an intense wave of panic, then shut it out. It was a distant storm. My family’s ship might be sinking; my own, though, was just setting sail.

One day my cousin John, who would soon be the new CEO of the family company, called me, fraught. “Franny, you have to
do
something about your father and that woman.”

Before my father married her, I knew he meant.

“John, what
can
I do?”

While John worried about our family’s public image, I ruminated about my father’s health. I heard my father was drinking again, after eight years of sobriety. He and Elisa had met at Sparky’s, a preppy bar in Grosse Pointe where he sat one evening having dinner. Someone told her he was “Eric Stroh, of Stroh’s Beer.” She sat down next to him at the bar and asked the bartender, “Stroh’s! Do you
serve
that crap?”

“I happen to make that beer,” my father told her.

And they were off to the races.

All the years growing up at the mercy of his alcohol-driven mood swings came back to me in flashes of pain, and I partitioned myself off even further from the barrage of bad news.

As the weeks passed, I found I had no tolerance for the Elisa reports from other family members. The frequent calls were becoming a distraction. London was my golden chance to finally get away, to become independent, and I was determined to circumvent this landslide of family drama.

“What should we do?” Whitney asked too often, the transatlantic static engulfing his voice. “I heard she quit her job at McDonald’s when she met Dad.”

“Just ignore it,” I advised. “I’m sure it won’t last.” My father had told me he would never marry again. And I simply could not picture him with anyone except my mother, certainly not with a high school peer of mine, whoever she was.

Even my mother did not take this relationship seriously. “I saw them having lunch at the country club,” she called me to announce. She paused ceremoniously. “I don’t think you have to worry, Frances; I saw the girl. Dad is just enjoying himself.”

By this point my mother had married Lloyd Marentette, whom she’d known for forty years. The previous spring, they’d been part of a tour group cruising the Seychelles. When Lloyd had grown seriously ill with a respiratory infection, my mother nursed him back to health, sitting in his stateroom through the night and monitoring his breathing. They fell in love. Now my father could no longer drop his laundry off at my mother’s house or take her out to dinner. He must have felt abandoned, all their ancient rituals finally settling into history.

S
oon my MA program began, and the noise from the States receded into the background. My flat was located just around the corner from my graduate studio at Chelsea College of Arts. I worked every day, except Sundays, when the studios were closed, and bonded with the other graduate students who haunted the studios on Saturdays.

In October I audited a theory class in the undergraduate program, located just off the King’s Road. I didn’t recognize the instructor’s name but my well-read, cynically witty studio mate, Mike, didn’t miss a trick. “He’s a rock star, Frances,” Mike said, tossing his head up in approval. “Most important critic in London.”

Students spilled into the hallway when I arrived to class on the first day. I slipped through the crowd and found that all the chairs in the seminar room were taken. Some students sat on top of a broad table pushed against the wall, and I seized the last spot, sitting Indian style with my notebook on my lap.

Standing before us was a fit man in his early forties: the famed art critic Trevor Atkins. He had cropped salt-and-pepper hair, glasses, and an ordinary face made exceptional only by the rather pained expression he wore, as if his very popularity were a source of embarrassment to him. His hands rested tentatively on the back of a chair as the masses settled themselves.

When he finally spoke, I was transfixed. He had a gift for the oblique, the ungraspable, managing to synthesize everything I had ever read or thought about art over the years, while somehow creating his own art form with the parallels he so astutely drew between art and theory.

The seminar left me feeling only more motivated; I wanted to participate meaningfully in this dialogue between art and theory. I wanted, too, to know this Trevor Atkins, to absorb his influence, and sought out conversations with him whenever possible, even arranging studio visits with him for all the MAs. Then Trevor and I arranged a theory seminar for the MA program, inviting all the top theorists in London. Suddenly I had access to people I’d only read about in the States. These luminaries came out to the pub with us after class and, later, to my dinner parties. I had finally landed exactly where I needed to be, it seemed.

The change of longitude acted as a kick-starter for my
art. I worked feverishly day and night to keep up with the intense flow of ideas, making small installations in my studio as sketches for larger pieces. I spent hours each day slicing up Dennis Cooper’s
Frisk
, line by line, just as Cooper’s protagonist sliced up his victims’ bodies. I relabeled beer bottles with the dismembered text and sold them as art objects at a pub on the King’s Road. Only much later did the piece’s seemingly disparate links between the devaluation of the artist, human carnage, and my family’s brewing history become clear to me.

I hardly slept. I’d wake in the middle of the night and scribble ideas inside a journal. Everything I’d ever thought or read was taking on visual shape, and I had to catch it all, as if I could outrun my terror of something essential slipping away. Come morning, I’d discard almost everything or morph certain aspects of ideas into new ones that might bear fruit.

One sleepless night the sky cracked with thunder, and rain pelted against my bedroom windows. I dropped my journal onto the floor and walked through my conservatory out onto the tiny terrace, the rain coming down hard on my head. I raised my arms up toward the pink glowing dome of London sky. I caught the rain in my hands, shallow pools forming in my palms, and splashed it over my face and neck like holy water. I stood there a long time, feeling the warm rain soak straight through my T-shirt to my skin. The muffled sound of traffic horns traveled over the buildings to merge with the rumble of thunder splitting open the clouds. I could stand there as long as I wanted, I realized; my life felt utterly my own.

T
revor Atkins and I had been in a darkened seminar room for hours. I projected slide after slide of my work from 1990 to 1995 while he hit me with searching questions. Certain slides we’d linger on for fifteen minutes or more, discussing my ideas, my intentions. A bold rectangle of light hit the wall when the last slide had finished.

“I find it refreshing,” Trevor said, “that your work is not exactly . . . ‘female.’”

I wasn’t sure how to take this. My breath quickened, erratic, imprecise. I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, and in anticipation of our meeting, I’d stayed up reading Trevor’s exhibition catalogue essays. Compared to his brilliant lectures his writing style seemed stiff; and yet attaining his respect felt critical.

Trevor shifted in his chair. “Then again, certain pieces are clearly about how you perceive others in
relation
to yourself. Right? There’s a self-consciousness to them, really, and this, I suppose,
could
be seen as ‘female.’”

He was referring to my family piece, I knew, among others. “My work does tend to deal with the relativity of perception,” I offered. “You know. And with point of view.”

I hated the idea of my work being identified as “female”; I wanted Trevor to see me only as brilliant, apart from my sex. I yearned for this with every synapse in my brain and every cell in my body, as if my self-realization as an artist were entirely dependent on his favorable opinion of my work.

I lifted the slide tray from the projector, and Trevor
reluctantly picked up his canvas book bag. He had been in that room with me for two and a half hours, three times the allotment for a studio visit, which is what this was, technically. Much of our relationship took place in situations like these: darkened rooms with projected slides; empty theaters after assemblies or lectures had finished; hallways or corners of graduate studios where no one walked or worked nearby. We would always linger on a bit, talking about Derrida or Warhol, or my newest installation, maybe; Trevor’s book-in-progress. But the distance he kept whenever others were around became confusing to me. Only when I discovered he was married did I understand. Accepting the inherent distance, I resolved to channel my interest in this man into my work itself, spending longer hours yet in the studio.