Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (13 page)

NON-SPECIFIC LOCATION #1,
1996

(by Frances Stroh)

M
y shared art studio in Southeast London had a large window facing a block of boarded-up storefronts and crumbling prewar brick warehouses. I often paused on the windowsill in the afternoon to absorb some heat from the old radiator beneath it, looking out. There were no trees anywhere, even on the vacant lots. The brown grime covered every surface—of ancient coal dust, or an eternity of exhaust fumes. The very people milling about outside seemed to have absorbed it into their drab clothing, their worn-out shoes.

I was working on a new idea: rudimentary remakes of famous film scenes. So far I had made just one—the scene in
Apocalypse Now
where the helicopter lands on the beach and blows everyone’s stuff away. I had reconstructed the beach on a large rectangular table using sand and cocktail umbrellas, then simulated the flight of a helicopter by coming down onto the beach with the video camera and a hair dryer blowing from behind it. The effect, with the addition of an audio
track of a helicopter in flight, was magnificently absurd, especially as all the umbrellas blew away one by one.

I hadn’t been able to think of any other movie scenes I wanted to re-create. We had an open studio show coming up in early December—only one month away—and were committed to exhibiting at least one installation. All week, while I’d been busy showing my father and Elisa around London, my studio mates had been hard at work on their pieces. My father was so jazzed on Elisa he hadn’t even remembered to suggest a studio visit to see my work. Then my flat was robbed, tying me up for days at the American embassy, where I’d gone to replace my stolen passport. The thief had also taken the Nikon camera and lenses my father had given me in high school, all my personal photos, and some cheap jewelry.

“So you were
burgled
, were you?” the police officer exclaimed when I’d called to report the break-in. But they never came out to investigate. George Orwell, I figured, had the British attitude down: property itself was theft, which was clearly why I’d been relieved of mine. Case closed.

By my father and Elisa’s last day in London, I was eager for them to board their Concorde if only so I could get my life back. It had been two weeks since I was in the studio. On the very last day, while Elisa had a massage at the hotel, my father and I went to see the Degas exhibit at the National Gallery. Standing before the hundredth painting of ballerinas, I pictured lining them all up on the beach and gunning them down. I knew I could get the soundtrack of a machine gun somewhere, and music box figurines of ballerinas were plentiful. Perhaps my idea needed some evolving. I wouldn’t
limit my imagination to scenes from movies. Perhaps anything was fair game.

My father grunted at the painting and wandered off. I trailed behind him. Passing a tall ballerina sculpture, he looked shrunken beside her proud, lithe stance on the pedestal, his shoulders caved forward. He was getting old. I wanted to reach out and hug him through his khaki raincoat. But I didn’t.

The day before, we’d been at Harrods, where my father had bought Elisa a leather backpack costing £400. Afterward, while they looked on uncomfortably, I tried on a pair of earrings that cost £100. My father seemed torn, with Elisa watching, between pulling out his credit card and letting me buy them myself. It occurred to me, then, that any friendship that might form between Elisa and me would be contrived only for my father’s sake.

As I admired the gold earrings in the mirror, Elisa ruffled the tissue paper in her enormous Harrods shopping bag. The tension was stifling. My father wheezed through his cigar smoke, wondering out loud where we should have lunch. Finally, I pulled out my own credit card and handed it to the sales clerk. My Fulbright extension had just ended, and I could hardly afford the earrings, but I wanted to show my father that I could take care of myself, even as I was beginning to wonder if it was true.

Later, when Elisa was seated at the hotel bar downing yet another drink, my father led me into the lobby and gave me an envelope containing £400. “Happy birthday,” he said. “Maybe get yourself a new camera.” It was an apology, and
I felt grateful for it, though the money was, I knew, a booby prize.

I spent every penny of the gift on black cabs to and from gallery private views, instead of taking the Tube, a luxury I rarely allowed myself. The money lasted just two weeks, until my thirtieth birthday had passed. I knew I was being reckless with my father’s money, reckless the way he was, and this somehow calmed me.

E
lisa and I are engaged,” my father announced over the phone, just one week after their Concorde flight had touched down in New York.

I sat down on my futon sofa and studied the chips in my thrift store coffee table. “That’s great, Dad.”

“And look, you don’t have to worry. We’ll be signing a prenup. Bill Penner’s drawing one up.”

“I’m not worried about
that
.” I hadn’t even considered it, in fact, but felt reassured just the same, knowing that Bill Penner, the family lawyer, would handle the matter well.

“I hope you’ll come to the wedding, in the spring.”

“Of course,” I said.

“And I’m inviting you kids to join us out in Jackson Hole after Christmas. My treat.”

“Wow, thanks.” We hadn’t been on a family vacation since I was a teenager. But Charlie would be excluded from the trip, I knew, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for the family politics, particularly now. “Can I let you know as we get closer?”

“Of course
.”

I felt surprisingly unburdened as I hung up the phone. With this frightful thing actually happening, there was at least one less catastrophe to fend off. I even felt happy for my father, remembering how Elisa had smiled at him at dinner, lit his pipe for him, laughed at his awful barroom jokes; she had a few of her own to share, too. Maybe it made a kind of sense, this odd May–December match.

The birds on the brick wall outside my conservatory chirped in the smog. A fake-sounding British siren bellowed down Wandsworth Bridge Road. Soon I’d go over to the Indian liquor store to buy my bottled water, and on my way home I’d stop to chat with the furniture makers who rented the storefront below me. What did it matter what went on in Michigan?

W
ith just two weeks left to conceive and finish an installation, I still hadn’t decided what I’d present in the studio show. Usually I would spend months on a new piece. Knowing now that this effort would be rushed, I was reluctant to invite Trevor Atkins or any of the art dealers.

Trevor, who was moonlighting as a guest curator, had put some of my British friends into a show at the Hayward Gallery—but not me. When I’d run into him at a gallery private view in early November and asked him about his decision, he’d said, “It’s a survey of British artists, Frances. Nothing personal.” But it did feel personal, particularly after Trev
or’s enthusiasm during my final MA exhibition at Chelsea back in September. The buzz from the visiting art dealers and critics had also been encouraging; Lisson Gallery and Interim Art had made special studio visits to preview my work. A mere two months later, Trevor was putting safe—and mostly male—British “art stars” into the Hayward Gallery show, and the art dealers, too, were radio silent.

I began to wonder if I was too much of an outlier as an American artist. When a well-known British artist offhandedly suggested I keep my contacts active in the States, “just in case,” my suspicions solidified, and I began to believe that coming to London had been a grave misstep in my career.

I should move to New York, I decided. Then again, the thought of establishing myself in yet another big city was exhausting. To say nothing of the expense. With my Fulbright income gone, I needed a teaching job in a college art department. The small income I received from our real estate trust in Detroit, while helpful, was not nearly enough to live on. I began to have fantasies of escaping the drudgery of life in London to some whitewashed village in Greece. There, I could build up reserves—both emotional and financial—before my next move.

With my momentum in London all but exhausted, I often forwent the hour-long Tube ride to the studio to work on a piece for the upcoming show. Instead, I became involved with projects around the house, like applying for studio programs in New York, or vacuuming. Or polishing camera lenses—the used ones I’d bought to replace the stolen lenses.

At last I arrived at an idea for the studio show: a life-size video projection of a poker game. It was part of a series of
“happenings” that I filmed from the ceilings of rooms and then projected, often back into the very spaces where the events had been recorded.

Having spent the afternoon at the studio setting up for the shoot, I pulled a rectangular table into the center of the room, climbed on top, and attached my video camera to the ceiling. Then I spent an hour adjusting the angle of the camera, observing the image of the tabletop on a monitor, lining the edges up with the frame.

With the show only a few days away, an oppressive mood had settled over the studio. Dispirited, Mike and Ole tinkered for hours with a broken video projector. Tanja came over from across the hall to use our bathroom, but didn’t stop to talk. Gary sat at his desk, ignoring everyone.

My poker-playing friends were due at any moment, but then the phone rang and I went over to answer.

It was my brother Bobby. “So, dad eloped with that . . . thing.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh at this, or cry. I leaned into the wide windowsill, observing the desolation of the street outside, dead grass studding the empty lot beyond like patches of mold on old bread. Tiny flecks of rain blew sideways through the air.

“Where?” I said.

“At Gruhn’s—that redneck guitar store in Nashville.”

I knew it well, the store. My father spent tens of thousands there each year buying vintage Martin guitars and selling others back for pennies on the dollar. “I thought he was going to invite us to a wedding or something.”

“Well, he was with Elisa and Ginger Boatwright and they all got drunk and threw an impromptu wedding. No prenup. Nothing. Bingo, right? Mom is fucking
pissed
.”

Ginger was a buxom and soulful bluegrass singer, a friend whose career my father had probably subsidized. She herself had wanted to marry him at one point, but he must have been holding out for a young thing like Elisa.

Hanging up the phone, I felt as if a truckload of wet concrete had just been dumped on top of me. I wondered how I’d make it through the shoot.

I walked back to the set and adjusted some floodlights around the poker table. Neither Mike nor Gary looked up from his work. Ole watched me silently for a moment, then returned to the broken projector. The old radiators began to kick out some heat, and the room grew warm with the comforting smell of scorched dust.

O
n the day of the studio show, I stood at the center of the exhibition room, observing my piece for the first time; just a color projection of poker chips and cards, with hands manipulating them on a tabletop. No sound.

With its banal subject matter and lack of implicit critique, the piece came across as . . . nothing more than itself. Rather than enlarging the experience, the all-seeing eye of the camera had reduced it, and I was relieved no one mentioned it to me either during or after the private view, which attracted over a hundred friends and art-world types.

In the disappointment of the show, I couldn’t help but feel the tide had permanently turned for me in London. If the proverbial club sandwich had ever been there, it certainly wasn’t anymore; and I no longer felt deserving of success, anyway.

My flat was a warm, safe cave in which to hibernate through another London winter, and I stayed home for days, subsisting, like my mother, on cream of tomato soup from cans, and sleeping too much. The answering machine picked up my messages with the volume turned all the way down. My clothes sat in piles on the floor.

It seemed I was losing everything all at once: my father, my family, what I’d hoped to be my career. So many blows in so short a time. And that legacy of failure I thought I’d left behind in the States? It had not only caught up—it had overtaken me. I wasn’t the favored one anymore, not anywhere, and it felt like a kind of death, as shameful as it seemed to even think this way.

One day, when the phone rang, I decided to answer it.

“Frances,” said my father. “Will you be coming home for Christmas?”

“I don’t know, Dad.” Sudden tears burned my cheeks raw. “I’m just . . . you know, really, really busy here.”

“What’s
wrong
?” he said.

Nothing, I told him, and we talked instead about the weather and the beer business, avoiding entirely the matter of his marriage. Elisa, I figured, would be right there in the room beside him, downing a beer, or firing up a smoke. I had to choose my topics carefully. Now I would be the one hovering in the shadows, afraid to speak. The absurdity of the thought made me smile for the first time in days.

I
was stretched out on John Hilliard’s sofa in furry leopard pants. John, who lately had taken on something of a fatherly role, sat in the chair to my left, talking over my future with me, red wine and crackers laid out on the table between us. All around us, printed on enormous canvases, were John’s famous photographs, resting against the tables and walls. I adored my friend’s house, formerly the vicarage of an Anglican church, with its Gothic arches and minimalist decor.

“London can really work for you, if you give it some time.” He sipped his glass of cabernet. “Make three more of the inkjet prints, why don’t you, and invite the galleries over to your studio.”

As part of my final exhibition at Chelsea, I’d made a nine-by-nine-foot color print—a partial aerial shot of an unidentifiable town in the North of England—enlarged and sumptuously printed on vinyl, then mounted on stretcher bars in the manner of a painting, much like John’s work. He had assisted me in stretching the “canvas,” an all-day undertaking, and the print had been the focus of much attention during the exhibit. Now it was rolled up in a closet at my studio, collecting dust.