Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (6 page)

FRANCES STROH, 1982

(by Eric Stroh)

C
arrying my trunk and an Oriental rug, my mother and I climbed the cement stairs of the dormitory to the second floor and found my room, a tiny cell with flimsy metal-framed bunk beds, two dressers, and two desks. Old lead-paned windows looked out onto the green rolling hills of western Connecticut, punctuated by clusters of oak trees and, beyond them, the school’s perfectly groomed athletic fields.

We unrolled the rug across the gray cement floor, instantly brightening the room.

“Cool rug,” said a narrow-faced girl wearing a man’s felt hat. She’d come in and sat down on my trunk unannounced. “I’m Jen.”

“Jennifer Victoria Fairchild?” I said, shaking her hand. I’d gotten the school letter with my roommate’s name the week before.

“That’s me,” she giggled. She went over to the bottom bunk and unrolled a poster: Bob Marley smoking a cigar-size joint. “Where should we hang
this
?” she asked.

My mother shook her head with resignation, pushed my trunk into a corner, and gathered her purse.

I laughed, feeling a spike of excitement. That poster represented a whole uncharted world. I had smoked pot only once, in eighth grade, but I’d never actually been high. I was determined to change that this year, in spite of my parents’ warnings that pot led to “harder stuff.” Now, of course, they could point to Charlie as an example, but I wasn’t like Charlie; I was smarter than he was—I was sure of it—I could break the rules and still come out on top.

Soon my mother would get into the car and drive away and everything would become possible. My heart quivered at the thought of her leaving. She would worry, I knew, but only for an hour or two. I would miss her; I would miss a lot of things, and yet my whole life, I realized, had been preparing me for this moment. I saw my childhood spinning away from me like so many lackluster previews before the feature itself. I looked around at the blank walls of our cell. “Anywhere,” I said.

“There are other cool posters we can buy in the Village,” Jen said. “Taft charters a bus to New York for long weekends.”

T
he campus of the Taft School, founded in 1890, was made up of old neo-Gothic buildings arranged on hundreds of acres of greenery. The school had only begun accepting girls in 1971, ten years before my arrival, around the time it eliminated coats and ties. The most flamboyant students now were throwbacks to the sixties, with their long hair, hippie beads,
and Mexican ponchos, while the faculty seemed permanently frozen in the conservatism of the 1940s or ’50s, the era they’d begun teaching there, in most cases. They seemed to have unfurled like ivy from the school’s stone walls and spires, these tweedy, pipe-smoking teachers, and appeared entirely unprepared for the hopelessly stoned, guffawing students that passed them in the halls. The less passive among them cast their disapproving gaze on these bohemian kids whose politics were so vastly different from their own. Like flies in amber, the warring forces of straight America and the hippie movement appeared perfectly preserved at the Taft School.

There were only thirty-five boarders in the freshman class, and ten of us banded together in a tight-knit group whose closeness surpassed our own sibling bonds. Among the girls, we shared our clothes, our cigarettes, our boyfriends, our houses and apartments, and, soon enough, our alcohol and drugs. Almost overnight, in the absence of parents, we became one another’s family.

Music was our religion. The Grateful Dead, the Doors, and Neil Young—they were gods. And the Talking Heads, the Police, and the Clash, demigods. We all went out for sports, pulled all-nighters to study for exams, and never missed a class. But in our free time, we asserted our newfound independence by violating each of the school’s rules, one by one.

The doors to the dorm rooms were kept unlocked, except when parties were under way. The junior and senior boys regularly supplied us with pot and shrooms. Day students provided alcohol from their parents’ liquor cabinets or purchased on trips to Waterbury.

Taft had a two-offense policy: two drinking and/or drug
offenses and you were out. The fact so many “Tafties” were the progeny of prominent Wall Street financiers, famous authors, and brand-name families hardly mattered. Among us kids, the individual was judged by how much he could party—how well he played the game of risk—and still do well in the games of school and sports. Straight As, varsity teams, good taste in music, and a robust drug habit, that was what landed you on top, socially. Surviving a “bust” made you legendary.

The academics at Taft mattered as much as anything else, though. I spent my first exam week snorting crushed NoDoz while studying until dawn, my friends and I taking cigarette breaks every hour down in the butt room—a room-size ashtray in the basement of Mac House. My favorite course was third-year Latin with the preternaturally acute Mr. Cobb, whose famous line—“Whenever you have a fifty-fifty chance, ninety-five percent of the time you’ll get it wrong”—seemed to apply to everything.

In the dorm we’d stay up late discussing Camus while drinking home-fermented cider (produced by adding yeast and three successive rounds of heating next to the radiators and cooling in the snow), or collaborate on algebra problems, the Ramones beating a manic rhythm in the background, while packing for our next weekend getaway. Because, with Taft’s chartered buses and lenient travel policies, New York quickly became our off-site playground.

N
early all my friends had either grown up in New York or had a parent with an apartment there. Sasha lived just
off Washington Square Park on Waverly Place, Liv on Eighty-First and Riverside Drive, Cece on Park and Sixty-Sixth, and Feren’s dad in a high rise on the East River.

We stayed at these apartments on the weekends, when my friends’ parents were out at their country houses, and spent our days trolling the West Village. The Village dazzled with its array of head shops, art house cinemas, and the most coveted suppliers of bohemian wear in Manhattan—Canal Jean and Reminiscence. Indian print T-shirts soon replaced my Alligators; dangly silver filigree earrings replaced my tiny gold studs.

We shopped with the cash dispensed by Taft’s accounting office, our expenses later billed to our parents. Despite my mother’s pessimism, the Stroh Brewery had expanded nationally by acquiring the much larger Schlitz Brewing Company—described by the
Wall Street Journal
as a “minnow swallowing a whale”—and money came my way more easily now; I could see our beer brands in all the liquor stores in New York, the empties in Central Park and even on the Taft campus. Still, handing over those crisp ten- and twenty-dollar bills in West Village shops, I got a rapid-fire charge of adrenaline guilt, as if spending money were as risky as shoplifting or smoking pot. I’d witnessed my father’s freedom with money, of course, but never without my mother’s sportscaster’s commentary. I’d internalized both somehow, so that spending became just one more naughty thing I could do.

Fifteen-year-olds with pockets full of cash, we felt as if we owned the damn city. We dressed up and went out to Upper East Side bars, practicing our classroom French on the
bartenders, ordering martinis. We took cabs downtown, had dinner at John’s Pizza in the Village, and danced at Studio 54 or Danceteria, flashing the bouncers our fake college IDs, procured at Playland on Forty-Second Street. We bought pot in Washington Square Park to take back to whichever apartment we happened to be crashing in, and if no one was selling the good stuff, we called Choo-Choo.

Choo-Choo brought the drugs to your building, uptown or downtown, like a train carrying precious cargo. A scrawny old punk rocker, he’d show up wearing peg-legged black jeans, a wifebeater, and a spiky dog collar–style belt down low on his waist.

O
ne Sunday after a particularly late night, a group of us sat around Liv’s penthouse on Riverside Drive waiting for Choo-Choo’s delivery. When the doorman telephoned up to announce, “Miss Goodman, Mr. Choo-Choo is here,” Liv and I went down in the wood-paneled elevator with our wad of collected bills.

Choo-Choo was waiting next to the leather sofa in the lobby, I remember, sweating behind his sunglasses. The doorman politely looked away when we pulled out the cash.

Upstairs, we sat in the living room drinking really strong gin and tonics and smoking Marlboros, the baggie of green buds on the coffee table in a nice crystal ashtray, right next to the
Times
—with its front-page article on Choate Rosemary Hall. Two Choate students had been arrested at Kennedy Airport
for trafficking cocaine up from Colombia, and fourteen others had pleaded guilty for financing the trip. The article seemed to encapsulate a multitude of truths about our kind of crowd; we took risks—big ones—as a diversion from our boredom. It wasn’t about running away “Summer of Love” style; we worked from within the system, using our own privilege as a launching pad. The trick was recognizing where the lines were and then letting someone else cross them. One of the traffickers, see, had been the son of a truck driver, hell-bent on fitting in with the privileged set at Choate, and . . . he’d been used. Just as Charlie had been used. They were the line crossers.

“Can you
imagine
?” said Feren. “You’d have to be, like,
so
fuckin’ ballsy to go for that.”

I sipped my drink and studied the faces of the kids involved—kids just like us. I couldn’t believe they’d done it. “I almost
went
to Choate,” I said. “I wonder if they’ll go to prison.”

“That so easily could have been you, Franny,” said Jen, absently dropping her ash on the rug. “You know? I could totally see you doing it.”

I thought of Charlie—now stationed in Okinawa—and I felt an inviolable boundary within myself. “Nope, I’d never have gone for that.” I already understood, at age sixteen, the elusiveness of the line between a life of privilege and a life in prison. Soon after Charlie’s trial, Michigan had raised the penalty for dealing cocaine to life without parole.

“Would you?” asked Sasha, looking over at Feren.

“Me?
” asked Feren jestingly, laughing her semi-insane laugh. “Not a chance.”

But I wasn’t convinced. Feren was the wildest of us all. Over spring break she’d apparently been cavorting with some French sailors who’d docked in Nevis, the West Indian island where her mother lived.

“I wonder what will happen to them,” I said, glancing down at the photo. “They’re so screwed; they’ll never get into college.”

“They’ll end up in reform school,” said Liv in that endearing deadpan monotone of hers. “As far away from drugs as you can get.”

Feren got up to replenish her drink. “I don’t know, Liv. They probably have great drugs in reform school. Like they do in prison.”

“Better than at Taft?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine a place where drugs were more available or more intrinsic to the culture. In Grosse Pointe some kids I knew were starting to use coke, but at Taft you’d have to hide under your bed to avoid being implicated in drug use, and you’d probably find someone’s stash while you were under there.

The irony was, my parents had sent me away at least in part to protect me from drugs. As it turned out, getting high was just such a key part of life at Taft—an essential step toward becoming an adult, an instant form of self-reinvention, and certainly a step away from a childhood that was best left behind. I talked with my parents once a week on the pay phone in the hall, but with all the kids gone from the house except Whitney, I imagined the scene at home was rough. My mother’s persistent cheerfulness in the face of my father’s emotional decline was enough to keep me in New York for half of all my
vacations, either with friends or at my grandmother’s house in New Jersey. I hoped Whitney would survive until he could go away to school, too.

O
ur “dorm mothers” were too detached to snoop—at least until sophomore year, when I roomed with Sasha. We’d chosen the room because no teachers resided on that hall, and the set of purple psychedelic curtains framing the window at the end of the hall, just outside our door, was a main attraction. We loved those curtains, with their absurdly bold swirling patterns, so retro 1960s, so symbolic of the ironies of Taft. Once Sasha took them down and donned them as a cloak she wore to sit-down dinner.

Pamela, a tall, skinny blonde from South Bend, Indiana, usually came down to do bongs with me. We used a “hit towel”—a regular white towel, dampened and rolled up for maximum absorption, into which we blew the smoke to avoid stinking up the room—and we sprayed Ozium in the air, as an added precaution.

But then Jan Coleruso, a newly hatched teacher from Yale, started knocking on our door during study hall, asking for aspirin and tampons, inhaling our room’s aroma as she stood in the doorway, her running shorts sprouting thick, muscular legs.

“Why is she
stalking
us?” I complained to Sasha as soon as she’d left.

“Um, because you’re a pothead?” Sasha would say wryly, grinning as she went back to her book. This was the routine.

Being practical, Pamela and I changed our schedule: we brushed our teeth, smeared Clearasil on our faces, and did bongs every night before bed, avoiding smoking during study hall hours.

Then one Saturday night my luck ran out. I’d been playing Quarters at an off-campus party, and my friend David, a day student, dropped me back on campus past the midnight curfew. The doors to the dorms had already been locked, and everyone’s lights were out except Coleruso’s. I knocked loudly and waited. I heard footsteps on the cement stairs, doors creaking open, and then my heartbeat pounding in my ears when I saw her through the porthole, turning the key in the lock, a gaseous cloud of beer and cigarettes wafting into the vestibule when I stepped in. I knew I smelled like a frat bar.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said.

Coleruso just stood there staring at me. Twenty-two and new to Taft, she had no idea how to carry out a bust. Having shadowed me for months now, she was freezing.

I signed in on the roster and swiftly retreated to my room before she could figure out what to say. Three days later, she turned me in to the dean. I was suspended for two weeks. My parents took the news in stride. A little beer wasn’t a big deal to them, although it was clear they hoped I would clean up my act after my suspension, which I spent in Grosse Pointe with Whitney and Ollie while my parents vacationed in the Bahamas.