Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (7 page)

Two weeks in Michigan was a long time, particularly in February. I couldn’t call any of my friends in Grosse Pointe, because my parents didn’t want anyone to know I’d been sus
pended. Confined to the house, I spent the mornings keeping up with my schoolwork and the afternoons watching HBO with Whitney.

I missed getting stoned with my friends at school and would make do smoking a bowl myself in my room at the end of the day. I’d sit in my window seat watching the flurries blowing around outside, the house dead silent, Ollie downstairs roasting a chicken the way she used to do for us. Whitney would be in his room doing homework. I wondered if I appeared to him the way Charlie had once appeared to me—pasty skinned and preoccupied. Whitney had been alone for a year and a half, and this was our chance to reconnect; instead, we were both holed up in our separate quarters. I’d given him a couple of Neil Young cassettes, and I could hear “After the Gold Rush” floating down the hall from his room.

I took another hit, holding the lighter in the bowl until it burned my thumb, and exhaled. I cracked the window. A few flurries of snow blew in, melting instantly.

True to form, Ollie never mentioned the daily cloud of pungent smoke to my parents when they called to check on us, or let on about much of anything. She’d always been on our side, throughout everything that had happened, and I loved her for that.

W
e stood under the bleachers at a lacrosse game—Taft versus Hotchkiss—while the crowd above us roared.

“My brother was busted by the Fed for dealing coke,” I told my friend Trey. My head felt light with the beer we were sharing.

“No shit, really?” He took the last drink from the can, then tossed it on the ground. “The fuckin
Fed
?”

“But don’t tell anyone.” I tucked my hands into my jeans pockets. “My parents made me swear I’d never say a word about this.”

“I swear,” said Trey. “But that’s, like, crazy.”

We’d been hanging out lately, getting stoned in the woods, smoking cigarettes and kissing behind the science building after vespers and dinner. I’d hung out with him one night in the fields while he tripped hard on mushrooms, laughing aloud at the stars. He had a high school band—Space Antelope—that played twangy Grateful Dead–inspired tunes.

“You’re the first person I’ve ever told out loud,” I said. “I guess I needed to tell someone.”

Trey looked at me and grinned. “Cool. So now you’re lighter, right? Now you don’t have to worry anymore—you’re free.” His auburn hair caught a splinter of sun, turning it gold. His lashes were blond, almost invisible.

I leaned against the rough edge of the bleachers. The crowd stood up and cheered, a riot of stomping feet and shouts.

“Now I’m free,” I repeated.

I wondered if this could be true. I never felt free for very long, only for a few days or weeks before the heaviness came back. Whenever I had that feeling of lightness, I knew it wouldn’t last. Which meant I had to do something, drum up some new excitement, to keep ahead of that terrible weight.

F
or ten hours I pretended to be asleep in the back of the car with my trunk. My father drove silently, stopping only for gas and food. I knew he must be too angry or too heartbroken to speak, and his silence was, in fact, a relief to me.

Taft was throwing me out. I had only one documented offense, even counting the bottle of vodka found in my room that I swore I’d never seen before, but the school, reserving the right to change the rules, had decided I shouldn’t come back for junior year; they saw me as a ringleader of sorts, my influence spreading to innocent freshmen like Pamela, and so I was being excised, like a cancer.

I remembered my mother telling me about when Bobby was expelled from Kent, how he and my father had cried together at the airport. Charlie’s expulsion from South Kent had followed, then his college expulsion, and now this. Would
I
end up in the Marines?

The car came to another stop. I heard my father pumping gas. A few minutes later, he came back with what smelled like McDonald’s burgers and fries. I heard him trying to hand a bag to me in the back but even now I didn’t open my eyes.

Tears washed over my cheeks, perhaps at the kindness in my father’s gesture, what seemed almost like forgiveness. I was losing everything—my friends, my room, my independence—but . . . at least my father was with me there, silently, on my side.

He had driven from Michigan to talk the school out of expelling me, but the meeting apparently had not gone well.
This was why I was “asleep” in the back of the car, and why I would have to spend the next two years back in Grosse Pointe until I could go away to college.

Ever since the bottle of vodka had been found, I had cleaned up, avoided all the spring parties out in the fields, the smoking sessions in the day-student locker room, but the headmaster had told my father, “Sorry—too little, too late.”

I knew they were making an example of me. My friends whose fathers had attended Taft, they had all been given warnings, while I was being expelled. Charlie had been a scapegoat as well—getting clean only to suffer the repercussions of old crimes. The fact that life was intrinsically unfair lodged itself at the center of my chest, like a well-mortared brick. I loved Taft; I’d finally lived my life fearlessly, everything within my grasp. With no one to stop me, I’d ordered the proverbial club sandwich—and I’d devoured it whole. Now those old feelings of unworthiness were creeping in again, and I wondered if I’d even deserved any of the happiness I’d felt over the previous two years, the frenzied sense of freedom.

Granted, there probably wasn’t a single handbook rule I hadn’t violated, with the exception perhaps of plagiarism or cheating, but my grades had been good and I’d been a strong athlete—varsity ice hockey, varsity tennis. I’d seen plenty of kids get away with more than I had. In the boys’ dormitories I’d seen bongs as tall as standing lamps, with lamp shades placed on top as their only disguise. I knew students who were regularly invited into a certain teacher’s apartment for cocktails, and boys who got caught red-handed with drugs and faced no consequences. The omnipresence of drugs and
booze at Taft had taken nearly all of us up in its mischievous embrace. The chartered buses into the city, the free-flowing cash, the “chaperoned” theater trips, the dinners at Beefsteak Charlie’s with free pitchers of beer. We’d all partaken.

And then they’d changed the rules on me.

Hearing a crackle of plastic, I opened my eyes: my father, opening a pack of cigarettes. I sat up in the seat, and he eyeballed me in the rearview mirror, a slight smile on his face. He lit two cigarettes with the car lighter and handed one to me.

I took it silently. The last time he’d given me a cigarette I’d been ten, also riding in his car. I took a long drag on it and looked out the window at the blankness of Ohio, picturing my father and Bobby smoking at the airport, the tears drying on their cheeks.

We were almost home.

WALL IN DETROIT, 1984

(by Frances Stroh)

T
he potholes on Jefferson Avenue got worse every year. Five months of ice and snow and then the blasting April heat caused the pavement to buckle, then shatter. This, combined with the badly depleted coffers of local government, meant we had a piece of Swiss cheese for a road as we headed into the heart of Detroit to the abandoned Uniroyal Tire plant, an icon of the city’s manufacturing past that was set to be demolished in just a few months.

We had been planning the excursion for weeks, speaking in muted voices in the hallways at school, lining up a car, discussing the pros and cons of various drugs. LSD, we’d finally agreed on.

Hobey drove while I sat in the passenger seat and Caitlin and Mike lounged in the back. Dilapidated buildings lined the street, and ambling jaywalkers crossed in front of our car. Hobey knew we were coming on, and he cranked up Bad Brains—hard-core raspy punk that made my skull ache. Grosse Pointe seemed a million miles behind us.

I observed Hobey’s herringbone tweed overcoat, his trim buzz cut, his wicked smile—all so out of sync. Bags of provisions and gear were piled at my feet: cigarettes, beer, water, camera equipment. We passed a billboard displaying the tagline “Stroh’s Is Spoken Here,” and I felt a little ashamed. Stroh’s was Detroit’s beer, like Bud was for St. Louis, but it wasn’t as if I’d done anything to deserve having my name up there like that. No one else noticed, or they didn’t report on it if they did. My friends and I never talked about it, the wealth I’d grown up with.

Everyone in the car jammed to the music and smoked. We had Mickey’s with us, not Stroh’s. I opened one to calm my amped nerves. I was coming on fast to the acid. Outside the window, the streets visibly vibrated with the music while the car floated forward, a bubble of self-sufficiency, into the density of the forsaken city.

Toyota and Honda were winning the war. And Detroit, Detroit was an aftermath in the form of a city, a tragic defeat of all things American. Populations, industries, architecture—collapsing in on themselves like decimated ruins. The wreckage of this city etched itself into my genetic code, I could feel it, the patterns engulfing every shape and color.

I turned to Caitlin and Mike in the backseat. They smiled, their eyes melting pools of light. Caitlin’s black hair blew sideways across her face. She had a fragile beauty, with the translucent skin, the shadow-encircled eyes, of a druggie. Mike wore his sheepskin vest, a silver medallion resting against his hairless chest. He put his hand on Caitlin’s, holding on while his feet lifted off the floor, his red curls all liquid fire as he
threw his head back, laughing at nothing at all, or maybe everything.

“Wow . . .” It was all I could think to say. On the street a homeless man shared his food with a dog. “Wow, I mean, look . . .” I trailed off, the waves of feeling so intense I knew they must have seen it, too—the open wound that was the world.

Hobey switched the cassette and turned up the volume on “Box of Rain,” smiling over at me. Deejay as shaman. The gentle, twanging notes made the sun feel warmer, the sky bluer, the bombed-out city a kind of refuge.

Caitlin knew the way into the abandoned plant. An alley off the street led to an open side door that had been used by squatters. Old soiled clothes littered the filthy floor, along with broken glass, blankets, syringes. Entire walls had been painted black, as if to simulate night.

We walked in astonished silence toward a great wall of windows, the sun pouring through, a waterfall of light. Outside, the vastness of the defunct tire plant stretched before us like a forgotten city: a maze of streets lined with two-story buildings, railroad tracks, even a garbage dump where torched tires melted under the sun. Yellow-and-black signs reading Hazardous Waste had been posted on the sides of buildings. Concrete rubble piled up everywhere, as if an earthquake had toppled whole structures, forcing the city’s inhabitants to flee.

We carried our cameras outside, into the maze. Caitlin and Mike held hands as we ducked under a barbed wire fence and walked along the train tracks. We pushed open an unlatched
door, and our footsteps echoed inside a warehouse stacked to the ceiling with shipping containers. Dust hung in the air, catching the gauzy light.

No one spoke. I snapped a shot with my Nikon. “Day turns to dust,” I heard myself say, breaking the silence.

The warning signs had been posted everywhere. Uniroyal was a forbidden zone, the site a toxic waste–dumping site long before the hazards were even well understood.

We walked deeper into the maze of buildings, taking more pictures. Pools of putrid water had formed from all the spring rains, some of them full of trash and weeds. We wove around them, separating and coming back together, laughing out loud when one of us splashed through recklessly. Mike splattered mud on Hobey’s coat, and Hobey kicked a black leather boot into the water, soaking Mike.

“You asshole!” Mike shouted. He brushed the grime from his vest and arms. When the water had settled, a solid organic object—something dead—floated at his feet.

Hobey stopped laughing. “What the fuck.”

Caitlin walked closer and poked it with a stick, turning it over. “It’s a rat.” Her voice sounded hollow. She held up her camera and snapped the shutter.

“
Je
sus Christ,” said Mike, stepping out of the water.

I bent over to see it closer. The eyes were open and black, the body the size of a small cat. The fur rippled rhythmically, and I wondered if it might still be alive, but Caitlin’s sweater was rippling, too. Everything with texture was alive.

I imagined thousands of rats all around us, rambling through sewer pipes or thrashing their tails inside little holes
in the ground. I’d read a book once about the apocalypse that said only rats and cockroaches would survive a nuclear winter. They’d proliferate and take over the earth for millions of years until new species evolved. Even now, I thought I could feel things crawling on me. I scratched my arms up and down until I’d begun to produce welts.

A door slammed from somewhere inside the plant, and the sound ricocheted off the buildings in the silence. We all looked at one another. Had it been the wind? Anything could happen in here, and no one outside would know. People were murdered in Detroit every day.

I looked behind us and realized I wasn’t sure how to navigate back out. “This is too weird,” I said.

We lit cigarettes and listened to each other’s labored breathing. Mike’s curls looked artificially red under the now poisonous sun. He scanned the outbuildings of the walled city. “We should go,” he said, his voice shaky.

Hobey put his hand on Mike’s shoulder. “Relax, man. You’re just having a bad trip, hunh?”

But I’d had enough, too. “Let’s go back,” I said. “We get caught in here, and we’re screwed.”

“No shit,” said Caitlin, her pupils spheres of black velvet. She replaced the lens cap with a slender, jittery hand.

The magic had worn off, except for the bad kind. I thought I could feel the cockroaches under my clothes, could taste the radioactive particles on my tongue, like dirty pennies. And I suspected we weren’t alone in the plant.

We took off, sprinting across the railroad yard, but I stopped suddenly and turned around, taking a last look.
The web of discarded streets and buildings went on forever. The rest of Detroit wasn’t far from being like this—every windowpane shattered, every door hanging from its rusted hinges. Life had left this place. I felt my legs running toward the distant sound of feet hitting ground. I went around some warehouses and ducked under the barbed wire fence where I knew my friends had been, their dust still suspended in the air. I saw them waiting for me in front of the main building. We threw open the door and raced through to the street.

We stood panting next to the car.

“Let’s have a beer,” said Hobey.

M
y father was cutting the lawn when I arrived home, and both my parents’ cars were parked in the driveway. I could see the flashing screen of the TV through the library window. Being around my parents while on acid was an experience I generally tried to avoid, but everyone had bailed early, saying they needed to get home for dinner. Only then had I even remembered it was Tuesday. We had skipped school.

I entered the house through the side door, went up the back stairs, and slipped into my brother’s bathroom, where I knew no one would find me. The mirror caught my reflection; my eyes were all pupils, lashes grotesquely long. My skin looked orangey red. My geometrical bob was knotted from the wind, except where the hairspray had secured it. Hobey
called that sprayed bob my Darth Vader helmet. I laughed out loud at the absurdity of this.

My skin was moving, pulsing uncontrollably, like the walls, the tiled floor, the grain of the beige carpet in the hallway. Atoms, constantly moving.

I sat on the toilet to steady myself, the wall cool against my neck as I leaned back. The smell of freshly cut grass floated up from the garden through the open window, the sound of the mower as familiar as my mother’s voice. I was home, safe in Grosse Pointe, the wasteland of Detroit some infinite distance away. Our neighbors, the Fruehaufs, were readying their pool for the summer, while the high school tennis team at Liggett was vigorously hitting balls, their courts just on the other side of the fence from us.

I knew I would go downstairs soon. I would act normal, as if I’d been at Hobey’s house since school had gotten out, listening to his band practice in the basement. I would plant myself in front of the TV, find a movie on HBO, and wait for my mother to announce that dinner was ready.

But then I heard another familiar sound: my father’s voice. He was shouting over the lawnmower, probably at Whitney. Tuesday, I reminded myself again. My father would have been “at work,” meaning he’d been drinking all afternoon downtown near his office, putting me in grave danger of having a bad trip if I saw him.

I went down the back stairs and out of the house, and climbed into the front seat of the Ford station wagon. As I turned the key in the ignition, I could still hear my father’s infuriated voice coming from the flagstone path that led to the terrace and lawn.

O
ut on the road I picked up speed. To the right was the country club golf course, a blinding streak of neon green. On the left were storybook estates—replicas of English manor houses, their sweeping lawns studded by towering trees. Twice as tall as the houses, their branches swayed like dancers’ arms to an internal rhythm I couldn’t hear, beckoning me. It was the waning acid talking, I knew, because the houses had invisible force fields keeping me at bay. In all their perfection, the homes looked as lifeless as the Uniroyal outbuildings, only the gardeners visible, in glimpses, to let you know any of it was even remotely real. Our house, a big brick Colonial we’d moved into when I was nine, was matchbox in comparison, if a good deal more inviting.

I passed the Williamses’ house with the antique-car collection in their twelve-car garage and, with my one-handed steering wheel grip, stubbing out my cigarette in the ashtray, took the curve past Buhl Ford’s house. It seemed every house on Provencal Road had a family just like mine: at least one fanatical, uptight parent, with a host of wayward, rebellious youth. Often enough one of these kids wrapped a sports car around a tree on the golf course, the tire marks on the putting green a haunting reminder in the weeks that followed.

All the kids on the street, except me, either went to Liggett—the private school right by our house, where I’d gone for grade school and junior high—or to boarding school. And since Liggett hadn’t taken me back after I’d been expelled from Taft, I’d matriculated at Grosse Pointe South High School the previous summer.

“Public school,” my mother had lamented, “Oh, Frances . . .
that
really is an embarrassment.” I reminded her that Bobby and Charlie had also served time at South High after their boarding school expulsions. So I was in good company.

As I approached my cousins’ house I could see both Uncle Peter’s and Aunt Nicole’s cars parked in the driveway, along with that of Gwendalyn, their Jamaican cook who had often made me cinnamon toast when I was a child. I’d be propped up on a stool as she chattered about her life in Jamaica in her intriguing accent, a whole wall of refrigerators humming behind me.

Nearly every house on the street had a fleet of cars—an American car to drive downtown to work, a pair of foreign cars in the garage for the weekends, the wife’s car, the nanny’s car, the cook’s car, and the gardener’s truck. It seemed one simply could not have too many cars.

I looked across the golf course at the uneven line where the horizon met the sky. Objects were once again becoming themselves as the acid wore off, contained inside predictable borders, the colors of things once again muted. The leaves on the trees had stopped glistening like wet diamonds. Grass was grass; golf carts were golf carts.

I passed Henry Ford II’s neo-Georgian estate where the Hugo Higbies had lived before him. Then I drove out of the gated entrance to our cul-de-sac, the armed guard waving me through from his mini brick fortress, and down one block to Lakeshore Drive.

I turned left, having no idea where I was headed. All I wanted was to drive along the expanse of the blue lake, listen to Fleetwood Mac, and smoke.

Peppering Lakeshore Drive—once the jewel of Grosse Pointe, with its sprawling lakefront estates built as summer houses in the first quarter of the century with automotive money—were scores of Mafia palaces. Most of the grand, old houses had been leveled, the properties subdivided. Few could afford the staff to run them. New houses had gone up on smaller lots. I studied their red-tile roofs, stucco walls, and flags of Italy flapping at full mast in the brisk wind off the lake. Mafia and automotive money now shared property lines, and everyone had bumper stickers pleading “Buy American.”

The sun dipped low, setting the lake on fire, while above it a sky of blue glass began to crack with stars. I knew I should be home studying for my algebra test the next morning. But I’d had to get away from the sound of my father’s voice.