Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (5 page)

My mother’s anxieties fueled my own, and as a preteen I shoplifted clothing and makeup from the local department stores. I even stole my first trainer bra. Part necessity, part
sport, my thievery had begun in first grade, when I’d occasionally taken pencils and erasers from my classmates’ desks, and later at sleepaway camp, where I’d stolen a pair of Dr. Scholl’s from a neighboring cabin, only to return them later under a cloud of guilt.

My middle school friends and I would take turns distracting the sales girls while one of us slipped the desired items into a canvas tote bag, our hearts revved up on adrenaline. Somehow my mother never thought to question my burgeoning wardrobe, even after I was caught and she’d had to retrieve me from security at Hudson’s Department Store. Perhaps she was gratified, albeit unconsciously, by this demonstration of self-reliance.

At those moments when her worry overwhelmed her, my mother collected clothes from the street. As with backgammon, her compulsion became a kind of hobby. I’d come home from school to find piles of found clothes, laundered and folded or ensconced in dry-cleaning bags, stacked in neat piles on my bed.

“Can you believe I found this on Cloverly Road?” my mother said, bursting with excitement, as she held up a tired, old blue cloth coat. “Someone’s moving, and they threw it out by the curb. Have you tried it on yet?”

I picked up the coat. “I don’t like the style,” I said. “There’s too much padding in the shoulders.” I’d grown accustomed to turning down such gifts, always taking care not to hurt her feelings.

Undaunted, my mother would deliver the clothes to the Thrift Shop, the Grosse Pointe hub for secondhand finds,
where she volunteered on Saturdays. Then she’d bring home a bag of secondhand clothing for which she had exchanged the original garments, and I’d have to come up with a whole new set of excuses for why I didn’t want to wear them.

“I have enough clothes,” I’d finally tell her, gesturing toward my closets.

That usually ended the conversation. My mother foraged, I stole. Each of us had figured out our own way of coping with my father’s disease.

Getting Away

CHARLIE STROH, 1981

(by Eric Stroh)

T
he December light faded so suddenly I could hardly read my own words. Rather than switch on the chandelier, I slid my high school application essay across the dining table closer to the bay window. Snow was beginning to fall. The empty house creaked around me as I bore down on my paragraphs, determined to get down exactly how things had felt the summer before, when everything changed, it seemed, overnight.

I wrote about my parents’ faces—pale and swollen with sleeplessness—and the knotted feeling inside my stomach. Something terrible was happening: my mother had given up playing backgammon; my father had stopped leaving for work. I described the hushed voices, the closed doors, my gnawing sense that everything would come apart at any moment, that only a barely discernible tensing of all my muscles might hold it together.

My parents sealed themselves in the library for days.
“Whatever you do,” my father said as he pulled the door behind him, “do not come in here.”

Whitney and I sat on the porch watching TV, our blank faces masking our alarm, buoyed at least partly by
The Brady Bunch
,
Bewitched
,
Happy Days.
My younger brother’s auburn hair was oddly disheveled, his trousers an inch too short. How I envied my older brothers, both of them off at college, Charlie a sophomore and Bobby a senior.

On day three my parents emerged: drained, older, yet united in their conviction that we should know the truth.

“It’s so awful to have to tell you this,” my mother began in a cracked voice, the puffed wedges underneath her eyes by now a deep purple. “But it’s important you know: your brother Charlie is a drug dealer.” Her eyes filled up with tears and she looked away.

My father dragged on his cigarette dismissively. “We’re taking him out of college. Putting him into the Marines to clean him up.”

As my mother wept my father put his cigarette into the ashtray and gently rested both his hands on her shoulders. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen them touch.

“You must never mention a word about this to anyone outside the family,” my mother said to Whitney and me with unusual sternness, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Nobody at all.”

I felt the news and accompanying emotions seal themselves off inside my body with the ease of a closing elevator door. Drug dealers were something you saw on TV, not in my own family. I remembered an episode of
Starsky and Hutch
where the drug dealer lived in an abandoned apartment on the outskirts of town. Starsky kicked in the door while Hutch aimed the gun.

I turned on the chandelier so that I could reread my essay. Outside the snow was falling harder now, and a few stray sparrows pecked aimlessly at the frozen ground.

My last winter in Michigan.

Next year I’d be gone—away at boarding school for ninth grade, and away from this house. I’d been waiting to go since sixth grade, counting down the years impatiently.

The applications all asked for an essay on an experience that had changed my life. And so while other eighth graders wrote about their golden retrievers dying, I wrote about Charlie’s drug bust and what it had done to our family, the shame and silence spreading from my parents to us, and then into just about every aspect of our lives.

As I wrote the story, I felt stronger, clearer—separate from those events for the first time. I wrote about the tension in the house, breaking it down into scenes with characters and dialogue, constructing not what actually had happened, but something that felt even realer than that. I wrote everything I’d been forbidden to say, everything that gave me back my voice. I wrote draft after draft, trying to get at the truth.

Charlie had been selling cocaine, a drug I knew about from
Time
magazine. I’d seen pictures of it, lines of white powder on the cover
.
My parents had heard the news from Charlie’s college dean earlier that year, in the spring. He was expelled, and, under pressure from my parents, immediately enrolled in Marine boot camp in San Diego, leaving in early
June. But as June passed into July, everything kept changing. And the tension in the house got only worse.

Coming home from day camp or tennis lessons, Whitney and I watched TV in the library, or rode skateboards up the street with my cousins Pierre and Freddy. In his universal attempt to avoid my father, Whitney routinely asked Freddy if he could spend the night at his house, but Aunt Nicole sometimes locked the kids outside while the house was being cleaned, or while she napped, and for hours at a time no one would know where Whitney or Freddy had gone. They were nine and ten at the time.

When Whitney finally came home, he’d steer clear of my father even as he sought approval by doing small chores around the house—unloading the dishwasher, say, or feeding the cats. But my father would simply complain about the direction the forks faced in the cutlery drawer, or the ratio of dry cat food to canned food in the cats’ bowls, and Whitney began to wear a permanent expression of defeat.

I usually stayed in my room playing Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones albums over and over. Sometimes my father would throw open my door and shout, “Turn down that goddamn rock ’n’ roll!” and I’d grab the volume knob so fast the record would skip. Later, I’d turn it all the way up again, partly to block out the eerie silence in our house, but also eager, in a way, for any interaction with my father.

I often found myself thinking about Charlie, who had turned strange over the last couple of years. Once tanned and vital, his face had grown pale and blemished, his eyes flattened like old decals. When he was home, he was, more often than
not, on the phone or outside the house talking with people I didn’t recognize, people who came up our driveway in their unfamiliar cars while my father was downtown at work. Charlie referred to the visitors as his “good buddies,” but he never had much else to say about them. He crept around the house, always appearing busy, any closeness I’d felt with him utterly replaced by a disquieting distance.

Charlie wasn’t the only big change under way. The Stroh Brewery was acquiring the F&M Schaefer Brewing Company of Pennsylvania. My father rarely talked about what was happening at work anymore and never wanted my mother to throw parties for his brewery colleagues at our house. He stopped flying to Hollywood, and soon new Stroh’s Beer commercials were on TV—commercials that seemed to surprise my father as much as the rest of us. In one, the outlaw Jesse James held up a stagecoach for a case of Stroh’s. It was exactly my father’s kind of ad, but he walked out of the library after it aired, without saying a word.

In the evenings after work, my father often stayed out at the bars, or ordered pizza to eat in front of the TV while the rest of us had dinner in the dining room. On the rare occasions when he spoke to us at all, it was to shout.

My mother carried on as if everything were still normal, taking us for a swim at the club while she played her backgammon, out for Chinese food once a week, on errands to the dry cleaner, the grocery store, and the bank.

“Do you know what Charlie does in the Marines?” my mother said one evening in August as she placed plates of steak and potatoes in front of Whitney and me. “He wakes
up at four a.m. and does a hundred push-ups. Then he cleans all the bathrooms on the base before breakfast.” She forced a smile. “Don’t worry, Charlie’s going to be just fine.”

“Does Charlie
like
being a marine?” I asked.

My mother gave me a puzzled look, as if liking the Marines were completely beside the point. “He’s there to clean up his life,” she said finally. “Put himself back together.”

My mother’s optimism was contagious, and we all believed in the quick fix the Marines would provide for Charlie. I pictured him picking up the pieces of his life, like so many shards of broken glass, going back to college, and eventually working at the brewery—the path expected of every young man in the Stroh family.

At the end of the summer, my parents flew out to San Diego for Charlie’s boot camp graduation and stayed with friends in La Jolla.

My father was smiling as he loaded their suitcases into the car. “Charlie’s a tough guy,” he said proudly. “It’s not everyone who can get through boot camp.”

On the day of the ceremony, as I heard later, they waited in the auditorium, holding their programs, eager to see Charlie graduate into his new life, desperate to put the whole ordeal behind them. But when the Marines finally filed in, clean and spiffed up in their blue uniforms and broad-brimmed Marine hats, my parents noticed that Charlie was not among them. Confused, my father walked up the aisle to look into the hallway. There was Charlie, stiff with fear in his uniform, handcuffed and surrounded by several federal agents.

My father went back into the auditorium and took my
mother out by the arm. Charlie was gone. Done for, they drove back to La Jolla, my mother in tears, my father shocked and humiliated, both of them determined to conceal from their hosts what had happened. Their worst nightmare was unfolding: Charlie’s drug dealing would surely make it into the papers now, especially if he ended up in prison. Everyone in Grosse Pointe would know—everyone
everywhere
.

My parents hired a Marine criminal attorney and brought Charlie home on bail. He’d been arrested, it turned out, for crimes he’d committed before entering the military; in the Marines he’d managed to stay clean. His officer wrote a glowing letter to the judge about Charlie’s achievements in boot camp and about his changed life.

In the court hearing, taped recordings of our family’s phone conversations were played out loud in the courtroom. The Feds, it turned out, had bugged our phone line for eight months the previous year. My parents sat next to Charlie’s attorney, listening to recordings of me gossiping about boys and parties with my middle school pals. Then came the recorded drug transactions—scores of them.

Ollie admitted to my parents that she had noticed Charlie handing off packages to cars that came up our driveway. My father made inquiries and discovered that the son of some people he knew in Grosse Pointe—another college coke dealer—had reduced his own sentence by tipping off the Feds to Charlie.

After a protracted trial, Charlie got off with a large fine and probation. No prison sentence. As for the media coverage that my parents had feared, it never materialized. The
Marines, it seemed, had done the trick. And Charlie still had his four-year tour of service ahead of him.

I
sealed my last application inside the envelope along with my finished essay. Everyone else in the family had gone to the airport to pick up Charlie, even my father. My brother was on leave for the Christmas holiday from Camp Pendleton, where he’d been stationed after boot camp.

Outside, I walked in the dark down the winding, snow-covered driveway toward our mailbox, the four envelopes snug in my gloved hands—envelopes addressed to Choate, Groton, Taft, and Brooks. The sky was blacker than I’d ever seen it, and I crunched along the tire tracks in the snow until I came out into the street, where the mailbox stood. As I pulled it open, I imagined myself throwing open the gates of my life. A great wave of hope swelled within my chest. Soon my story would be out in the world. I imagined its debut as a loud, crashing sound, like the aftermath of a bomb. I wondered if anyone else would notice the explosion.