Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(18)

Our “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.

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.


We 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 f*ckin 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.