Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(19)

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.


For 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.





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WALL IN DETROIT, 1984

(by Frances Stroh)





Detroit, 1984


The 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.