Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(21)

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.


My 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.


Out 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.