Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(24)
FRANCES STROH, 1984
(by Eric Stroh)
Whitney and I had been lying around the house all day, watching MTV and microwaving Stouffer’s frozen French bread pizzas. The August air swelled with the metallic scent of an imminent thunderstorm. My father puttered around the house with his cameras, polishing lenses and blowing Dust-Off at me every time I walked past him in the kitchen.
He sat down and pulled a fish-eye lens out of its leather case. “Hi, Franny,” he said warmly when I glanced over his shoulder. “Got another party tonight?”
It was the summer after my senior year, and I had been out every night. My father let me drive his Voyager minivan, even though I had totaled his Buick just a few months before, resulting in emergency surgery to eradicate the hematoma trapped inside the shattered cartilage of my nose. “It’s Spence’s birthday,” I said.
Spence was my boyfriend that summer. The boyfriend who’d blown his entire summer-job salary to keep us both high on coke.
“Just don’t wreck my car,” my father said with a teasing smile. He reached out and tweaked my nose. He was in a good mood. “Make sure to avoid that fictitious dog, too, hunh?” He loved pointing out that he hadn’t bought my alibi the previous winter that I’d swerved his silver Skylark sedan into a telephone pole—on the opposite side of the road—to avoid hitting a golden retriever.
“There was a dog,” I said with a straight face.
“Right.”
It was a dark morning in January that the wreck had happened. Partying our way through the inevitable depression of a Michigan winter, my friends and I had been out all night, then attended a sunrise meditation class at the Hare Krishna mansion in Detroit. The “Krishna center” was located on the sprawling estate of the Fisher Mansion, one of the old Detroit houses emblematic of the automotive industry’s heyday, donated to the sect by Alfie Ford.
Meditation, music, drugs, and alcohol, they were all facets of the same mind-expanding trajectory—especially potent when combined. My friends and I had all read On the Road and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And with the help of state-of-the-art amphetamines and a healthy dose of cynicism we had taken the legacy of the fifties and the sixties to new heights—in the eighties.
The Corinthian pillars of the meditation hall were edged in gold. A robed, pot-bellied man with a Krishna ponytail sat lotus style facing the large group. We sat down in our stocking feet and tried to look spiritual. Sweet-smelling incense burned in all four corners of the vast room.
And now the chanting began. I glanced around at the other meditators as their voices rose. A beautiful woman with a shock of buzzed orange hair was sitting alongside us, cross-legged: Annie Lennox, her knee just inches from mine. Recognizing her immediately, we broke into ecstatic, wide-eyed smiles. We were living a cultural moment, absorbing her palpable aura of celebrity, metabolizing a cocktail of gorgeous chemicals, chanting “Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Krishna, Krishna, Hare Hare . . .” We had finally arrived. Annie was stunning, younger than we would have thought, and, amazingly, a real person. Her voice converged with ours like a train escalating to the heavens, echoing off the baroque, gold-leafed ceiling of the Fisher Mansion ballroom with the rapturous beat of life itself.
After the meditation class, my friends and I popped codeine tabs to soften the landing, then trudged through the snow back to my father’s car.
The roads were thick with ice; the overcast January sky hung low like the dark concavity of an overturned bowl. I started the engine. Road conditions never worried me, even in blizzards. I could drive on ice blindfolded. I accelerated quickly, skidding against the curb.
“Whoa!” everyone shouted, laughing. They smoked and debated the age of Annie Lennox, seat belts still unbuckled.
The lawns were buried under filthy old snow. No other cars on the road. I accelerated again, feeling the pedal give obediently beneath the stiff leather sole of my right cowboy boot.
Brick houses whipped past us in blurs of reddish brown. The car heater roared with cold air. I pulled a Marlboro from my pack. No one could find the lighter, so someone in the backseat just held out a lit cigarette. I turned around and leaned into the back, my left hand still on the wheel, my starved lungs drawing on that fragile point of light with mighty focus—the last burning ember within miles—but my cigarette didn’t catch right away, and that’s when it happened.
We slammed to a stop with a great exploding sound, our bodies thrown backward as if from an electric shock. Then everything stopped again.
A telephone pole, I saw, stood inches from my face, just beyond a windshield web of shattered glass. The front of the car was an accordion of crushed steel. I was still in the driver’s seat. We were all still in our seats.
“SHIT ,” everyone said at once. We were alive, though.
My father put his lens back into the side pocket of his camera bag and buttoned it shut.
“What kind of dog did you say it was, again, Franny?” He asked me, still amused.
I picked up the Dust-Off and blew some air at the back of his head.
“Hey—Stop that!” he shouted good-humoredly. He glanced around. “Where the hell did your mother go, anyway?”
“No idea,” I answered. My mother’s mysterious absence was hardly unusual; she had been out even more since my father quit his marketing job at the brewery after a fight with my uncle Peter.