Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(27)
My stomach turned at the mere sight of food. I sat down at my place, lifted my glass of wine, and took a generous sip. Everyone was talking at once, and I couldn’t make out the words. The coke was speedy, the shaking of my wineglass just barely perceptible. I looked out the window and across the snow-covered lawn to the forest where I’d first smoked pot with some friends back in eighth grade. The blizzard had stopped, and the sun suddenly broke through the clouds. The surface of the new snow shone like splinters of shattered glass. I emptied my wineglass and poured myself another drink.
My uncles were droning on about our family’s listing in the Forbes 400. I was aware of the fact, I guess, but I never really associated it with us. I’d bought a hundred-dollar bed for my college dorm room because the futon I wanted had been too expensive. Forbes must have done some interesting math if they thought we had that much money.
“The information in this issue is completely outdated,” said Uncle Peter. “Fact is, the riverfront project’s nearly doubled the business. Someone ought to write the editor a letter.”
“Why don’t you write the letter?” chimed in Aunt Nicole, her cropped blond hair tucked stylishly behind her ears, above a sleek black cashmere dress. “You are the CEO, aren’t you? They need to get it right. It’s ridiculous.”
Uncle Peter took a bite of turkey with stuffing, chewed and swallowed, while the table waited for his response. “I’ll write to them,” he said finally. “Send them the plans for the Parke-Davis site.”
It was a story I’d heard so many times. Uncle Peter and Coleman Young, Detroit’s mayor, had shaken hands one windy day in a parking lot on the Detroit River next to the former Parke-Davis Pharmaceutical Company. The mayor promised Peter a stampede of tenants and greater visibility if the Strohs would develop the site, just upriver from where the Uniroyal Tire plant had been, and thereby improve Detroit’s derelict riverfront. Coleman Young, who called himself the “MFIC”—Mother Fucker in Charge—certainly had the power to fulfill his promises, and Uncle Peter knew as much. Though personally I found it hard to believe anyone could ever revive Detroit. Seemed a little late to me.
Within a year of the famous handshake, the brewery had begun development on the site, launching a project that included a five-star hotel, a luxury three-hundred-unit apartment building, and a 1.8 million-square-foot office building. The development, renamed Stroh River Place when we’d bought the site, was the most ambitious development in Detroit since the seventies, when Henry Ford II built the Renaissance Center.
Soon afterward, Uncle Peter closed down the turn-of-the-century Detroit brewery and moved the corporate headquarters to Stroh River Place, saddening not a few Detroiters who took pride in Stroh’s Beer being brewed in their hometown. The subsequent demolition of the historic building was even more demoralizing, but the family had already lost a hundred million dollars in production costs by keeping it open. Now the Stroh brand was produced in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the newer Schaefer Brewing Company plant, where fire-brewing copper kettles had been installed, at enormous expense, to stay as true to our brand as possible.
“And send them that article from the Detroit News,” suggested Nicole.
“Which article?” asked my father.
Nicole folded her arms across her chest. “Announcing that it’s safe for whites to live in Detroit again. Because of the Strohs.”
Uncle Peter chuckled. “The article didn’t phrase it quite that way.”
My father, who now got all his company news at gatherings like these, shifted restlessly in his chair. “Nonsense. No one gives a damn who lives in Detroit. No one’s cared since the 1967 riots—’cept maybe the drug cartels.”
Uncle Peter sipped his wine. “We do, Eric,” he said.
Nicole turned to my father, superior. “We’re in real estate now.”
Everyone knew that Nicole basically ran the company behind the scenes, but no one was complaining; dividends had recently doubled.
“I know that, Nicole,” said my father, controlling his temper. “I did work there until last summer.” He made a point not to look at his brother.
My mother went into the kitchen to take the pumpkin pies out of the oven, glancing at Charlie’s place on her way out of the room, monitoring his alcohol intake. Charlie ignored her. He reached over my grandmother’s plate for the wine bottle.
My father sipped his glass of water and watched Charlie pour the wine. “Keep it up, Chas,” he said bitterly. “You can handle it.”
Seeing that my glass was empty, Charlie passed me the bottle across the table as soon as he’d filled his glass.
I poured gingerly, watching the sunlight pass through the carved crystal onto the white linen tablecloth to create floating fields of red. I wouldn’t always be here, doing this; I wouldn’t go down with the ship. For the moment, though, the wine warmed my insides and made the whole thing bearable. I picked up my fork and took my first bite of turkey, with no particular appetite for it, but it hardly mattered; the food had already grown cold.
Together
CHARLIE, WHITNEY, FRANCES, AND BOBBY—DALLAS, 1993
(by Cheryl Stroh)
Dallas, 1993
Charlie’s condo complex sat just off the freeway, sandwiched between a strip mall and a sprawling warehouse advertising storage units for rent.