Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(28)
“Park over by the gate,” Charlie said to Bobby, pointing to a chain-link fence with a pool on the other side. The condos were a forsaken collection of brown cardboard shoeboxes with mini balconies, each with its own laundry line.
“You live here?” asked Whitney from the backseat.
We all got out of Bobby’s Volkswagen and followed Charlie through the gate and up a cracked concrete path.
It had been a little over a year since I’d seen Charlie, but he had the skin of an old hobo—mottled and bumpy, unshaved and scorched red, as if he’d been drinking moonshine under the blazing sun for the last forty years.
At thirty-two, he’d failed three rehab programs within five years. After a series of scenes at various family events, including Bobby’s wedding, my parents had banned him from coming home for holidays.
When I’d called about coming down to Dallas to film him, he was full of enthusiasm. “I love my family,” he gushed. “You know? I really miss everyone.”
My work had been selected as part of a group exhibition at San Francisco Camerawork Gallery entitled The Family Seen. Video screens of my family members talking would play in a darkened room simultaneously.
We’d all met in Dallas for a couple of days so I could shoot the interviews—the only time the four of us had ever met outside a family occasion. Whitney had come all the way from Missoula, where he was a senior at the University of Montana. I had come from San Francisco, where I lived and worked as an artist. Bobby and Charlie lived near each other in Dallas but hardly saw each other. I liked to think that art had brought us back together.
“Hold on a second,” said Charlie. We followed him past a small play area with a warped plastic slide and a jungle gym. A group of people sat at the pool smoking, complaining in raspy voices about their “* bosses.” Charlie leaned over the fence and greeted a shirtless man decorated with a collage of prison tattoos.
The man mumbled something to Charlie in a conspiratorial tone.
Charlie smiled. “Be over soon,” he said.
Whitney gave me an anguished look and Bobby just rolled his eyes. Like my parents, Bobby had given up on Charlie long ago.
The freeway hummed behind us as we took the cement stairs to the second floor. Almost every door had a few pairs of well-worn flip-flops strewn outside. A bag of garbage sat leaking in the hallway. The earthy scent of pot smoke wafted out from someone’s open door, and it occurred to me that this condo complex was likely the last stop, full of drifters like Charlie who’d lived in every condo complex in the Dallas area until this one, been kicked out each time for reckless behavior or failure to pay the rent.
Charlie opened the door. We stepped into a tiny living room that merged with a kitchenette. A beige sofa I recognized from the house on Grayton Road was the only furniture, other than a big Sony TV perched on some wine crates. The air smelled like sheets that hadn’t been changed.
“Anyone want a beer?” asked Charlie, opening the fridge to a shelf full of Coors. I realized how proud he was to be hosting us and, though I never drank during the day, took a can.
“What’s with the piss water?” asked Bobby.
“Got a case on special,” said Charlie, the old yearning for approval audible in his voice; his big brother had finally come over to see him.
“No, thanks,” Bobby said.
Bobby and Charlie’s relationship had soured in recent years. When Charlie had a warrant out for his arrest in California for reckless driving three years before, Bobby had stepped in and gotten him a job at the Herman’s Sporting Goods store he was managing then in Dallas. More than once, Charlie had come to work drunk, eventually losing his sales position, and their friendship never recovered. Since then Charlie had worked in a string of mini-markets shelving merchandise, and once as a gas station attendant.
Charlie took Bobby out onto the balcony while Whitney sat on the sofa and flipped through TV channels. Through the sliding glass door I could see my brothers talking the way they used to and wondered if, deep down, Bobby felt somehow responsible for Charlie. Had Bobby been the one to turn Charlie on to drugs in high school? I doubted it. All I knew was that the further Charlie fell, the more compelled Bobby seemed to feel to look away.
I went into the bedroom and attached the video camera to the tripod. I arranged a chair in a corner by the window. The bed was barely made, so I straightened the blanket to create a sense of order in the room.
Outside, the tattooed man held court at the pool. He smoked and talked and moved his arms wildly while everyone laughed, and I understood that all these people played a greater role in Charlie’s life now than any of us did. All the missed holidays were adding up to Charlie’s not really knowing us anymore. Our family was no safe harbor, but without us he’d been set, it seemed, irretrievably adrift.
Is the camera on?” asked Charlie.
“Not yet,” I said, as I adjusted the lens. Whenever he spoke, his left eye dipped into the viewfinder. “Try not to move your head.” I hoped to keep his identity obscured by training the camera on the bottom half of his face. “All I want to see is your mouth.”
I turned on the camera and went through my list of questions: What was it like for you growing up in our house? How were you affected by Dad’s drinking? Why do you think Mom and Dad got divorced? and so on.
As he told his version of the family story, Charlie candidly discussed his coke bust in college, his years in the Marines, his downward spiral into drugs after his honorable discharge. “I made some bad mistakes,” he admitted. “But that doesn’t make me a bad person.” His face began to sweat, probably from the stress of talking about the past, and I didn’t want to go on for too long. I realized that while drugs had been a phase for me, they were a way of life for Charlie.