Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(29)

After I’d gone through my list, I paused. “What are you doing in Dallas?” I asked. It wasn’t one of my scripted questions.

“I’m thirty-two and currently unemployed,” he said to the camera, his lips spreading over yellowed teeth as he broke into a smile. “So let’s hope the family business picks up and I can take early retirement along with everyone else.” He nodded his head, still smiling.

I laughed. By “everyone else,” I imagined he was referring to our father.

“So, that’s your hope?” I asked.

“My number one hope and ambition is to come home for Christmas this year and see everybody,” he said with a note of optimism. Then more defiantly, “Mother, I can come home and have just as much fun with my family not drinking as I can drinking with my friends.”

He had rightly assumed that our mother would see the footage.


When we arrived at Ruby Tuesday, the bar buzzed with the local singles scene. A soccer game played silently on two enormous flat-screen TVs while Eddie Vedder’s throaty, tortured voice bellowed over and over from the speakers, “Ohhh, ahhh, I’m still alive.”

“Table’s ready,” Bobby said over the din.

The four of us walked into the restaurant, slid into a booth, and picked up the vinyl-coated menus.

With his Ralph Lauren–model looks, Whitney seemed utterly displaced in the Formica-trimmed booth. He glanced across the table at Bobby. “What do you recommend?”

“The potato skins,” said Bobby. “With three-bean chili, highly recommend.”

I studied the potato-skins offerings. “Do they pour the chili right on the potato skins?”

“Well, if you want it poured on you can get a twice-baked potato with chili.”

“They also have great steaks,” Charlie said. He’d had two beers at the bar during the twenty minutes we’d been waiting for the table. Bobby had told me privately he wished Charlie weren’t coming to dinner. “He’s guaranteed to get drunk and make a scene.”

“He’s coming,” I’d insisted. “This is my one night in Dallas.” I was leaving in the morning to film my parents back in Michigan.

We ordered the food and two pitchers of beer. The conver sation floated from Bobby’s vintage Volkswagen collection to his World War II uniform collection to the Stroh Brewery’s poor sales record in Texas, where Bobby now worked as an area business manager for the family company, interfacing with wholesalers.

“It’s pathetic,” said Bobby. He took a long draw from his beer, leaving a mustache of foam on his mustache. “We have a brewery in Longview. We make beer in Texas, for God’s sake, and we can’t even sell our products here?”

“It’s like the Busches not selling beer in St. Louis,” said Whitney.

Bobby smeared his potato skins with sour cream. “Well, more like the Busches not selling beer in Colorado, but . . . I take your point.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have gone national,” I said. “You know, by buying Schlitz. I mean, don’t you think the Detroit brewery and the Schaefer breweries in the East would have been enough?” I knew our troubles had begun when we got too big, when Great Uncle John could no longer walk the brewery floor, talking with his employees on a daily basis. There were just too many brewery floors now, and Uncle Peter was far less hands-on than Great Uncle John had been.

“No, Peter was right,” said Bobby. “The industry was changing. Every other viable brewery had already made the move from regional to national. It’s just, you know, that we grew too fast. We were underprepared. There was no strategy other than just to grow for the sake of it. And we borrowed too much to finance the Schlitz deal, of course. That’s what’s killing us.”

“Someone could have bought us out,” I said. “We must have been worth . . . something.”

“Not enough,” said Bobby. “Lot of mouths to feed in this family.”

“How many brands do we make, anyway?” asked Charlie. “I can’t keep up.”

Bobby dipped his potato skin into his chili. “About thirty?”

Whitney cut into his steak. “And are any of ’em doing well?”

“Not in the U.S.,” I said, through a mouth full of French fries. “Far as I can tell . . .”

“They have Stroh’s on tap at the bar here,” said Charlie. “So . . . sales can’t be that bad.”


I slid past a row of four knees en route to my window seat. I took a Russian novel out of my bag and began the five-hour dissociative state that the flight to Detroit always called for.

I put the book down and gazed out the window. They were loading the luggage onto the conveyor belt. My camera equipment sat snugly in the overhead compartment, the tapes stored in the foil-lined bags my father had given me at Christmastime. “Never forget to put your film in here,” he’d said, handing me the bags unwrapped. “X-ray’ll destroy everything.”

He still thought of me as a photographer. “Why don’t you keep shooting pictures?” he’d asked when my work had taken a new direction just after college. “You’re a damn good photographer.”

But I’d begun to feel limited working in two dimensions and had a feeling that becoming a master printer wasn’t in the cards. I didn’t have the patience. The truth was, I suspected I wasn’t very good.