Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(49)
Now, with the retreat of the automotive industry to the suburbs and abroad, all signs of manufacturing had finally vanished in Detroit, its smokestacks emitting no smoke. In many parts of the city, only footprints of manufacturing plants remained where the buildings themselves had been leveled. Defunct cement silos dotted the riverfront because the city was too broke to take them down. Crack cocaine, the cornerstone of the new economy, was a difficult commodity to tax.
Yet all the devastation had given birth to Eminem and the Detroit underground hip-hop scene, the first sign of life in a city that had been dying for decades. It had taken forty years, but Detroit now had its signature music scene again, one that reflected the hopelessness of the times, just as surely as sixties Motown had once mirrored the burgeoning black middle class’s sense of abundance and upward mobility.
The arrow-straight freeway suddenly looped around the city at exactly the spot where the Stroh Brewery had once stood, its pinkish-red letters lighting up the sky. When the Chrysler Freeway was built in the sixties, the city had man dated that every building in the interstate’s path be razed, except the historic brewery. If only Coleman Young had shown us the same respect and level of consideration; seventeen years and $300 million later, the stampede of tenants he’d promised at Stroh River Place had never materialized. Our office building was half empty, our apartments and hotel lost in foreclosure. My family’s arc was eerily parallel to Detroit’s; we’d boomed together and now . . . we were failing together.
“That’s where Stroh’s Beer was made,” I told Arkady, pointing out the window.
He frowned at the weed-filled expanse of derelict land. “Unbelievable,” he said, in a single word deftly acknowledging all my family’s losses since the demolition of the brewery fifteen years before. “Too bad we can’t drink Stroh’s Beer with the dinner I’m going to cook for you,” he added cheerfully.
Arkady was a world-class amateur cook, one of the reasons I had fallen for him. We met on Crete in the summer of 1997, shortly after I’d left London. He was sleeping on the balcony of a partially built hotel, under the stars. I was intrigued.
“I cannot sleep in rooms,” he told me. “I need air—not dust.”
We cooked lamb on the beach and drank wine straight from the bottle. He did weight lifting with actual rocks, his Olympic muscles as chiseled as those of the ancient Greek statues I’d seen in Athens. When he brought me Mediterranean salt water to heal a sinus infection, I nicknamed him “The Bushman.” He’d lifted the jar of murky water to my nostrils. “Inhale,” he commanded.
For months, Arkady listened sympathetically to my family saga. I told him about the family ski trip in Jackson just after Christmas, and how, with all the stress, I’d come down with the flu and had to extend my stay by three days, holed up in my hotel room and ordering French onion soup from room service. I convinced the airline to change my ticket back to London with no extra charges. My father appeared at the door of my room only once, holding his breath while dropping two Advil into the palm of my hand.
When Elisa, my father, and I checked out, my father told me, not a little sheepishly, that I would be responsible for covering the cost of my extra days—totaling about $900. “I agreed to pay for six nights,” he reminded me.
Elisa stood at my father’s side, looking on with what seemed a certain satisfaction.
Stunned, I pulled out my credit card. I had no idea how I would cover my rent back in London. I would move out of my flat, I decided, after using up my last month’s rent deposit.
“It’s a sad story,” Arkady would say with conviction as we sat in this or that taverna, sipping Greek coffee. “This would never happen in Russia. Never.”
“But that’s how I ended up in Greece, see?” I told him. “Because it’s dirt cheap.”
“A man’s daughter should always come first. Always.”
Arkady’s values and opinions were as solid as the rocks he lifted on the beach. When it seemed my family situation had toppled my flimsy house of cards, Arkady provided strength and sanity. Our days on Crete were filled with mountain hikes, dips in the Mediterranean, yoga, and the preparation of three organic meals. Arkady knew nothing about contem porary art and had little money; still, I felt nurtured when I was with him. As the weeks passed, the complexities of the art world and my family supplanted by a program of rigorous self-care, I developed a bodily sense of well-being I had never before known. My newfound sense of calm felt totally unfamiliar, and I slept through the night for the first time in years, often after listening to Arkady play Russian gypsy songs on his balcony.
Some days I felt perfectly at peace with the simplicity of my life on Crete, and yet there were other days when my body and my mind seemed at odds, when I longed for the intellectual stimulation I’d left behind in London, the city’s frenetic sense of potential, even as the possibility of returning to that other life receded.
The change in me happened slowly, almost imperceptibly, like the leftover summer snow thawing on Crete’s distant peaks. It happened incrementally, taking hold as we traversed the arid landscape past tiny white chapels dotting the hillsides; or strolled along beaches fiercely drifted by the sirocco winds, our sun hats skipping across the sand in front of us, our skin whipped and welted. Somewhere inside the casual rhythm of our days, I began to understand: not just that my entire life would change, but that it had to. I needed more substance, less abstraction; more space in which to move around emotionally and physically; and fewer hang-ups about money, fewer preconceptions. I would somehow find the way to depend on myself, rather than others. While in my work, I would benefit perhaps from a medium in which to deal with real events and real feelings—filmmaking, say, or writing.