Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss by Frances Stroh

Author:Frances Stroh [Stroh, Frances]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-05-02T21:00:00+00:00

SOUL EXTINGUISHER, 1992

(by Frances Stroh)

On a hot, windless day that everyone called “earthquake weather,” I sat in an editing room at the San Francisco Art Institute and pieced together my family’s answers to my interview questions, trying to imagine the psychological effect on the viewer when all six narratives overlapped. I knew the visual effect of six talking mouths in one room would be captivating. In the tapes, Whitney’s and Charlie’s veneers cracked quickly, their upper lips beading with sweat, voices leaking bitterness. Bobby and I were subdued, philosophical, bent on humor. My parents were distant and instructive, looking down on their children from lofty heights, particularly when talking about Charlie.

“The problem with Charlie is he never grew up.” My father paused and puffed on his pipe. “We wish it were different, but it isn’t. If you asked him today, he’d deny that he has any problems with drinking and drugs. He’d say, ‘Oh no, I don’t have a problem.’”

My father went on to share an exercise he himself had learned in rehab. “You make a list of things you like about yourself in one column, and in another column you list the things you don’t like. Then you study the list and figure out what you can change about the things you don’t like. Some things you can’t change, but most things you can.” He drew on his pipe with a certain satisfaction, talked about how he “took the cure,” then went on to admit that he still drank while on planes.

“Dad’s drinking was the catalyst that led to the divorce,” said Bobby. “And Charlie’s problems may have surfaced during a fragile time in their marriage, you know?—which only caused Dad to drink more.”

“There’s a myth in my family that Charlie’s alcoholism and drug addiction caused the breakup of my parents’ marriage,” I said.

“Charlie is a junkie, an alcoholic,” said Whitney. “He’s stolen from his family, he’s lied, he’s cheated, he’s shat all over them. It’s broken their hearts.”

“Dad blames me for the divorce,” said Charlie. “But that’s a bunch of bullshit. It was his drinking.”

“Each of my children has been deeply affected by Charlie’s problems,” said my mother, “but in different ways. My ex-husband’s been the most affected, to the point where—to the point where he can hardly talk about it.” She went on to say that my father had been ineffective at his job at the brewery, and that her sons were “procrastinators.”

“But I see myself in my daughter. She is striving to achieve, as I am in my own life. I think if I had those years of mothering to do over again it would turn out just the same. I’d like to have control over my children’s poor decisions, but I find I don’t.”

As I sat in the darkened editing room, something unexpected happened, something for which I was not prepared: I had my first conscious glimpse of just how profoundly screwed up we were, how detached, inhuman, even. Each of us discussed Charlie as if he were nothing more than a character in a novel we’d recently read.

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