Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss Read Online Free

floor like my brothers used to do at home, but most of it sat on high shelves well out of reach.
    We were the only guests. Everyone who worked in the Rathskeller greeted my father. The bartender, a bald man wearing an apron and leaning against the wooden bar, seemedespecially friendly to my father, like all the bartenders at the clubs my father frequented.
    “Well, hello , Eric.”
    “Hello there, John.”
    “You’ve got your brood along with you today.”
    “Most of ’em, anyway.”
    Whitney, the baby, had stayed home.
    “A good-looking lot, they are,” said John.
    “Let’s have a drink, kids,” said my father, heading for the bar.
    Bobby, Charlie, and I settled at a table and waited quietly. A waitress brought us cheese, crackers, and three Cokes. No one said any more to us, and I began to feel as if the staff in the Rathskeller were waiting for us to leave; they were expecting a tour group “any minute,” I heard John tell my father.
    My father came over carrying a pile of T-shirts that said “Stroh a Party!” across the front, and we put them on over our clothes. We sat saying nothing in the too-big T-shirts while my father had another drink. And then, from the factory floor, came the hiss and roar of the flames firing up underneath the copper cauldrons.
    Charlie broke into a wide, bucktoothed smile. “Cheers, Franny,” he said, tapping my glass with his. He tossed the Coke back in three quick gulps—a perfect imitation of my father.

THE HOUSE AT GRAYTON ROAD, 1974
    (by Eric Stroh)

O ur house was full of shiny valuables that we were forbidden to touch. Rare Martin guitars leaned against upholstered chair backs in our living room, as if waiting for cocktails to be delivered. Glossy silver boxes housing monogrammed guitar picks littered the mahogany tabletops. Antique Leica cameras and real guns from the Wild West decorated desktops and bookshelves, where leather-bound first editions of Nathaniel Hawthorne comingled with a first edition of Through the Looking-Glass signed by Lewis Carroll.
    On occasion, my father would take out his favorite antique revolver, a perfect greyhound of a gun with a long barrel and intricate engravings surrounding its ivory-inlaid grip, and show me how to clean and oil it. Then he would have me reach my finger around the trigger and pull. Afterward he’d open it up and show me why it hadn’t fired; there were no bullets, see.
    “John Wayne carried this gun in How the West Was Won ,”he’d tell me with pride. My father loved old Westerns. He sometimes dressed the part and walked around the house in boots, spurs, and a cowboy hat, flipping the guns out of their holsters like the outlaw Jesse James. He often told the story of dressing up as a cowboy when he was a kid on Christmas Day, and how his mother had shouted at him to change into a jacket and a tie. “I never forgave my mother for that,” he would say with a faraway look.
    If my mother came into the room while my father was showing me how to load the bullets, he’d look up at her and beam. “God, I love my guns, Gail—more than anything in the world.”
    “Those awful guns.” This was her habitual reply. “How can you love them?” And while the two of them dueled it out with their scripted conversation, I enjoyed the privilege of handling the goods. My parents often talked this way; I usually knew what one would say to the other, a predictability I found deeply comforting. Nor did it concern me, the thought that my father loved his possessions at least as much as he loved us. I took it as a given.
    But there was a double standard in our house. While I was sometimes allowed to handle my father’s treasures, as soon as my younger brother, Whitney, could walk, he was punished just about daily for touching my father’s things—spanked, yelled at, and sent to his room. None of us was immune; when I was four I wandered into my parents’ bathroom and ran my father’s razor up my arm to see how it worked. When he