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.
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.