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.
I took classes at the San Francisco Art Institute after Duke, mostly in their New Genres Department, and there I entered the world of video, installation, and performance. I began to think in terms of narrative and space, context and concept, signs and signifiers. Later I joined the MFA program at Art Center in Pasadena but found that the making of art there was essentially peripheral to the reading and discussion of French critical theory.
As for my loft in downtown Los Angeles, with packs of wild dogs in the streets and Interstate 10 practically grazing my windows, it was a lot like a scene out of J. G. Ballard’s Crash. When the L.A. riots broke out after the Rodney King verdict, I could see seven different buildings burning within a mile, not to mention machine-gun armed militia roaming the streets of my neighborhood. L.A. felt like the end of the earth; and I missed San Francisco.
I dropped out after my first year at Art Center. The program felt soulless and the art derivative—my own in particular. As a farewell, I did a site-specific piece in the school’s Bauhaus-style building by silk-screening over the words fire extinguisher with soul extinguisher on the rectangular black extinguisher boxes lining the hallways. My boyfriend Marko—also an artist—pulled the squeegee while I’d held the screen.
Now I was back in San Francisco and single, with a well-paying job at an interior design firm and several shows of my installations scheduled over the next year, the family piece being the first. So far, my family members were cooperating. In fact, the combination of lights, a camera, and a list of open-ended questions seemed to open a Pandora’s box of responses that I never could have anticipated; everyone seemed to have a pent-up need to talk about the family.
As practice, I’d been experimenting with friends in San Francisco, filming their answers to questions, then editing together only the responses, one cut after another. The stream-of-consciousness, solipsistic effect was powerful, rather like the way it felt to be privy to interior thoughts of one of Tolstoy’s characters.