Beau

[mallorys_camera]

Beau’s Zoom memorial left me feeling… odd.

Part of that was my realization that I don’t like MaryAnn, that I’ve never liked MaryAnn.

Maybe that’s circumstantial: She’s my first husband’s second wife, after all; Max’s stepmother; the mother of Max’s sisters who are no relation to me. It’s possible, I suppose, that had I met MaryAnn in another context, I would have liked her just fine.

Possible but not probable.

MaryAnn is very judge-y and somehow thinks her opinions must be truth because they’re her opinions. And she’s very forceful about those opinions! She is always pronouncing them in a loud, grating voice. She has a very abrasive voice.

She was forever putting me down. Yes, yes, yes, that was her own insecurity as apparently, she felt very threatened by me. Still, I had to eat a lot of shit over the years to placate her. She bad-mouthed her X-husband, Beau’s father, constantly in full earshot of Beau, and I didn’t want her badmouthing me in front of Max. So, I was always simperingly deferent to MaryAnn in all my interactions with her except for once—I would not let Bill and MaryAnn take Max with him when they moved to Orange County.

“You’re a good mother, Patrizia, but let’s face it: Kids do better in a two-parent family,” MaryAnn told me.

I do not disagree with this, by the way. Had Bill and MaryAnn been moving anywhere but Orange County, I might have caved in, but Orange County is simply the most vapid, materialistic, soulless and therefore sinister place on the planet, and no kid of mine was gonna be raised there.

I absorbed enough of Rik’s philosophy to think, Well, divorce may mean the end of the marriage, but not the end of the family relationship, and Bill was open-minded enough to go along with this. I could tell, though, it was always a strain for MaryAnn. For a while, she was game, and we pretended to be friends, but in the last couple of years, we stopped pretending.

I don’t like her.

She doesn’t like me.

I could tell it was a strain for her that I was even logged on to the Zoom memorial, but fuck her: I knew Beau, and I cared for him.



The second thing is that MaryAnn wants to blame Beau’s death on the Tragedy of Addiction: Beau got into a horrible kayaking accident a couple of years ago, was given opiates for pain, got hooked. Was too ashamed to ask for help. Preferred to be homeless. Eventually stroked out and was deposited at the doorway of an ER.

That’s the story.

The reality is that if Beau had asked for help, there would have been lots of conditions on that help, and one of those conditions would have been that MaryAnn is always right, and he is wrong unless he acknowledges that MaryAnn is always right.

I can see how being homeless for two years, living in a tent in one of those canyons that line LA’s polluted highways, would be preferable to acknowledging that MaryAnn is always right: At least, you have your freedom, right?



Beau was a pretty uncomplicated kid when I knew him. Reticent around adults but then, adults had almost always been a disappointment to him. His mother and father had gone through a most acrimonious divorce, and his stepfather didn’t like him. Bill was really mean to him. I screamed at Bill on several occasions about it—this was long after our divorce, so screaming wasn’t really appropriate, but I couldn’t bear to see the way he was treating Beau.

You know what he told me? “It’s a natural response. He’s not my biological child. No man wants to get stuck raising a kid that’s not biologically their own.”

I tracked Beau pretty consistently while Bill and MaryAnn were living in Berkeley simply because I did a lot of childcare for Beau. This was part of my conviction that it was simply too weird for Max to have a part-time brother; it made sense for the brother to be present at least part of the time in both homes.

I’ve told the story about how Beau fixed my car at the age of seven too many times to want to tell it again.

The kid really had amazing engineering talents. He could just look at something once and immediately know how to take it apart and put it back together again.

After they moved to Tustin, though, I stopped knowing what was going on with him. Max was a reluctant information source, whether because he was keeping Beau’s secrets, or Bill and MaryAnn’s secrets, or just moving into that adolescent space where mothers are the enemy, I never really knew.

There was a best friend named Karl. I got the sense—unconfirmed—that Karl was somewhat older than Beau. Under Karl’s tutelage, Beau—and sometimes Max—did a lot of ding-dong ditching, a childhood pastime that surveillance cameras have thankfully made extinct. Also a lot of shoplifting. And who knows what else.

And then Karl got shot.

With a gun.

And died.

Some kind of robbery was involved. Some kind of expensive music system was at stake.

I never knew if Karl was the robber or the robbed.

Beau started drinking. Heavily. I seem to think he was only 14 or so. He started showing up drunk to school.

Bill and MaryAnn’s response to this was to throw him in rehab.

Mine would have been therapy. Also family therapy. And transfer to a different school.

(Of course, I hate all rehabs. My own mother put me into Synanon when I was a teenage druggie, a story for another day.)

But Bill and MaryAnn’s treatment of Beau struck me as weirder and weirder as the years rolled on, especially since when their own two daughters became teenage druggies, their behavior was not discouraged. In fact, you could say it was encouraged. Bill turned part of his garden over to marijuana cultivation, and frequently got stoned with the girls while MaryAnn—a proud member of AA for over 40 years—sat by, making judgmental remarks.

Clearly, Beau was the designated goat. All big families have them. The kid who’s a fuck-up, in part because of their own intransigence but in part because that's what's expected of them, and they're good kids at heart who try to do what's expected of them.



Personally, I think Bill and MaryAnn fucked Beau up.

Fucked him up so irretrievably that when he had that kayaking accident, he fractured into a million little pieces as James Frey, the author of that infamous, bestselling faux addiction memoir might say.

Of course, one wouldn’t necessarily expect an acknowledgement of that fact to be made at a Zoom memorial attended by 50 family members and friends.

Still, it made me feel weird to hear MaryAnn talking about how every red-tailed hawk that flies in the sky over her head is really Beau’s spirit visiting to shower her with blessings!

Like I was sitting on insider information or something. But not allowed to trade!