My Friend Bea

 

Ask me what a friend is, and I can’t promise the answer you’ll want.  To me, a friend is someone that will tolerate you when they absolutely can’t or shouldn’t. and insist at 3AM that it’s no problem at all.  I’ve been that friend to some once or twice, and I had to spend some time afterwards wondering why I was.

Is it some kind of sub-level codependency of some sort…? Or is it something greater..? Is it the need to play martyr to escape our own callings..?  In any event, in a lot of cases, it’s not necesssarily all bad.  In fact, we just might find ourselves paying honor to those friends in need who in-turn by nature of themselves become friends in our need.  It’s just possible that The Man Upstairs designed it just that way.  It’s not perfect, of course.  But the 12-step Codependency Family and Recovery Group industry wouldn’t be the factory that it and its book sales and lecture circuits and retreats are today.  It’s the fuel of our ecosystem.

Sometimes though, the primitive ecosystem is the creature itself.  As a child, like so many of us, I lived in that very ecosystem.  And it was fascinating.

I didn’t have “young” elders.  Mine were all middle age or more and grew up in that wonderful old nightmare called The Great Depression, followed by The War, followed by the angry 1950s, etc, etc..  They saw it all.   My mother was for much of her life a desperate, functioning alcoholic forced in motherhood to straighten out once and for all.  When I hit thirteen, it looked like it was actually happening.  She’d been dry nearly a year, after a few years of heavy AA participation. 

My ailing uncle and aunt, my mom’s sister-in-law of some decades, now lived in Florida.  Not the swiftest move on their part, since all their kids and family lived in Queens, near us. 

My aunt didn’t really have that many close friends, but plenty of acquaintances.  Most of them were long-time ones as neighboring couples in fifties Queens suburbia during the Ike Era.  Now they were all rich retirees in sprawling palms, just an hour’s drive from one another.  My uncle was ill with worsening PSP at the time, unable to engage with others.  But there’d still be polite visitors.  It was only right.  For awhile.

One of these folks was a lady I’d heard about for years, since early childhood, but never got around to meeting.  Her name was Bea.  I thought it was “Bee” like from Mayberry R.F.D., but no, more like Beatrice.  The long-time story about Bea was that she drank heavily.  My mom had a bender now and then, but hers were more sporadic.  Bea was well older, rich with no responsibilities, and wasted most of the time.  It wasn’t really something I spent time thinking about, though when I finally met her and her husband of thirty years, it did get me wondering.

On a visit to Florida, to my aunt and uncle’s new expansive condo (it looked like the set of an Aaron Spelling nighttime drama, literally), we rode from Snapper Village to Miami Springs for dinner at Bea and Gary’s home.  Their home was an honest-to-God movie set out of the late 1950s.  I thought I was walking into a museum.  Where were the velvet admission ropes…??

The living room was too immaculate to enter.  We all sat in the equally as exquisite Florida Room.  You can’t have a house in Florida without a Florida Room.

That living room was a piece, alright.  Shame this was long before digital smart phone photos.  All that room was missing was Donna Reed.  In 1979.  On the couch sat a tiny, hand-woven pillow with the inscription, “To Have A Friend, You Must Be One”.

Bea was predictably Judy Garland to her mansion.  A five-foot waif, with a jet black coif bigger than herself, tilting around incomprehensively and precariously, with a huge splashing goblet that never went empty.   She was relatively tame, gracious, talkative as far as muttering and mumbling went, and for the condition she was in, she held it together pretty well. I was betting she’d collapse before evening’s end.  My mom and her niece weren’t exactly known for holding it down so well.  Bea on the other hand was a visible pro.

Bea and Gary were an object of troubling curiosity.  What was their thing, anyway…?  What did they do..?  Here was this quiet, soft spoken retired pilot, and his afflicted wife.  They must have had extensive and lucratively paid staff.  Our dinner was what White House visits were made of.  Was Gary a former pilot or a U.S. Senator..??  Gold silverware..!

It was later on of course, through my mother’s inquiries to my aunt, that I’d learn of some of the behind-closed-doors-history of Bea and Gary.  Some domestic physical response from time to time was not out of the question, and at one time explained Bea’s bandaged eye. 

It may be no surprise that folks existing as such did not seek emotional or supportive refuge in others, and as a result didn’t engage too much in the social carnival of mah-jongg and shuffleboard retirees.  Gary looked oddly good for his age, if stout, with a 1959 slick as black as his wife’s.  I don’t think he touched a drop.

But an alcoholic in-progress needs a sounding board, someone to be heard by, as in a bar, on a train, plane, ball game, etc.   Those trapped at home, like Bea, made use of the phone. And she had one reliable, captive ear:  My aunt.

Those phone calls from hour-away neighbor Bea rang nightly around midnight, muttering jibberishly about some movie that was on Channel 4 and are-you-watching..?  Maybe about some cars driving loudly down the road, or perhaps wondering if my aunt got home alright, my aunt unavoidably countering with “Bea….we weren’t out tonight”…

But Bea muttered about anything and everything for at least an hour, and it’s a good thing my aunt didn’t have to be up early.  She also didn’t know what to do about this.  Good thing my mother in recovery was around to respond to her dilemma.

“She’s an alcoholic..!  What are you expecting from her..?!?  If he doesn’t ger her into treatment, she’ll be dead…”

Meanwhile the phone visits went on quite regularly.  

In a discussion with my mom about something else entirely, my aunt offered a point that was made in a conversation with Bea one late night….something about bug season, and my aunt said “Oh that’s right……..my friend Bea was telling me…”

My mother found that validation of a crippled alcoholic absolutely outrageous, and she told her sister, the aunt on my mom’s side, all about it.  Her sister was the first line of gossip defense against the U.K.-born sister-in-law they’d had reservations about since they were all teenagers during the war when I wasn’t even born.   I just knew them as old gossip hens. Buck buck.

“Do you believe her…?!? My Friend Bea…!” My mother roared her trademark smug laugh into the phone.  A day later, her sister-in-law would be getting the smug laugh about some insulting thing her sister said to her.  These family triangles were pretty isosceles.

A few years later, when my uncle became immobile with his illness, and he and my aunt moved back to an apartment near us, in a comparatively swanky Queens condo, word was Bea was coming to stay for about a week.  I was about fifteen and really had little thought about the matter, but got to hear my mom’s nightly analysis on what a deadly disaster this could be.

“She’s in their apartment and drunk constantly……she’ll fall over and drop dead..! And then what…?!?!”  She tried to explain that danger to my aunt.  My uncle, eldest brother and greatest life-long enemy to my mother, in his incoherent, decaying growl uttered to her one afternoon….”It’s none o’ ya’ business…!

I was treated to a three hour one-woman performance at home that night, depicting how this bastard had continuously to this day ruined her life. Hour three was just as good as hour one.  No repeats.  I’d rather have caught Letterman that night, but…

Even if some kind of semi-cathartic time was had by all over the years in some way, a year or two later we learned that Bea had passed.  There was little or no discussion of her and their association with her afterward.  My mom upon hearing the news, intoned to me, “not a surprise..”   My mother would lose her own battle of recovery four years later.

It was in that brief several-year time though, that Bea was a name we never really stopped hearing.  Kind of like Koch or Brezhnev in newscasts, only it was Bea in our lives.  She was this figure of reference that served as a default cast member, a comic relief, a buffer, a non-sequitur, something historic, a piece of furniture perhaps.  And in all that, she did in fact offer something everyone in my family needed.  And probably got what she sought in return.  I don’t know where that tiny pillow went, the one that read “To Have A Friend, You Must Be One”.  But when that living room gets enshrined at the Smithsonian, that pillow damn well better be there.  If it’s not, no one will know whose living room it was.  

Noah F.