Beau developed his personality. He was naturally inclined to talk back and wisecrack, and he grew into telling and playing jokes. Especially in his association with Steve, it worked with the girls. Beau had his high school’s largest collections of knock-knock, grape and elephant jokes. In the years to come he would readily absorb other genera, like lightbulb jokes, and lawyer jokes, and dumb blonde jokes.

As for physical comedy, he started with items from the Anthony’s catalogues: whoopie cushions, cigarette loads, plastic puke. He matured into acts like soaking a sleeping friend’s hand in warm water to make him wet his bed, short-sheeting Steve’s bed, stealing underwear from girls at a slumber party and freezing it. For a time when they were in college Beau got into cooperative ventures. He organized big projects like taking three horses up into the dean’s office, or disassembling/reassembling a VW bug so it formed the centerpiece of an upstairs co-op dining room. But before and after that, for most of his jokester life, Beau has worked alone.

Steve and Beau caddied all the way through high school, and in that period their attitudes did change about golf. Steve accepted the fact that he wasn’t going to win any big awards at the game. Beau realized that he had developed a kind of unwilling commitment; he still couldn’t say he liked golf, but he was accustomed to playing it, and that custom had become something of a ritual for him. The young men went together to college and continued to play a couple of times a week.

Perhaps Steve liked the way it felt to, as he said, “face the facts about golf and drop the fantasy,” but he became increasingly more practical and pragmatic as he passed into adulthood. He majored in economics in college and then went straight into his father’s very successful brokerage business. He married Elena Boudy, the girl from his neighborhood his parents most wanted as a daughter-in-law. That’s not to say he didn’t love Elena in his own way, but it was very convenient and useful to marry her. Especially after their son came, the union provided the impetus for her father to merge his business into Andreini & Company, and anyway, Elena’s mother and Steve’s mother were best friends.

Beau went the other way. It was ironic for him to be so impractical, given the fact that he had no family money behind him, but he couldn’t resist majoring in classics. He was never good-looking, always too thin for his height, with features unoffensive but too bland to attract, but he went with a number of young ladies in college. He may have driven a few of them away with pranks like the Vaseline lump on the toilet seat for that squishy surprise when she uses the john in the middle of the night, but mostly his sense of humor drew them to him. In fact, his last and best girlfriend, his future wife Annika, laughed when she sat in the glop. Came after him without even cleaning her thigh, pounding him with her pillow and wrestling with him until of course they fucked. She made him agree to stop pranking her when they got married. Actually, the day after they got married. On their wedding night, after consummation but before sleep, Beau stretched some Saran Wrap tightly over the toilet bowl, set the seat down, and unscrewed the lightbulb. He figured Annika would use the toilet during the night and if she tried the light he wanted her to think the bulb was blown. He snickered as he imagined her urine stream bouncing off the drum-tight plastic.

As it happened the joke worked. That time, Annika wouldn’t have found it funny. She was a very good sport but just a little sentimental about it being their wedding night. She would have been genuinely angry at Beau except for the fact that a huge sewer rat had managed to swim up their plumbing and into the toilet bowl. But for the Saran Wrap, the rat might have had a piece of Annika.