Ben

   During the first few weeks of the 4th grade, Ben became my best friend. I was a new kid, at a new school, in a new town. Somewhere along the line, I had convinced myself that I was a karate badass who was not to be trifled with. Ben and I had gotten into a verbal confrontation on the playground and I gave him a shove. He (to borrow the terminology of professional wrestling) “oversold” my push and flung himself in a ridiculously exaggerated fashion onto the ground. He then shuffled off to find a teacher to tell. When he returned, with the yard duty by his side, he was in hysterics, crying and babbling that I had hit him, barely comprehensible. The side of his face was bright red. This was not only due to flushing, but because he had slapped himself. This rat played dirty.

   No big deal was made over a minor playground scuffle. They didn’t even call our parents. What they did instead was to put the two of us in an empty classroom to talk it out. The teacher was to return after we had finished to make sure we had smoothed everything over, utilizing our nine-year-old’s understanding of diplomacy. Ben immediately admitted to me that he had been faking. He could make himself cry on command, he said, and he wanted to be an actor. We agreed to concoct a story together that would get neither of us into trouble. I do not remember what preposterous tale we came up with, only that by the end we were both laughing and more than pleased that we had crossed each other’s paths. We began playing together daily, both at school and home. 

   Ben was a funny kid. His sense of humor was…sophisticated for a boy of nine. He possessed sarcasm and a cutting cynicism that normally wouldn’t have developed until someone was in their early-20’s and had been given enough time and experience and disappointment. He was what some may have called an old soul. A boy from another time. To me, he was just Ben. There was no other word better suited to describe him. 

   The types of play that I enjoyed with my other friends – army, war, football, karate, WWF wrestling – didn’t hold any interest for Ben, so we never partook in any of them while together. He seemed to fill his time more artistically. Homemade VHS videos of puppets he had created singing Cyndi Lauper songs, clip art collages featuring things like Tammy Faye Baker reading Playboy, drawings and giant dioramas, usually centered around Gumby and Godzilla. He was the best artist in class, by far. Once, when the entire class had submitted captioned artwork to be displayed in a scrapbook that our teacher had assembled, the work of another student bore a little too close of a resemblance for Ben’s liking. He covertly added a speech bubble to the other boy’s project reading, “I copy Ben!”

   His favorite activity, though, may have been petty vandalism. Ben loved mischief. So much so that he formed a club around it. I was inducted as the 3rd member of The Mischief Club shortly after our first meeting. Official club business included doorbell ditching (or “nigger knocking”, if you prefer the vernacular of the time), egging of cars and houses, prank phone calls, and running through supermarkets with our arms extended outward, knocking as many items off of the shelf as possible. The toilet paper aisle was a favorite for this, and I can’t recall either of us being ballsy or stupid enough to try it in the aisles full of beer or jars of spaghetti sauce. Ben was always as cool, collected, and as inconspicuous as possible. I, on the other hand, would always be laughing maniacally, eyes darting around on the lookout for trouble. 

   The night before picture day it had rained heavily. In class Ben got the idea to, at recess time, scope out any girls who were standing close enough to puddles in their nice clothes and then run by and splash them. We got so excited at the idea that we made up a song in anticipation of “Puddle Time,” as we named it. It was doo-wopy type of number: Puddle time, Puddle time, Put-put-puddle time…Puddle Tiii-eee-iiime. This went over as well as one would expect and we both spent the rest of the day’s recesses standing against the wall. This was standard punishment for recess infractions, and one I grew quite accustomed to. We would repeat Puddle Time after every rain that school year. 

   Another one of Ben’s favorite activities was raiding his older brother Joe’s room. Joe was in high school and I don’t remember him being home much. He was a hardcore punk. In those days punk rockers in the suburbs often fell into two categories: There were the brainy freaks who were barely socialized and then the thuggish goons who were merely biding their time until adulthood and the state penitentiary called. His brother was, undoubtedly, of the latter type. Often when calling Ben, if Joe were the one to answer the phone, the conversation would go something like this:

   “Hi, is Ben there?”

   “Yeah, hold on. BENNY, IT’S ONE OF YOUR LITTLE QUEER FRIENDS!”

   I had no interest in punk music at the time, still preferring the less-hardcore sounds of Huey Lewis and the News. But his room was a trove of other kinds of treasures: The pornographic kind. We pilfered stacks of Hustlers, thumbing through each issue repeatedly.  In addition to all the naked ass and spread beavers, which I was excited by but still too young to fully appreciate, there were pages and pages of jokes, dirty comic strips, ads for aphrodisiacs and sexual enhancement gimmicks, and – what we found the most humor in – the endless ads for phone sex. The ridiculousness of these were never lost on us and even our pre-pubescent minds had enough sense to realize that there was no way the pictured blonde named Shirley was the person actually answering on the other end. We even called one time and I “ruined” the call by not being able to stop laughing. 

   In addition to magazines, there were videos, too. I became a lifelong John Waters fan after a mind-blowing viewing of Female Trouble. This remains one of my favorite movies to this day and it's endlessly quotable dialog was first repeated by me on a 4th grade playground. As enamored as we were by Waters, it was the other VHS tapes that piqued even more of our curiosity. I can still remember most of the titles: Stephanie’s Lust Story, I Like to Watch, Brooke Does College, and- the jewel of them all- Taboo 2. 1980’s porn is entertaining at any age, but to grade-schoolers it was downright sublime. We would interject dialog from the movies into casual conversations whenever possible. Saying, “Ahhhh! Watch the teeth!” in class or having discussions about Junior and his sister Sherry, as if they were kids at school, in front of our mothers.

  As I said, I was still too young to fully grasp (no pun intended) the purpose or possibilities of an erection. Ben, I suspect, figured that out long before me. But, jacking off was still a source of shame in the 4th grade and the ones who had made this great discovery would have never copped to it. Ben seemed to deal with his guilty conscience on the issue by projecting. Billy, the boy who lived across the street from him, was a compulsive masturbator. Ben assured me of this. Billy liked to jack off with cubes of butter and would often do so in full view of his bedroom window. Why no one but Ben ever witnessed this, I was never made aware of. Regardless, with my big mouth, the rumors spread and took hold. So much so that, to this day, the words “butter,” “Billy,” and “jacking off” are permanently intertwined in my mind. 

   Our fascination and exploration of all things pornographic was taken to the next level one day when Ben showed up to play with a Reader’s Digest-sized magazine. It was like nothing I had ever seen before and wouldn’t see again until the rise of the internet over 10 years later. The magazine was more like a catalog and was devoted almost entirely to sexual “freaks.”  Long Dong Silver, Moby Dick, The Incredible Bulk, and John Von Dong were all represented. We sat, concealed from passerby in some bushes, flipping through the pages debating whether or not the ungodly massive and/or duel cocks on display were legit or not. What if he got all the way hard!? It would poke him in the chin! Contemplation of such things may or may not have led to recurring vivid dreams that I had all throughout my adolescence in which I was able to autofellate. 

   This particular magazine was the only one in which I asked Ben to borrow. I had an older brother the same age as his and I couldn’t wait to see the look on his face when I showed him this. I tucked the magazine into my waistband and headed toward home. I cannot for the life of me remember the specifics of what happened on my walk home. Something – it could have been seeing my mother’s car drive by – spooked me and I withdrew the magazine and quickly threw it in a creek. I had every intention of going back to retrieve it and to salvage what hadn’t been ruined and waterlogged. But, I was never able to find it. I told Ben the next day what had happened in a nonchalant but still apologetic manner. He was devastated and acted genuinely betrayed.  

   “I trusted you. And you let me down,” he would say. He was awash in a seriousness that I found uncharacteristic at the time, but would see more and more the longer we were friends. The melancholy didn’t last, though, and we were back to our fixation on the X-rated world. 

   The culmination of this, to me, was a time in the school nurse’s office. To get out of class all one had to say was that you felt sick and needed to see the nurse. They would give you a hall pass and you would go and sit amongst the other afflicted children and wait for either the ice pack or thermometer. That time it was only Ben and I in the waiting room. Well, Ben, I, and a giant stuffed panda that was larger than either of us. As we waited, Ben picked up the panda and began to strike poses straight out of Hustler. He did doggy, 69, reverse cowgirl, face sitting, all the while miming facials reminiscent of the male model’s orgasmic expressions. At that moment I seriously thought that I might die from laughing so hard. It was not only the hilarity of what I was seeing, but also the nervous fear that the nurse would walk in while he was on all fours displaying his O-face. She did not interrupt, but such was life with Ben. Full of laughter and the anxiety of being caught.        

   Ben had a mean streak, too. I’m not entirely sure of where it all came from, but there were a plethora of factors to choose from. Shit, he knew himself, even at that young age, that he was fucked up. He was the youngest of three brothers. A year before I had met him, Steve, the middle brother, had died of pediatric cancer. It wasn’t something that Ben seemed out of touch with or repressed in any way. He would discuss the topic freely when it came up and articulated feelings of mortality in a manner that would be astute for anyone, more so for a 10-year-old. Any vitriol was reserved for Kelly and Sam. Kelly was a child suffering from leukemia who went to our school. He was a few grades below us, making him very young.  Ben used to shoot dirty looks at him whenever he passed. He would whisper that he hated him, in a manner so only those two could hear. Kelly would just look sad, scared, and confused, all doe-eyed in the face of this venom that he couldn’t make any sense of. Ben would always state how slighted he felt for his family and that the school never held any stupid fundraisers for Steve the way they did for that other kid. I don’t remember Ben’s reaction when Kelly died in 1989. Maybe we were out of touch at the time, maybe not. 

   Sam was a kid in our class. I am not sure what disability he had been born with, but it showed in his skinny and palsied frame. He was severely knock-kneed and walked with a distinctive shuffle that other kids, little assholes that we were, learned to imitate. To be fair, Sam got fucked with by others, but Ben seemed to make a special mission of it. Hitting him, knocking him over, and berating him whenever he had the chance. I don’t want to get on a high horse here because I had my own forms of Sam torment, much of which did not involve Ben at all.  But Ben’s methods seemed to be born less of selfish amusement and more of a cathartic release of bottled up aggression and anger. I have no idea what became of Sam or where he is today. If he shows up at my door someday with an AR-15 and riddles me full of holes, please know that I totally had it coming. 

   Ben had been referred to our school’s psychologist before I had even moved there. He would sit in for single and group therapies. One of the other boys in his group was in our class and was suffering from abuse at the hands of his dad. I guess they didn’t have mandatory reporting laws back then. I know all this because Ben spilled the beans to me on everyone else in the sessions. He was unsympathetic and would scoff at their issues and state with certainty that their pain paled next to his. Underneath Ben’s wacky hijinks was always a cloud of misery and despair. Something that, I am sure of now, he had no clue of how to process, much less deal with. He described this feeling to me one day as we were riding bikes to his house. 

   “Do you know that feeling in your guts that you get when you’re about to go on a really scary rollercoaster?” he asked me. “It’s like that and it won’t go away.”

   These days Ben would have received a laundry list of diagnoses and, most likely, an even longer list of medications to curtail these dreadful feelings. He would have easily been tagged bi-polar and possibly sociopathic. The Ben that I knew and loved may not have been allowed to exist today. In retrospect, I know how I feel about it. I’m just not sure that it’s the way I am supposed to feel about it. 

   Ben and I fell out of touch in junior high. Even though his family were Lutherans, he was sent to Catholic school for 6th grade in a last ditch attempt by his mother to curb his bad behavior. He was expelled before the year was out and we lost touch shortly after. The next year I would last less than two months at the same school. Chalk it up to the bitch nuns not knowing how to handle whirlwinds like us. 

   The last time I saw Ben it was me noticing him  walking down a trendy street in Berkeley. I was standing around in all of my punkness and he barely recognized me. Funny enough, I had run into his brother Joe a few months earlier under the same circumstance. Joe was oddly more receptive.

   “You’re looking pretty punk,” Joe said. “What made you wanna go this way?” he asked. 

   “It’s fun,” was my only answer. He seemed pleased with this.

   “Damn right. I had a blast!” he said before going on his way. 

    Ben was less welcoming and not at all as excited as I about our chance encounter. He had no enthusiasm for rekindling an old, childhood friendship. We went to lunch together and barely spoke. He seemed detached and very uncomfortable with my loud brashness, a common trait that we once both shared. Whatever connection we had had been severed by time and development. The only small nugget of conversation that I can still recall was him asking me what my drugs of choice were and seeming confused when I answered back with only beer. 

   Years later, during my brief stint on social media, I searched endlessly for Ben, all to no avail. Even if there was little chance of picking up where we had left off, there was still the curiosity. Probably no different than a million other social media lurkers: What did he look like now? Did he get married? Have a family? Come out as gay? Was he ever able to put his artistic skills to their full potential? 

   Other than what he ended up looking like, I would never find these answers. After years of searching, I was finally able to locate a page for Ben. It was on FindAGrave. He had died in 2017 at the age of 40. He is buried next to his brother, Joe, who had died 8 years prior. That one I had heard about. Ben’s cause of death wasn’t listed in any obituaries as it was for his brothers, both of whom died of cancer. Did Ben have the same terrible genetic predisposition, or was it something even more unlucky and sad? Did the stresses of living a whole life with a grown-up mind finally crack him up and push him beyond the breaking point? I wish I could think not. His epitaph does not narrow things down, simply reading, “You will always be loved. You will always be remembered. You will always be missed.” All three statements are true.