October 20, 2007

• For Ben

  Ben was a keen observer and had
  a clear memory. I’m asking friends to check this prose elegy for errors of
  fact. Ben was my fact-checker. He could be counted on to remember that no,
  Timothy wasn’t there, and further that I forgot that Mark was there when such-and-such went down, or when we took a trip to
  that one place.

  He admired clean reporting,
  clear writing, and their product, good thinking. It wasn’t until a classmate
  read aloud a piece of reportage that included the phrase “the drink satisfied
  his quench” and did not see that anything was wrong with it that Timothy and I
  knew it was time to see the registrar and drop the “advanced” writing class.
  The class met once a week, at night, and Ben had the prescience to see it held
  nothing for him two weeks earlier. Timothy and Ben were rooming that semester,
  so it gave us more time to hang out, and to watch whatever reality TV shows
  were on that night of the week. We both loved cultural critique, and we both
  reveled in particular shallow elements of popular culture that tickled our
  fancy. It wasn’t ironic detachment—we both hated ironic detachment—it was
  inconsistency: care and thought on the one hand, reckless abandon to cheap
  pleasures on the other.

  That year was my junior year at
  Eastern, and a tremendously difficult one for me. In the fall I lived off
  campus with two roommates who had dropped their studies and taken on full-time
  day jobs. The rest of my closest friends were studying abroad, and I was left
  behind, my request for a study away rejected, and not a dorm room left for me.

  I was welcome in his room in Kea
  as a roommate, in addition to Brandon in the fall, who switched places with
  Timothy in the spring. I spent hours on the beat-up couch in there, many times
  studying, many times procrastinating, and many times relaxing. I’d be sitting
  on the couch in mid-afternoon reading for one of my classes, and Ben would be
  on his computer—writing diligently, playing Text Twist, or, most commonly,
  multitasking between those two pursuits plus listening to music. He would
  quietly get up, gather papers and a book, and excuse himself to go to class. He
  would return later; I would still be there, or not. I drove over to campus
  before a snow storm hit so I could get snowed in there, and I spent the night
  on the floor.

  Ben made frequent trips to our
  off-campus house, too, in his beat-up stick-shift. He had been part of the
  brainstorming session when we settled on the name for our dilapidated duplex at
  47 Grove Avenue in Devon. Tebben had been planning to spend that year trucking,
  so in honor of that we named it “Exit 47,” later to be fondly referred to as
  simply “The Exit.” I remember Ben calling it “the house” sometimes. It was an
  exit, an escape; eventually for me it became a much too nihilistic one. But he
  was there for good times—the turduckin at Thanksgiving, the carol sing, Martin
  Luther King Day—as well as for the bad—driving Timothy over and back to campus
  when he’d had a particularly awful day (he being in no state of mind to drive
  when he arrived, and in no legal state to drive when he left)—and for the
  mediocre, too. On one occasion splatters of his vomit wound up on two of the
  walls and the door of our downstairs bathroom. We never figured out the physics
  of it. He slept on the couch a few nights; I woke up and he was gone, back to
  campus and back to work.

  We didn’t float in and out of
  each others’ lives. We shared life. The rhythm of hanging out and being apart
  to do our own things was natural, casual. It was so easy with him.

  Some people have changed my life
  just by virtue of having met them. It was a revelation to meet other young
  people who loved to write poetry and could write it well, for instance. It
  could have been that way with Ben. The trip to the top of the Empire State
  Building (“Do you guys want to do something crazy?” “Umm, yeah.”) would have been enough. That was a life-altering
  experience. It was the only major experience I shared with Todd until Ben’s
  death recently united us to add to it.

   

  Ben and I played Halo (1 &
  2) together, ATV Off Road, Kings of Chaos, Literati, Capture the Car (our team
  won). We went on two spring breaks together. He was part of the explosion that
  put holes in my tent on a camping trip I didn’t join. Between the two of us we
  drank half a bottle of dark rum one evening on the beach (the rest finished it
  off). I have more body mass; I could walk straight. He couldn’t. I slung his
  arm over my shoulder part of the walk back to the campsite. He pointed at
  everyone and acknowledged them by name, even if he didn’t get the name right.
  He acknowledged Timothy’s foot, then fell into self-amusement. “…Foot. Stoot.”

  Sometimes I saw him as a sort of
  younger brother, a younger brother who was much smarter and more full of
  promise than me. When the drinking got heavy, and the smoking became a habit, I
  worried. It forced a few of us to grow up, quit the college-boy lackadaisical
  attitude, and put on a serious face so we could show our concern. The boy could
  get addicted to anything. When it was something actually addictive—alcohol, tobacco,
  pot—I think he found himself surprised. He seemed naively to feel betrayed,
  like a child who lets you hold his hand during grace but is shocked when you
  don’t let go when it’s over. He knew enough of the world to be cynical, but his
  nature was to be trusting.

  One day Ben was listening to 16
  Horsepower. I hadn’t heard them in a year or so, and I couldn’t remember their
  name. Ben told me I had to listen to a particular song. I loved it, and I
  wanted to hear it again. And again. And again. He put the song on repeat for
  me, and didn’t mind as I listened through it at least ten times. He didn’t even
  grimace. Later, he sent me the mp3, knowing full well I’d just stick it on
  repeat for myself, and that maybe he would be around when I did.

  Ben loved sharing the news, and
  with some of us he would indulge a guilty pleasure of sharing choice bits of
  gossip. It helped him cope with having to resist publishing it. I never felt the slightest inkling of
  suspicion that he might have gossiped about me.

  Ben was there when Timothy smoked
  his first cigar, in the woods below McInnis, the last night of a spring
  semester. Ben and I smoked a cigar, too. Then the three of us lit the three
  hundred-foot-long ropes of firecrackers we had laid out along the dirt trail
  and bolted back out to the paved path, trying to walk away naturally (looking
  back over our shoulders, “What’s that?”) in spite of our schoolgirl giddiness.

  Ben came along when we skipped
  our dorm hall’s weekly Bible study meeting to go see Jackass in the theater.
  It didn’t seem odd or contradictory that he was also a brilliant exegete of the
  Bible and went on to help manage the Bryn Mawr Film Institute. We could talk
  philosophy together. We could have entire conversations of nothing but curse
  words. In his last blog entry, I make a comment indicating my profound
  reverence for the Hebrew Law. I also call it “f—– up.” Ben understood. We
  were both on long religious quests. Neither of us expected to reach a
  comfortable destination while we yet lived. I mourn the death of a fellow pilgrim.
  We both feared God and were picking our way through dense undergrowth and
  wrinkled landscapes in search of God. We knew it would do no good to run, and
  that time is God’s. We knew we couldn’t hide from God; the problem was that we couldn’t find God.

  Ben was a better journalist than
  I was, but I didn’t mind and he didn’t care. Long after I left my post as the
  Waltonian’s news editor (I had the pleasure of working with him as a writer his
  first semester at Eastern) and he went on to surpass anything I had
  accomplished while on the paper, he still treated me as a peer, a colleague. He
  always loved the ideas I had for fiction stories and plays, even though I think
  he knew better than I did that I would never write them, at least not soon. He
  gave me the privilege of publishing an essay of his in Frodo’s Notebook. He was happy to serve as our editor-at-large
  later, and he contributed more than he realized during that time. It was on a Frodo’s Notebook planning retreat that
  he and I found and picked up the black rat snake which now appears in photos
  that have been shared around.

  I once complained to Ben about
  how much DJs talk on the radio in the morning, when I’m grumpy and just want to
  hear some good music. Ben saw it differently (he saw most things differently).
  He told me how he liked the human touch, how it helped him get to work in the
  early mornings the summers he spent roofing. (The first summer, he played Kings
  of Chaos almost every day before work, leaving him only time to grab a whole
  unpeeled carrot on his way out the door. That was his breakfast.) That was Ben.
  He was often at his best, and when he was, he used his abilities to give
  himself more time to spend with friends. He also unfailingly used his talent as
  an observer to see, point out, and cherish what is good in things. I can only
  wish that I was as keen an observer as he was, with as clear a memory, that I
  could have seen, and today point out and cherish, every last thing that was
  good in him.

  • 6:59 pm
  • 9 Comments