#101 Benny
Benny (Fiction)
Benny once said that the first time he had to sleep on the street, he didn’t mind it at all, it fit him like a glove. But the second time he had to sleep on the street, it was awful, and he said that he cried the entire time.
The reason he cried was because even though he had three cans of beer and a half pack of cigarettes, he’d forgotten to get his hands on some matches or a lighter, and it was so cold that night that no one was out, so he couldn’t find anyone to bum a light from, and the lack of nicotine sent his heart into a turmoil he never wanted to experience again.
That was Benny for you. Complaining about a lack of nicotine, not the fact that it was freezing that night, not because he was out on the streets in only a pair of jeans and his notorious leather jacket, and certainly not because his parents had died and left him nothing, so he had nobody to turn to when his luck was down and out.
Benny was that kid. The kid who wasn’t a kid anymore, but who stuck around in our small little town in order to teach the younger kids how to be kids.
If you were growing up in ____ and you wanted something that required ID, then Benny was your first, and only choice. Cigarettes, booze, porno mags—you were underage, and you wanted it? Well, then you had better be on Benny’s good side. Fuck, rumor even had it that Benny could get you coke or smack if you wanted it—but none of us ever really found out if this was just a rumor or not. I mean, us suburban kids, we were trying to be rebels, but that hard shit, that sort of shit actually scared us.
Not Benny though. Nothing seemed to scare Benny.
***
The first time that Benny got arrested, a lot of us “tough kids” took to sewing black patches with the letter B on them onto our favorite hoodies or jackets. Some of the less artistically motivated kids, like me, we couldn’t figure out how to make patches, so we just took a sharpie pen and inked the letter B onto all of our clothing, but the motivation was the same, nonetheless.
We wore these B’s with pride, as a sign of protest against “the man,” ‘cause Benny’s arrest was “total bullshit, man! Total fucking bullshit!” But the funny thing, looking back, is that none of us even knew why Benny had been arrested, so for all we know, it was “totally called for, man.” But we were just a bunch of kids, in need of a hero.
The whole patch idea seemed really cool at first, but when Benny was released from the local slammer, and he saw what we’d all done on his behalf, well, he couldn’t stop laughing. For about two weeks after his arrest, whenever he saw a kid in town with a “B” on their clothes, he would just point at them and say “baaaah.” He wasn’t grateful for our attention and our hero-worshipping, and by calling us out as sheep, well, shit, that just made Benny seem even cooler to all of us.
Benny wasn’t working for us, he was just living his life—reckless and careless and in your face. Of course, this was before I got to know Benny, before I saw what he was really all about. Hindsight ‘aint 20-20, it’s just jaded and full of remorse—at least with me it always seems to be that way.
***
I was about six years younger than Benny, but my older brother was in the grade behind him, so Benny was vaguely aware of me in a way that made a lot of the other kids in my grade feel jealous. I liked this, as I didn’t have a lot going for me back then.
I was fifteen and full of despair. I thought everything in the world was phony, just like Holden Caulfield thought, only unlike Holden, I didn’t have a brother or a sister to obsess over, and I didn’t want to catch any fucking bodies falling. I just wanted to get high, so that I could stop worrying about how I was never going to get a chance to touch a girl anywhere past her shoulder.
But just ‘cause Benny would nod his head at me when I crossed his path in town didn’t mean that I was actually his friend on any level other than the imaginary. In my head, Benny and I, we were tight. Secret handshake tight. Inside jokes about other kids tight. But in reality, I was just a chump who bought ten sacks from him for the price of a twenty bag, and I always remembered to smile as I got ripped off—because Benny, well, shit. He was cool…that‘s why.
That’s why I never understood how that whole night ever even happened. Because unless I was actually special to Benny, in some sort of way, then why would he have trusted me, of all people? Why would he have confided in me, and shown me the worst aspects of his life, unless we were closer than just drug dealer and drug buyer?
I’ll never know. But I’ll always wonder.
***
I was fifteen years old, and had been so for just over a month. I’d just taken my first job ever, at the local Burger King, and something about a real job made me feel like I was an adult, and this made me eager to experience some real, adult problems and adventures.
My parents cared about me, but they didn’t care about knowing where I was at all hours, and what I was doing with my time when I wasn’t at home playing video games and trying to set personal records for most masturbations in a day. So at the time, they were “my fucking lame-ass parents,” but in retrospect, they were pretty chill—as far as parents go.
I was at work, “late” on a Thursday night. I was in charge of closing down the BK and my fat disgusting boss was in her office sitting on two chairs (one for the left cheek of her gigantic ass, and one for the right. That bitch was disgusting.)
All I had left to do before I could leave was take out three enormous bags of trash. I had to pass the bitch’s office on my way to take out the trash. I looked in as I passed her office and saw that she had passed out, yet again, with a half eaten burger nestled next to her mammoth tits. I shook my head as I noticed that part of the mayo and tomatoes from her burger had slid onto her four lane highway of a belly. She was so pathetic that it actually made me feel sick in my stomach. I vowed then and there to never again eat another burger.
I stopped staring at the whale and made my way outside to the dumpsters. I had a fun game that I liked to play when I closed, and this was to throw the garbage bags as high into the air as I could, so that when they landed in the dumpster they would explode upon impact. I was fifteen—this is what fifteen year olds do for fun before they discover how to drive and get drunk and high everyday…
Well, I took that first bag and flung it over my shoulder, as high as I could, and I launched that fucker to a new record high in the air. It came down with a huge thud, and some of the milk shake spray pelted me in the eye. It was marvelous.
But then I heard someone yell, “WHAT THE FUCK?” and that’s when Benny’s milk shake covered head came out of the dumpster. He looked like a fucking skeleton rising from a coffin and the image made me shriek like a little girl.
This, in turn, made Benny laugh. Benny, as I would later discover, liked to laugh a lot.
“Relax, little Hof, it’s just me.” He said.
Hoffa was my family name. My older brother, Greg, he’d been called Hof all his life, and I was therefore given no choice by my schoolmates and the community in general; outside of my parents and immediate relatives, no one called me anything but “Little Hof,” and it drove me nuts. Christ, even the teachers at school sometimes slipped up and called me Little Hof, instead of my real first name. I wasn’t little, I didn’t want to be little, and I therefore hated my nickname.
“Benny…what the fuck are you doing in there?” I stammered.
“Snoozing, before our big night.”
Our? Had Benny really just used a pronoun that included me with him? What the hell was going on here? Before I could revel any further in this matter, Benny said the only thing that made that night possible.
“Wanna get laid?”
If you are reading this, and you are a guy, then I don’t really need to explain just how momentous Benny’s offer was to my fifteen year old self. Go ask most any fifteen year old white kid from the suburbs, virgin or not, if they “wanna get laid” and you’ll see in their eyes the maniacal expression of a frenzied gold miner from the 1800’s. There is nothing on Earth that simultaneously excites and terrifies a fifteen year old white kid from the suburbs like the prospect of having unfettered access to a girl’s body.
I was so busy licking my lips and picturing a girl laughing at my penis that I didn’t even answer Benny.
Benny pulled himself out of the dumpster. “Hof, did you hear me? Now, quick, go get me some fucking towels, I gotta clean myself off, you little turd.”
He had called me Hof. My big brother’s name. I was spellbound.
I shook myself into action, threw the remaining two bags of trash into the dumpster, and raced inside to get Benny some paper towels. Shamu was still napping in her office, so I snuck into the storage closet and stole an entire ream of paper towels for Benny. I then locked up the two front doors and clocked out. I was back outside in less than ten minutes, but Benny was nowhere to be seen.
I was used to disappointment, but this was a pretty crushing moment. I kicked a few loose rocks on the ground, and tried to figure out how I could turn this into a really cool story to impress my friends.
Before I could really begin obsessing about the inevitability of dying a lonely old virgin, a large yellow Buick screeched into the back alley of the BK, freezing me with its headlights. The car stopped about five feet away from me, and Benny stuck his head out the window and yelled, “Get the fuck in, Hof, let’s go!”
I ran over to the passenger side of the car, and pulled on the door, only it wouldn’t open. Benny let me try a few more times, laughing the whole time, and then he finally reached across the car and unlocked the door for me. He was laughing like a maniac, and I felt like an idiot.
I slid into the comfy leather bench in the front seat and handed Benny the paper towels without a word. In return, he handed me a splendidly rolled joint. “Fire it up, bro.”
I fished into my pants for my favorite Zippo, probably the only thing I owned that was even remotely cool. I lit the joint, and pulled hard, and the smoke made my lungs explode into a coughing fit that convinced me I was dying of Ebola.
I tried to look cool, but Benny was laughing even harder now. He took the joint from my skinny small hands and inhaled like a pro. By the time his two hits were done with, he’d already smoked more than half of the jay!
I was already so high from the first hit that I could barely think, so I faked the rest of my hits and smoked the thing Bill Clinton style.
Finally, after about twenty minutes of conversation-less driving, I realized that Benny and I were out on the highway and about three towns away from our home town, nearing the big city.
Questions I wanted to ask, but I was too afraid to:
“Where did you get this car?”
“Where are we going?”
“Why were you sleeping in a dumpster?”
“Am I really going to get laid?”
“Are we friends?”
“How does sex work?”
Questions I didn’t really care about, but I asked Benny so that he would think I was cooler than I actually was:
“So, um, our town is like, so fucked. Don’t you think?”
“Man, did you hear about Billy Epstein? Fucking A, he got kicked out of ____ High for getting caught with a hunting knife in his locker. That’s so fucked. Don’t you think?”
Benny varied his answers to my inane questions by either laughing hysterically or just by saying, “No shit.” I learned, that night, that Benny is a man of few words, but many joints.
By the time we pulled off the highway and into the shittiest, least safe area of the city that I’d ever seen, Benny was sparking up joint number three.
Instead of making sure that Benny had a plan, or inquiring as to my overall safety, I instead gave into my desperate, adolescent need to be “cool.” I therefore continued to nonchalantly ask Benny what he thought about every tedious bit of small town gossip that I could think of.
Benny interrupted me at some point and said, “If you had a little sister, would you let me fuck her?”
I didn’t have a sister, little or big, and I didn’t think that if I did, I’d have any say as to who she did and did not fuck, but I figured this was some sort of test, so I said, “Of course, Benny. We’re bros.”
This made Benny lose his shit. He started laughing so loudly that spit was coming out of his mouth and a thin string of snot was flapping like bubble gum in his left nostril. He was so dirty and punk, and this was so cool to me at the time.
Benny kept driving, and I was now staring silently out the window, stoned out of my mind.
As we drove on, the houses got shittier and shittier and the people got blacker and blacker. I began to grow afraid. I wasn’t racist, so much as aware of the fact that skinny little white kids from the suburbs were not supposed to be in this part of the city at this time of night. Even cooler than cool kids like Benny were NOT supposed to be there.
Suddenly Benny pulled the car up in front of a gruesomely beat up little house on a street with no lamps. In front of the house, four black MEN were sitting on the stoop sharing a blunt. Upon our arrival one of them threw an empty bottle into the street and then the group cheered as it exploded. This frightened me. A lot.
I looked down and realized that I was still wearing my dorky collared burger king work-shirt. Benny noticed my apprehension, and without a word, he removed his famous leather jacket and handed it to me.
All my fears evaporated as I put on Benny’s jacket, and I felt an elated tingle course through my body as the momentousness of this occasion sunk into my mind.
Benny looked me in the eyes, and asked me if I had any money he could borrow.
“I’ll pay you right back, I promise bro.“ he told me as I handed him all my money, which amounted to about thirty six dollars, a lot of money for a kid like me.
Without another word, Benny got out of the car and I followed right behind him as he made his way up to the four men on the stoop.
“Sup?” Benny said.
No one bothered to look at us, or to answer Benny, but one of the men moved his ass just far enough over for Benny to fit one shoe on the porch step. Benny did just this, and then pushed his way into the front door.
I stood behind him, and all four men suddenly began to laugh at me.
“Shit, Whitey, you don’t wanna stand out HERE. Best to follow your boy.”
I caught his not-so-subtle hint, and put my foot on the empty spot on the stoop and launched myself into the house. The men continued to laugh as I closed the front door behind me.
***
The house smelled like a symphony of pot smoke, cigarette smoke, dog shit, stale beer, and there was another smell, one that I wasn’t familiar with at the time; pussy.
Inside about ten more black guys were sitting around drinking and smoking, and one of them offered me a blunt.
The last thing in the world that I wanted at that moment was any more pot, but I wanted to fit in, so I took a hit of the big brown blunt, and the smoke hung like a fire in my throat and lungs. I winced, I coughed, and then I realized that everyone was staring at me, only it was hard to see them through the water in my eyes. I felt my heart beating in my right thigh, and I remember thinking that this was very odd.
By the time I could see through my eyes again, Benny wasn’t there. I also thought this was odd—or, to be more exact, I found it devastating.
The guys in the room stopped laughing at me, and returned to their aimless drinking and smoking. I slid into a corner of the room and tried to act nonchalant, but it was hard, because no one was talking, there was nothing to do there.
A radio was on in some other room, emitting some rap song that I wasn’t cool enough to recognize. I pretended like I knew the song well, and tried to bob my head along with the beat, hoping this would make me look cool.
Looking back, I don’t think a single person in that house gave one fuck as to whether or not I was “cool.” As long as I wasn’t police, they didn’t care what I was.
I sat around, like a total tool, for about twenty minutes, which felt like four hours, and finally, Benny returned to the main room, holding a young black girl’s hand.
Let me elaborate a bit. When I say young, I mean YOUNG. This girl was younger than me, and by a lot. If I had to guess, which I did plenty of that night, I’d put her at twelve, tops.
“Hof, this is Kinka. Kinka, this is Hof.”
Kinka was beautiful, in that “she’ll be hot someday” kind of way. But the operative word here is “someday.” At that moment, she wasn’t hot at all, she was just a kid.
Kinka feigned a smile for me, but I could tell that nothing about me interested her. All I could think about was the fact that Kinka, at this hour, should have been asleep, or at the very least, combing a doll’s hair. Not hanging out with a bunch of druggies and drunks, and—and Benny.
Benny thrust Kinka’s hand into mine, and nodded to the hallway.
“First door on the right. She’s all yours.” He said.
I stood there, frozen in fear. This was NOT how I was supposed to lose my virginity. This was not a cool night. There was nothing going on in this house that I wanted to be a part of. I didn’t express any of these thoughts to Benny or anyone else because I figured that if I did, they would all laugh at me the way my classmates had laughed at the fat kid in our school for smelling like shit one day in class. That was NOT going to be me.
So I took Kinka’s hand and let her lead me into the back bedroom.
Kinka and I had yet to speak, and we’d actually only looked each other in the eye for about twenty seconds total at that point, but as soon as she closed the door, she pressed her body against mine and began to probe my lips with her tongue.
Something else began to throb in my right thigh, and I had no idea what to do about it.
Kinka must have felt my throb, because she next began to literally FEEL my dick, rubbing it with her little hands over my jeans.
I grew very hard, and I knew what was coming next, but I didn’t know what to do about it.
Just as I was about to explode in my pants, Kinka, a real pro, she pulled back from me, and let out an insincere giggle.
“First time.” She said this. It was a statement, not a question.
This was more embarrassing than anything I had ever experienced. Here was a girl, way younger than me (at fifteen anything more than two years is WAAAAY young, I tell you.), and she had more experience in the bedroom than I did, and was calling me out on it.
“No way!” I yelled. I yelled this pretty loud, I guess, ‘cause Kinka, for a split second, seemed a little alarmed. But then she looked me in the eyes, for the second time that evening, and she could see right through my machismo lie.
“We don’t have to if you don’t wanna, but y’all still need to pay.” She said this with the same tone and care that a supermarket clerk says, “paper or plastic.” All business and nothing more.
My mind was racing. I was basically weighing the odds of three choices: turning Kinka down, and then trying to explain it to the fourteen or fifteen other guys in the house, turning Kinka down, but getting her to pretend that we actually did it, and, lastly, but least likeable of all was the option of actually having sex with her.
Why the hell was I here? Why the hell had Benny met me at the dumpster and asked me to accompany him? What the hell was the point in all of this? My desire to get laid, and my curiosity about how it all worked was strong, but some part of me, a part I never knew existed before that night, was trying to speak some sense to me, and I was surprised to find myself actually listening to this anti-virginity-losing advice.
“Kinka, look—” I began.
“—Yes or no? I don’t got all sorts of time.” Kinka was now sitting on the bed in the room and pretending to find interest in a loose stitch that had become unraveled from the cheap blanket on the bed.
Aside from the bed and the shitty blanket on it, there was only a small table in the other corner of the room with several empty cans of beer and an overflowing ashtray. The combination of smells was making me seriously ill, and I finally realized, for sure, that I couldn’t finish this job.
So I said, “how much?” and she laughed.
“You gots to ask my man that. I don’t touch nothing except you. Get in, or get out.”
With this, she threw off her shirt and exposed her barely feminine chest. She had tits, for sure, but they were really small and undeveloped, and I felt like a total fucking pervert just seeing them there. I smiled and tried to think of something polite to say, but nothing would come out. Kinka continued to play with the loose thread, so I eventually turned my back on her and left the room.
My head was swimming. I was stoned out of my mind, and all I could think about was how fucking weird it was for Benny to be fucking an extremely young prostitute in the ghetto. There were a million girls closer to his age in our hometown that would be more than happy to fuck him. So why in the hell were we here? Nothing was adding up, and I felt weary from all of the confusion.
I got back into the living room, and Benny was nowhere to be seen.
I tried to play it cool, and pretend that I had just fucked Kinka—fucked her real good, like a man would, but no one in the room was giving me any sort of attention. I sat there for another three minutes, eavesdropping as best I could, but nothing these guys were talking about made any sense to me. I didn’t understand a word they were saying, it was as if they weren’t even speaking English.
Finally, I got the nerve to check outside for Benny.
I can’t even tell you the sense of paralyzing fear and panic that devoured me as I went outside only to find no Benny, and NO CAR.
“What the fuck?” I thought to myself.
One of the men on the stoop, the one who had barely moved to allow me entry to the house said, “Shit, boy, you look like you just seen a ghost. You too old to be believing in ghosts!”
This got everyone else laughing, which added to my sense of panic, and also allowed me to feel quite humiliated.
I was trying my best not to panic, but this was all too much for me. I was now alone, in the ghetto, surrounded by older men who were getting fucked up on all sorts of shit, and I had no money, no car, and no real idea of what the hell was happening. I would use the word surreal to describe this moment in time, only surreal sounds far too friendly, and I wasn’t feeling ANYTHING friendly at that moment. I only felt bad vibes and a sense of confusion that only comes about from smoking too much weed in a “foreign” environment.
Finally, their laughter died down, and I managed to eek out, “You guys seen my friend?”
No one laughed this time. The place got real quiet all of a sudden, and then the same man who had asked me about seeing a ghost said, “You don’t got no friends here. I think you should go.”
Things were really quiet now. No one laughed and no one stirred. It was just like the night before Christmas, only instead of milk and cookies and holiday cheer, this night was full of weed and beer and intimidation.
I was afraid, and feeling terribly let down. I was now beginning to wonder if Benny wasn’t a loser, and not my hero, and I was fairly sure that Benny wasn’t really my friend.
He had smoked me out and taken me to get laid, but he had also, apparently, taken all of my money, and then left me high and dry to get my ass kicked in a strange ghetto.
I wasn‘t sure what to do, so I tried to vie for a little time.
“Hey, my ride…uh, you know when he’s supposed to come back?” I asked.
All four men stood up. A guy in the back pulled the corner of his t-shirt towards his belly button, revealing the black handle of a gun. The ring leader then looked me hard in the eyes and said, “Bitch, All your business is done here. You better start walking.”
“mmmm-hmmm.” his friends agreed.
I now had two very simple options at my disposal; I could walk left, or I could walk right. Given my lack of local ghetto geography and experience, combined with how dark that street was, both options seemed like certain death to me.
What I wanted to do was to somehow marry an odd combination of desires to bawl my eyes out and to find Benny and fucking kill him, but I knew this was out of the question.
So I pretended like everything was cool; I pulled Benny’s leather jacket tight around my body and I zipped it up as high as it would go, and then, taking a gulp, I stepped off the porch and walked down to the curb.
When I got to the street, I took another long look to my left, and then an even longer look to my right, and despite all my desires to be cool, and to be a man, I let it all go, and I began to cry.
I didn’t want those men to hear me crying, so I turned left and started marching down the street on my very own personal Cambodian Death March.
Two things kept me going as I trudged down that scary-ass street: One was a fantasy that Benny was going to suddenly pull up next to me in that yellow Buick, joint in hand, laughing, and then he would explain to me, in between his inhalations and maniacal laughter that “it was all a joke, Hof. We’re bros!”
The other fantasy that I entertained was even better: I was going to find Benny the next day and then expose him to everyone in our town for what he really was: A good for nothing sexual pervert who paid to have sex with little girls.
All in all, I’m lucky as hell, because after walking for only about four blocks, I spotted a 7-11 and, as luck would have it, there was a police car in the parking lot. I knew that my parents were going to give me hell for ending up in the ghetto after midnight on a school night, but I also knew that getting hell from my parents would be way “cooler” than getting killed in the ghetto, so I walked up to their car and knocked on the window.
What’s even luckier is that I didn’t have to say a word to the cops about Benny, the whorehouse, or any of the drugs, because the cops were so busy laughing at my scared little black-leather jacket wearing white-suburban-ass that they never even bothered to ask me why I was there in the first place. Instead, as if it were a routine, the cops took it upon themselves to offer me a ride home. They found me so comical, in fact, that they didn’t seem notice that I was stoned out of my mind either. They just dropped me off at my home, without a threat, a taunt, a warning, or any desire to contact my parents.
***
Here’s where things get weird(er): No one in my town ever heard from Benny or saw him again. Suddenly, he was a ghost, and I was the last person to have seen him, only I couldn’t tell anyone this, not even my own best friend, because I was too scared of being connected to Benny, in case it somehow got back to those scary men at the house, or to my parents, or to the police. I was so scared, as a matter of fact, that I buried his leather jacket in my backyard when my parents were at work the next day.
But the talk in town was pretty impressive. The top two rumors involving Benny’s sudden disappearance were that he had been killed in a knife fight or that he’d killed someone else in a knife flight and fled to Mexico. Not a single rumor involved underage girls or a stolen Buick. Your guess is as good as mine.
Years later, with the help of the internet, I tried to find out what had happened to Benny, but all my searches wound up empty. In an odd sort of way, I almost prefer things this way. Now that I’m “old,” and many years have passed, my entire life consists of my wife, my children, my bills, and a few different crime-mystery TV shows that all have an acronym in their title. It’s kind of nice to be able to look back at my youth and have a few question marks, a few mysteries; to have a real ghost story of my own.
I asked my brother about Benny one year at Thanksgiving, and all he said was, “Who?”
My parents, however, had overheard my question, and my mom began to laugh—Benny style, kind of maniacal and discomforting, all at once.
“Honey, do you really remember your imaginary friend Benny? That’s so funny. Your father and I were worried sick when you still mentioned him halfway into your teens. You always had such a vivid, incredible imagination!”
My father added, “Yeah. How come you never did anything with that?”
I had no idea what they were talking about, I didn’t remember anything about any imaginary friend, and, trust me, Benny was real. This isn’t some stupid fucking ghost story.
