Ben

 In the early 2000s, I wrote a short story called Seeking Listrania. It never went anywhere, though I do believe it was one of my better pieces -- and at the time, I considered it my masterpiece, the culmination of several years' worth of creative writing classes and a sense of entitlement. With some polish and editing, I could probably expand upon it or get it published in a literary mag somewhere even today, twenty-plus years later.

Seeking Listrania was purely a fiction piece, a "love story" of attraction and addiction. Though fictional, I'd heavily based it on interactions with my friends at the time. I'm sure there's a lot of fiction writers out there who do the same thing. There were only three characters in the story -- a fictionalized version of myself, the character Listrania (based on my friend Ingrid --yes, that is her real name, who there was a sort of mutual infatuation with for a brief period in real life) and my character's friend, Ben -- who was, for all intents and purposes, a carbon copy of my actual friend Ben. Much of the dialogue in the story between my character and Ben's character was very close to, if not verbatim, actual conversations I'd had with the real Ben in real life, about real women. Ben serves as the moral compass of sorts in the story.

Reading through the story again now, it is very clear that it was written by someone in his early twenties. It's not bad, but it's quite far from being "good." I'd intended to submit it to different places, to use it as a steppingstone, a portfolio piece I could point at and say "look, I actually can write." Ben read through the draft of it once I'd finished it, and was concerned. I remember him asking me if he should be worried about me doing the same things in real life as the character based on me did in the story. I told him no, it was fiction. He countered with the fact that his character seemed like a pretty realistic portrayal of him, so he wanted to check. 

Ingrid never read the story. The title character, loosely based on her, dies in the end. Spoiler alert. The reader doesn't find out how. It's an unflattering portrayal of a person, to be honest, and I'm glad she never read it. I lost contact with Ingrid a few years after college; she'd been engaged to her boyfriend the entire time I'd known her, but at some point that fell through and I just sort of fell out of contact with her. I looked her up a few years back -- what information I could find on her was sparse, but she appeared to be married (she'd changed her last name, so that's usually a pretty good signifier) and was living/working out of state somewhere. 

Ben, however, remained in my life and was sort of an inspirational figure in it for many years. I met Ben in 2002, during his first year at WVU. I am not exactly sure how or when. He was part of a freshman class to WVU that included a number of lifelong friends I acquired pretty much all at once. All of them had gone to high school together and had all come to WVU at the same time. I have no idea how we all met up and became close, but it was likely at the Mountainlair, WVU's student union, which was like a second home to me throughout my undergraduate education. Ben was a bit of a legend until I met him; I'd heard stories about this man who did X things in Y places and lived to tell the tale. Sometimes those stories were true, sometimes they weren't -- as I'd get clarification on a lot of them throughout our friendship. Sometimes, the stories you expected to be complete bullshit for someone his age -- like blacking out drunk while trying to get laid, and waking up the next morning in the homeless shelter -- were absolutely true. 

He and I should not have gotten along. He was intensely charismatic and charming, and was well-built and muscled, with a shock of afro-like curly hair and a goatee. He was also one of the funniest people I've ever met. He was a competitive fencer and joined the fencing team at WVU; I believe he won some awards for that. Ben was also a heavy drinker (which explains the above story) in college, and was able somehow to balance that with being extremely busy at almost all times -- he had a scientific mind, so in the beginning he decided he was majoring in Biology or Chemistry or something like that, I can't remember. It was...rough on him. I, meanwhile, was the fat, nerdy English major who drank too much coffee, smoked too many cigarettes, and -- for as intelligent as I was -- I did not know a fucking thing about real-life, applicable chemistry or biology, especially not at the college level. I lived at home with my parents in a pretty sheltered existence; Ben was the very first friend I met who had his own apartment, in a prime location juuuuuust off campus, within a five-minute straight-line walk from the building that, at the time, housed the WVU English Department (so, I was always somewhat close by). 

On the surface, Ben and I were absolute polar opposites. But personality-wise, we were very similar. Both of us were very funny, sometimes loud and extroverted people (yeah, I was a very different person twenty years ago than I am now). We both loved the same types of music and media, as well -- we were both into anime pretty heavily at the time, and that's part of how we formed the WVU Anime Guild -- the first official anime club to ever exist at WVU, which later became the WVU Japanese Animation and Manga Society (or, as we called it, WVUJAMS). Ben was elected President for about a year or so, and I was his VP. We'd later swap positions, so that I could serve a term or two as President as well. 

Ben was a polarizing figure. There were people who loved him and people who could not stand him, or found him immature and cringe-inducing. I felt a kinship with him there as well, as a lot of people had the same love-or-hate feelings for me. I know there were a fair number of people I knew in college who I was absolutely grating to. Ben held some controversial views here and there, but it was the out-of-control persona and his unreliability due to his alcohol use that made some of the more straitlaced amongst us sort of roll their eyes and figuratively wave him off. Of course, I was a pretty heavy drinker at the time as well, though I wasn't as overt about it.

As our time in college went on, our schedules got busier. There were still, however, adventures -- I remember one morning skipping class and a few of us meeting Ben at his place to pile into his van -- a van with close to 350,000 miles on it or something like that, with a recording of Howard Dean's scream as a car alarm (or so he told me) -- to go to the Meadowbrook Mall in Clarksburg, something like 40 miles away...for...something. I have no idea why we actually went, but I remember that there was a purpose. For me, it was exciting. It was illicit, it was something I shouldn't have done, and something my parents probably would've been really upset about -- getting into a friend's vehicle for an 80-mile round trip? To a mall? In the middle of a weekday? When I should have been in classes and when nobody knew or had any clue where I was or that I'd left not only campus, but the city? It would have been scandalous. 

Knowing Ben was always like that though. There was always going to be a little debauchery here and there, some questionable decisions, some adventures. In 2003, he invented the term "anger soap," which I would write about in my blog at the time -- though I gave it the misnomer of "angry soap":

That was the kind of person Ben was. Always good for a laugh or some new terminology, a turn of phrase, an adventure. He once told me that his favorite game to play on Friday nights (because after all, WVU was and still is a "party school") was "Don't Get Arrested" -- where, well, I guess the name of the game gives away the overall goal.

This is an actual conversation we had circa 2003-04:

Me (6:15:51 PM): Were you drunk when you left me those messages at like 3:30?

Ben (6:16:09 PM): Oh man, not you too!

As well as...

Ben (11:40:51 PM): Woo!

Me (11:42:06 PM): o_o;;

Ben (11:42:20 PM): I'm drunk!!!

Ben (11:42:24 PM): And hyper!

Me (11:42:43 PM): Dude, calm the fuck down.

Ben (11:43:06 PM): woo!

Ben (11:43:10 PM): Heheh, ok.

Ben (11:44:12 PM): Man, you're the best.

Ben (11:44:22 PM): Haha, I know I'm being stupid drunk, but you're my bro.

Ben (11:44:26 PM): And don

Ben (11:44:31 PM): 't you dare fuckin save this convo!

Ben (11:44:34 PM): lol

Me (11:44:57 PM): Too late, I have a program that makes AIM logs automatically.

Ben (11:45:04 PM): Noooooo!

I loved Ben. I felt a true kinship with him. He was like a brother to me, despite his flaws -- and there were many. This is the man who ate raw bacon that was half-frozen just to tell us the story ("It mostly just tastes like ice"). This is the man who did know, even then, that he had some...ahem...major problems with alcohol and acknowledged it, but also at times reveled in it. This is the man who went on at least five dates with one of my friends I went to high school with (this was purely coincidental; she ended up being on the fencing team with him) and he still didn't know if she was "into" him. But, this is also the man who went to Japan to teach English for a few years after graduating from college. This is also the man who would listen to you talk about your problems not just because he was there, but because he wanted to help -- and sometimes, he gave great advice. If back then were today, Ben would have been canceled so many times over by so many people for so many things, his sense of humor being just one of them, but it wouldn't change the fact that he was, as they say, a good dude. I don't think there was a dishonorable bone in his body. He always prided himself on doing good, in the same way that Superman does good. 

In the years after college, I moved out here to the midwest and contact with a lot of my friends back home, including Ben, became largely sporadic. While a lot of my friends from college gradually moved away from a lot of contact-by-instant-message, I steered even harder into it, as it was my only means of communication with many people, especially after I moved out here. As such, Ben was one of many folks I slowly, over a period of time, slipped out of regular contact with. We'd see each other online here and there for a few years, but after 2010, 2012, something like that, I don't think we actually had any further conversation. He'd occasionally comment on my Facebook or drop me a line here and there, but after a while even that stopped. 

Ben died three days ago at the age of 37, "after a brief illness." His funeral was today. There's been no confirmation of what the "brief illness" was, but I've heard from some friends through the grapevine that it was likely pneumonia that went septic. I have no real way to confirm, and honestly, it doesn't really matter anyhow. He's gone now, like so many others we've lost over the years. 

I've had a not-insignificant number of friends die suddenly, not just from illnesses but from accidents and suicides, and two of them (two!) were outright murdered. Every one of them touched my life in one way or another. Some were casual acquaintances. Some I was closer with. Some may as well have been family. Ben was almost family to me. I'm not going to say he was far more significant to me than he was, but he did feel almost like a brother, and I have a lot of core college memories associated with him.

In the days since his death -- and I found out the day it happened -- I've been trying to process my grief, but it almost feels like I should have more to process. It's almost as if I feel like I'm not grieving enough, or like I'm not caring enough. Ben's death feels so distant, as if he died in an overseas war or on a galactic starcruiser on the other side of the galaxy, but he didn't. He died in West Virginia, where he was born, grew up, and lived most of his life. My lack of feeling makes me question myself as a person, as if I'm beginning to lose my empathy, or if I'm just becoming numb to tragic events. Ben's death was surprising and unexpected, but it wasn't the sharp punch to the gut that knocks the wind out of you that my friend Meredith's death was, or the car accident that killed my friend Robbie was, or the murder of my friend Shannon was. I was deeply in shock and in a deep grieving process for those friends. Why don't I feel the same punch to the gut for Ben? I just feel an emptiness, like the universal starlight just got a little bit dimmer -- but I am not sick with grief, and to some extent I feel guilty about that. Maybe it's part of the process. I don't know. 

Also in the days since his death, I have done my part in reaching out to those of us in our friend group who did not already know, essentially making me the bearer of bad news for a good chunk of people. When I did this, it was shocking to me to find how few of us are actually left and still in contact with, well, anyone from our friend group really. I felt a sense of duty, though, as his friend, to make sure other people from that era who would have also considered him a friend knew about his death. I would want others to do the same for me. Nobody I broke the news to actually knew of Ben's death. Part of that may have been to his own design; as an adult and after college, I got the sense that Ben was an intensely private person. He wasn't posting on Facebook every day (the last post I saw actually from him or by him was in 2017, thanking people for wishing him happy birthday). He may have been active in one online community or another, but I never saw any of it. The last time I personally heard from him one on one, it seems, is 2014 -- eight years ago, a few months before Daisy and I got married. I was still living in Kansas at the time. That seems like a lifetime ago now. We were in contact pretty regularly up until that point, though it started to wane around 2010, 2011. 

Ben was not married. Ben did not have any children (to his knowledge; that was a running joke in college that I still use to this day). Regardless, as far as I know he never had any kids. He had girlfriends here and there, including a long-term one for several years running, but his Facebook says "single." I know that to be incorrect, as his obituary mentions a girlfriend by name. I cannot imagine what she's going through. 

As he got older, just like many of us do, Ben appeared to have let himself get out of shape and he put on some weight. Hey, I don't judge. The latest few pictures I've seen of him, including some photos from what appears to be a friend's wedding about eight months ago as well as the photo included with his obituary, shows that in his later years he filled out a bit and became a heavier man, much like myself. That tells me that he was at least somewhat comfortable in life. He was still recognizably Ben in these new photos, but seeing him in them compared to when I knew him and when I was close with him was much like Luke Skywalker unhooding himself at the end of The Force Awakens, showing the fans how much he'd aged.

I'm sure Ben would appreciate being compared to Luke Skywalker, as well.

I have relatively few photos of Ben in my collection of pictures I've saved over the years, but no other photo of the man I've ever seen more exemplifies the Ben I knew than this one -- tan, muscular, thoughtful, and wearing the Mario shirt I must have seen him wear 20 times or more over the years. 

Thank you, Ben, for the memories and for your friendship.

I'll see you on the other side, brother.