My Friend Ben (Not His Real Name) Alexander Gardner

I was sissy as a little kid. All my friends were girls—Jennifer, Becky, Heather. I was oblivious to boys my age, and afraid of the older ones. In Fifth grade I once found myself in the dreaded situation of being in the gym locker room alone with an eighth grader, Jack. I stopped dead when I saw him, standing terrified in my tighty whities. He was sitting on a bench, and calmly said to me, “You don’t have to be afraid.” Jack went on to establish a bank for low-income people. He was hero material. As handsome as a man named “Jack” should be.

My town had no school of its own, and after fourth grade we had all transferred from Hinesburg to Williston. On the first day, sitting in a circle on the floor, as I desperately looked around the room, I was relieved when I saw my neighbor, Becky. I said her name and she rolled her eyes, as though my presence was a serious social setback for her.

That might have been the moment I decided to reinvent myself and put some effort into understanding boys. I became friends with curly blond-headed kid named Chris Hood, and the first time he came over to spend the night I hung a sheet over the shelves where I displayed my stuffed animals. I fell in with the popular guys—Richard, Doug, Gordon, Dave, and Hero Jack’s younger brother Ben.

Ben was charismatic, handsome, funny, and friendly to everyone. He was the third of four boys, and for the rest of middle school I did everything I could to become the fifth. It was like belonging to an exclusive club. His family lived in a big old farmhouse with outbuildings and two staircases that I still dream about climbing. Ben proudly told me how his mother looked like Princess Diana. She baked shortbread that they called scones. It took me years to understand what a real scone was and to learn the actual name of shortbread, and even now I think of Mrs. Anderson and Princess Diana whenever I eat either.

The Andersons had a second house on Lake Iroquoise that I could get to by biking, so I was there most of the summers before and after Eighth Grade. I ate meals, slept, kept clothes there, knew the neighbors.

Ben and I once went together on a bus to visit his grandmother down in central Vermont. I don't remember her, but her house had gables, and flowery wallpaper. On the way down we sat in the back, and at a gas station Ben bought a pack of cigarettes which we tried to smoke. He did OK, but I couldn’t figure out the cigarettes, including what he was doing with them in the first place.

The moment we got to high school Ben dropped me. He pursued the upperclassmen so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to follow, not that he invited me. He was still friendly, but that near-blood bond we had forged and that I had thought would be lifelong was simply gone. We moved in the same circles—the theater-art room-band-chorus crowd—but he went to parties that I found out about afterwords. There was no recognition from him that we had ever been close. I was just one of the many.

I didn’t know what I had done. It hurt. Perhaps had I tried harder to keep him he would have brought me along as he rose in the school’s social hierarchy and made friends with beautiful people from other schools. He was a magnet for creative people. He would surely be a movie star, or a famous doctor, or an author of novels.

Needless to say, we lost touch after graduation. I had heard through my sparse High School contacts that Ben never went to college, never had a career, never really did much with all his talent aside from some impressive paintings. About ten years ago he was waiting tables in Brooklyn when he wrote me and asked to meet.

We sat in Union Square, and he reminded me of an encounter a year after we’d left High School. I had been sitting with a group of friends when I saw him, and spitefully called out, “Hey Ben, you still arrogant?” He told me he knew then how much he had hurt me by dropping me our freshman year, and now, so many years later, he’d asked to meet so he could apologize.

Ben told me that he had started drinking that first semester in High School and drank every day since. Only now, when we were both pushing fifty, had he become sober, and I was on his eighth-step list. 

Being dropped at fourteen had really hurt. It was the first time someone I loved had shut me out, and it was hard to trust male friends after. For thirty years I had thought of Ben only as someone who had hurt me, someone I had lost.

All that time wasted. I never looked past his glamor, not once had I considered that he was in crisis. So concerned with the pain he had caused me I didn’t think to ask him if he was OK. I’m the one who should apologize to him. And really, anyone out there, I forgive you already, and I’m sorry I’m so wrapped up in myself that I haven’t checked in.