Pug Hill - Alison Pace [86]
I stand up straight. I take a deep breath. I don’t quite Take the Room; I take about half of it, but since the sweating has started, I figure the best thing to do right now is start. I steal a quick glance at my index card even though I’m pretty sure I know it all by heart.
“When I think about Benji Brown,” I say as my voice falters a little, “a British Invasion band from the Eighties is often playing—really loudly—in the background.”
I pause, look up. Lawrence is smiling at me brightly, he pumps a fist in the air. I can do this, I think. I continue. “It’s something about all the guys I went to high school with, something about the memory of hearing them blast their Smiths, their Cure, their Erasure, their Depeche Mode.” I close my eyes for a minute, I can still see them all: the way they were back then. I can see all the Flock of Seagulls haircuts, all the bangs. I can see the baggy pants folded at the bottom and rolled up, the black penny loafers with nickels where the pennies should be, all the sockless ankles.
“The second I saw Benji Brown, I knew he was going to be important. I knew it the second I saw him,” I say again, for emphasis, “I knew it right away. It was the summer before eleventh grade. There was Benji, at a party in someone’s basement in Northport, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I’d heard his name before; people had mentioned this guy who’d moved here from Boston and was coming to our high school in the fall. No one new ever came in eleventh grade, so by virtue of that alone he was special, and he was rumored to be this completely amazing soccer player, and then, of course, there was that name. His name, the first and the last name both starting with B, that he still went by Benji at sixteen years old, seemed so dorky, but at the same time so cool to me. He seemed so dorky and so cool to me.” And he was. He had the combination down. Equal parts dorky and equal parts cool. It is a mixture I think I’ve been searching for for some time. Come to think of it, ever since high school.
I speak clearly and not too fast. I tell them how Benji had such thick, curly dark hair, how it was a little bit like an Afro. I tell them how he had eyes that always looked a bit sad. I tell them how Benji’s family was Unitarian Universalist. I tell them how with Benji, I never felt weird for being Jewish and Catholic, something in high school I used to feel weird about a lot, and, as you know, sometimes still do. But Unitarian Universalist was like an entire religion that didn’t care that I was Jewish and Catholic, it was like a giant religious melting pot; the kind I’d always wanted to be able to see myself as. I tell them how Benji was a great athlete, but so sensitive, so completely void of any Captain of the Football Team behavior. Or rather, Captain of the Soccer Team behavior, because at my high school, all the cool boys played soccer.
“Also,” I continue, “there was a little bit of cinematic romance in the fact that he transferred in eleventh grade. Heathers was playing in the theaters the summer that I met Benji, and I sometimes thought of us as Christian Slater and Winona Ryder. Before, of course, they killed all Winona’s friends and blew up the school.” Everyone laughs, and I think that’s good, that I made people laugh. It’s good and it buoys me, so I can continue, and tell them about the most important part, about the mix tapes.
“Benji made the best mix tapes of anyone I’ve ever met, and most of the time, I think, of anyone I ever will. A lot of the time we spent, we spent listening to his mix tapes. We used to drive around to nowhere in his car, listening to Erasure and New Order and Flock of Seagulls and R.E.M. and The Smiths and The Cure, always The Cure, for hours. And then we’d pull over, and listen to them for a few hours more. I can remember kissing him a thousand times in that car.”
I leave out the part about how I can remember the exact feel of his body, the exact feel of my own, as he maneuvered himself over the stick shift,