A/N: Benny isn't mine, he belongs to Jonathan of course. This poem belongs entirely to Miss Nikki Giovanni. I only got one review for the last chapter come on people, I know you're out there!
Benjamin Coffin III, 34, Real Estate Broker
Benny is someone I did not expect to say yes to the project. He mostly keeps to himself among the gang, being by nature more on the introverted side. He's decided not to hang around here much. On top of that the others don't find him very likable, even those in the RENT group. Even though I disagree, liking him quite a bit and feeling flattered that he'd come back just to humor me, nothing about him ever said poetry to me. But then, I guess that's the point, to show how poetry can touch anyone.
Benny had asked very politely if we could do the interview away from everybody else. "I don't want Roger to know I'm into poetry," he'd confessed bashfully. "I'm in the closet." Roger gives Benny an especially hard time because of an affair between Benny and Mimi when she and Roger were on the rocks. I decided not to tell Benny that Roger was lined up as my last meeting.
Now he and I sit alone in my living room. The lights are low and the rain storm outside casts the whole room in a shroud of silvery light. Benny is across from me, perched on one of my mother's wrought iron chairs. He leans forward, shoulders hunched and rounded under his black sweater, and chews his bottom lip distractedly, looking half at me and half at his hands twisting in his lap.
"I'm a little nervous," he mumbles.
"Aw, don't be, Ben," I smile as I push "record." "Nobody's going to hear this but me."
He smiles halfheartedly.
"Never done this kind of thing before," he says. His voice is low, a deep alto with a light edge. I have a belief that black men make everything sound like love. Caught up in it I find myself saying:
"If you don't want to do it, you don't have to you know."
"No it's fine," he protests. "It's a cool idea. I wouldn't want you to think I was just some corporate drone. I got a little poetry in me too. Just about enough."
He's kidding around with me, but for some reason the words makes me sad.
"Hey, that's what this is for. Go when it feels good, okay?"
He lets out a breath and looks down at the piece of paper rolled over his leg.
"This is called, 'Just a New York Poem' by Nikki Giovanni," he says.
"I wanted to take
Your hand and run with you
Together toward
Ourselves down the street to your street
I wanted to laugh aloud
And skip the notes past
The marquee advertising "women
In love" past the record
Shop with "The Spirit
In The Dark" past the smoke shop
Past the park and no
Parking today signs
Past the people watching me in
My blue velvet and I don't remember
What you wore but only that I didn't want
Anything to be wearing you
I wanted to give
Myself to the cyclone that is
Your arms
And let you in the eye of my hurricane and know
The calm before
And some fall evening
After the cocktails
And the very expensive and very bad
Steak served with day-old baked potatoes
After the second cup of coffee taken
While listening to the rejected
Violin player
Maybe some fall evening
When the taxis have passed you by
And that light sort of rain
That occasionally falls
In New York begins
You'll take a thought
And laugh aloud
The notes carrying all the way over
To me and we'll run again
Together
Toward each other
Yes?"
The deep low voice ceases its reading and I am shaken a little outside the world of the poem. Benny looks back at me with a shy expression, as though he's wondering whether or not he did something wrong.
"That was it," he says.
"That was great," I reply, meaning it. He grins.
"Well, good, hard part's over." We both chuckle.
"So how'd this poem find you?" I ask.
He seems a little puzzled by the way I phrase the question, but says nothing about it.
"I read this poem for the first time when I was…ah I think a freshman in college. I was going to Brown University and I was taking a course in African American literature. Um…truth be told I thought it was a really useless course. I've never been much for English, as you can probably guess, especially poetry."
He laughs nervously as I give him a falsely reproachful look, but plunges on in spite of it.
"I know, I know. I mean I always felt like it was irrelevant to me personally. Learning about rhyme and meter has nothing to do with going to business school. And then we started reading Giovanni. We read a whole book of her work and I was like you know "whatever" about it. Then I graduated and moved to New York with Mark and Collins and Roger. And I remember one day just stepping off the train after living there about a month and looking around and thinking to myself, this is the most beautiful town on the face of the earth. And for some reason I'll never know, the whole poem just came flooding back to me. I went out and bought the book it was in for like a quarter because we had no money and even the food we bought was used."
He laughs to himself.
"And I just kept reading it over and over. Every time I read it I find something new about it. I love how clearly Giovanni shows you what she sees and how she makes everything very beautiful but in a grounded sense. Even things that shouldn't traditionally be beautiful, you know? The rejected violin player. The expensive and very bad steak served with day old baked potatoes. Like how New York is that, you know? I also really feel her overwhelming love to the person she's writing to. I, uh, I never really got that part until I met my wife Alison. We met when I was twenty six and she was twenty one. Her father was our landlord and uh…and he was a real asshole. Kinda like me actually." He chuckles quietly, sadly. "Sometimes I think the only reason she wanted to date me in the first place was to piss him off. How could she know I'd end up loving him more than her?"
He looks past me, rubbing his face nervously. Maybe he'll cry.
"Somehow we fell in love. Not at the very beginning and definitely not at the end but somewhere in the middle, after the third or fourth date. Once that happened I…I totally understood the love going through the poem. I realized wanted to run with Alison and show her the New York that I, and Giovanni, saw. So run we did and just like Giovanni said, when I was with her I felt 'the calm before.' And that vulnerability at the end, that question, that 'Yes?' I felt that too. That feeling of wanting a person so badly but fearing they'll refuse. It was just me, her and New York in those days."
He stops suddenly and looks back as though he'd forgotten I was there.
"So tell me why you love the poem."
I use on him that same gentle voice that I had on Angel. Benny sighs.
"I love this poem because it brings together my two great loves, New York and my wife. No matter what I've done to them both I'll always love them."
I nod and push stop on the recorder.
"Thanks, Benny."
"You're welcome," he replies with only the slightest hint of emotion.
We gather up our things in silence. I can see he's very deep in thought. Then as I start to walk away he calls:
"I read it to her."
I turn.
"We'd been going out for a month. I read it to her. Then she made love to me for the first time."
My face breaks into a grin.
"See that? Poetry gets you laid."
He laughs.
Yeah, I definitely like Benny.
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