---

Benny is three.

It is often suggested in the Coffin household that Benjamin was an accident. Although Benny does not quite comprehend how a person can be an accident, he understands that this is probably why Ma and Da don't like him that much. He knows they don't like him because sometimes Da just turns around and glares at him, says mean things, and mutters, "Goddamn condoms." Benny doesn't know what a goddamn condom is, but he can tell it has something to do with why Da doesn't like him.

Ma is a different story altogether. Although she doesn't hate Benny as much as Da does, she too gives him looks of loathing occasionally. However, she sometimes sits in his room while he tries to get to sleep, his breathing evened and dreams prewritten as a result of the creak of Ma's rocking chair. She doesn't speak to him – ever – or sing, the way some Benny knows some mothers do to their kids, but Benny is happy for her presence, regardless. It makes him feel like maybe even if Ma doesn't flat-out love him, she at least doesn't hate him and avoid him like the plague, the way Da does.

At three, Benny knows how to react around Ma and Dad. He keeps his head down, watches his feet, and wonders what he could do to get Ma and Da to like him. He cleans up the apartment, which Da growls hasn't been the same since Benny was born, and offers childishly to skip Christmas to save money. Christmas is something he has read and heard of, but never celebrated; however, as all three-year-olds do at some point, he experiences difficulty in differentiating between fiction and reality, and feigns memories of celebrating it. Ma tells Da it's cute, and it's natural; Da tells Ma that she should just shut up, that her job is to keep the house neat and not to back-talk him.

Suitably chastised, those are the times when Ma retreats to Benny's room and watches him. She never speaks to him, though. Never.

----

Benny is four.

Since Da and Ma hate him that much, he is banished from the apartment briefly, sent to Grandpa's apartment in Perth Amboy. Benny has never met Grandpa before, so is nervous about going, but when he arrives, he is forced to face his fears. Ma and Da drop him and his bag on the front porch and drive away, leaving the only child completely alone to ring the doorbell, petrified of who or what will be on the other side.

As it turns out, Grandpa is just an old person. His long, textured dark hair matches Ma, and its many dreadlocks bounce against his back in a ponytail. Benny considers this impressive; he's never seen any man with such long hair before, just as he has never seen anyone whose hands tremble the way Grandpa's do. And certainly, he has never been addressed by anyone the way Grandpa addresses him upon their first meeting: "Hey, kid. I guess you're Maya's kid, huh?" Without waiting for an answer and without peering to see if Ma and Da are outside, he uses the strength of a true seventy-nine year old and hoists Benny's single bag into the air, then tosses it into the living room. "Nothing fragile in there, I hope?" Grandpa asks lightly. Benny only shakes his head, too shocked to speak.

Over the three weeks they spend together, Benny learns a few things about Grandpa. One is that not all people who smoke are intimidating; by a drunken Da, Benny has been mockingly offered many a cigarette in his life, and learned to fear them. Grandpa, however, explains to his grandson that the cancer-causing substances themselves are not what ought to be feared. Addiction, he emphasizes, is the true fear, and nearly-eighty-year-olds don't have much to fear by way of addiction anyway. Benny doesn't understand, but he pretends he does.

When he is picked up by Ma and Da, Benny is deeply sorrowful to say a last farewell to Grandpa, beer, and television, none of which are available in his own home. He says nothing of the sort to his parents, however, and sits silently throughout the rest of the car ride. It is hardly out of character for him, after all.

-----

Benny is five.

Knowing as he does that most people his age have friends, Benny attempts to make some of his own. He sneaks out of the apartment one day, creeps downstairs, and scampers across the street just as a little girl just his age sneaks out of her own house. "Hi," he says, popping up out of the bushes. "I'm Benny, I live over there." He points, unable to comprehend the girl's horrified expression. "You wanna play?"

"You live with poor people," she tells him accusingly. "You're icky." With that, she galllops away to join the man who just now emerges from the same building she came out of. Irritated and hurt, Benny watches for a few minutes as the girl recounts the events to the man who must be her father. Instead of feeling upset, however, Benny sighs.

It is people like these that make him wonder why mean people are allowed to exist. They don't do anything good for the world, right? So what is the purpose in their existence? Is it to present a roadblock for the innocent, or to make live interesting? Is it to make people more different from each other? Or maybe, Benny thinks, visualizing Da as he climbs the stairs to his second-story apartment, maybe mean people exist because nobody knows how to get rid of them. Maybe they're too hateful and hurtful and scary for people to eliminate them from the earth – and therefore, there is nothing to do but let them live.

------

Benny is six.

The fact that he still cannot read is a cause for alarm; although Grandpa's monthly-or-so visits are filled with attempts to teach the child to read, none are successful, and Da claims that school is stupid anyway. So it seems that the child will not be attending school in the near future – until, that is, Grandpa takes the matter up with Da in private. It is a long four hours for Benny, whose ear is pressed against the door as he pretends to try to tie his shoes. Though he doesn't understand most of the words Da and Grandpa say, he pretends he does, which is usually enough anyway.

Da and Grandpa emerge, and Benny scampers into the living room, where he studies his fingernails carefully. Da then leans over, jerks his son's head up, and growls, "You start school on Monday, you little prick."

Benny waits the seventy-one seconds for Da to disappear outside before he leaps up and hugs Grandpa. He doesn't quite understand the concept of "school," but he knows that it means getting out of the house and getting to meet other little people like himself. "Thanks," he gushes to Grandpa, not knowing any other ways to express his undying gratitude. Grandpa briefly surveys the boy that is so unexpectedly like him before sighing deeply and offering Benny a place in his apartment for the day. Grateful beyond words, Benny consents, delightedly resigning himself to a day of entertainment at Grandpa's.

-------

Benny is seven.

He wonders how a person can inspire such fear in people as Da does. Ma, he suspects, is afraid of Da, and that is a fear the he himself knows he has. Da is a terrifying presence, of course; there is no getting around that. Ma, while she may simply be a naturally fearful person, appears to Benny to have once been a truly strong individual prior to the abuse she suffered at Da's hands. It makes Benny wonder how she was prior to the marriage, to meeting Da and having Benny and becoming Mrs. Coffin instead of Miss Whoever-She-Was-Before.

Benny resolves at this point to never get married – ever – for love or money or anything. He doesn't know what Ma married Da for, considering that she doesn't love him and he certainly lacks money. Or maybe Ma had no say in it; Benny recalls reading about arranged marriages in Social Studies. Maybe that's what this is, an arranged marriage. But Benny can't forget the remarks about his being an accident, and he remembers that arranged marriages were originally invented to improve finances and have attractive babies. At least, that's what he was told in school.

The only logical conclusion is that Ma didn't choose, Benny decides, to marry Da. If that is the case, Benny's loathing for his father is intensified a thousand times over, because it means that the biggest decision of Ma's life was made without her own approval, which is Da's fault.

If that is truly the case, Benny knows that Da is a terrifying person indeed.

--------

Benny is eight.

Although Da has always given him mean looks and insults, Benny has never yet received a physical blow from his father until one evening, following the consumption of nine glass bottles of yellowish liquid that Benny vaguely recognizes from Grandpa's house. At first, Benny barely registers the punch to his face, but it is only a second later that he is kneeling on the floor, clutching the nose that may be broken and is gushing blood onto the little boy's hands.

Fortunately for Benny, Ma hears his whimpers and emerges from the kitchen to investigate. Finding her son sprawled on the floor with a broken nose, she can think of naught else to do than to pick up the phone and call an ambulance, as well as her own father. Grandpa arrives before the sirens do – in fact, the sirens are simply turned off, but he does arrive before the ambulance does. Benny, with a towel pressed to his nose and tears running down his face, merely squeaks and whimpers.

Although Benny is never informed of the evening's next goings-on, he knows that he is placed into the ambulance with Ma. While he is rushed to the hospital, Grandpa and Da have an enormous argument, ending with a sharp hook to Da's jaw and a dramatic exit on Grandpa's part. What Benny does find out later is that from there, Grandpa walks directly to the police station and fills out a report on domestic violence, accusing Da of hurting Benny and Ma on a regular basis.

Nine days later, Benny is released from the hospital, and instead of being driven "home," he is taken to Grandpa's house. As Ma explains to her son, she and Da need some alone time right now, and since Benny loves Grandpa so much, it shouldn't be a problem, should it?

---------

Benny is nine.

In school, it is easy for him to place the different kinds of kids there are. Labels are important to him, due to his intense need to classify everyone based on their relationships with him. For example, he recognizes that in school, there are the kids whose financial and political status matches his. There are those whose families are quite on the opposite spectrum, as well, and the greasy mini-city of Perth Amboy appears not to exclusde those either. Some kids in Benny's class are right smack in the middle, the way Grandpa says he was when he was younger.

He classifies them by race as well, figuring that it impacts their personalities and certainly the way he reacts to them, and by gender and just about everything else he can imagine. Still, he finds that his classmates' economic statuses are the most telling when it comes to defining how they relate to one another, because he has never once, since the age of five, managed to speak to the middle- and upper-middle-class students in his school. Although his friends are few and forgettable, they are predominantly black and poor, like Benny himself.

Still, he can't help but wonder what it might be like to be friends with different people. If he's only been with one kind of people for his whole life so far, how does he know he likes them better? Simply put: he doesn't. But intuition advises him against trying to be part of a group that he clearly wasn't meant to enter.

----------

Benny is ten.

There is no doubt in his mind what is to be done on Father's Day in school, which is observed with the rigid stillness of a religious holiday. Fathers are invited to a brunch at school where they will be served food made by their children, and while this is a cause for concern to Grandpa, Benny merely shrugs and takes his mentor's hand, dragging him to the car. "You can stay until three today, right?" he asks conversationally as the car pulls into the school parking lot, and it is with that that the two enter the school together, Grandpa playing the role of Benny's father not for the first time.

In the months immediately following this occasion, Benny realizes with certainty that Grandpa truly is his father figure. Were it not evident before, it certainly is now; between Grandpa's fervent completion of the papers enrolling Benny in middle school and his great care not to offend the impressionable boy, he is everything Da never was. Their home, a ranch – a single-story house with two bedrooms, a kitchen-slash-living-room, and a bathroom – is far more suitable for the boy than was the apartment he once shared with Ma and Da, in which heat was never a guarantee and food was even rarer.

In September of his tenth year, Benny asks Grandpa if he could please call him Da, just to enforce the title at which Grandpa stands in his life. Although Grandpa refuses to allow that, he does tell Benny the following: "Someone doesn't need a label to have an important place in your life. You know? I could be your friend, your grandpa, your father, whatever. It doesn't make our relationship any different."

-----------

Benny is eleven.

It is at this age that Grandpa first explains to Benny the wonder that is a garage sale. Ma and Da are out one day, so the two stealthy Coffins creep into their apartment and retrieve long-forgotten goods from one of their closets. Then, Benny and Grandpa select certain items of their own that are able to be sold, slap price stickers on them, throw them all on a table, and place the whole display outside, along with two folding chairs borrowed from the upstairs neighbor, who is an actor and often performs for the public in his own apartment.

People who come to buy certain items are not, thankfully, Ma and Da. Instead, those that purchase things are people from all over the building, people who are charmed by Benny's manners and Grandpa's friendly demeanor. As for those idiots passing through Perth Amboy on their way back to the suburbs, Benny and Grandpa have hastily-scrawled tags with higher prices and slap them on over the original prices. When Benny laughs and asks why they do this, Grandpa shrugs and says that he figures he can get more money from the rich idiots.

The strange thing is that it works. By the end of the day, Benny and Grandpa have sold half of their belongings and have made a hundred and forty dollars, nearly half of which was made as a result of the presence of suburban idiots. Out to dinner go the two beaming Coffins, and then to a bar where Benny's presence is perfectly natural considering Grandpa's frequent orders, and then, at last, they go back home. At that time, only seventeen dollars remain, which Grandpa figures is just enough money to pay the ticket he is bound to get for putting his yard sale table in handicapped parking spaces and leaving it there overnight.

Then again, he might need to sell the rest of the stuff before he can pay the entire ticket, but seventeen bucks is a pretty good start.

------------

Benny is twelve.

His former habitat with Ma and Da is called to his attention again. Although he has not visited since his ultimate departure from "home," it is deemed worthy of Benny's attention when Grandpa informs him that Ma is, well, dead. His stammering is the proof of it – even before Grandpa actually manages to say the word "dead," Benny is out of his seat and in the cheap, battered car, waiting to be driven somewhere, anywhere, so he can kill Da and mourn Ma and then help with the funeral plans. But alas, it happens quite differently. Grandpa does, yes, join Benny in the car, but it is to get to the hospital and confirm that the death was a result of domestic violence.

Unlike many a son in his case, Benny does not whimper and suspect that it was his fault – if only he'd stayed, he could have saved Ma. No; instead, Benny merely sits in silence, lets tears fall down his cheeks, and asks quietly when he can testify. In his area, minors are permitted to stand as witnesses in cases that concern him, and so it is a mere week before he can stand up in court and accuse Da of hurting Ma.

A week after that, Benny wears a rented tuxedo and stands up at Ma's funeral, speaking about her. He was never particularly close with her, it's true, but he certainly loved her, and isn't that enough? He speaks to relatives he has never met and will never see again, explaining that yes, Da did this to her, and he will be punished suitably (ten to fifteen years, it has been said), but it will do nobody any good to complain and hiss over Da's wrongdoings and forget all about Ma's contributions to the world.

When Benny gers home to his and Grandpa's apartment, it is over his first cigarette that the two Coffins mourn the mother and daughter that will certainly be missed.

-------------

Benny is thirteen.

In his entrance to the world of adolescence, he takes a brief moment to review the status of his life at this point in time. No, it does not concern money or politics, but rather, he wonders about love, in particular.

He loves Grandpa, and he loved Ma. He knows he does not and never did love Da, but rather the idea of turning up victorious over him. Is it wrong to love an idea? Benny doesn't know, nor does he really know anything about love. Living with a seventy-odd-year-old man who was never married and only had one kid isn't exactly the best environment for a teenager who wants to know about love, but he tries his best – without asking Grandpa, that is, because he doesn't want to see that battle. Grandpa is a staunch non-believer in love. But Benny is of the secret opinion that Grandpa loves him. At least, he hopes so.

In desperation, Benny decides on five non-living things that he loves. One is ethics, morals and his conscience, which he groups together and adores because of his deep-rooted loathing for those mean people he always has to see in school. The next is individuality and nonconformity, because he wonders exactly how horribly he would have turned out, had he not grown up in an environment where he feels comfortable and able to be himself.

Benny also loves Perth Amboy. It is a city he might describe as "ratty" if he did not live there, and even sometimes despite his ties to it, but he loves it anyway. Why? Simply for its culturally diverse background and "I really don't care about your personal matters" attitude. It is far from suburbia, and Benny loves it for that.

Two more things Benny loves are almost exactly the same thing: knowledge and education. To some, anyway, these would be seen as identical, but Benny knows better. What he knows is rarely what he is taught formally, and vice versa. For example, he knows that he is an individual, and yet he has never been told that. It is his own idea, and to Benny, at least, it is a hundred percent accurate.

Does it really matter what other people have to say on the matter? Not to Benny.

--------------

Benny is fourteen.

Now that he is in high school and has a much greater chance of somehow accessing cigarettes, Benny finds a lot of the stress from his life draining away. That is to say that while in eighth grade there was a modicum of pressure for him to get acceptable grades, here, he couldn't care less. He snags cigarettes and lighters and joints from his fellow students, lighting up his drug of choice and letting all his stress drain into the burning object. As his cigarettes turn to ashes, Benny watches the flame slowly die out, wondering if a cigarette would be too profane a metaphor for life itself to be put into a poem for school. He decides that if it comes from his heart, it should be okay.

In high school, it is odd, but he finds things much more relaxed and less tense. He shares cigarettes with Grandpa at home, although he finds that Grandpa smokes less and less, coughing more and more. He drinks with Grandpa, at least, maintaining an attitude of "fuck the fucking drinking age" as he goes to purchase six-packs of beer for himself and his grandfather. The people at the convenience store very clearly do not give a shit, and grin at the young teenager as he comes in every day with a twenty-dollar bill hanging out of his shirt pocket.

Although his teachers would love to hear that the drugs and alcohol are making his life more stressful, that is simply not the case. It is a fact, Benny decides, that he is a zillion times more comfortable sprawled on the couch, dragging on a cigarette, than he is in the same position with, say, potato chips.

Potato chips, he decides, are a kid's delicacy. But for a fourteen-year-old with pressure in school and a liberal grandfather, is there really anything keeping him away from a few joints and cigarettes a day? Not at all.

---------------

Benny is fifteen.

He is surprised to discover that in reality, he is perfectly content with his life with Grandpa. Sure, kids his age love to preach about how they are rebels, but try as he might, Benny cannot find a single thing in his life that he would like to rebel against. No; he is happy as everything is, and wouldn't change it one bit.

He wouldn't run away, or leave home or school. Life is pleasantly simple when he wants it to be, and sure, it has its complications when he craves interesting roadblocks – and yes, it happens often enough. He wouldn't want to live away from Grandpa, not because he doesn't think he can, but because he loves Grandpa and wouldn't want to be apart from him. It's almost that he's in love with the way life is now, even if he doesn't live with Da, even if Ma is dead, even if he doesn't have any siblings or friends or people his own age to love. No, Grandpa is enough for Benny, and wanting anything more would seem a bit like pushing his luck. O

Sure, it's fine to live in the dirty, crime-ridden Perth Amboy. He doesn't mind the crappy apartment, doesn't mind being poor, doesn't mind any of it. Really, the only thing he does mind is that Grandpa is coughing a lot more than usual now, and he seems sick, but won't let Benny do anything about it. "I'm fine," he says, and Benny is skeptical but unwilling to cause a fight. What good would it do, anyway?

Circumstances can only improve when there is a will for them to do so, Benny knows, and he really doesn't want anything to change. In fact, change is is greatest fear at the moment, and that is what he is afraid might happen.

----------------

Benny is sixteen.

It happens too quickly for him to make anything of it. The days pass by in a blur, Grandpa coughing on the sofa and refusing to be taken to the hospital. After the days turn into a solid month, the hospital cannot be avoided, and Benny comes home from school ready to tell Grandpa that when he finds the house devoid of any breathing save for his own. Grandpa is found dead in his sleep, a cigarette's fresh ashes speckling the bedsheet and Grandpa's clothing.

Benny has seen his mother's death. Rather, he has been privy to its consequences. In this case, it is far more serious; at the time of Ma's death, the two had lived with each other for far shorter a time, not to mention the fact that the two were never close. Grandpa has been Benny's mentor and role model since as far back as he can remember, and besides, he and Grandpa have been close all their lives. He is – was – Benny's guardian, for god's sake.

As was the case with Ma, Benny is left all Grandpa's money and possessions. As for the material objects, he sells them, then spends a good deal of his acquired money on a car – a Range Rover, which is far less shitty than what he always expected to drive, should he ever have managed to come into possession of an automobile. With the Range Rover, Benny drives – just drives. He drives from Perth Amboy through a dark tunnel, trying not to hallucinate Grandpa as he does, and ends up in New York. Whether or not it was deliberate, Benny will never be able to remember, but he can recall his sharp intake of breath upon entering the city.

Manhattan is no Perth Amboy, but it has no memories for Benny, none good nor bad. It has no familiar faces, no shabby old apartment that contains just about every cigarette Benny ever smoked. It doesn't have things like yard sales or headline news about domestic violence-caused murders, and for god's sake, it doesn't have all the fuckery Benny intends to never see again – the fuckery that is his childhood, that is. He resolves to change himself, to make himself unrecognizable from who he was formerly.

The first thing he does on that quest is to find his own apartment, which he ends up sharing with roommates (so it isn't really his own). It takes three weeks to do so.

What he does immediately afterward is to drop the habit of smoking and drinking and smoking pot – and it is easy enough, probably as a result of the trauma of finding one's mentor in bed, dead, with cigarette ashes sprinkled over his blankets and a cremation to come.

Benny has always feared change, so it is quite a bad sign when the next thing he does, years and yearslater, is to break the promise he sealed for himself years and years prior. He gets married.

If that isn't a sign that Benny's life is starting to go utterly downhill, he will never know what is.