Being Benji Campbell
Summary: This takes place before Love, Victor starts and during the first two seasons of Love Victor. Benji tells Victor his whole truth.
A/N: Trigger warning: I'm going to talk a lot about alcoholism and mental health throughout this story.
** I've had this idea in my head since I watched that episode in Season 1 where Benji talked about his DUI. I hope you enjoy it!
*** Also, the hill I am willing to die on is that Benji is 18. I refuse to write him any differently no matter how much the writers want to back-track on that decision. His license in S1 specifically said his birthday was November 16, 2002. He is 18. It's also the only way he could have been sober over a year and have had a suspended license. He had to have been at least 16 when he drove through the Wendy's. If he was under 16, he wouldn't have had his license when he drove. He wouldn't have been issued a suspended license; he just wouldn't have gotten it for however long they agreed upon during his hearing. If he got his 1-year sobriety chip a week before his birthday, then he's had two birthdays since he got sober. Even if he had his accident and immediately got sober without a single relapse (unlikely), he's had two birthdays since his accident. Thus, 18. There's no way around it.
~ Chapter 1: The Beginning ~
When I was eight, my parents bought me my first guitar for my birthday. It wasn't the drum kit I'd asked for, and actually begged for, but the moment I touched it, it was like the stars in my personal universe aligned. I didn't choose guitar; I genuinely believe the guitar chose me. It wasn't anything special – a relatively cheap acoustic guitar; it was cheap compared to the guitars that I would eventually own when my parents realized it wasn't just a phase, but it was the best gift I've ever received. I don't play it anymore, but I still have it. It's in the back of my closet right next to the keyboard I never touched after I got my guitar and in front of my lockbox. I'll get to that later.
I'd been playing piano for what felt like my whole life, and I enjoyed it, but I didn't love it. I fell in love with guitar that day. I fell in love with how the strings felt under my fingers, with how you could make so many different sounds with so little. I went to every lesson with a passion I never brought to school. I spent hours every day practicing whatever chords and eventually songs I learned during my lessons. It didn't feel like work to me; guitar felt like a way of life. I guess, in a lot of ways, you could say it was my first love. Playing guitar was the freest I ever felt… until I met you, Victor.
I love you, Victor, but I don't think you love me. I don't think you can because I have very carefully constructed a Benji Campbell for you to fall in love with. I cut out all of the bad parts of my life that I have trouble living with, and only showed you a tiny sliver of who I am.
I think I want to give us a real shot, but I can't do that until you know everything.
You deserve the whole truth; you deserve to be with someone who can talk to you about anything, so here it is. I didn't think I'd ever be able to share this with you, but I need you to understand. I need to give myself the chance to find out if someone can love me if they know everything. If you don't, I'll understand. I promise, I will. I think it's going to be really hard for you to love me once you see how much I've lied to you and kept from you. That's not me throwing a pity party; it's me being honest. You'll see.
I think I need to go back to the beginning.
You once asked me when I knew I was gay as if that was the start of everything. I told you the truth. My first kiss with a guy happened the summer before I started sixth grade and that was when everything clicked for me. It was my, "oh, yeah… that's what it's supposed to feel like" moment, but I didn't tell you the whole truth because long before I had my first gay kiss, I knew I was into guys… or I at least knew I wasn't into girls the way I should be.
My story didn't start with that kiss. No, it started long before that. It started with Jeremiah Jenkins. Yes, that Jeremiah Jenkins. He was my best friend when I was little. I know… shocking. But he was different when we were little; he grew up to be an ass, but he was great when we were young. He and I were inseparable. We used to go exploring in my backyard, pretending that we were on a wild safari or traipsing through the jungle or getting ready to board a rocket ship to fly amongst the stars.
We fake fought with one another, turning branches into swords. We used to climb this tree that my dad had removed after Jeremiah's little sister fell off of it and broke her arm. We were pirates and criminals and police officers and knights in shining armor. We took turns being rescued and doing the rescuing.
The Jeremiah you know… yeah, he's a dick, but he's not the same kid I grew up with. We'd been friends since birth. Literally. Our moms met while taking us for a walk in the hospital. His mom set off the alarm because she got too close to the door. I slept through the alarm, but he didn't, and my mom went to her rescue. We were born a day apart. Technically, we were born three hours apart, but my 11:52 arrival meant that I just made the cut-off and Jeremiah was born in the very early hours of the morning.
My mom insists that we were friends right away, but how could we have been? We were babies. Our friendship consisted of them laying us next to each other or putting our car seats side by side. Not exactly a true friendship right there.
That's all it took for our moms to consider us best friends and to use us as an excuse so they could get together. When we were old enough to actually play together, we were together all the time.
According to my mom, Jeremiah is the only reason I started walking because I wanted to be able to keep up with him. I don't remember that. My first memory is from when I was two-and-a-half, and Jeremiah's mom had his sister. Jeremiah spent three days with us because his mom was recovering from complications with her c-section.
When my mom showed us pictures of his new baby sister, I asked my mom if she was going to grow a little sister for me too. Surely if Jeremiah was getting a little sister, I'd get one as well. That's how everything had worked for us up to that point.
My mom broke down in tears. That night, she and my dad sat me down after Jeremiah went to sleep and explained that I was their little miracle and that I'd be their only miracle. My mom looked at me and said, "Benji, one day, when you're all grown up, you'll meet a woman that completes you and you'll realize that you take the miracles you can get. One is amazing. Two would have been great, but it wasn't in the cards for us."
I wouldn't know for a long time that my mom had been diagnosed with cancer while she was pregnant with me. They didn't tell me until I was twelve… don't even get me started on how much that fucked with my head. She started chemo after she had me because she didn't want to risk losing me. She got lucky; even though she waited, she went into remission quickly, but she couldn't have any more kids. I was it. The only one to pass on the Campbell name. I'm not even kidding; that's what my dad said.
Heavy stuff for a two-year-old, right? It was another thing I didn't think about right away, but I would. Trust me, I would.
I told Jeremiah all about that conversation the next day. I think he understood it about as much as I had. He put his hands on his hips before he said, "then we'll just have to share my sister."
At the time, I just agreed to live vicariously through him. When his little sister came home, I pretended she was my little sister. About a year and a half later, his mom had twins. By that point, we were five. We were getting ready to start Kindergarten, and he was my absolute best friend. There were no such things as boundaries. When the twins came, we used to pretend they were our babies. My mom told us, "two boys cannot have a baby."
In retrospect, I don't think she meant it that way. I think… I hope, she meant that anatomically, we couldn't make a baby and she obviously wasn't wrong, but our takeaway was that it wasn't something we were allowed to do.
We didn't stop; it just became our secret. I didn't understand why it was a big deal, but we were worried they'd make us stop if they knew, so we kept it to ourselves. We would sneak into the twins' nursery when our moms were watching one of their shows. We would pretend that we needed to feed the babies and burp the babies. We'd act like we were adults and make up imaginary scenarios that surely would have unfolded at our imaginary places of work. It was no different than what we'd overheard our parents do countless times.
You see, the secrecy didn't start when I realized I was gay. It started long before that when I was just a little kid. It was ingrained into me as I grew up. I knew that there was the Benji my parents loved and could be proud of and then there was me.
To this day, I wonder if things would have been different if they hadn't set the expectation that we were just best friends and if they hadn't set these boundaries for what was appropriate for two little boys to pretend. I sometimes wonder if maybe I wouldn't have made as much of a mess of things, but then again, I also think I could just be desperate to put some of this blame on someone else.
When I was five, pretending didn't make me feel guilty. It didn't mean as much then as it did when I was older. Back then, it was just about having fun and creating an imaginary world like we had a hundred other times. I didn't think either of us knew what it meant to be gay yet. We'd learn pretty soon into starting Kindergarten because this one kid in our class had two moms, and it was a whole thing that year, but I'll get to that later. You're probably wondering why I'm telling you this, but I have a point. I promise. I'm not ready to make that point yet, but what I will say is that when you start hiding stuff as a five-year-old, you quickly form a habit that is nearly impossible to break.
It was so easy for our pretend play as little kids to translate into my sexuality when I grew up. So easy and so damaging.
When we met Lucy, things somehow got even weirder. We met Lucy when we started Kindergarten. She was in the preschool class next door and recess and lunch were sectioned off by hallway, so we were with her. Our duo became a trio. The Three Musketeers, we used to get called.
Lucy joined our safaris in the backyard, she came with us to the park or the playground, she was one of us. You know that Lucy's awesome. I don't need to convince you of that, but it's important for you to know that I didn't actually like Lucy all that much in the beginning. Everything seemed kind of perfect with Jeremiah, and I didn't want anything to change, but it was almost expected of us. We spent one lunch with her and then suddenly, we were a package deal.
Jeremiah liked her right away, but I felt like I was kind of competing with her. Jeremiah was my best friend, after all. I didn't want anything to change between us, so I spent the first several months that we knew her trying to sabotage her. Granted, there was only so much I could do, so sabotaging her mostly involved suggested we do stuff that I knew Jeremiah loved and Lucy hated. Almost like it was proof that I was the better friend.
Eventually, I realized how great she was, and I stopped seeing her as an invader. She became my best friend. Not my "other" best friend, but one equally as important to me as Jeremiah. My time with Lucy was different. It didn't feel as secretive. If our parents caught us doing the same things that had gotten me in trouble with Jeremiah, they thought it was cute. I didn't understand why it was different. I mean, I knew Lucy was a girl and Jeremiah was a boy, but I didn't know what that had to do with anything.
When I went to pre-first while Jeremiah went to first grade, Lucy was the one to point out that this meant we'd be in the same grade. It cheered me up enough that I stopped thinking I was stupid and started thinking it was meant to be. Jeremiah and I saw each other all the time; this meant I'd get to see Lucy just as much.
Around Christmas time, my mom was talking to some woman at the grocery store that she somehow knew (my mom seemed to know everyone and all I knew was that it prolonged the torture of the grocery store). She told them about Jeremiah, my best friend, and Lucy, my girlfriend.
I had a vague idea of what she was saying, but I didn't really know what it meant to have a girlfriend or be someone's boyfriend. That didn't stop me from repeating it. The moment she called Lucy my girlfriend, everyone was calling her my girlfriend.
I asked my mom if Jeremiah could be my girlfriend too. She told me he wasn't a girl, so it wasn't possible. I thought about it and proudly said, "then he's my boyfriend."
She just laughed at me. Yeah, Vic. That's really what she did. As if the idea was too absurd to take seriously. She said, "no. it doesn't work like that."
I didn't think anything of it then, but I thought about that a lot when I realized I was gay and how my mom didn't think relationships worked that way. How, when I was little, I was allowed to have a girlfriend but not a boyfriend. If it wasn't allowed when I was little, how was it supposed to be allowed when I got older?
And, really, why don't we do that? Why don't we call two boys that are really good friends boyfriends when we are so quick to call a female friend a girlfriend? What is it that we are so afraid of? That a kid might learn from a young age that love is love? The shame.
Sorry, I got a little off topic there. I had a lot of time to think about it when I was trying so hard not to be gay. I don't want to sound like I'm assigning blame because, at the end the day, it's the decisions I made that led to where I am today. It's not my mom's fault or my dad's fault or your fault.
You once told me that I couldn't understand what it was like for you to be gay because I have liberal white parents, and you're right, Victor. I can't understand but having liberal white parents didn't change that the expectation was always that I was straight; it didn't save me from struggling with my sexuality or struggling to figure out how to come out to them. At the time, I didn't tell you this because I was so scared. I didn't know that you were about to tell Rahim about me; I thought if we had even the slightest chance of getting through this, I needed to be as unproblematic as possible. We still lived in a bubble, albeit a fragile one that I was desperately trying not to pop.
I'm not saying I have the hardest life, but it was hard, mostly because of the decisions I made but partly because we live in a world where you're straight until you say otherwise and that sucks. It was shoved down my throat before I even fully knew what it meant to be attracted to someone. By the time I understood, I was too scared not to meet that expectation.
So, yeah. I believe in my heart that that's where it all started. It was the beginning of the end, you know. The beginning of me realizing that who I was wasn't who anyone else wanted me to be.
Because, as they joked about me and Lucy growing up and getting married, Jeremiah factored into the equation as my best man or my best friend or sometimes not at all. It never felt right, but I didn't know why. I was just a little kid, after all. I was learning about the world through the people around me, and the lesson I learned was that little boys and little girls were supposed to pretend to get married. Not little boys and little boys.
I'm not saying I knew then because that would be a lie but, I swear, Victor, I knew something wasn't right with that picture of me and Lucy and the future.
I didn't know, wouldn't know for a long time in fact, what that something was. But in order for you to understand, for you to truly understand, that was where I needed to start.