What is a savage, really? To be brutal, vicious, fierce. Somebody with no restraint. If he had to categorize someone using that word, it might be Chon. But the guy is so full of layers and there is a certain savagery within those layers, that even someone as close as Ben can't understand. He's not like that, although he does a good job of pretending. To some extent, it's inevitable, being in this business.
Ben isn't as complex as he likes to make the world believe. He's travelled, he's seen what exists around him and still he finds there's too much out there that still waits to be discovered. There's pain and hardship and he knows, when it all comes down to it, he's only a small fish in a big ocean. That doesn't stop him from trying to make it right.
Sensitivity is not a weakness. He has tried to convince Chon of that often enough but the man's experiences tell him otherwise. You can't always heal what's damaged. Not that Ben cares about changing Chon.
The guy is his everything, his brother, best friend, the one he shares all he cares about with. He just wishes he could accept his emotional side, because Ben knows it is there. His best friend just refuses to let it get a solid grip.
He has let people down in his life and maybe it is an irrational urge or he is honestly as good-hearted as others make him out to be, but he finds solace in charity. Whoever thought up the system, the one that America clings to like a lifeline - laissez-faire, everyone to their own and all that bullshit, has obviously not looked at places like Africa.
People need help. And those who have the resources should feel obliged to help. Not enough of them realize how much it can give oneself to be giving to others. It's like with plants, with enough love and attention, they grow to reflect exactly what you give to them.
As a kid, he daydreamed about becoming a gardener, the kind that creates landscapes for royalty and has the most exotic plants at hand. Reality blessed him with even more. It introduced him to the greenery that breeds the mind-blowing sensations and money to practically swim in.
Sometimes he thinks back to the times in college, when he and Chon were full of crazy ideas. Insane plans for the future, the majority actually legal. But Chon has been in some of the darkest places a man can go and Ben let his idealism go soon enough. To get what you want, you beat the system with its own methods. Marijuana is illegal and the money they get from it is certainly just as shady. But he wasn't blessed with intellect for nothing. Outsmarting authorities doesn't feel as dangerous as it should with Chon beside him.
He's not in the drugs for the cash but for the art of it. Still, as his practical friend reminds him, it's money that makes the world go round in the end. Ben doesn't try to dispute that because it material terms, it is true. But when they're both lighting up as dawn breaks over Laguna, he likes to think his partner in crime understands the way he really feels about what they're doing here.
Ben knows O truly appreciates what he's doing. Never mind that she's been hooked far longer than he has. She's a lover too. She embraces emotions while being able to keep a distant eye on things. If he hadn't already had Chon as his ideal counterpart, he thinks she could have been a soulmate. He's come to see it doesn't work that way.
Chon is brutally honest in the way he lives, speaks, even in the manner he looks at people. Ben can read his movements as though they were his own by now. No thinking involved. O is more of a dreamer and a living, breathing mystery to him. He still can't quite place his finger on the moment they all became so entwined. Never mind when she walked into their lives.
He sees love, not just affection, when he looks at their relationship. It's a different love from the one that shines back at him from a starving girl's eyes, when he provides food. It's different from a young man's face when Ben gives him the opportunity for an education. Sometimes it overwhelms the love he feels for the world, for being alive even.
Before meeting O, he'd never thought about the concept of polyamory. At some point in his life, he did believe that there was a single person to be destined for. He enjoys the change of heart he's had and comes to think it's something he should have known all along. They all have something the other craves. There can never be a single soul that matches another as well as they do in their constellation. They've formed a perfect circle, where somehow, each of them gives and takes, as they need.