Ben and I: A Christmas Story

COPYRIGHT © 2006 BY GENE BREWER.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2006909189

ISBN 10: HARDCOVER 1-4257-1879-5

SOFTCOVER 1-4257-1880-9

ISBN 13:   HARDCOVER 978-1-4257-1879-4

SOFTCOVER   978-1-4257-1880-0

EBOOK     978-1-4771-7955-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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CONTENTS

1:    Ben

2:    The Park

3:    Frankenstein’s Monster

4:    National Pastime

5:    Sirens

6:    Pigeons

7:    Crazy Otto

8:    Eternity

9:     Neighbors

10:   Lost Dog

11:   Snow

12:   April Fool

13:   H’less Blind Vet w/ AIDS

14:   Spring

15:   The Laundromat

16:   The Flower

17:   The Pigeon Man

18:   Horses

19:   Fricka

20:   Rain Showers

21:   Landmarks

22:   Church Bells

23:   The Vet

24:    Joggers

25:   The River

26:   Dreamers

27:   Blossoms

28:   Best Friends

29:   Graduation

30:   Realities

31:   The Parade

32:   Mirrors

33:   The Mongrel

34:   Basketball

35:   The Storm

36:   The Bat

37:   The Sun

38:   Pavarotti

39:   The Banger

40:   The Wedding

41:   Cri de Coeur

42:   National Holiday

43:   Drinking Buddies

44:   Stars

45:   Night Life

46:   Trash ‘n’ Treasure

47:   The Magic Dwarf

48:   Summer Heat

49:   Olympic Skaters

50:   Courage

51:   Life and Death

52:   Rebirth

53:   Gulls

54:   The Bible Salesman

55:   Truck Farm

56:   Potpourri

57:   The Idiot

58:   Ambrosia

59:   Vincent

60:   Brigitte

61:   The Blind Man

62:   Music

63:   The Pretzel Man

64:   Statues

65:   Grass

66:   Dead Tree

67:   Twins

68:   Street Fair

69:   The Juggler

70:   The Elephant Man

71:   Leader of the Pack

72:   Blue Sky

73:   Peace

74:   Leaves

75:   Books

76:   Filmmaking

77:   The Poet

78:   The Children

79:   Duke

80:   Halloween

81:   Winter Chill

82:   Blackie

83:   The Exhibitionists

84:   The Preacher

85:   Late Autumn

86:   Change

87:   The Last Robin

88:   Repairs

89:   Perspectives

90:   Thanksgiving

91:   Fog

92:   Cleopatra

93:   The Fire Station

94:   Cold Weather

95:   Goodwill

96:   A New Life

97:   Hell’s Angels

98:   The Good Samaritan

99:   Christmas Eve

100: Christmas

OTHER BOOKS BY GENE BREWER

K-PAX

K-PAX II: On a Beam of Light

K-PAX III: The Worlds of Prot

K-PAX: the Trilogy, featuring Prot’s Report

Creating K-PAX

Alejandro, in Twice Told

Murder on Spruce Island

Wrongful Death

to Juan Ramón and Platero

in the heaven of Moguer

1

BEN

I don’t know how old Ben is, but when we go to the dog run in the park he is like a puppy. All the other dogs come at him, bouncing and yipping, while I fumble with his rope. They coax him to the center of the great arena, his ridiculous orange coat flashing from time to time like an enormous carrot among the blacks and browns of his entourage. They roll him over and the timeless Bacchanalia begins.

On the sidelines the spectators congregate to chat and watch the buffoonery. We never look at each other, and no one knows anyone else’s name, only those of the dogs. Ben is happiest dog in pahk, the Chinese woman tells me, and it is true, despite his cocked eyes and general clumsiness. But this has nothing to do with me.

It was nearly a month ago, on a cold February morning, that I found him pressed against the wrought-iron fence enclosing my living quarters, shivering and asleep. I opened the swinging gate—it is never locked, though I wire it shut to confuse would-be interlopers—and invited him in to share my breakfast. Without a moment’s hesitation he bounded down the half-dozen steps and sat immediately with one cocked eye on my bananas, the other on the gate. One of his ears was bent back, giving him the absurd appearance of someone who doesn’t know his socks don’t match. Despite his enormous size and dearth of eye co-ordination he took the bites of fruit with the delicacy of a surgeon.

Everyone assumes we are homeless. That is not true. We have a home, we just don’t pay rent. Although it suffers from a certain lack of amenities it is relatively warm in winter, cool in summer, and there is no doorman to tip. It is quiet and convenient to the park, churches, schools, shopping. Camouflaged by a pair of large plastic trash cans, there is ample room for sleeping, dressing, and storage of all our belongings, which consist of an extra set of clothing for myself, a few cans of soup, a leaky air mattress, two blankets, a sketch pad, notebooks, a discarded thesaurus, and the usual odds and ends. In exchange for these facilities we keep an eye on the empty flat, beneath whose sidewalk we sleep, for the absent owner.

Ben breaks away from the group and runs over to me. I know what he wants. It’s okay, Ben, I tell him, and he lopes to a corner for his morning bowel movement. While I look for a discarded newspaper to pick up the steaming excrement he bounds away to find his best friend, Fricka. But the nameless people are beginning to leash their companions and return to their warm apartments, the latter to doze and wait, doze and wait, the former to pursue whatever endeavors their lives have taken them to.

I, too, must work; I slip Ben’s rope around his great round neck and we leave the park. He trots animatedly at my side as if we are going to the fair, though he knows full well it is only to the savings and loan, where I hold the door for people to come in and deposit their money or take out what they have put in earlier. All morning we work the door, Ben accepting the occasional pat of a familiar hand, and I the passing inquiry as to his health, though rarely does anyone ask after my own. Have a nice day, I offer inanely to the tippers because they expect it, and to the penurious to shame them, though it rarely works.

By noon we are rich with nickels and dimes, enough for me to buy a day’s meals from the Korean grocery and deli while Ben waits outside, his rope draped over the hydrant, never moving and never taking one or the other eye off the entrance until I emerge, greeting me as though I have just returned from a long and dangerous voyage.

It is an unusually clear day and we have lunch on the bench with the good view of the city skyline, Ben sitting attentively at my feet, waiting confidently for the last bite or two of my tomato and sprouts sandwiches, apple, and oatmeal raisin cookies. I give him a whole cookie. Ben loves oatmeal raisin.

2

THE PARK

If the shallow cave where we sleep is our bedroom, then the park is our kitchen, dining area, bath and parlor. Our favorite bench faces its entire length and we can see everything simultaneously: the chess tables, the dog run, the circular arena where the jugglers and musicians perform, the vendors. It is near the playground, and our afternoons are filled with the rich, innocent, untrammeled laughter of children.

From the north one enters the park through a huge concrete arch celebrating the inauguration of the father of our country. Statues of the Italian patriot Garibaldi and someone named Holley watch the passersby from their high pedestals, where they have stood for decades. But these are lifeless edifices which do not interest Ben and me, not when a microcosm of all humanity, its dogs and its horses, even the odd pet deer or parrot (an ostrich once) traverse the square day and night until they close the place at midnight to evacuate the bums and derelicts like ourselves.

It is surrounded by a great private university, whose main library and one of its attendant churches face us across the street from the southern boundary. Students of every discipline, yammering continually about the minutiae of their cloistered lives, frequent these hallowed sidewalks, oblivious to the plight of those who call the park their home: Crazy Otto, Mabel, Vincent the artist, the pigeon man, the Banger, and various transient drunks and other addicts, not to mention the squirrels, birds, rats, trees, shrubs and flowers which contribute substantially to the color and ambience.

But it is the sounds—the yelling, the crying, the barking, the laughter, the music—which continuously remind us that we are a part of nothing less than existence itself, with all its joys and sorrows. Life, whatever else it may be, is clamorous.

3

FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER

Whenever we come across Mabel, the heavy-set woman who stays in the corner of the park, I always think of Debby Hatcher, the little girl at school who was so bundled up in winter that she walked like Frankenstein’s monster: stiff-armed, stiff-legged, silent. She was such a prisoner of her heavy carapace that she could barely change course, and our teacher had to point her in the right direction and give her a little push toward home at the end of the day. One morning I came across her lying motionless in the snow, her arms lifted toward heaven in soundless supplication. It took two of us—myself and my friend Jack—to pull her up.

Debby’s father was a minister, the hell and brimstone kind, who made her fall to her knees in prayer whenever she had done anything sinful, like dance spontaneously or talk to a boy. It was an effective system: she never spoke to me, nor to anyone.

When we got to the seventh grade and physical education became mandatory, the gym teacher was handed a note from Debby’s father requesting that she be excused from the class for reasons of modesty. Unmoved, and perhaps suspicious, Mrs. Paxton made Debby play volleyball and take a shower with the rest of the girls. It was then that all the welts and abrasions were discovered on her thin little body.

But those were minor lesions compared to the contusions of her mind. When she was a junior in high school and unable to take another beating, and finding no surcease in prayer, Debby killed her father with a steak knife. She ended up in an institution for the criminally insane and I never heard from her again. Except once, I received an unsigned note with no return address: Thank you for pulling me out of the snow.

Mabel hasn’t tipped over yet, as far as I know, but she too can barely move in the three or four overcoats she always wears, those she can’t cram into her mobile home, a huge canvas cart bearing the inscription PROPERTY OF U.S. POST OFFICE. Sometimes she naps on the bench she has claimed for her own, but when she is awake she is rarely silent: she sings or hums a medley of hymns, whose melancholy notes invariably wrench a sympathetic whine from my canine companion. She likes Ben but is suspicious of me, whom she calls Po-lice. To Mabel, all white people are Po-lice. Except, of course, for Crazy Otto.

I don’t know what sort of Frankenstein created Mabel, or any of us, but for her and for Debby, the hell they were taught to fear at the end of their lives can’t be much worse than the inferno they have already endured on this Earth.

4

NATIONAL PASTIME

So many things are happening at once in the park and on the streets that the vicissitudes of our little world fill all the streambeds of my consciousness. Yet, no matter how deep the rivers of recent experience, they drain away in the night and the darker memories of the past rush back in like the runoff from a sudden thunderstorm.

I saw a boy of five or six playing catch with his father today, though the temperature was in the thirties and every gentle toss must have seemed like a fastball to his untested hand. It is not this recollection, however, nor Ben’s snoring, that keeps me awake this cold early morning, but the burning image of a snapshot of my little brother, who will be six in May.

The picture that floods my mind is of Chris in his Peewee League uniform. He is wearing his Cubs cap; a Louisville Slugger rests on his shoulder. Unbeknownst to him the bat has bent his left ear forward, like Ben’s. He is smiling, but it is the fake smile reserved for the lenses of strangers.

It was almost a year ago that I took him out on a warm afternoon in mid-March and swatted grounders and flyballs to him for more than an hour. How my chest hurt that night! I feel the pain all over again as I