BYE, BYE, BEN

I wrote my nephew to tell him I couldn’t be his friend on Facebook anymore. I love him, of course, but his pro-Trump posts stank of xenophobia and sexism, and, as I explained to him, it hurt to see my nephew behaving like one of Hitler’s brown shirts. He was surprised, but accepting, and because he grew up with the same vicious sense of humor I did, he gave one hell of a zinger as he said good-bye: “If it makes you feel better, I do thank you for making my news feed great again.”

Losing that regular connection to a family member stung, a lot, but like most people, I’d gotten used to losing friends on a daily basis as the alt-right both lent Trump their support and used his rise to advance their own. I’ve lost “friends” who I’d never interacted with other than on social media, and I’ve lost friends whose casual racism they kept to themselves, or at least hidden from me, until it became less casual once they had an actual dog in the hunt and were feeling threatened, and encouraged. (I was going to make a joke about casual racism being racism in polo shirts and khakis, but then that’s exactly the uniform the alt-right Sieg Heilers adopted for their latest marches.)

I know some of you feel driven to hang onto the racist friends as you try to convert them. Let them go or keep working on them but don’t fucking defend them and their racism! I’ve seen people who would sooner let go their aversion to racial profiling than let go of Sam Harris because they were so flattered when he “hearted” their reply to his tweet once. Let him go. Bye, bye, Sam.

I’m not saying it’s easy. Here is a eulogy to one very close friendship of mine that ended shortly after Donald Trump was elected.

I met Ben in summer school between our freshman and sophomore years of high school. He complimented my David Bowie t-shirt.

It had been ten months, and one whole school year, since I’d moved to the Sacramento area from Corona and I still hadn’t managed to make any friends. My Southern California fashion sense meant that I was a weirdo, but not quite the right kind of weirdo to get along with the weird kids. The cheese stands alone.

But here, this goofy kid who always wore Hawaiian shirts had complimented my David Bowie shirt. This was promising. I desperately wanted him to be my friend.

“You like Bowie?” I asked.

“Yeah, I have a bunch of his tapes.”

This was enough to build a friendship off of but we were in the last week of summer school. I had to move quick. In the fall Ben would go back to Roseville High, and I, having already been kicked out of Roseville, would be returning to Success Continuation High School.

I waited until the last bell rang on the last day of summer school. I was as nervous as I’d have been asking a girl out on a date. Doing my best to sound cool but with a tremor in my voice, I asked, “Hey man, Labyrinth with David Bowie is on cable tonight. You wanna come check it out? We have a pool.”

I ad-libbed the bit about the pool and immediately worried it sounded too desperate.

“Yeah.”

Yeah? Yeah was the answer I’d hoped for. I explained where I lived and he laughed because he lived just a few blocks away.

Ben rode his bike over and we swam, and had dinner with my folks, and swam some more. And then Ben asked if I smoked pot. I told him I didn’t, worrying this would be the end of the friendship, and wondering if maybe this should be the end of the friendship. He said he wanted to smoke a quick bowl and did so in my parents’ downstairs bathroom, blowing the smoke up into the ceiling fan. I didn’t like this at all, knowing my dad would freak about drugs being done in his house, but damn it, I really needed a friend. I decided to overlook this minor quirk.

After watching Labyrinth, Ben called his folks and asked if he could spend the night. They said okay, and my mom drove us to rent a pile of horror movies from the local video rental place.

We hung out watching splatter flicks and talking about music all the next day. I was incredibly amused that my parents liked him so much and thought he was such a nice kid. He was nice, but not in the way parents mean when they say someone is a nice kid. Not only did Ben do any drug available to him, he sold individually rolled joints for a dollar each at school, and he had an extensive collection of cassette tapes, most of which he stole from unlocked cars during his early morning paper route. There was something almost magical about such an eclectic music collection. Listening to music was my hobby, and I put a lot of effort into it. I was proud of the wide range my own collection covered. And here Ben had gotten to a similar point by mixing and matching whatever his neighbors forgot to securely lock up.

Ben’s parents came by to meet my folks. His mom, Betty, was a sweet woman with enormous breasts and his dad was an absolute maniac. George mentioned his wife’s “knockers” at least once per conversation, kept pictures of her in her Halloween Elvira costume on him at all times (an actual hard copy photograph, at the ready in his wallet, these being the dark ages before cell phones). He was overly friendly and pushy.

“You guys gotten to know the neighborhood yet?” he asked my dad. “There’s a Kentucky Fried Chicken right up on Douglas. Just right there. You like KFC? It’s probably the best fast food. Get a big bucket, with some corn and mashed potatoes and gravy, you got yourself a proper dinner, you know? Have you guys been up there yet, to the KFC?”

My dad changed the subject a few times, but George always found a way to bring it back to the Colonel’s delicious fried chicken, and though it could have gone either way, Dad seemed to decide that George was one of those characters he’d be amused by instead of annoyed by. He played along, “Um, George, would you like to stay for dinner? We can get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

“That’s a great idea!”

And George of course made no move to pay for it. After all, we had a pool.

The next weekend it was my turn to visit Ben at home. George and Betty, I discovered, rarely left the bedroom. Ben told me his parents were nymphomaniacs and, they didn’t know he knew this, also swingers. I wondered if they’d invite my folks to partner swap with ’em.

“No, man. They have a club they go to. There are dances.”

“You think they’ll invite my parents to go to their club dances?”

“Probably not.”

I wondered what was wrong with my parents.

We watched music documentaries, and more horror movies, and checked out Ben’s collection of porn magazines. He also had porn novels, something I’d never been exposed to before. They all seemed to involve incest, father/daughter, mother/daughter, brother/sister.

“Dude, this is some weird shit!”

Besides the nymphomania, which at fifteen years of age, I thought seemed like maybe the best psychological disorder you could hope for in a spouse, there were other signs that things were a little off in George’s world. The house was very dark, with all the blinds pulled at all times. George had a recliner that sat centered in front of the television. Anyone who wanted to watch TV with him would have to sit on the couch and turn their head sideways, or pull up a chair from the dining room table.

George was over-the-top chipper and affectionate until he got mad, and then he was explosive. I remember me and my friend Christian coming to visit Ben, and he was out running an errand. While we waited, we helped Betty bring some groceries in from the van, and George tore open a huge package of artificial crab. We got a live infomercial for the reassembled white fish with red dye added.

“You guys ever try this artificial crab? It’s the best. Betty, don’t bother with dinner, I’m just gonna finish off this artificial crab.” As he shoveled it into his mouth in huge handfuls right from the Styrofoam tray, Christian and I looked at each other and didn’t dare laugh.

“You boys sure you don’t want some? So good!” It was weird for us to see an adult acting like this, but also kind of nice to see a man so thoroughly enjoying something, even if that something was a small step up from flavored Styrofoam.

I loved going to see movies with Ben and his folks, always mindless comedies. Jim Varney’s Ernest movies cracked them up, and they would roar with infectious, contagious laughter, which I thought was just wonderful.

When George wasn’t laughing at Ernest asking Vern if he knew what he meant, or singing the praises of imitation crab, he was constantly kicking me out of his house, his truck, his van. He caught Ben and me smoking when picking us up from school one day. He’d come from a different direction than we’d expected, and we were caught unaware. We both dropped our cigarettes and casually stomped them out, hoping he hadn’t noticed. It was clear right away that he had as we climbed into the cab of his truck under his angry glare. We rode in silence for a few minutes, as he was too angry to speak, and then, “Really, Ben? You want to smoke cigarettes? Look, if you want to kill yourself don’t let me stop you. Why don’t we just make it quicker? How about we go home I’ll give you my shotgun and you can shoot yourself in the face three times? How does that sound?”

From the backseat of the king cab, I said, softly, “Um … Mr. Bradley, it would be pretty hard to shoot yourself in the face more than once.”

He pulled the truck over. “OUT!” and I walked the rest of the way home.

If he’d known what else Ben smoked, he’d have lost his mind. Most of our parents in the late eighties were still in the full grip of drug war hysteria. Marijuana, not yet the miracle cure for all that ails ya, was a “stepping stone drug,” it would make you crazy, etc. And Ben’s father, who’d gotten through the sixties without ever trying weed, was the worst. I can’t trust anyone who was a young person in the sixties and didn’t try weed at least. When I asked George if he liked The Beatles, figuring this was always a safe bonding place, he answered, “Oh, you mean the band that ruined rock and roll with their goddamn drugs? No, I do not.” It was then that I knew how I felt about George. Fuck this guy forever.

And yet, Ben’s house was where the kids went to drink, smoke, do drugs, and watch porn. Obviously it wasn’t the house with the laid-back parents, that was Jacob’s house. Jacob’s mom would let you do any drugs that weren’t white, so long as you brought enough to share. She was on an antidrug crusade as much as the other parents, she was just more particular about which drugs. You might have a room full of kids sitting around tripping on acid that she had supplied, listening to her horror stories of the government putting some kind of tracking device in crank.

Let’s face it, though, kids will do drugs. Maybe giving them honest, if somewhat paranoid, advice about which drugs are REALLY bad isn’t such a crazy idea. The little nanobots hidden in your drugs will crawl through your pores and report your location to the helicopters overhead if you accidentally do the government’s tweek—well, okay, that was a pretty crazy idea.

Ben’s dad, on the other hand, seemed the most likely to shoot you for doing drugs in his house, and he had the guns, but other than that minor detail, his house was a perfect teenage drug den, mostly on account of George being employed as a firefighter, working forty-eight-hour shifts at the firehouse. Add in the sex addiction, and Ben’s mom was often at the fire department as well, taking care of things in the parking lot. They had a great “bedroom on wheels”–style van that they put to good and frequent use.

And, when Ben’s parents weren’t keeping the van a rockin’ while on the clock at the Fire Department, he and his mate were doing up the swingers’ scene. This left an empty house much of the time, and since George was also a doomsday prepper, he kept the place unbelievably well stocked with munchies. He’d never been in the military, or hunted, or done anything to give him any idea how being a survivalist was supposed to work, so instead of freeze-dried goods, beans, and firewood, he had an extra restaurant-size freezer and a refrigerator in the garage in addition to a full one in the house. When the bombs fell, Ben’s family would have all the postapocalypse frozen pizza bagels they’d need, so long as power stayed on. In the meanwhile, stoned kids watching dirty movies didn’t have to venture out to 7-11, where they were likely to run into their own parents or the overenthusiastic local cops.

As I’ve said, Ben never met an intoxicant he didn’t like. When traditional highs were not available, my friend was a bold adventurer, ingesting household cleaners, smoking various vegetables, and keeping notes. He was the kid who found out which aerosols granted the good highs, and which ones made your friends ponder whether to call 911, or do a drive-by drop-off at the emergency room. VCR head cleaner, by the way, will give you a ride you wouldn’t believe, just one of the many exciting discoveries made in Doctor Ben’s laboratory.

On a typical evening at Ben’s, we were chowing down chocolate chip granola bars and the ever-popular frozen pizzas. There was nothing worth watching on cable and so Ben was persuaded to grab the video tapes out of his parents’ closet. These were unlabeled tapes full of porn. I didn’t know where they came from, but I imagined the swinger folks swapped and traded tapes they had dubbed. Why this household had no originals from which to dub I couldn’t figure, but it wouldn’t be hard to believe that George would be the cheapskate who took, but never left, a penny from the “Take a penny, Leave a penny” dish down at the 7-11.

Ben popped in the first flick and we all focused like we never did in prealgebra, but it was pretty amateur. Hairy and nasty and all-around uncomfortable to look at. Boos and pizza crusts were hurled at the screen as Ben inhaled something he claimed was jet fuel. He buzzed his way to the VCR, hit the eject button, and barely managed to pop in tape number two.

As Ben took another deep inhale, his parents appeared on screen. Ben must not have registered this fact too quickly because he just stood frozen as his dad pounded his mom from behind while she chewed on the most insanely sized dildo I’d ever seen. It got worse. George began chanting, “I’m gonna put it in the butt, I’m gonna put it in the butt!” to Betty’s playful return chant of, “No, No, not in the butt. Not in the butt.”

Well, he did put it in the butt, and Ben’s mom decided that despite her repeated pleas of “No, No, Not in the butt. Not in the butt” being ignored, being in the butt was indeed a good thing. As she yelled, “YES! YES!” I felt like screaming, “NO MEANS NO, GEORGE!” It wasn’t easy being a porn-loving feminist teenager watching his friend’s parents not respecting sexual boundaries.

I pondered what their safe word might be, as Ben suddenly registered what was happening and lurched forward, pushing the eject button on the VCR hard enough to send the entire machine spinning off the top of the television and onto the floor. The tape went off, but not before we all heard his mom start singing a little song along the lines of “I love it, I love it, I love it in the butt.”

I could’ve sat there in shock for quite some time, but instead I had to jump into action, as our clueless friend Mike began berating Ben. “What the fuck, dude! Why’d you turn off the fuckin’ video. Dude, he was totally giving it to her in the ass. And THAT BITCH WAS LOVING IT!”

I barked at Mike to shut up and told Ben to go outside. He grabbed his jet fuel and his cigarettes and headed out to the driveway without a word. I turned on Mike, “What’s wrong with you, man? Those were Ben’s fuckin’ parents!” being more literal than intended.

“George and Betty?! Bullshit, dude. That wasn’t his folks.” Mike knew Ben’s folks. Mike had lived two houses from Ben’s folks all his life. How the hell could Mike not be able to tell that these were Ben’s parents?

I made a decision then, and I’d like to believe that my motivation was pure. Ben was still outside, and I turned to Mike. “I’m gonna put this back on for just a second. You look good. Then you shut your goddamn mouth about it forever.” I popped the evil video tape back in, and Mike and I both squinted at the screen.

“Dude, that is so hot. And so not Ben’s parents,” he moaned.

“Mike. Look at the bed. Look at the blankets. Look at the big ass painting of a lion with a mane like an Afro on the wall! Now come here.” I led him to Ben’s parents’ room. There it was. The bed. The blankets. The bigass painting of the lion with an Afro. I took a chance and moved a pillow. There it was. The mondo plastic phallus, with chew marks. “Now Mike, will you shut up?!”

“Dude! Oh my God. … Let me have that tape. I can’t believe Ben’s mom loves it in the ass. You’ve got to let me take that tape.” He must have seen the hatred in my eyes as he took a few steps back, but he just got more desperate. “C’mon man, you don’t understand, I really have to have that tape. I have had the hots for Betty all my life.”

“Mike. You’re gonna go home now or I’m going to beat the shit out of you. If you talk to Ben, one word, I’m going to beat the shit out of you. If you do anything other than walk out that door I’m going to beat the shit out of you.” I didn’t usually act like a bully, but sometimes a guy needs the threat of having the shit beaten out of him.

“Dude. I can’t go home, I’m high! I’ll be cool, man. Don’t make me go home.” And with this, Mike started to cry.

“Okay, shut up. I don’t care where you go. I’m not gonna call your house and check on you, I just need you out of here.”

“Dude! There’s nowhere else to go, man. I’m high, dude. You can’t kick me out, man.” The tears were really flowing.

“Alright, Mike. Go to the back bedroom and go to sleep or something.”

“Thanks, dude. Thanks. Really, man, I’m too high to go anywhere else, man. I’ll just go to sleep.” And as Mike turned to go to the back room, I punched him. I hit him as hard as I could on the back of his right shoulder, causing him to drop Ben’s parents’ sex tape that he’d stashed in his sweatshirt.

I ushered him into the back bedroom, with him crying all the way. “Everytime I see you I’m going to hit you, so don’t let me see you,” I threatened as I shut the door.

I had no idea what to say to Ben. I found him sitting on the driveway. He didn’t look too bad off. He’d been dealing with nympho parents for years, I guess. Hell, I’d known them for less than a year and I’d already gotten used to his mom answering the phone while having sex.

“Hi, is Ben there?”

“Um, yes, but, oooh, ah, I can’t get him right now!” making me an unwitting part of their sex.

“Okay. Why don’t you hang up and then let me call back and DON’T ANSWER THE PHONE?!”

“Oh, Oh, Oh, Okay.”

“Thanks. Tell George I said ‘Hi!’”

I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe Ben was, at least partially, just going through the motions because this was supposed to be upsetting. I mean, Ben would like to appear as a normal guy, and normal guys get weirded out about seeing their parents fucking. Ben was probably pretty confused and not sure how to feel. It was a bizarre situation to say the least, and of course he had all the jet fuel swimming around in his brain.

“You okay, dude?” I asked.

He didn’t look at me as he answered. “Yeah. I’m alright.” He flicked his cigarette down the driveway. We went inside and watched Return of the Dead.

Ben’s other friends were surprised that I had made it to the ripe old age of fifteen without ever smoking pot. Many afternoons I’d sit in George’s recliner enjoying his many cable channels and eating up his apocalypse snacks while he fought fires or had sex with his wife in a parking lot, and his son smoked pot with his other buddies in the garage.

Amusingly, all of my friends’ parents worried about me. The only teetotaler in the bunch, and they were sure that I was on drugs. “Is Keith … okay?” they’d ask. “Is there anything you want to tell us?”

On one idyllic spring day, I was watching an Echo and the Bunnymen documentary, and drinking Coke in a can while sitting in George’s recliner. All that was missing was pizza and it would have been a perfect situation. I headed out to the garage freezer to get some. Ben and his buddies were in a circle and I noticed an odd contraption in the center. They had cut the bottom off of a two-liter bottle, then set it in a pitcher of water. They put a small metal bowl with a stem at the top of the bottle, and as they pulled the bottle up out of the water, air was forced through the bowl, which they’d packed full of marijuana and were now holding a lighter to. The bottle would fill up with smoke, which, once cooled, they’d suck down into their lungs, lowering the bottle to push the smoke in faster.

“Whoa. Nature abhors a vacuum!”

They all turned to stare at me. “You guys have created an artificial lung!” I was excited and explained to them how their gravity bong, as I learned it was called, employed the principles they’d failed to understand in science class. Ben looked up at me with bloodshot eyes. “You want a hit?”

I did. For some reason it was this DIY ingenuity that finally brought me around to giving weed a try. I took a nice big hit.

People who smoke weed love getting someone high for the first time. If you want to score a few free tokes, just tell people you don’t smoke pot. Even now, as someone who used to but doesn’t anymore, I have friends champing at the bit to smoke out with me. Ben and his circle of stoners watched me eagerly, waiting for some sign of my being high.

“You feelin’ it, man?”

“You high?”

“I don’t think I am. I’m not feeling anything.” I answered.

“Well you gotta give it a minute.”

I gave it many minutes. I hypothesized that because I was hyperactive maybe weed didn’t hit me like it hit them. I explained that Ritalin would be like speed to them but not to me. They asked me for some Ritalin.

Eventually they got bored of watching me not be high so we put everything away, sprayed some air freshener, and headed on our bikes toward Denio’s Farmers’ Market and Auction, a local flea market.

I pedaled up next to Ben. “Hey, is this the best day you’ve ever had in your life?”

He looked at me. “Dude, you’re high.”

“Well …” I answered, thinking it over. “Maybe. But maybe not. I mean, it could be the weed but it could be that it just actually is a great day. Is it not gorgeous out? Could it just be that the sky really is terrifically blue today, that a nice breeze is blowing, and that we’re with our best friends riding our bikes? I mean, that’s a pretty great day, yes?”

“Dude, you’re high as fuck.”

I still wasn’t sure I was. I wasn’t really sure that I’d gotten high until the next morning when I woke up and looked at the t-shirts I’d purchased from the flea market. The first had Spuds MacKenzie, the Budweiser party dug, flattened as roadkill having just been run over by a Coors truck.

The next had Mickey Mouse’s dog, Pluto, shaking between two fire hydrants with “Decisions, Decisions” written above.

The third featured a French fry, an old wavy one like you’d get at the drive-in snack bar. A caterpillar with thick glasses was mounting the wavy French fry, and lines were drawn to indicate motion in his hips. The caterpillar was fucking the wavy French fry. Above the wavy French fry was a word bubble. The wavy French fry was saying to the bespectacled caterpillar, “Get off of me, you asshole, I’m a French fry.”

Yeah, I was high.

It’s amazing in hindsight that Ben’s drug consumption stayed hidden from his folks for as long as it did. Eventually, though, he got busted at school. He was caught with some weed, and the principal told him his little spoon necklace tested positive for meth residue. He confessed to the meth. I told him later that I was pretty sure they hadn’t tested his necklace. They just knew what a tiny spoon pendant means, as did everyone else in the world except for Ben’s parents.

Ben’s home life, already pretty surreal, became a nightmare of tough love combined with mental instability. When his dad wasn’t screaming at him and hitting him, he was hugging him and assuring him he loved him. He often threatened Ben with kicking him out of the house until Ben tried to call his bluff, packing a bag and heading to our house, where my mom said he could, with his parents’ permission, stay as long as he needed.

Ben and I were standing on the driveway when his dad pulled up. “Ben, get the fuck in the truck.”

“No,” he answered, staring at his feet. George grabbed him and threw him on the ground, kicking him twice in the stomach.

“Get the fuck off him.” George looked up to see that my brother Edward was standing over him ready to brain him with a shovel. “Now!”

He got back in his truck. “Ben, get in.” Ben got in.

Things got worse when Ben’s mom caught him drinking and, no doubt emotionally exhausted and terrified herself, tried to hide it from George, to spare them all from his overwrought response. George found out anyway. I was at their house, once again helping Ben pack a bag, when I heard the answering machine pick up, and George leaving a message in a deep growl. “Betty, Ben, get out of my house. When I get home, if you are there, I will shoot you. Anything of yours that is left in the house, I will burn.” I suggested to both of them that they call the police immediately.

Ben stayed with us for a couple of days. If I remember correctly, Betty stayed with some friends. A week later they were back in the house and things were back to their version of normal.

George came to school to pick Ben up unexpectedly and caught him wearing eyeliner. He smacked his son in the face in front of everyone. Ben decided to come out bisexual to his dad in the truck. That went about as well as could be expected. Sometime later George walked in on Ben having sex with a girl in his room. “Good boy,” was all he said.

This cycle of angry explosions and smothering love went on for years. After turning eighteen, Ben moved out, went to jail, moved back in. I went to visit Ben at his parents’ place after we’d both turned twenty-one. I had a few beers from the case we bought. Ben drank the rest and was very careful to get the cans into the outside trash, no evidence of his drinking left in the house.

George checked the trash upon arriving home from a dance party, finding the cans. Ben told him the beers were mine, and that it was okay for me to drink because I didn’t have a problem. George was remarkably calm and told me that I needed to not drink around Ben if I wanted to be a good friend to him. I agreed and made a promise to myself never to visit that house again.

George was invited to resign from the fire department after driving the big hook and ladder truck home from work in a fit of rage and chasing Ben down the street with a shotgun. Other than having more time for sex and swinger parties now, things continued on pretty much as usual. Ben continued to live there.

He was in and out of jail, mostly short stays, nothing major. At one point he did a couple months in, and upon getting out he raced to an old girlfriend’s house and banged on her door. When she opened he said, “Quick! I haven’t had sex in four months!” We both had a good laugh together over this line actually working.

Ben started dating a girl with white-power tattoos. He told me her last boyfriend was a skinhead and that she didn’t feel that way herself. I wouldn’t hang out with them as long as the tats were visible, and they remained visible. Ben and I were already moving apart and this accelerated it. Ben took it hard when they broke up, going on another bender and burning an A, her first initial, into his arm with cigarettes.

We saw each other only occasionally as we entered our twenties and had several fallings-out, including me threatening to call the police if he got in his truck and tried to drive after showing up at my place already drunk and proceeding to slam more beers, but we always made up. He came to my wedding and bragged to my teetotaler mom that he was a changed man, meaning that he had arranged a sober ride home before getting smashed on wedding wine.

He did in fact seem to be doing well. He was married and had a steady job. He and his wife were able to buy a house from her aunt, getting a really good deal.

Like many old friends, we got back in touch more regularly via Facebook. Ben started leaning more toward his dad’s conservative politics, but a few times when I called him out on the cruelty of his positions and the rude combative way he chose to express them, or on his lack of sympathy for people with the same struggles he had faced, he’d write me and apologize. He specifically mentioned his father and not wanting to be like him.

I was curious and checked out George’s Facebook page. It was full of pictures of very young-looking Asian girls and links to what seemed to be sex trade tourism sites. He was very thin, and I suspected his health was not good. Ben confirmed, his father had cancer. When George died, Ben eulogized him, “I couldn’t have asked for a better father.” I thought, Yes, you could have. You deserved better. I didn’t know if it was crueler to say this or not to say this. I expressed my condolences.

I got a few more angry screeds and then a few more apologies, but eventually the apologies stopped while the screeds continued and escalated. The more power the alt-right gained, the more frustrating Ben parroting their talking points, sharing their easily debunked fake news, and otherwise cheering them on became. I noticed his friends list filling up with people more extreme than him as he steadily moved in their direction. Finally, Trump took the White House and moved Steve Bannon into it. Ben, like a lot of other folks, was a closet Trump supporter. He’d slam Hillary and then say, “I’m not supporting either party,” but he was gleeful over Trump’s win and over the prospect that he’d make good on his promise to “lock her up.”

Again I engaged with him, but with this victory for his alt-right views came a new level of smugness and a more public embrace of alt-right ideals. Ben didn’t need any sympathy or understanding now. He himself was doing good. He’d gotten his, and everyone else would have to get their own, like he did, or die trying.

I decided it was time to say good-bye to George’s son, Ben. I’ll always be sad thinking about the good times we shared, and about the horrific upbringing my friend suffered through, but saying good-bye to him wasn’t difficult. By that point he’d been, for years, behaving more like George and less like the sweet, goofy kid who complimented my David Bowie shirt.