There had been a drag show and everybody was outside watching the queens leave. Benny was working. It was his job to keep out the kids looked like they wanted to fight with each other.
"People, why are we fighting?" he'd say. He was a huge guy, doing this Mick Jagger impersonation-"why are we fighting? We don't want to fight."
He was built like a wall, Benny was, an action figure--skin stretched so tight across the muscles it looked like it could split. He looked mean, and most people who didn't know him kept it pretty low. They stayed out of his way.
Except it had been one of those weeks that's sticky hot, hazy, sweat rolling itchy down your back all night and day and drinking only makes you mean. So these punks outside, they started fighting.
Benny goes up to them with his routine--"Brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters"--he was always watching those movies, those documentaries about rock stars. About everything he said was from the Rolling Stones or somebody.
One of the punks has a knife and stabs Benny. There were other bouncers--they pounce the guy.
Everybody yelling. Benny's standing back holding his arm, blood running out around his fingers onto the sidewalk.
"Baby," he says, like it's nothing, "go get the Bacardi from the bar."
I come out with it and they've got the punk facedown on the sidewalk. All of them standing there with their feet on his back dropping cigarettes on the kid. There's a game at the stadium a couple blocks away and the night is purple from the big stadium lights. Cigarette smoke twisting in the purple streetlit air. It's a painting, this moment, and I come out with the Bacardi and give it to Benny.
He pours it down his arm and lights it. The flame opens instantly, like a nightmare's sail, like salvation, this brilliant smoking flash. The bright cut on Benny's arm darkens to a sticky tar;
"What the fuck, man?" says somebody.
"Cauterizing the wound, motherfucker," says a guy, has his boot on the punk's head.
Benny, dripping with sweat, smiling. His sweaty buddha's face. He looks at the punk on the ground with benevolent eyes. He will do nothing to hurt the punk or to save him. In Benny mythology interference impedes another's growth, interference was a sin. Everybody was a different kind of plant to Benny.
"You grow uninterrupted," he says to me once, "you work yourself out. Eventually."
"Or you don't," I said.
"You know there's this one kind of plant that secretes poison out its roots to kill everything around it. That way it gets all the light, the water, everything," he said. We were standing there chewing sunflower seeds. He finished chewing and spat. "It takes all kinds."
A job where you let the people do what they want until they figure shit out for themselves; there must be a job like that somewhere and Benny should have had it.
"Let me up, man," says the punk. "I'm sorry."
"Sure you're sorry, says the guy. "You're a sorry skin-bag of blood and yellow ass guts; you stabbed Benny, man." He grinds the punk's face into the sidewalk. "I don't know about calling anybody, what do you think?" he says.
"Benny?"
Benny with his palms to the sky while his arm lit in flames--someone was sending down a message, the answer, and the rest of us could only watch.
His blood ran down, making a stain I believed I could see years later after everyone was gone and Benny was dead and I was alone. When I've forgotten the rest I will remember Benny.
Ceramic, poreless, my searing memories:
"People used to be so perfect," I said to him once. We weren't even really talking. Sometimes you want to say something to make it less true. But he answered me.
"Anybody ever said this to you, girl--what you don't have, you don't need it now," Benny said. "They could put that in the Bible." He put his arm around me. I touched his scar. I always felt safe with Benny.
We walked to the creek. He was in love with how clear the water was. We watched the sun go down and he told me about how when he was a kid he believed there was a slot in the earth where the sun went at night. The moon was down there, too. Sometimes they'd slide against each other like coins, he said. "I was always going to video arcades," he said.
"I liked petting zoos," I said.
"Healthy little animal."
"But now I prefer the aquarium."
"Cold fish."
"No, boo, a raccoon. I can't help but keep sticking my hands in."
He grabbed my fingers and put them into his mouth, laughing.
"It's all slots with you, isn't it?"--but he wouldn't let me leave, he pulled me closer and held me tight. And I let him, because it felt good to pretend to be held to something solid, unshifting.
The secret is that it is all smoke and ashes. It is only that some things blow away before the rest.
Fire and ashes--he died in a house fire. The fire was contained to his bed. Nothing else was touched. They could not explain it, but I can tell you.
In Benny's secret self he was burning alive, from fingers to neck to his unbound heart, how brilliant the message, and entire. He burned until there was not anything left.
.
