know he was fucking some of them, ’cause I could smell it on him when he came back. Sometimes I’d ask him who and sometimes it was a woman, sometimes a man. I’d ask how he’d be helping people and he’d say however they needed it. I asked him how he loved them and he said however they needed it. I know he talked to some of them about how he could speak to God, about what God really is, about the way he saw the world. About how it going to end. And people believed him. They started showing up at my apartment. Sometimes they brought gifts, brought food or clothes, sometimes they brought money. Sometimes they’d be crying. Sometimes they’d be fucked up on drugs or drunk. If he was home he’d let them in. Some of them he’d take in his arms and whisper in their ear. Some he’d sit with on the couch and take their hands and stare at them. Sometimes he’d stand by the window with them and talk real soft. Some he’d take in the bedroom, men and women both, and he’d close the door, and I know he’d be fucking them, and loving them, and making them better, same as he did to me. Some he put his hands on their cheeks and he’d kiss them real light. I don’t know what he was ever saying or doing to them people, but they’d leave better. They’d leave different. They’d leave with that true belief in their heart. And they’d be telling other people. So Ben started having people saying things about him. That he had powers. That he could perform miracles. That he could save you or change you or make your life better. That he was a prophet. That he was a holy man. That Christ had come back. That he was the Messiah. The Messiah the world been waiting for and praying for and worshipping for, that he was the man come to save us or let us all die. He never said nothing about anything of that. People would say things to him about it and he’d smile and say nothing at all or say
When it was just us, it was like we was married, but not hating each other like most married people being. Was like we was a couple. He didn’t seem to be loving me any more or any different than anyone else, but we was together, and he always came back, even when he’d be gone for a night or two, and I was always knowing he’d come back, never doubting nothing. It didn’t matter I was only nineteen and he was thirty-one, and it didn’t matter we was different colors and had been raised different or that our parents was from different countries, speaking different languages and believing in different Gods. We just loved each other. Didn’t want each other to be no different. Didn’t bitch about what we didn’t like ’bout each other. Was accepting of each other as human fucking beings. Who felt the same shit. Knew the same kind of pain. And knew that love was the only weapon against that pain. Nothing else can end it or stop it. That’s what Ben taught me more than anything. That we got this gift of life and we got it one time and we gonna get hurt in it and be hurt going through it and the only thing that’ll make that hurt better or hurt less is love. And part of our love was fucking. Ben loved to fuck. He loved to kiss me and lick my body and suck on everything I got. When Mercedes was sleeping and no one was knocking on the door, we’d spend all our time fucking. Fucked for hours and hours. He never got tired of fucking. Said coming was the closest thing any human on earth would ever know about Heaven. That there wasn’t no pearly gates, no trumpeters, no man waiting with some book ’bout all the good shit and bad shit we supposedly done in our lives, ’specially when most of what we do ain’t good or bad, just boring. That there ain’t no one gonna judge us and decide we can be in that all- time never-ending party or get sent to burn. That there ain’t no party like that, just like there ain’t no ball for Cinderella and her sisters, or prom for Barbie, or labyrinth with a bull that gonna eat your ass up. But there’s the feeling you get when you cum. When everything disappears. When your body tells you it loves you and everything in the world is perfect and secure and safe. When you feel better than you ever feel any other time in your life. That feeling you wish wouldn’t never end. He said people that try to say it’s wrong is just stupid. That people who say fucking is wrong is just stupid. That say you got to fuck under certain conditions laid out by God are just fucking stupid. No one should tell other people how to fuck. Said people who take vows not to do it are denying themself one of the greatest gifts we got in the world. That men in silly robes singing songs in dead languages who ain’t never fucked in their life certainly got no right. That maybe if they fucked, they’d understand God in a way no book and no cardinal and no pope could ever be telling them. He said if everyone who went to church or temple or mosque spent all that wasted time fucking instead of praying to made-up shit, the world wouldn’t be ending soon. And he right. And you know he right. If you look in your heart, and if you’ve ever cum in your life, you know he absolutely right.
After my classes and before I’d get Mercedes and go home, I’d go see my momma. They had moved her to some place where people watched her and tried to make sure she was comfortable and she lied in a bed and her body was just wasting away. She was hurting real bad. Her body eating itself. Eating all its organs and eating all its bones. Cancer everywhere and no way to do a thing about it. There wasn’t ever a thing to do about it. Most days I was strong and I’d hold her hand. Some days I’d just sit by her bed and cry. They’d just be giving her more and more drugs. Drugs that make her someone she wasn’t, make her something not even a person. Just some flesh lying there breathing. You ever sat by the bed of someone dying you know what it’s like. There ain’t nothing you can do. You just sit there feeling pain like nothing else on earth. You sit there feeling helpless and empty. When they awake, every second you sit with them you know that they gonna die soon. Every word you say got this weight on it ’cause you know there ain’t gonna be many more words. Everyone comes into the room do their best to be happy and seem cheery. To be talking about shit that ain’t got nothing to do with death. But it’s always there. The sickness. The death. The fact there ain’t nothing to do about it. The fact that they won’t be no more. That they gonna go in the ground and rot. And that you gonna go on living. And you can say whatever you want and tell them you love them and do everything in the world to make their passing easier, but it don’t change. They feel the pain. And the only way to stop the pain is load up on so many drugs that you a vegetable, or die. And in the meantime, everyone that loves you just feels the pain. The worst pain you can know.
Momma was getting worse and worse, but not dying. Just being in pain. The doctors wasn’t even around anymore. Just nurses and people doing their best to have her be comfortable. She started telling me she wanted to die. Every day she tell me she don’t want to go on, that it hurt too much, that she ready. I tell her she gonna be okay, that she got to keep fighting, but she tell me she don’t want to fight no more. That her whole life been a fight. Growing up in a shack in a broke shitty country was a fight, coming to America thinking her life would be better was a fight, being in New York and realizing that nothing gonna be better, that the American Dream only for people with the right skin and the right accent was a fight. That raising two kids without no husband or man and without no money or family or help while she cleaned the houses of people who seemed to be getting everything real easy was a fight, that watching those kids drift and watching her dreams for them die was a fight. That getting cancer and not being able to afford to do anything about it was a fight. It was all a fight, from the moment she came screaming outta her momma ’til she ended up where she ended up, in some rundown place with cockroaches and rats and crackheads outside and gunshots every night, what they call a peaceful place where they send poor people to die. She was done. She didn’t want it no more. I cried, wailed, sobbed, begged her, told her I didn’t want her to go. She smiled and said she loved me. And then they gave her more drugs and she passed out.
When I went home I was doing terrible. I couldn’t stop crying. Mercedes come over to me, say it’s okay, Momma, it’s okay. And it make me cry harder ’cause I wish I could tell my beautiful little three-year-old girl that I love so much and that I want to have whatever she want in the world and that I would die for that it ain’t okay, that the world is fucked up, that pain and suffering everywhere, that people hurt each other and hate each other and kill each other for no good reason, that we live and then we die and when we die that’s it, we gone, just fucking gone. I wish I could tell her that she would be okay. That she gonna have a great life, but I know I’d be a liar. She gonna grow up, get hurt, and someone gonna break her heart and she ain’t probably gonna have what she want in life and she gonna get treated like dirt and she gonna bust her ass alone and then she gonna die. There ain’t no beauty in that, there ain’t nothing but pain. So I cried harder. For Momma and me and her and everyone else in the world that ain’t got and never gonna. I cried and I couldn’t stop. It wasn’t gonna be okay.
Ben came in and saw me and asked me what was wrong. I couldn’t even be talking for a long time. Just cried. And he put his arms around me. I wanted some of whatever he did to other people to make their pain go away. I waited for him to make me free. He didn’t whisper nothing in my ear. Didn’t put my face in his hands and stare at me. Didn’t talk. He just held me and had Mercedes come over and he put his arms around both of us. And he just hold the both of us. And I didn’t stop crying for a long time. And then I did. And Ben ask me
Ben waited for me to stop crying again. He looked into my eyes for a real long time, then spoke.
