Ben

Ben was heroin addled fantasy from the time. I had just been released from
jail after six long months. I had spent most my time of planning for things that would never happen. My first week in jail was spent recovering from surgery. When I was arrested, I had four large abcesses. An abcess is a place where bacteria gets under the skin and the flesh starts to rot. I had to have surgery on my arm. When I took of the bandage, I cried. Not because I was in the hospital, not because I was in jail. I cried because they had sliced open my tattoo! The horror of it all. I used to take a sterile needle and cut them open myself. Needless to say, my nickname was the abcess queen.

When I was back on the streets, I felt alone. I gave up my homeless encampment living for a hotel either the help of my parents. They believed I could stay clean but I did not. Ben was another resident of the hotel at the intersection of addiction and sorrow. His hoodie and cut off Ben Davis caught my eye. First we were strangers, then we were friends.
We both agreed that we were together as a couple with nothing more than sharing a half gram.

Ben had the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. He could hold a conversation. We liked to read and write. We did not have a sexual relationship as normal couples do. Drugs were our sex and words were our drugs. He had a few friends that would visit. They never understood why he would be with me.
He loved me as we lay dying in our queen sized sheets. He hated me for our disease. We fought but we had our silent agreements. We enjoyed the fantasy of having an other.

The drugs that brought us together tore us apart. That was the end of our endless discourse. We got together because we needed each other. We would lay on the bed with our clothes on. We clung to each other and wondered how we were transported into the depths of despair. We awoke daily to the bussle and the hustle. The trust walked out the door and I went with it.

He called me from jail a few months before he died to apologize for all the pain that had come between us. He had seen "Black Tar Heroin" in the jail. For a split second, I almost did not accept his regrets but I relented. We all made our mistakes. My mistake was accepting less. His mistake was giving up too soon.


He had a tattoo on his neck that read rejected. I thought he was perfect for me, perfect for that time in my life. I remember many of those arguments now and have to laugh. The abcess queen and Ben and those days captured forever for your viewing pleasure. It is strange now to see him say that he loved me and know that he is dead. I notice things like the fact that he is wearing my pants in the movie- all the intimate details. He promised me in that call from jail he would consider recovery. I wish he would have made it. He did not get the chance to try a second or third time like me. I remember the good things like how he wanted us to write a book together....like this one...