Of course, Ben isn't his real name, but his real name is equally short, innocuous, and unassuming.
And calling him a kid feels reductive. Sure, he's 19, but can you still be a kid when you have a daughter, a gun, and a couple individually wrapped eightballs in your car?
When I started working at the restaurant, I was two months out of college, and desperate to pay my rent. I tried to get "a career job," but I for the first time in my life I had bills to pay, and nothing was coming together, so I took the restaurant job with the understanding in my own mind that it was only a temporary gig until I figured out something else.
Ben doesn't look scary. Short and stout like a bulldog, he's soft and hairless and a very light shade of brown. I have a foot of height on him, but he's twice as wide as me. It takes a lot to make him smile, he mumbles more when he speaks Spanish than English, and he'll usually spend the last hour of his shift smoking hash oil.
He never moves out of the way when you need to squeak past him.
At first I thought he didn't like me, but in hindsight I think he was just approaching me with the same ice-cold indifference that he approaches most of the things in his life.
In the context of the restaurant, he's a punk. He doesn't help anyone else, he doesn't pay enough mind to his work, and when he asks you to do him a favor, he'll never say thank you.
But, as it happens when you're working side-by-side with someone in the wee hours of the morning, you get to know your coworkers. One day, he furtively waved me over towards him in the kitchen, holding his phone out.
"Check this shit out." I dry my hands and take the phone:
It's a picture of his daughter. A cherubic little Hispanic girl, with the same chubby cheeks as her father and a spiral-y tuft of dark brown hair. I flip through the photos: her crawling on the ground, her laughing while she puts a toy in her mouth, Ben holding her while she curiously sticks her finger in his nose.
The next picture is Ben's gun - a cold, dark handgun lying on a pillow.
And after that, a video. With his permission, I hit play. It's his daughter crawling across a table towards Ben, who sits next to his friend. The anonymous friend is drinking a tall can out of a brown bag, and both of them have the low, crimson eyes of incredibly high people. Ben is so happy to see her make her way awkwardly across the table, and you can tell that even when he's faded, he feels that paternal something.
As I'm watching this video on his phone, he pulls out meticulously folded dollar bill and unfolds the origami to reveal a small mound of white powder. He pulls out a Metro card from his wallet, scoops up a tiny corner of cocaine, and stares straight into the eye of the security camera as he rails it.
Two weeks later, he comes to work looking sick, pale, a bit of a sheen on his skin. He's chugging water like a camel. It takes me a bit to realize he's feeling some withdrawal.
He tells me he stopped doing coke because he needs to pass a drug test for a court date to get more time with his daughter.
It's a complicated juxtaposition of a heartbreakingly dark youth, and a young father who's doing the most he can for his daughter.
He tells me he doesn't want to sell coke, that he picked up the business from his cousin who got sent to jail. He laments that he just moved back in with his mom and that it's hard to keep it a secret from her, that he feels bad selling drugs out of his mom's house. I ask if the money from selling wasn't enough to pay his own rent at his own place, and he tells me that he moved back in with her so he could put all that rent money towards his daughter.
I don't understand Ben and the world he lives in. The doors that have always been closed to Ben have always been open to me, and soon enough I won't be working a job where I regularly rub shoulders with people in Ben's position. Society is eager to cast Ben as a lazy, druggy piece of shit. My friends think this is a hopeless, tragic story.
I don't understand Ben, but I do understand that he is not what he seems to be. He has every reason to be angry: when I ask him, somewhat boldly, if he thinks he's a good father, he simply says that he's better than his father was.
"How so?"
"I'm trying."
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