Chapter 33 Benji
Tex cooks lunch like a man preparing for a natural disaster. There are five adults, and the amount of food coming off the grill and out of the kitchen could feed a football team and their families and possibly the referees.
Brisket sliced thick from the morning smoke.
Pulled pork from yesterday’s batch, reheated with a splash of vinegar.
Smoked sausage links that split and hiss on the flat top.
Coleslaw in a bowl the size of a birdbath.
Baked beans with burnt ends stirred in because Tex believes beans without meat are “a side dish in crisis.” Cornbread in a cast iron skillet.
Sweet tea in a gallon jug. And a plate of sliced tomatoes from a garden he grows beside the parking lot and has never once mentioned to me until this morning when he said, casually, “I grow tomatoes out back” as if every biker bar owner in Florida tends a vegetable patch between smoke sessions.
“Tex,” I say, staring at the spread being assembled on the deck table. “There are five of us.”
“Correct.”
“This is enough food for thirty.”
“This is lunch. Lunch at my bar is not a suggestion. Lunch at my bar is an event. My daddy always said if you’re going to feed people, feed them like you mean it.
Don’t put out a little plate of this and a little bowl of that and call it a meal.
Put out the whole spread. Let people see what you’ve got.
Food is how you tell people you love them without having to say the words, and I am a man with a lot of love and a very large smoker. ”
The deck is beautiful in the afternoon. The second-floor view puts the Gulf right at eye level, and the breeze carries salt and a trace of hickory from Big Bertha below.
Tex has set up a folding table that’s too big for the deck but fits because Tex believes all furniture should be slightly too big for its space.
The chairs are mismatched — two wooden ones from the bar, a plastic lawn chair, and a padded deck chair that was brought up specifically for Sheila because it has a cushion.
Mickey’s wheelchair fits at the end of the table where Tex has left a gap instead of a chair. No adjustment. No announcement. Just a space the right width in the right place, the way this whole building has been quietly rearranged around the dimensions of Mickey’s chair.
I take the seat next to Mickey. My knee touches the side of his wheelchair and I don’t move it. His hand finds mine under the table, casually, constantly.
Sheila comes up the stairs carrying a plate of cornbread and a look of general disapproval directed at everything.
“The beans are too sweet,” she says, setting the cornbread down. “I told him less brown sugar. He put in more brown sugar. Every time.”
“The beans are perfect,” Tex calls from the kitchen doorway. “The brown sugar is not negotiable. My daddy’s recipe. Sacred text. You don’t edit sacred text, Sheila.”
“Your daddy’s recipe has too much sugar.”
“My daddy’s recipe has exactly the right amount of sugar and if you say one more word about it, I’m going to name a menu item after you. It’s going to be the blandest thing on the board. Sheila’s Unseasoned Chicken Breast. Served dry. No sides. Just disappointment.”
“You wouldn’t dare, Tex.”
“Try me. It’s a chalkboard menu. I can name a terrible item after you every day.”
Sheila sits in the cushioned chair and says nothing further about the sugar but her silence is louder than most people’s shouting. Tex stands there in the doorway, holding two plates of sausage, looking at a woman who has been fighting him about seasoning for years.
“Mama Sheila?” he says.
“What, Tex.”
“I love you.”
Sheila’s hand stops on the napkin she was straightening. Tex is standing in the doorway with sausage in both hands.
“I love you too, baby,” she says. “The beans are still too sweet.”
“I know they are.” He sets the plates down. “That’s not going to change.”
Stormy comes up the stairs last. He walks to the table and takes the chair on my other side. My left. He pulls it out, sits down, and scoots it six inches closer to me.
“All right,” Tex says, lowering himself into the remaining chair, which creaks under him.
He surveys the table. “Everybody’s here.
Food’s hot. Mickey’s home. Benji’s here.
Sheila’s angry about sugar. Stormy’s hydrated.
This is as good as it gets, people. This is the whole thing. Right here at this table.”
I load my plate. Brisket, slaw, cornbread, and two tomato slices that taste like dirt and sunshine. I say so out loud. Tex looks at me like I’ve just said the most intelligent thing anyone has said in his presence in years.
“That,” he says, pointing at me with a rib bone, “is the correct response to a homegrown tomato. Dirt and sunshine. That’s exactly what a tomato should taste like. Store-bought tomatoes taste like mildewed refrigerators. They taste like a tomato that gave up on its dreams a long time ago.”
“Oh, Lord, here we go on the tomato stories,” Sheila says, sighing.
“I’m serious. I grew those tomatoes from seed.
I talked to them. I watered them by hand.
I played them Willie Nelson because Willie Nelson is good for plants and I don’t care what anyone says about that.
Specifically ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.’ It’s a scientifically proven fact that plants grow better with music. ”
“That’s not true,” Sheila says.
“It’s proven in my garden, which is the only laboratory I recognize.”
Mickey squeezes my hand under the table. I look over and he’s eating his brisket with his free hand, unbothered, his face relaxed in a way I’ve never seen in a hospital or a rehab facility. This is Mickey in his element.
I squeeze back.
Stormy is eating beside me. He started with the brisket, moved to the slaw, and is now on the beans in a clockwise pattern around his plate. He eats the way he does everything — carefully, without waste, finishing one thing before starting the next.
“Stormy,” I say, leaning closer.
He looks at me.
I put my hand on his forearm. He doesn’t flinch.
“Can we be friends?” I ask.
The table gets quieter. Stormy glances at my hand on his arm, then at my face. The corners of his mouth move. “Yeah,” he says. “I’d like that.”
I lose it. “Oh my God, okay, this is happening,” I say. “Stormy and Benji. Official friends. This is a landmark moment and I want everyone at this table to acknowledge it. Because Stormy just agreed to be my friend and I need everyone to understand the magnitude of this commitment.”
Stormy looks like he’s been hit by a very enthusiastic truck and isn’t sure yet whether it hurts or feels good.
“Stormy, this is not a casual arrangement. I’m going to text you.
We’re going to have inside jokes. We’re going to have a bit.
Every great friendship has a bit. Tex and Mickey’s bit is that Tex talks for nine hours and Mickey says four words.
Our bit will be better. I don’t know what it is yet but I’m going to find it. This will be great.”
“Benji,” Mickey says gently. “Hold on.”
“What?”
“You’re scaring him. Slow down a little.”
“No, I’m not scared,” Stormy says. His face hasn’t changed. “You just talk a lot.”
Tex barks a laugh so loud it sends the seagulls off the railing. “He sure does. Benji talks like me. That’s why I like him. It’s like looking in a mirror except the mirror is shorter, has better hair, and plans weddings instead of smoking meat.”
“First of all, my hair is phenomenal and I appreciate you noticing. Second, I don’t plan weddings. I create experiences. There’s a difference.”
“Oh no,” Sheila says. “Now we’ll all be creating experiences.”
“Sheila, you are literally the queen of creating experiences,” I tell her.
“Every person who sits at your bar has an experience. You pour a vodka soda and it becomes a life event. That tourist who came back three nights in a row? That was an experience. You’re in the experience business whether you admit it or not. ”
Sheila looks at me over her reading glasses. The look lasts three seconds. Then she straightens the napkin in front of her and says, “I like this one,” to nobody in particular.
The lunch stretches into a meal that has no endpoint because nobody wants to leave the table.
“Let me tell you a story about Sheila,” Tex says, leaning back in his chair.
“Last week a guy walks in wearing a sports coat. In Panama City. In July. He sits down at the bar and orders a martini. Sheila looks at him and says, ‘The only olives in this building are on a pizza.’ Guy says, ‘What kind of bar doesn’t have olives?’ Sheila says, ‘The kind that has self-respect.’” Tex points his fork at the empty air where the martini guy was sitting.
“Guy gets up. Walks out. I’m thinking, well, we lost that one.
Hour later, same guy walks back in. No sports coat this time.
Sits at the same stool. Orders a bourbon neat.
Tips thirty percent.” He leans forward. “She ran him off and he came back better. That’s not bartending. That’s ministry.”
“It’s common sense,” Sheila says. “You walk into a roadhouse and order a martini, you need guidance. I provide guidance.”
Mickey leans toward me. His mouth close to my ear. “This is what every meal is like,” he says quietly. “Every single one. For twenty years.”
“I love it.”
“That’s one of the reasons I asked you to stay.”
I turn my head and kiss him. Quick, light, on the corner of his mouth, in front of everyone.
Nobody reacts. Nobody cares. The table absorbs a kiss between two men the same way it absorbs everything else — as part of the family.
Mickey’s hand finds mine again under the table. He felt it too.
Stormy pushes his chair back and starts collecting plates, stacking them in order of size with the silverware corralled on the top plate. I stand up and start helping.
“You don’t have to do that,” Stormy says.
“I want to. That’s what friends do. They help.”
We carry the plates to the kitchen together where I wash and he dries. Stormy has opinions about how dishes should be dried and I have no opinions about it at all and this is how we discover our rhythm.
“Do you have an Instagram?” I ask him.
“No.”
“Do you want one?”
“No.”
“Fair. Do you text?”
“Only Tex.”
“Can I have your number?”
He dries a fork and puts it in the drawer. Dries another fork, puts it next to the first one, perfectly aligned.
“Yes,” he says, and he tells me his number. I put it in my phone and send him a text.
Benji: This is Benji. Your friend. The one who talks a lot. I’m standing three feet from you. Wave if you get this.
His phone buzzes in his pocket. He pulls it out, reads it, and looks at me. Three feet away. Standing at the same counter. He raises his hand and gives me the small Stormy wave. Two fingers. Half a second.
“We’re going to be great friends,” I tell him. “The best. You have no idea what you’ve signed up for. I’m a friendship hurricane. I’m going to blow into your life and I’m never leaving. You’re stuck with me forever.”
“Okay,” Stormy says. He puts the last plate away and folds the towel into a perfect rectangle and sets it on the counter. Then he says, without looking at me, in a voice so quiet I almost miss it. “I’ve never had a friend before. Just so you know.”
“Well,” I say. My voice is not steady but I’m done pretending I’m a person who keeps it together in this place.
“Now you do, Stormy. And I’m the best one you could have gotten because I’m loyal and I’m fun and I will fight anyone who messes with you.
I have no fighting skills whatsoever but I will stand in front of you and yell very loudly and that has to count for something. ”
“It counts,” he says.
I walk back out to the deck where Mickey is waiting in the sun. Tex has pulled his chair to the railing and is pointing out something in the water, a dolphin or a boat or an unusually shaped cloud that’s about to generate a fifteen-minute story.
Sheila is in her cushioned chair with her eyes closed and her face tipped toward the sun, pretending to rest while also listening closely to everything.
I sit back down next to Mickey. He takes my hand again immediately, threading his fingers through mine, and his thumb starts its slow track across my knuckles. I lean into him, my shoulder against his arm.
“Stormy told me I’m his first friend,” I tell him.
His thumb pauses on my knuckle. “You are,” he says.
“The first one he chose on his own. Tex told me on the drive home. He said if I mess things up with you and you stop coming around, Stormy loses the first friend he ever picked. And then Tex said he would not watch him lose another thing so I’d better do things right with you. ”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say.
“I sure hope not.”
“I gave him my number. I texted him from three feet away. He waved at me. Two fingers. The smallest wave in recorded history. It was the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen and I once watched a golden retriever puppy fall asleep in a pot of sunflowers.”
Mickey laughs, low and quiet.
Tex is telling the story about whatever he saw in the water, which has turned out to be a pelican that dove for a fish and missed. Tex is narrating the pelican’s failure with the gravity and detail of a nature documentary.
“He committed to the dive,” Tex is saying.
“Full commitment. Wings back, beak down, the whole aerodynamic package. And then he hit the water and came up with nothing. Just a mouth full of saltwater and a look on his face like a man who just checked his bank account after a vacation here. Confused. Hurt. Questioning every decision that led him to this moment.”
Stormy comes out onto the deck and walks to his chair, the one beside me, and sits down close with his shoulder near my shoulder. His spot now.
I look at the five of us around this table. This is a family.
My phone buzzes. It’s a text from Stormy.
Stormy: I’ll water George and Frankie when you’re not here. I already set a schedule.
I glance over at him. His face is neutral, but the phone is still in his hand.
Benji: They’re lucky to have you, Stormy.
He reads it and puts his phone away. I catch the smallest movement at the corner of his mouth.
He knows I’m not talking about the plants.