Two
Ben
Our guitarist, Eric, sits on the speakers downstage right, and I’m standing off to the side. We just finished sound check, so now we can enjoy the downtime—something we rarely get between shows.
Tonight, we’re playing Portland, our new home. We left California three months ago, right after New Year’s, and the atmosphere here is the perfect inspiration for my writing. The greenery, the rain, the normal summers—the fucking women.
I’m the lead singer for the punk band The Roes. We’ve been a band—with Eric as the lead guitarist, Jason on the bass, JJ on drums, and me as the singer—for nearly four years. We started the group when I was eighteen, playing in dive bars that we shouldn’t have been allowed to step foot in. They were shady places that make me question how we didn’t get ourselves in more sticky situations. Finally, our song “Run, Baby, Run” became a hit. All that time kissing ass, clawing our way to the top, and opening for bigger headliners, and now we are the headliner on our first arena tour. We aren’t at the bottom anymore—we’re the penthouse suite.
“Get up and play, shithead.” Eric throws the football directly at me, and I nearly miss it. Fumbling it a bit when I grab it, my eyes zone in on my bandmate.
“Fuck you, asshole.”
I put all my strength into my throw and release the football back to Eric, hitting him hard in the chest and causing him to lose his balance and fall off the speaker. JJ and Jason join me in laughing. Eric’s face looks panic-stricken as he falls and lands on his side with a grunt.
“Dick.”
He stands and dusts himself off, bouncing on the balls of his feet. I smirk, giving him the finger, and head toward the booth where they’re setting up merchandise.
“Don’t fuck with the greatest, man,” I holler over my shoulder.
My mood rides high, and I’m on a pedestal no one can knock me off. It’s not a matter of if I am ready for the show but if the show is ready for me. Adrenaline pumps through my veins, and my hands are twitching to be behind the mic already. Only a few more hours and I will be on that stage, feeding off the energy of my fans and looking for fresh pussy. Talk about the perks of being a fucking rock star.
I had women before we got noticed, but now I can drown myself in them and never get tired. Sex, music, booze, drugs, and the feel of my face being hit repeatedly—those are my releases. I like to feel pain. After years of trauma, I am scarred and bruised inside. For years, my father abused my mother and me. He thrived off letting me know my mom and I were worthless and didn’t deserve happiness.
The older I got, the less he hurt her because I was around to take the beatings and to step up and defend her. The one time I wasn’t there—the day I ditched school to hang out with some friends and get drunk—he used her instead. She had to take the beating for me. My father didn’t care that I missed school; he never planned on me being a scholar—no, it was more about his reputation. His son skipping school and him having to get the call. I wish they had called my mother instead. Maybe she would still be here if he hadn’t known.
When I think about that day, I start to spiral. It is a giant trigger for me. In fact, it is the worst thing for my mental health. All I have left now is missing her. Often before shows, my mind will get in a loop where I wonder if she’d be proud. Would she be in the crowd cheering? Would we have run from him and made it out? All those thoughts bring me back to the same moment. That day. That coward beat my mother to the point of no return, and like the letdown my father always claimed I was, I wasn’t there to protect her. Losing my mother at the hands of my father when it should have been me was all it took for me to dispose of my faith in humanity or any higher power. My mother taught me to have faith, but I drove out any morals I had left because of his actions and my failure that night. It should have been me who died, and it wasn’t, so now I take each brutal hit with pleasure. I owe my mother that.
Fighting random strangers when I need to release all the unresolved anger isn’t heroic. It doesn’t bring her back. I’m no vigilante, but goddamn, does it feel fucking good. Pain for pain. You can thank my sperm donor for leaving me with a diagnosis of intermittent explosive disorder. The smallest things can cause me to react with anger. Textbooks might call my actions unwarranted, but I do my best to try to remember that this illness is real. I am not a textbook. I am a person trying to fight back against my own mind. A mind that was formed by the man who was supposed to love me but ultimately fucking destroyed me.
Pulling a joint out of my back pocket, I light it up to help take the edge off this unpleasant jaunt down memory lane. Most of the time, when my mood starts to take a nosedive from high into low, I can barely handle it. I need something that can rein me in.
“Ben, you good?” Our tour manager, Nick, is hanging up our band tees.
“Hey, yeah, perfect,” I lie through my teeth. “Looks good.”
Doing my best to not show my internal turmoil outwardly, I brush him off, but I know damn well he can see right through me. He’s been more than a manager to me, he’s been a mentor. A best friend. He knows my past, and he knows what it can do to me.
The drugs, the drinking, the fighting, my mental health issues—all of those make up a concoction that most people don’t even want to attempt to address, let alone help me with. Nick stays with me through every rise and every fall. Every. Single. Time. There are not many people out there I can say that about. Actually, there is no one. I have my bandmates, but they all have their own vices and are working through them the best they can. The only one I can truly depend on and be the real Ben with is Nick.
Thankfully, he lets me have a reprieve on this one. “I didn’t know we got more shirts. When the hell did we make that one?”
“Came in last week.” He moves to the next box.
“We should make a shirt with my face on the front that says, ‘If you think his face is fucking perfect, you should see his dick.’ That will sell like crazy,” I tease. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve tried to drown out the noise in my head. I don’t want to think about my past any longer. So I will hide behind my humor and bury that trauma a little bit deeper. Isn’t there a saying that what makes someone the most fun to be around is being riddled with trauma?
I, Ben Cooper, live my life with no control and no restraint, barely hanging on to a slippery ledge. I’ll never truly find peace again. Only wish for it.