My high school didn’t have jocks, nerds, or burnouts—at least, not in the way I saw them on TV. Sure, some kids were more popular than others, and some kids were on the robotics team, and some kids were stoners. But no one cared about sports outside of whatever sport they themselves played.1 The most popular kids at my high school were straight-A students who would matriculate to the UW, just like their older siblings did (and their younger siblings would). And every single person at my high school smoked weed. When I was a junior, I remember some freshman guy—shaved head, combat boots, the closest thing I’ve seen to a skinhead in person—walking through the halls in a white t-shirt decorated with Sharpie: “School sucks / jocks suck / football sucks.” I was less concerned with the sentiment2; I was more just confused by the outlet and target of his rebellion. “Jocks suck?” Yeah, I suppose they do in Degrassi and Sixteen Candles. Our school had a “fine arts week.” It was cool to do musicals. My senior year, our homecoming king had a video game addiction, and our prom king went to Stanford for computer science. (I was the midwinter king.)
We didn’t have some equivalent of the Trench Coat Mafia, but we had some alt kids. Dyed hair, Doom mods, Eyehategod t-shirts. Kids who would bring a switchblade to school just to flash it during a gym class to make you laugh. Kids who had never been in a fight, yet always seemed on the verge of provoking one. This is where I place Gabe and Evan.
Gabe and I bonded over proximity—I sat behind him in our freshman year math class. He had striking, handsome, almost feminine features—long lashes, full lips, high cheekbones—all punctuated by a mop of brown hair with just the center third dyed blonde. I don’t recall him standing out, or fitting in, in any other way. He didn’t care about sports, but in a truly neutral way, where sports occupied no part of his waking life or concern. He didn’t have stereotypical-atypical interests like comics or punk or Japanese horror movies. I remember us talking about Nine Inch Nails, and I walked away thinking his fandom seemed pretty shallow and performative. He just cared about getting good grades. I think he had a 4.0. He was a weird guy, but like a normal weird guy.
Evan seemed more reckless. A year younger than Gabe, Evan didn’t seem to care about school—naturally smart, well read, insightful and incisive, Evan was more going through the motions of public education. Some people find high school boring, yet they put in the work; some people find high school boring, so they spend class seeing how far they can dig a pen into their skin. Evan was the latter. I remember hearing that Evan and some friends once held Gabe down and [REDACTED]. I thought it was unbelievably funny; I also took note to not be caught off guard around Evan.
I don’t know how I met Evan. I know that we had a gym class together—my senior year, his junior year—and I remember him talking to me as if we’d met before, and I just played along with the charade, until the charade faded into friendship. Although I had a dedicated friend group that, augmented slightly but, remained mostly unchanged since middle school, I had an ability to pass seamlessly between different groups of weird guys—always guys, always weird. Something about me was a flame to the proverbial moth of weird guys; normie enough to lend some cred, weird enough to not be boring, and—most prominently and probably most importantly—funny. The same worked in reverse, too; I could spot the dude who played the baritone sax or browsed 4chan or was too into the Simpsons from across a room. I feel Evan must have seen my flame, or I saw Evan’s, or we both saw it in each other, and there was a safe, comforting acceptance knowing that we shared some oddity at our core.
With me, Evan, and Gabe, it felt like planets caught in each other’s respective gravitational pulls, creating interlocking orbits with no obvious center. So when I found out that Gabe and Evan had made a rap album, I was intrigued and elated in a way only becoming of a puppy.
Here’s how I remember the lore: Gabe and Evan, along with their Latin class, were set to take a field trip to some Latin convention, so they decided to make an album for their friend, Benjamin, to listen to on the bus ride up (ya know, like a normal person does). Thus: Benjamin’s Parents.
A quick correction: Benjamin’s Parents wasn’t a “rap” band. They rapped occasionally—usually about their dicks, often interspersed with the F slur. (One of the few bars I can still remember: “jizzing in a cup, I don’t want to miss a drop / put in the freezer, make some lollipops.”) But Benjamin’s Parents was more than just hardcore juvenilia; the majority of their oeuvre was composed of odd sound collages, ambient drones, 20 seconds of a speed metal riff. They had an “instrumental” “song” called “Anuses”—no music was played, and Evan and Gabe would spread their asses open to show their respective buttholes. It was like if John Cage collaborated with GG Allen.
I was Benjamin’s Parents’ biggest fan. I was obsessed. I loved everything about Benjamin’s Parents. The weird guy flame had been doused with kerosene.
Slowly, by sheer force of my interest, I became the unofficial third member of the band. I saw myself as the hypeman. I had no creative control, but I didn’t want it. I was just happy to be invited to the weirdest party.
To my knowledge, Benjamin’s Parents played two live shows. I couldn’t attend the first, because I was in upstate New York touring schools. When I texted a friend the next day about the show, I was told that Evan and Gabe had filled two super soaker water guns up with Vodka and shot each other in the mouth as an “encore.” Walking around Bard College that morning, I had a difficult time explaining away my extreme perturbance to my mom.
The other show:
It’s a lot to get into, but some of my other friends were really into throwing raves, and what started as a series of dance parties for a contained group of 20-ish people accidentally ballooned into over 100 sweaty kids dancing, drinking, and grinding in a basement. It was debaucherous, lecherous, and—frankly—dangerous. The cops were always called. Cars were broken into, people were robbed. At least one floor collapsed. Plus, it was promised that my shirt specifically would always be off by 10:30 PM. It was fucking cool.
The issue, though, with throwing an illegal, floor-collapsing rave was that they were hard for a group of seventeen-year-olds to plan. You had to wait for someone’s parents to go out of town, or, just as likely, to have some idiot dad agree to host it, because he wanted his daughter to like him again after a divorce. No house hosted a rave twice, and demand outpaced supply. So when Evan’s parents had a weekend trip in Michigan, Evan saw his shot: he would host a rave in his basement, as long as the DJs would leave a 20 minute break between sets for Benjamin’s Parents.
Surrounded by drunk girls and dudes from other schools looking to hook up with drunk girls, I put a microphone in my mouth to serve as a human mic stand. Gabe sat behind a cheap drum kit, and Evan strummed a bass down-tuned to drop C. I don’t remember if it was sludgy or speedy or hardcore or what. I don’t remember if Evan screamed his vocals, or did a Cookie Monster growl, or neither. I don’t remember how many people left, just that most did. The specifics are lost to me, but I remember the effect: freak out the normies. It was Weirdo Guy Night at the club.
But, even after exposing ourselves to the crowd, the party went on. And high school went on. Gabe and I graduated; he was actually one of our commencement speakers, and he went to [REDACTED] for college. A year later, Evan went to [REDACTED] in Ohio. I stayed in touch with both in the very specific a-few-years-after-high-school-on-Facebook-before-Facebook-became-extremely-lame kind of way. Eventually, we stopped talking—not with bang, but with a whimper.
I moved to New York. Evan moved there too. A friend’s band was in town playing some DIY Brooklyn venue, and Evan and I went and hung out. He wore a button up with the top couple of buttons undone, and it seemed so normal, so finance-guy-y and out-of-place for him, like he was researching how normal people dress. To my recollection, he worked a normal office job, but wrote for a left-of-progressive publication. I think he bought a van and ended up driving around America.
I asked him about music and Gabe and Benjamin’s Parents. Evan said he never wanted to talk about Benjamin’s Parents again. That was the last time I saw Evan.
Gabe reached out via LinkedIn earlier this year. He works at [REDACTED] as a software engineer, and he wanted to see if I could get him a job at the company I work for. He candidly admitted that he had automated away 95% of his job, and he was looking to be “over-employed.” He had bought a house in Minneapolis that he was treating like a co-op with, presumably, other over-educated yuppies living some poly-adjacent, hippie-but-not-sixties-hippie commune dream. (Maybe I also made that up; I kind of don’t want to read our text messages to see how much of that is actually right.) We exchanged the standard, vague, “Let me know if you’re ever in my city” plans. I didn’t bring up Benjamin’s Parents.
I’m likely the last person who remembers Benjamin’s Parents, or at least remembers them fondly. The only digital relic I could find without using the Internet Archive is a Last.fm page.3 With 252 scrobbles from 4 listeners, the listed songs include “my cock,” “Get Your Sex On,” and—as a nice change of pace—“Evening of Refreshments.” To some degree, I mourn the loss of the stupidity, but mostly I mourn the loss of a friendship that wasn’t mine. I’m reminded of song lyrics by the Dismemberment Plan—“Ellen and Ben / they made each other feel like they could die, but they couldn’t stay the slightest of friends”—and I wonder if that they even had that strong of a friendship, or just were two weird dudes being weird together.
I see my fear of abandonment painting over the pictures from my youth. I see my friends moving on—not out of malice or purpose, but because people just grow up. Last month, I saw a White Sox game with some high school friends—all of who live in the same city, all of whom I adore—and I thought, “Why don’t we do this more often,” and I know it’s because I have other friends, and they have other friends, and I have hobbies, and they have hobbies, and I have work, and they have work, and I have a girlfriend, and they have partners, and I have a kid, and they have families, and I’m visiting New Zealand and Philly and Door County, and they’re visiting St. Paul for a wedding I wasn’t invited to, and I wonder when our friendship becomes their Benjamin’s Parents, an embarrassing, profane moment of the past that they’d prefer to not talk about, and there’s a little less weirdness in the world.
During my high school tenure, I attended one football game. What I remember most is a guy in my grade—Cameron—climbing on top of my parents’ van in a McDonald’s parking lot, and I drove around in circles to see if I could throw him off.
(One I shared at the time) (and continue to share) (outside of a general understanding that some amount of schooling is likely required to produce informed, productive citizens) (and outside of a love of football.)
The bio: “Benjamin’s Parents once drove Benjamin and me to soccer practice, and it was really awkward because all that they talked about was how big of a dick someone would need to steer a car with only the dick.”