Cheers, Benny.

Cheers, Benny.

Benny didn’t really care what he was going to do today. He didn’t care whom he was going to meet, where was he going to go, or what he was going to eat. He just wanted to get things over with. He just wanted the day to end. Like any other day, right? Why should this day be any different than any other goddamned day? A voice in his head then reminded him: Today he turned seventy. David Benjamin sighed. Right. He damned the day he started to die, in other words, the day he was born. Since his birth, God had acquired the hobby of screwing around with him. Picking on him. Yeah, alright, sure, God loves him. Then, why the hell did his fifteen-year-old mother died on birth? Why the heck did his alcoholic father choke himself, with a cake Benny himself had baked as a gift for him on Father’s Day? He sighed, with grief. Somewhere in the oblivion of the universe, in the abyss of the souls, someplace in hell, Death was almost done waiting for him. The two tragedies he had just remembered were just the beginning of a life of misery. I mean, they weren’t even big tragedies. Those weren’t even funny, Jesus. Sure, his mother died, but it’s not like he ever met her. He rented her body for a few months, it’s not like he would miss her. And his father? Fuck his father. The eight years he was with him were definitely not his best times. His father had been disowned by his family, on account of sleeping with a woman who was six years younger than he was, and leaving her pregnant, making him, more, or less, her second hand murderer. Anyways, his only reaction to this was to move to LA, with his infant child and fifty bucks. Why LA? Well, his father had a crazy idea: become a screenwriter. He had seen the lives of the showbiz circle, and he wanted in.

Obviously, that didn’t happen.

He became an alcoholic, knocked up yet another girl, and, a week after he started beating little Benny up, he died. Obviously, his father’s pregnant girlfriend didn’t want Benny, so he ended up being adopted by a pair of very old people. And by old people he meant a pair of old gay men. Look, he didn’t had a problem with homosexual people. In fact, when the pair adopted him, he couldn’t really tell what was going on. But, hey, he didn’t like being the target of all the school bully’s. Therefore, when he was fourteen, he was gone. In the streets, alone, with twenty bucks in his pocket. Like father, like son.

What happened later wasn’t even worth recollecting, but somehow he ended up living there. In the cave. In his castle. There, on the banks of Barton Creek, about two hundred yards off the Loop 360 - Mopac Expressway interchange. Sure, it was uncomfortable sometimes but he didn’t mind. It was the best place he had lived in for years. He even had a radio.

He picked up an empty Vanilla Coke can from the stone-cold floor, and tossed it away. It was the year 2031 and he was seventy. He had crossed the barrier. All throughout his life, he had grown to believe that everybody who’s more than sixty-nine is very old. Fifty is like a bit old. Sixty is old. But seventy… phew… seventy is a whole different league. He meant, how much time he had left? Five? Maybe ten years? If that. With all the shit that’s been going on in the world… He was lucky if he even got to see a flying car. The radio had told him that Ford was already developing them. That it was fifteen, maybe twenty, years till they start to fabricate them. Then it would be Supersonic age. And so, without a warning, he started to cry. He had always wanted to be a Supersonic.

He looked up at the sky, and told God to go to hell. After that, he reached towards a pile of garbage he had been using as a pillow, and got his arm inside it. When he took it out, he had a bottle of vodka in his hand. “Happy Birthday” he murmured. His words echoed around his cave. "Cheers, Benny, cheers" he answered himself, with a weak smile, which soaked itself with his tears. He turned on the radio. It’s five-thirty in the morning, it said. Benny yawned. It was going to be a long day.