15 March 2021
Years ago, I decided to migrate our family’s landline to an all-cellular phone arrangement. Back then, I worried about losing the landline I had possessed since 1986. I didn’t want to give up the number in case someone from the past wanted to reach out, even after decades, to say hello. Always wanted to keep an ear out for those drunk 2 AM ‘remember when’ calls.
As a result, I decided to migrate that phone line’s number to my oldest son. He was admonished to let me know if anyone called specifically looking for me if the call did not appear to be a scam. I already get enough warnings about renewing my car warranty. Also, there are plenty of calls, usually in broken English, about the IRS being ready to arrest me if I don’t make a telephone payment immediately.
In the decade since this transition two calls have been brought to my attention. Both have been notices of severe loss. Last night I received the second of those calls. An old friend had died last month and another old friend wanted to talk about it. As we talked time rolled backwards through decades coming to rest at point where Gerald Ford was President.
I first arrived in Michigan in 1974. East Lansing was ungodly cold and ungodly strange to a boy used to a diet of cheesesteaks and to summers at the shore. On day one I was dropped into a gulag with thousands of other freshmen on the western edge of the Michigan State Universe(ity). I hated Michigan, all of it. For me the winter of 74/75 was spent plotting my escape to a warmer climate like Virginia or Georgia.
Back then college transfers before the junior year were discouraged. Thus, I was stuck in Michigan for that year and one more year. However, I was not stuck in the Brody Dormitory complex, a place of raging male hormones and 18-year-olds puking from too much cheap beer consumed at the old Brewery bar. Based on a recommendation from a smart assed guy in my public speaking class I gave a look at moving to Mayo Hall.
Mayo was everything I wanted. It was small. It was populated by upperclassmen. It was in the old part of campus. It had functioning fireplaces and leather couches in large common rooms. When I first went into the building there was a young woman noodling jazz out on the grand piano in the western lounge. Impressed with the smallness of the building and the general vibe of the space I signed up to be a resident my sophomore year. I figured that all I needed was a tolerable space to occupy until I got accepted at another school in a warmer climate.
There are so many Mayo stories I could tell. Yeah, the low hanging fruit are tales of drunkenness and debauchery. From being thrown into the fountain on one’s birthday to guys running nude down the hallway of the women’s floor; it was all fun and games until someone’s GPA got busted. Or as in my case you were put on probation for events you didn’t even know you could be in trouble for. Like the night I left my room unlocked and a dear friend threw a party there that was noisy and boisterous and brought the wrath of the Assistant Head Resident Advisor down on my head, even though I was in the university library studying. Got double secret probation for something I was not even involved in. Ah the 1970s.
The harder thing to capture is the vibe of the people that lived there. Mayo held within its walls an eclectic mix of future musicians, journalists, lawyers, broadcasters, veterinarians and social workers. Most people in the dorm then were music majors. The nearest academic building was the music building a mere three-minute walk from the dorm. No wonder Mayo attracted music students.
When you walked through the halls you would hear Eric Dolphy, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, and Keith Jarret their solos bleeding out into the hallway. Of course, the tunes would be wrapped up in an oddly pungent smelling smoke that also crept out into the passages from west to east and up and down in this 250-person dormitory. Sure, there were outliers who were listening to Kiss, The Sweet and Lynyrd Skynyrd. But the real music of Mayo was jazz blended with a smattering of country rock-we were all space cowboys. Oh yeah there was that one dude who just kept playing On the Border by Al Stewart over and over again.
But I digress. The people. The people who lived in Mayo were the oddest, quirkiest and most interesting people you could find. With a small cafeteria and limited food hours you invariably had to share a table with someone. You were forced to talk to people. You heard stories of lives lived that were so very different than your own. One person’s Dad was a car dealer, another’s an executive at a dying car company, another’s an executive at a big accounting firm and another’s a psychiatrist. When you were the child of a factory rat like I was the tales of these people’s lives spent at private boys and girls schools in rich Detroit suburbs seemed foreign and exotic. These personal histories were blended with tales of the music freaks who had seen Charles Mingus and Miles Davis live. Even weirder there were the people who were singing Faygo pop jingles at dinner crowded around an eight-person table. Let us not forget the near religious worship of Bob Seger.
Back then there were some things that acted to blend disparate people into friendships. Two that stand out were in no particular order the beat the clock drink specials at bars like Dooley’s on Fridays and the campus movies shown in the large auditoriums at Wells Hall. Early in the year nobody wanted to go to either of these events alone. And so, at breakfast or lunch on Friday people made plans to go out on what in essence was a clump date.
Clump date? I made up the term but the way it worked was that to avoid rejection by a member of the opposite sex you were interested people would agree to go get a burger and drink beers with a group of seven people or so, four guys and three women or vice versa. You would meet back at the dorm at four PM and head off so as to order a bunch of beer when it was still 10 cents a glass and before it went up to a quarter. Or you would eat dinner and then gather together to head off to see either a recently released film, an art film or a porno (thank you Beal Films) most likely with bottles of Strohs stuffed in the pockets of those overstuffed jackets we wore in the day.
I first met Jerry Benjamin at either a film outing with a group or when he stopped in to watch me repair my waterbed as I was listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. Jerry was a music major of some sort and I remember talking with him about the song She’s the One. His comment upon hearing Born to Run was that for a pop musician Springsteen was using some interesting techniques. Jerry heard Max Weinberg’s triplets in She’s the One and thought that it was just the coolest thing.
Jerry had this thing for a woman who had jet black hair and the most sarcastic tongue I have ever encountered belonging to a female not raised in New Jersey. Five of us dudes and this woman walked the ten minutes from Mayo to Wells Hall to see Nashville. I am pretty sure each of the five of us men had our penis sizes ridiculed, were castigated for having unibrows or were told that our mothers dressed us funny as we trekked to the film. Still, Jerry took it all in good humor. He was just that kind of affable guy. Me not so much. Maybe that is why I cannot remember the woman’s name.
Then there were other things that happened binding us together. There were trips across Michigan Avenue to the MacDonalds located in what is now the People’s church parking lot, for non-dorm food. There were more movies and then there was time spent hanging out in people’s rooms reading the album covers of their music collections, smoking dope and talking. We talked about life and God and everything that we bumped into in class or outside of class. You know I think Jerry was just amazed at some of the questionable choices I made and he offered his opinions on those bad or at least ill advised. Think of what he had to say about those two women beating me with hairbrushes. Initially he looked on in looked on in stunned silence but then came the commentary.
Jerry smiled a great deal and was a fairly deep thinker amongst a whole bunch of folks who oft ran deep down the rabbit holes of philosophy and political theory and musicology. Late in the evenings he would be one offering up the next comment, “But don’t you think that…” When he spoke, he was almost always smiling. And then there was his riffing with Ramon, that stuff could get pretty twisted pretty quick like listening to one of Mr. Mike’s stories on Saturday Night Live.
Jerry was a gracious man. He took Nate who was my roommate, me and a woman he knew from the music department to his home on the lake in Sanford, Michigan for a weekend. Being Michigan, it was during an ice storm. I remember that Nate and I almost bought the farm at Jerry’s place when we lost our footing at the edge of the bluff leading down to the lake. Luckily, we caught a sapling about 10 feet from the drop off to the frozen lake surface and hung there like a couple of comic Wiley Coyotes for a minute or two before we let go and took our lumps on the ice. I think the highpoint of the weekend was watching a Ghoul presentation of Vincent Price in The Fly. My overarching memories of Jerry are of a gentleness, a friendliness and of an easy laugh.
Jerry and the circle of goofballs and whack jobs that lived in that place made me change my mind about staying in Michigan. Yeah, a couple of women played a role but it was the genial nature of people like Mr. Benjamin who would always suggest something fun to do on a slow winter weekend that convinced me that Michigan was a great deal better than pretty much anywhere else I could go.
After I left for law school, I lost touch with Jerry. I talked to him once after that about 19 years ago. Back then we were rededicating the Mayo Hall fountain and I had sent out a bunch of invites to the event. A number of people who couldn’t come called me with regrets and Jerry was one of them. We talked for over an hour about everything under the sun. It was a warm call; it was a good call. The years just dropped away.
And then last night I got the call from another old friend, someone much closer to Jerry than I had been, telling me Mr. Benjamin had passed. Life for Jerry after we talked 19 years ago had presented him with some major challenges. Still, he soldiered on. Per the conversation Jerry’s last years were filled with some degree of pain. I am sorry for that. But to me he will always be twenty years old. To me he will have a goofy grin, wire rimmed glasses and a “What the fuck, why not…”, about to roll out of his mouth. Miss you man. Travel safe and travel well.
