Bennie and the Jets

My grandmother, Carmen, was a bit of a self-proclaimed gypsy.  She traveled a lot, stole sugar packets from restaurants, and saved boxes and anything with an Owl on it.   She worked hard, she drank hard, and she loved hard.  She had five husbands, and one she remarried at the end of her life.  When I was five, though, she married Hiram Benjamin Bentine, or Bennie.  He was a dear, fussy old fellow, with a lemon yellow El Dorado, a good palate for food, and similar drinking and talking habits.  We moved in with them to help everyone out a bit – them with money for the house and my mom who was working nights -- with me.  I remember Saturday night bowling.  Lanes for kids were free after midnight – if you could stay up that long.  I did, and after bowling, we’d pile into the car and go to Sambo’s.  It was a very non-PC breakfast joint that stayed open all night.  We’d eat breakfast, drink coffee or more cocktails (mine was a Shirley Temple for which with copious amounts of pancake syrup I account my late-night stamina).  Bennie was good to me, spoiled me, let me climb into his lap and poke at his fancy buttons and shirt pockets.  I don’t remember what brand of cigarettes he smoked, but that he did so copiously.  He drank Old Granddad on the rocks, which I remember from a photo taken in Mexico of him (Old Granddad) sitting on some rocks (on the rocks).  It was the 70’s before we all became so self aware about the drinking and smoking we were doing.  We had a pool with a changing room, a great slide, and a wonderful overhung patio full of ivy.  We had horses. They had a big house, a great entertainment space, and catfights at night with flying shot glasses. That was my grandmother.  She could hit any man running or walking with a shot glass at 30 paces.  She was a pistol. 

Bennie was the cook at our house, and he was good at it.  He also did a lot of the shopping, as none of the rest of the adults were to be trusted with the selection of decent perishables.  He and Carmen were both newspaper people and gone all day during the Summer, when his daughter and I lounged by the pool with her friends while I fetched them sandwiches and sodas.  The weekends were lively parties with everyone home, including my mother, by the pool with the dogs, and barbeques, salads, and yes, more drinks.  One day I was invited to the shopping expedition for ribs and briquettes.  It was a short trip, and for some reason, I was invited along.  Maybe my Grandmother and mother needed to talk, maybe he needed to get out of the doghouse for something, or maybe I was annoying everyone underfoot as being the only five year old in the house will do.  But he brought me and we took off in that lemon yellow El Dorado to the store.  We wound through the affluent neighborhood, listening to the radio, with Neil Diamond, Roberta Flack, and Elton John.  “Bennie and the Jets” played, and being five, I thought it amazing that I was currently riding with a Bennie.  I thought the song was about him.  We said so, and sang along even to the piano parts “Bennie and the jets, duh, da, da, da, da, Dum, dum, dum.  Bennie!!”  if you’re five and in the car with a beloved grandparent, it doesn’t get any better than this.

It was years before I figured out which one of our albums was Elton John’s, I loved his flashy clothes, and his cool lyrics, and his mojo.  It was the theme song of the summer.  The pool, the ivy, the drinks and cigarettes, Elton John, and those mad, mad riffs, “Hey, kid!”

40 years later, I’m back in California after a Big Move.  That’s one where you give up your job, your life, your big house in the South, and move to a small Northern California town to raise your child and reclaim your family, sense of self, intellect, time, and your sanity.  I am procrastinating from approaching the local district office for substitute teaching work and the local colleges for adjunct teaching.  I just want to hold onto Summer for another week before I dive into remaking my professional self, the self that cares about grading papers, making money, and maybe writing an article on how we are or are not Academically Adrift.  I don’t want to do this just yet.  I want to think, I want to write, I want to go to Farmer’s markets, and I want to play with my child.  I am carefully pulling out of the parking lot onto Main Street, when “Bennie and the Jets” comes on the radio, fuzzy, a little distorted, as if the song had to come through from 1974 and land like a faded and exhausted butterfly in the cab of the olive green Honda CRV.   For a moment, I am five again, fearless and without worry, singing with a single tear trying to leak through my utmost bliss.

My grandmother died about two months ago from fatigue, loneliness, and a bit too much Vodka of a few too many evenings.  She was 85, though, and had a good run.  I didn’t always call her back, or friend her on Facebook, or write her enough notes, I know.  Her life was rough at the end.  She remarried husband number three, the tall, big, charming but terribly immoral Sean Connery looking fellow at whom she’d thrown a number of shot glasses in her stunning 30’s.  He’d died and left her the house that they’d shared, but being broke she’d taken in lodgers, including an aunt with questionable pharmaceutical habits, and a few of her friends.  It wasn’t pretty, and it probably wasn’t nice.  I sent her red Christmas gifts of silk and good perfume, but wrapped up in my own petty dramas, little else.  Bennie died of lung cancer years before and left her to rely on her friends and family.  They are sometimes fun, great in a crisis, but everyday life confounds them.  When I am here, I can forget for a moment, so much that I neatly sidestepped when I went to Grad School.  But I’m always going to think of Sir Elton John’s Bennie as my Bennie.  Oooh, you’re so spaced out. 

Perhaps, but time is starting to do this weird thing where it folds in on itself.  Supposedly, this is how wormholes are created, and the universe bends, but for mere mortals who are not scientists, it’s also how memories survive over 40 years of Lacanian theory and childrearing to become important about what has made up our imaginations.  One day, I’ll look up Elton John’s Bennie to see who he was, but for me, he’ll always be Hiram Bentine, cruising in a yellow El Dorado, with a borrowed grandkid, who thought he was so very, very electric cool.