The Misfits of Lima

By Benjamin Rosenberg

Benjamin has always been the type of guy who stands to the side and watches the classic all-American, pretty boy badasses swoop in and get the girl. They always seem to know how to act, and being charming and cool is effortless for them. Meanwhile, curious, contemplative, and comically awkward, Benjamin,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Benjamin Rosenberg
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736575703

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Copyright © 2021 Benjamin Rosenberg.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBNs

e-book 978-1-7365757-0-3

Paperback 978-1-7365757-2-7

Hardback 978-1-7365757-1-0

Printed by Amazon., in the United States of America.

First printing, 2021.

Contents

ACKNOWLDEGMENTS 

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4.

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

ACKNOWLDEGMENTS

Ben would like to thank his wonderful wife Rhacel and their miracle Malaya .

His mother Eleanore, his brother Laurence, and Lori, Efrem, and Marshall.

He regrets that his grandparents Goldie and Benjamin and Esta and Jerry aren’t here to read the story.

Family and acquaintances who have inspired the author along the way:

Michele and Charles, Dina and Patrick, Alan and David, Rich and Bobbie, Lavaay and Carl, Ari, Marina and Andy, Alisa and Sasha, Maria and Bill, Rick, Carl, Cerissa, Celine and Dan, Juno and Noah, Peter, Cecile and Nick, Jessie, and Rolph.

Cover art by Flavia Leotta.

Social media by Merilou Salazar & Lucy LaForge.

The book is dedicated to my father, Edward. It hurts like hell that I never got to say goodbye. It hurts like hell that Malaya never got to say hello.

The author hopes that his first novel, The Misfits of Lima, contributes a meaningful verse to the powerful play.

CHAPTER 1

I t’s not in the death. It’s in the diagnosis. That’s what my father answered during our last verbal sparring session. It was his response when I questioned a central tenet of his teachings when applied to those suffering from a terminal illness.

There’s no slap to the side of the skull, I hear my contrarian self say to his assertion that so many of life’s significant moments are blindsiding. They see death coming.

Benjamin, he says softly, trying to uplift my crushed confidence without a hint of resentment. Just the slyest of grins that differentiates victor from vanquished. The intelligent should never stop questioning. The world suffers greatly when the intelligent stop questioning.

And I was kind of appreciative that he termed me intelligent. It had been another rough day. Some ill-conceived schoolyard shenanigans and my co-conspirators fading away and leaving me lonesome had triggered another phone call home. Which prompted another late supper sit-down with my exhausted father.

But I mostly chalked up his forced compliment to chagrin. Chagrin at his son’s apparent lack of intellectual acuity. And I was suddenly so overwhelmed by a sense of inadequacy that I up and bolted from the kitchen table for my bedroom.

And my already fragile feelings about myself have turned decidedly more defeatist since that last night we spent together two months ago.

My dad died the following day. His contention confirmed. A car driver ran a red light and smashed into his side door as he raced home.

Now, as I sit on the edge of my mattress and stare at my bedroom’s bare walls, I again mull over the insane set of circumstances that lead to my father’s death. And again, my barely suppressed rage boils over, and I bellow, Fuck this!

I flip over and put fists to the mattress as I verbally rage. As I mentally smash the 50 percent of my rage stemming from the fact that I miss my father. He was my closest confidant and life coach. And the 25 percent of my anger that comes from having never obtained proper closure upon his passing. And I focus on the remaining 25 percent, originating from another blindsiding event.

We are leaving the city. The only home I’ve known for fifteen of my sixteen years.

I’m mortified. I’m mystified. I’m pissed off like a motherfucker.

I’m not fucking going! I shout out as I bury my head in my pillow.

I’m city people! It’s been so and was always supposed to be so. I have two years left of secondary schooling, and then it’s city college, a city career, a city wife, a city life. There’s so much to do in the city. My friends are in the city. They said they’d visit, but I know they won’t. I wouldn’t.

I stand and limp across the empty room. I have a leg injury. It’s a pretty minor scrape. I was trying to impress a girl, and it didn’t go well; as per usual.

I’m a virgin, but I am hoping this will be my year. Maybe this move will help. Small town girls lead boring lives of quiet desperation. So says my television.

I open the shades and stare out across the night sky. Two million buildings lit up. It’s beautiful. It’s home. I count three shining stars in the dark sky. I’m on the 16th floor. I’m high up, but not that high up. Sometimes I wish we were higher, sometimes lower. It depends on the day and with whom I’m talking. Life’s rather complicated here in the city.

I close the shades because I can sense the small town of Lima off in the distance. Seven hours up the I. Approximately. It’s the childhood home of my mother. She’s returning home to a new life for all of us. It’s all so frustrating. It’s infuriating.

She’s a painting replicator by trade. She paints paintings of paintings. She’s accomplished; she can accomplish her work anywhere. We can stay local.

I slump to the ground as the door down the hall creaks then slams shut. My brother’s stirring. He’s getting sick but doing his best to hide it. I hope he blows chunks face-down in the toilet bowl. Laurence is an asshole. Laurence is adaptable. Lima will love Laurence.

He’s already enrolled in the highly gifted dork program there and starts school in four days.

I have a week ’til I start at the little schoolhouse on the prairie. I’m depressed. I think I’m going to bang my head on these oppressive walls ’til they fall.

There’s a knock on the door.

I’m busy, I lie.

Eleanore enters anyways. Even now, her clothes look like they’re straight from the laundromat, and she has not a single hair out of place.

It’s past your bedtime, she states. We have a busy day tomorrow so lights out.

Your moving men packed my pot, and I can’t pass out without it, I think but don’t say.

I don’t drink, smoke, or use, except for sarcasm, which I partake of abundantly, if not expertly.

My mother stares down at me. We stare at each other. Her eyes are tired. She’s tired. She starts to speak, but no words come. She’s concerned but thinks better of engaging my neurosis tonight. Instead, she dims the lights.

Good night, love.

I don’t need her to say anything else. It’s understood. Benjamin, this is all your fault. This move, everything. It’s all your damn fault!

CHAPTER 2

It appears to be a psychotic clown head, zombified and placed atop an impossibly twisted and blood-soaked skeletal frame. It stands 15 feet tall with eyes pitch black. Its bony fingers grip my neck as my feet flail about below.

Let me go, I wail and eye the creepy crawlies that slither about before they fan out all over my naked self.

My panic is palpable as I struggle to break free. To breathe. I strike at him but miss by miles. I strike out again. And miss again. He could snap my neck in a millisecond, but a conviction must be confirmed before my execution.

Guilty! he says in the most ominous voice my unconscious mind can imagine.

His breath smells of spoiled spinach steaming in the summer sun and triggers my gag reflex.

Please let me go, I beg as spittle, chunky bits, and bile dribble over my chin and splash down on my bare feet. I strain to maintain eye contact, to try and trigger a modicum of humanity hidden amidst its cold and evil. Does it understand my pain? No question, it has a backstory—a history similarly imbued with lust and loss, stupidity and shame, humiliation and hopelessness. We can connect.

Guilty, it says again and releases its grip. I fall backward into an impossibly deep ditch before I crash down onto a frozen plank. I expel the little air left in my lungs; the particles dissipate into the cold and blackness. I lie still and stare up at the large tombstone marked LIMA. The creaking of box hinges shifts my gaze, and I gasp as I feel the sharp-toothed creepy crawlies go to work on my flesh. The box lid slams shut with a deafening whack.

I jerk awake and touch my forehead. I’m sweating. It’s frustrating. I stumble off the floor and into the partially illuminated hallway. Laurence is back in the bathroom. The apartment is a ghost with most traces of our former life now packed and shipped, the unlucky losers lounging in a city landfill.

I enter the kitchen and flip the light switch. Eleanore’s left me a cup of water. A solitary cup resting on a bare counter. She washes my sweat-stained shirts in the morning, so she knows I require a little liquid replenishment overnight. It’s her way of showing me that she still cares.

I take a sip and peer out of the window. Our sister building is lit up like a Christmas tree tonight. I scan down three floors to check on Christy. There are millions of stories in the big city and just as many beautiful women. Of all of them, Christy is my favorite. My real-life Yuri pulled from the pages of my favorite manga. My perfect romantic heroine. My blue-eyed Geisha with a Gun.

Her apartment is dark, but the blinds are up. It means she’s out late with him. At our first encounter, he almost killed me after I almost paralyzed her. Our second encounter was even more complicated. She’s the pivotal player on the most critical day in my life, and she has no clue. She knows me none too well.

I take another sip of water as I feel my eyelids grow heavy. I close my eyes before I force myself back to consciousness.

I should get back to my room, I mumble but stand still.

My bedroom, my sanctuary from my mother, my brother, and the world at large is also the site of the train wreck that triggered my eternal torment.

Instead, I grab my sketch pad, hidden away in a bottom drawer, and slump to the floor. I close my eyes again as my mind races through the past months’ events and the myriad changes coming my way.

Why can’t I see you, Dad? I ask agonizingly and sniffle quietly as tears trickle down my cheeks. My nightmares are so vivid.

I receive no response, so I wipe my eyes and flip through my book of progressively more sinister sketches. I pull out my pencil and start my late-night process anew. Tonight’s tormentor is my terror number 22.

CHAPTER 3

They met at age nineteen. I like to think that it was love at first sight, but Eleanore assures me it wasn’t. At least on her part.

He looked twelve, she says. Nineteen years of age and hadn’t shaved a day in his life.

He approached her at the beach and asked to borrow her Times as he’d left the day’s crossword puzzle on the train.

Brown socks with black sandals were his footwear of choice on that particular day, she quipped, but he was quick-witted and made me think.

His parents were of poor immigrant stock. His mother’s family history is mostly unknown to me; I know she passed away shortly after Edward’s birth. His father was an absentee father by nature, a third-rate salesman by trade, and a young Edward was soon forced to fend for himself when his broken father suffered a debilitating stroke at the age of 35. Edward’s passion was art history, but poor Jews on scholarship didn’t graduate from the entitled majors. Instead, he became a Jewish stereotype. A positive Jewish stereotype. A doctor.

Her story is unique. Her mother escaped from Russia in a box, literally sent down the river along with her three younger brothers and two younger sisters. Bubbie, who assumed the role of family matriarch at nine years of age, was aware that the baby, Vlad, was too sickly to attempt the escape, but Jewish life in 1969 in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union was beyond a nightmare for the family of a political dissident. Besides, there were few footloose and fancy-free adults left in the village to care for a sickly eight-month-old. After the KGB came, there was barely a village.

The weather was frigid, and their meager rations depleted seven hours before being pulled ashore. Two thousand and twenty terrifying minutes in their little darkened hell had felled little Vladimir. On land, Bubbie allowed herself 30 minutes of grieving before turning her attention back to the living. The family was her burden to bear.

The two boys and three girls were sent to America and forcibly scattered along the East Coast. Bubbie landed in the city and was a fully employed seamstress at age 11. On her fifteenth birthday, she met a real charmer four years her elder. My grandfather, an OG, who, along with his brother, was in the insurance business: any business that didn’t accept their offer of insurance was eliminated—by them.

Bubbie, married and pregnant by 17, lived in blissful ignorance with her baby Eleanore until an unexpected knock on the door turned out to be federal agents in search of a murder suspect: her husband.

Five months later, her brother-in-law was dead, her husband was sent away for 25 to life, and Bubbie was strongly encouraged to leave the city for her safety.

She moved in with a sister in a small upstate community called Lima and eventually reunited much of her family under one roof. Seven people lived in 700 square feet of apartment. My cousin, a civil rights attorney, and lesbian activist, literally lived in the hallway closet as a toddler.

Opportunities were scarce, but Bubbie found work as a domestic worker at a small motel three towns over. One hour spent on three buses to work for a masochistic drunk who hated everything about this Jew invasion infestation...except her T&A.

The accumulated stresses of life weighed on Bubbie, and Eleanore watched with considerable sadness as her mother aged quickly. She wanted out of Lima in the worst way and was granted her escape by an elite private school that plucked her out on an out of the ghetto scholarship. After winning a citywide math scholarship, she had come onto their radar and was one of one Jews enrolled at the school.

Cultural capital is paramount at a New England prep school, and Eleanore entered with zero. Any attempt to accumulate some while in attendance was quickly squashed as her scholarship depended on her mopping classroom floors four times a week and serving the students breakfast on Saturday mornings. She made one true friend, and for the second time in two years, she fled to her next new life while vowing never to look back.

And so, in her second year at university, she and my father met at the beach and soon married. And she followed him across the country as he pursued his medical education, and she perfected her artistic craft.

Then one day, a letter arrived at their home in El Paso, Texas. He’d joined the army as a military physician, but he remained stateside due to the birth of his eldest son—me. I always joked that I saved his life. Benjamin, irony is thy name.

The letter from Vengersky, Silverman LLP, was a simple notice of condolence and included a printed copy of Bubbie’s will. She had passed away suddenly—an inordinately stressful life felled far too early by an aneurysm. There was no official birth certificate, so no certainty in age, but she had left Eleanore her most valuable earthly possession: her house in Lima. Bubbie had spent a lifetime saving for the house, and it was the center of the family’s universe for all but Eleanore. Eleanore seemed to have no connection to Lima, and I always wondered why she insisted on keeping the place.

All speculation aside, by tomorrow, Bubbie’s house will be our new home. Tomorrow begins our new life in Lima.

CHAPTER 4.

We’ve only owned one family car. A big, brown piece of shit that my father bought used in Texas and transported up north with us on my eight-month birthday. Middle-class city people don’t drive all that much, and the parking space’s cost exceeded the value of the car approximately two months after the move. My father kept the car for those just in case situations.

Just in case I want to spend an extra twenty minutes with my little angel, Benjamin, before working the weekend.

Today, we pile into a rental car with an interior so small it makes our brown bomber feel like a stretch limo.

That’s why God created window handles, Eleanore quips as I turn on the A/C and realize that it’s practically useless against the August temperatures expected to climb past 90 in the shade. She can be a real sarcastic jerk when she wants.

You had to pick this seven-hour trip to go environmental mental? I think but don’t say. You run the A/C in the winter.

We’re saving on gas! proclaims Laurence, on cue.

His declaration strongly suggests that he’s the driving force behind this monumental mistake, and I so badly want to brawl. But I can’t bitch. Such is my burden.

And we’re off, Eleanore says lightheartedly.

I honestly can’t remember seeing my mother behind the wheel, yet she decided to wait ’til this morning to take a few practice trips around the block—during morning rush hour traffic, no less. So we start and stop and start and stop as she attempts to acclimate herself to the gas and brake pedals while my supremely embarrassed self sinks lower and lower in my seat.

Lookin’ good, baby! The catcall trickles into the car, and I raise my gaze to see my mother smiling warmly as she playfully waves back. She’s enjoying this travesty! Eleanore has an exceptionally warm and welcoming smile, and seeing her smile after these many months brings a smile to my face too.

It takes precisely two blocks of starts and stops for us to stop dead in traffic, and the smiles to fade away. Instinctually, I switch on the radio. Thankfully, this car has a workable stereo system though the speakers kind of crackle.

Here, Laurence says as I hit scan in search of my favorite station. I turn to see his iPod Touch placed on Eleanore’s shoulder.

Okay, Laurence, Eleanore says and quickly connects the cord.

It’s gonna be a long trip, she sighs softly. Everyone will get a chance.

I turn and give my brother a once-over with my death-iest of death stares.

Though his father’s son in every way physical, unlike dad, Laurence has shockingly little sense of the other. Especially when inconvenienced. Even for a 12-year-old. I suppose the entitled personality that tends to typify the young and gifted before maturation could be mitigating, but right now, I don’t care because he’s pissing me the hell off, and I want to beat the living shit out of him. I force myself to hold fire for my mother’s sake—her sanity.

The speakers hum, and soon Weird Al Yankovic’s super whiny Ricky flows through and immediately starts to work my last nerve. My father was a fan and took Laurence to see Al’s latest tour. Now Laurence plays his music always. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the occasional comedic polka, but my current mind-set is more closely aligned with Metallica’s Kill ’Em All.

I lean my pissy head against the window and silently say good-bye to my only known home as block-by-block, my environmental familiarity wanes. We’re up to track seven of Al’s second masterpiece entitled Weird Al Yankovic in 3-D when we finally break free of the tunnel traffic and hit the open road. Our increased momentum should bring me some relief, but I already have a headache from the rising heat, so I turn down the volume on Al.

I can’t hear! Turn it up! Laurence squeals from the backseat. Mom!

It’s time to turn it down, Laurence, she replies as Laurence frowns and slumps back. I’m getting a headache.

I turn my gaze to meet my mother’s and smile weakly. Though I much appreciate her stepping in, I know the radio issue will not settle ’til we step from the car at the trip’s end. Laurence is not the type to let anything go.

I switch my focus to the commuters in the