Profile #1: 7/5/05: B. New

This short bit will tell you all you really need to know about B. New (AKA Benge):

Junior year in high school, I think it was, I woke up on Christmas morning and went through my usual routine of enthusiastically and quickly tearing open every present in the large mountain of presents that could always be found under our tree. After I got to the bottom of the stack I looked around the room and dramatically pretended, as I always did, not to be disappointed in my bounty. Even though I probably was. Which is pretty ridiculous, really -- my folks always got me lots of cool shit and I had no right to complain about a thing.

Anyway, at around 2pm that day I was sitting on the couch watching the annual Christmas Day NBA game on CBS and stuffing my face with pistachios when the buzzer rang. It turned out to be B. New, making an unannounced Xmas vizzit. When he came upstairs, I noticed that he had a large sack over his shoulder. He reached into the sack and pulled out a brand new Patrick Ewing jersey, which he handed to me.

"Merry Christmas, Hans," he said.

Before I even had a chance to thank him, he was turning and heading out the door. He had other presents to drop off, and time was short.  I think he stopped at the home of every one of his friends and delivered a gift that day.  It may not sound like much now that we're adults, but for a 16 year-old to have the thoughtfulness and generosity to pull that off is exceedingly rare. The thought of him bounding from house to house with his sack of joy still gets me misty eyed. I kept that Ewing jersey for about fifteen years.

B. New is a true friend and a New York original.  Here's a quick overview of his life as I understand it.

-He grew up on 2nd Avenue and yet he attended P.S. 3, the hippified, experimental public school in the West Village where all the kids call their teachers by their first names. Whatever.

-I met him in 7th grade at I.S. 70 and we immediately became inseparable buds.

-He is one of the best natural videogame players of all time. He won the ColecoVision game "Antarctic Adventure" the very first time he played it! He also turned "Dragon's Lair" into his own personal highlight film.

-He's a great baseball player and a graceful, accomplished all-around athlete, even though he took a tremendous amount of abuse over his exaggerated, "pro-style" commitment to proper form on the field of play. In retrospect, it was probably jealousy. He once smashed the neon restaurant sign across Greenwich avenue with a mammoth P.S. 41 dinger.

-He made one of the greatest one handed football catches I've ever seen, laying on his side after slipping in the snow in a game of touch at P.S. 41. in approximately 1982. I could be wrong about this, but I think it happened in a game against our dreaded rivals, the 9th Graders.

-Like another one of my heroes, John Starks, Benge attended 4 colleges in 4 years, before finally locating his groove at the University of Vermont. Also like John Starks, Benge went undrafted by every NBA team.

-After a glorious return to NYC in the early oughts, he has retreated to the serene beauty of Vermont, where he is putting his good heart to good use counseling teens(?)*

-He has one of the nation's largest private collections of funk vinyl, and you can hear some of it every other Tuesday night from 6-8 on WRUV.org. If he ever rents a room from you, make sure he spreads those stacks of records out, or they may drop right through the floor.

-Rather unfortunately, Benge quoted Billy Joel in our high school yearbook. He already knew it was a mistake before the book hit the printers, although occasionally he'll try to claim that the line he quoted was apropos of something or other. Don't believe him.

-I sat with Benge high in the upper deck at Dave Righetti's no-hitter in 1983, while D. Lee and D. Sandals snuck down to better seats. I think Benge's favorite 1983 Yankee may have been Jerry Mumphrey.

-Speaking of 1983, Benge turned me on to Saranac wristbands that same year.

-B. New worked at Miracle Grill under Bobby Flay. He can tell you about that experience.

-In approximately 1988, Benge and another friend compiled their heartbreakingly naive list of the Greatest Songs of All Time. Had he waited until his personal musical awakening a year or two later, perhaps Lisa Lisa would only have scored one spot on the list instead of two.**

-Benge had a trapeze in his apartment on 2nd Avenue, which lasted until the evening of his moving out party. That night, a young woman biffed herself right on the head when the trapeze came loose from the ceiling as she was doing fancy gymnastic maneuvers on it.

-Benge is real good at figuring shit out. He was on email in like 1991, and he even sent emails around to all of us at our university accounts. Of course, we had never heard of the internet or email, even though our schools had set us up with accounts, so we never got to read his messages. Still, pretty swift of him to figure all that out.

-Benge used to like egg creams. Not sure if he still does.

-Benge used to have a Honda Accord.

-He once drove out and picked me up at LaGuardia Airport on one of my trips home from college. That shit is unheard of, even now.

-He is obsessed with The White Shadow and can provide you with any Shadow-related info you might need. He maintains that Coolidge was easily the best player on the team, even though Hayward was theoretically the best. I hope I got that right.

-There's plenty more about B. New, and I may add to this later. I hope I've gone at least a short way towards distilling the excellence of this tremendous man.

* I am ashamed to admit that I have forgotten exactly what Benge is doing up there, although I know it is something positive towards his fellow man. Generally speaking, I have little idea what any of my friends do for a living. I hope this doesn't mean I am a dick.

** I have a hard copy of this but I ain't scanning it right now.

Profile #1: B. New

Profile #2: Little Scotty F.