BEN FRANCO

"Benji."

My first memories of Ben are from our days at Clarke. He was a pretty cool dude. He was never part of the "in crowd." But I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who didn't like him.

Ben was a certified member of the "black T-shirt" crowd. He loved his heavey metal music. And you'd be likely to see his notebooks covered with Metallica lyrics, or have the color of the notebook cover erased to spell out the name of the band W.A.S.P. or something.

If I'm not mistaken, Ben was kicked off of the freshman year football team for failing to quit smoking. Nicotine is some powerful stuff.

I had a language class with Ben in the second semester of our freshman year. Mrs. Fischer taught it. At some point we had to give a speech about ourselves. I remember Ben's speech. He told about a time when he lived in Arizona, and had had a really bad day. He said that he had encountered a rattlesnake, got away from it, back to the safety of his house - where he was promptly met by a scorpion. A bad day indeed! It turns out the whole story was bullshit.

In the beginning of our sophomore year, I loaned Ben three of my "phone madness" prank phone call tapes. These tapes had been passed around to dozens of people since the time I'd first recorded them, back in January, 1986. But on the day that Ben borrowed them from me, he decided it would be wise to break into someone's home. The police literally caught him with one leg hanging out the window. My tapes were in his pocket. Several months later, I got a disorderly conduct fine for those tapes. And they kept the tapes. I have copies of two. But tape #3 is never to be heard again.

I had Ben in Mr. Conrad's biology class in our sophomore year. And it was in this class that I discovered something else about Ben. He was smart. At the very least, he was much smarter than anyone ever gave him credit for. He and Christine Soppe kind of had a running, friendly battle with each other over their quiz and test scores. And more often than not, Ben would win. And Chris Soppe was pretty smart.

I believe Ben was present for our entire junior year. But I don't think he was around at all for our senior year. I don't think he ever left town. Because I did run into him once or twice at the video store. So he apparently dropped out of school. That's a shame. He was better than that. I believe Ben moved to Texas, and is married to a woman named Maria.