The day my friend Benny died was the day I opened my Rider-Waite Tarot deck for the first time. I didn’t open it because of him — in fact, I opened it first, that afternoon, when he was still alive — but these two things happened on the same day. I woke up to the next morning to the news that Benny, weeks shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, had taken his own life. I tried to put the pieces together like the world’s most horrible jigsaw puzzle — friends, family, his mother all posting on his Facebook wall with memories and condolences. There was quickly a GoFundMe set up to help his family with funeral expenses. This couldn’t be true. Of anyone, not the most loved, happiest guy I possibly ever knew. Not Benny.
I knew Benny from working with him at the local community theatre. He was the “tech wizard” — the magic-maker in the light and sound booth. My first three shows as a stage manager were with him, one of which was right beside him as he worked the light board and I the sound effects. In fact, there is still a remnant of Benny in that booth, though he hadn’t been in it for over a year because of the pandemic. On the closing night of Love, Loss and What I Wore, I crocheted the cast and crew coffee cozies and attached a tag with everyone’s name. Benny took his name tag off and attached it to one of the poles in the booth. And there it remains. And there it will stay forever.
I couldn’t look at him at his wake. I couldn’t have the last image I had of him be this young man, still dressed in his signature flannel and beanie, in a casket. Seven months without him feels like both a lifetime and the blink of an eye. Still now, I haven’t finished processing it. Will I ever finish? How can I make this make sense? I have theories and threads that I’ve tied to help me sleep, but it doesn’t bring him back.
The Monday following his death — he died on a weekend, which adds just another tragic element to the entire thing. Weekends are for your true self, for living — I went back to the theatre. I was in rehearsals for another show, and although that particular rehearsal was virtual, I needed to be out of the house. I set up my laptop in the empty house, which was truly empty because of the seat renovation, the old seats removed and platforms torn out down to the concrete. I opened my binder to check off attendance for the Zoom run through. Out loud, I ran through the names of the actors who were to attend, and for the one person who was not called, I said “…and Ben’s not here.”
Just then, the lights flickered. The light directly above me. It’s an old theatre, but the house lights have never flickered, and I had stage managed for nearly every show over three years. Benny was still messing with the lights.
With Benny gone, I started learning and practicing the Tarot. While teaching myself to shuffle one day, some time between his death and his service, a card flew out of the deck. This card didn’t simply fall out like they so often do, but this one came with a force. It landed face-down on my table. I picked it up to examine it: it was The Fool.
The Fool is the first card in the major arcana of the Tarot. It depicts a male-presenting person with a bindle over their shoulder, happily about to leap off a cliff to their next adventure. The Fool generally represents taking that next leap, the beginning of the adventure. Benny was a spontaneous, happy-go-lucky guy, and so I took that as a sign. Benny was The Fool, and he was trying to tell me that he was okay, and he was going on his next adventure.
Recently, I was reading a classic book on studying tarot, and just a few pages in, I was struck at this depiction of The Fool. I read it, without exaggeration, dozens of times. I couldn’t believe how much these words were talking about my friend.
From Rachel Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom:
The Fool represents true innocence, a kind of perfect state of joy and freedom, a feeling of being one with the spirit of life at all times; in other words, the ‘immortal’ self we feel became entrapped in the confusions and compromises of the ordinary world. Perhaps such a radiant self never really existed. Somehow we experience our intuition of it as something lost. Virtually every culture has developed a myth of a Fall from a primeval paradise.
‘Innocence’ is a word often misunderstood. It does not mean ‘without guilt’ but rather a freedom and a total openness to life, a complete lack of fear that comes through a total faith in living and in your own instinctive self. Innocence does not mean ‘asexual’ as some people think. It is sexuality expressed without fear, without guilt, without connivance and dishonesty. It is sexuality expressed spontaneously and freely, as the expression of love and the ecstasy of life.
The Fool bears the number 0 because all things are possible to the person who is always ready to go in any direction. He does not belong in any specific place; he is not fixed like the other cards. His innocence makes him a person with no past, and therefore an infinite future. Every moment is a new starting point.
…
Those Tarot commentators who argue whether The Fool belongs before, after, or somewhere between the other cards seem to be missing the point. The Fool is movement, change, the constant leap through life.
For the Fool no difference exists between possibility and reality. 0 means a total emptiness of hopes and fears, and the Fool expects nothing, plans nothing. He responds instantly to the immediate situation.
Other people will receive his complete spontaneity. Nothing calculated, nothing held back. He does not do this deliberately, like someone consciously deciding to be wholly honest with a friend or a lover. The Fool gives his honesty and love naturally, to everyone, without ever thinking about it.
I assume the author, Rachel Pollack, didn’t know Benny. But she wrote an exact description of him. A more mystical, mythical, loving, open being has never existed. I drew my own conclusions when that card popped out and I decided to assign meaning to it, but now, from a book written over four decades ago, I know it to be truer than ever.
Now, every time I pull The Fool — which I will admit, is not very often, making it a special occasion — I take it as a sign that Benny is trying to tell me something. Generally, he tells me get my ass in gear and just do it. What’s the worst that could happen? What’s the best that could happen?
Chabai Booker 