December Daily: Bender & Brian

clevermanka - "How are Brian Johnson and John Bender are doing these days?"

Mmm, nice one!

Let's see. Bender and Brian were in high school when I was in college, so they're at or near fifty now.

I can't help feeling that I gave all the life-changing realizations to John, and that Brian's due for some kind of big difficult emotion. Kaneko's Most Likely To does such a nice job taking him through the ups and downs of the dot-com boom that my mind has latched onto it as pseudo-canon. "Don't worry," John says. "Guys that get educated just need to make sure they have a dropout to support them when times get tough."

John and Carlinhos buy Wysocki out, of course, and maintain his long tradition of having an eagle eye for anyone who's queer and knows their way around an engine. The way employees of Shermer Import Auto Service keep leaving to open their own places, eventually John's going to discover that he can do a giant road trip across the country meeting up with alumni of Wysocki's Shelter for Bent Delinquents. So he does. It's what he and Brian do instead of going to their 25th high school reunion.

(There's bound to be a mini-reunion of the Breakfast Club itself at some point. I started thinking about Andrew blowing his knee out and becoming a coach, and had a nice little daydream where he survives a couple of shallow marriages before shocking everybody by winding up super-happy with the mom of one of his athletes, a widowed farm wife ten years older than he is. Let him be the trophy spouse for a change.)

Right now John's pouring a possibly unwise amount of money into outfitting the garage with the latest and greatest in electric car charging stations. "You watch," he says.

I think he and Brian get married. Illinois started trying to legalize same-sex marriage in 2007 and didn't manage it till 2014 -- they'd have been in their forties. I think each of them would have privately said, "It's not that big a deal to me; I'm doing it for him," but the guest list kept getting longer and the flower budget kept getting bigger and the toasts kept getting more sentimental. It's impossible for John to ensure the deletion of every cellphone photo of him crying.






( Prompts and How To Leave One - behind cut )