Richard Benjamin, Jr., age 19, Selma, AL,
February 19, 2004 Robin Bowman

Richard Benjamin, Jr., age 19 I don’t like my daddy too much. He left me when I was about seven or eight. I haven’t seen him since then. My mother is my father. I say, my mother is my father… my father and my mother. I got two sons and one daughter here, and one in Chicago. I had them with three mothers. I don’t believe in marriage… No, ma’am, I’ll never get married (laughs). I don’t know, it hard. It hard to find somebody to see eye to eye. But I respect females… all females. ‘Cause they the most precious. I dropped out of school the beginning of my eleventh grade year. I was sixteen. I realized it was a mistake a year ago, realized that I was doin’ wrong. The thing is, it come back and haunt you when you go look for a job. I can’t get a job without a diploma. Then, watchin’ all my friends in college, and I see I ain’t makin’ it with my life yet. It been a year since I’ve been drunk. One night, me and some friends we were ridin’, drinkin’, and you know, smokin’ on our cigarettes… just chillin’. I seen these people fightin’ and they was intoxicated. Well the fight shouldn’t have even really happened, ‘cause it was really about somebody steppin’ on somebody’s shoe. So they were drunk, they just start fightin’, and alcohol make people act wild and they don’t know how to control it… My friend, he died over it. We was pullin’ up, drivin’ up, and then we did heard the gunshot and he fell to the ground. He was a real close friend… I decided then to stop drinkin’. Make my life right. What do I like most about myself? My willpower to do better. And I want a business where I help children when they have problems, like peer pressure. Like a counselor or something.