Ramón Pebenito, 1983-2022

In memory of a friend

Ramón Pebenito, whom I knew as Monty, passed away last Friday. Cancer took him, and it took him fast, and the world is a worse place because of it.

Monty was my friend. He was the only friend from adolescence with whom I’d remained in substantial contact. Our adult relationship was long-distance. We’ve always lived in different cities and had bad luck for years when it came to coordinating travel. I didn’t get to witness in person the life he’d built with his fiancée, or connect with his enormous activist networks in New York. So there are significant aspects of his life known to me only at a remove. But I knew Monty, and knew him well, from my own perspective. A few long phone conversations and a string of texts, which he answered more sparsely as his battle with cancer grew harder, marked the last stage of our friendship. I was trying to brace myself for the worst even as I hoped for the very best. Still, I was shocked by the news of his death, which I received a few days late, and to be honest I am still half-numb. I want to share some of my understanding of him and his life and our experiences together because he was special.

Monty and I started hanging out a lot our senior year of high school in Northern Virginia. We were relatively conventional teenage boys, but we also shared interests in literature, art, and politics that not all of our peers had. Young Monty adored Nabokov, Joyce, and Kafka: the three pillars of his literary aesthetic. I still have his copy of Ada, or Ardor, which I always meant to return once I’d read it. Our AP English teacher Mr. Griese (son and brother of the famous football quarterbacks) told both of us how to pronounce “Proust.” Monty was good at keeping up with his other high school friends in a way that I was not, and in the years after he’d give me updates about old classmates he still talked with.

In the fall of 2000 and the spring of 2001, we’d regularly go into DC for movies and dinner. (Sometimes a third friend would join us, sometimes not.) We saw several titles that were part of the Shooting Gallery film series, including Sabu’s Non-Stop and Bahman Ghobadi’s A Time for Drunken Horses. I remember catching Requiem for a Dream with him. It was before either In the Mood for Love or Apocalypse Now Redux that we, needing to kill time, bought a Papa John’s pizza to go and ate it on the street waiting for the theater to open. We liked to visit bookstores and museums. I recall on one of our excursions an unusually friendly, mulleted guy who was into MMA or professional wrestling, or both, yakking at us on a Metro ride—this dude and his chatter about what “coach says” at “the dojo” became a shorthand character in conversations between Monty and me for years afterward. We had various long-running jokes like that. (Another one involved Orrin Hatch.)

We talked one time about how brushing your teeth before bed worked as a mild stimulant, which seemed counterproductive to the process of sleep. “Zach, I’ve pulled some all-nighters where I had to brush my teeth three or four times to stay up.”

I first ate Filipino food at his parents’ house during a graduation party. I showed up without an appetite, yet devoured two plates’ worth and a dessert. Any time I eat pancit I think of that day. When Monty’s diet was more restricted due to his illness this past fall, he had me text him pictures and descriptions of the tocino, batchoy, pancit, pork sinigang, and crispy patas I ordered on a few occasions, so that he could enjoy it vicariously.

Monty lived with my parents briefly when we were in college. He was in need of a change in scenery for personal reasons, so while I was up finishing school in New York, he lived down the hall from my mother and father for a few months. (The picture above was a few years after that period; we’re both 24 in the photo.)

He was a photographer and filmmaker. He could have made a career as a brilliant policy analyst, researcher, community organizer, political strategist—and in fact he was all these things, at different times and concurrently. He went on a Fulbright to Lithuania, where he learned some Lithuanian and studied suicide rates in the Baltic countries. He perfected his Spanish from his many stints waiting tables. (He was a superb waiter.) He did graduate work in economics at the New School. This is all just the tip of the iceberg.

Monty could be an intense person with intense passions. He often assumed whoever he was talking to knew more than they actually did. “Yeah, you remember how the Slovakian legislature introduced that one bill six years ago, and how much chaos that caused, right?—of course I don’t need to remind you…” It was an investment of good faith that made you want to be worthy of it. He could summon all sorts of facts about any topic he was interested in; he was a man who hit the books, the studies, the streets, all of it, with fervor.

In recent years he became increasingly involved in local leftist politics. I believe many of his friends and comrades will underline how dedicated, disciplined, and proactive he was in service of the cause. And that is very true of Monty of the past five years and more. (I do also remember when he went through earlier spells in life where you could describe him as, maybe, a Clinton Democrat. Plus he did a killer James Carville impression.) From time to time, our later phone conversations would veer into delicate political territory. I, who have only become less, let’s say, doctrinaire with age, would not always see eye to eye with my friend, who gravitated to a very specific Marxist-Leninist line. Despite this, Monty was lenient with what he might have thought were my weaknesses and mystifications, and we nevertheless knew that we agreed on more than we disagreed. He was interested in helping people, particularly poor and working class people, predominantly people of color, in his communities in Brooklyn. He had ambitious ideas about food security and hydroponic/aquaponic gardening. His last job, which he loved, was as Organizing Director for the Drivers’ Cooperative. He started a program, Left Hook NYC, where he taught kids to box. He lamented the plight of liberal arts majors who didn’t come from money, were sold a pipe dream, were forced to conform to a merciless economy, desperate well into adulthood to earn a stable living.

In 2014 I went back to New York to attempt to shoot a no-budget film with friends over a long weekend. The shoot was chaotic and the finished object didn’t turn out so well (trust me). But Monty was the MVP of that production: he was my DP, my equipment guy, and one of the leads in the film’s fiction segments. My ill-advised attempt at making a movie would simply not have been realized without him. Below is a screengrab from the footage.

In the spring of 2015, Monty was one of the friends with whom I could talk deeply and openly about struggles I was experiencing at that time. Profound changes were before me. I was finishing my PhD, barely, but also dealing with the fast-tracked disintegration of my marriage, while I suffered from significant, untreated depression and isolation. I don’t want to share any more personal details than this about what I was going through, but on a milestone day, when I needed a lifeline in the most vulnerable way, Monty came through with some encouraging, compassionate words and a link to a song that now has a weirdly sacred place in my life.

It’s useful to know that we usually had very different tastes in music; he liked a lot of emo and pop-punk. Me, not so much. So in a different context I might have been more placid. But here it is, a real gift and a testament to the kind of spirit Monty had, that he was able to intuit what I might need, and what would provide me with surprise, in that moment. “Staying Alive” traces that initial burst of vitality that is required if one hopes to get out of those darkest moods, mimicking the adrenaline and determination to DEFY despair. He understood this because he had confronted many of his own demons over time. (If you go to YouTube and do what you should normally not do, and read the comments, you will see that many people credit this song with saving their lives in dark moments, too.) The outro offers peace and slowness: “The worst is over / the worst is over / the worst is over.” 

Although he never got the chance to meet my current partner and fiancée in person, his enthusiastic blessing of her, based on what I told him in the early stages of dating, remains a touchstone.

He was a writer, and he encouraged my writing as well. We always talked about ideas, techniques, and approaches. I write all of this and share it—something here, about him, rather than nothing—because in words and through words we can try to move closer to the other person, to convey a sense of their reality.

Monty once told me that I was meant to be a light for others in this world, and though I have fallen short of that ideal perennially, I have aspired and will continue to aspire to do justice to my friend’s extremely generous way of seeing me. This is the impact that Monty had. This is how he touched people. All those he left behind who loved him will ache.  

What I wouldn’t give to have one more long conversation with him.

I love you and will miss you terribly, my friend. “The worst is over,” and you are outside of time and space but never outside our hearts.

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