The last time I saw Billy was at the funeral, but the second-to-last time was when we got the guitar. The guitar I still have now. We knocked on Billy’s door and he answered in loose jeans and a green sweater with a hole worn in the chest that you could see a small circle of white skin through. His wild curls were matted nearly flat on one side. He let us in without a hello even, looking confused like he forgot he had even invited us over.
I know that Francesca stopped over and cleaned up for him once in a while, so it wasn’t totally filthy, but it stank. The apartment smelled like a thousand dead cigarettes and some burning plastic mystery poison. It was a one-bedroom with a barely used kitchen off to the side that had an empty fridge with some cans of SpaghettiOs and Coke and a stick of butter from last year.
The rug was gorgeous, with a blue-green underwater different-color sheen depending on which side you looked at it from. The furniture was modern and looked like sculpture, copies of famous designers I’d never heard of. Aaron told me but I forget the names now. The futon on the floor in the bedroom was the only afterthought, but Billy said it was because he was into Zen simplicity. The painting on the wall was one block of a slowly shifting shade of gray, shot through with a yellow horizon line. Relics from a better time. Like I said. Billy was famous, or whatever that means if you’re a jazz musician, but still. He was.
We sat on the couch without an invitation. He ambled over to the suitcase Fender Rhodes organ in the corner that he bought right out of a church in Tennessee one year when he rolled through there on tour. I watched as he played a scrap of something I didn’t understand, humming over the top and shouting explanations of certain bars to Aaron—what would go where in the arrangement. His fingers were white and long and looked clean and soft, untouched by elements or dishwater or time, though Billy was at least forty. The music was a mess. Not that I really knew, but I suspected he might have been making it up as he went.
I looked up at the ceiling. Directly above me was a spider spinning a web. The spider hovered for a minute. If the spider went left, I thought, they would tour again soon and everything would be okay. The spider went right. I wished even then that I could stop looking for signs.
“I dig it, man,” Aaron said when he was done. “When can the other guys hear it? When can we play it?”
“Soon, man, soon. I’m not ready. When I’m ready we play it. Now, run out and get us a bottle to celebrate, because I’m out. Leave your lady here to help me cook.”
He was punishing Aaron for bullshitting him. He knew it wasn’t any good. And there wasn’t anything to celebrate. But another unwritten rule of the universe was that you gave Billy what he asked for. Aaron left grudgingly.
When he was gone, Billy moved over to the couch and opened a funny little swing-out drawer in the cherrywood end table and pulled out some blackened foil with a halfsmoked glob of tar heroin sitting at the end of a charred trail in the center of it. I’m pretty sure he was shooting the dope when no one else was around. But socially he smoked it.
“Fucking California,” he said, meaning the dope. It was better in New York.
He lit a lighter underneath it and took a long hit off it before offering it to me. Aaron and I were by no means full-blown junkies like Billy, but we were chipping pretty regular by then and we were well on our way. It was Billy who had turned us on in the first place. I took the straw, soggy wet with his spit, and pulled a hit of smoke through it, leaning back against the couch and holding it in my lungs for as long as I could. And there it was. The okay. I imagined the fixing, the healing, the profound experience of relief traveling through the walls of the capillaries in my lungs and being carried by my blood vessels to the very extremities of my body. Like the films they show you in health class that explain the respiratory system and the circulatory system. Breathe in oxygen, breathe out carbon dioxide. Except it was heroin. Breathe in heroin. I wouldn’t ever breathe it out if I didn’t have to. I would stay there, breath held, time stopped, in my bubble of okay.
“I need a lady,” said Billy, dragging his gaze off the ceiling and onto me.
I breathed out, keeping my eyes trained on the light fixture. “You need to go out more to get a lady.”
He sighed, real dramatic, and we sat there for a while, him looking at me and me pretending like I didn’t notice. I loved Aaron desperate crazy but I still wanted to kiss Billy right then. I think it was because Billy had a way of making me feel needed, as opposed to my suspicion that I was eventually going to be expendable as far as Aaron was concerned. Of course, Billy didn’t really need me, either. But it didn’t cost him anything to pretend.
“You play anything?” he asked. I’m pretty sure he knew I didn’t.
“No. My dad was a horn player. But I don’t play. I wish.”
“Right. Everyone says that. I wish I could play. What would you play?”
“I don’t know. Maybe guitar. Nothing fancy. But just to be able to play a song.”
“Pick it up,” he said, pointing to the vintage Martin sitting on the unmade futon in the other room.
“No. I don’t even want to touch that thing. I’ll drop it or something.”
“You’d only drop it on the bed. Come on. Pick it up.”
I felt like I was doing something wrong when I sat down on the futon and put the guitar in my lap with my hand loosely around the neck like I was waiting for a request. I was flushed in the face and foggy from the drugs. Something about Billy made me red in the face and chest.
“Looks good on you,” he said. Then he walked over and sat down behind me.
He put his left hand over mine and moved each of my fingers to an uncomfortable spot.
“Strum it.”
I tentatively ran my thumb across the strings. It sounded awful.
“Press harder and try again.”
I did. And there was a chord. The most perfect thing, a chord.
We sat there playing like that for a minute. Then he formed the chord shapes with his left hand and I strummed the strings with my right. He pressed his chest against my back and rested his face against my hair. It was so strange to lean into him. I never even touched his hand usually. We weren’t cozy; he was more like that with Aaron. He smelled like little boy sweat, like he’d been running around outside in the cold, sweating under his big coat. But I knew he hadn’t been outside in days.
He played “Dead Flowers” and he sang light into my ear and it was nothing really. Like standing with my back to the band during sound check and feeling the music close to me, but not close enough. I knew when we put the guitar down it would be like it had never happened. He was just making me uncomfortable because he could. And because Aaron and I were caught in his web. His grip grew tighter as his world got smaller. Billy had to burn down everything around him and rise from the ashes again and again. That’s what kept things interesting for him. Stick around long enough, you knew you would wind up a casualty, too. But you stuck around anyway.
When the song ended he left me sitting on the bed with the guitar.
“Do you like yourself?” he asked.
“Ask another question.”
Aaron came in then. Stood in the door with the paper bag in his arm. He had picked up some cereal and milk along with the scotch.
“Any luck with the SpaghettiOs?” he asked.
He didn’t mind, really. It was only Billy. It was only a few chords. It was only me, after all, and I wasn’t going anywhere.
There were no SpaghettiOs made, so I poured three bowls of Cheerios while he broke ice from the plastic molds in the freezer and poured two fingers of scotch into each of the heavy crystal glasses. Billy was married once. He still had the crystal.
He handed me the guitar as I walked out the door.
“To borrow. To learn on.”
Only when Billy gave me the guitar did Aaron start to bristle. Once we were in the car, he said, “What the hell were you two talking about? Do you have any idea how much that guitar is worth?”
I still have the guitar. I still haven’t learned a thing.
Part of me never wants to see Billy again and part of me knows that I see him every day in my head anyway. Every day I think of Aaron and I find that Billy is there, too, our strange little triangle. I pretend I’m fighting to live in the present but really I’m having an affair with the past every secret moment. Talking to Billy feels like the most delicious admission of guilt. I’ve been pretending to be with a crazy man when really I’ve been with you all along.
We agree to meet at eight at a local Indian restaurant. It’s the night before graduation.
1592 hours down. 8 hours left to go.
Twenty
I shower back at the house and borrow a black dress from
Chandra that is too small for my boobs, too fancy for Indian food, and too flimsy for the cold weather. I pull on a tight pair of fishnets. In dim light, when I wear fishnets, you can’t see the scars on my legs unless you look close.
The bodice of the dress boosts my now quite spectacular tits into a perfectly sculptured rolling porno landscape. I am pitched sideways with a strange sadness and a new stirring of what I suspect is anger. Anger at this alien being in my body and anger at myself for the thousand obvious reasons. Everything looks blown clear by a cold wind. I am that kind of altered. As I dress I feel wildly reckless. Thoughts of Jake and the echo of his slap roll through me in unguarded moments. Fuck him, I think, looking in the mirror and teasing my hair into a sixties-style half updo resembling Javier’s Sharon Tate doll. And fuck me. Fuck me while you’re at it.
I apply about four gallons of liquid eyeliner and a bucket of shiny pink lip gloss, while kneeling on the floor in front of the full-length mirror we have wedged up against the side of the dresser.
Violet lies on the bed behind me reading Lithium for Medea. She looks up when I stand and straighten myself out. She has already expressed her disapproval of my seeing Billy, but she’s through with scolding me, I guess.
“Wow, Bebes. You look really pretty.”
She’s right. I do look pretty. I don’t know what I’m expecting out of tonight—a confrontation, an apology maybe. Or maybe just to see the face of someone who knew Aaron like I did. But I do know one thing. I want to remember what it was like to be pretty.
Billy is seated at an outside table underneath the heating lamps. The gated patio is covered with low-slung vines and glowing lanterns, like a tiny paradise off a seedy stretch of Sunset and Normandie. I see him and my heel immediately catches on an irregularity in the pavement. I stumble and then try to smooth out my step, to smooth out my skirt. His hair is the same. He has the same profile. He sees me and stands.
For a moment I feel an intense relief flood me, as if I’ve suddenly been given back everything I lost. Then just as quickly I remember, no. No. Billy wasn’t what was lost. But he was so close by, you could almost confuse the two in the low light, in the late, late winter.
“Baby.”
“You can call me Bebe now.”
“Didn’t I?”
Billy kisses me on the cheek and holds me against him for a beat longer than is comfortable.
“You look beautiful.”
He pulls out my chair for me.
“Yeah, well, you look exactly the same.”
“But I’m not the same,” he says, resuming his seat.
“So I read.”
“Press is press. You know that. It’s not the whole story. You should learn the whole story. That’s why I called. But first, I’m starving.”
As he says it, a shy-looking waitress appears and puts a Kingfisher beer down in front of him. There’s a glimmer of impish mischief in his expression when he turns toward her and then a shadow of that drug addict sad damage when he turns the other way. His face has always been alive like that. He’s one of those people who look like a totally different person in every photograph.
“Would you like a drink?” he asks. The waitress looks at me with her pen poised above her notebook. The colored lights strung across the patio give Billy’s wild, white boy afro a red halo around the edges. I look at the beer.
“No, thank you, water is fine.”
“Come back in a few minutes,” says Billy.
“You said you were sober.”
“I am sober. Six months now. This is just a beer.”
“You can’t be sober and have a beer.”
“Yes, I can. I’m sober from all illegal narcotics. My problem is with drugs. Beer isn’t my problem, so I can have all the beer I want.”
“Okay, Billy. I’m gonna go now,” I say.
“Wait, Bebe. Don’t go. Please. I need to talk to you. You’re not the only one who loved him, you know. If it makes you uncomfortable, I won’t drink. Okay? Just sit down.”
I surrender. I sit. I don’t want to leave anyway.
“Good. Let’s order,” he says. “Shall we?”
Billy shifts gears and explains to me the difference between northern Indian food and southern Indian food. He tells me that he once went to India with an ex who was into Sai Baba.
“Long before I met you. When there were different times for all of us,” he says.
Billy is a jazzman at heart but how he made himself a star is by collaborating with rock musicians and also by writing a song that was covered by a pop star in the early nineties. He gets me laughing with stories about Bono and some rap producer who doesn’t have a stick of furniture in his house and a guitarist who eats nothing but enchiladas with ketchup. We’re most of the way through dinner before I realize that he hasn’t told me why he called and also that he’s nearly made it through three beers.
“It’s getting late,” I say. “I have an important day tomorrow. I’m graduating.”
“From cosmetology school?” He doesn’t bother to hide the derision in his voice.
“It’s a good gig. It’s my ticket out of town.”
“You and your tickets out of town,” he says. “We haven’t even talked yet. Okay, I’ll tell you what. I have something I want to show you. I live right across the street here. Come over for a quick minute and then I’ll let you go and I’ll never bother you again. That or you can come to my show at the end of the week. Your choice.”
I agree to go with him, not because I believe anymore that he has something to show me or even something to tell me, but because I can’t bring myself to say good-bye.
He offers his arm as we cross the street. I take it just above the elbow, but don’t lean on him. Billy is only a couple of inches shorter than me in my heels, which still makes him about six feet tall. Usually I tower over men when I wear heels.
He lives in an old, five-story brick building, which has somehow weathered the many earthquakes without crumbling.
“When did you move?” I ask.
“I moved when I quit dope. Got to change up the feng shui when you do that kind of thing, you know?”
We walk up three flights to a clean, one-bedroom apartment with a wall of exposed brick. Brick walls always remind me of Toledo. Strewn around are a few pieces of midcentury furniture and some expensive vintage music equipment. I don’t see the old organ anywhere.
I follow him to the kitchen, where he immediately opens the fridge and grabs another beer. An urge to drink washes over me, as powerful as any I’ve felt since I quit. Some sharpfingered demon hand reaches through my back just underneath my shoulder blades, grabs my heart, and squeezes. The only thing that will relieve the terrible pressure is a drink. I can smell the yeasty sweetness from across the table like it is the most natural thing in the world. Part of your sweat and your blood. Don’t you need it like water to survive?
If I drank a beer it would be the final stone out from under my tenuous foothold and I would go sliding down the mountain. It would be the end of trying to hang on. My muscles ache from clinging to the last stone all day long every day. I’m sick of gripping so hard. I’d almost rather fall.
My head, my body, my soul demands a beer. And I’m not being dramatic here
. Within the course of a minute, my logical faculties have reasoned it out. My deep nihilism has put in its vote. My exhaustion has echoed a resounding yes. I don’t want to sit here sober and always apart from it all and aware of every little thing. How my nose is stuffed up and how the world is at war and how Billy laughs with a bitter edge and how the polar ice caps are melting and how it is hard to sit like a lady in my too-slutty dress and how Jake is locked in the VA hospital and how Aaron is nowhere at all and he never will be. Oh, yeah. And how I’m pregnant. And that, too.
I decide to ask for a beer. Better yet, to reach out and just grab Billy’s and take a sip. It’ll be cute. No one will care because no one will know. One beer. One beer won’t hurt a baby. Maybe enough beers and I’ll find the courage not to have this baby after all. Billy will grab another beer. I’ll finish his, and then drink another and then another until I pass out and wake up here as if it’s happened a million times before. I’ll quietly take care of my little problem and then I’ll slip seamlessly into his life. Be the drunk hairstylist girlfriend of a drunk legend. I’ll move straight from Serenity House into this pad with the brick wall and the fancy guitars in the corner. I like his face, I think. I always liked his face.
Drink now, I tell myself. Just fuck it. But my body doesn’t move. I will my arm toward the half-drunk bottle in his hand. Now. Now before it’s all gone. But some neural connection is severed and my hand stays by my side. It even moves for a second to readjust my skirt, but it doesn’t reach for a beer. Outside of my skin and in the air of the room, things are moving like they have been all night but on the inside, the soft dark of my brain goes still. And I can only think some supernatural force holds me back that’s more powerful than all the will in me pushing me forward. At a different time I might have called it Jesus, believed that Jesus is here holding me.
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