I dreaded going to his house this evening. My best friend. I suppose that I walked here instead of taking the subway because I didn't want to see him in bed wearing his sweaty threadbare blue tee-shirt and his dark eyes, so much darker when he's lying there with his glasses on the milk crate by the bed instead of on his face.
I'm a much weaker person than Billy. Billy expects to succumb to whatever ails him, whatever causes these swoons from being functional—functional as a funny, selfish, sarcastic, music-loving, film-obsessed, argumentative, anti-social, irritating, completely non-sentimental Billy. He expects to succumb to it, temporarily and ultimately, and he expects this illness to return, today, tomorrow, next year. Sometime. I'm the opposite. I've known him for 20 years, and when he's done with the worst of it and begins to feel better, I expect roses from that moment on. But things are never okay. I've got to learn that. That's something I haven't learned.
The walk to his house, it turns out, didn't do me any good. Up Fulton Street to Franklin, then right. Trash was scattered on the sidewalks, an all-day of people's shopping, with children, and eating fast food. It turns out trash on the streets turns me morose, into someone with a dim view of my fellow human beings. Billy asks all the time where this moral attitude came from. I care about land mines and the depletion of the ozone layer—what everyone around me cares about. Those conditions feel remote, though, like becoming inured to violence by watching action movies or playing video games. The distance is an effective antacid. Chicken bones and plastic bags on Fulton Street produce a more physical response, plus an anger and an unsympathetic criticism of the people who dump all the crap—teenagers, bums, men and women who don't care, or don't think to care. I walked on to Franklin. Dog shit, fast-food wrappers, broken toys, a sneaker, bus transfers, cute little crack baggies, plastic water bottles, dirty diapers, fliers for clubs, hair ties and twists of synthetic hair, the endless plastic shopping bags, caught in tree branches, wrapped around a stop sign, blown up against the grill of a closed boutique, on the metal bars of bodegas.
A greenbelt runs through Eastern Parkway, including a tree-lined bike and walking path. The right turn from Franklin is a killer. Men sit on milk crates and broken up stools, bearing their gums and stained undershirts, the sidewalk showing evidence that they haven't left their spots all day, liquid outlines made in urine. The corner smells bad and so do they. A vacant lot comes next, and all that comes with a vacant lot, which acts as the trash receptacle for Eastern Parkway; it allows the broad avenue its green and clean appearance. But seeing enormous New York City rats dart under the fence draws all the attention away from the strip of lawn and trees across from the big apartment buildings.
I'm in a really bad mood.
I am to meet Billy here—there are three of us, three middle-aged men who call ourselves Billy. Some teenagers in Bed-Stuy called me Billy one day, and we all agreed that name Billy described the three of us so aptly that we insisted on a universal name change, a self categorization that, quite frankly, belongs to cults and pretentious art movements. We are Billy, white men who live in Black neighborhoods, who tend to date Black women, who listen to music made by Black people. We don't want to be Black because then we wouldn't be Billy. It's a shameless practice of whiteness, a pathway that allows as part of its definition whiteness, a nearly academic condition of super geeky white music-lovers obsessed with Blackness from the U.S., the Caribbean, from Africa.
Part of what makes the Billys unique is our age, 40. We went to college together and have been best friends ever since. Best friends and single. There is a peace that comes with it—40, living alone, almost too far into habits that may never accommodate a woman or a wife. And there have been girlfriends, significant others, one-night stands, long distance relationships, fuck buddies. They have told us jointly and individually to grow up. We're not lotharios, but at least the two of us, Billy and I—Billy who will show up any moment now on his skateboard—have been with women recently. But Billy hasn't. He hasn't had girlfriend since before Bill Clinton got caught with Monica Lewinsky and he hasn't been laid this millennium. He smokes pot every morning, every night; drinks heavily. He has been homeless and jobless. He has slept on our couches and our floors, borrowed our money, not to mention smoked our pot and drank our booze.
Apparently, he not so functional at this moment, which is why we are descending on 314 Eastern Parkway. Billy says he didn't get out of bed all weekend, and then he skipped work today. He said this over the phone. He didn't call in to work, then absentmindedly picked up the ringing phone to find his boss at the other end. Billy made up something, but he told me he doesn't see how he's going to go to work tomorrow. I got off the phone and I began sweating with the imperative of Billy's job. Billy didn't work for two years, getting evicted in the process, bellying up bankrupt, owing everyone on the ground money and an untold number of favors. How do you help stake someone's mental stability to something like a job when the person is so unstable he cannot hold the job? Or is unstable the right word anyway? Drinking as medicine? Too much THC in his system?
I called our friend Billy. We need to go over there and get him out of his funk. We are all in this together, this perpetuation of ourselves as the Billys. And in the perpetuation of ourselves—a community of the miscreants of early middle age.
Billy found Billy his job. He knew someone who knew someone who worked for a temp agency who needed someone to work in the basement of a bank operating an arcane computerized payroll system. We bought Billy interview clothes and tried to disabuse him a bad attitude born out of the alcohol and THC in his system, an attitude he likes to call "Kill All Humans." You ask Billy how he's doing, and about half the time, he replies "Kill All Humans." He will indiscriminately hate humanity. How are you Billy? "Genocide."
Billy pulls up on his skateboard, eternally high himself, either on weed or just happy from all the endorphins that run through his blood system. Billy is a sociologist whose research takes him to housing projects all over Brooklyn. Billy's perfect job. He skates from the most dangerous housing project to the second most dangerous housing project. He has been known to skateboard down an entire set of peed-on needle-infested housing project stairwells. I can't do it—blowing by dudes smoking trees in dark corners, or wanna-be gangsters brandishing scowls. He smokes weed with those very same gangsters, been a god-father to teenage baby mommas, handled weapons, chilled with clients watching TV at night, afforded entre, afforded access.
"Billy! Yes-I. Wha-g'won, my yoot?" he asks in a fake Jamaican accent. It's embarrassing, but no one is around to hear it. I suspect I must look sullen. The garbage-filled stroll. "Are you sure it's not you who is spending all his time in bed?"
Billy tends to take a different view of our friend Billy's malaise. He doesn't trust clinical depression. Billy is built on physical engagement. He earns his tremendous amount of able-bodied sun kissed Southern California robust health riding around all day, and swimming five days week. With us, he loses patience, I think, because usually, we can't keep up. And at six-foot six, keeping up with Billy isn't easy. He thinks that Billy's problem is simple. Billy needs exercise and a change of diet.
Get him riding his bike once a day, get him away from those greasy meat products, and he'll have more energy. Get him drinking water instead of beer every night, and in two weeks we'll see a change.
But that's their thing—the great debate over how Billy can improve himself, how he should improve himself. Billy retorts to Billy, You're all about self fulfillment, and I'm all about being Billy. I think of them as the two poles on either side of Billy, and I spend my time shuttling back and forth between the two.
We walk into the building because we each have a key, and then we walk into his apartment, yelling "Billy." We hear the stereo, we see his bedroom door closed. Billy is a 40 year old man who lives in his bedroom, much like we all did as teenage boys. He has his bed, stereo, his desk, his computer, and virtually everything else he owns. He lives with two other people in a two bedroom apartment. He doesn't like the people he lives with, but because he declared bankruptcy, he cannot invite a credit check and thus does not want to look for another apartment. Simply put, he lives with horrible people.
A couple occupies the other bedroom, Susan and Duane. Billy sees little of the couple. They couldn't be older than 25, and didn't come from New York. Billy said they moved from Stafford, Virginia to become paramedics after 9/11. Patriots. Like Billy, they drink and smoke, and like Billy, they do not occupy the living room much. But unlike Billy, they yell and scream, for they have someone at whom to yell and scream. He has heard Duane smack Susan on more than one occasion, and he has heard Susan crying. He has heard objects thrown across the room and land loudly. He has heard things broken. Only once he threatened to call 911, only to hear Susan yell, "Ha! We are 911." We've asked Billy why he doesn't do anything more, and he says he really doesn't know what he can do except leave, and that he sees leaving as being more trouble than it's worth. I guess Billy hasn't been in much a position to help others.
Billy and I knock on Billy's door. "Can we come in?" The assumption was that we'd find Billy in bed. What does it mean when the usual devices don't work? He has a fulltime job and all the structure implied; he lives in an apartment with a full-year lease, cheap rent—he pays $500 a month in 2007!— he buys weed from a dealer who delivers; booze at the pubs in midtown when he gets off work, bars all over the city, discount liquor stores strategically located around the Village, beer at the corner store.
I try to be there for Billy. But I have my own problems. I'm starting to get sick of myself. Billy fights with his demons, and Billy seems fully adjusted to his role as the Silver Surfer of the Brooklyn Housing Projects. I want to help Billy, but I also want a girlfriend, or maybe even a wife. My hangovers debilitate, and my memory hasn't been untouched by smoking grass with Billy and Billy every weekend. I think about what it would be like to own a house instead of having my rent pay someone else's mortgage, of buying a car to get out of the city on the weekends. I wonder what being an adult feels like.
This is all hypothetical, and I don't talk about it. I don't tell either of the Billys. I try not to think about it, in fact. There's a big part of me that doesn't want anything to change—I've been living like a Billy for over 20 years. How can I change now? Can I change now?
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