He was tall, courteous, and a gentleman in every sense of the word. He was a friend and his name was Bill. Bill and I often went to the beach to look at the local talent. We’d sit there a beer in one hand and a Marlboro in the other, never going into the water, never moving from our spot until the sun had gone down.
According to the girls in town he was a bastard, this might have something to do with the fact he ended up sleeping with at least one or two different girls each night. One thing all the girls seemed to agree on was that he was dynamite in bed, so good he had to pass girls on to me to make sure they were rotated properly - he was always willing to share. That’s just the kind of guy he was, always willing to share, in fact he gave me his last cigarette on many an occasion, he would even give you the shirt off his back, although I normally had at least one shirt near me if not on me.
Now Bill was one of those bohemian guys that didn’t bathe. It was against his sensibilities he said. You got used to the smell after a while in fact most of the time all you could smell was the girl's scent he popped the night before. His girlfriends - when he had them - would ask him why he didn’t bathe, he’d normally reply with something like “It’s dishonest.” If there was one thing Bill prided himself on it was his honesty, even telling the truth when no one wanted him to.
“Do these pants make my ass look fat?”
“Well, yeah.”
This was probably why he couldn’t hold a girlfriend down for long. Another reason was because he couldn’t help but hit on his girlfriend’s mothers, it was a fetish he had that he was powerless to stop. “Nothings sexier than a woman that knows where it goes who can cook.” Funnily enough he didn’t really get along well with his mother, apparently she never cooked - I shudder to think what the real problem might have been. One of his girlfriends - can’t remember which one - who was relatively hopeless in bed got so mad at him for doing her mother that she washed him. He passed out one night and she got a small bowl of warm water, bleach, after shave and a jar full of potpourri and began scrubbing. I probably should of stopped her but I was incapacitated from the … well this is Bill’s story.
The next day he smelt like a botanical garden and everything began to change, he didn’t know it yet but he was about to fall in love. No one could have predicted it, it was the tsunami waves rolling ashore and continuing into the town destroying everything in its path. Everyone said it would happen one day - the law of averages would suggest that - but no one took it seriously least of all me. It happened on a routine trip to the forest in mushroom season, she was on the side of the road her car had broken down. We knew nothing about cars but we figured we’d give it a shot.
“I think you’ve got a distributor problem. Can we give you a lift anywhere?”
To the best of my knowledge there was nothing wrong with the distributor, Bill just liked saying “distributor”. There was probably some interesting aside to that but my mind fails me as to what it was.
“Yeah, this distributor is gone. Man I haven’t seen a distributor
this damaged before. Have you been riding your distributor really hard?”
Oh he also liked working the words ‘ride’ and ‘hard’
into a sentence.
She slid into the back seat and Bill stared into her eyes not saying anything nearly crashing into at least three cars. We dropped her off at her house and Bill decided the mushroom hunt would have to wait.
Like I said everything changed then but to be more correct only Bill changed. The earth still went on revolving junkies kept shooting up, alcoholics kept on drinking, people kept on bitching, politicians kept on lying, the poor kept on getting fucked in the ass and the US of A kept on blowing shit up. Bill however started bathing twice a day, shaving every day, drinking water as opposed to beer, buying new clothes every week, watching reality TV, quit smoking and easy lays - he even took an interest in D.I.Y.
I started seeing him less frequently - in fact not at all - for at least three or four months. Until he turned up at my house on a hot January for my birthday. The fact that he remembered was strange enough but the fact that he actually bought me a present made me slightly uneasy. What’s more it was a practical gift, a suit, a business suit, a black pinstripe business suit with a blue power tie.
“I thought I’d take you out to dinner.”
“Why” I said, this was quite possibly the weirdest proposition I’d
ever heard. Especially from Bill who knew my idea of dinner was a bottle of
vodka and a jar of olives.
“I thought you might want to meet my fiancée.”
There was no vodka at this dinner it was a Christian restaurant owned and operated
by Rachael’s parents.
So I sat there at the table in my business suit watching Bill smiling and laughing
and patting other suits on the back they were all black and pinstriped as well,
but different sizes and spaces of stripes. Finally I got to meet Bill’s
soon to be wife Rachael.
“So how do you know Bill?”
Rachael was a very plain girl, with very plain clothes however she did have very extreme Christian values. Apparently they had not had intercourse yet because it was a “sin to have sex without being under the covenant of marriage”. Bill confessed his sins and was forgiven by god for his … “experimenting” as Rachael put it. Then began the preaching and prayer for my soul, apparently I was wicked and under the devils control, god was the only truth and light that I needed, the devil had made me think that alcohol and loose women were fun, I had been lead away from him, but he forgave me and still loved me and… I think you get the basic idea.
I was lucky that I bought my smokes and an eighth of coke with me. A waitress came out and saw me snorting so I had to give her some, I didn‘t want to but hey, life’s all about compromise. The coke didn’t make the dinner go any smoother, in fact I was kicked out by the owner/operator apparently Christians don’t take to kindly to illicit use of drugs on their premises. I was however invited to the wake after the wedding, people call them receptions but there really a wake, it’s the celebration of death that brings them together.
Bill looked happy I suppose. He seemed to smile in the right places and cry in the right places. The best man made a speech about the goodness inside Rachael for leading Bill away from the path of fear and loathing. The best man was a man who knew Bill only from the stories told by Rachael. I thought of the time Bill and I spit roasted a girl that looked remarkably similar to Rachael, the good ole days experimenting with mind bending drugs and promiscuous sex whilst exploring the deep void inside ourselves through many bottles of Jim and Jack. Experiencing the futility of life by striving closer to death. They were all gone now just a faded memory an acid flashback, a hangover slowly being destroyed along with a thousand or so brain cells.
Bill and I would not see each other for a year which seemed to go by fast. Rachael became pregnant a week after the wedding, according to Bill the next nine months were the happiest in his life. Rachael had cravings for ice cream and peanut butter with bacon on top at three in the morning. Bill would rush out and succumb to every wish she had. He filmed the birth of his son whom he called Isaac; he told me Isaac was his greatest achievement, his Everest, his gold medal, his moon landing.
Unfortunately Rachael saw things a little differently the stress of child birth and parenting drove her crazy. In a written statement she gave to police “Isaac was in fact the son of Satan and would bring the world into complete darkness on his sixteenth birthday”. This is why she had to kill him before his first birthday while he was not strong enough to defend himself. She strangled him with a plastic bag in the cot next to his teddy bears and night light. The court trial was long and arduous eventually Rachael was acquitted by reasons of insanity and was committed to a mental asylum. She later committed suicide in a padded cell - she held her breath till she died.
This is when Bill came back to town, he was less than half the man he used to be, but he was still my friend, Bill. He stayed at my house and it was like the good ole days again, the next few years flew by in a drunken orgiastic utopia. When Bill wasn’t drunk you could hear him wailing in his room for days on end - the sound would make you want to slit your wrists just so you didn’t have to hear it. I normally went to a bar instead, there I would be told by some of Bill’s former lays that he needed psychiatric help, it made sense but I struggled to find anyone that didn’t need some sort of psychiatric help.
Then one day the wailing stopped. Bill became a completely empty vessel all emotions had been cried out. He walked around the house eyes glazed over, an insincere smile plastered to his face. His mouth moving but no words ever coming out. Then a month later he disappeared he left a note saying
“All will be explained later. By the way I left a bottle of Jim for you.”
Every couple of months or so People would tell me they saw him walking down some road west of nowhere. About a year went past then the strangest thing happened, there was a knock at my door this wasn’t the strange occurrence - although people did rarely knock on my door. The knock on my door was only a prelude to a bouncing baby boy sitting in a basinet on my doorstep. There was a note cello taped to the side which said
“My name is Isaac. Please look after me.”
I brought Isaac inside and put it in Bills old room. The sheer panic I felt as a result of that baby made me smoke a pack of Marlboro’s in five minutes. Then there was another knock at the door, this time it was little more familiar, and then the smell hit me. There was Bill smiling at my door step unshaven, unwashed the way he was all those years ago. He walked in and said absolutely nothing and went to his room picked up Isaac then turned around and left, and then he disappeared again.
For years I got notes from him on my doorstep saying “all is well” and “Isaac’s good” and so on and so forth. Apparently Isaac was a clever little thing and went to university and got degrees in something, he was proud of him - his Everest. Eventually the letters stopped, I was worried about him for short time but I guess there was nothing to say, that was Bill always honest always generous and never one to waste your time. As for me I got older, drank less and tried to make lasting connections with people. It never really worked though, Isaac visited me every couple of months telling me he’s heard from Bill and such and such has happened.
As you get older you see things a little more clearly not crystal clear but clearer then before but even when you begin rocking your chair on the balcony you still can’t figure out the mysteries of your own life. You sit and reminisce, you think and wonder, you wonder how it’s all going to end and hope for the best. You hope your true friends will all visit you and you will have an emotional memorable moment - one that is worthy of movie - but they never come, and you sit on the balcony waiting for your friend, you wait some more and then some more. Your senses become even more finely tuned to certain noises, smells and when the wind blows in the right direction I can still smell him from miles away and I know he’s on his way.
So I wait. And I wait some more, for my friend, Bill.