This means, in my current-stage grad-school-and-Husband-Watch-2013 iteration, I no longer have the purple hair, but the tattoos and the involuntary momentary swooning for any Billy with a skateboard and a guitar are (so far as I can tell) here to stay. Don't get me wrong - I don't actually try to date skaters any more because Reasons - but the
This wasn't any ordinary punk god. I mean, yes, he thrashed around on a guitar with minimal skill but maximal panache; yes, he whipped a crowd into a frenzy quite handily with a mic; and yes, he was probably dressed in all black and was definitely no stranger to a tattoo shop. But by day, while most punk Billys tend to be delivering pizzas or laying around on your goddamn couch smoking all your weed, Billy Ballroom was a dance instructor.
A classical fucking ballroom dance instructor. And competition dancer. And choreographer.
(Ever heard the term "pants-off dance-off?")
Oh, and also a felon twice over, but we'll get to that later. First:
The inaugural time we hung out, I picked him up from his band practice-space in an industrial, empty-at-night, railroad-switchyard-hobo-having part of the city (which involved walking down an honest-to-god rat-scuttling alley alone, knocking on graffiti-tagged steel doors till one opened and there was his bass player greeting me). From there, Billy Ballroom and I then drove to another warehouse that I'm not even sure why/whether he had keys for (don't tell me about creepy first dates. You don't even know creepy first dates.), where he switched on one shop-light (the dangling sort that mechanics have, with the cage around the bulb), pulled up his phone's iTunes, broke out a flask of Jim Beam to share, and then, over the course of a few hilarious, increasingly-buzzed hours, taught me the entire Thriller dance. I mean literally, from the first beat down to the last step, until we could both make it through the song with minimal outtakes.
(Go ahead, re-read that if you need to and then try to tell me you wouldn't go out again with these moves. I'll wait.)
To this day, that ridiculous night with Billy Ballroom still ranks right up near the top billing for "Most WTF-ingly Fun First Date Ever," and after that, I was fairly hooked. It helped that Billy Ballroom and his crew were ultra-late-nighters, which was my own schedule at the time, and also that they all loved coming over to my little tiny half-of-a-duplex and drinking and drugging and messing around with my acoustic guitars till the sun came up and/or neighbors came knocking. And, even when I heard the story of his felony convictions (both related to a college-age incident where he (allegedly) took a golf club to the windows of a frat house as well as several pricey, likely-daddy-bought vehicles outside of said frat house), I honestly found it more endearingly in-character than problematic (what respectable skatepunk doesn't disdain him some frat boys? And what frat boys don't, at one point or another, deserve some shit like that?). After all, the deed was (allegedly) done with said douchebag frat boys' own golf clubs, which had (allegedly) been thrown at him and another friend while skating past. I really saw it as delicious, nine-iron-y irony.
Billy Ballroom endeared himself to me even further by taking an interest in my bookshelf.
I'll admit, I like books more than the average kitten, and because by virtue of my semi-nomadic 20's I just wasn't able to keep all of them around, post-read, I've developed something of an All-Star traveling squad of favorites over my adult span. And, in the case of a work I know I'll end up drafting for the home-team and thus revisit at some point, I'm an underliner and dog-earer and highlighter, too, so my specific book copies are a bit of a personalized treasure to me.
Billy Ballroom paid particular attention to the small section of books I've cultivated dealing with religion - among them stuff by the Dalai Lama, Bertrand Russell, and Richard Dawkins (I'll give you one guess how Bible-oriented I am). When he asked if he could borrow one, I happily let him spirit it off in his bag (because hey, maybe a kindred soulless punk-rock spirit!). When he asked for another, I momentarily didn't remember that he had yet to return the first (and probably would have given him the benefit of the doubt anyway) and so he left with another selection. This happened maybe four times, and they were all books on atheism, freethinking, religion-free spirituality, the debunking of metaphysical beliefs, etc.
And then, Billy Ballroom went on tour, and fell off the radar.
One day maybe a week after the band kicked off from Billy City, I glanced down at the shelf from which Billy Ballroom had been slowly siphoning my paperbacks, and noticed a new title there.
It was definitely not mine.
It was a book about youthful turbulence and the shining path to Christ and salvation.
And it contained a note from Billy Ballroom, suggesting it might change my life.
(Oh. Oh sonofaDEITY!)
All of a sudden, like a religious awakening, it all became clear:
Here I was thinking Billy Ballroom's interest in the subject philosophies was parallel to mine when it was actually exactly perpendicular! And proselytizing, at that! God. DAMMIT!
I also realized I was probably not going to get my beloved books back without having some sort of Christ talk. Which I considered, but then remembered that nothing Billy Ballroom had taken in his surreptitious switcheroo was out of print, and so Billy Ballroom fell quietly off my phone contacts-list.
Or perhaps he ascended to punk-god heaven, while I fell into (continued and unrepentant) sin, which I enjoy greatly to this day.
Considering the reading material available in both destinations, I guess I'm not so sure I don't prefer the latter.
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