Billy Builder's Backstory

Billy Builder could, I guess technically, be called my first (unintentional) stab at online dating.

Rewind back to about age fourteen.

Yes, I said fourteen.

(High School Susie, on the prowl)

I went to a party with the one girlfriend I had who was older, Allison. You know you had your own Allison, too - she was kind of dumb and kind of cute and most importantly, she was old enough to drive and her parents gave her a car. So if there were Saturday night things to be done, you were going to be damn sure you called a seat in Allison's (invariably tiny) ride.

So on this particular weekend we cruised out to West Billyville, across the highway and the railroad tracks and a little bit of prairie, to where the streets aren't all paved because West Billyvillians kept voting down the necessary tax increases (even now, there are still no sidewalks in West Billyville), and pulled up to a little log house, Zimas-with-Jolly-Ranchers-in-the-bottom in-hand (oh just own it, you know you and your Allison drank those too!).

Inside there was a little party, with a few people I knew and a few I didn't. In the midst of talking about whatever teenage girls talk about with teenage boys (80% chance: pot and/or your stupid parents), I happened to glance over and there. He. Was.

(Enter Future Billy Builder, center stage)

Did I talk to him? Yes, for perhaps all of eleven likely-awkward words, only two of which I technically remember. But in under a dozen, I got his first and last name and gathered that he wasn't from Billyville Senior High. Where was he from? Don't know. How old was he? Don't know. Whose house was it? Don't know. Who did he know there? Don't know. Was he even invited? Don't know. Was he a felon or meth-cooker or otherwise unsavory character? Don't know. 

Didn't care. 

I committed the name to memory and secretly promised myself I'd see him again. 

Then, in no particular order, I:

-grew up
-graduated
-fell in and out of love(-ish) a couple times
-joined the military
-traveled the country
-went to college
-made new friends
-made new enemies
-tangled with the law
-survived some growing pains
-shed some skins
-reconnected with old friends
-got smarter
-got dumber
-got smarter in new ways
-adopted some dogs
-bought a home
-broke some hearts
-sampled a few careers
-excelled and failed, in stunning technicolor
-made some U-turns
-took some chances
-learned some gutpunch lessons
-hit some jackpots
-scraped through some lows
-caught some fortuitous updrafts
-shaped myself into some version of an adult

...and otherwise proceeded with Life As Usual, USA, without another encounter with or, in all honesty, another thought about Mister Billyvillian until my age had almost doubled.

OK, cut back to adult Susie. I'm in college, visiting my mom who now lives down south over spring break, and right there on Myspace (go ahead, date yourself if you're gonna date me - we all know you once tended a 'Space profile, too!), right at the top of my friend's page, suddenly appears a comment from someone whose picture I don't exactly recognize but whose name - those two little words - I most certainly do. And where does he live now? Across the country from my old hometown Billyville, and two states from where I'm now a student, but less than 30 minutes from my mom's latest abode.

I fire off a message to the effect of "Hey, I met you once and now I'm in town and you probably don't remember me but do you want to run away and rob banks and set things on fire and share ice cream and go skinny-dipping and skip the border and fall asleep naked and wake up smiling and maybe grow old together hang out, err something, sometime?" (which, from my end, was pregnant with the sort of butterflies you might get by crossing the feeling of uncontrolled levitation with the foreknowledge of an imminent car-crash). Within a few minutes he had responded, and by that afternoon we were facing off across a formica Chili's table over horribly-mixed, overpriced chain-restaurant drinks, which were, in a surreal and suburban and laughably-standardized way, absolutely perfect. 

For hours. 

Until.

It happened! By jove (and by Long Island Iced Tea number four), it happened!

By this point, the Mr. Billyvillian I had so carefully filed into the fire-and-flood-proof valuables-vault part of my otherwise comically threadbare memory that night a dozen years ago had also muddled his own way through a good stretch Life As Usual, USA, and had become Billy Builder - who has, since The Kiss, for better or worse, continued to resurface in a recurring role, alternately scripted as uplifting / heartbreaking / befuddling / infuriating / unnaturally natural / impossibly complicated / unpredictable-to-the-end, in the Susie Solo Chronicles.

(Meaningful? Stay tuned.)