Kryptonite, Part I

I flew back down to visit Billy Builder less than a month after our first grown-up run-in. And then I came back again less than three weeks later. And then he came up and stayed with me. And then I weaseled my way out of normal life for another few days at his place. And then we went to a mutual friend's wedding up by my hometown Billyville - where we met all those years ago - a dude I knew from high school, for whom Billy Builder was a groomsman. And then I went back down south as soon as I could to Billy Builder's. And somewhere early on in that exchange, I found myself in a ripcord-pulled-but-no-parachute-deploying freefall for the guy.

It was not exactly what select girlfriends of mine had in mind.

(Is a *little* support too much to ask when I'm about to make terrible life decisions, you bitches?)

But here's the thing: when Susie Solo's stupid brain, or heart, or whatever sort of manipulative arrangement between those two you might believe is running the show in these sorts of affairs, makes a call, shit does not get reversed. There's not even a replay-review option. So instead of listening to various friends who knew us both (including one, The Mover, who actually shook me by the shoulders one night a few beers in and told me Billy Builder and I combined were "like Whitney and Bobby, for fuck's sake!"), I toed the accelerator to the floorboards and maintained course.

(LalalalalalaIcan'tHearYouLalalaLA!)

Why the alarm from my nearest and dearest? Well, Billy Builder... was a fuck-up.

I don't mean his life was a total wreck or anything, but he'd been through some shit, and maybe spent some time as a less-than-great human - and because we had a lot of social overlap, a few of the people in my life knew about it. But here's what I saw: the aforementioned stumbles, yes, but he'd come out the other side thinking harder about things. I mean, isn't that the whole point?

Confession: I have discovered, over the years, that I have not just a tolerance, but maybe even a bit of a preference for guys who've had to crawl their way out of some trainwreck situations of their own making. I don't mean just your average hood-rats who are still trolling the bottom-waters and hurting people along the way, and not the never-had-a-chance sad-sacks with terrible family histories, and not your typical cliche "bad-boy" dead-ends. I mean folks who have learned the value of making their damn bed properly not from a textbook, but by personally fucking it up royally, and then having had to sleep in it in the past. These are the sorts of lessons that tend to turn boys into men (and girls into women, to be fair), and I actually have more respect for someone whose perspective has been shaped by a two-steps-back, regroup-and-get-smart, three-steps-forward kind of history than I do for someone who's just always been on a greased downhill track toward success. "I seriously question the life values," young Susie used to say, "of anyone who's never been arrested or fired." (That's still a little bit true.)

(I can't see how anything could go wrong here.)

And so things were fine. As things tend to be, at first. Fine as in: that moment you lay eyes on someone, like through the airport glass or walking toward your door or even just waking up in the morning, when your heart both somehow stops, but also feels like it just started beating in fast-forward, all at once - that kind of fine. The Billy Builder Experience was initially housed in a hazy envelope of those kinds of moments.

And then I had this terrible dream about Billy Builder, the night before I was booked to fly down to see him again.

I don't believe in any sort of clairvoyance or other metaphysical bullshit, but I do believe in intuition, and this one was the sort of dream that wakes you up like a punch to the gut, half-sitting upright and gasping for a deep breath of air in the dark while your brain slowly assembles the reality that it was a dream: that you're awake now and you didn't kill that guy or your sister's not really possessed or you're not actually at work without your pants or whatever, and so your life's not ruined here in the real world, and you collapse back onto your pillow in relief. But you don't fall asleep again for a long time, just blinking at the ceiling and waiting for the dream-dread to ebb while you slowly absorb the concept that that shit wasn't real.

(There are nicer ways to wake up.)

Except it was.

It might sound crazy, but I somehow knew from the minute I saw Billy Builder standing at the bottom of the airport escalator, smiling up at me standing there with my carryon the next afternoon, that it was true.

We went out for drinks at the bowling alley a couple blocks from his place, where I watered my liver to germinate the words for the question I already knew the answer to. Then we went home, where those words sprouted and unfurled and filled out into complete questions, growing up my throat and out of my mouth in vines that choked the space in the room between us. And instead of cutting back the jungle, Billy Builder's answers just obscured him in more green, unchecked.

(Did not sow. Don't want to reap.)

Details are not really useful here, but in very non-detailed silhouette: Billy Builder was still hung up on his ex. And she was back in the picture. And suddenly, my whole summer with Billy Builder was like the Lost City of Z, buried in vines, maybe nothing more than an Amazonian myth to begin with.

There are a lot of things I'll fight against, for the right reason, but going up against The Ex is an exercise in futility, and even at that young age, I knew it. She was local while I was a thousand miles distant. She was a two-year indelible scar on his past while I was just a currently-fleeting kiss, leaving no mark. And without even having met her, she was immediately my least-favorite person on Earth - a faceless nemesis made of Kryptonite.

(Two faceless nemeses, actually.)

I'd like to say I was graceful about it. I'd like to report that I handled myself with poise and dignity. But what really happened was more like this:

Without much of a choice at that hour, I quietly went to bed with Billy Builder, where he probably stared at my back without blinking all night, afraid to fall asleep or disturb me by, say, breathing too loudly, lest I fucking stab his face off with a broken beer bottle snatched from the nightstand. Then, predawn, I gave up on sleeping and dove into the most effective therapy I know: I went for the sort of run that makes everything else seem small: ranging miles and miles longer than I was currently trained up for, charging farther and farther from Billy Builder's house, pushing harder and harder, growing more and more out of breath until the fallout of the night before finally caught up to me by the side of the road. The actual moment - the sinking into defeat - is gone from my memory, but suddenly, this: me, on hands and knees there on the gravel shoulder, forehead touching down amidst the grubby constellations of discarded fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts stirred by the tailwinds of the morning's first early commuters. Time stopped there, as far as I remember, until a kindly dad-type pulled over, no doubt thinking I'd been clipped by someone's sideview mirror or something, buoying me back to the surface with approaching footsteps crunching through the weeds toward me and a cautious "Miss? Hey... Miss? Are you OK?"

And then I got to my feet, brushed the broken glass from my palms, and packed up and won the tiny battle of not looking back at Billy Builder as my taxi pulled away from him there on his stoop, my hands fighting each other in my lap and my disobedient heart lurking somewhere in the growing mileage between us, refusing to accompany me as I flew home.

(Coping, steps 1-7. Step 8? Blogging.)

If I could say the story ended here, it wouldn't have ever been blogged. But, because this is my weird life, and my weird blog, it didn't.

In true Susie-Tailspin fashion (know your predispositions and own up to them, folks), I proceeded to get fired from my job (my abovementioned life values are just fine, thank you very much). Then, later the very same evening I got canned, I received a phone call from someone who, at that point, I still mostly just knew secondhand through Punchin' Judy: Billy Boulangerie.

I hadn't seen or even spoken to him for probably nine months - the length of time since our first ill-fated encounter. For crying out loud, I didn't even have his number in my phone when he dialed me at close to three in the morning. I almost didn't answer, but because this is my weird life, for some reason I did, and here is what the semi-stranger on the line had called in the middle of the night to ask:

Did I want to take his job? You know, the one we had talked about nine months ago at the bar that one time he was in town? The one I'd said I would love to do sometime, if I wasn't already in this charmed relationship and happily employed and all? The job where he was one of three full-time salaried crew on a small, private, race-built sailboat that traveled all over the globe?

Because if I did, he was suddenly needing to find a replacement for himself and was offering me right of first refusal.

And if I wanted to be that replacement, I would have to let his Captain know within a day.

And if I said yes, I would have to get my current landlocked life shut down and put on ice, and meet the boat in Grenada - yes, the spice island just north of Venezuela - by the end of the week, prepared to be on-board and out-of-country for at least a year.

The Captain would call me tomorrow for an answer, said Billy Boulangerie.

Just think about it, said Billy Boulangerie.

Good night, said Billy Boulangerie.