Me: Your soul mate: [HellNo-type screen name such as "G_Thug881 or "MuchoMachoVida"].
Judy: Now those are some special prison tattoos.
Me: I don't know if you're the "kind of shourty (sic) who can Keep Up" though...
Judy: If his photos are any clue, I think by "Keep Up" (capitalization preserved) he is referring to attending quinceañeras and eating hot wings?
Me: Ah, well then I stand corrected, you're golden.
Etc.
(Dammit, "Abe_Dawg_1865," mirror selfies are an immediate no-go.)
Were it not for Judy accidentally punching in the wrong search zip-code during one such joint-browsing session, I honestly never would have even seen his profile, as he lived an hour away from me and, in Billy City, there's just no need to search too far and wide for Billys. But Judy clicked all over him and wanted to bed him by proxy, so insisted that I should write him. This is how I met Billy Bullfight.
Billy Bullfight was a little bit of a sleeper, which is interesting, because the fact of neighboring-town distance - even if only an hour's drive - immediately worked to push our dates to the overnighter level. In fact, the first time we went out for drinks, I ended up staying with him rather than driving the hour home late at night, and it was a great - though mostly-clothed - night and morning.
A week later, Billy Bullfight asked me up to stay with him in a friend's A-frame cabin in the mountains where he was dog-sitting, just outside the ski-slope town of Billyridge, where he had lived for years. And again, this time tucked up in an awesomely rustic ladder-loft bed, after having spent a couple dark on-deck hours wrapped in intertwined sleeping bags to keep the late-fall chill of the forest at bay while we shared a bottle of wine under a spectacular Orionid meteor shower, we slept together. But I mean like literally, we slept. Billy Bullfight liked to get about nine hours a night (fairly opposite my own insomniac tendencies), and the dude just wasn't in a hurry to get laid - which was half frustrating (because inquiring Judys wanted to know!), but also half charming.
(I'm good at this.)
For the first month or two, I wasn't entirely sold and was actively dating other people anyway. But Billy Bullfight was persistent and consistently easy to hang out with, and so he eventually won the dating wars. One day he asked me if we were "in a relationship," and I realized that this one had snuck in under the radar over the course of a slew of weekends of hikes and trail runs and co-cooked dinners and coffee under blankets in the mornings and climbing gym visits and snowboarding hooky-days and house-party makeouts and goofy slacklining-in-the-park afternoons and hot-tub-and-Netflix evenings, and had become, yes, a real relationship.
Billy Bullfight was a runner (oh, aren't they all?), but like no other runner I've ever known: not only was he a speedy mofo who turned in blistering mile-split times and placed in every 5- and 10K he entered, but also, he ran ultras: he'd drop into 50K mountain trail races on a whim and win; he outran his own pacers for the last 20 miles of the Leadville 100, for fuck's sake. Coming from him, "Let's go for a run!" was a pretty formidable Sunday morning invitation: I once, about an hour's push-pace (for me) into his "short trail loop" with him, casually asked how many miles we were going to cover, to which he'd shrugged, completely not out of breath (in stark contrast to yours truly gasping along a few strides behind him), and nonchalantly sighed, "Umm, I think it's only like thirteen or fourteen or something?"
(I am only maintaining consciousness by watching your calves work, Billy Bullfight.)
He wasn't a particularly big dude, but he was all muscle - a fact I enjoyed every single ounce of. Just watching him unloading groceries, or stepping into pants in the morning, or reaching up to lather in the shower or whatever was like art. I mean, yes, sure, any man with a decent physique and something like 2% bodyfat is going to be neat to look at, especially when you spray soapy water on him. But what really turned my head and put me on the high-burner was the fact that he had a huge, ragged scar that knitted and forked and knotted all the way across his back.
From running.
Because, see, Billy Bullfight might be able to beat any mere human at any conceivable distance, but he couldn't claim the same with the four-legged crowd - a lesson he'd learned the jackass hard way, by getting himself gored pretty savagely in a Costa Rican running of the bulls. Dummy.
Punchin' Judy has long held the notion, which I've adopted wholeheartedly, that for a man to be hot - not just run-of-the-mill good-looking, but hot - he has to have an "Owen Wilson Factor." That is, he needs something not at all typically-beautiful - like Owen's jacked-up nose - to set him apart from the merely-pretties, into the uniquely-sexy category. Billy Bullfight's scar was his Owen Wilson Factor, and I was insane over it. I loved the way his lats moving underneath it made it twist and pucker. I loved the way it felt, like little hard ridges and concave valleys under my exploring fingers when we were in bed. I fell asleep tracing it and woke up watching it move with his breathing and I thrilled to run my hands along it when we were chest-to-chest.
All this iron-manliness was juxtaposed against the somewhat effeminate fact that Billy Bullfight spent his days thinking about, talking about, baking, and basically eat-sleep-breathing cookies, because he was, by profession, a cookie shop owner (a fact I immediately snarked to Judy via live-text updates during our very first date, upon which news she dubbed him "The Cookie Baron" and texted me approximately 18 times the morning after to impatiently ask if The Cookie Baron and I had "made love on a pile of chocolate chips yet or what?").
(There's just no street-cred in cookies. None.)
He was gorgeous, yes - but in a kind of innocent and dumb-looking* way, with big astonished long-lashed Disney-eyes and a huge family-friendly grin at-the-ready for the whole world, and a passion for cookies that brought Dopey and the rest of the lovable dwarf crew's half-witted love for mining to mind. So much of a passion that, as a grown-ass man, he happily went by "Cookie-[real-world first name]," or sometimes just "Cookie," among his friends.
*(I'm not claiming Billy Bullfight was actually unintelligent. If he had been, he wouldn't have lasted more than two dates and possibly a bedroom test-drive on my roster but instead, I ended up falling for him pretty hard over nine or so months. So.
Also, about the whole cookie alter-ego: true, he did rather unfortunately refer to himself as a "dough-boy," and also true, like a 12-year-old fatgirl, he did use "Snickerdoodle" as his snicker-worthy password for everything. But on a slightly more respectable plane, he orchestrated every last one of all the business details, ran the shop's website, directed all kinds of advertising, kept tabs on finance, and managed a cast of part-time college-age girls. On top of that, being a slight perfectionist and control freak, he did all the packaging up and card-personalizing for internet mail-orders and call-ins himself, and - because he didn't want to have to insure said coeds on the road - personally made all the local area deliveries. The latter MBA-oriented strengths were the ones I stressed to friends, in my honorable-girlfriend efforts to frame him as a Cookie Baron, not just a simpleton Cookie Boy.)
But I digress. Cut to the part where once I was fully starry-eyed, Billy Bullfight abruptly dumped me on my ass, which stung like a motherfucker because I never even saw it coming. I mean, usually (if you haven't already pulled over first yourself) you can feel the road getting narrower, maybe you're easing up a bit already on the accelerator and veering a little toward the shoulder so it's more of a glancing blow. Not this one. One day I was all-in and he had me meeting his extended family and shit, and the next thing, head-on collision. There were no survivors.
(Oh by the way, I shut off your oven timer a while ago, Billy.)
So I was brokenhearted about stupid Billy Bullfight, in a Judy-better-bring-me-ice-cream-at-the-drop-of-a-hat way, except the problem there was aforementioned cross-country geography, and the fact that Judy - although she did put in a best-girlfriendly-worthy amount of phone time - would probably not have hesitated to hop in the sack with Billy Bullfight had she been in any sort of proximity, just because I couldn't anymore, whereas if she was on the scene, she probably could. Friends like these.
But Billy Boulangerie, who's seen me run aground through a couple low tides over the years, was on-point in getting me righted and back out to sea (possibly because, what with his dietary preferences, he could personally understand the pain of missing out on so, so many cookies). He called more to check in. He emailed funny things. He still mocked me and my crumbled cookie empire dreams, like any true friend worth keeping around, but in only the gentlest of ways, formulated to carve just enough distance between my mangled pride and Billy Bullfight to allow humor to weasel in and widen the gap. For instance, when I lamented the fact that, for obvious reasons, I could probably never again enjoy one specific cookie made in Billy Bullfight's shop, of which I'd grown crack-addict fond over the course of our courtship, Billy Boulangerie suggested that perhaps I could lurk in the alley behind the storefront and entice kids into taking money to buy me one. Y'know, much like alchies approach incoming liquor store patrons to purchase their 40-oz's after they've been 86'd. Not that I'd know anything about that.
(That's just from shampoo in my eyes and I'm thirsty so GET OFF MY BACK.)
One day, Billy Boulangerie texted to ask "what's your address again?"
I sent it off without a second thought.
The following morning, my doorbell rang. I didn't answer it, because I was very busy and also wearing the same clothes from two days prior. But a few hours later, when my midweek breakup-induced tailspin hangover ebbed enough for me to stop with the Youtube videos and lurch out of bed, I shuffled downstairs and found a neatly-packaged box on my steps.
Inside was a delivery-order dozen of those pined-for cookies, accompanied by a note that was, of course, penned in Billy Bullfight's own unmistakable handwriting:
"Sorry [Billy Bullfight's real-world name] was such a stupid fucking dud.
Love, [Billy Boulangerie's real-world name]."
Friends like these.
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