Riding With Billy Bondo

Because I'm normal and normal things are always happening to me with normal frequency, I got another Facebook message from Billy Bondo. Think of it like hitchhiking: you probably survey the vehicle/subject-line for only a second or two before you have to decide whether to get in.

I clicked.

When we last left young Billy Bondo, he was dreaming of face-licking and I was all like:

(I just got my hair done.)

But, because you can't actually see someone's facial expressions (much less try to get your tongue on them) when they open your email, Billy Bondo apparently kept me in his dossier of taste-test possibilities and tossed out one more email even after his last offer was met with silence, which started like so:

Hey Susie! Brace yourself, things are about to get mildly strange for just a bit!

 So, apparently things get "mildly strange" for people at different points on the journey, because here I thought all this talk of face-licking was right about where we started swerving over the center line in bat-country. I buckled up and read on:

How do you feel about mushrooms? Wanna go eat some in the desert with me? 

Now I'm not against drugs. In fact, I'm rather fond of some of them and partake on the regular.

 (Oh hey, Mom... haha! Drugs! You know, like caffeine? Mmm, coffee. And a nice glass of chardonnay with my pedicure? Don't mind if I do!) 

But I can't say I've ever had "take psychedelic substance of unknown source with face-licking stranger in alien environment far from home" on my adult to-do list. But hold on, we're heading toward the horizon at full-tilt with the top down here, and it keeps getting better:

We're all on our own journey and a little absurdity creeps into everyone's life and behavior and that gets under our skins and takes strange shapes... I imagine peeling beautiful people I see on the street apart layer by layer. I just would like to see you without your skin to know whats underneath.

Ooohhhhhkay.

I know you could, of course, take "skin" as a somewhat interesting - if maybe slightly ham-handed - metaphor for the walls people build between themselves and the rest of the living, breathing, painfully-beautiful spectrum of human connections, through a lifetime of for-better-or-worse experiences. Or some such horseshit. And for the record, I do think that's the angle Billy Bondo was attempting to come at it from. But just in case there are any Billys out there thinking of using this same idea as a first-date pickup, I'd like to suggest that the most effective imagery to conjure in your prospective Susie's mind might not be that guy in Florida who ate a homeless dude's face off next to the freeway, or, say...

Buffalo Bill.

(Are all the Billys these days just too young for this movie? Anyone? Bueller? Oh, is that another movie I'm the only one on the singles-scene old enough to remember?)

This.

This right here is the sort of thing that makes your skin a little tougher, adds another road-rash layer between you and the next stranger, the next potential Billy, the next ride taking you ever-closer to the great Pacific: when you have to bail out shoulder-first over the top of the passenger-side door while the car is still moving, rolling gracelessly to a stop along the dusty, deserted side of the heat-cracked two-lane blacktop while the taillights of another questionable Billy regain speed and recede into the low desert light, sun already cooling behind the fire-dry mountains.

(You're going to want some lotion for that.)