Susie and the Electric Kool-Aid Basso Test

 Grenada.

Late evening, following a full 36-hour pileup of travel mishaps involving small aircraft, questionable maintenance, tiny airports, and infuriatingly-leisurely island scheduling.

90-plus degrees after sundown.

Open-air airport, roaring with the alien sounds of a tropical summer night. Whiffs of wet green earth and a trace of raw sewage saturate the already-near-saturation-point air, through which one sole sore-thumb whitegirl is laboriously dragging a duffel the size of a portly human corpse. It is naively packed with a year's supply of Dramamine (for previously well-established reasons), as well as a comical selection of  ridiculously stupid shit like economy-sized tubs of specialty shampoo, hardback novels, sparkly evening gowns and heels (you never know!), and a ziploc full of aspen leaves, among other even less practical items, toward customs.

Wait, back up.

(Still not sure how to empty the dust bin on this thing.)

Six days prior, I'd gotten the call from Billy Boulangerie. Did I want to take his sailboat job, thus essentially signing myself over to a slightly less secretive, but still Witness Protection Program-esque, make-you-disappear sort of arrangement?

I'd thought about it over one sleepless night. I'd mulled it over with local pals and relatives, whose reactions ranged from "You can't be fucking seriously considering that, right?" to "Send me postcards, you lucky bitch!", and then... I'd pulled the plug.

Classes: dropped.

Possessions: jettisoned.

Parents: shocked.

Stress-level: THIRSTY.

(No I'm not. HahaHAHAHAyes I am.)

Before I left Fort Billy, the weather turned absolutely miserable - torrential sheets of rain, gloomy grey mornings undifferentiated from gloomy grey afternoons and gloomy grey evenings. Symbolically, I told myself, this was old Fort Billy giving me the lights-out.

And so, for five days, I glanced repeatedly at my printed travel itinerary, pinned to my fridge by a magnet bearing a washed-out snapshot of myself and four of my closest coworker-family amigos laughing arm-in-arm behind the bar at The Homebar, as I buzzed about a grayscale Fort Billy tying up loose ends.

It was my one-way pass to a sunny mystery island northeast of Venezuela.

It was like Charlie's golden ticket, a Get Out Of Jail Free card, asylum granted to a bright new full-color world.

It was also, the closer I got to dislodging that photo for the unknown that waited behind it, like a hangman closing in on me at the gallows. I know, I know, I'd just fallen ass-backwards into going to go live - on a generous salary! - on a sailboat... but I found myself realizing, as nostalgia ramped up with unexpected speed approaching D-day, that there was a lot I loved and would miss around here.

(What if... there's no dependable high-speed internet to keep up with memes?)

And then, seemingly all of a sudden, it was like I'd just woken up from a dream, and shit got Quantum Leap real in Grenada. No more doubt or agonizing or rethinking potentially-rash decisions, because now I, not unlike Quantum Leap Sam, didn't even really have a plan-B to get me back home. I mean, I didn't even really have a Ziggy to give me hints.

(First of all, wrong Ziggy. Second of all, that outfit isn't even the most ridiculous thing I brought.)

Wide-eyed, I found my way out of the airport.

And into the realm of Billy Basso.

Billy Basso is one of those guys you hear long before you see him. In the island world of liltingly-unintelligible Caribbean "English," Billy Basso's voice came plowing through the night at me, unabashedly loud, unyieldingly low, un-fucking-mistakably American. I knew this was my guy long before I rounded a corner and actually saw all 6'4" of him - the sort of person whose presence actually has its own gravitational pull - holding court with a crew of laughing airport personnel.

This is the hurricane I am swept up into for the next year: Tropical Storm Billy.

(Like so, but I was slightly less prepared).

Billy Basso picks me out of the thin crowd instantly and advances on me, brushing aside my professional-handshake-ready arm with an oblivious-to-our-height-disparity bear-hug. Then he hefts my body-bag to one shoulder in a quick flicking movement, gives me a momentarily judging-yet-hilarious “WTF?” look when he feels the weight of the thing, and turns his back, already striding away on legs that take one step for every three of mine. Over his other shoulder, he booms out: “C’mon already, let’s get a drink.”

At this point, I’ve talked to Billy Basso on the phone exactly once, most of which conversation involved him making me repeatedly assure him that yes, I was serious; no, if he bought a ticket he wouldn’t be waiting for a no-show at the airport; yes, I understood this wasn't a fucking vacation; and yes, I thought I would be able to physically handle the sails on a big boat in dicey water (I'll just let you guess which of these questions I'd answered with purely-optimistic lies).

The truth was, I had not, in those few international phone minutes, found a way to broach the subject of my stomach’s complete failure to pass my one and only test at sea. 

But you know what? 

Now I was here.

Now there was no turning back for either of us. 

Now was definitely the the time to take some preventative Dramamine.

(Luckily, Dimenhydrinate's OTC. Now, if I can just find it amongst all these cowbells in my luggage...)

Furtively, I fished a couple pills out of the container in my pocket and dry-swallowed.

We tossed my sarcophagus of useless land-life shit into the back of a ratty rental Jeep and sputtered out into the night.

(Good thing I also packed a wide selection of turbans to keep me from freaking out!)

Lest you get the wrong idea here: Billy Basso was not, technically, a Billy, in the dating-prospect sense. In fact, if he was the personality-punch maelstrom that swept the last traces of my old life away in those first few Gilligan's Island weeks aboard, his girlfriend – an adorable little redheaded Alabaman Gulf Coast belle also there to greet me at the airport – we'll call her Ginger – was the calm harbor that never EVER ran out of cabernet and girl-talk to share on the deck or docks. And from pretty much the first three-way toast at our patio dinner table, I knew things were gonna be alright.

But back to the immediate matter of dinner. After wine glass number two, I suddenly remembered a warning I’d received from a much more sea-seasoned friend (who had achieved the unthinkable and gone on a three-day cruise once): “Drinking will make you ten times more susceptible to seasickness.”

Oh fuck.

But Billy Basso had already summoned another bottle to our table! I didn’t know if our boat was at a dock, bobbing around in an anchorage, or maybe we were setting sail within the hour. I still knew nothing about what I was getting into, except that I was woefully unprepared and didn't want to show it. One more glass to be polite, I told myself. One glass, and then double up on the Dramamine. I swished two more little pills down in a gulp of house red, raising my glass to Billy Basso’s “To new crew!”

(Think happy non-barfing thoughts...)

And now cut to the near-future where I am drunk. Not completely Susie Solo In the Wonder Years Shitfaced, but definitely tipsy enough that I suddenly remember, with slight panic, that I’m too drunk to even attempt the insurmountable task of not spewing on myself as soon as I step aboard a boat. A boat! On the water! You idiot, you’re capable of getting sick from sitting on a floating pontoon-dock! The jig will be up! You’ll be on the first plane home tomorrow!

But Drunk-Susie then suddenly remembered a fix: Dramamine. I held the magic solution right in my pocket! No time to waste: two more pills down the hatch.

And one more for good measure, because Drunk-Susie is forgetful and incapable of performing simple arithmetic and let’s just be blunt – a goddamn moron.

(There's a lot of wiggle room in dosages.)

So we leave the ramshackle restaurant, and bounce off again through the night, launching over potholes and scrambling down steep sprays of gravel and careening around dark corners like a go-kart safari. Or maybe we just idled calmly across a parking lot. The thing is, I don't know, because somewhere around this point all that Dramamine, no doubt augmented by a healthy dose of wine, started to do its thing. By which I mean, if you take too much of it, as I had inadvertently done, Dramamine apparently does a mild sort of thing-on-acid.

(Alright, who unpacked my disco ball?)

Everything was big and loud and confusing. I mean, Billy Basso really actually is big and loud and kinda confusing, and I was travel-and-wine tired. But on top of those factors, everything else just started to seem incomprehensible. And inebriatedly struggling to process that I was in the beginnings of a mild-to-middling Dramamine OD, I dimly realized with horror that I was kind of unintentionally tripping balls.

(First impressions are really my forte.)

I remember stumbling out of the back of the Jeep and laying eyes on the boat in the cool blue moonlight for the first time: she was a floating figure of classically-swooping outlines, sparkling stainless steel, twinkling mast lights, soft silvery teak, ghostly spirals of furled sails, leather-stitched helm wheel and, from the end of the dock where we stood, the faintest echo of Billy Eckstine wafting out from the salon. I felt like I was stepping back in time. I also, slightly less magically, felt like my lips were going numb and I was starting to hear weird shit Billy Basso and Ginger weren't. And though I wisely hadn't confided in either of them, what with them being my brand new boss and coworker, I was certain that the boat knew it. 

Onboard. Ginger is showing me the tricks to finding the hidden light switches in every room, and I'm steadfastly setting them all ablaze because the bright lights seem to normalize things a little bit.

Then we're in the dim galley and Ginger is pouring me a grotesque glass of wine from somewhere and I'm accepting because aforementioned Drunk Susie shortcomings, but then when I reach for it, there's no wine glass. While Ginger watches with a somewhat astonished look on her face, I casually paw at the walls till I mash the right button and fire up enough wattage to dispel the phantom stemware. I'm so fucked. Meltdown imminent. This is going to be the shortest, most embarrassing employed-to-fired period in my life. Goddammit, Susie! This was your once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity! Biggest. Fail. Ever.

Then Billy Basso is touring us around the working innards of the boat, opening tiny Alice In Wonderland doors and odd-shaped hatches and hidden compartments, proudly showing me things that make no sense: weird little showers, fucked-up electrical sockets, endless switch-panels, optical-illusion walls that curved in illogical places, pulleys and levers and ladders to nowhere, engines and generators and watermakers with blinking sensors and toggles and dials and shit.

It was way too much for a drunken, sleep-deprived, Dramamine-addled Susie. There are just not enough lightbulbs in the world to make it through this.

(Now just one more, for good measure!)

And then something wonderful happened.

The boat - in the one and only instance of mercy I ever experienced from her - came to my rescue: lights-out.

The boat, that wonderfully demanding, fitful, grand old dame, had taken pity on me and called the game just in time - with every possible filament aboard lit up like a nursing-home birthday cake, she'd blown the power to the entire dock. Deus Ex Machina - the night was over!

Billy Basso unleashed a torrent of lower-register expletives, knowing he was in for a long night of futile trouble-shooting by flashlight. Ginger sighed, knowing she was in for a night of hearing about it. And I sighed in relief, as Ginger spirited me away to my bunk, urging me with a wink to just go to sleep and stay clear of the action.

"Just come up whenever you wake up, you must be exhausted," she said from the deck as I descended a ladder into my room with approximately the same amount of grace and elegance as my bag, which Ginger had unceremoniously stuffed through the hatch and let thud like a dead body to the floor ahead of me.

Oh, you have no idea, I thought, collapsing into bed as she let the hatch fall closed behind me.

There was moonlight coming through one small porthole, shifting with the boat's position. I could hear docklines creaking somewhere level with my head, and water rippling around the hull under my bunk. The last thing I remember was having the distinct but somehow unalarming impression that my duffel, slumped on the floor, was snoring.

Tripping. That's how I started my years-long trip on the Sailing Yacht Delirium.

Lights.

Out.

Billy Blades's Ship Has Sailed

I got back to online dating immediately after Billy Bullfight terminated my contract, relationship-wise, mostly at the behest of girlfriends who insisted I should distract myself (and amass more Billy Stories, which I suspect was a slightly self-serving motive). So, because dating is something of a team sport among my local network of gals, and also because goddamn if I was going to be unaware of the down-to-the-minute, not-if-but-when of Billy Bullfight's return to electronic matchmaking, I bit the bullet and reactivated my profile.

(I see you've failed to change your status to "divorced" now that we're both back online, BILLY.)

Immediately, I got "favorited" by somebody whose overview details included a tiny thumbnail of him in what appeared, at that minute scale, to be a questionable flat-brimmed baseball cap/sports-jersey "street" style combo, and the fact that he was already somebody else's baby-daddy. He looked to be all of 22, and from the one main image I saw, I would have bet on the probability that he had his (undoubtedly exceedingly Caucasian) surname tattooed somewhere on his own body in Olde English font. 

I did not click through.

So the summer progressed, I racked up a few ridiculous Billy yarns, and just as my three-month subscription was about to expire, I happened to browse back through the various "connections" that had been made with my profile and saw a picture of a possibly... kinda... actually pretty darn... waitwhat? whoah, hell-O there! Billy I didn't remember seeing before in any previous notification. My exact thought was something like "WTF how did I miss this one?!"* 

*(accompanied by involuntary grabbing motions in the direction of my computer screen, because I am subtle).

(Of course it is, otherwise it wouldn't be Billy-Blog-worthy).

It became clear after the first two pageloads of his profile that I had seen him before, but he'd changed his main picture from the unfortunate prior Wiggerz4Lyfe-ish icon to a totally respectable, dare-I-say gahtDAMN snapshot of himself flashing a genuinely happy smile, while rafting or climbing or engaged in some such outdoorsy activity that's high on my sexy-points list. I had about 48 hours left before the lines of commo were set to be cut off, so I jumped into (highly-delayed-action) action. It was like my final cyber Hail Mary.

And it worked! Even despite the fact I'd ignored his indication of interest for a good two months based solely on my shitty superficial assessment skills, as soon as I made contact he messaged me back immediately to say, in effect, "Thanks for (finally) writing - yours might be the most memorable profile I've seen."

We emailed. We texted. With every exchange I learned something increasingly attractive or intriguing or just fucking cool about him - we had some obscure, long ago and far away life-experience stuff in common, he did interesting things, he was pretty into being a dad, and the cherry was that one of my friends actually knew him in-person and attested to his real-world hotness and general seems-like-a-decent-guy-ness. So we set a date.

On my profile, I had included a photo of me from the roller derby facet of my life. Picking up on this, he suggested we meet at the local roller rink for a skate date. Nonconventional, physical, and likely a little out of his comfort zone with potential for mutual embarrassment and/or bodily injury? I giddily sent something like:

"Really, roller skates on a first date? That, sir, is a bold opening gambit... I'm in!"

...to which he quickly texted back: "Well... I'll be on blades."

(.................Oh.)

***

You've probably heard this one before: What's the worst part about being a rollerblader?

(No no no, not "telling your parents you're gay." It's realizing you're also a cop.)

***

Punchin' Judy and I have a mutual friend who also used to work at The Homebar with us. Will is a hugely-tall guy, he has kind of clumsily thrown himself at every female coworker to cross The Homebar threshold, over the years, and to my knowledge never once sealed the deal. It's legendary by now, because he actually seems relieved to be able to assume the platonic-pal role once his halfhearted advances get turned down. So in summary:  he is terrible at women as elusive moving targets, but wonderful at women at point-blank, stationary Friend-Zone range, because he's super sensitive. He's a listener. He's a damn good honorary-girlfriend, and when added all together, the sum of it was that he was known at The Homebar (quite openly) as Big Gay Will.

(One time Will actually wore a kerchief. Nope, not Halloween.)

Even he jokingly called himself "Big Gay Will" from time to time, as if he was so obviously hetero it was just a funny lark, but here's the thing: he really might have been gay. Not in the fabulous, self-loving, "And, so what?" way that I adore and support, but in a kind of pent-up, closeted-even-from-himself way that I still adore and support, but come on. Come ON.

So one time, I had this dream that Big Gay Will was having a very important package delivered, but it had to come to my house because it was a secret from his family, who was visiting or something. And in the dream, I came home and there on my porch was Big Gay Will's box. Like an enormous refrigerator box, size-wise. So I dragged it inside and during the dragging, that monster came a little untaped and from it, spilling out like a slot machine jackpot, came an everlasting cascade of rollerblades.

Ladies and gentlemen, I will rest my case and allow you to draw your own conclusions from here.

(Ahhh... yes, sure, it's true that they "weren't your size," Will.)

***

Anyway, so Billy Blades and I had a roller-date. 

I'm not really sure what I expected. On the one hand, I was pretty interested in talking to him face to face, but on the other, I still didn't have a firm grasp on whether I would even recognize him in person - such was the chameleon nature of his photos. To that end, I made sure to arrive at the rink slightly early. Alone. On an open skate night. Technically, in the late afternoon hours of "Wacky Wednesday."

If, like most of us, you've not been to a public roller rink since somewhere around third grade, and if, as was my situation, you are not at said roller rink to sit on the sidelines with a celebrity gossip magazine while your small uncoordinated offspring teeters around in circles, let me tell you what this is like: you immediately feel like a suspected pedophile.

I mean, parents are looking at you so hard that you even start to suspect yourself after a minute or two. Who knows, maybe it has to do with the odd lighting, or the "manic clown" theme decor, or the blaring kid-friendly music, or the fact that the one other adult in the place who's actually wearing roller skates is a middle-aged, denim shorts-clad, mulleted dude with a creepy pencil 'stache and shifty eyes who is also clearly NOT here with a child under his charge. Maybe it has to do with the fact that the particular roller rink where we'd arranged to meet happened to be exactly right next door to a topless "gentlemen's" club (totally true story because WTF, zoning?). Maybe it had to do with the fact that I am a pretty short female, and this:

(No, glaring mother of a 6-year-old, I'm not taking pictures with this thing.)

Holy shit, Billy Blades could not arrive fast enough.

And then he did.

And he was beautiful.

And he was charming and irreverent and smart, in just the right proportions.

And yeah, he was wearing roller blades, but I swear to god that man made even roller blades hot, or at least he made me forget he was on them while we skated around and talked. At some point the conversation turned to sailing, and that's right about where I started to get blown out to sea.

He knew the same spots in the Bahamas that were dear to my heart. His retirement dream was to run away on a sailboat, too. Sitting on a bench while that awkward "expanding Solo cups" skating game was underway, he casually finished my thought (between mild bouts of delightfully horrific jokes about the "stretching-machine" Mr. Jorts -  who by this time was one of the finalists in the cups game, ogling the leggiest tweeners as they straddled ever wider in skates - probably had in his basement):

"You'd just need the right partner to make it work."

And lingering eye contact.

Aaaand scene (begin montage).

(Terrible humor and the same endgame? Be still my beating heart, Billy!)

Right there. Right there I saw it clearly:

Our wheels touched and I envisioned Billy Blades and I skating around on the deck of our sloop, shamelessly escalating each other's most tasteless jokes right into the sunset. He side-smiled at me and I started to think about multi-faith relationships - could I convert him to roller skates? It didn't matter, love conquers all. He brushed my knee with a gesturing hand and I started to think about how dual-religion families raise their kids - would our little ones start off on skates or blades? Would our liveaboard be called the SS Quad or the SS In-Line? Or maybe some combination of the two?

A random little boy toddled up to us, interrupting as Billy Blades was about to expound on the splits-stretching pulley system Mr. Jorts secretly strapped himself into by night just to be able to skate to the painful end of the cups game amongst the most coltish of prepubescent girls. And this child, clearly sent as a divine messenger, handed me a tiny blue hair clip, then wandered away. "Perfect," my brain immediately realized, "Here it is, a sign: something borrowed, something BLUE."

The bench beneath us started to rock as if upon gentle waves, the years-of-burnt-hot-dogs-and-stale-cotton-candy odor of the dark rink gave way to fresh sea-salt breeze and bright sunlight, the incessantly high-pitched shrieking of children became the music of chattering seagulls, and Billy Blades, O captain my captain, my co-pirate, glanced knowingly at me. Our 16-wheeled, seafaring life together, the one we'd both been unwittingly, perfectly leading up to with our every waking move, every day of every past trip we'd both made around the sun without each other up to this point, had begun.

(But not in a creepy jean-shorts-mullet way.)

"I have to go to hockey soon," Billy Blades said. It wasn't exactly how I'd imagined his marriage proposal being phrased, but I, unfazed, accepted.

With full sails, we set our course toward the doors, as not only were our lives destined to change today upon meeting, but, it turned out, he also really did have to get to hockey. And anyway, I admitted to myself, parents would definitely not approve of us consummating our starcrossed love right here in the concessions area. Somewhere hidden in the laser-tag room... maybe, but not right here. Next time. Next time.

We navigated out to the parking lot, where Billy Blades had parked right next to me. Even our vehicles were drawn together by an unseen force! I looked at him. He squared off to me. This was going to be it: the defining before-and-after moment. From here, forces joined, we would set sail on the greatest journey of all!

He lowered his chin and I raised mine, flush with anticipation.

He looked deep into my eyes, right into my soul, and smiled. He knew me.

I coyly asked if he'd like to go out again, knowing it was a frivolous question, knowing he understood the implied meaning: when would we pick up where we'd left off, on this, our ever-after life of adventure and romance on the high seas?

"Uhh," said Billy Blades, "I've kind of just started seeing someone else, so I probably shouldn't."

(You really should have thought of that before I married you in my head, Billy.)

Um.

So wait. 

Now when we sail off over the horizon, this other gal is going to have to come too? What kind of a stupid third-wheel fairy tale is this? My captain's been bewitched by another siren and we haven't even gotten off the fucking dock? I mean, we don't need a second-mate, Billy. In fact I'm kind of starting to question your Captaining ability if this is the way you're going to staff our bo---

And then.

And then...

...he shook my fucking hand and bade me good day.

(I believe the old saying goes: "Red sky at morning, sailor take warning; handshake in strip-club parking lot, sailor--hold on, have you even read the script, Billy?!")

Lightning. Roiling storm clouds. Swells building to mountainous tossing walls of water. Suddenly, gale-force winds whistling out of an ominously-dark sky, drowning out the polite farewells from our mouths. Our future, heeling over at an alarmingly unsustainable angle, rigging groaning and snapping, sails ripping at their seams, me stumbling and falling on the heaving, splintering, foam-washed deck. And then right before my eyes, Billy Blades swept overboard by a crushing wave, never to resurface despite my frantic, wind-whipped scanning of the whitecaps.

I mean, realistically, of course he was lost at sea. 

Nobody can swim with fucking rollerblades on.