Goodbye to Billy Bittersweet

It's well over a decade ago, and I'm in the company car with yet another Billy. He's not even my project - he's my coworker DelValles's Billy - a good-looking semi-punk of a kid who I catch looking at me just a half-second too long every time I say something. Somehow I've ended up working this contract more than DelValle has this last month. It happens like that in Army Recruiting, sometimes.

(Goddammit, DelValle, that's my trick.)

He's leaving tomorrow, this Billy, and I'm taking him down to his hotel room in the bowels of Los Billgeles to await the early-morning ship-out. We haven't been driving too long - we're still on the 101, with a generally-brain-fogging slog through the Valley on the 405 ahead of us. The sun is going down late, it's summertime-hazy, and we're zipping by strawberry fields and factory outlets and scraggly palm trees that haven't been groomed for varying amounts of time just over the "too long" mark. I love this place, southern Billifornia, but for most of my year in recruiting, I'm not even really conscious of it going by. Not like now.

Some of the guys are quiet, and that's OK. I'm comfortable owning the conversation and serving them up their share as I shuttle them south into the city and their big, looming futures. If you make the drive down the coast often enough, with enough Billys, the talk generally falls into a standard holding-pattern of routine topics that change very little. You get so you know what sorts of things will come up almost before you're on your way, just by how the kid's parents say goodbye. The humor might change, the faces might change, the traffic might change (HAHA no it won't!), but the general skeleton of the trip's the same. It's the same drive over and over, chewing up countless five-hour blocks of this, my twenty-first year. 

Eventually it just gets easier to embrace a sort of numbness than try to make yourself care about every face, every question, every four-year contract you set into motion. Recruiting is a fucking exhausting revolving door of people, an 80-hour workweek blur, a year where you'll never talk to so many people for so much of your day, yet feel so goddamn lonely all the time. Mostly, though, I've discovered how not to mind it, because times like the drives, I just don't even really live through it anymore. I bounce through it without realizing it, I chatter without really absorbing any of the kids' hope or fear or regret or boasting or whatever, and it's for the best. It's self preservation. Whether you care or not, they all sail over the edge, they all turn into ghosts one way or another, sooner or later. And they're just fucking kids. They'll be fine. Just like you were - you, who can't even remember your recruiter's name just now.

(Me, on hearing there's no cake in boot camp)

But this Billy isn't one of those kids. He's a little older, and conversations with him are always of their own breed. The first time I talked to him, engaging him in the office while DelValle was out on a call, I was shocked and actually a little irked at the way he subtly managed to run the conversation. This was my job -  I was the professional meant to be running that fucking show from the first handshake all the way to the boarding call bound for Basic Combat Training and he was just a fucking recruit and really, at the end of the day, what the shit, I was young and dumb but he, he was just a high school skater who was more clever than DelValle, for sure, but could barely pass a standard drug-screening UA - a failed-once-and-might-not-graduate-again-this-year who lived every minute of his punk-ass days by the grace of rich parents in orange grove country, up the San Guillermito Valley. 

But also. 

Also, it woke me up in a way, because all of a sudden there I was paying attention and genuinely laughing. I was recruiting, yes, but also with DelValle's Billy, I was Not Recruiting. It was real interaction. I guess that can come from surprising sources.

(I meant enlist! Enlist! Haha, I can't believe you thought I said kill.)

Anyway, I've grown to like him. I think it's because we've made this drive a few times, DelValle's Billy and I, what with him coming up hot at the last minute on the piss tests. In fact, I've probably spent more time in the car with this kid in the last month than I have in the same room with my but-for-logistics ex in the last three. I still live with the dude in a tiny little SoBil studio, we dance silently around each other without touching or making eye contact in the mornings because there's only the one bathroom, and I get through that without really living it, either, and that's also probably for the best. The futon is fine. Nothing could keep me awake by the time I get home at night.

So DelValle's Billy is telling me about flying prop planes out of the San Guillermito airstrip with his dad. He mentions he called the office the other Saturday looking for me, wanting to see if I was serious about taking him up on a previous offer of a free ridealong on one of his practice flights. I was probably busy, I say, and he nods his chin upward almost imperceptibly, like young confident Billys do, and says I guessed as much, but man, sure wish you coulda gone.

He laughs and shakes his head and I think to myself yeah, I wanted to go, and then in my head I privately replay how instead, when DelValle took the call, I whispered to him to tell his Billy I was out at the community college on an appointment. And I think to myself how after DelValle hung up, I shrugged at him and rolled my eyes and then suddenly felt like I might choke if I didn't quietly get up and walk out of the office and back down the hall to the bathroom, where I locked the door behind me and stood there in my uniform, looking down at those awful regulation black-patent heels and that stupid green polyester skirt I ironed every goddamn morning. I think, here at 65 mph with DelValle's Billy next to me, about that dirty, scuffed-up bathroom linoleum where I stood there just breathing in and out and shaking with my palms pressed on my forehead, fingers curled like hooks, not sure why I was suddenly so upset and frustrated and terribly, terribly sad.

(In space, no one can hear you curse.)

The sky is filthy: blood-red smog blocks our view even as we tunnel out of the Sepulveda pass, where a business-as-usual mesquite brush fire this dry summer on the northbound hillside has traffic coagulated to a dehydrated ooze. Jetliners are plowing their noisy way through the air above us, and once we turn off the freeway and into the tangle of the city's inner-workings they seem to hang, sluggish and unmoving, surreal and low over the boulevard ahead.

We pull up to the hotel and I shut off the car. It's late enough in the day that the air-conditioner chill is able to linger awhile even without the engine blowing. I lean my skull back on my headrest, and I want to close my eyes but out of the side of my field of vision I catch him looking at me like he does, just a little bit too long, and he sees me do this. And something about this specific quarter-of-a-second lodges somewhere in me like shrapnel: that image becomes a sharp unextractable foreign object that to this day, not often but every now and then, maybe at night when I turn over on it wrong in my sleep or something, still aches like a scar. He's got a tiny silver stud in his left ear and it flashes in the orange sodium glow of the evening's first streetlights as he glances down and then back up at me. Tomorrow's drill sergeants are going to destroy him if he doesn't take that out by morning.

I think to myself, we're here.

I think to myself, again.

And I think to myself, I probably will never see DelValle's Billy again. 

And then I'm surprised by the realization, not just a string of words occurring to me but an actual feeling, that after all the other kids I've driven over this cliff without a second thought, it's really too bad, this time around.

My head feels like it's made of steel, the headrest is a magnet, and the force required to separate the two to turn and face him as he grabs the door handle is like ten years of tiredness all at once. Recruiting'll take it out of you if you let it, sure, but fucking life: that's the exhausting thing. I don't have any energy to spare on it. I have so many more Billys I still have to find, charm, cajole, convince, sign and seal and deliver, forget. The meter never stops running.

(Clearly not L.A. because green lights.)

I blink at him. You want me to walk you in?

Nah, he says, I know where to go. And I know he does, which is a relief. I hand him his papers full of DelValle's signatures and DelValle's recruiter ID number, and they weigh a hundred pounds. He takes them and holds them in his lap with the sort of quick breath you take before saying something, and I catch his eyes wandering on my face again while he pretends to leaf through the packet.

And me: I look away.

And then he is standing in the parking lot, a rush of balmy, exhaust-filled air settling in his empty seat. The trunk closes with a hollow jolt and DelValle's Billy raps on the roof of the car as he shoulders his duffel, facing the back window with one hand up in a poor civvie half-salute. And waiting.

I turn on the ignition and pull away and in the rear view, we watch each other shrink for a few seconds before he turns away and walks out of the sudden red splash of my brake lights, toward the automatic doors.