Billy Belize Might Take the Cake, But Susie Takes the Towel

I am going to preface this entry with a spoiler: I'm calling this guy Billy Belize because any other, more appropriately-descriptive name like Billy BWAAAAM-bwwwaaammmmp (think of that comical disappointed-trombone sound-effect) or Billy Belongs-Behind-Bars is just too annoying to type repeatedly, and I cannot let Billy Belize cause me any more annoyance in this one life. For, although it's been years (and I've found the humor in his story has blossomed with time), my brush with this fucker was truly the worst.

(Worse than a movie spoiler. WORSE THAN DWIGHT SHRUTE.)

Some background: immediately after I axed Billy Basement, I also took a hatchet rather clumsily (...which skill level shouldn't be too surprising - imagine this girl wielding... well, any sort of tool. It's not pretty.) to the rest of my life at the time, because what's a long-term breakup good for, if you're not going to firmly pull the ejection-seat lever? So, I not only cut all my boring ties with Billy Basement, but I also pulled the plug on my less-than-fulfilling employment at the time, meaning I had to relocate from the house which, admitted, I'd taken to describing as "shared with Billie Beautiful" rather than as "Billy Basement's," both of which were *technically* true. I accordingly shuttered my Billydelphia social life and, essentially plan-less, I moved to a tiny little mountain town several winding and treacherous highway passes away. Look, when I break up, I BREAK. UP.

And so I found myself residing in Billy Lake, Year-Round Population 447. No, that number is not missing any zeroes.

What does one plan to do in such isolation, an astute reader might ask? Well if you've ever even read the Billy Blog you can already probably guess several correct answers, including "drink" and "write a book."

But then, rather rapidly, I found myself residing there in the winter. And in that winter, I found myself quickly wishing for a non-ethanol-based companion on the long cold evenings that settled in. I realized that one of the abovementioned correct answers I must have naively assumed about what one does in such a place, without having considered the actual logistics of the place, would involve some sort of Billy.

(Hello, neighbor.)

See, before I left Billydelphia, I must have abstractly imagined a social scene something like this: bearded witty outdoorsmen of the most independent and chiseled strain, chopping down trees and discussing philosophy over rye whiskeys across the one rough-hewn bartop in town, while occasionally constructing attractive remote cabins with their appropriately-calloused hands and wrestling moose to the ground in the dead of winter to sustain themselves and the fashionable-yet-low-maintenance, mountain-goddess wives they all dreamed of devotedly romancing with handpicked bouquets of forest flowers.

 (HELL-OOHH, NEIGHBOR!)

But then, due to aforementioned companion-wish, I got online. And here is more like what I encountered:

 (WTF do you mean, "92% match"?!)

Also. Aside from the demographic-skew, here's something about being a young single not-mutant-looking human female and moving to a very, very small town which I also hadn't considered: my reputation preceded me.

I shit you not.

At first, in hopeful ascetic style, I committed to solo endeavors for several weeks as I was finding my footing - trail running for hours, walking my dog down the dirt road to the local creaking-wood-floored grocery shop, frequenting the formerly-one-room-schoolhouse library for quiet sunny reading, and perching on a stool at my kitchen table overlooking frozen Billy Lake itself for hours of dedicated writing time. I literally conversed with no one.

But, of course, the social side of me eventually started throwing small internal tantrums of loneliness, and so one evening I put on boots and ventured down the snowy, unplowed main road to the one-block wooden boardwalk that was "town." No more than 30 seconds after my first beer was placed in front of me on the bar (aha! I was correct about the one rough-hewn bartop in town!), but I was surrounded - as if by some coordinated pack maneuvering - by no less than a half-dozen local swingin' dicks who all knew something about me I'd not yet shared with anyone.

You're the gal just moved from Billydelphia huh?

Saw you out stretchin' after your run the other day.

You're living in that little cabin up the hill, right?

You sure do like Patsy Cline in the evenings!

You got new curtains in there.

(My bar tab's probably still open to this day.)

And that is exactly the evening that, from over 3,000 miles away, Billy Belize's fishing line drifted across my online surface and, starving, I bit.

Here's the thing: while he wasn't actually from Belize, which would've been cool, Billy Belize was a pretty strong candidate on paper: he was gainfully employed at an environmental non-profit (with videos online to showcase both his job and general vocabulary), he had been an investigative journalist previously and so was really really good at wordsmithery (be still my beating heart!), he had an elite climbing and mountaineering background replete with published adventure-story accomplishments, and he seemed very interested in the same sort of connection that I (still lugging around that ever-lit Husband-Watch torch) ultimately sought. So yeah, he was a few time zones away in the Far North, but he was a fun sort of prison-pen-pal distraction from the grim reality of my local Billy selection.

Right about the same time we began exchanging emails, my old friend Billy Basso and his wife, who I'll call The Botticelli (in part because she's sort of the quintessential Venus from the sea, and also in part because she's a bit of an actual painted lady (terminology stolen from Billy Billionaire), in that she sports an impressive collection of absolutely beautiful tattoos), got in touch with me to offer a visit to the boat where they were living and working at the time, in the islands off of Honduras.

(YES PLEASE)

And right about the time that happened, Billy Belize mentioned in a phone conversation, which stage we had evolved to, that he'd had plans to be in Belize for a friend's wedding that was now falling apart, but for which he had already purchased plane tickets, for dates that closely overlapped my already-purchased tickets to mainland Honduras. You know. Neighboring countries. Like a quick city-to-city bus ride rather than a full continent apart.

I'm an opportunist, a romantic, an adventurer, aaaand a total Jew with my money. This was a two-birds-for-the-price-of-one deal! You can do the math.

(i.e., "good ideas that run over budget.")

Now granted, I know I just said I'm a romantic, and that's true - but I've also developed a healthy dose of cynicism in the near two-ish decades I've been a Susie on the dating scene, because OMFG life. So I planned this trip accordingly: I would spend a little alone-time getting my bearings and firing up my dormant Spanish around mainland for a couple days, and then Billy Belize and I would meet up the day before we would take a ferry to Billy Basso and The Botticelli's boat. If I decided against it, I could always bail and head for the safety-net of friends solo, which people and location he didn't know any details about.

*****

I tried to give Billy Belize a chance, I really did. But as with oh-so-many online dates, the very first ten seconds of our meeting spelled his doom because zero actual chemistry. He was mostly-polite and all, aside from annoyingly trying to insert his shitty two-week Rosetta Stone Spanish into my taxi and hostel negotiations (my mother's maiden name is Chavez and you are already very sunburned, so stop, gringo. Stop.). He was in good shape and physically capable, aside from smelling horrible (for which I gave him the 36-hour-traveler's pass because we can all agree, standard airline travel is a bitch). And he was decently well-spoken, aside from having a voice that, in person, seemed... idunno, higher (and was just more annoying with its topics-of-choice than expected).

But it just wasn't there.

And sometimes, that's all there is: you know it's never going to be there.

(Me, exhibiting classic Avoid-the-Move-in-for-Kiss counter-move.)

But, he was friendly and non-threatening and capable of some pretty interesting conversation and so, after a local beer, I pulled the trigger and mentally gave him the final boarding pass for the whole islands visit. I mean shit, why not?

OK, just for a sec, we need to get back to the whole smelling horrible thing.

Having checked into a hostel, Billy Belize and I parted ways to clean up before dinner. And when he returned from showering, he had a request: he wanted to borrow my camera while I read a letter he had written. Like an honest-to-god handwritten old-fashioned many-paged letter to me, penned while he flew from the north end of the globe to the equator, musing about boats on the open ocean below, and my former-sailor's life, and how awesome and crazy it was for us to be in touch. It was laying it on a little thick, and the whole "photographing the moment" thing was a little goofy, but it was a cool letter and I'm nice, so I went with it.

The only problem was, I could barely read it because, with Billy Belize hovering next to me snapping photos, I started to have a hard time concentrating on anything but the terrible, awful smell of something nearby. It wasn't quite burning, but close. It wasn't quite rotting, but close. If you could concentrate the way mildew grown entirely on human hair surfaces might off-gas in a sauna, that would be closest of all. Was it actually Billy Belize? How in the fuck was this happening post-shower?

(So back to that "I mean shit, why not?" - I didn't really mean shit, as in the verb, Billy.)

Well I will tell you: Billy Belize was traveling with his own towel, and that towel was the single most offensive piece of textile on the face of the earth. Seriously, if this towel was any angrier it would have punched me right in the nose when I walked by it, hung over a closet door.

Actually, that is pretty much exactly what it did.

So, um, your towel? I broached casually, It's, ahh, kinda ripe, huh?

Billy Belize laughed. Yeah maybe, I've had a few nasal surgeries and I actually can't really smell anything any more. Lucky me, hahaha!

And that was that. Billy Belize did not take the hint and launder (let alone, more appropriately, exterminate with a flame-thrower, final-scene-of-The-Thing-style) his rot-rag of a towel.

*****

So I thought, if it's OK, I can just take photos with your camera for the both of us? says Billy Belize.

Because, I like to travel light so I didn't bring one. 

(Oh good because I travel light too and you won't mind carrying all my telephoto lens cases too, right?)

By now we are halfway through our ferry ride. I give it to him because what the hell. It's windy on the upper deck, which helps with the stank problem, but makes every photo Billy Belize takes of me a goddamn trainwreck of out-of-control hurricane-hair and I mentally note how hard I'll be deleting every single one of them as soon as I have my hands on my Canon again. He snugs up to me for a tandem selfie, which with one brief exception is the closest I get to my own camera for the rest of the trip because he keeps it on his person, paparazzi-ing me approximately every four minutes for the next several days. In much later image review once I was home again, I can tell by the way my lips are pressed in just a little that I might be holding my breath.

*****

While the days spent on Billy Basso and The Botticelli's boat are awesome and amazing and fun and hilarious and full of cocktails and karaoke and stories and silliness and scuba and good-friends-and-tropical-water-time, and are an OMFG! much-needed break from the bleak mountain winter gulag I've checked myself into at Lake Billy, they're really not all that key to the Billy Belize story so, sadly, I'm going to mostly skip over them.

The two details I will include are these:

One: I am not proud of this, but the evening we arrived on Billy Basso and The Botticelli's boat, I got Susie-Solo drunk. No, no, be serious now, it's not the drunkenness that brings me shame - I'm used to that. It's the fact that Drunk-Susie, ever the direct problem solver, hatched and executed the devious plan to momentarily steal away from the lively cocktail scene at some point in the night, procure Billy Belize's Towel of Utter Evil (upon which, I was dismayed to find, my camera was nestled!) while he was socializing up on deck, and throw it off the back of the boat. 

Was that a nice, considerate, Golden Rule thing to do? No.

Did this illicit burial at sea solve a gag-worthy problem with only minimal shoulder-shrugging denials of knowledge as to the Terrible Towel's whereabouts required of me the next day? Yes. And also, didn't he boast repeatedly about traveling light? I was helping. The end.

And two: on the final day before we are to taxi back across the island and part ways, Billy Belize sort of sneaks up on The Botticelli while she's online and asks her then-and-there to friend him on Facebook so I can see all the pictures of us. Because I didn't bring my own camera, you know. I travel light.

(Just... y'know... not right while you're watching.)

The Botticelli gracefully makes the requisite mouse-clicks, under close scrutiny and guidance by Billy Belize and while I side-eye her apologetically, and then we are off.

*****

If any part of this story is wholly, entirely my fault, it's that I just didn't have the heart to tell Billy Belize in person, over the four days on the island, that he simply wasn't going to ever, ever make the varsity squad. I mean, we were among my friends so any time spent with us all post- "Just no, Billy" conversation would've been super-awkward for him, he seemed as oblivious to my lukewarm signals toward him as he was to the aggressive odor of his existence, and it seemed kindest to just part ways with the dignities of our own perceptions of the trip intact, and let him down easy once he was home, where he could deal with his disappointment in the dark privacy of the Arctic Circle wilderness.

And so, upon dropping my duffel containing still-salty freediving fins on the cold floor of my freezing cabin 24 hours later, I wrote him an "It's Not You" email. Hey, I had a great time meeting - but I just think it's probably best if we keep looking individually for whatever it is we're each looking for, I typed. It was short and, though not exactly sweet, it was at least gentle and to-the-point and, I thought, unambiguous.

(I can't change science, dude.)

I can't say Billy Belize took it well, but that's mostly because I'm not sure it took with him at all. He continued to send novel-length emails, text-bombs, and long laughing voicemails, despite the fact that now, none of them were returned.

Finally, after shunning a handful of each type of communication over the course of a week, I realized that I needed to be more firm. He gets one more response from me, I thought. And so I clarified, as much as one can further distill the essence of the first two-letter word every single English-speaking baby in the world ever learns:

(I know. I know. No, I NO.)

And here is where Billy Belize started to unravel.

His emails and voicemails started to swing on a manic-to-threatening pendulum. In his brighter moments he referred excitedly to the amazing future I see for us!, attaching copies of his latest resumes and cover letters he'd fired off to employers in my own state so we'll be together soon!!. But in his darker spells - which sometimes arrived a mere matter of hours after a unicorns-and-rainbows communique - he would snap that I had no right to turn on him like this, and that I would learn not to treat people this way. 

Never ever treat someone this way without expecting consequences. 

I mean it Susie, think hard on that one. 

There are consequences to treating someone like me like shit. 

I refuse to go out like this. 

I think you are hiding something from me and I can't allow that. 

I will move closer to the truth every day. 

It's a fascinating exercise for me. 

I hope you stay up at night wondering how your lies will come home to roost.

You should know that keeping things from me will bite you in the ass, Susie. 

If you don't know, you will soon.*

*(Actual hand-to-god quotes, though distilled from at least ten separate emails.)

(HahahahAHAHAHA.PANIC.LAUGH)

I didn't know what to do, other than keep up with trail running and writing at my kitchen table and to assure myself, through phone calls where I told the ridiculous tale to my girlfriends back in Billydelphia, that homeboy was surely several thousand miles distant and not exactly capable of an impulsive stop-in slashing or something. I mean, he worked for a non-profit and air travel ain't cheap, even if you travel light. 

But it dawned on me, just before the very same sentiment began to surface in his emails, that I was a new girl in a tiny town where everyone already knew whatever generals there were to know about me. Anyone could waltz into town, stop at any of the four open establishments on the boardwalk, and be readily given directions to where that new Billydelphia gal lived. And I had no neighbors actually wintering in the cabins on my dirt road - if my car didn't drive in or out after a snow, there were no tracks. I had no local support. I had nobody I could call to check in on me, in the event something weird started to happen. I had nobody on whose door I could knock if something didn't feel right. Shit, the closest police station was 20 minutes down the highway assuming the highway was plowed.

I adopted radio silence and forwarded all his emails to a friend for record. I talked to my sister about filing a police report. And then, I heard from Billy Basement out of the blue: "Who the heck* is [Billy Belize's real name] and why is he writing me?"

*(Oh please, you didn't think Billy Basement was OK with anything as exciting as cursing, did you?)

(Of all my Facebook friends, you picked Billy Basement? You are the most boring stalker EVER!)

Suddenly, I realized that he was shopping through my online social networks for ins, and must have remembered Billy Basement's unique first name from some conversation. While it made me laugh a little bit (HAhaha, hope you're titillated by those Instagram pics of his latest vegan oatmeal!), it also kind of infuriated me, and pushed me back into action. I filed a report, and  I dropped The Botticelli a quick line to let her know, essentially, that I'm not in ANY contact with this dude anymore and you can do what you want, but he's gone a little stalkeriffic with me so please don't take the bait.

She immediately wrote back to tell me he had been emailing her repeatedly, pleading with her to please check in with me and then let him know what's going on, and claiming there had been a mysterious accident and he just wasn't sure who in my family was in the hospital, and feared the worst since I hadn't responded, and NEEDED INFORMATION FROM HER.

(Delusional 101: Of course your target's friends/family will take your crazy-talk seriously. Why not?)

A couple things I'm pretty into: not being involved with crazy people and, oh, laws. So I sent him not only The Botticelli's forwarded emails, so that it would be clear to him that he was not tricking anyone, but also an unequivocal "Do not contact me or anyone else to solicit information about me again, under threat of prosecution" statement, accompanied by the full text of my state's Stalking and Harassment statute, and a reference to the police report number as a cherry on top.

And there was silence, for about 30 minutes. 

Then, I received two more emails.

The Botticelli's message rolled in first, with a succinct notation by her: 

"He just sent me this. Holy fuck." 

It was a forwarded rant from him, warning her of my almost superhero-nemesis-level evil antics, claiming he and Billy Basement were "practically best friends now" (uhhh... I guess implying some sort of Starsky and Hutch-style detective work by Snoresky and Nuts?) and paternalistically suggesting she cut off all dealings with me based on what, quite frankly, I would call an enviably dark background of mine that he had "uncovered." It included a wide range of awesome horseshit - a history of bankruptcy, racketeering, abandoning children, killing endangered species, committing treason, practicing witchcraft, drinking milk straight from the carton - you name it, and Billy Belize was probably heroically warning my old friends about it. On the one hand it was amusing yet disappointing, to realize that I had apparently not even gotten to enjoy committing all these unbridled acts of the Id. On the other hand, it was OMFG crazy.

And then, email number two arrived, from Billy Belize himself:

Susie. We've both vented what we needed to about our relationship. We have a chance to still end this on a good and loving note, if you send me the photos I took on our vacation. I have a right to remember the wonderful time that we had together, and I need closure to move on from this intense time in our lives, so please do the right thing and send me those pictures. They are all on your camera, because as you know, I travel light. Thanks.

(This dialog is so bad it's even making Keanu sad, Billy. Also, I couldn't even make this up.)

While my immediate reaction was utter scoffing disdain, for some reason, something in this one started to pull my heartstrings the more I considered his request. I'm not a sentimental person, but I did realize, after thinking it over, that Billy Belize indeed needed closure and that I was the only person who could provide it. 

I knew what I had to do.

I caved, and sent him one special picture to remember me by.

It was a night-flash photo, and so he would have to look carefully to distinguish what is going on in it. But on inspection, one can find context in the bit of the boat's rail caught in the corner of the frame. And with closer examination, one can definitely make out the outline of a distinctively-patterned towel, sinking gently into the dark water of the marina.

(You're welcome, kthxbye!)