Billy Billionaire Comes Aboard

Not long after I made my way to the South American coast aboard Delirium, I started to hear rumblings of a tour de force even greater than Billy Basso headed my way: the yacht's owner, Billy Billionaire.

I'd get tipsy on the dock with Ginger and she'd say something like "Oh he's just going to eat you up!" Then Billy Basso would chime in with something similar, but less encouraging, like "Oh yeah... he'll eat you alive."

("Don't worry," they said. "It's all in play," they said.)

But I wasn't worried about all of that. After all, I'd cast off the lines of my suddenly-quite-dreary-seeming former life for the barefoot work of a suntanned deckhand in the tropics. I'd sailed off into the blue yonder with dolphins jumping at our bow, I'd swum in the ocean with green eels as big around as my thighs, I'd toured through steaming jungles and sat salt-sprayed helm watches in the middle of stormy nights and woken up to butterflies landing on our little ship when there was no terra firma in sight for 360 degrees. I'd had small near-daily word-nerd epiphanies on the nautical etymology of everyday language like "learning the ropes" and "giving leeway" and perhaps most importantly, I'd managed to not get myself fired. In fact, while learning that seasickness was, inexplicably, not really a problem for me on Delirium, I'd also managed to learn a fair amount about sailing in a short time and even though there were absolutely no Billys on any foreseeable horizon of mine in this new unpredictably nomadic life, I'd fallen in love with the water. I'd become smitten with the work of sailing in proportion to my growing competence on-deck. Yeah, I still had my occasional late-night moments of lonely mourning over Billy Builder when he'd cross my mind from halfway around the globe, but I'd made a couple friends and started to see the world and the related distractions were many. I wasn't invincible, but I was on the upside of life. I was ready for Billy Billionaire.

Or so I thought.

We prepared for days before he was to arrive: Ginger provisioned and cooked some of his favorite things, Billy Basso and I scrubbed and polished every surface, I made up the stateroom with 1,200-thread-count sheets and fancy towels and Godivas tucked into nests on every pillow, and at night we ate dinner and I received what, in retrospect, should maybe have been a disconcerting amount of coaching about how to "handle" Billy Billionaire.

"He just..." Ginger offered, trailing off. Expectantly-raised eyebrows did nothing to revive her sentence. That was all she had.

So here are the things I had heard:

He's in his seventies. DO NOT let this fool you, because:

• His visit will mean big changes to your daily routine.
• He likes to snorkel and sail to new snorkel spots all damn day. ALL. DAY.
• He drinks every night.
• He drinks nothing but gin martinis.
• Cocktail hour will be your cue to get out of uniform and ready for the town. All three crew. Every night.
• Gin causes him to get outrageously funny.
• No really, he drinks nothing but gin.
• He is hilariously, self-deprecatingly charming.
• He is generous to a fault. Money is nothing to him.
• He lives for other people's drama.
• He will try to get your life story out of you for said drama.
• You must not tell him your life story, because he is your boss and he will never ever forget anything you say.
• You will have to drink martinis with him. It is literally part of your job.
• However, you will love drinking martinis with him.
• You will invariably drink too many martinis with him.
• This will not help you to refrain from telling him your life story.
• He will tell you his life story. And it is fantastic.
• He will get adorably animated.
• He will spill lots of gin.
• He will love it if you spill more.
• You will probably start to spill more.
• The man. Is fueled. By gin.
• He will make friends with the entire bar, every bar, every island, every time.
• He will never *ever* have a bad time. He is always at his best.
• He is invariably a center of laughter.
• He will sneak off to bed once everyone else has set sail for blackout island.
• He is happiest when everyone else is having a roaring time.
• Your roaring time will not keep him up and you will continue to roar. Later than you should. You late-roaring imbecile.
• He will always be up early in the morning.
• You will always have to be up earlier.
• He will get you to drink too many martinis for this crack-of-dawn bullshit.
• GodDAMNit.
• You'd better be bright-eyed anyway.
• Sunglasses on the morning sails are your friend.
• Fuuuuuuck.
• There is no point even hiding it. We're all in the same boat (literally).
• He will invite you to share $100 wine at lunch. Do this if needed.
• You will be excited about the evening by the afternoon sail.
• All of the above: repeat daily.
• You will be exhausted, relieved, energized, and sad when he leaves. Except your liver, which will just be exhausted.

(I... am... failing to see any problem with this.)

So, the first day Billy Billionaire came strutting down the dock, an utterly unassuming-looking dude in a t-shirt and cargo shorts escorted toward Delirium's slip by a suitcase-toting Billy Basso, I stood barefoot at the edge of the teak with Ginger. He came aboard with hugs, immediate at-ease jokes, high fives, and smiles. And the night proceeded to follow the above script near-verbatim, until he fell down his stairs putting himself to bed. Ginger and Billy Basso both commented that even for him, this was a new level of drunken merrymaking. "I think you're in," they said.

I loved the guy.

But then, the next morning, with Billy Basso and Ginger and I all at the ready in our polos and khakis at sunup, Billy Billionaire failed to emerge at his usual early hour. According to them, this was absolutely unheard-of.

We waited. We joked about how my presence might have been the overstimulation that sent him over the edge the night before. We listened occasionally at his door for audible signs of life (there were none). And hours crawled past.

By eleven, in the neighborhood of four hours past his usual rise-and-shine, some serious worry had developed. What was the responsible course of action here? After all, he was the yacht owner, we were the help, and disturbing him was the last thing anyone wanted to do. But... what if he'd hit his head on that stair fall and was in bed with a subdural hematoma? What if he was just dead on the floor from alcohol poisoning or aspirating his own vomit or something in there? Finally, when I couldn't take it any more, I knocked.

There was no answer.

(Time for Plan B.)

It was "agreed," in a sort of ro-sham-bo loss, that I should go in for reconnaissance. It made sense: I was new, he seemed to think I was cute, and if he was mad about having his privacy invaded I could at least fall back on one or both of those excuses.

I cracked the door. Inside, in the dark, I could make out an inert human shape under the comforter.

Maybe six steps separated me from the edge of the bed. I squinted in the dimness, hoping to at least detect the up-down motion of breathing coming from the covers. No such luck.

Two steps closer. I could see now that the bed was a tangled mess of linens, covered in dark streaks. Ohgodohgodohgodisthatblood??ohgodohgodohhhh... The bed is absolutely destroyed. It looks like there has been a struggle. Now, as my eyes adjust, I can see definitively that some of the bloody streaks are clearly trailing handprints. And there is still no movement from Billy Billionaire's form.

Another two steps closer. Those blood streaks are so ominous now, so clearly not just the evidence of a nighttime nosebleed that I feel like I might throw up. OhgodohgodohgoddidI*kill*himlastnight? ThatistheONEwayIcouldpossiblystillgetmyselffiredGATDAMMIT!  I'm right next to the bed. I whisper Billy Billionaire's name but of course, nothing but silence and dread are in that room with me. I reach out to where I'm guessing his shoulder should be. I hesitate, taking a deep breath. OhgodohgodohgodOK...SoldierUPohgodohhh--and just as my fingers touch down on the corpse, the en-suite bathroom door bursts open and Billy Billionaire, looking a little haggard but freshly-shaved nonetheless, finds me bent over the bed in horror.

"Thought the old man shit the bed, huh?" He asks, with his trademark wry twinkle.

I'm still catching up with my pounding heart, barely processing that he meant "shit the bed" quite literally as opposed to the figurative meaning I'd been convinced of, as he shuffles past me to the door. Over his shoulder, he adds with a touch of reproach, "Oh for Christ sakes, it's chocolate. You hide those goddamn chocolates in a drunk man's bed, that's what you find in the morning."

And as I'm still clearly dumbfounded, he pauses in the doorway. "C'mon kid. Let's get some coffee."

(...Or therapy. Either one.)

And that, on what turned out to be the first day of the Billy Billionaire years, is exactly what we did.

Meet the White Rabbit

For your sake, I hope you have that girlfriend.

I started to recognize her in passing long before I knew her name. As it turned out, even though we worked on two fairly professionally-isolated floors of the same agency in Billy City, she knew through the grapevine who I was months before we ever actually talked, too. 

See, we were two of a slim selection of single young Susies in a big office building populated heavily by Good Ol' Billys (who, true to the profession-based cliches, frequently tended toward the socially-stunted side). Add to that a smattering of middle-aged, big-haired secretary-type dames who wouldn't hesitate to bite you right in the jugular over office supplies, and you get a workplace dynamic such that she and I actually first genuinely bonded, one random day, over the tandem wakes of suggestive workplace gossip* that we both had trailing us.

*(For the record and much to his credit, the Billy Big-Wall interlude, which happened after I'd already put in notice but nonetheless would have been one piece of actually-legit fodder among otherwise-baseless bullshit, never even hit on the catty-rumor-spreading radar.)

And so, as sister tailored-shirt-wearing black sheep (black is the new... black) there in the sea of ill-fitting oatmeal-colored slacks and tie-dyed socks that is the Aging Federal Workforce Where Fashion Goes To Die, it was only natural that we became either arch-nemeses or fast friends. Obviously, we went with the latter.

(...and that is assuming we're grading on a curve around here, Billy.)

Lest you think I'm just humblebragging for myself about the undeserved default attention (both friendly and saboteur) that comes an even marginally-attractive Susie's way in a male-dominated work environment, allow me to divert your attention with a shinier object:

This Girl.

She's this beautiful, athletic sexpot with a wicked sense of humor and a wonderfully no-bullshit approach to everything, who also just happens to be a brainy engineer.

She's the sort of girlfriend who, every time you assess your lives over drinks, unwittingly inspires your resolve to seriously tighten up your ship and step up your game to a more adult level - she's raised a lovely tweenage daughter solo while building a real power-career and yet her outfit's never ever mismatched and her hair's always goddamn perfect, for fuck's sake!

But also, virtually every time I spend time with her, the hours seem to spiral down a rabbit-hole of increasingly bizarre or hilarious or just pricelessly stupid adventures that simply do not happen to real grown-ups this side of the looking-glass. 

She is The White Rabbit. And I fucking love her.

(Well, wrong Rabbit, but right idea.)

So, 'twas a time in life when The White Rabbit and I were both online dating, and possibly due to the stream of ensuing stories hashed over in our lunch-hour Sushi/Sake Thursday tradition, we hooked a third single coworker, Jen, into enlisting on the same matchmaking site, too. And Jen, being a sweetly-optimistic country-mouse kinda gal, and maybe not having much extracurricular experience with The White Rabbit on which to base a wiser decision, divulged to us the details of an upcoming first date she had set up with a fellow and asked for advice. "I mean, y'all go on dates all the time, but I ain't gone out in years! I'm bad at it! I get so nervous! Y'all gotta help me!"

The White Rabbit and I sprang into action: our naive lil' small-town girlfriend needed us! What if we came on the date with you? we asked. Jen was skeptical but we persisted: What could go wrong? we countered, grinning like jackals. Jen worried that we would make her even more nervous, but we were already sold on the idea and thus had a majority vote. You'll never even know we're there! we promised, fidgeting with anticipation. After all, Jen wanted feedback. Jen wanted backup in case he was a crazy. Jen wanted coaching. Jen had no goddamn idea what she was agreeing to. We'll just... you know... assess from a distance. Like date-insurance! If things aren't going great we can bail you out! If there are snags we can throw you a line! We can all triangulate our impressions after the fact! It'll be a fun review session next Sushi/Sake Thursday!

Jen was a supremely good sport. So the deal was done: we had a 4-way date.

(What Jen's response by all rights should have been.)

It was a lunch meetup, and so on the ordained day, we all met up at the elevators of our building, then The White Rabbit and I took off in a car ahead of Jen. We quickly scurried to the bar while she was still parking, scanning madly for whoever might be waiting around to meet her. We were going to do some good today: we were here for Date Assistance.

Several potential candidates were present. We flipped through online photos, trying to recognize the right suitor, as Jen came through the door and they spotted each other. But then, before we could even really take stock of anything about him, they were ushered to the general restaurant seating, far out of our visual and auditory range. Now the pressure was on: The White Rabbit and I had to find a casual way to immediately change our locale.

"Can we maybe get a booth?" The White Rabbit called out to our bartender. "We just..." (looks at me and smiles) "...we need some privacy."

(Definitely doesn't think we're lesbians. Nailed it.)

Shortly thereafter, a surly hostess led us into the dining room, to the one available booth.

But it wasn't any better. We were still separated from Jen's rendezvous by a half-wall stacked with silk plants and Italian-themed tchochkes! This would not do. As discretely as possible, we again summoned the nearest waitress.

"Um, this table isn't quite what we were looking for," ventured The White Rabbit. The waitress, clearly unamused by our section-hopping, glanced around the rest of the full dining room in no hurry. Her gum snapped. The ice in our cocktails, on a tab that had not yet even been transferred from the bar to our current table, continued quietly melting. On the other side of the partition, Jen's first date was progressing rapidly without our witnessing presence. We were approaching a crux.

"I mean, could we get... a table?" asked The White Rabbit, eyeing an empty but uncleared four-top closer to Jen's. I was acutely aware of what pain-in-the-ass customers we were being, but desperate times, man. We were missing our goddamn date, here. Jen needed us!

(We. Are. Stalking. Capisce?)

"I'll see what I can do," said our waitress. What she could do, and (possibly justifiably) did do, was hurry away, never to return.

Half the date had already escaped us by now. Still undefeated, we agreed to make the best of it and take turns going to the restroom, to gather what little information we could as we passed their table. The White Rabbit went first, but when she got close, she lost her nerve and bolted past without even turning her head. I could see she was trying not to laugh.

I stood up and started their way. And right then, Jen caught my eye for the first time in this operation and gave me an impossibly brief but unmistakable "get your shit together" look. She was watching our floundering this whole time! It was not, as promised, like she'd never even know we were there - and yet, despite our bumbling background interference, she was motoring through it like a true champion actress. She was the undercover agent! She was acing her date while we were choking!

Deflated, I hurried to the bathroom, and when I emerged, being as how it was taking place under a lunch-hour time restriction, the date was drawing to a close. Fuck a duck! The White Rabbit and I had to position ourselves for this! We'd blown the rest of the thing, but we sure as shit weren't going to miss the ending!

I quickly descended on our table, communicated my panic in the most Dude way possible...

(Calmer'n'you are but C'MON, we gotta roll!)

...and we scrambled out the door before the smitten couple so we could position ourselves to casually observe their goodbyes. But they were goddamn efficient diners and check-payers and they were emerging right after us! And here is where things took the White-Rabbit turn:

On a wordlessly synchronized decision, we sprinted. Directly into the shrubbery.

I'm not kidding: we literally dove into the bushes. This is The White Rabbit's magic: what shoulda-coulda-woulda been a mildly-interesting, low-key lunch date of professionals with anyone else had somehow been turned into a fifth-grade ninja debacle with her.

(Just play it off, noooobody noticed...)

Let me see if I can sum up the scene accurately:

• Jen (the self-proclaimed "terrible dater"): culminating a fruitful, adult date with friendly conversation, eye-contact, and plans for another meetup.
• The White Rabbit and I (the smooth "coaches" to aforementioned "terrible dater"): awkwardly vying for the more hidden position amidst the landscaping trees of a family-friendly chain restaurant, suffering seizures of laughter at ourselves, punctuated by prodding and mutual eye-shusshing, causing renewed laughter, spurring more shusshing, etc.
• One of these things is a picture of normal dating success. One is not.

I'd like to say, for dignity's sake, that at least we remained undetected. But then, this: they parted ways, Jen coolly shot daggers out of her eyes in our general direction, and he started walking toward his car.

Which was right next to us.

Which triggered in both of us a pathetic freeze-or-flight reflex so powerful and moronic that instead of, say, just staying still (and at least possibly-undetected) behind leaves and trunks, we opted for the alternative: colliding into each other in stooge-like panic as we broke and fled.

(Ohhh honey. Just NO.)

Did he see us? Did he recognize us as recurring extras from the cast of his earlier dining experience? Did he wonder what the fucking fuck two grown-ass women in well-pressed business-casuals were doing crashing around in the trees outside of Macaroni Grill? These were the fleeting thoughts that accompanied us as we ran, mission completely aborted, around the back side of the stucco building, in full view while Jen's Billy slowly drove away.

Curiously enough, we were not invited on Jen's second date with him to find out the answers to these questions.

Evading Billy Bike-Cop

The U-Billy campus is teeming with bicycle police, a status which never fails to amuse.

Generally they hang out in little highly-visible packs on the busier pedestrian intersections and take turns verbally pulling over cyclists who fail to dismount in the designated zones. They have zip-ties instead of handcuffs, they are made to wear ridiculous janitorial-esque outfits, their average age is probably right around 21, and they land somewhere between meter-maid and Paul Blart, on the respect spectrum. So look, I know they're probably wholesomely-intentioned kids aspiring to a life of real-world heroism someday policing the bad guys with their very own squad car. But this doesn't mean I can't silently mock them a little bit. And the thing is, they are so laughably simple to avoid that it's an easily-indulged schadenfreude to watch them playing "cops-n'-robbers" with the poor dumb schmucks who they actually manage to nab and ticket.

(*sigh* They grow up so fast.)

***

Billy Blades and I have offices in the same U-Billy building, meaning that despite my generally-swift skulking through the public spaces, I see him incidentally more days than not, because probability and luck and timing and just FML. One day, as I started off on my bike toward home, I happened to spy him walking on the sidewalk away from our building. It was late in the afternoon and campus was virtually empty to the point I'd unconsciously assumed there was nobody still around to even run into, and so I was momentarily flustered by my sudden recognition of him there ahead of me.

I noticed a little bit of a slow shuffle in his step.

Aw, he looks tired, I thought. Or kinda bummed.

I'm a person who tends to notice these sorts of things, and then has a hard time ignoring them. This used to lead to That Crying Girl at the Bar hugging me (sometimes inescapably) in club restrooms in my twenties, and nowadays tends to result in having my ear bent at all hours by friends of both genders needing a prod toward laughter about the latest bullshit in their lives. And so I considered, for a split-second, just socially chatting as our paths crossed, since even though we're not exactly chummy, the guy's not a total stranger and we're all human and I've long held that you can never be just plain good to too many folks.

Maybe he had a shitty long day.

Maybe people, as people sometimes are, were mildly, gratingly awful to him at work today.

Maybe he just needed a friendly smile.

(Because why not? (and also, ulterior motives))

And then, like a cynically closed-off and/or non-crazy-person, I nixed those socially-inclined notions and pedaled on past, resurfacing from my little Billy Blades friendly-conversation reverie to the sound of someone calling out.

"Miss! Hey miss, stop... please?"

The 'please' sounded like a hesitant question, like some kind of a joke setup. One glance over my shoulder and the punchline materialized like a low-grade nightmare, huffing and puffing toward me earnestly on his university-issued velocipede. Billy Blades is presumably still ambling along behind me, possibly (if there is any mercy on this godforsaken fucking Earth) unaware that the two-second distraction that was his mere presence on the left side of the street had caused me to completely fail to observe the gaggle of Enforcyclists that was congregated on the right, breezing through a stop sign right in front of them with nary a thought to braking.

And so it came to pass, at an hour when aforementioned characters were pretty much the only traffic left on the street, that *I* became one of those morons who somehow got pulled over by the U-Billy Bike Patrol. Literally right in front of Billy Blades.

God fucking dammit.

(Hell is full of mustaches.)

There are some complicating factors here that, at this point in the story, I should explain. No no, maybe not exactly explain, but at least mention in a vague and purely hypothetical way:

Let's just imagine that a friend of mine had recently been hauled into the Student Conduct Office to answer for a previous unfortunate encounter with The U-Billy P.D., involving a choice exchange of words which (though the ensuing police report made for a delightful reading experience that actually caused the attorney in the Student Legal Services office to involuntarily laugh out loud upon review) didn't sit well with the U-Billy administration.

(Dash-cam footage prior to arrest, as seen at disciplinary hearing.)

What can I say? Sharp Susies who are sufficiently well-versed in their goddamn constitutional rights and supporting American case law are no darlings of beginner cops who are not. And, unsurprisingly, insufficiently-obsequious Susies who don't handle being badgered via a badge with as much grace and self-restraint as they, in hindsight, maybe hypothetically could have shown* are required, once released from the hoosegow, to answer to a Student Conduct board in the form of a hearing. And thus, this hypothetical Susie I know may or may not have been unceremoniously placed on disciplinary probation by U-Billy, pursuant to the board's decision on said hearing, which may or may not affect the remaining story. Hypothetically.

*(like say,  just for example, the most poised course of action for a small-wristed, pissed-off Susie might not be to twice hypothetically slip out of bunglingly-applied handcuffs.)

So anyway, immediately, upon this detention, I pictured myself getting not-at-all-hypothetically zip-tied by a bike-cop in front of Billy Blades and internally fucking died. There was only one alternative: kindness. All that kindness I'd been musing about sending forth toward the more attractive parts of my universe mere seconds earlier had to now be grudgingly redirected toward Billy Bike-Cop, lest he look me my friend up, see my my friend's tenuous record, and take me down.

The thing is, I am capable of being pretty charming, given the right set of motivating circumstances. So I stopped, took a deep breath, and turned to face the pimply music pursuing me.

(Oh, haha! The "miss" confused me, since I usually get "ma'am-ed" these days!)

He was perhaps 20. He was panting slightly from the exertion of a half-block's acceleration. His white Humpty-Dumpty bike helmet, emblazoned with an authoritative "POLICE" decal, was comically too large and sat askew. And it was clear, within the first 5 seconds of our interactions, that I (or maybe his job in general) scared the shit out of him.

This would not do: authority figures do not like to feel uncomfortable. People with a little authority turn into terrible humans when they're uncomfortable! I needed lil' Billy Bike-Cop to feel unthreatened and respected and - dare I say it - loved.

He stammered through a couple lines about the state law concerning bicycles and stop signs while I smiled and maintained eye contact like an upstanding citizen. He tried stumblingly to return the dialogue to the official topic of traffic rules and cycling safety while I apologized and swallowed my lack of actual fucks-to-give and asked about his day and nodded and laughed on cue. He started to loosen up. When I leaned in and tilted my head to subconsciously mirror his posture and complimented his friendly professionalism and bowed slightly to make him seem dominant and otherwise pulled out every salesperson's ruse I ever had up my former-U.S.-Army-Recruiter's sleeve, he finally broke and smiled back. This was the moment I knew it was in the bag: Billy Bike-Cop shot a quick "yeah, bicycle contact terminated" response to the inquiring fuzz squawking out of his shoulder-radio, then mentioned that he was willing to "go against policy" just this once and forgo a ticket. I beamed as hard as I could with a straight face.

And then, still straddling his bike, Billy Bike-Cop awkwardly hopped toward me, handed me a slip of paper containing what I took to be a warning, winked, and rode off, looking over his shoulder at me as he carefully braked to a dead halt at the deserted intersection between him and his uniformed brethren. I fled the scene.

Once I was home I unfolded the warning and found it empty, save - scrawled on the "Officer information" line - Billy Bike-Cop's first name, a non-local cell number, and a smiley-face.

(Mmmyesyes, well played, young Billymmm, but I wasn't born yesterday. Or even yesterdecade.)

I believe this juncture is where Billy Bike-Cop's story will, in accordance with all applicable rules of the road, be required to come to a complete stop.

Billy Below-Zero Heats Up Valentine's Day

Billy Below-Zero originally wrote me from the South Pole close to a year ago. (I should note that while I rarely post in real-time, this one's a sort of real-world Valentine's Day Special. So grab some chocolates or whiskey or however you celebrate/anti-celebrate this Hallmark Spectacular and... enjoy?)

(Love has no boundaries, man.)

So, long ago and far away, I somehow acquired this pen-pal in Antarctica, whilst residing in Fort Billy - a small-to-medium-ish college town smack-dab in the middle of the continent - within striking distance of some things, but really close to... well, not much.

When Billy Below-Zero first emailed me (yes, via an unnamed dating site), I'll admit it - I was uninterested in the actual dating sense, because even manageable semi-trans-continental distance no longer floats my boat, let alone full-hemispherical challenges. But, given his situation, I was more than a little intrigued and wanted to mine him for his current life data, and so I wrote him back. I mean, I was doing the transition-to-grad-school-type day-to-day drudgery of field work and not getting anything else I wanted or needed, such as funding or even admittance into the goddamn study lab I coveted, while this guy was doing something completely off the wall - living and working at an atmospheric research station on the South Pole. I mean, these fuckers are stuck down there for four months at a stretch with NO ESCAPE - as in, no resupply planes from ANYwhere, no medical evacuation, no transportation of any kind capable of arriving or departing in the deep winter. Non-negotiable.

(Oh hey, Billy Torrance! You're just in time for happy hour!)

You go crazy? They literally restrain you in a padded room and wait it out, no chance to plead your case. You wander outside drunkenly at night and get lost? Sayonara. You die? Corpsicle on months-long deep-freeze in a merely-unheated room till they can get you out on a convenient flight next spring. Just 50-something scientific souls, of which 4 to 5 max are female (seriously, goddammit, STEM fields recruiting), sealed off with no physical exchange and patchy-at-best internet contact with the outside world.

And according to Billy Below-Zero, what do they do as a traditional rite-of passage when the last resupply flight of the season takes off from Amundsen-Scott bound for Aukland, leaving them essentially stranded in a place devoid of daylight for one third of a year? They get together and watch either The Shining or The Thing. I mean, come on. I dare any writer-type on Earth to try to tell me they wouldn't have been driven to glean some stories out of this guy, and I was more than happy to cough up some normalcy for him to have and hold in exchange.

(Quit overthinking this, Billy.)

I never did decipher what search initially led him to me (he'd never been to Fort Billy, had zero geographic ties, we had no apparent social overlaps), but that's beside the point.  The point is, for a few weeks of harmless distraction, I was really taken by Billy Below-Zero's tales of middle-of-the-night fire-scares (because the place is apparently comparable to a space-station, in that a structurally-damaging fire could actually threaten survival), the hallucinogenic-level nightly Aurora Borealis, the archetype mad scientists and cafeteria cook simpletons he was stranded with. It was all goddamn fascinating. And in exchange for this titillating peek into his bizarro-dimension, Billy Below-Zero got, from my end, what he apparently craved: mundane tales of the everyday and the occasional photo of summer - with actual sunlight! - in the high country.

For a few weeks.

And then, I grew bored and ran out of time to be endlessly emailing some stranger whose interest in my personal life seemed to be becoming increasingly-inappropriate. I was sending him stupid little anecdotes about dog walks and on-campus politics, and he was suggesting, via flowery 2,000-word diatribes, flying me out to New Zealand to meet him upon his disembarkation from exile. I was briefly joking about having my weekly awkward dinners with my parents, and he was speculating at essay-length about what it would be like – which for him included, apparently, the rules he would have to institute –  the first time we (hypothetically) "made love."

(Wait. This isn't hypothetical to you at all, is it?)

It was time to pull the plug.

And so, Billy Below-Zero sank into a deep-drift of unanswered emails, and I went on about my real life. So go the fickle snowstorms upon the oft-overlooked continent at the bottom of the social globe that is online dating. 

Then, time progressed until riiiight about now, with nary a word from Billy Below-Zero. Until, all of a sudden (because just of course), he popped back up in my (non-dating-site, regular-email) inbox. By now I'd been seeing someone for a few months, and had all but forgotten about Billy Below-Zero and his South Pole life for at least eight. The email was lengthy, but can be summarized like so:

"Hey! I'm done in the Antarctic! How are you doing?!"

Well. How to respond?

On the one hand, yeah, I'd emailed this Billy months ago, and yeah, he was interesting and engaging and utilized proper punctuation and selected the appropriate homonyms in his discourses so of course he had points there. On the other twelve or so hands, aforementioned current Billy and I were flirting with an actual relationship, I didn't have anything else to really wonder about regarding life at the South Pole, and, truth be told, I was just not that interested in continuing a pen-pal exchange. 

I gingerly bit.

And maybe I should have foreseen what I got back today:

"So guess what? I just decided to move to Fort Billy!! No job, just hangin' out..."  said Billy Below-Zero. 

"How about a Valentine's Day beer?"

(It's just weird. Any way you slice it.)

What. The. Fuck.

Let me be clear: Fort Billy is not really a destination city for anything, save a few select programs at the university. Fort Billy isn't the most convenient town for skiing, for the mountains, for lake recreation, for the coast, for cultural events, for big-city access, for anything. And yeah, Fort Billy is a pretty neat little college town... but it is what I've long referred to as "a town of bartenders with Masters degrees." There are just not many entry-level career-type jobs outside of academia. Hence, there exists in Fort Billy a dearth of single, available dating prospects that are older than undergrad-age, because you either do your school here and move on, or you move here mid-career, with your spouse and kids in tow.

Or, say... you "randomly" relocate from friggin Antarctica because who the fuck knows why, except just maybe you did it on a mildly-obsessive whim because someone lives here with whom you want to meet up.

And so today, in the midst of the endless grant proposal season loop of edits and re-edits, on a day in which my most recent Billy is actually booked for the evening with a band gig (to be fair, I suspect he'd likely be highly amused by whatever trainwreck story could possibly come of any such meetup and would probably encourage it), and on a day when I wake up to Punchin' Judy's triumphant text announcement that her long term on-and-off finally jammed a rock onto her mitt last night, this is looking to be my most tantalizing Valentine's Day proposition.

(But... I mean... do I at least get that beer first?)

***

Eh, you're right. I shouldn't break my wine-drinking date with my cat.

Billy Bullfight Sucks At Gambling

Sometimes, just sometimes, a Billy Affair works itself out with more than an ample supply of shadenfreude. To wit:

Punchin' Judy and I have a long-ongoing joke we like to call The Decade of Cats. It goes like this:

For every year past 30 that you are single, you should go ahead and get yourself a cat. If, approaching age 40, you are also approaching 10 cats, well... there's your final answer.

Naturally, since Judy is a comforter and a nurturer and hilarious but also a total bitch, she immediately brought my hypothetical Decade of Cats progress to my attention in the aftermath of Billy Bullfight's U-turn on me:

(Friends like these.)

Unfortunately, even after the above Final Call, I still had to deal with him for the usual collecting-of-my-shit/destroying-of-your-shit-and-denying-I-ever-had-it logistics. Occupying highest priority on this to-do list was the reclaiming of some rare/expensive wood I'd scored, which was residing in his workshop, as he'd jumped on my idea-wagon and the usual Susie's Half-Baked Project Hour had turned into a joint furniture-building endeavor.

This reclamation of property, much to Judy's delight upon dramatic reenactment, was a task which involved an incredibly heavy slab cut to fit my project, a small hatchback, a diminutive female's upper-body strength, a general lack of geometric intuition, a refusal to ask for loading help, a series of comical problem-solving failures, a minor solo shit-fit, and finally, a semi-defeated confiscation of every single one of the remaining slabs (which were cut to the smaller dimensions of Billy Bullfight's intended project), because no way was I letting that fucker win the entire burl-war. No way.

(One of us can always break out the chainsaw and cut more.)

But still, it took a few weeks to get my poker face back on and make the best of the shitty deal, and a few months of complete radio silence before I'd really seen enough cards come out to calculate the odds and conclude what betting high-stakes on Billy Bullfight had been: Not Even Fucking Worth It.

And you guessed it: in the style of all Billys who get scraped off into the NEFWI discard-pile, Billy Bullfight, once thusly classified, began to make apologetic noise on my periphery again. He started sending stupid peacemaking joke-texts my way. And when those went unanswered, he left a couple voicemails of ambiguous intent. And when those, too, went ignored, Billy Bullfight played his trump card, his four aces, the one thing he must have known would elicit a response from me: a picture of himself.

I won't share the pic, but it was a selfie of sorts. It was captioned "Look what I've got now!"

Billy Bullfight is on his couch, and the camera is pointed down at his lap, where (NO, not that kind of selfie) not one but two cats are lounging.

(Should've just stuck to dick-pics, dude.)

I've never really been one to need the last word.

I've never really been one to give a shit about "winning the breakup."

But right at this point, if my life had been a poker hand, I would have just tossed my final few pennies in ante, only to be dealt three Uno cards and a dead monkey. I mean, even aside from my recent Billy-induced battle wounds, nothing else was going my way on that particular few months' deal, so to speak: job, finances, school plans, living situation, social complications - all of it was coming up mismatched low numbers. It should have been - nay, it was - my weakest moment, the point in the game where I had no chips left and the casino wasn't even serving drinks anymore and even though I knew better, I just needed the safe ride home that Billy Bullfight could offer and might have been on the verge of taking it.

And then, there was Billy Bullfight showing his hand. "Look what I've got now!"

(Actually, sorry, not sorry at all.)

Right then, he folded! Billy Bullfight's cards hit the felt and I was somehow the last player standing! It really wasn't much, admitted - but it was enough. I cashed it all in and left the table laughing, with just enough gas money to get the hell out of Vegas, back over the Clark County line and on with my life.