Billie Girl

Chapter Two

In the afterglow of that dream, I called Blake and he didn't pick up. I hated when he didn't pick up. t made me feel like the world had come to an abrupt stop. We didn't share a casual thing, and not picking up the phone was not something that happened often with us. We didn't give each other space: we didn't allow each other breathing room. On the odd nights when we didn't sleep in the same bed locked in an embrace, we talked on the phone till sometimes four or five in the morning, or until one of us discovered the other had fallen asleep. The most important thing about those conversations was that we stayed connected at all costs. I already knew everything there was to know about Blake. I knew all his little tragedies. Like the fact that his father left his mother and started a new life with a woman half his age. I knew that his stepmother was only twenty-five years old and had never had a job. She was anorexic thin and she had wide eyes and full lips. She was a Brazilian girl, who was looking to get her citizenship by marrying Blake's dad. I already know that Blake hated her because she stole his father away and because all she cared about was shopping and getting clothes for herself. She liked to wear tight-fitting leggings where you could see every female curve and crevice. "I once told my Dad this new wife had a bad case of camel toe syndrome," Blake once said. And his father promptly sent Blake to go live with his mother. And though his mother tried and tried to coerce him into looking for a straight job, Blake wouldn't do it.

Blake was my defiant hero, no two ways about it. He spent all his time in coffee shops writing his spectacularly long epic poem about all the injustices in his life. His thinly disguised "tell all." Before they outlawed smoking in public places in our town, he used to sit in this funky coffee shop that was open twenty-four hours a day, and he was growing a beard which he told me would be as long as his epic poem. He vowed never to cut it until he reached the last page. He looked like a young Dostoevsky. And the dive where he did his writing was so cloudy with tobacco, just to breathe was like smoking a pack. No, he didn't officially purchase cigarettes, but just taking a breath in that place was was like being a pack-a-day smoker.

Being a non-smoker, I never condoned him actually buying cigarettes. And as soon as he came over to visit after spending hours writing in that den of iniquities, I begged him to shower. So he would drop all his clothing to the floor of my bedroom and I would immediately dump it all in the washer. He would shower away all the nicotine evil, and then he would put on this black robe that was always waiting for him. And then we embraced in a chaste way, because of my divine hang- up.

No, this was no casual thing. We were soul mates who felt blessed to have found each other so early in life. Sometimes I would scan Craig's list personal adds and see the dozens of lonely women who where over thirty and still looking for love.

How would I ever find another like Blake? Who else would show me what it was like to walk towards the edge of my existence? To tempt death, to invite death to come over for a visit. I swear that Blake would ask death to take his shoes off and then ask if death needed a place to crash for the night. What I am saying is that Blake was totally unafraid of dying.

Blake was a spiritual-minded atheist. My old school poet Blake, forever rewriting and reworking his words. Never letting me hear a word of it, which caused me to romanticize what he might be up to even more. Naturally I was convinced it was all about me. An ode to me. A poetic tribute. A portrait of the virgin girl who loved him so.