Billie Girl

Chapter Twenty Four

Blake was pissed that Mom would not let us marry any time soon and certainly not now, while there there was practically panic in the streets of our city.

Blake was sure that my mother was trying to deny us happiness because she gave us a high and mighty speech about how we must still pay our dues, go through hard times, become seasoned, sprout a few gray hairs, travel abroad and learn about new cultures, get our masters degrees, or get and keep our first full-time jobs, before we are allowed to do something as meaningless (in her eyes) as marry. So be it.

Did I care what she thought? Did I care what anybody thought? Well, not really, but still I could not do any damn thing that I wanted to do until my birthday in May.

And when that day came, I planed to break free big time. That is, if I lived to see that very important day.

Grand Rapids was fast becoming a police town. I was so sick of seeing patrolling cars and cops on the beat. It was as if my street was the Magnificent Mile or Times Square, for God's sake. But I was touched that the authorities did give a damn about us young folk.

Still, lots of elderly women stared at my tangled, frayed, unwashed hair with disdain. Yet teen boys really liked my "just-hopped-out-of-bed" style and twenty-something men or thirty- something men would hire me in a second if it weren't frowned on to be an unkempt free-spirited post-hippy. I just knew that even elderly women secretly wished they had the balls to just stop grooming themselves and could make torn clothing look sexy. Like I did.

Which brings me to another very important person in my life.

I had a friend who was a very old man. He was like a pen pal, but more than that because I actually visited him in his nursing home. I was a companion volunteer. This all started long before I met Blake. I just randomly answered an ad in a smoke-filled coffee shop in East Town (before the smoking ban) and it said that they needed people of all ages to volunteer to spend time with elderly patients in nursing homes. I had nothing better to do with my time, and so I walked to the Metropolitan hospital, which was only a few blocks from my house and they assigned me to a gentleman named Richard Phillips, who was now eighty-three years old and suffered from Scoliosis so bad, he could not walk and he could barely even sit up in a wheelchair for that matter.

He was a very simple man, and a very kind man, yet he had a devious look in his eyes. I could just tell that if he had his way he would engage in all sorts of unsavory acts with me. But he had a way of keeping this all contained within him with his sublime politeness. In many ways, he was the ultimate gentleman.

Tova could not understand why I was so loyal to Richard Phillips. She thought that I should not associate with anybody over nineteen. She could not see the point. Tova liked older men but she had her limits. She thought that anybody over fifty was contagious, and that you could possibly catch old age from them. She was afraid to be friendly with someone who was too old, fearing they might sneeze on her and make her suddenly elderly or something.

Tova thought that time was not moving and that there was no way in hell she was ever going to get older. No way, no how! But I knew that was not true. Richard put it best when he told me, "The years just passed. There was nothing I could do about it."

Today I had to wait awhile before talking with him because he was on the oxygen machine. I waited patiently in a chair next to his bed. The machine sounded like the whole room was breathing. It was eerie. Four other men resided in this room, and they often said that Richard was lucky to have a young chick like me as an afternoon companion, and I used to laugh and take everything that they said with a grain of salt.

You see, Richard had this way about him. It was like he was really a young guy wearing an old man's mask. The fact that he could not walk was just a minor inconvenience for him, just a phase that he was going through. So, when he got off the oxygen machine, I once again searched for something in his face that might be young. But nothing about him–not his eyes, or his lips, or those wisps of white hair, or those veiny arms and fragile crooked fingers–could in any way be perceived as youthful.