Two Dead Boys

”It isn’t enough,” Billie whispered hoarsely into the phone. A light rain pitter-pattered against the glass of the back alley telephone booth, his short form slightly visible under the dim 20 watt bulb above his head. Around him all was dark and above the back door of a small, grungy bar strange insects swarmed around the wall lamp. Alongside the curb Mike stood leaning against the back door of the van with his arms crossed, watching his best friend as his skepticism had not passed despite the other musician’s assurance that he was fine.

Catching his best friend’s stare, Billie turned into the corner of the booth with a tight, wet grip on the filthy phone. He tried not to look distressed. “Listen… just…” he sighed, running his left hand through his hair and gritting his teeth. “Do what you have to do,” he mumbled out with tightly closed eyes. After a few seconds he heard the soft click of the phone call end and slowly hung the phone back up on its hook.

He pushed his forehead into the cold glass and sighed, began drawing with his finger the stick figure face of a girl with long hair and dark eyes, only for it to disappear quickly under his hand when the fog of his breath faded away. There was a sharp rap on the glass that startled him from his daze and his stomach dropped when he saw Mike’s face through the rain stained window. The other boy lifted one eyebrow casually, easing Billie’s initial dismay to what he thought would be another inquiry of his well being.

The door of the booth groaned at the hinges when he pulled it back and stepped out as coolly as he could. “We ready to go?” He asked his band mate evenly. Mike caught himself studying the way Billie looked at him and for a second wondered if he should press the issue, but instead abandoned his strange suspicions.

“Yeah--yeah on to the next one!” Mike pointed to where the alley ended and the street began with as much excitement he could in touring with his best friends. Billie chuckled genuinely at Mike’s amusing facial expressions over a case of beer that was sitting pretty in the open door way of the van, not looking back at the tiny, foul smelling phone booth.

---

It was happening again. He was shaving with a small, hand held mirror on someone’s couch; a friend of the band, Jason. The plastic Bic razor trembled under his poor coordination and a knick on his jaw line started to bleed. He swiped it up with his thumb and cleaned the blood off with a blue rag that was lounging on the side table. “Shit,” he muttered through half closed lips.

He had this thing against mirrors. It was as if his flaws and secrets went unnoticed to those around him, but a mirror--oh but a mirror, it intensified his flaws, amplified them against his blurred silhouette on a dark blue sky. It made him angry. Angry enough to break it.

It’s done. It’s over with. I shouldn’t be worried. But the guilt was eating him alive. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand and tried not to think about it.

It was 1991; they were back home in the Bay area, done traveling around the country until the summer, and had spend much time squatting in Jason’s apartment. When the van came to a halt for the last time on Jefferson, everyone breathed a sigh of relief and climbed out of their hot, sticky seats and the crowded floor, still hung over from the night before and grossly dehydrated under the parching late August sun.

The light gleamed brilliantly through the window above the couch where he sat ghostlike, emanating from every direction the guilt he could reveal to no one. The mirror held close to him in his hand shivered and he looked down at it with distaste and anger, and the boy looking back at him scorned at what’d he’d done. Billie looked down at his reflection with quiet contemplation; it was quite the paradox, how calm he’d trained himself to be and how the bite of guilt was still nipping at his skin like vultures scuffling around a dead animal.

His knuckles flushed white around the cracked plastic handle of the mirror and he found himself struggling to keep it from shattering into a million bright little pieces on the floor; instead he set the mirror down on the coffee table and buried his long, dark hair into the palms of his hands, groaning into his wrists. All of a sudden he jerked his head up and with one hand picked up the plastic bowl he’d filled with water and used to rinse his razor and threw it across the room, standing up abruptly and incoherently.

He stepped towards the bowl where it had landed near the doorway of the kitchen and peered down at it disapprovingly, as if it were a dog that had tracked mud on the carpet and knew what it had done; but Billie knew differently. He knew better.

He lifted the plastic bowl and bent it in his hands, the strange metallic-teal shine of its hollow flexing between his strong hands like a moving galaxy.

“What happened?” A voice alarmed him from the other side of the kitchen; it was Mike, again.

“Oh, uh--” Billie started, coughing into his fist, “I dropped it. Watch where you’re goin’,” he explain smoothly.

Mike only nodded cautiously. “Didn’t you say you were gonna call your woman?” He asked as Billie threw the bowl in the sink and leaned against the counter. He’d forgotten about Adrienne. His mind was so preoccupied he’d forgotten to call her when he got back home like she asked him to.

“Yeah, I just wanted to shave first. I was startin’ to look like a lumber jack, “ he joked.

“Well half your face is still furry, Yogi Bear,” Mike retorted, smiling when his joke brought a chuckle out of his best friend. He missed that. “And since when do you need to shave your face to talk to a girl on the phone?”

Billie said nothing. He laughed casually and turned on his heels, disappearing back into the room where he’d left his half shaven face. And his girlfriend. Waiting.

---

Later that night the apartment seemed abandoned, quiet and at ease. Dishes sitting in the sink. The late night news humming through the den. The saffron burn of a streetlight next to the window. Moths flocking around the electricity like satellites.The guys had all left for a party and Billie stayed behind to get some privacy and talk to Adrienne--while also enjoying the company of two beers and a package of Twizzlers. He intended to avoid any social activity in the Bay area for the next year, and when he was asked why, the only thing he could think of was I’m tired of being around people.

The young musician stood in a shaft of light near the window, dust motes floating around like loose bits of algae floating in a pond. Billie. Billie and his pond-water eyes. The deep hollow of his iris a pool of minnows and the soft cut jade of a hippy’s necklace. He looked like a ghost in that light.

“What?” Billie’s mouth gaped into the white, plastic wall phone of the den in the glow worm wash of the buzzing television. His facial expression fell broken and soft as he felt a mix of shock and disappointment. He anxiously twirled the phone cord between his calloused fingers and waited for an answer.

“I just don’t think we’re gonna get anywhere with how everything’s been working out.”

“Exactly,” Billie let out an exasperated gasp. “It’s working out!”

“Please don’t yell.” She sounded like a child huddling the corner of a room. “I love you…” Her voice rang out above the static and it breathed the dry realization that that wasn’t the answer for everything. It pained him to hear her put herself through anything, to blame herself for whatever she had felt.

“I promise things will get better,” he said in a low voice. Somewhere inside of him he felt another pang of acidic guilt electrifying his capillaries and leaking into his body. There it gathered at the bottom of his stomach as he tried to keep it down.

“I really don’t know…I mean you’re never around.” She paused for a few seconds and in a breathy voice, blurted out, “I get really lonely.”

He gazed down at his torn shoes, studying the floor in the silence on the phone. He soon began to feel a lump form in his throat, his eyes glossing over and his mouth twisted dangerously while teetered between spilling everything to her and saying, “Me too.” He kicked a small, dead spider on the floor and spun around the room, bothered by the sudden realization that maybe it might not work out--no matter how much he loved her, what he would to do keep her and how much he would risk.

“Please, let’s try to work this out,” he half whispered in urgency with his head pressed against the wall. The window was open on the other side of the den, and the night wind blew through the room, ruffling the papers on the coffee table and cooling his sweating forehead. Billie turned his back to the wall and slowly slid down, soon sitting on the floor beneath the phone, listening to her voice and wondering whether or not it was all worth it.