Torn

Maybe I was blinded by hatred. I hated this guy. He really is a thorn in my side. My best friend Lily loves his band, but I don’t. I can’t sit by and listen to how gorgeous his eyes are, or how lustrous his lips are. She believes Billie Joe Armstrong is the epitome of God, but he is the devil’s spawn.

My deep rooted hatred for this guy starts off with my brother. You see, I was sixteen at the time. This was back when American Idiot first came out. My brother, Aaron, was a big Green Day fan. He worshiped the ground they walked on. I didn’t really care for their music. After all, I was never the music lover in my family, Aaron was. I guess he got that from his father, my stepdad.

So, it was a surprise to me when I see Billie Joe at a grocery store. Aaron was so shocked. He almost didn’t go up to Billie Joe. He couldn’t believe his eyes. I told him to suck it up and go say hi. Before we reached him, however, he had gotten a phone call. So, we waited. The conversation seemed to be really heated. Billie Joe seemed pretty angry at whoever was on the other end.

After he hung up, Aaron came up to him and asked for an autograph. Billie Joe still had an angry look on his face when he grudgingly signed the piece of paper. When Aaron went to ask if he was all right, Billie Joe screamed at him. “God damn it!! Why don’t you just leave me alone? Can’t you understand that I’m upset? Do you have to be such an asshole? Leave me the fuck alone!”

Yeah, maybe he was upset at whatever the other person was saying, but did he have to yell at some random person? No. I couldn’t stand to just stand there and not say anything. So I yelled at him. “All he wanted was a fucking autograph! He was just going to ask if you were all right, but I guess you’re a bigger asshole than you think he is for even assuming what he was even about to say before he said it!!!!” And with that, we left the store.

That wasn’t exactly why I hated the guy. Not even close. After that incident, Aaron was devastated. He couldn’t see why his idol would ever call him an asshole, when he did nothing wrong. Even after I tried telling him that Billie Joe was having a bad day and didn’t really mean it, he still wouldn’t believe me. It ate him up. He was only thirteen. He kept replaying what Billie Joe had said about him being an asshole and it led him into depression. I had to eventually take away every trace of Green Day, because he started cutting himself.

This was only the beginning. For the next year, he couldn’t bare to even have any kind of fun. We had to put him through counseling, but it didn’t seem to work. It didn’t help at all. Aaron was beyond our help and it killed me inside. I swore up and down that if I ever met Billie Joe again, I’d rip his throat apart.

I was the one who found him, four years later. I had just gotten home from work. I didn’t see anyone around at first, but then I realized that there was blood on the floor. So, I walked upstairs, into the bathroom. I can’t describe how scary it was to find his body laying in the bathtub like that. It was horrifying.

I couldn’t talk to anyone for a month. I just couldn’t.

The next time I spoke, it was to cuss out a certain asshole.

“You’re a fucking idiot, you know that? You killed my fucking brother!!!” Those were the first words out of my mouth before I punched him right in the face.