St. Billy was the son of an important political family from Ohio. He was everything a prince should be: handsome, polite, bright and blond. But somewhere along the lines after Billy left Ohio for Washington, D.C., things went wrong. Two years later, when he was 20, his parents were afraid he had died. Billy was living on the streets of DC, spending each night with strange men, completely addicted to crystal meth.
St. Billy's full name was St. Billy of Rehab. One night last spring, while he and I were meandering through the garish carnival booths of a county fair in northwestern Washington state, eating fried dough, he told me that the morning he woke up having slept with a man who was HIV positive in exchange for meth, was the morning he decided to get help.
I choked on my fried dough. I am not often speechless, but jokes about crystal meth and HIV are not exactly among my first-date arsenal. I had nothing to say. Long past gone into uncharted territory, I did the only thing I could think of to do: I held his hand.
"I don't have HIV," he hastened to say. "Miracle in a stack of needles, though."
If I could make this shit up, I would, and I would not come off as so soft, trust me. Holding hands? Insane. But anyway, the story is this: I was alone, in a strange town on a strange coast, working an internship at a poetry publisher. I didn't have 99 cents to buy a song on iTunes, but I had a view of the Pacific, which came free to nearly every window in town.
Billy, it just so happened, had been shipped to this particular end of the earth by his parents, and imprisoned in a ritzy rehab facility, of the "outdoorsy brats" variety. "Promises Malibu" it was not. Boys only, with lots of hiking, kayaking, community service, Patagonia jackets, etc.
When I met Billy one morning at the gym (of course) he was three months sober, living in a half-way house with several other guys in recovery, and had by this time fully replaced his other addictions with an addiction to fitness. After the requisite few days of eye-sex, he finally approached me.
"You've got the best legs," he said.
"You've got a new boyfriend," I said.
La la la, off into the sunset, walks on the beach, kissing on the ferris wheel and strolling through the county fair choke.
Did I not mention he was SOBER? Sober, people. No 17 beers with a side of painkiller. No four games of shrub, not one shot-gunned joint, not even a glass of wine with dinner. S-o-b-e-r. And not only him, but me! I had to be sober in order to hang out with him, out of respect and because he told me he wouldn't be able to see me otherwise.
At Dartmouth, this seems unimaginable. Kissing sober is the problem, isn't it? That's the big leap that's so hard to make: from hooking up after a night out, to hooking up while stone-cold-sober after a night in the library. And because hooking up sober is so hard to do, we then spend more and more time getting drunk.
So how do two 20-year-old college kids have a completely sober romance? Somehow I survived to tell the tale: You go on walks. You talk. You go to the movies. You go to the fair. Afterwards you ask, "Can I kiss you?" And then you ask, "Do you want to spend the night?"
I called him St. Billy because in my mind, he was being persecuted. I can't imagine an entire life stretching before me, without a single glass of wine on any horizon, ever again. I really can't. But I also called him St. Billy because, at the risk of sounding like the voice-over from "Titanic" he saved me.
I think every Dartmouth kid wonders at one point or another if they are abusing alcohol or substances beyond their capacity to recover. Junior Winter was an all-time low, in that department, but meeting Billy proved to me that I could still have sober fun, and even sober sex. He proved it to me, because I wanted so badly to prove it to him, too.
I believe it can be done! I believe we can and will be able to have real lives. If it's too hard here, then in the next place. It will be fine. If I can go from being the drunkest girl in the history of Dartmouth College to the sober slamfrag of a veritable saint, then the damage, for most of us, can still be undone.
I don't know if Billy really believed it, though. I knew he had to tell himself that an entire life without a glass of wine would be fine, so I pretended it was fine. But I think he felt, as I did, that a life built on the absence of something is almost as sad as one built on its abuse.
St. Billy once told me how he used to re-paint the walls of his closet over and over again, and sit in it with the door closed, to get high on the fumes. That was the Spring screenwriters were on strike and I was speechless, again. Holding his hand was the easiest thing to do.
