There's Something About Bill

Rowhouses in South Philly. Image via.

I’ve gotten along with nearly every person I’ve ever lived with and not always because we share the same habits. If they smoked weed, odds are they hung out with me a lot more, but in some cases, our differences nurtured a closer relationship. A prime example of this was my housemate Bill, whom I lived with in a house near Dickinson Square in Philly.

When I first visited the place, I went with my girlfriend. We had recently seen a beautiful one-bedroom in a much nicer neighborhood, and she grimaced when we pulled up to the dilapidated South Philly rowhouse. She was mortified when we saw the available apartment. For the modest price of $425, I could rent the second floor of Bill’s house—a bedroom, a bathroom with holes in the ceiling, and a kitchen with incomplete flooring. While I wasn’t too keen on the condition of the building, I knew I wanted to live there after talking to Bill, because I could feel good vibes emanating from him. He was an aged punk with the tattoos and beer belly to prove it, and he lived in the rowhouse with his girlfriend, Felicia, and her identical twin sister, Fawn—they both smiled when I asked if they had any issues with weed. Bill said, “Smoke as much as you want, dude! We don’t really smoke, but whatever. You are my kind of guy. We’d love it if you lived here, and your girlfriend is very sweet, too.”

When we walked back out to the car, my girlfriend could see that I was definitely going to take the place and was less than sweet about it. Needless to say, the relationship didn’t last, but I got to spend my last year in Philly with Bill, one of the best guys I have ever known—and I got to solve a little mystery about Bill along the way.

The night I moved into Bill’s house, a fight erupted between Felicia and him. As I built furniture in my bedroom, I could hear them arguing above me. Felicia was definitely winning, and Bill was incredulous—each of his screams was a question. After the fight ended, Bill ran down the stairs and knocked on my door. His face beet red, he asked me if he could bum a cigarette. I invited him into my room, and we sat down on cardboard boxes and lit up cigarettes without talking. Finally, he broke the silence with an apology: “Dude, I swear it’s never like this,” he said. “This is the first time she’s acted like this. I mean, she’s talking about walking out on me. I was ready to marry her. It’s fucking hilarious actually.” Bill then proceeded to do something I have only seen in movies—he started laughing, and then his laugh turned into sobbing, and he bowed his head. I put my hand on his shoulder and talked him through it. It really seemed like he was the victim in this situation, so I told him, “It’s better you’re finding out she’s a nut now and not after you marry her.” Then I tried to implement my personal solution to stress, offering to blaze out with him, but he refused. After about an hour of pep talk and a whole pack of Marlboros, Bill gravely thanked me and ascended back to his domestic hell.

Over the next few days, Bill and Felicia’s relationship disintegrated, and Bill kept coming to me for solace. He would walk in freshly damaged and exit with new hope for the future. This wasn’t because I was a particularly good therapist, but because Bill was a resilient guy who needed a shoulder to cry on as his love life fell apart. I kept insisting that he smoke with me during our talks, but he remained adamant. “Nope, I can’t get high,” he said. “I might even quit drinking.” Bill made this a reality with admirable diligence; he completely cut out all substances and started running every day as part of his recovery plan from his breakup. In a matter of weeks, he became the thin, lean punk he was in his youth. He was back on the dating scene too. “I only drink ginger ale when I hit the bars, which isn’t really conducive, so I’ve been meeting girls online,” he told me. I started hearing him come home with ladies, chuckling as they walked past my room on the way up to Bill’s bed. I smiled every time, glad to see how far he’d come since his immediate post-Felicia days.

One morning, I was heading to my bathroom when a slim figure beat me to it. From what I caught, it was a tall, thin black girl wearing a head wrap. In a sleepy stupor, I stood at the bathroom door waiting for her to exit, when I noted the distinct sound of someone peeing while standing. Before the sound was completly audible, it stopped, and then I heard a flush. Not wanting to scare her when she walked out, I backed into my room. Unable to make visual confirmation, I was left wondering what I had heard.

Bill continued to stop by my room to smoke cigarettes and talk about his life progress. He always expressed his success with the ladies. There was always some machismo to the descriptions of his exploits; I tried to subtly convey to him that I didn’t care whom he dated and that he was free to talk about it, but he remained cagey. I would occasionally run into him in the hallway with one of his dates, and he would always employ the same method of hiding his date. He’d rush over to me and start talking really fast while his companion slipped up to his room. Once she was safely upstairs, he would back away, laughing sheepishly before running up the stairs. I couldn’t figure out how to tell Bill that he didn’t have to do this and that I would prefer if he didn’t force his dates to sneak around the house like bandits. The mystery plagued me until the night when Bill finally agreed to smoke weed with me.

That day, my bandmate, Bas, was over at the house thumbing through Bill’s record collection when he came across a cache of nazi punk albums. As a couple of brown guys, we were pretty freaked out. Knowing Bill, I insisted that he merely had them as part of an encyclopedic collection. “You can’t edit history,” I told a skeptical Bas. He wanted a more definitive answer, and I discouraged him from confronting poor, gentle Bill.

That evening, Bill came to my band’s show at the Tritone, a now defunct Philly venue. My car was parked right outside the entrance, and after we got off stage, we all piled into it to smoke a joint. Bill was excited to smoke for the first time in ages. He and Bas were shooting the shit about punk history when Bas unexpectedly threw out the contentious question. “Hey Bill, why the fuck do you have so many nazi punk records?” he asked. “You’re not a nazi punk, right?”

The whole car went silent as Bill puffed on the joint, thinking of an appropriate response. Finally, he sarcastically said, “Yeah man. I’m a fucking Nazi. I’m a raging racist. That’s why I live with a Muslim dude and fuck black ladyboys on the reg.” For Bas this answered a recent query, but for me it revealed the only thing that Bill had hidden from me throughout the roller coaster of his relationship recovery. “I knew it!” I yelled. Bill started laughing. He admitted that he’d been hiding this from me, not because he thought I was conservative, but because he was figuring out his own preference and didn’t want to broadcast the process, not even to his de facto life coach. I could tell he was relieved, and from then on, he was open about his dates. It turned out he was meeting them on Craigslist’s casual encounters, which he described as a treasure trove of willing sexual partners. He was frequently seeing one girl in particular right before I moved out. The day I left, I saw her in the kitchen making lunch. Standing in his doorway smiling, Bill was a new man. I had watched him transform from a heartbroken drunk to a slim, trim king of his own domain. When we said goodbye, he told me that I’d been there for him in the most transformational year of his life and that he’d miss the smell of weed pouring out of my room.

Previously - Blazed Out Moms

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