Being Billy Olsen by Gerald Coleman

“One’s real life is often the life one does not lead.”
—Oscar Wilde

Billy Olsen didn’t remember the moment he started to grow into the image everyone had of him. Nor whether other people’s “Billy Olsen” was anything like the real one, if there was one. Self-awareness was not a strength. Perhaps that’s why he confided in me.

 My belief was that he didn’t want to be the unreliable narrator of his own story and was better off out of it altogether.

Elementary, high school, and college came and went with few rewards or sorrows, as if Billy Olsen’s image was simply glued onto the graduation pictures. But in the early fall of 1974, for two consecutive Thursday nights, Billy Olsen became the focus of the regular session at Mulcahy’s Bar on Ninety-Third—specifically, he told us about the release of his virginity. Even that was to be expected. It was happening all around us. How the young women dealt with this problem, we had no idea. Just because it took one from each category—one from Column A and one from Column B—to form a loss of virginity, didn’t mean we were helpmates or partners in the proceedings. Complicating matters was the likelihood that the event tended to be between—one from Column C [Achieved] and one from Column D [Incomplete]. What gay people did was totally alien to us, but it couldn’t have been any easier.

Roughly half of the children of our acquaintance went to Catholic schools inside a fog of sexual ignorance. Those who received public educations were not that sexually advanced, but at least benefited from going to school with the opposite sex and received a minimum of sexual health information.

The story Billy Olsen told was re-told until it became almost scriptural. It wasn’t something he’d lie about, either. That was another thing about being Billy Olsen. He didn’t have the sense to keep his mouth shut occasionally.

He was almost twenty-two when Alexandra Schuler, whom he hadn’t seen since elementary school, made a critical re-entry.

By twenty-one, Alexandra’s eighth grade body had accomplished what it needed to do. Enough for Billy Olsen. She was a piece of work in the lyrical, mysterious way she was in the eighth grade. She was hot shit and she saw him first.

Billy Olsen had a squirrely left leg, like a lot of guys. Alexandra Schuler caught him and his bouncy leg alone at the bar at Big Bill’s down The Jersey Shore watching the dance floor in the bar’s mirror. He was trying to understand why images going into the mirror became reflected in reverse or were inverted. Why’s that, he thought.

Alexandra Schuler was untroubled by such matters. She was untroubled by leg-twitchy men, too, but was fully wary of the difference between left-leggers and right-leggers. Left leg men were right hemisphere driven, non-verbal communicating personalities. A category of man she could deal with. And how.

 Otherwise, right leg bouncers were abstract thinkers, talkers, temporal, rational, logical, linear. Some other sister’s dream boy—not Ms. Schuler from Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, N.Y.

She had a girlfriend in tow. They headed to where Alexandra sidled next to the stool Billy Olsen and his left leg sat bouncing on. She caught a reverse glimpse in the mirror.

“Don’t I know you?” she asked.

“How can I possibly say?” he said into the mirror.

His leg stopped. His heart did too when he faced her.

 “I hope I know you,” he said.

 “Brooklyn, no?”

 “Brooklyn, yes.”

 “High school?”

“Na. All Boys unfortunately.”    

“St. Pat’s?!’

“Yes. Alexandra Schuler. I’ll be Billy Olsen if you want? We sat next to each other in the eighth grade.”

Alexandra was in the third row; he sat next to her in the second. She never once spoke to him nor any boy in our class. Why she was unforgettable was simple. She was a small girl, thin and brazen, and braless. Who could tell? Billy Olsen. With girls’ school blouses buttoning left over right, there were often spaces between fabric and buttoned buttonholes. He was positioned for an occasional glimpse of a perfect girl’s breast like a pinkish handball resting lightly on her ribs. Too cute for words.

Alexandra probably knew exactly how cute.

That night in Big Bills, he noticed he was strangely witty and calm once he shut his leg off. He was normally overly sincere and anxious with girls. Tonight was different.

“They call me Sandy. Sandy Schuler. Sounds dippy, don’t you think?”

“I’m not saying. I’ll let you know later, if I think of something good.”

He had a sidewinder smile which made the line work. She introduced her girlfriend, So-In-So. He wasn’t listening. He grabbed Sandy Schuler’s hand “Hi.” He bought them beers then took the girls to the edge of the dance floor in the middle of what action there was. He would have asked her to dance, except Alexandra—Sandy—was likely an amazing dancer, which would be a deal breaker for his confidence, now on the high road.

And what to do with Ms. What’s-Her-Name doing tic-toc head moves with her knees pinched together for the honey-bunny effect? Normally Billy Olsen’s perfect Column D girl, but not with Sandy Schuler in town.

Sandy and Billy Olsen commented upon the dancers, noticed how those who could dance—mostly all girls—seemed to have another person inside who did the artsy, coordinated grunt work, allowing the actual girl to look at her partner, smile, enjoy the dance, even flirt if inclined. Everyone else—mostly all the men—danced with earnest faces meant to impress, taking the long view down a leg, stumbling into unplanned steps they made look intended. Mysteriously Hispanic looking moves were made by un-Hispanic looking men in solipsistic, over-the-shoulder glances.

 He and Sandy worked together well braiding quips and wisecracks. About having kinesthesia would be cool listening to “Strawberry Fields.” Or how stage lights affected sound waves and what happened to Billy Olsen when he was in the eighth grade in St Patrick’s Elementary.  “What!?”

 “That woman, Sister Mary, is dead,” she said.

 “Oh.”   

Billy Olsen took Sandy to the bar where they drank cheap beer. Her friend, What’s-Her-Face, purred near the dance floor before disappearing. Sandy told him her memories of his attempts to read from the geography text that day: North Africa. She thought he was hysterically funny. Then, of course, she knew he was not. But that was okay by her. I sat behind him that day in Saint Patrick’s. I remembered it differently.

I saw him run his finger in anticipation across his projected paragraph, to familiarize himself with the words associated with the north coast of Egypt where he had never been, over and over to get it right. When his turn came, his reading cortex was in tatters. The more Billy Olsen read, the harder it became to breathe; the more he faltered, the more the kids laughed. Alexandra was gagging in delight across the aisle

When he got to the end of his paragraph, he dropped his head like a stone onto his desk. I pointed out to Sister Mary the section I was prepared to read.

“No John. William Olsen, the next paragraph, please. Continue.”

It was the cruelest thing I ever witnessed. I walked him home. I said, “See Ya.” He said, “Yeah.” We never discussed the matter. I never forgot.

For some reason, there in Big Bill’s, Billy Olsen believed he had forgotten the episode. He did, however, explain his eighth-grade fascination with Alexandra. What he saw and didn’t. She found it sweet in a nostalgic, girlish way. She put her hand on his left knee lightly as he spoke. She had the gift of getting inside a boy’s boundaries. Her lashes—long, black, concupiscent—were impossible to oppose, her flesh young and pure, her breasts once more realized before him. Billy Olsen was not expecting a guest that night. Sandy was not expecting what happened either. Both were conjoined, body to body, kiss to kiss, and Billy Olsen’s first time happened in a motel room in Belmar, New Jersey.

In the morning, they made love in Column C where unintended promises were made.

Two days later, he drove up The Parkway in a laurel covered chariot with the perfect story for Mulcahy’s.

 Sunday afternoon in his room in his parents’ 92^nd Street apartment, he checked out the papers looking for a job. His draft number was 120. Okay, depending on how The War was going. The US just invaded Cambodia.

By Thursday he was anxious to tell his story with all the quirky Billy Olsen omissions and additions in the accidental, paradoxical way he experienced life. It was through that haze we got the details—results without causes, destinations without journeys, moans unsolicited.

 “She said sounds more than words. Which was good because I wouldn’t know what to say and I kept my mouth busy,” he said. “Nobody took nothing off. Her or Me. We were like totally naked from the start. Which couldn’t have been, I know.”

The guys were happy for Billy Olsen that night. He couldn’t buy a drink.

Except.

Except, three days later he was having problems peeing. There was burning. There were discharges. He rang my doorbell.

 “Jackie. We gotta talk.”

We walked to 4^th Avenue and back while he confessed his symptoms.

 “Olsen, you’re a fuckin’ idiot. No condom to be had down The Shore where they’re dispensed in every toilet?”

“I don’t remember. I mean, I didn’t have one.”

 “What are you going to tell the guys?”

 “Nothing. Unless you do.”

He told us everything. It was perhaps the funniest thing we ever heard, until it wasn’t.

Billy Olsen’s course of action was obvious, as was the source of his infection.

 “The Bitch knows what’s up. Get a shot and buy a pack of condoms for frig sakes,” Vinnie Di Paola said. He opened his wallet where an oval mark was etched in relief.

“I’m not proud of its unuse, but it’s there.”

 Now what?  

Sandy got a phone call. It was the only “Billy Olsen” thing he could think to do.

 “Sandy? It’s Billy Olsen.”

“Bil – ly Ol – sen.”

She flattened each syllable to depersonalize him. Perhaps he would go away.

“How have you been?” he asked.

It was hard to speak, but he opened up about the latest guys from their class to be drafted. Hopefully she already knew about herself.

 “Did you hear about Ives? Missing in Action. If the gooks get to know him, they’ll send him home,” he said and laughed a laugh.

(. . .)

 He planned to say, “We have gonorrhea.” He remembered only snatches of the conversation. He told me he thought he might have said, “I have ‘the clap.’”

If that’s what he said, it was no lie. More critically, he offered to take care of her doctor’s visit.

Ms. Sandy Schuler hated him more sincerely than any living human. It was bad enough to have a venereal disease, which she already figured out for herself. Now here’s Billy Olsen on her doorstep. She was also low on cash. Everyone was low on cash. She might ask her mother or go to the family doctor. Maybe she could lie. How do you lie about that? It sank in, she had little choice.

“It was probably my fault,” Billy Olsen repeated with such conviction she knew he had to be a total idiot, the greatest fool ever, or a guy willing to pay her doctor’s bill. She knew she technically was guilty, but it wasn’t like he put up a fight.

They walked to a “neutral” doctor’s office the next day.

 “It doesn’t matter who’s to blame,” Billy Olsen said back on the topic walking along Ridge Boulevard. “I probably should see the guy myself; would you mind?”

“Do you believe, let me get this straight, do you believe that I’m gonna walk into a strange doctor’s office with you? Do you really think so?”

 “I can wait outside. I already got the shot.”

 He paid the bill. They walked the long way back to her apartment.      

 “We’ll be out of action for a while, you know?” Billy Olsen said.

 “Did you say ‘We?’ I thought I heard you say ‘We?’”

He used a primitive gesture with an open hand to his forehead. However, she let him take her to the Dyker Theater to see The Godfather Part II.

For Sandy, there were worse ways to be “out of action.” He was kind of smart-sweet with Billy Olsen hair; and Billy Olsen’s take on life had a “you had to be there” quality not unbearable, even kind of adorable, in an unusual way.

 While they were recuperating, he took her for long walks, to the movies, and the Harbor Diner for hamburgers. Sometimes they snuggled over the arm of their theater seats and often she would tease him.

“You ain’t supposed to get hard-ons in your condition, you fiend. Get over there!”

She’d point to his seat. Or she’d poke him on the dick for no reason when she figured he deserved it. Nothing in his life prepared him for Sandy Schuler.

Life without her was not life. Nevertheless, he would always say too much, always give her the poem with the purply adverbs he swore he wouldn’t, always confess the secret he meant to keep. He pretended everything he did or said was meant in jest. It never was.

 He felt better “down there” within a few weeks after another shot, but it was another month before Sandy got her medical “all clear.” In between, it was Chinatown, The Exorcist, The Towering Inferno, and their absolute fav, Young Frankenstein followed by bagels and locks. He took Sandy wherever she wanted. One Saturday, they went to the Dyker to see Cabaret. Afterwards, her spirits were dragging. They decided to walk the loop around Shore Road to get the most out of her sadness, which Billy Olsen insisted they experience together. Mingled Hudson River and Atlantic Ocean waters at mid-tide lapped against the barrier rocks to affirm the lethargy of the afternoon.

She was cold. He helped her jacket around her shoulders and tucked in her hair. They walked along Fifth then stood on the corner of Ninety-Fifth and Fourth for Sandy to say something she had to say.

He saw the shadow of the town fall away down the hill through the streets and parked cars, the trees and apartment buildings, passed the church and the melancholy façades of the school and convent.

“What? I’m sorry. . ..” He leaned in.

Sandy was saying something.

 “Cynthia Overmeyer. Her name? Billy? You remember her. From that night down The Shore? She told me she likes you.”

Nearby, crickets geared up their mechanical, autumnal voices behind garbage cans in the alleys. It sounded like ten thousand tiny bells reeling inside brass bowls.

 “You’d be good together, Billy. Cynthia Overmeyer?”

The crickets stopped chirping then restarted as if orchestrated by a hidden maestro. He tilted his head, closed his eyes. He felt the underground ripple of the subway coming into the station beneath his feet and the bored drone of the highway to the west.

“Oh, Billy Olsen.”

Gerald Coleman

Image by Anqa from Pixabay Two condoms in red packets.