Joe had gone to London in the summer of 1979. He'd been injured at work - he was working in an undertakers when he got hit by a trolley with a 240-pound coffin on it. He'd taken the compensation money and disappeared on a cargo flight to England without a word to anybody.
Billy had been so mad at Joe for leaving him behind that when he came back Billy refused to talk to him for a week. One of those stupid things.
Joe had suggested that they start a band together right after: it was the only thing that made Billy forgive him. Billy can see now that Joe had just been trying to keep him sweet. Maybe Joe never intended the band to go anywhere. Maybe it was just another scheme that grew legs.
Joe had just shaken his head when Billy asked him about the scene in London, said punk was dying over there. But he'd also brought piles of new records - he'd thrown out half of his clothes to make room in the suitcase. The Slits, the Specials, The Pop Group, Public Image, Crass, and lots of weird singles by no-name punk bands. The names were almost as good as the songs: Nazis Against Fascism, The Homosexuals, The Notsensibles, The Disco Zombies. Lots of secondhand stuff too - weird anonymous records from the 50s and 60s, gospel and rock and roll and reggae and ska.
From the time they were 14 until the first time Hard Core Logo broke up in 1991, the summer Joe had spent in London in 1979 was the longest time Billy and Joe had spent apart. Now Billy wondered what had happened then, the only part of Joe's life that really feels inaccessible to him.
He only has the faded, incomplete memory of what Joe told him, and he knows that Joe left some things out on purpose.
Hard Core Logo played in England five years later, but they didn't really get a chance to do much sightseeing, and Joe was tight-lipped about what he'd gotten up to the last time he visited. He never knew Joe's London.
Maybe their whole lives would have been different - better - if Joe had just stayed in London. A lot of punks did that back then: immigration rules weren't as tightly enforced back in the 70s.
Joe would have been happy living in a squat and snorting heroin and occasionally throwing bricks at cops until he died. Billy could have gotten on with his life, playing guitar or writing the Great Canadian Novel. No band. No never-ending obligation.
***
All Joe's worldly possessions are Billy's now - another obligation. He has to work out what to do with Joe's records, his clothes, his porn rags. There were more books than you'd expect - Joe's pretentiousness wasn't all posturing, he did some of the reading.
Billy throws them all into boxes in Joe's shitbox apartment in downtown Vancouver. He's paying the rent on the place: he comes up here every couple of weeks, finds sitting in Joe's abandoned squalour somehow comforting. Yeah, Billy knows he's got some issues.
Right now, he's sorting books to give away - he's gonna donate them all to Spartacus Books, which is where half of them seem to have come from in the first place. A good deed. Joe would approve.
There are a lot of books, mostly non-fiction. Joe didn't really like fiction, and he barely has any, except for Orwell and Steinbeck and a collected works of Oscar Wilde.
Billy? He likes the mid-century modernists.
Billy was slightly shocked at how many books Joe had about anarchism. He always thought Joe was posturing, that he didn't take that shit seriously, but clearly he took it seriously enough if he has books by Bakunin and Kropotkin and Emma Goldman and Malatesta, and Squatting: the real story and Society of the Spectacle, and an anthology of writing by anarchist prisoners, as well as big books by Marx and Engels and Terry Eagleton, and old issues of the New Left Review. There's even a book about anarchist perspectives on feminism, although it looks suspiciously unread: Joe barely creased the spine.
More books about history and politics - the Spanish Civil War and the Soviet Union, World War Two, the French Revolution, America in Vietnam. And a bunch of books on what Billy thinks of as hippy bullshit - nuclear energy and uranium mining, environmental destruction, what Canada and America did to the Indians. Books about the drugs trade and the Catholic church. Some of them have pieces of paper stuck in them: could be bookmarks, could be song lyrics, could be grocery lists.
Billy grabs a book at random and flips it open to the marked page, reading:
"Meanwhile our American worship of space, open road space, frontier space, astral space and more particularly, as much space as possible between me and whoever you are — on the bus, on my block, on my job, in my field — our American dreams of “the first” and “the only” produce an invariably mistaken self-centered perspective that repeatedly proves to be self-defeating and, even antidemocratic. Demos, as in democratic, as in a democratic state, means people, not person. A democratic nation of persons, of individuals, is an impossibility, and a fratricidal goal. Each American one of us must consciously choose to become a willing and outspoken part of the people who, together, will determine our individual chances for happiness, and justice."
Well, there was no way Joe had believed that at all. He was a pretty stubborn individualist. Anarchy, as Billy had heard a million times from annoying fucking Crass fans, was meant to mean "without rulers", not "without rules". Somehow Joe had flipped the formula around.
Billy's eyes tracked further down the page.
"But I’m special. I’m different, just like you. I worried about putting together these sentences I have written, here, from my heart: What was the point? To whom should I present myself? What can I know of the doubts and the aching and the bitterness that may prey upon a middle-class nuclear family living in, for instance, Portland, Oregon?
And then I understood that the question was, rather, do I care? And then I understood that the answer is yes, yes, yes: I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the quality and the outcome of my social, my democratic experience."
So you could tell this was a really old book, because Billy was pretty sure there were no middle-class nuclear families left in Portland, Oregon.
I care about you because I want you to care about me. I have become aware of my absolute dependency on you, whoever you are
Joe had a kind of empathy, sometimes. It came out in his songs more than in his life. But Joe was the only person Billy knew who had whole conversations with homeless people, with hookers, with waitresses. Would buy you a cup of coffee. Didn't want anything, because when they met, Joe was squatting in a building with no water and electricity and was only one rung up on the ladder above homeless, anyway.
Apart from the books and the records, there are Joe's scrapbooks. Billy pages through the one from 1992, the year after Hard Core Logo broke up. Somehow he hoped it would be empty: that he'd ruined Joe's life. No such luck. Posters and flyers from small-town promoters and little left-wing groups: letters from fans and bookers.
He feels fury build up in him as he looks at all the gigs Joe did for good causes, all the zines and tapes, all the bullshit advice he sent out. Joe played for the Anarchist Black Cross, the New Lavender Panthers, Sistering Toronto, Anti Racist Action Niagara. He was great at helping out strangers: not so good with the people who loved him.