It was Gay Pride day in LA today. Made no difference to Billy, except that his driver had to take a different route, navigating around the closed-off streets.
Billy spent a lot of time thinking about Joe these days: about the past, too, about stuff that had happened a really long time ago. Billy's therapist said that this was part of the grieving process. Billy didn't think that was quite right. It was more like this: Joe had been the keeper of Billy's memories, the historian, the narrator. Even when they disagreed, they played off each other, used each other as a reference point.
When Joe was still alive, Billy never had to worry about where his past was. Now he had to do his own stocktake.
It was funny how your relationship with a guy changed once he killed himself.
Billy kept remembering the early days, the good days, or at least the less fucked up days. Like today. He was thinking about when Joe made Billy go with him to the pride parade.
That parade in 1981 has been the first official pride parade in Vancouver. A new left-wing mayor had been elected, and he'd finally given the gays a permit.
Joe had been really pleased when that guy got elected, because he'd been convinced that electing a socialist in Vancouver was the first step towards getting a left-wing majority in the BC parliament, and then ending capitalist rule in North America, or something. Joe had been kind of more naive back then.
Joe'd done everything he could to try and get that guy elected. For once he'd put his money where his mouth was. Joe had given out leaflets at gigs, signed up to go door to door canvassing voters (and argued with the guy from the party who didn't want to let him out in case he scared potential voters away), he'd even held a voter registration party at his place, getting people to fill in the forms while his anarchist friends sat there with their arms crossed and called him a fucking liberal.
And when the mayor endorsed the pride parade, Joe went, and he made Billy go with him.
Billy wasn't sure how Joe'd talked him into it - frankly, he could think of about a million things he'd rather do a Saturday afternoon than go march in solidarity with the oppressed. But Joe was always good at getting Billy to do things he didn't really want to do.
At first Billy had felt self-conscious there, and kind of angry with Joe for dragging him somewhere where he would feel self-conscious. They didn't fit in with the crowd: Joe in his "MUMMY WHAT IS A SEX PISTOL?" t-shirt, Billy in a pair of tartan bondage trousers that he'd bought in 1980 and worn pretty much every day until 1982, when he had a lucid moment and threw them in the trash. Sure, they didn't fit in anywhere, but here they were among people who were equally, but oppositely, at odds with the mainstream. A lot of tie-dye: a lot of flowers in hair. Like nobody knew that the 60s had been over a long time and the 70s had been declared dead too.
Nobody had bothered them, though, or been bothered by their presence. It was a big crowd, and they were too busy celebrating to take much notice of two punks. At least a hundred people, laughing, talking, dancing, kissing each other.
Billy remembered standing there alone and just watching the crowd, because Joe'd spotted some of his fellow socialists and ditched Billy to go talk to them.
It had been pretty hot, so someone had cracked open a fire hydrant or a hose or something, and people were jumping in and out of the spray. A sunny day for once. The sun shining through the spurting water.
Billy'd surprised himself by finding it all kind of moving. All these people had been kept down, kept out. The people who tried to keep them down were the same people who were mad at Billy for being different, for wanting a different kind of life. But they couldn't keep them out forever: the street was theirs, if only for one day.
Billy couldn't really remember much about what had happened after that: all the marches and street parties Joe had made him go to blended together. Maybe they'd just gone home. Except if Joe's friends from the Party had been there then he'd probably hung around with Joe while they packed up their banner, and gone to a bar with them after. He was pretty sure that guy Michael who went on that ship to Nicaragua later was there.
There had been a couple other punks there, he was pretty sure: Princess Crystal and her friends, and Bernie, and Gay Tony, and Spike, and one or two more people Billy knew from the scene but wouldn't have expected to see there, people who'd seen Billy and gone pale and stepped back onto the sidewalk to avoid him.
Billy knew exactly what they'd been wearing that day because someone took a photo, and they were in it. They ended up in the newspaper. So everyone made fun of them for a while and asked them when the wedding was, and at least some people still sincerely believed Billy was gay, however many years later.
The photo had disappeared into Joe's collection of news clippings about the band, which at first he kept folded between the pages of a hardback book, and then later kept in scrapbooks as it got bigger and bigger.
Except for the picture of them at Pride. At some point that picture was framed and hung on the wall in Joe's kitchen, because that's where it was when Billy and a couple of Joe's neighbours broke in to his apartment a week after he died.
Billy still doesn't know why Joe'd kept that photo, let alone why he framed it. There were about a million fucking pictures of them together - there was a whole fucking film, now.
Maybe, he thinks, Joe kept it because it was an unposed picture. They weren't looking at the camera, weren't selling anything, they didn't even know the camera was there. Billy's eye were kind of squinty because he was mid laugh. Of course, in the picture Billy was laughing at something Joe'd said: that would have appealed to his narcissism.
It was a sentimental thing for Joe to have done, but Billy wasn't so surprised by that. It was always the most fuck-you-motherfucker guys who were the most unbearably sentimental, and Joe was no exception.
Now that he thinks about it, he went to Pride with Joe again, years and years later. After their third album, after Warner Brothers said no but before Sire started to say yes.
They'd just finished rehearsing. Billy was tired and just wanted to go home, but Joe said Billy should come with him to this after-party some of his friends were at, and somehow Billy ended up going and getting drunk with a bunch of gay people Joe knew.
Billy hadn't meant to go out and get that drunk that night, but in those days he often ended up going out and getting really drunk without really meaning to, so he couldn't blame Joe for that.
It had been okay, really. Maybe even good. The party was in the back of this little gay or maybe just gay-friendly bar, where they let the DJ play weepy records from the fifties instead of trashy disco -- or, worse, the Pet Shop Boys.
Billy liked Johnnie Ray. And he liked the queers well enough. Gay punks, drag queens, Aids activists in leather jackets, softly-spoken older guys who talked to Joe about socialism.
As the night went on he'd realized that really a lot of the people there seemed to know Joe, which was kind of strange given Joe had never mentioned any of them or this bar before.
Billy never really asked Joe about it, but he wondered. Then again, Joe was a fucking alcoholic, so maybe he'd gone drinking in a couple gay bars when he'd been cut off elsewhere.
Billy kept trying to decide what the last good memory he really had of Joe was, but he thought that that one was probably it. They'd gone somewhere together and Joe hadn't caused a problem or embarrassed himself or tried to embarrass Billy. No hidden resentments had come roaring out by 7 pm.
Three months later, they started the tour that ended with Joe pissing on Seymour Stein in New York and Billy ditching the tour before their gig in Detroit. He didn't see Joe again 'till just before the reunion.