Turns out his fiancé was with Tim over at his house. Bill wouldn’t find that out until later in the day when they finally did connect. Later in the day was more toward late afternoon after she had finished her classes and was home feeding the cats and getting ready to go out wherever she was going for the evening.
Later in the day for Bill was after he had done the prep work with Mary, cut meat and made hamburgers and bleus with Henry Lee, put up the lunch with Henry Lee and no other help, broken down and cleaned the steam table after the lunch meal, spent most of the afternoon in the meat room cutting more meat and the rest of it with Mary finishing out the prep work and setting up the line for the dinner.
He’d tried to call her several times. No answer each time. Actually this was not a bad thing because more than likely she would be the one who was apologetic. That was a good thing because in the end while she had nothing to be apologetic about, he would be let off the hook. He didn’t want to have to do any explaining.
Later on in life Tim would hang himself from a tree in Battery Park. This was after they had all moved to New York, not together of course. He would hang himself because he was unhappy, depressed, maladjusted—for lots of reasons, none of which was visible or even knowable to his friends, not even his closest ones. Maybe it was because he was lonely. Maybe it was because he didn’t have many boyfriends. Maybe it was because his career wasn’t going the way he thought it would.
Tim, Bill would always remember, somehow managed to let his long-haired, grey, Persian cat out the door. The cat, not one known for its smarts, never came home, probably could not find its way back. Not that this mattered in the scope of things because this was the same Tim who sat with Bill’s fiancé for two days while she was coming down from a bad trip. Bill had left Tim with her while he went to take a day’s work as a dishwasher at one of the campus restaurant dives. It was one of the crappiest jobs he’d ever done, but he finished out the day because they needed the money, all twelve dollars for the eight hours’ work. When he’d walked into the little kitchen’s even littler dishwasher’s area, the dishes and pots had been stacked up so high Bill almost had to stand on his toes to get to the top dishes. Still and all, he worked his way all the way down and left the area clean.
Tim was holding Bill’s fiancé in his arms when Bill walked in the door. They were in the bedroom and Tim reported that she had woke up about noon and had been in and out of sleep since then. Her eyes were still not focused and she was not speaking intelligibly yet. Stupidly, Bill and his fiancé had popped LSD before they’d gone off to a party and then at the party they had snorted MDA from a big bowl set on the dining room table. Bill would always remember that trip, one of the best of his life. But he would remember that trip more because sure as sure could ever be, her bad trip was the harbinger of the evil that hallucinogens were.
Susan hanged herself too. Bill would not meet Susan until he was late in his thirties. He would meet her at one of the last few restaurants he would work in. He would meet her and get with her, surprise, not so much because he wanted to but more because she wanted him to. Like many of the waitresses he had been with, he was good to her, kind and helpful.
