The Afterlife of Billy Fingers: How My Bad-Boy Brother Proved to Me There's Life After Death (6 page)

T
hinking about the rescue mission made me anxious. That night I kept waking up from crazy dreams, just as I had when Billy was trapped in Margarita.

In the morning I went to Starbucks for a double espresso. The sun was shining and the air carried a welcome hint of spring. As I drove home, a piece of sky seemed to turn a brighter shade of blue. Then I heard Billy's voice coming right through my windshield from that same bright place.

Call Tex and tell her I said to drink green tea.

It was the first time Billy had spoken to me when I was outside my house. I might have been scared if there hadn't been a light beaming down on me from the bright patch of sky with a familiar intoxicating effect.

Call Tex now. Drink green tea.

I reached Tex on her cell.

“Billy just gave me another message for you. ‘Drink green tea.’”

Tex's gasp was audible.

“I'm coming from the acupuncturist. He said I'm toxic and have to stop drinking coffee. You know me
and my coffee. I was just this minute thinking, ‘How in the world am I going to do that?’”

After I got off the phone, it hit me. Billy's cryptic messages—Ain't no sunshine without the son, Show me the money, and now Drink green tea—were the “proof” Billy had promised. These inexplicable incidents were his way of proving to me that he was real.

When I got home, I went straight to my computer, and looked out the glass doors up at the sky.

“Okay, Billy. I get it. You're real. But can you tell me how you were able to make these proofs happen?”

As always, I had no control over what Billy said.

Hello, my sister. To tell the truth, if it wasn't for the itching, I never would have called you from Margarita. I was having too good a time, at least up to that point.

At that time I was making money, collecting money. In one of the toughest enclaves of Margarita Island, Bill Cohen, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn, got guys to pay up their gambling debts. Hard to believe, huh?

We're meant to engage in all kinds of things on earth— things that don't make sense from a human point of view. So take a moment before you judge your fellow man too harshly. A lot of people judged me, but I was dealing with circumstances I had signed up to explore before I was born.

I was living with lovely young Elena. Elena was maybe twenty, and I was—what, almost three times her age. Sweet Elena took me under her soft little wing.

I never really liked drinking that much, but at that point I didn't have money for drugs. I let myself drink as
much as I wanted, let the whites of my eyes turn yellow, let my teeth get rotten. I didn't care about the conventions anymore, or the future or the consequences.

First came the pleasures, then the pestilence. Nausea, anxiety attacks, hair falling out in clumps. And then the best one—the itching. Unbeknownst to me, these scabies were burrowing under my skin. I was so anesthetized from all the drinking it took me a while to feel the itching, and by then the bugs had gone so deep the town doctor couldn't identify them. They moved from area to area, doing their own special little dance.

In all my years I never experienced anything as harsh as these bugs. Were they God bugs or Devil bugs? Good bugs or evil? Is it all the same? I can't say, but for sure it was the itching from these bugs that made me call home, and I now know that if I had stayed in Margarita, the underworld had some very special treats in store for me, some very personal designer bon-bons the likes of which I'd never seen. Most of my life I got away with it. From other people's points of view, things didn't always look like they were going so great for me, but to me it was an interesting adventure. Like I said, I had signed up for it.

What I was getting into in Venezuela was another story. The darkness had me cornered.

It was your love and determination that snatched me from that fate. You were my hero. Lots of people had strong opinions about your attempts to save my life. They tried to assign you various roles that weren't particularly flattering. The pitiful victim, the codependent—and, my personal favorite, the fool—for trying to save an addict
like me. I wish I could have told you then, but I'm telling you now. To me, you were the grace of God, pure and simple.

Here's another secret for you, honey—some more big brotherly advice direct from the other side. Don't be overly concerned about how you look in the eyes of others. People will pretty much see you as they will. Play your part in the cosmic drama, but never forget, baby, that you choose the way you see yourself. Don't let others do the casting.

When Billy was in Margarita, visions of being abducted and held for ransom in South American drug country had made my going to find my brother out of the question. After two months of trying to convince Billy to get on a plane and leave Margarita Island, and desperate to make myself feel better, I had gone to see Olga, the Colombian manicurist, to have my toenails painted red.

“What's wrong with you?” she asked. “You look like hell.”

I blurted out the story. She's tough, Olga. She thought for a few minutes and said, “I know a guy—a really big guy. He can go find your brother. For a price.”

I stared at her. A sort of kidnapping. How fantastic! Why hadn't I thought of that?

The Colombian guy wanted ten thousand dollars to find Billy and bring him back. Now that my wheels were in motion I happened on a better solution.
I could send my good friend and fellow meditator, Guru Guy, the Jewish boy from the Bronx, who was the king of South American travel.

“I'm sending someone to get you, Billy.”

“No! Really? I can't believe it. Oh my God, hurry up! I'm dying. This is no way to die. Itching to death.”

“Tell me where you are and he'll come get you.”

“I can't, Annie. I can't.”

“Why not? You're driving me crazy. I can't take this anymore.”

“I can't come home, Annie. I look awful. My hair's falling out. I'm all bloated. My flesh is hanging, like Daddy's when he was dying of cancer.”

Now I understood. Billy had always been goodlooking. He was still vain.

Finally, the itching won out over Billy's vanity. The plan was for Guru Guy to fly into Margarita. Billy would somehow get to the airport, they would take the same plane right back to Miami, and I would meet them there. If Billy was a no-show, Guru Guy would start the search.

N
ow that the weather had started to warm, I began thinking I should do something with Billy's remains. His ashes had been sitting in a rosewood box by my fireplace for almost three months.

When Billy was alive, he always said he wanted to be cremated and scattered in the sea. I suddenly had the impulse to take his ashes to the bay across the street from my house so they would be close by.

I put on white clothes like they do in Eastern funeral rituals. After I poured Billy's remains from the box into a red silk embroidered purse, I sifted through the light gray speckled ashes with my fingers. Billy-dust. There were small, hard white chunks in it, probably bone, and a large piece of metal that looked like part of a dental bridge. I slipped on a jacket and went to the bay. The sky was intensely blue and cloudless, and the wind was blowing in the right direction, out to sea.

When I put my hand into the ashes, a piece of sky got brighter, and I heard Billy's voice.

It's too cold for me, honey.

“What?” I asked.

It's too cold. The water's too cold.

I stood there, not sure what to do. “You know, you could have told me that before I came down here.”

Tell you what. Just sprinkle a little bit so you can feel like I'm here.

As I threw a handful of his ashes into the sea, Billy said:

The world is your oyster

The world is your oyster

You are the pearl

And the oyster

I had no idea what that meant, but it made me feel luminous. When I returned to my house, I could still feel Billy around, so I sat down at my computer.

Thanks for sprinkling some of my ashes in the bay this morning. I feel better. I really do, though, because you did it with so much love.

When I was alive I used to say my life ended the day you were born, and I'm sorry for that now. It's just that I was always the bad one and you were the good one. And Daddy loved you so much! It was one thing if Mommy loved you more than me, but not Daddy, too. The family drama is the first one, the primary one, and it has a lot of oomph. My envying you was a major factor in that drama.

On earth there's a lot of who's-better-than-who-type issues and that causes a lot of suffering. It's a game devised by the forces of Maya, or illusion, to make people unhappy. That's one of the purposes of illusion: human misery.

But the way I see it from this side of things, every soul is unique in very beautiful ways. Some are just farther along the path of development than others, and that's okay.

Now that I'm dead, I know it was no fun being the good one, always having to clean up the family mess— and we were messy, that's for sure. And I was the one who got all the attention, wasn't I? It was always all about me. What a revelation that was!

But you always loved me anyway, didn't you? Took your first steps to me, wrote little rhymes for me, looked up to me and out for me like I was your own personal James Dean. And what did I do? I pretty much ignored you. Well, that's over now. I'm making up for lost time.

The blessing I gave you today? It's more than some reward for what you did for me. It's a thing of the spirit. Infusing your life with it is the outcome of this moment and all it contains.

I can see you sitting at your computer right now, crying. You're crying because of how it ended between us. I struggled with my addiction for almost two years after the rescue mission; then I died. You rescued me, but couldn't
really
rescue me. It was written. Those last few months before my death, you told me to stay away and leave you alone. I was a drowning man, Annie, taking you with me.

I don't care much about memories anymore, but when I see you sitting there, crying, I want you to know there are memories much bigger than the fights you and I had at the end, down there on that very temporary planet. Memories like getting on that plane from Margarita
with my new sidekick Guru Guy, crashing in a motel room in Miami, then waking up from my intoxicated sleep and seeing you standing over me like a Madonna. I had been away such a long time and I was so happy to see my baby sister, caring for me, saving me, getting me ready for the hospital, doing whatever it took to keep me from dying in hell.

So now you're crying at your computer, wondering if I forgive you.

Maybe the real question to ask yourself is, do you forgive me?

And really, darling, there is no one to forgive, because we signed up to do this dance together before we were born. We weren't acting out some type of I-did-somethingwrong-to-you-in-another-life-and-I'm-paying-for-itnow kind of thing. It doesn't really work like that. That concept of an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth karmic equalizing of the score isn't the real deal, at least not where I am.

It's more a kind of experiment chosen for soul-type reasons that humans have an almost impossible time understanding. And not understanding is an important part of the experiment. If people knew the workings of the experiment, it would lose some of its punch, and that losing of punch, well, that's a little bit of what enlightenment is all about.

A
fter his pearl in the oyster blessing, I wanted to give Billy a special tribute. The next day I decided to spread his remains in the Catskill Mountains in Upstate New York, a place he always loved. The year before his death he'd promised to take me on a trip there to see the autumn leaves.

I packed the red silk purse that held his ashes in my overnight bag, drove for five hours, and checked into a small hotel-spa I had stayed at before. It was a bare-bones, funky place, but the pine trees and forest were spectacular. I ate lunch, dressed in white again, put the silk purse in a backpack, and walked up a large hill.

When I reached the top, a big buck with huge antlers was staring at me from the edge of the trees like a mythological forest guardian. A little scared, I approached him slowly and stopped about fifty feet away.

“May I scatter Billy's ashes in your forest?”

When he didn't attack me but ran off into the woods, I thought that meant it was okay. At the spot where he had been standing, I opened the red silk purse. Then I heard:

It's too lonely here. And it's not cold now, but it's freezing in winter.

“I just drove for half a day, Billy. Why didn't you stop me?”

Billy didn't answer, but I could feel his spirit everywhere, like a bright mist illuminating the hills. I walked back to the hotel with the ashes still in my backpack. The shabby buildings looked like enchanted cottages, and people's faces were glittery and beautiful. I decided to stay until lunch the next day and scheduled a morning massage with someone named Vincent.

Before Billy escaped to Margarita, he was a masseur, one of his better gigs. I never met anyone with hands as gifted as Billy's. Another reason he liked the name Billy Fingers.

When I woke up at daybreak in my dimly lit room, my brother was waiting.

Thank you for honoring me by carrying my ashes to these sacred mountains. The miracle of creation is here in this place, everywhere: the trees, the skies, the sun, the friendship, the kindness, the love. Perhaps today I can give you a small sign, a small miracle, a small thing of beauty that will connect you to the source of all beauty and miracles.

Vincent turned out to be a big, round, twentysomething guy with slicked back blond hair and phenomenal hands. I don't know if it was because of
the similar feel of their touch, but while Vincent was rubbing my back with warm oil, I told him about Billy. I didn't care if Vincent thought I was a weirdo. I'd never see him again. When the massage was over, I pulled the sheet around myself, sat up and saw that Vincent was crying.