Will Bilowich 2 (cont’d)

Will Bilowich 2 (cont’d)

       By Bucking Billy Beavis

Will was a writer of poetry. A Canadian teaching English in the western half of Canada who wrote voluminously. Poetry, and criticism about other Canadian writers. His grave intention was to promote Canadian literature and writing. This sounds altruistic but it takes little imagination to see that his future was at stake. Big interest in Canadian writing, sirrrrrah, big interest in Will Bilowich.

       Asked if he had any interest in girls, he would blush and nod and gesticulate if the person asking was of a prominence to solicit any response at all. If asked by someone beneath his dignity he simply scorned that luckless individual with a scornful look, or with a jibe concocted half of reference to Shakespeare and half of alliterative sounds, or even with a joke at the asker’s expense, usually attaching itself to an item of the asker’s apparel, or to the degree of baldness the asker had achieved since he, Will, had last laid eyes on him. Will Bilowich hated being addressed by those who stood for no increase in opportunity for Will Bilowich. He despised an inferior’s questions unless that person happened to be an attractive woman when, of course, his opportunity came in the form of his relative attractiveness to the young and beautiful, a feature of social connectedness and social sway that anyone in the vicinity with more clout that Will Bilowich would pick up on to the satisfaction of Will's vanity and strategies for success, if you will. Or it could just as readily and for the same reasons as above be a young and lovely man who was attractive to women.

Will Bilowich was a little prick. That’s what he was, a little conniving asshole of a prick who had a tall, thin, tubular (like Bert’s from Bert and Ernie), rotundular greying head with hair shaved high above his ears in a mistaken fashion move that made him look even taller, thinner and less interesting than the sum of his parts would have under normal circumstances, while clearly having been chosen by himself for the very opposite reasons. He thought the style fetching. What he needed in order to recuperate a chance at something akin to attractiveness was a look of some disorder about the head parts, and in his clothes, if for no other purpose than to mitigate the anal order of his prose and verse. Instead, he chose to give a pinched quality to the parts above his shoulders, a vertical culvert look, an exactness of cut and length of hairs, a precision of sheer cliff of cropped lawn without purchase relieved by a curried and snit-bound tiny bit of shag at the very top, a shag combed thoroughly in front of more than one mirror a day and with not one follicle out of place. Oh yawn, oh sigh, who cares. But he irritates me so and thus on I write.

       A dress would have become him. And lacy underthings. Such as a training bra. His shoulders were thin from the side and narrow from the front and back. He kept a trim stomach at no cost to himself and his digestion. He sported graceful hands that members of both sexes felt inclined to kiss, especially after a few glasses had put them off remembering the rectality of his prose and verse. He was, after all, someone of position, someone violent enough in his vanity (not in his physical demeanor; physical violence seldom tells of real violent mentality but of constraints and endless requirement of servility until the individual lashes out and hurts in order to gain some momentary rest from entrapment) to be a desirable catch for a young female or male. One does not like to think of the rectum simultaneously with entertaining or acting on the thought of kissing someone’s hand.

       He wore exquisite stockings with on them pretty designs. I could tell this sitting in my booth twelve feet away. I had chosen a quiet booth guaranteed to remain quiet because it had only one chair and no room for another. Besides which, I am relentlessly unattractive to members of the female sex and so socially at everyone’s best alone by myself, off to one side, so to speak. These were of silk or some such fragile material, and colorful, indicating deliberation and careful selection. His jeans—yes, Oh heavens! he wore jeans. One would have thought dress slacks!—were pressed and neat and absolutely clean. No possibility in their shadows of former dirt, since there were no shadows of former dirt, of Will’s having changed the oil in his car, or having crawled about behind his furnace looking for the summer fan switch. No, his jeans were faded but new. He smelled clean as if he himself had been twirled around in a dryer with Bounce. A scented cleanness he had that did not hide any spot or odor. He was, in sum, a clean, neat, sweet-smelling lady of a man who wrote much Canadian literature and criticism.

(to be continued)