Billy Wurst is just waking up.
It's 5 p.m.
"My feet hurt, my hands hurt, my back hurts," he whines.
Lying in bed, Billy wears what he calls his "Adidas outfit": blue rip-away pants with a white Adidas T-shirt. He didn't iron the shirt today. He usually does.
Billy doesn't always sleep in until 5 p.m. Lately he's been waking up at 6 a.m. Billy got a job. For the first time in more than a year, my brother actually has a job. Hopefully one he won't get fired from.
Lounging on his bed at our parent's home, he flips through the stations on TV. His clothes from last night are scattered around the otherwise meticulously clean room, and his 18-year-old girlfriend, Jenny, sits next to him. People often wonder why she's with him, a recovering drug addict who only knows her as "bitch" and has been taken to court for domestic abuse. People wonder, but rarely do they see.
Billy isn't so bad. In fact, at times he is a pleasure to be around. Funny, goofy and always the center of attention, Billy is charismatic and good-looking. His hair is cut every two weeks, and he complains if his sideburns aren't exactly even. Every T-shirt gets ironed before it goes on to cover his skinny chest, and he's constantly polishing his shoes.
"He's like a girl," says Michelle, our 20-year-old sister. "He'll ask you how his butt looks in jeans or if navy blue matches black. He used to take two showers a day."
Besides his obsessive-compulsive tendencies to be neat, Billy has a few other quirks. For one, he can't stand still. Billy is "that guy" constantly pacing, looking out windows and making everyone around him nervous.
"Lot's of people have nervous ticks when they do coke," he explains enthusiastically. "I'm the window peeker, FBI, and shit girl, you don't know what's going on in Aurora these days."
Sometimes he forgets to swallow when he talks. He'll be so wrapped up in what he's saying that even something as casual as swallowing his own saliva escapes his mind.
"I'm in love with myself," he says laughing before recounting one of his many crazy escapades which range from self-mutilation, to drug convictions, to drug overdoses, to halfway houses and heroine addict ex-girlfriends. Luckily, Billy is afraid of needles, so he never picked up those habits.
"I've seen people shoot up on a number of occasions. I won't even get my finger pricked though," he laughs. "Thank God I'm not diabetic. Just looking at needles freaks me out. Man that shit freaks me out. I'm breaking into a sweat just thinking about it."
But needles are about all Billy is afraid of. In seventh grade, he got in trouble for bringing inhalants on the bus. "Mom tried spanking me," he recalls. "I just sat there laughing."
He never has cared much about what the effects of his behavior have had on us as a family. "I didn't care, why would I? I was young. Now I don't care either," he says matter-of-factly.
Besides the occasional urinating on the shower curtain of our bathroom when he was drunk, most of the really crazy things he's done have happened when he is away from home. To him, this is reason enough to disregard the effect of such actions on the rest of us.
"I didn't see it [family reaction]. Out of sight, out of mind," he says at ease. "I wasn't living at home. When I'm not here, people should mind their own business."
All of this so easily said, until he comes running home to mommy and daddy with no place to live. This is the side of Billy that most people despise--this arrogant, nonchalant attitude that he is an entity unto himself; his actions affect only him.
But the rest of the family sees the situation from a different perspective. We have been affected in ways Billy will never understand, but we love him just the same - although often it is hard.
"Turn the volume all the way down Jenny. I can't hear my sister. Fucking bitch, all the batteries fell out of the remote," Billy laughs. "See, things like that upset me."
Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad
It's 1997. Bill and Bette Wurst, our parents, finally have a day off. It's their 18th anniversary and they're heading out to eat. Back at home my girlfriends start arriving. The infamous junior-high sleepover is about to begin. It's Billy's first night out again after being grounded for a several weeks.
Bette found some drugs hidden in a garden glove in the garage and made Billy turn himself in. After weeks of sweeping the fire station garage, Billy is a free man, and I'm happy to have him out of the house.
After a few hours of Billy-free time, the doorbell rings. On my tiptoes, peering through the peephole, I see my brother passed out. Two guys are holding his limp body up. Damn it, I scream. Fuck you, Billy, I can't believe your doing this to me. I run to the back door and punch it as hard as I can before bursting into tears. Curious friends timidly peek into the front hall as my brother is dragged up the stairs. His buddies undress him and lie him down in bed.
"Make sure he stays on his side so he doesn't choke on his vomit," they caution before leaving.
"I can't take this," I scream.
I am trying to have a sleepover here and now I have to worry about my brother dying. Running to the phone in hysterics, I beg my neighbor to come over and take the situation off my 13-year-old hands. Nobody is ever going to want to stay over at my house again.
My parents rush home early. The door slams, and I know what's about to happen. I quickly round up my friends and take them upstairs to my room. I turn the radio volume as loud as I can and pray that I'll still have friends after this.
"We were drinking straight vodka from the gallon," Billy recalls excitedly. "We drank a couple 40s on the front porch. I don't remember the rest of the night. I woke up naked, drank a class of water and puked my brains out in the sink."
To this day, Billy has no idea how embarrassed I was.
"I don't remember any of this, so let's move on. You can fill in the details cause I have no fucking idea. I don't even remember getting drunk. I didn't even know mom and dad knew."
So Billy threw up all morning pretending he had a stomachache, completely unaware of the fact that he ruined our parents' anniversary and my sleepover.
Since as far back as I can remember, that's basically how Billy lived his life: completely unaware of the fact that anyone around him could be affected by the things he did.
The beginning of the end
We had a normal middle-class family; loving parents, a big brother, two sisters and a dog. We had an in-ground pool, a park across the street and a good neighborhood to frolic in. Michelle and I were off to an ambitious start with school; we were in honors classes, student activities--your basic goody-two-shoes.
"Billy was high maintenance; he was hard to keep track of," our mom, Bette, says or her only son. "The teachers said he was just immature, but I had a feeling that wasn't right."
Everyone told Bette that the things Billy did were typical guy things.
"All boys start fires on occasion," they'd say.
"All boys shoplift on occasion," they'd say.
My dad would just reconfirm their statements.
"Your dad would say, 'Oh, he's just a kid, just a boy doing regular boy things," Bette says with a bit of "I told you so" in her voice. "I always suspected it was something more."
But she tried her hardest to keep Billy under control. After he started the woods across the street from our house on fire, Bette took him to the fire department to confess. She personally took him to Jewel to apologize for shoplifting after he got caught stealing a Clearly Canadian. It was only worth $1.50.
"I brought him to Jewel and it was mortifying. I knew everyone there, but I made him fess up," Bette recalls. "I even made him send money to a Target all the way in Shaumburg where I found out he had stolen from.
"I was trying to do the right thing to make restitution. I told him I'd turn him in and I did. I knew I was doing everything right."
Soon, Bette became very suspicious of everything Billy did. She had to watch him like a 4-year-old child. On her way to work the night shift at the labor and delivery department of Edward Hospital in Naperville, Ill., she would take her 16-year-old son's shoes and hide them in the trunk of her car so he wouldn't sneak out at night. She suspected he was drinking when she saw the liquor bottles in the cabinets slowly empty and locked then up in a chest, which she hid in her closet.
Around Christmas, Bette went to take the bottles out and make room for Christmas presents. All eight bottles were empty.
At 16, Billy would enter rehab for the first time, but the problems would stretch far beyond alcohol and would put an emotional drain on the entire family.
Through another loop
It's a Friday in late 1999, and Billy is sitting in front of the TV at his friend's apartment where he has been living for a few weeks after being kicked out of the house for doing cocaine. He picks up a bottle of vodka, puts it to his lips and casually chugs. After a while, he stumbles to the bathroom and pukes. Back in his chair, he tips the bottle and chugs some more.
Reaching for the phone, Billy calls his girlfriend. She refuses to come over. Billy assumes it's because she's with another guy, so he drinks himself into a fit of depression.
Pete and Brandan, longtime friends of Billy's, notice his disposition. Before heading to bed, they find Billy's gun and take the bullets out so he doesn't shoot anyone in anger. They leave Billy to drink beers on the couch.
Everybody is in bed, but not Billy. Wandering around in a drunken stupor, he spots a knife in the kitchen, picks it up and begins slicing himself from wrist to elbow. After quickly making multiple slices up and down his pasty white arms, Billy takes the remaining vodka and pours it over his bleeding wounds.
The next morning Pete wakes up and notices several bloody rags strewn around the kitchen. He sees Billy's arms and calls Bette at home.
"Have you seen Billy? You need to check out his arms."
"That totally blew me away," Bette says, still in shock though Billy's arms have long since healed. "Just when you think the worst has happened, he throws you through a loop. I never saw it coming. Cutting was something I didn't know much about, so I did a lot of research."
After hours online, article after article claimed the same thing: Self-mutilation is a sign of desperation. The guilt set in.
"I felt so guilty," Bette says.
But Billy said, "Shit like that is not that big of a deal."
He moved back home again.
What's your brother doing?
By now, Billy had been in and out of rehab for years, though he completed the program only once. He would simply go through the motions. After all, it wasn't his money he was wasting.
"We can do a whole story on just rehab," he jokes.
To him, everything is a joke.
"He thinks he's above everyone," Michelle says, irritated. "That's totally his big thing. No on can touch him. That's Billy in a nutshell: He's better than everyone."
No one can touch him, and in his eyes, he can't touch anyone.
Bette stood outside of the Linden Oaks rehabilitation clinic and braced herself for the bad news. The councilor had taken Billy and Bette outside to tell them that Billy was being dismissed for noncompliance.
"I remember I started to cry," Bette says. "And Billy looked at the councilor and said, 'Look what you made my mom do. You just made my mom cry.' She just looked at him and said, 'No, Billy, you just made your mom cry.'"
This is one concept Billy still doesn't understand. How could anything he does affect anybody but himself?
"When people ask me about him, I feel so embarrassed," Michelle says. "My boyfriend's mom will ask me, 'What's your brother doing?' and I have to say, 'Nothing, he can't get a job.' It makes us look bad too. Like she's thinking, 'What kind of house did they grow up in?'"
Eventually, neighbors quit inviting our family over for pool parties.
"We were the bad ones because of Billy," Bette says. "I even remember calling the cops one time about something, and they're like, 'Oh yeah, over on Red Fox Run.' They knew us by name. That really spooked me."
As the problems with Billy got worse, the harder it got for Bette to talk to people about them. Billy was kicked out of his halfway house and arrested on several drug convictions. He had managed to overdose, got beaten up by gang members and raked in a DUI. She was embarrassed.
"I didn't talk to Lisa for years, and I've known her since I was 12," Bette says with a sound of dismay in her voice. "She would always talk about her son on the honor roll. I just didn't feel like telling her what we were going through. How could she understand it when I couldn't even understand it?
"When I was younger I was more naive. I thought that if parents knew what was going on with their kids, stuff like this wouldn't happen. You're just afraid everyone thinks it's you who screwed up.
"When they have a good life they don't want to hear about your problems, so you don't talk about them. Every relationship I had was just on the surface because I couldn't talk about what was really going on in my life."
At school Michelle and I were constantly referred to as "Billy's little sisters," which led to years of embarrassment in high school as teachers cast scornful looks upon us. Parents wouldn't even let their kids come home with us to hang out because rumors about Billy's behavior spread like wildfire throughout our small, rural Illinois town.
But all of this could be cast aside. Reputations, as I soon found out, could be rebuilt, the emotional damage, which Billy doesn't even know he's caused, will take years to heal.
Disappearing acts
One of the hardest things to deal with when it came to Billy was his unexpected arrival and disappearances from our home. One week he'd be home, the next he'd be kicked out. He'd come crying back, and the next day he'd be all settled in.
"I used to get pissed all the time," Michelle says in disgust. "They'd let him stay at home, then he'd fuck up and they'd say, 'one more time, just one more time.' If she keeps letting him in the house, he'll never learn. I don't think that's the way it should be, but I'm not a mom."
But Billy had this charming power over everyone, even Michelle.
One time, Michelle was home alone while Bill and Bette were on vacation. Billy came by, begging for a place to sleep, she too gave in.
"I guess I had the good will in my heart," she says. "I don't know why I did it. I had the power to let him in and I did. Maybe that's why mom keeps doing it."
When Billy became violent, we had to change every lock on the house because we were afraid he would harm us. When he does drugs, Billy isn't the same person. He gets angry and threatening. He gains an extremely large ego. He is convinced that he is in ultimate control of every situation, stepping down to nobody, even dad.
To this day, Billy doesn't have a house key. He has access through the garage's pin pad, a code that can be changed anytime.
"I'm fairly certain he'd never hurt us, but there are times when I'm afraid to sleep, especially when he owes gang bangers money for drugs," Bette says.
Billy was in and out of the house for years, and every time he'd come back, he'd do something to screw it up.
"I felt guilty kicking my kid out on the street, but he knew the consequences," Bette says. "I couldn't take it any more, the arguments, the effect it had on me and dad. I couldn't live with that in my house. Everything revolved around Billy."
At least Bette took action. When it came to Bill, our dad, nobody knew where he stood even though he was experiencing the same things we were.
"It's not like your dad didn't give a shit," Bette says, defending his stance on the situation. "Dad just didn't believe it was as bad as it was. Dad's point of view is that it's easier to ignore it than to face it. Your dad saw me as looking for trouble. I was just seeing what he didn't want to see. We all would have had a very happy life if we just ignored it."
But Bill and Billy were the only ones who seemed to be able to ignore it. "I didn't think once that this wasn't a good lifestyle to be living," Billy says arrogantly.
"When all of your friends do the same thing you do, it's OK. Why do you care? I don't worry about what you do."
Just a secretary
Time has passed. We've stopped caring. Not entirely, but things have changed.
"In the beginning I would go to court with him," Bette recalls. "One time there was a prisoner in the elevator with us and he looked at Billy and said, 'You're lucky that your mom's here with you.' Billy just laughed. What the guy meant was that Billy's lucky that I cared enough to be there. As the years went by, I quit going. Now I understand why his mom wasn't there."
Michelle and I have moved out, and other than the occasional, "How's Billy doing?" at the end of a phone call to mom, we don't worry much about him.
"I tried to talk to him on my birthday," Michelle says. "It was the most awkward thing ever. I had nothing to say. I felt like I didn't even know him. I guess I don't. I really don't."
Today I called to talk to my mom. Billy picked up the phone. I gave him my usual, "Hey, is mom there?" and for some reason he got really upset.
"Is that all you can say? You can't say hi?" he shouted angrily. "I'm not just a fucking secretary."
Sounds like someone wishes I cared.
Reach the reporter at erika.wurst@asu.edu.
