Daisy Jones & The Six(17)

Warren: I was outside talking to some of the crew guys and I caught the tail end of it. I could see a bit through the windshield. It looked to me like she hit him. I think she had a bag with her and I think she slugged him with the bag. And then the two of them left the bus.

Camila: I made him take a shower before I would say another word to him.

Billy: I wanted her to leave me. [Pauses] I’ve thought a lot about it and … that’s what I’d been up to. I’d been hoping she’d cut me loose.

That night Camila and I were sitting in my hotel room after I got out of the shower. And I could feel myself sobering up and I didn’t like it. I pulled out a bump and I remember Camila looked at me and she said, “What are you trying to do?”

She didn’t say it in an exasperated way. She was really asking me. What was I trying to do? I didn’t know how to answer her. I just shrugged and I remember how stupid I felt, shrugging at a time like that, with a woman like that. This woman carrying my child. And I was shrugging like a ten-year-old boy.

She stared at me, waiting for more of an answer, and I didn’t have one. So she said, “If you think I’m gonna let you screw up our life, you’ve lost your mind.” And she walked out the door.

Graham: Camila found me and said she was going home, wasn’t gonna deal with his bullshit. She asked me to watch Billy all night. I was getting sick of watching Billy. But you don’t say no to a woman like Camila, especially when she’s pregnant. So I said okay.

And then she said, “When he wakes up give him this letter.”

Billy: I wake up, sick to my stomach, terrible headache. Feel like my eyes are bleeding. Karen is standing over me with a piece of paper. She has this pissed-off look on her face. I grab the paper and I read it. It was in Camila’s handwriting. It said, You have until November 30 and then you’re going to be a good man for the rest of your life. You got it?

The baby was due December 1.

Camila: I think I just refused to accept that he was as low as he claimed to be.

I’m not saying it wasn’t real, what he did. Oh, it was very real. All of it was real. I’ve never been so lost and scared. I was sick over it, every day. And I couldn’t have even told you what part of me felt the sickest. My heart hurt and my stomach felt like it was gonna turn inside out and my head throbbed. Oh, it was very real.

But that didn’t mean I had to accept it.

Rod: I wasn’t close with Camila but her decision to stick with Billy wasn’t so hard to understand. She’d gotten mixed up with him when he was a good guy. And by the time she realized he was coming apart at the seams, she was too far in.

If she wanted her baby to have a daddy, she had to fix Billy. What’s not to get?

Billy: Like an idiot, I said to myself, Okay, I’ll just take until November 30 and get all of this out of my system. Do it all now. So I don’t ever have to do it again.

Sometimes I wonder if addicts aren’t all that different from anybody else, they are just better at lying to themselves. I was great at lying to myself.

Karen: He didn’t stop messing around with all of it.

Rod: The tour got extended again when we picked up some shows opening for Rick Yates. It was good news. It was great exposure. The album was off to a respectable start. “Se?ora” was climbing up the charts.

But yeah, Billy was off the rails. Going at it double time after Camila caught him. The coke and girls and the booze and all that.

To be honest, I thought all of that was manageable. Not great, but manageable.

I figured as long as he wasn’t hitting the strong downers—benzos, heroin—maybe he’d be all right.

Graham: I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to help him or whether to trust what he was saying to me. I felt, stupid, honestly. I felt like, I’m his brother. I should know what he needs. I should always be able to tell when he’s high and lying about it.

But I didn’t know. And I felt … embarrassed that I didn’t always catch what he was up to.

Eddie: We were all sort of counting down the days. You know, sixty days until Billy has to get clean. Then it was forty days. Then it was twenty days.

Billy: We were in Dallas opening up for Rick Yates. And Rick was really into snorting heroin. I thought, I need to try heroin at least once.

That made perfect sense to me: that it would be easier to get clean if I tried heroin. And it wasn’t like I was going to use a needle. I was gonna snort it. And I’d had opium in the past. We all had. So when I was with Rick backstage at Texas Hall, and he offered me a bump … I rolled on up and took it.

Rod: I always tell my people to stay away from benzos and heroin. People don’t die staying up, they die when they go to sleep. Look at Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison. Downers kill you.

Graham: It all spiraled from there. Once he and Yates started snorting H, I lived with this dread in my belly. I tried to keep an eye on him. I kept trying to get him to stop.

Rod: When I found out he was with Yates, I called Teddy. I said, “We’ve got a dead man walking.” Teddy said he’d handle it.

Graham: No amount of advice or lectures or trying to chain somebody down ever stopped anyone who didn’t want to stop in the first place.

Eddie: When it got down to ten days left, and he was forgetting the words onstage, I remember thinking he was never gonna clean up.

Billy: On November 28, Teddy shows up at our show in Hartford. He’s there backstage when we’re done with our set.