Death by Misadventure
By: Erynn*Alice
We all stood over the grave, a somber remembrance to the man who used to be. It did him no justice. A stone with his name, the dates he started and ended life, and a cross sitting like a joke at the top. He wouldn’t have wanted it to be like that. There were so many mistakes made, I wish I could have taken a red pen to the day and corrected them all.
Sure, Billy snorted a little coke, smoked a lot of pot, and could do more shots than anyone else I knew, but it never made him a bad person. He always gave change to the man who sat outside his favorite bar in D.C., he donated a lot of his paycheck to some charity for troubled kids, he always baby sat his nephew when he was needed. He was a good guy, and he didn’t deserve his death.
I knew him for ten years before he died. The rest of the guys knew him longer, since before he graduated high school. He was tall and lanky and certain girls would go absolutely mad for him. He had a bit of a southern twang in his voice, but he was never shy about it and always talked a mile a minute. I came into the band later on in the life of Good Charlotte, but Billy was definitely the first one to accept me as a true member.
The band was always something that kept everyone busy. It was a job as well as a hobby, which can be great and horrible at the same time. We always got in fights about if that rift should go in the chorus or the bridge or whatever. It never lasted long. There were also the fights about who was and wasn’t pulling his share in the band. Those sometimes lasted for some odd weeks, but no grudges were left over after apologies were said and hugs were exchanged.
Most people expected Billy, quite possibly the darkest member in the band, to have killed himself by time he was 25. He didn’t, he never even tried. He lived until he was 31, actually. So many people mistook him for a suicidal Goth boy, but he wasn’t. He was a normal Goth boy, if that’s even possible. The bracelets on his arms were never there to hide scars, they were a thing he had going between himself and his girlfriend. After all those bracelets were called “Fuck Bracelets”, break one and…well…the name says it all.
We all knew that Billy, the youngest member in the band, would undoubtedly die first, so that part wasn’t a shock to anyone. It was how he died that left Paul, Joel, Benji, and myself to sit and wonder why he died the way he did.
It wasn’t gruesome, it wasn’t vulgar, and I’d like to believe that it wasn’t painful. It was shocking.
Billy had this abnormal fear of driving. He drove so slow it was painful. He made complete stops at intersections and he’d sit there forever, just to make sure he had the right of way. He always wore his seatbelt and had his air bags and break pads checked every three months, regardless of whether he was on the road or not. He rather had people drive him somewhere than drive himself. I was fine with that, since I’d sooner walk to wherever than have Billy drive me.
See, that crazy fear of driving was what made his death seem so out of the blue. He died in a car crash on September 23rd, 2012. He tried to break at an intersection, but his breaks weren’t working. He wasn’t wearing his seatbelt that night and was projected out of the car.
Billy died on impact, never felt a thing.
We put him in the ground on September 27th, 2012. The tombstone had a cross at the top, which was put there by his father, a man Billy loved because he had to. Billy wasn’t a Christian and having that on there was nothing more than a joke. There was no epitaph, no special saying carved on the granite.
A simple stone seemed to fit Billy perfectly. He was never complicated or dealt too much with the little details of life. Anything else on that stone would have been a disgrace to him, much like the cross.
The soil was piled on top of the coffin and it made a small mound in front of the stone. Benji, Paul, Joel, myself, and Ryanne, Billy’s widow, all stood around the grave, not sure of what to make of it.
We all knew, after all, Billy was going to die sooner or later. We all figured he’d die in a plane crash or doing something stupid on tour. He wasn’t supposed to die before he had kids, before he really got to live a little more, he wasn’t supposed to die in a car crash.
I know he died on impact, but I hate to sit up late at night and think about how scared he must have been when his breaks didn’t work.
The coroner found trace amounts of alcohol in his system from Nyquil that he was taking for a cold which wouldn’t have distorted his senses at all. There was no sign of drug use in his blood and it appeared that he was perfectly coherent. The coroner ruled Death by Misadventure, which I’m sure he would have loved considering that was what the coroner ruled in the death of the lead singer of AC/DC, one of Billy’s favorite bands.
Everything in Billy’s life played some strange part in his ironic and shocking death. No one saw it coming, but everyone felt the after effects.
Benji put a Silverchair sticker over the cross on Billy’s grave the day of the funeral. Everyone there smiled and no one complained. No one cried or gave a cheesy retelling of his life.
Billy Dean Martin was my best friend and band mate. He was, in my opinion, the best guitarist of the twenty-first century. The world would be blessed to see another Billy, but I know they never will. He’s the kind of guy who would just sit up wherever he is with a stupid little smirk on his face when everyone started to wish he was there. He’d sit there, perfectly content with being a fly on the wall and nothing more.
I’m sure he’s somewhere around this old empty world, never seen, never heard. Just like it always was.
The End.