Billy Ray

Today, while checking out at my neighborhood grocery store, the bagger called me Billy. I was busy fumbling with my debit card and the little key pad, trying to type in my club card number so that I could get all of my rightful discounts when he said "Need some help out, Billy?"

It took me a minute to realize that he was talking to me because my name isn't Billy. It's Valerie. But everybody around us - the people behind me, the cashier, and some nosy little blonde girl inching closer to the candy stand (who was probably just staring at me because I was peeping her out) all stared, waiting for me to answer him. I looked around at everybody's eyes on me and said "Oh, you mean me?" He nodded. That's when I realized that he had bagged my groceries a week or so prior, when my guy friend (gf, for short) and I had decided to shop for ingredients to make homemade ice cream and a sock-it-to-me cake (that's another post that I'll have to remember to make). He must've heard my gf call me Billy and thought that was my government name. I laughed and, despite my name not being Billy, I told him "No, thanks. Maybe next time," because it'd be too much to explain the inside joke and I really wanted to get home and out of my work clothes.

You see, my gf calls me Billy, which is short for Billy-Ray, which is short for Billy-Ray Valentine, because we love Billy Ray Valentine. And if you are an Eddy Murphy fan then you know just who that character is. He's from the movie "Trading Places" starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd (or however you spell his last name). Well, we watch that movie all the time, it's one of our favorites, and at the end (spoiler alert!!) Eddie is chilling on the beach with some bikini wearing babe, and Dan is standing on a yacht with Jamie Lee Curtis under his wing and he yells out "Looking good, Billy Ray!" to which Eddie responds "FEELING good, Louis!" and they both smile like two filthy rich assholes who just put two other filthy rich assholes in the poor house. It's great. So, those two lines have become our way of complimenting one another. Yeah, it's corny, I know. At first it was just to compliment one another. I'd get dolled up or cook something nice, for instance, and he'd say "looking good, Billy Ray," and so on. Then it morphed into us actually calling each other Billy Ray for any and every little thing. "Ttyl, Billy Ray" or "See you tomorrow, Billy," or "Vanilla or strawberry yogurt, Billy?" which is what he'd asked me that night at the grocery store (it was plain yogurt for sorbet, but I digress) and the clever little bag boy overheard him and stored it away in his memory bank. How sweet.