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. “Señora” 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.
I say, “What are you doing here?”
He says, “You’re going home,” and he takes me by the arm and holds on to me until we’re practically on the plane. Turns out, Camila had gone into labor.
We land and he drags me into his car and drives me to the hospital. We’re double-parked in a red zone in front of the lobby. Teddy says, “Get up there, Billy.”
This whole long journey and all I had left to do was walk in the double doors…but…I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t meet my kid like that.
Teddy got out of the car and went up there himself.
CAMILA: I’d just spent eighteen hours in labor with only my mom by my side. And I’m expecting my husband to walk in the door and straighten up. I understand now that you can’t just fix yourself. It doesn’t work like that. But I did expect it to work like that then. I didn’t know.
Well, the door opened and it wasn’t Billy…it was Teddy Price.
I was so tired and I was sweating bullets from the hormones running through me, and I was holding this tiny baby that I’ve just met, this girl who looks just like Billy. I decided to name her Julia.
My mom was ready to take us both back with her to Pennsylvania. And I was tempted. Right then, giving up on Billy felt easier than trying to have faith. I wanted to say, “Tell him I’ll raise this baby on my own.” But I had to keep trying for what I wanted for me and my kid. So I told Teddy, “Tell him he can start to be a father this second or he’s going to rehab. Now.”
And Teddy nodded and left.
BILLY: I waited for what felt like hours, outside the lobby, fiddling with the latch on the door. Teddy came down finally and said, “You have a baby girl. She looks like you. Her name is Julia.”
I wasn’t sure what to say.
And then Teddy said, “Camila says you have two choices. You can get your ass up there right now and be a good husband and father or I can drive you to rehab. Those are your choices.”
I put my hand on the door handle and I thought, you know, I can just run.
But I think Teddy knew what I was thinking because he said, “Camila didn’t give any other options, Billy. There are no other options. Some people can handle their booze and their dope. You can’t. So it’s over for you now.”