S2 [10] Something Bigger Than Me | The Ballad of Billy Balls

hired fast. Visit career builder dot com. A quick warning before we begin. Today's episode contains a discussion of addiction and suicidal ideations, so please take care in listening. Last thing, um, just briefly, it's four so um the drug that she was taking. You mentioned it. This is one of the first conversations I had with my producer, Austin. I'm about to tell him about one of the most pivotal moments in my life with my mom. I was nineteen and she was in a really bad way, the most down

the rabbit hole of drinking. I thought it was just drinking at that point. It was very, very very dark. My whole upbringing. My mom would have these gnarly outbursts. But I had always thought she just couldn't handle alcohol. She would have one glass of wine and fly off the handle. So one day my mom, for the first time in many years, left town and I was there

with this friend of mine. Uh. We decided to clean and we were cleaning, and I lifted up her mattress of all cliche things, and there was a pillbottle under her mattress. I remember time kind of slowing down and being like aware, just kind of kinetically aware that I had stumbled upon something that was going to change the course of my life. And it said it was a prescription for a drug called the oxen. And I went

and I searched what is the oxen? And it basically said that it was a emphetamine, and it said, uh, should never be mixed with alcohol because it produces psychotic behavior. And I was like, oh, cool, Okay, you know she's on speed. That's what this has been. And it's really hard to explain the sensation. It's it's like the butterfly

emerging from the cocoon. These moments in your life when you're forced out of childhood into adulthood, all of a sudden, I had grown up thinking that my mom was crazy, and there's a loneliness that's inherent to that, and isolation and terror and pain. And in that moment, I realized, it's not because she's fucking crazy, it's because she's been on this drug, and it shifted everything. My dad told

me that the Saxon had been billy a drug. So I then started digging into Billy, trying to understand the house of grief that I was born into. Today on the show My Life with my Mom, how it fell apart and came back together again from Crimetown, I'm io till it right, And this is the ballad of Billy ball. If somebody who you thought was your life partner, your protector, you're like soulmate, is viciously murdered, your grief is of a different nature. It's ray jing grief. It's like slaughter.

Everybody grief. I grew up entirely at the mercy of somebody else's moods, who was simultaneously my greatest protector and my greatest antagonist. I'm a little worried that we're going into family. Should I not worry about this because it's your show? But I mean, this is very difficult, very complex stuff. Chapter ten, something bigger than me. Why don't we just start? Tell me who you are. So my name is Cora, and we grew up together. I mean

we really grew up together. Core's five years older than I am, and her dad and my dad were best friends, So we spent a lot of time together as kids. You were so um, spunky and scrappy and fiercely intelligent. But you were also like physically small and and and wispy and beautiful and delicate. You know, you were immediately

my sibling. Yeah, I was really special. I mean we spent a lot of time together, listening to music and bullshitting all day long, and eating snacks because we were always hungry, and walking around in the summer and getting ices and just being around the city. You know, it was not a place for children. I mean it was an adult world. There were parties all the time. There were shooting galleries where people would go cop drugs, shoot up.

I have a memory of being six years old and walking to your father's house with my dad and on the way stopping in a building because you know, he just had to make a quick stop. You know, there was a lot of poverty, and there was a lot of drugs. So I kind of inherently had these feelings of and wanting to just protect you a lot because I sensed that there was danger. And I remember, you know,

sleeping over at your house for example. And you know, Rebecca, your mom had a boyfriend, Bernardo, for a long time, you know, and it was a small apartment and I remember, you know, I remember them having sex in the middle of the night. It's not that, you know, sex is so indecent or whatever, but there was something like really primal going on and there was no privacy, and it just was not okay. It kind of just like held you.

We were like lying in the bed and I just pretended I was sleeping, and you kind of woke up for a second and looked at me, and I just was like, it's okay, and I just kind of held you. I didn't feel like you were in a safe environment. And I never questioned that you were loved. Your parents love you extremely, but I felt that your mom was really going through some ship on a soul level. That's something had happened that had shifted her consciousness. Did you

ever hear anything about Billy. I don't remember hearing about Billy It's okay. If not, I don't remember. She's also very cagy. I don't know what was your understanding then of what was going on with her. She's just your mom is wild, you know, your mom is wild. And I felt like the poverty did not help, you know, being super broke all the time and taking care of a kid. It's it's traumatic, you know, but there was there was always a sense of IO can totally take

care of IO. You were scheming and like hustling. Always. You were like figuring out the way to get what you needed or wanted that your parents couldn't provide. You know, most kids can't go home and or do homework or whatever. And I'd be like, okay, how do I get quarters. I'm showing Austin my go to hustle spot in front of a McDonald's on Broadway, and this McDonald's right here was like my like north Star. If I could get enough money to get a happy meal, I was like,

it was a good day. How would you get money? I made like ghosts out of tissues and sold them, and ghosts like Halloween ghosts, like you bawl up a tissue and then you take another tissue and you put it over the top, and then you put like a rubber band for the neck, and then you draw a little face on it. And I would walk around and sell those. I was a cute little kid, being like, you know, give me a dollar, and people be like, damn, a dollar would be like two dollars, and like damn,

people would buy my like weird dumb ship. I look at the world as like a Rubik's cube, where I'm like, all right, so I'm nine, I can't get a job. I've got seventy five cents. I need to make it to tomorrow, and I need to eat. Okay, So when this piece goes there and that piece goes there, and I know I can call it this person for that and maybe I can eat the scraps over there, It's

just like a riddle. You know. On the one hand, she was really rough, and on the other hand, I got this sense that, like anything that I came up with was a valid Your parents and my parents as well, you know, never questioned our creativity, are intelligence or self sufficiency. You would come to school in army fatigues, and you were so adamantly and clearly, very very sure that you were a boy. You were a boy. You presented as a boy. There was no distinguishing feature that would mark

you or gender you as a girl. You were very clear in your communication that I am a boy, period, full stop, and don't fucking ask me. And your dad in particular, was just like, yeah, that's yo. You know, Iowa was io. You declared it to me. It wasn't like I had to You just declared it to me. You said, I'm a boy. I told this to my dad when I was really little. You know, we were just walking through Central Park and you went to join some kids to play baseball, and they said you couldn't

play because you were a girl. And you marched up to me and said, from now on, dad, I'm a boy. I'm your son. You will refer to me as he, and that's it. Do you understand? And I just accepted it. So I went home and I said, hey, Rebecca, I says, I says, she's a boy. Rebecca's like great, fine. She gave things that were totally above and beyond, like accepting

me for who I was. Right. She fostered my imagination and she like read to me a ton and like there was always books and music and always always always music and dance and culture and like fostering my imagination. Around this time, my dad left for Europe, he says, to try to get clean, leaving me alone with my mom. I think the thing is my mom didn't realize that she was an unsafe place for me. She applied the same like dieting standards to me that she applied to herself.

And she applied the same professional expectations of me as an eight year old as she did of herself as a thirty eight year old. You know, but thinking back when she was with Billy, it seems like they lived that way too, you know, like that was accepted back then, and as the world changed around her, she stayed the same. There was definitely like a disconnect for her about like what a child needs. So we're down here. This is like this is the City Hall area, very kind of

epic architecture. I took Austin downtown to a place where I made a drastic move to change my life. Is this the way? Oh? This is it is? Yeah, this is the building. I'll never forget these columns ever, So the New York County Family Court. It all started when I arrived at a new school for seventh grade, and I had huge dark bag circles under my eyes and

I was really really pale and really really skinny. And at that school they had an actual gym that was gender segregated, and so the first gym class, they sent me down and we're like, okay, go change in the locker rooms. And I was like, like, I can't go in the girls. I can't go in the boys, like and I had this gender meltdown, and they were just like okay, Like you need to talk to the school psychologist, like what's going on. He asked me what my home

life was like. I was like, uh, because I was not supposed to talk to people of authority because my mom's love of her life had been killed by the police. Authority was bad. And I told her. I told her that our fridge had no food in it, which barely mattered because the power was off half the time. Anyway, I told her that I stole most of my meals, but I didn't go to doctors. I didn't sleep enough, and my mom and I would scream at each other like banshees. I told her that I was hungry and

scared and that I hated my life. So one day, this woman shows up at my school the middle of the day and this woman is standing in the hall and she's like are you I I'm like yeah, and she was like Hi, I'm so and so I'm your social worker and I'm here to take you away. And I was like, I need to call my mom and she's like, you're not allowed to. And I was like, I don't give a funk, like I'm calling my mom, like I will fight you physically. You don't want that scene.

Just let me call my mother and tell her what's happening, because I'm not doing that to her where I'm just gonna vanish off the face of the earth. My mom was like, don't go with anybody. Don't go with anybody. I'm gonna kill your guidance counselor. So I was like, it wasn't her, it was me, And I'm okay, and I'm gonna be in touch with you when I can.

I gotta go. So I left, I got my coat, went and got outside, went outside and got in a van with this woman and they drove us right down here the New York City Family Court Building and they took me upstairs and we went into an office and they basically were like, all right, well here it is like this is the moment. You now get to decide what you want to do with your future. And I was like, holy sh it, give me a minute. I

need to think about it. And I went this room and they got me some French fries, and then my mom showed up and started screaming in the next room about how I was a liar. I had told them that I hadn't really been to the dentist, and she was like, I listed the dentist all the time, and she's calling me she and I heard it through the wall, and I was like, nah, fuck this, like my mom is calling me a liar. I'm not going home. I told them I wanted to live with my dad in Germany.

I just got a call from New York that you were in the custody of the city and that you had brought about your removal from the house. And I got the next plain to New York and then began this long battle of me trying to win custody. And I made the mistake in the first interview with your attorneys, because the city assigned your attorneys of being a little bit protective of Rebecca because they were trying to characterize her as a kind of monster, and I was saying, no, no, no,

Rebecca is not a monster. You don't understand. And I was just saying, Rebecca, can you just stop back off. I wants to live with me. Let I live with me. Stop fighting this, and then we don't have to go through this whole court thing, and I can just you know, it's time to move on. Okay, Rebecca, You've come to the end of your rope on this thing. You know, my lawyer said to me, if you speak to her again, I'm no longer your lawyer. She is the opponent. We

have to win. Don't be a pussy like that's how they talk. The custody battle lasted three months. The courtroom wasn't a place where my mom shined. It was very sad for me to see Rebecca funk it up um and come in with a black eye, come in with a lawyer who was half an hour late and couldn't get his tie straight, and and then say stupid things like she has a vast knowledge of the human body, and that's why you didn't go to see the dentist.

When I watched her say these things, and the judge kept looking up at me like we were looking at each other silently, going like, oh boy, you know, um it was very painful. Actually, Rebecca defeated herself. Do you remember the phone call when you called me to tell me. I don't recall anything except we won and you were delighted. I don't remember. I think your first words, where can we go? My first question was as my mom monkay ah, right, that's true. Yeah, of course you were very defensive of

your mom. You're from the very beginning you were worried about her condition. You made the move to defend yourself, but you were very worried about it. Of course you were. After it was over, during mandated welfare checks, I saw my mom for the first time since she lost the case. The first time we showed up, my mom showed up with a big black eye. The second time we showed up, she showed up with like a bag of ice over

her other eye and it was bleeding. When she said that her boyfriend had thrown a bell and it had accidentally skewered her eyeball, and just all this bullshit, you know, because she had a fucked up, monstrous boyfriend, and I know that I've like just destroyed her, and she's like bleeding from the eyes like some kind of biblical matriarch. And I was just like, I can't fucking handle this. I think I came outside and threw up or something. She had to go to the hospital. She almost lost

her eye. M just fucked up, fucked up things happened here after the break Germany. I lived in a beautiful, small university city in Germany called and you were plunged into a kind of better than normal circumstance, like a wonderful circumstance to which you were completely unaccustomed. I stepped off the plane in Germany and it was like the Twilight Zone. People got mad when you jay walked, and the error was chris so clear. Everybody thought I knew

jay Z because I was from New York. And everybody was nice to each other. And I had a wonderful kind of nineteenth century apartment with many rooms and bedrooms and dining rooms and balcony. My dad lived with his girlfriend in a big apartment. I learned how to use a fork and knife. I had a computer and a full refrigerator, both powered by electricity, but I wasn't an easy kid. You actually just wanted me to be your dad and leave any other circumstance. And that was your

declaration to me. You know, I didn't escape that fucking jail for you to have a girlfriend and a career and a life in the theater. I'm here, now, let's go. I was impossible. I had never had any dishes to wash, and I resented having to take out the trash. I hated having to share my dad, and I was coming to grips with something huge that I couldn't identify yet. When you hit puberty, you just announced made another announcement. You just kind of came to me and said, I'm

going to be a girl now. I had never tried to be a girl before, and being in a safe environment made me long for acceptance and friends. So I thought I'd try it. I grew my hair out and got tighter jeans, but I had a real problem with authority. I got kicked out of two German schools and then a boarding school in England. You were a nightmare. You were determined to like burn the world down. I mean

when you went away to boarding school in Europe. He went to this progressive this is my friend Cora again. And I was afraid that you were going to live in Europe for the rest of your life and I wasn't going to see you, um. But I didn't live in Europe for the rest of my life. When I was sixteen, I got kicked out of that boarding school and my dad's heroin addiction had escalated, so I had nowhere else to go but the place that I had fought so hard to escape, that New York City apartment

with my mom. But I just remember there being a very sharp disconnect between the years that you were with seven the years that you were living with your mom. Um. And I remember one night this is so anecdotal, and again I wasn't there, so it's like third person bullshit, But your mom was in a state, and all I remember really from the story was that the ambulance was called, and I think she was having like a psychotic episode. Basically, there was a lot of concern. Maybe you can fill

me in. Sure. It was the night before I was taking my final exams graduate high school, so I was seventeen. It was also the night before my mom's birthday. She came home really really really drunk and really upset that I hadn't taken her out for her birthday. That hadn't happened yet. She was obliterated and was saying that I was a horrible child because I hadn't done anything for her birthday. And I went in and I was like, Mom,

your birthday tomorrow, would take out to dinner. And she was so upset and so convinced that I was a horrible spawn that she was started talking about getting on the six train and riding into the end of the line and getting out and walking. I was scared my mom was going to hurt herself. I didn't know what to do, so I called the cops. Then they showed up with an ambulance, and I was in my pajama pants and had no shoes on, and had nothing in

my pockets about my cell phone and my keys. And they knocked on the door, and I just like freaked out because I was so I was like, I can't and I like I went downstairs to the second floor and stayed at the other end of the hall while they went in and effectively arrested her. And when they passed by me to take her into the ambulance, she looked at me with this just betrayal and terror and fear, and was just like burning her eyes through me of like,

how could you invite the police into our home? And I went to the officer and I was like, can I please just get in the ambulance with her for a second and explain to her that this is for her safety? And he was like sure. So I jumped in the ambulance and sat down and was like, mom, this happened because I don't want you to hurt yourself, and of course she just spewed violence at me and we immediately started f eating and the fucking e MT

sitting across from muscos are you inebriated? And I was like what, and she was like, your pupils are dilated. Are you intoxicated? And I was like, my pupils are fucking dilated because it's four in the morning and I am terrified and my mother is strapped into an ambulance right now. And she was like, that's it, you're intoxicated to your coming with us, lam traps me into the seat. I was in disbelief as they drove us to the hospital and then they locked us in separate rooms. Oh

my god. I but then I made my escape. I basically convinced this like young guard dude to like let me use the bathroom down the hall And as I was going to the bathroom, I saw an exit sign down the hallway and I just fucking ran and I took off in my socks, and like the sun was starting to come up, and I ran all the way

back to the apartment and I fell asleep. Then she came home, and she threw everything in the house at my door and tried to beat it down with my own baseball bat, tried to bust it down with the body. I don't know how that piece of ship in section eight housing door held up, but it did. And eventually she passed out. I woke up that morning, you know whatever, an hour of tormented non sleep later, and I went to high school and somehow passed my exams. Goddamn, it's

a miracle. Huhm. I was a bad one. This went on for years. We fought brutally all the time. Eventually I found that bottle of desks and under her mattress. I was furious. I couldn't believe everything she'd put me through. Because she'd been high. I wanted nothing to do with her, and when I was twenty two, I moved out for good and then I met Katie. Hi, Hi, I'm recording you. Oh my, how did we meet Katie? Well, I was really embodying my grungy coffee girl Harry armpitted lesbian self,

and Um, one of our mutual friends introduced us. And then you swooped up real stylish, like in your piel Mercedes. And we went to the Googgenheim because where I'd seen New Yorkers and at our first date non date, which was not a date but was definitely a date. Um, what happened at the Guggenheim, Well, they have individual bathroom stalls at the Guggenheim. Shout out to the Guggenheim for their romantic design. And I think you said, like, I have to go to the bathroom, and UM, I said,

I'm coming with you. And I walked into the bathroom with you, and I really hope you use this for your podcast because this is really funny and I and I said I wish that I could straddle you right now,

and he said, why can't you? And then I came over and straddled you, and we basically hooked up for the first time in the Gugenheim bathroom with people like pounding on the wall, M and Co. And then you invited me over your apartment in which you had just recently moved and had one box on the floor and we had our like first romantic dinner on a cardboard box on the floor with no furniture. Katie and I were together for the next few years, and during that

time she got to know my mom. In terms of Rebecca, I mean, she's wild and she's I don't want to say, I'm not the most integrated, grounded person that you'll ever meet. When your mom was either immersed in being intoxicated and consumed by her own depth of pain, there was no room for you, um, and that you were immersed in her pain, um involuntarily and without really comprehension of what was going on. What what is your understanding of where

her pain came from? I mean, I think a lot of it has to do with Billy Um, whom she has always talked about a lot, this saga of losing the love of her life and the unresolved story and history of that and living in the past and um that being an open wound. Katie and I broke up, and I started doing some pretty self destructive things of my own. I was a workaholic and drinking too much to try and manage the anxiety that was surfacing. I was insistent that I was not a victim and that

everything was fine, but inside I was a disaster. When I was twenty seven, I went to California for work and the bottom fell out. You called me and we're like, I need your help. I need you to come here right away. It was urgent, everything called very urgent um and I got on a plane as quick as I could.

What did you find when you got there? You were reallyish, shell of yourself um, you a feeling of being really hollow um and your face like barely had any color in it, and you were crying kind of consistently, but frantically and randomly. You couldn't sleep. You would wake up in terror, literal terror, like shaking and and yelling and feeling like you were going to die. And it was really scary. Do you think I thought that I was going crazy? Yes? I mean definitely you expressed that you

thought you were going crazy. I was having a mental breakdown. I started calling Katie and my dad constantly to not be alone. You were having panic attacks, and you were having um great disturbances of the spirit. It was like, oh, a black cloud is moving over my head from behind me, and I everything is dune and I have to die. The pain and stress were building, and I didn't know where they were coming from. Something bigger than me was

overtaking my mind, and I was terrified. And I remember there was a particular day when I went to the beach and it was a big, blazing, beautiful blue day, and I sat on the beach, wrapped in a towel and everything was black and it disturbed me so much. I got into my car and I was sobbing so hard I could almost not drive. It was all coming

to an unbearable head. And I called my dad. At the end of my rope, I got back to my friend's house I was staying at, and I called you, saying, I want to get off this planet, holding a end of mine's gun in my hand. I didn't know that. And you said to me, if you kill yourself, you will take me with you. Oh, I probably did. Yeah, that's probably true. It is Yeah, that would be unacceptable. So I didn't and at that point I was faced with Okay, if it's not blue pill, then what does

red pill look like? And for me, it was to embark on a quest for understanding. I decided to live, but to change everything. If I was going to make it, I was going to have to rip the plant out of the ground and repot it in entirely new soil. I started exercising, going to a twelve step program for the loved ones of addicts. I stopped drinking and went to therapy twice a week, and I started writing a

book about my childhood. You discovered agency you were digging, you were looking, you were managing the information you were discovering. It wasn't happening to you. You were actually taking charge of experience. So that's a very important thing to do. Eventually, I was diagnosed with PTSD, which explained the mental breakdown, and I realized that I had been denying something I knew clearly when I was a kid. I'm transgender. I'm a man in a female body, which was a massive

thing to unravel of its own. It took me nine months to get back on my feet, but when I did, I threw myself headlo into my new life. Tonight, we hear from artist Io till it Right, whose photography projects have sparked a dial is an artist, activist, writer of the new memoir Darling Days Bout Darling Days. I moved to California full time and set up shop in the desert. My mom and I started to connect again. Our relationship works a lot better three thousand miles apart. Hey, I listen,

are you coming back across the country? Can't you bring me a tumbleweed growing? Tumbleweed called me back by so. Understanding that my mom wasn't just choosing to be an asshole was a really big thing, And that then led me to wondering about what caused all of the pain that she was trying to medicate away. How did she get there? How did she get to the point where like she could make choices that would imperil her kid and not know Billy all right is this same recording.

It's February six, two thousand and sixteen, and we are sitting in Williamsburg, and for the first time, we're having a sit down interview session for what will become the Ballad of Billy Balls and his baby Girl. Here's my mama. Yeah, Billy knew it at Harvard School. If I don't move past my anger and she doesn't move past her grief, we're not going to ever be able to have a functional relationship with each other. And I'm trying to change

it because I don't want to be angry at her forever. Okay, obvious, so much love, be so much on but man, goal in arms, but all the things that Billy didn't want to show her she doesn't want to see. I need to know that stuff. She just needs to know where he is. I want to find Billy's bodies so that she can say goodbye to him and maybe have a happier life. We're gonna find that, Okay, Okay, and you know what, I did find him. That's in two weeks.

If you or someone you know is having suicidal ideations, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at to seven, three eight to five. This lifeline provides free and confidential support. If you're queer and needs support, you can call the Trevor Project also seven at one eight six six four eight eight seven three eight six. I called them during my darkest moments and they saved my life. Use it.

Crimetown is Zack Stewart Pontier and Mark Smirling. The Ballad of Billie Balls is hosted by me Io Till It Right and made in partnership with Cadence thirteen. You can find me on the internet. I'm Io loves you on everything, and if you want to know more about my story, pick up my memoir Darling Day. We also want to hear from you. We have a voicemail set up and I love it when you call. Here's Casey from Dallas. I had kids, young have two kids, being a mom with such a hard job, and I screwed up so

many times. I wish my kids could listen to this and have the same kind of compassion and understanding that you have for your mom and your dad, because it's the hardest job to love someone so much and have so much power over the way their life turns out while just being a human being and trying to figure life out for yourself. If there's something on your mind, thoughts, feelings, complaints, call us and leave us a voicemail at five seven

oh three nine too. Especially if today brought stuff up for you, just call us and tell us about it. You can also get into our discussion forum on our website. The Ballad of Billy Balls dot Com. This show is produced by Me, Kevin Sheppard and Ryan Swigert. Our senior producers Austin Mitchell, editing by Zach Stewart Pontier and Mark Smirling. Fact checking by Jennifer Blackman. This episode was mixed by Kenny Qcak. Music and sound design by Kenny Qcak. Our

title track is Dark Allies by Light Asylum. Archival researched by Brennan Reats. Thanks to Daniella Aria, Rachel Lee Wright, Emily Wiedermann, Green Card Pictures, Alessandro Sentauro, Bill Clegg, Ben Davis,

Oran Rosenbaum and the team at Cadence thirteen. Special thanks to Sophie Martinez, Cora Fisher Andrea Frank's, Sarah Driver, Seth Tillott, Katie Atherton, Nicole Rauscher, Lena Tillott, Leslie Wright, d D Tillott, Brunetta Robinson and Jones Stockhammer and Amber and Johnny for taking me in when I needed it the most, and of course, my Mom, without whom none of this would be possible