I called ahead and ordered an Italian from Angel Foods. I’m eating it as I walk down Commercial Street to the far East End, chomping as a tomato slips out and lands on the asphalt. I’m in a hurry to meet Billy from Bradford Street, whom nobody calls by his actual name, William Jarecki. Billy would never eat lunch this way.

Billy has lived here, in a quaint cottage at the end of a gravel driveway, for the last 11 years. He walks me through the two gardens behind his cottage and we sit on wooden chairs in the yard. He’s in a pale pink button-down and light washed jeans with a deep green Eagles cap on his head. On his feet are the L.L. Bean duck boots he bought 40 years ago.

“The East End is like being in the woods,” he says. “It’s so quiet, but at four o’clock in the morning there are 20 million birds chirping. This neighborhood is all people who have a pile of money, but they take their own garbage out.” It’s different from the West End, he says, which has “rich folks who wear their money — it’s like the Hamptons, and they’re top of each other, and they have no privacy.

“This is perfect for me. I’m off the beaten track living over here. You barely hear Bradford, even, sitting here.”

Billy tells me about his past, which was not lived off the beaten track. In the 1970s, with his then-partner Tom Pritchard, he started Madderlake, a plant and flower emporium in downtown Manhattan. “We changed how people looked at flowers,” he says. “All the other plant stores had cute names. We came up with madder and lake. Separate pigments, a dark, dark red that turns brown eventually. We liked the idea that it was transitory.”

It was. But first, Billy says, “it was fabulous.”

He and Pritchard were written up in the New York Times, dubbed “the High-Fashion Florists.” That was 1977. Anna Wintour wrote about them, too, he says, when she was at New York magazine. “People would come down and we’d drink wine and play good music.” They moved their shop to Madison Avenue and 68th Street. Then they added a store in SoHo. “At our opening party, all we served was Crystal Rosé,” he says. “We didn’t even have bottled water.”

The pair published Flowers Rediscovered: New Ideas About Using and Enjoying Flowers (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1985) and later Pritchard wrote Madderlake’s Trade Secrets: Finding and Arranging Flowers Naturally (Clarkson Potter, 1994).

Jarecki and Pritchard were together for 23 years. Jarecki was born in Jersey City in 1954 and says he spent his childhood summers in the hemlock forests of the Adirondacks. He moved in with Pritchard in New York City when he was 17, taking the train back to Jersey in the mornings for school. Then he went to Cooper Union. “I thought I was a fine artist, but they felt I was a graphic artist,” he says.

Jarecki has traveled around the world. He’s been to Kenya, the Caribbean, and Mexico, he says, and has lived in Paris.

“I apparently was wealthy — we had three houses,” says Billy. He says he and Pritchard had a brownstone in the West Village, a compound of Dutch stone houses across the river from a mill in upstate New York, and a stone shepherd’s house in the Languedoc region in southeastern France.

Jarecki and Pritchard split up in the mid 1990s, but they’re still friends, he says. “I asked my ex not so long ago why we lost the money.”

Billy first came to Provincetown in 2001. He was back and forth between Provincetown and New York, working as a freelance stylist, designer, and shopper for an interior designer and architect.

The cottage Billy lives in was once the painting studio of midcentury cubist painter Kenneth Stubbs, who died in 1967. “His wife basically adopted me,” says Billy.

The family told him he could have the cottage for free as long as he renovated the kitchen. He now has a five-burner stove, “a Blomberg,” he says, which they gave him, though his hood cost more than the stove, he adds. The cottage is tight: “In 210 square feet, making pancakes sets off the smoke alarm.” Billy says if he won the lottery he’d move to Alaska.

Billy tells me how this past December he had a compression fracture of three vertebrae. But he’s walking fine now. Also in December, a titanium plate in his arm broke and a screw pulled out of the bone.

“Outer Cape Health is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” he says. “My primary, Dr. Shay, is terrific. I follow his advice.”

Billy says he is amazed anything can live in his body, “I’ve been HIV positive for 30 years,” he says. “I’ve had every vaccine — they keep updating me. All of that stuff in my system has to be poisonous for mosquitoes and stuff. I was out in the garden in France and flies were all over me and my mother was concerned. I said, ‘Mary! My blood is poisonous — those flies are gonna die!’ ”

Billy is of a mind that there are people in the world who have more problems than he does. He practices gratitude. “I’ve had times in my life that were euphoric,” he says. “In my head, I was 17 until I was 40, and in my head I’m still 40, but I’m 70. I think 72 is the next time I’ll switch my age.”