Czytaj książkę: «Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution»

CHAPTER 1

“I’m not from the States, I’m from Texas.”

– Bill Hicks

As a kid in grade school, Bill Hicks was a phenomenal athlete. He was strong, fast, agile. Anyone who ever saw Bill perform stand-up comedy in later years would have a hard time imagining this. With a cigarette dangling off his bottom lip, he’d tell his signature joke about smoking: perusing the front rows of the audience, he’d find someone with a lit cigarette and ask them how much they smoked.

“A pack a day…?” He’d take a drag of his cigarette and inhale like his life depended on that tar-laden cancer stick. “Pussy. I go through two lighters a day.”

Bill wasn’t exactly a posterboy for athletic prowess. Doubters wouldn’t be alone in their skepticism that Bill could ever have run anything but his mouth. A fellow comedian from his Houston hometown who accompanied Bill to New York City for an early Letterman appearance recalls seeing him in the hotel: “He took off his shirt and he didn’t have a muscle in his entire upper torso. I’ve never seen anything like it, it was completely slack. Utter lack of definition. Just zero. It almost had a morgueish quality to it in retrospect.”

Dwight Slade, Bill’s friend and comedy partner in the formative stage of his career, was in San Francisco in 1991 to perform on the bill with Bill at the Punch Line. The two comedians made an appearance on Alex Bennet’s radio show where Bill presented the host with an old 8x10 promo photo of the pair taken when they were just starting out. Bennet looked at the picture and remarked, “Dwight, you look exactly the same. Bill, what happened to you?”

Bill replied, “I’d only been drinking for two years then.” Bill was 14 in the picture. It was a joke.

Born William Melvin Hicks on 16 December 1961 in Valdosta, Georgia, he was given life and a name he was never ever able to live down. Bill hated his name. “Hate” is a strong word, but Bill hated his name. In the early years, he would step on stage and introduce himself, saying, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is William Melvin Hicks … Thanks, Dad.”

He made a short-lived hobby of trying to find successful comedians who had monosyllabic first and last names. He couldn’t come up with any besides Bob Hope. Bill even gave serious consideration to legally changing his name. Obviously he stuck with it, but his dissatisfaction never left him.

In late 1991, Bill was at friend Stephen Doster’s house in Austin. Nirvana had just started to make it big and Bill insisted on taking Doster, a well-respected local guitar player, singer-songwriter, and producer, to local institution Waterloo Records to buy him both the band’s albums, Bleach and Nevermind, then drive around town listening to them.

That was cool with Doster. First, though, he had to take his toddler son, Django, out for a walk. They headed down to the hike-and-bike trail along Town Lake and they walked. Bill says, “So, Stephen. You named the kid Django?” Django: named after guitarist Django Reinhardt.

“Yeah, that’s his middle name, but it’s what everyone calls him,” says Doster.

“Of course, you know what’s going to happen,” Bill baits him.

“What do you mean? Nothing’s going to happen to him.”

“Surely you, of all people, know what’s going to happen,” says Bill.

“No, Bill. What do you mean? What are you trying to say?” Doster asks. What, is he destined to suffer a disfigured hand in a fire accident à la his namesake? That’s not nice. Bill is just confusing his friend.

“His dad is a songwriter. His mom is a photographer. You named him Django. Surely you know what is going to happen to him?”

“What’s going to happen to him?” Doster isn’t sure where this is going and is more than a little perplexed. Then Bill grabs Doster around the neck with his hands – friendly, not hostile – and says, “He’s going to get sucked and fucked more by the time he’s 17 years old than you and I ever did in our goddamn lives.”

Bill the reductionist had figured it all out: cool name equals hot ass. His experience was the opposite. Redneck name equals not much ass at all. Jim and Mary Hicks, Bill’s parents, should have just called him “Cletus". In addition to the distinctly redneck name, Bill also had the misfortune of being born into a devout Southern Baptist family. With about sixteen million practising patrons, Southern Baptists constitute the largest fundamentalist denomination in the United States. And as fundamentalists they believe the authors of the Bible were inspired by God, making the Bible inerrant. That makes it easy to read: take everything literally.

Convenient for people without any imagination, but it also leads to some bizarre beliefs. Many Southern Baptists really do believe it is a sin to dance. The movie Footloose wasn’t just pulled from the dregs of a Hollywood executive’s brain. Some, not all, but some Baptist theologians maintain that dance is a social form of sexuality. So no go.

When Bill was growing from boy to teen in the Seventies, the Southern Baptists Convention was becoming even more extreme in its beliefs. There was an internal conflict in the church between moderates and fundamentalists, and the liberal factions lost. So, the church then began issuing statements on topics like the submissive role of women and criticizing feminist organizations. It issued a series of prayer guides to help save the non-Christians and lead them to salvation.

Despite his persistent protests and weak attempts to weasel out of it, every Sunday morning Bill was required to go to church. No exceptions. This is the doctrine he was fed; these are the beliefs he was expected to buy into. If every philosophy presupposed a sociology, then it’s not hard to see how a reactionary teen looking to get enlightened as much as he was looking to get laid, might have a field day with a religion to which the phrase “figuratively speaking” was meaningless.

Bill’s parents claimed they weren’t particularly religious; but every Sunday, there the Hicks were in the congregation. According to his mother Mary, “We just knew to go and went.”

Unfortunately for Bill, church took place on Sunday morning and Saturday night was the best time to catch late-night comedy. NBC had Saturday Night Live. Other networks would program movies late, and later still. Bill was usually up until 2 a.m. watching TV in his room. To him this was the kind of studying that mattered. An 8 a.m. wake-up call for church, though, didn’t exactly jive with his preferred sleep schedule.

Like any well-evolved creature Bill had to adapt. He tried resisting entirely, but when that failed, as it invariably did, he would make do. After services Bill would skip Sunday School and go nap in the church library.

Bill’s dad, Jim, worked in management for General Motors. He even wore the big GM ring, sporting it like he was a proud graduate of General Motors University. The company odyssey of the South sent Jim to Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, before affording the Hicks family an extended stay in Houston, Texas. The Hicks family bought a two-story hybrid of a colonial and a box in a slice of suburbia called Nottingham Forest, where an olio of shade trees sheltered both sides of the street. It was somewhere between upper-middle and lower upper-class America. The only danger was the boredom.

From the outside it all looked very Norman Rockwell: an immaculately kept house with a pristine lawn (Hicks mythology has it that Jim would measure the cut of the grass with a ruler) in a desirable zip code; 2.3 kids (well, three if you want to get technical – a brother Steve and a sister Lynn, both older); one dog named Sam, another named Chico. But, the veneer of the happy family wasn’t so thick as to be opaque.

As one of Bill’s childhood friends recalled, “There were pictures of Bill with Steve and his sister, and I’d ask, ‘Bill you’ve got a sister? You never told me you had a sister.’

“He was curt, responding, ‘I don’t have a sister.’

‘"Well, who is this?’

‘"Just some person that was in the house.'” Clearly something was rotten in the state of Denmark. Suburban Houston, too.

As a by-product of this household Bill spent a ridiculous amount of time in his room. It was a sanctuary where he could isolate himself from the foreign world of his parents and inculcate his friends to the virtues of sanity, reason and rock ‘n’ roll music. Camped in the permanent mess of his bed he listened to everything from Leadbelly to Led Zeppelin while he typed out one-liners.

His brother, Steve, recalls: “He used to write jokes and slide them under my bedroom door. And I would critique them and give them back … I didn’t even know what it all meant, he just said he was in his room writing all of this stuff.”

He was naturally gifted at almost everything. As a junior high football player, Bill’s speed and strength made him a natural at running back. He was even more gifted as a baseball player – amazingly so. Little League games are just six innings long; each team needs to get three outs in its half inning. That’s eighteen outs. With his wicked curveball and his gangly delivery, Bill regularly accounted for fifteen of those with strike-outs when he was on the mound. That’s so unheard of at that level it’s gaudy.

It was strange, though, that for all of his natural athleticism, Bill didn’t enjoy interacting with direct sunlight, preferring the bright but artificial light of the indoors. Bill and the sun didn’t see eye to eye. As a rule, he kept the blinds in his room drawn. The truth is, Bill probably saw as much sun on the small black-and-white TV in his room as in the sky outside. He wasn’t a shut-in, latch-key kid, but his room was his refuge from his family. He would stay up and watch The Tonight Show. He would read, he would write, and he would listen to records. Everything you needed in order to divine the make-up of a young Bill Hicks, you could get by watching him in his native habitat. Muddy Waters on the stereo, dog-eared copy of The Hobbit on the bed, posters of Jimi Hendrix and Woody Allen papering the walls.

That was Bill’s yin and yang right there – Jimi and Woody. Bill gave the credit to Allen, more than anyone, for inspiring him to get into comedy. He was 13 or 14 when he first saw Allen in the movie What’s New, Pussycat? Later in life Bill himself gave conflicting accounts of that seminal moment. In fact, as Bill got older, the age at which he claimed Allen first infected his life got younger. In an interview Bill gave in the last month of his life, he said that he was 12 and that movie was Casino Royale.

Either the next day or the following summer – again, he gave multiple accounts – Bill was in a bookstore and picked up a copy of Without Feathers. Years later he confessed to an interviewer he couldn’t even explain the affinity. “I’m not Jewish. I’m not short. I’m not a schlemel.”

A pre-teen Bill had just seen Allen in Casino Royale about the time he met one Dwight Slade. It was in the summer of 1974, when they were both between the 6th and 7th grades at Spring Forest Junior High. They were playing touch football with mutual friends. Dwight recalled simply, “He was odd-looking. Very odd-looking.” With jet-black hair, black eyes, and vaguely Asian-looking features, Bill’s appearance was not what you would expect for someone with such an authentically Southern genetic make-up.

Bill had become enamored with Woody Allen’s character of Dr. Noah in Casino Royale. It was the basis for the goofy impersonations he was doing at the time. The physical humor was something that Dwight not only instantly understood, but could match Bill in doing. The two became fast friends and developed a relationship that was part collaborative and part competitive. Recalls Slade: “We would mutually crack each other up, but we also had a sort of sibling rivalry as to who could make our friends laugh more.

“I don’t remember the specific moment, but he told me: ‘We ought to be comedians. We ought to be a comedy team.’ I said, ‘I want to be an actor.’ That was my dream when I was a kid. But when he said that I thought, ‘Well, finally here’s a guy that speaks my language.’ He goes, ‘We should be comics. I’ve written some jokes.’ I went over to his house and he showed me. Here’s a guy who thinks like me, I thought. And for Bill I think there was even more of a sense that, ‘Oh my God, I’m not the only crazy person here. I’m not the only person that wants to do something out of the norm.'”

Corny as it sounds, the two developed a really sweet friendship. For example, Dwight’s Boy Scout meetings took place at St. John Vianney Catholic Church, whose grounds ran right up to the Hicks’ backyard fence. During breaks in the Boy Scouting, Dwight would go over to Bill’s and throw a rock up at Bill’s window to get his attention. Bill would open the window and they would talk.

By the time Bill got to high school, despite his natural physical gifts he had all but left sports behind. He stopped playing football; he stopped playing baseball. He kept running track in the 9th grade, then in the first part of the 10th grade. But that was it. Slade explains, “It wasn’t because Bill didn’t like athletics, but he hated what it was becoming in high school.”

High-school sports were like a religion in Texas. High-school football was a religion in Texas. Stadia across the state turned small-town communities into congregations of a sort. Texans from Snook to Shiner easily spent more time on Friday nights in the fall watching the local kids run around the gridiron than they ever spent listening to sermons on Sundays. It was a ratio of about three to one. And Stratford High School didn’t just win, it won state championships. Okay, a state championship during Bill’s junior year (“State in ’78” was the rallying cry); but still, for a 17-year-old kid in Texas, being part of a state championship team would endow you with near god-like status. Stratford’s football team was fairly exceptional. The star running back, Craig James, later started for the New England Patriot team that played in Super Bowl XX. And Stratford standout Chuck Thomas was the back-up center for the San Francisco 49ers team that won Super Bowls XXIII and XXIV.

This is the environment Bill grew up in. If he had wanted it, Bill could easily have been part of the privileged jockocracy. He had all the physical tools needed to be a star athlete. Coolness, popularity, cheerleaders – if Bill had kept playing football and baseball, he could have had access to all the things that make high school a nontraumatic experience for a teen. But he opted out, and that’s where Bill spent the “best years of his life” – a common moniker for that four-year high-school slice of American life.

On the outside. That’s where he belonged. Bill was a misfit, both within his family and, with few exceptions, amongst his peers. He didn’t drink, and couldn’t understand why people did. He wasn’t social and he didn’t go to high-school parties (“keggers”). He liked to read. He was obsessed with Huckleberry Finn, The Hardy Boys and The Hobbit. Mystery and adventure were clearly his favorites.

Bill wasn’t a loser, but high school is pretty binary: either you’re cool or you aren’t. Bill wasn’t in the cool clique. But he had friends and, even though he valued his privacy and being left alone, he wasn’t a loner. Most importantly he had Dwight and, once in high-school, Kevin Booth, a neighborhood kid in the class one year ahead of Bill and Dwight.

It was serendipitous that Bill hadn’t dropped out of sports completely during his freshman year at Stratford because it was in track that both Bill and Dwight first formed a relationship with co-conspirator-to-be Kevin Booth. They were on the track for practice – well, they were out there in their track clothes, but not doing much practising – when Booth approached the pair to say hi. “What’s up? I’m the guy you met yesterday at lunch.”

With the two similarly subversive minds of Dwight and Kevin, Bill would begin dabbling in the two activities that would occupy the rest of his life – music and comedy.

That day on the track with Kevin, Bill and Dwight started talking about putting a band together. They had outlandish ideas about what they wanted to do – “We need to have a big stage show with lights and smoke and we want to have bombs going off and lights and big speakers.”

“I told them, ‘Okay, I know how we can do that,'” Booth remembers. “They were thinking I was full of shit, but I said, ‘Why don’t you guys come over to my house tonight and we’ll get started.'” In Booth they had stumbled across someone with the technical know-how to pull off their oversized designs. They took Booth up on his offer and that night they began their journey to rock stardom. But there was a slight hitch: they didn’t have musical instruments; nor did they have the ability to play instruments.

They called themselves Stress. It was perfect. It sounded punk rock. More importantly, it was monosyllabic and ended with two s’s. That sounds a bit arbitrary, but it turned out to be an unintentional asset. Every child of the Seventies in America knew the phrase: “You wanted the best, you got the best! The hottest band in the land, Kiss.” It was the band’s stage introduction on the multi-platinum-selling Kiss Alive! Dwight and Bill were big Kiss fans. Huge.

It was hard not to be. In the mid-Seventies Kiss were omnipresent.

One day the guys were talking about making smoke bombs for their stage show. Kevin, of course, chimed in: “I know how to make smoke bombs.” He went out and got some dry ice, then they all convened at Dwight’s. They sat in his room in a little circle around a bucket. Kevin poured some water on the dry ice in the bucket. The teens watched this tiny stream of smoke frothing up from the bucket while they listened to Kiss records and talked about how they were going to be bigger than Kiss and have a bigger stage show than Kiss. Bill and Dwight held flashlights, pointed them into the smoke and waved them back and forth. They understood the theater of rock, but they weren’t even community theater of rock.

But now they were Stress, it was like joining Kiss vicariously. All they had to do was substitute the one word. “You wanted the best, you got the best! The hottest band in the land, Stress.” Bill and Dwight would pass each other in the halls of school and greet each other with that rock ‘n’ roll catchphrase intra. It was plug and play hype. They started taking pictures of themselves in their best rock star poses and circulating the pictures at school. Never mind that they didn’t have things like songs or proper instruments. They had pictures. That made it real.

One day Bill was called into the vice principal’s office. Bill looked down at the table in the room and saw the word “Stress” carved into it, complete with the Kiss lightning bolt s’s. Graffiti was a pretty solid accomplishment for a band that hadn’t actually played in front of anybody.

Stress became almost a daily activity for Bill, Dwight, Kevin and miscellaneous other friends who floated in and out of the still-amorphous band. Bruce Salmon, Mike Groner, Steve Fluke, John Terry, all had stints of varying length as members of Stress. Basically, all it took was showing up some afternoon to play at least once. That earned you a place in the lore of Stress genealogy.

Salmon wasn’t just a frequent participant early on, but was a co-founder. His older brother had been in bands with Kevin’s older brother, and between Kevin and Bruce, they offered an invaluable asset to the fledgling band: Kevin could borrow a bass guitar from his brother; Bruce knew how to play it.

Still, initially it was a band by committee. Who wants to play what? Bill had an acoustic guitar that, depending on how you looked at it, had either a couple of strings missing or had a couple of strings. Sometimes Dwight sang, sometimes he played bass. Kevin played a plastic garbage can for a drum. They miked up everything as best they could to achieve maximum distortion, and proceeded to make noise. Again, their aspirations were way beyond their abilities, but that didn’t deter them.

Comedy was something Bill did in parallel to music. The two weren’t mutually exclusive: he loved both, and he invested hours of time working on both. Bill and Dwight were already spending much of their after-school time hanging out, but in the 7th grade, joke writing was still a solo activity for Bill. By the time the summer of 1975 rolled around, things began to change. Bill and Dwight were listening to sets by comedians – Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin – taped from the late-night talk shows with a hand-held audio recorder.

They were also developing more characters; better imitations of their goofy parents. Then, a couple of months into 8th grade, Dwight’s brother got his hands on a copy of Woody Allen doing stand-up in his nightclub routine. Big deal? In the mid-Seventies it was. This was like finding a copy of the Zapruder film. This was cooler than being made a general in the Kiss Army.

And it’s what really brought them together not just as friends with similar interests and tastes, but as a comedy team. “It was our first writing of jokes together,” Slade recalls. “Most of them were his, and I mostly just tagged on to them in the beginning. I was writing my own, but Bill was way ahead of me. My jokes were really simplistic and idiotic, to be honest. It wasn’t until then – and it’s so ridiculous to talk in these terms – but it wasn’t until 8th grade that I started to mature in my joke writing.”

Bill and Dwight also started working on their own play, Death. It was highly derivative of Woody Allen’s play Death Knocks (not to be confused with the Allen play of the same name, Death, that would become the loose basis of his movie Shadows and Fog). They tried out for the 8th grade talent show. Woody Allen, however, apparently wasn’t good enough for an 8th grade talent show. And as his apostles, Bill and Dwight weren’t either. They failed the audition. “Inspired” as it might have been by Allen, the play was not without its own originality and humor. Thirty years later, Slade half-jokes, “I’m still bitter.”

There was a silver lining. The Spring Forest Junior High drama teacher asked them to perform their play for the speech class. They happily obliged. In front of the willing audience, Bill and Dwight were stellar. They got real laughs, real applause. They were now as encouraged as they had been dejected after the rejection from the talent show. Their intuition that they were good at this – at writing, at creating, at getting laughs – was correct.

By that time Bill and Dwight (performing under the stage names of Mel and Hal – their middle names) had a fair amount of material: three monologues of about fifteen minutes each, plus the play. They had already put together a half-hour tape of their best stuff and sent it to local agents in hopes of having someone do the legwork of getting them gigs, and also gaining some legitimacy. As it was, they weren’t doing so great by themselves.

They still had some hard lessons to learn. Later that month Bill and Dwight saw an ad in the Houston Chronicle for open auditions for the Easter Seals Telethon in April. They were still keeping their ambitions clandestine, and couldn’t ask their parents for rides. So they took their bikes across town. Drenched from the effort, with the aid of Houston’s humidity – like a natural sauna 365 days a year – they arrived at the local school for the deaf where the auditions were being held.

Trying to cool off and stay calm, they did about ten minutes for the judges. Mel and Hal were told they were great writers. They got a “we’ll let you know.” For artistic teens, this was doubly hellish: in their budding social lives they were getting, “let’s just be friends” from the ladies; in their budding careers they were getting the showbiz equivalent. Mel and Hal never heard back from the Easter Seals folks. Neither did Bill and Dwight, for that matter.

On the upside, Bill and Dwight had done their first stand-up gig together.

They soon came across another ad in the paper: an open audition for a restaurant that put on live entertainers. Again, they took their bikes to the restaurant. They ended up in a room in front of five or six adults – restaurant and nightclub owners – who, in Slade’s words, “laughed their asses off.” Not because two kids showed up, but because of the comedy the kids did. These adults, with no obligations to like them, loved them. Bill and Dwight knew one thing: even if they weren’t getting work, they were getting laughs. They had a good solid six minutes of material.

They had also got themselves hooked up with Universal Talent. When Dwight and Bill started looking for agents, they didn’t even know what a headshot was. It’s not the kind of thing a 14-year-old should know for any particular reason, but it was indicative of the gap between what they were and what they wanted to be. Even the most basic facts about the business of entertainment as a business were beyond them.

Add this ignorance to the fact that they were essentially sneaking around behind their parents’ backs, and it’s all the more miraculous that they even dared to endeavor this endeavor. They had to call around studios looking for a photographer. When they were able to lowball someone to a price they could afford, they still had to ride their bikes (again) miles across town to the get the shots taken. On top of that, Bill was having to pilfer sweaters from his dad so that he could wear something presentable in the pictures. Finally, when the contact sheets arrived at Bill’s house for review, Mary Hicks opened the package before Bill could intercept the mail. That caused another row in the house. One: what the heck were the pictures for? Two: why the heck was Bill wearing his father’s sweater in them?

A meeting at Universal Talent? That was another 20-mile bike ride across town. Two hours on two wheels for about two minutes in the offices. Beverly the assistant told the sweat-drenched duo, “We’ll give you a call.” Nothing was easy. At least they were staying fit.

That summer, 1976, Bill attended camp. Church camp, actually. Somewhere out in West Texas. There he did his first solo stand-up gig. “I was absolutely terrified,” he confessed years later. “Not the least reason was that it was a church camp and a lot of the guys who I had been watching were like nightclub comics and Richard Pryor, so obviously I had to edit on my feet a little bit. I felt like I had made a huge mistake and I should have been in the ‘Kumbaya’ chorus that went up before me.” But after the show Hicks was accosted by more than one of his peers wanting to know how he had the courage to get up and do that in front of people.

“I don’t remember the exact thing that got the first laugh. I know I had, like, fourteen minutes of material, and, like, seven minutes of it was stolen, or someone else’s, like, Woody Allen material which nobody in Baptist West Texas country would ever be able to trace.”

Bill didn’t tell his parents but it wasn’t like he could keep it a secret. He did have the camp, staff and all, as an audience. One of the jokes he told was: “Ladies and gentleman, I had a rough upbringing. I was breast-fed … On falsies.”

Mary Hicks found out about Bill’s stand-up performance from one of the other ladies at Sunday School. Mary then went to the church’s assistant pastor to get more details. The pastor told Mary, “You might want to look at how you raised him.” Clearly Bill was correct in thinking no one there would ever be able to source his material. (Allen’s actual line: “I was in analysis for years because of a traumatic childhood; I was breast-fed through falsies.”)

Another faculty member of the Sunday School told Mrs. Hicks that her son thought Bill’s comedy was the funniest thing he had ever heard. Bill’s first show; Bill’s first rave review.

In the fall of 1976, Bill and Dwight were starting as freshmen at Stratford High School. Stratford was a shit-brown brick building with a mod-deco facade. And the near-windowless exterior made it look more like the kind of place where you would have line-up and lock-down than you would take roll. It was somewhere between eyesore and oddity. It hadn’t produced any poet laureates. It produced country music star Clint Black.

Right about the time Bill and Dwight were supposed to start high school, they also got a shot at what could have been the biggest gig of their lives … or the worst. While, over time, the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon has morphed into a parade of has-beens, back in those days it was a fixture of Americana: Elvis, John Lennon and Sinatra all made appearances. Plus, it was raising money for kids with muscular dystrophy.

The way the telethon works, there is a national show supported by dozens if not hundreds of smaller, regional shows all running concurrently. During the broadcast, the network cuts back and forth from the national to the regional shows. In Houston, this was being held in a restaurant, and the restaurant needed to book acts for the entire forty-eight hours of the telethon.

Frantic to fill the time slots, the telethon’s bookers called all of the agencies around town asking, “Who do you have? What can you give us?” Universal Talent called Bill and Dwight asking how much time they could do. They had their normal set of about a half hour, and they had the play. Beverly at Universal told them: “We have three hours we need to fill.” Bill replied: “We can fill it all.”

“Our idea was that it was going to broadcast on TV,” says Slade. “In reality, maybe it was going to be on in the background of the local show.” They had no idea even what kind of gig it was. It didn’t matter. When they went to their parents to ask permission, they got turned down flat.

Bill spent the bulk of his freshman year working on comedy by using his classmates as his audience. One teacher tried a creative solution to curtail Bill’s interrupting of class: she offered him the first five minutes of class. That time was his to get it out of his system. The rest was hers for teaching. Giving Bill the Sudetenland. Bad idea.

Mary recalls, “One of the teachers called me and asked me if I could help her get her class back from Bill. She said, ‘I told him he could have five minutes while I was checking the roll,’ and she said, ‘I can’t get it back.’ I said, ‘That’s your problem, you shouldn’t have let him get up there.'”

At lunch Bill and Dwight would resume their tag team activities by terrorizing the lunchroom. It was a low-paying gig, but it was a guaranteed booking five days a week. It was proto-guerilla theater. They would perform fake fights, do outrageous character pieces, flip tables and chairs. It was adolescent lunacy. And it was non-stop.

This would continue in track, at the end of the school day. Dwight and Bill would be jogging around the oval. Bill would inch in front of Dwight, slow, then bend over. An oblivious Dwight would unwillingly nail Bill in the ass from behind. Mime sodomy. During the fall, this went on in front of the football team. The team would be practising on the field; Dwight and Bill would be doing their schtick on the track encircling that field. They were performing for their friends on the football team, the people they knew who thought they were funny; but they were also pissing off some of the upperclassmen. It was bad enough that the comedie kids were getting attention in the lunchroom, but carrying it out to the sports arena – that was just showing them up.

“It was almost like doing antics in front of an ape in the zoo. They were initially just confused, then they would want to kill and beat and hit,” says Slade. “I remember seeing them once look at each other and nod and take off running after us. It was terrifying because these were very large Texas football players.”

Late in their freshman year, Dwight handed Bill a book by Ruth Montgomery called A World Beyond. The light went on. Dwight had had a very intense dream about death, and something in the book spoke very specifically to him about what had happened. When Bill read the book, he was similarly blown away. Destiny, fate, choosing your life; the way Montgomery wrote about these things Bill found very comforting. Bill and Dwight spent hours together talking about these concerns. Hours and hours. Southern Baptist tenets, those were his parents’ beliefs. Other spiritual avenues were opening up to Bill.

The Beatles had made the Maharishi a hipster-household name in the late Sixties, but by 1975 he had become mainstream, appearing on the 13 October cover of Time magazine with the teaser: “Meditation: The Answer to all Your Problems?” Still, it was a bit of a coup when Bill got his parents to allow him to attend a transcendental meditation retreat over the Thanksgiving weekend of his sophomore year. While largely a secular celebration, Thanksgiving is one of the top two family-centric holidays in America. For Bill to be able to leave the Hicks family to hang out with strangers (save Dwight), and do things that his parents not only didn’t fully understand but also didn’t subscribe to belief-wise, was astounding.

It’s no less amazing that Bill and Dwight (this time with Dwight’s older brother Kevin) gained permission to attend a second retreat over Christmas break. It was not only longer – a full week instead of a holiday weekend – it was right as families are about to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. If the Thanksgiving retreat was a coup, the Christmas one was a minor miracle.

It wasn’t the last bit of karmic kismet the pair had in store. During the following semester of school, in April the Houston Chronicle ran a feature on a new comedy club in town. This was it. This was the answer. Prior to this, Dwight had been combing the want ads for “Entertainer” under “E", or “C” for Comedians. Obviously there was nothing available for 14-year-old stand-ups. As he describes it, “It was just stupid.” Now they had an outlet. About a week after seeing the feature in the Chronicle, Dwight and Bill sneaked out of their houses and were standing on the stage of the Comedy Workshop, performing their material in front of a paying adult audience. But it was just a little too late. Dwight had known for months that at the end of the school year his family would be moving to Oregon.

“It was intoxicating,” as Slade recalls, “but there was this horror because here we are and we are really clicking, but we knew I have to leave.”

They were also found out by their parents and grounded for the rest of their adolescence.

Kevin Booth

Who am I? Well, I’ll give you an idea. The last few months I’ve been doing a one-man show – like a lot of comics these days are doing one-man shows, and I am no exception … The theme of the one-man show is about my life growing up, as I did, in a happy, healthy and loving family. And it’s called “Let’s Spend Half a Minute with Bill.” And uh … Well, hell, it’s such a short show I can do it for you right now:

“Good evening, everybody. Mommy never beat me. And Daddy never fucked me. Goodnight.”

I don’t know if the show will be able to relate with dysfunctional America, but that’s the way I was raised. Sorry. No bone to pick. Supported me in everything I did.

– Bill Hicks

It’s true. Bill’s parents supported him. When Bill wanted to be a musician, his parents dropped $1000 buying him a Fender Stratocaster guitar and an amplifier to go with it.

When Bill decided he wanted to move to LA after high school and pursue a career in comedy instead of going to college, his parents agreed to pay rent on his apartment in the San Fernando Valley. They even bought him a Chevette so he had a car to get around in.

Certainly Bill didn’t mean the bit about his parents to be taken literally. The strand of Baptist fundamentalism that wanted to take everything literally was antithetical to the core of Bill’s identity and everything he ever preached. Still, things were a lot less black-and-white when it came to the doctrine’s notion of the “happy, healthy, loving” family.

I remember the first time I met Bill’s mom. Bill and I were standing in the kitchen of his house, having this hush-hush conversation. To anyone watching, it must have looked like we were doing a drug deal. But we were talking about the stage show for our band, Stress, the one that didn’t even exist yet. Bill already had arena-sized ideas: “We’ll have this one song where we do the explosion thing, and one of the guys will jump out on stage with a fifty-foot papier-maché penis that starts coming over the audience. And the girls …”

Right then Bill’s mom walked into the kitchen. “Who’s your friend, Bill?” Bill’s response was less happy, healthy or loving than I ever could have ever expected.

“Godammit, Mom, I fucking hate your guts.” He stormed out of the kitchen. I was left standing there. Just me and Mary Hicks. “Uh, hi. I’m Kevin Booth.” Thanks, Bill.

His mom’s response was as surreal as it was calm, as in her heavy southern drawl she asked, “Do you want some pineapple, Kevin?” Did she not hear what I just heard? I said no thanks to the pineapple.

My lasting image of Bill’s dad, Jim Hicks, is a lot more pedestrian but no less ridiculous. The neighborhood association where we lived, Nottingham Forest, would award “Yard of the Month” to the spot with the nicest yard. Bill’s dad won the honor frequently enough that Jim could have landscaped in a home for the accompanying sign: it was almost a permanent fixture.

Jim proudly displayed the fuck out of that thing. Tending to the yard – that’s how I will always remember Jim. Outside at the break of dawn; Saturday and Sunday mornings; sporting his black socks and sock garters while mowing the lawn or clipping the hedges. Bill made endless fun of his dad for that, and for other aspects of his character Bill found embarrassing; but he also had deep respect for his father’s work ethic. Still, when Bill started to set foot on the stage it was open season and many of Bill’s characters were just variations on the theme of Jim.

One of my bands wrote a song about Jim years later, called “Yard of the Month.” Jim Hicks was like no other father I had ever met. He wasn’t just Bill’s father. Sometimes it was like he was your father, too.

Anytime anyone went to Bill’s house, they had to get past Jim, who was always doing that classic “father” pose Bill often mimicked on stage – right arm cocked behind his head, lips pressed forward sternly, eyes squinting and laden with seriousness. Bill would coach you that when you entered the house, go straight to his room. Just go past his dad. Ignore. Just keep going. He could do it. His friends couldn’t.

“Where you goin', son?” Jim would start with a heavy southern drawl to match his wife’s – the one that almost made “Bill” into a two-syllable word. The question was like gravity: you couldn’t ignore it. You were now getting cross-examined by Jim. How you were doing in school, how your parents were, etc.

Bill loved his parents, and they loved him. But they were Baptists. Specifically, Southern Baptists. In Texas we have First Baptists, Second Baptists and Southern Baptists. I know Baptists who don’t know the differences between the subsets, but the Hicks were so Baptist that the differences made a difference to them.

My earliest recollections of Bill are in the lunchroom where he used to “perform” on an almost daily basis with his classmate Dwight Slade. For example, they did this one bit in the school cafeteria where Dwight put some raisins into a spoon, and Bill was going to give the raisins to some lucky girl as a gift. Off Bill flew with havoc following. He was running over tables, tripping over chairs, crashing into people. Trays of food and milk were flying into the air. All the while Bill was doing everything necessary to keep the raisins in the spoon. As the commotion grew so did the gathering crowd, as people were trying to see what the big deal was. Well, the “big deal” turned out to be that Bill was presenting a spoonful of raisins to a completely unimpressed young lady. It didn’t really win over the audience, either.

But it’s a perfect image of who Bill was at that age. It was more important to make a lasting impression than to make a good first impression. He could have said something nice to that girl, and been done with it. Maybe compliment her. But no, there had to be a clumsy production to make sure she didn’t forget.

It was also somewhat standard fare of Bill’s formative years with Dwight. Here you had these two little punk-ass kids coming in and trying to be funny by acting weird and wacky. In reality, though, everyone thought they were losers. In fact, they were considered more than just losers. The difference between them and the regular losers was that they were also extroverts. Most of the geekier people in junior high and high school tended to withdraw into themselves. Not Bill and Dwight. They seemed actively to enjoy seeing how strange they could behave in front of people to rile them up.

Still, as a personality, I was drawn to Bill. We talked one day during lunch. Then a couple of days later during track practice I went up to say “hi” again. And before I knew it, we were hanging out together seemingly all the time. Lunch, track, after school. In fact, it was track that helped us become rock stars. “Rock stars” is obviously overstating it, given our modest success in high school as musicians. But track certainly wasn’t exercise; an exercise in convenience, perhaps.

While it was a year-round sport, track was really just another way for the football team to train together in the spring. In Texas there were rules limiting the amount of time high-school football teams could spend practising. Those limits were usually exhausted during the season in the fall. Across the state, shrewd and smarmy coaches alike would sign the entire football team up for track in the spring, football’s off-season. Voilà. They were no longer the “football” team. Rules averted.

So Bill and I were technically running track; however, track was the last class of the school day. And, in the spring, the coaches were generally only concerned with the football players. That meant we were actually doing one of two things. If there was no roll call, Bill and I would leave school, go to my house, and play music. If there was going to be a roll call at the end of class, we would go to sleep on the pole vault mats.

There were advantages to track. Being out there amongst the jocks gave Bill opportunities aplenty to make fun of them. And, of course, when he and Dwight would do these ridiculously stupid things right in people’s faces, it only made people want to inflict bodily harm on them that much more.

There were more than a few incidents when Bill got chased. He and I once did an interview with New Yorker theater critic John Lahr where I talked about one of these incidents. Bill was sitting right next to me as I finished by saying, “They caught Bill and Dwight and beat the shit out of them.”

Bill interrupted me. He was adamant: “No, Kevin, they never caught us. They never caught us and they never beat us.” It wasn’t nit-picking; it was important to Bill that the truth be known. And the truth is, for a guy who looked so thoroughly unathletic, Bill was a damned fast runner at that time. Damned fast. They chased. They didn’t catch.

Bill ran in several track meets before giving it up; and again it wasn’t that he wasn’t good, he just stopped caring. He got more into music; he stopped caring about sports, stopped running track, stopped playing baseball. Sports had definite objectives – score runs, cross the finish line first, etc. Music gave you more latitude. Here’s three minutes of nothing, fill it however you want. Ready? Go! That was clearly more in line with Bill’s ethic.

My parents thought Bill was a terrible influence on my life. I’m sure Bill’s parents thought the same about me, but Bill was actually one of the best things ever to happen to me; and at that point in my life, Bill kept me out of trouble. I don’t think one of our earliest attempts to put a band together, however, would do anything to prove either set of parents wrong. It was born out of misguided anger – inexcusably misguided anger.

We had already been “playing” as Stress when Dwight had a teen crush on a girl, Mila Goldstein, reciprocated. She was, as you might suspect with that name, Jewish. The informal flirtation fell apart and, burned by young love gone wrong, we fought fire with fire by writing a handful of songs. Specifically, songs that made fun of Jews.

We temporarily” changed the band name for the occasion, calling ourselves Joe Arab and the Nazis.

In hindsight it was clearly not the brightest of ideas. In fact, maybe it was the dumbest. Despite how much, prima facie, it looks to the contrary, it wasn’t anti-semitic.

It wasn’t anything more than teen angst. Hell, we didn’t even know what it meant to be anti-semitic. This was long before the History Channel was pumped into every house in America. There weren’t daily documentaries on Hitler and World War II running 24/7 on TV. We weren’t very attentive students, either. Plus, think about it: blue, poo, you, shoe, do, dew, screw … it rhymes with everything. Given our amateurish creative skills, that only served to help.

We just didn’t know – clearly a by-product of our padded suburban upbringing. If Mila had been Italian, we probably would have called ourselves Giuseppe Franco and the Fascists, without knowing what it meant to be fascist. We were kids. Dwight was hurt. We saw our friend suffering. It was a catharsis. That’s all.

We may have been stupid (sorry Mila), but we weren’t that stupid. Only half the reason for putting a band together in the first place was a desire to make music. Less than half: everything always came back around to us trying to find ways to meet girls. Never mind that we were borrowing instruments we couldn’t even play from siblings and friends. We had stage props. We had photos. And we had a good line of bullshit (“Yeah, we’re in a band”). That was enough to make it real. And being a teenage musician, that was a way to meet girls and impress them before you even had to open your mouth. Even better, write a song for a girl. That would get you in her pants, conditional on meeting her, of course.

Bill was smitten with a girl named Tammy Blue and he came up with this song for her called “Moment of Ecstasy.” He told her to come over to my house so we could play a private gig for her. Bill transformed himself into a rock star for the occasion. We might have been standing in the study of my suburban home, but Bill was playing a rock show to a stadium crowd. And there isn’t a bridge long enough to link the gap between what was happening in Bill’s head and what was happening in my house. My drum? The bottom of a plastic trash can. Dwight had a bass I had borrowed from my brother. Bruce was playing an acoustic guitar that had a couple of strings still intact. We dropped a mic into it and ran it through the same amplifier as the drum.

Then we played Bill’s song, which was a really charming number about cuming on a girl’s face.

Our moment of ecstasy I see you laying next to me And I know it’s gonna be right. Cause I’ve got it hot,I’ve got it hot. And you’re not gonna get by Cause I’ll becummin’ in your eye. Cummin’ in your face. Baby it ain’t no disgrace I’m gonna let it rip all over your lip Gonna be cum in your face Cum, cum, cum in your face.

It’s funny because Bill was such an innocent guy with no sexual experience. None. Yet here he was, singing ridiculously nasty lyrics. Everything about Stress was rinky-dink at that point, but it was what we had. It was a doctrine Bill never abandoned. What tools do you have? That was Bill’s only question. What do you have? You have a beat-up guitar with just a couple of strings on it? Fine. What can you play on a beat-up guitar with just a couple of strings on it? Pick it up and find out.

It was a very simple choice for Bill: do you want to sit around doing nothing while waiting for someone to give you some better equipment (or money, or whatever resources) so you can do things how you think they are supposed to be done? Or do you want to use what you have and start right now?

To Bill it was an easy choice. Start. Do it now. All you have is a trash can? Then turn the damn thing over and start banging on it. Now it’s a drum and you’re making music. That spirit and that attitude were infectious. Soon Bill and I were checking out books from the library trying to figure out how to make gunpowder so we could have real smoke bombs to go with our fake band. God, if we weren’t a fire hazard we sure looked like one. We made as much (if not more) smoke as noise. I even got my mom involved and she helped make a sign for the band. I cut out the letters S-T-R-E-S-S (yes, they were lightning-bolt s’s) from cardboard and wrapped them in tinfoil, while my mom poked holes in the letters and threaded Christmas lights through them.

That’s why it was so much fun to be around Bill. He didn’t wait for people to give him permission to do what he wanted. He stayed that way through his whole life. When we were older and still struggling, he never waited; he was happy to cobble together whatever resources he could. He never wanted to waste time. It’s like he knew he only had a limited amount of it.

The state of Texas allows you to get a driver’s license before the legal minimum age of 16 if your family can demonstrate that the child not having one would somehow cause a hardship for the family. Because my family had a ranch, somehow this allowed me to get such a “hardship” driver’s license. It was complete bullshit, but it meant I had a car, a blue and white LTD station wagon with fake wood paneling.

Bill had an uncanny gift of endowing ordinary things with special qualities simply by giving them catchphrase names. For example, he immediately started calling that station wagon the Stressmobile. He just had a way of making everything seem special. When you were doing things with him, you felt like you were part of some secret club.

From then on, whatever I happened to be driving, it was called the Stressmobile. Along those same lines, in the Stressmobile we used to go on what Bill termed “Nipple Tours.” Nipple Tours were just us engaging in harmless teen stalking. It wasn’t actually stalking, and it really was harmless, but looking back … it could easily have been made to look sketchy if lawyers had ever got involved.

We’d pile into the car with the Stratford school directory, and look up the addresses of girls we had crushes on. Then we’d do a drive-by. We’d just cruise by the house. That’s all. We went from house to house with the bizarre hope that we would see the girl or find out something – what, I have no idea, as 99.8 per cent of the time we saw absolutely nothing except the front of a house. Surprise.

On the rare occasion we saw someone, we’d pretend it was coincidence. We just happened to be heading down that street doing, uh, something. It was a form of cruising. The cool kids cruised up and down a central drag; we cruised by girls’ houses.

For a while we did our Nipple Tours in my family’s thirty-foot-long motorhome. My parents had given it to me to drive to school, like it was a normal car. There was another girl, Tracy Scovell. She was really hot but she had some scars on her face from where she had been bitten by a dog when she was young. The mark was not only a social hindrance but earned her the nickname of Tracy Scar-veil. Bill had a big crush on her. So after Stress got going and we were actually becoming competent musicians, we had all of our equipment – amps, guitars, etc. – in the motorhome, which happened to be outfitted with a generator.

One day we set up our amplifiers and a PA in the motorhome, then pointed everything out the window. When we pulled up in front of Tracy’s house Bill took the microphone: “Tracy Scovell … this concert is for you.” Then he let it rip. Don’t know if she was even there to hear it. Surprisingly the cops didn’t show up and tell us to stop disturbing the peace.

The band’s first big stroke of luck came when a friend of ours, Steve Fluke, broke both of his arms in a rope swing accident. Fluke was a better guitar player than anyone else we were hanging out with, but he just didn’t fit in. He was younger, but more importantly he was very “Stairway to Heaven” and we wanted to be “God Save the Queen.” However, Steve did have generous parents who had bought him a sweet-ass Les Paul guitar and an expensive amplifier to go with it.

Don’t ever let it be said that Bill wasn’t opportunistic. The day after Fluke broke both of his arms, Bill and I were over at Fluke’s house pretending we felt bad about his accident. After expressing our supposed sympathies, we turned to our more concrete interests. “Hey, man, since you can’t play guitar for a while, can we just borrow this for a couple of days?” Bill asked. “We feel really bad. We’ll come back and visit you tomorrow.”

We ended up leaving with his guitar and his amplifier (this was before Bill’s parents had bought him his rig); and not coming back to visit the following day. Nine months later Fluke turns up at my place raising a stink: “Dude, I want my guitar back.” Bill is going, “Oh shit, this isn’t mine. Is it?”

I don’t think Steve Fluke was unique in being involuntarily generous to us. Looking back, we would use people. We would act like we liked people just so we could use their equipment. We would beg and borrow just to get what we wanted.

It wasn’t long before we started to get a little more serious. Stress was never a joke, but it was just something to do that we enjoyed until Bill forced the issue by getting his parents to buy him a guitar and amp. Suddenly he was asking, “Well, Kevin, what are you going to do?” There was that bass of my brother’s we had been using. My brother Curt had schizophrenia, and at this point he was in and out of mental hospitals and halfway houses, so I was often using his equipment without even asking him. It was there. He wasn’t. I became a bass player.

It’s funny how Bill’s different worlds collided, but it’s when he and I were headed downtown to shop for guitars that we passed the Comedy Workshop for the first time. Bill stared at it as we drove by, his head careening to hold as long a glimpse of it as possible. “That must be the place I read about in the paper,” he muttered to himself. “People get up on stage and do comedy.”

A high-school kid in Texas in the Seventies? I didn’t even really know what a comedian was outside of Bob Hope or maybe Johnny Carson. Weren’t comedians old guys who stood on a stage in leisure suits making “Take my wife … please” jokes? It was something we equated with our parents.

But suddenly it was a budding sport in Houston where people were getting up on stage in front of a room full of strangers and expressing their thoughts; hopefully getting some laughs in the process. Comedy wasn’t really on the radar back then. There just weren’t many comedy clubs around – probably LA and New York, maybe Chicago – and the fact that one popped up in Houston in 1978 was pretty incredible.

For Bill, opportunity was meeting preparation. The Comedy Workshop had an open mic night every Monday. You show up, put your name on a list and you can perform.

When Bill and Dwight heard that, they said to each other: “Okay, we gotta go try this.” Their friends, myself included, were right there encouraging them because people thought they were hilarious. They were too young to know they were too young to sign up for an open mic night at a comedy club. Bill and Dwight knew they could get laughs in front of their friends; and their friends in turn would tell them, “Man, you guys are really funny. You should do this in front of other people.” There comes a time when you have to jump that chasm.

I told my mom we were going to a music store. Bill told his mom we were going to the library. We went to the Comedy Workshop.

It was the middle of a school day. I can’t even remember why we weren’t in school. We weren’t skipping, but there we were at a comedy club. We knocked on the door. A comic by the name of Steve Epstein answered. Bill asked some basic questions: Can anyone do it? How do you sign up? Does it matter that I’m only 16?

Yes. You put your name on the list. Maybe, we’ll have to check.

Epstein gave Bill a “What It Takes to Be a Comedian”-type speech. Dedication to the art. Hard work. Sacrifices that, with a bowl haircut, it doesn’t look like you are ready to make. Blah blah blah. The irony is that for all Bill didn’t know, he probably knew almost as much as Epstein at that point, if not about the practice of comedy at least the theory. Bill was already well versed in Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, Charlie Chaplin – people he had studied intensely and was already borrowing from.

But Epstein didn’t take Bill seriously at all. Why would he? He was just a kid of 16.

Monday, 10 April 1978: Dwight and Bill performed together at the Comedy Workshop in Houston, Texas. Bill again told his parents he was going to the library; Dwight told his an organ recital. I picked them up that night at the end of Bill’s street and off we went.

Oddly enough, Steve Epstein was the first comic to stand up that first night Bill and Dwight went to perform. They got themselves moved up as early as they could so as not to jeopardize their chances of lying to their parents and getting away with it in the future.

Bill and Dwight did about seven or eight minutes. They got laughs. Legitimate laughs. Some illegitimate or, more accurately, laughs that were a function of the novelty of it all. Here were kids who, legally, were too young even to be in the club (legal drinking age in Texas was 18 at the time), yet there they were. That these boys even had the balls to get up there and do this, wow! But certainly the audience had to be thinking, “Well, this is the first and last time we’ll see these kids.”

It wasn’t. Bill and Dwight had both been grounded after their first foray into the world of adult nightlife. So the next time and the next time, they sneaked out of their houses. Dwight did the classic pillows piled under the sheets to look like a body in bed, then left a note as to his whereabouts in case his parents checked.

It has become one of the more famous bits of Bill Hicks lore, that he used to sneak out of his house as a teen to go perform stand-up comedy in nightclubs. It’s true. I ran the getaway car. Aiding and abetting.

The side parking lot for the Catholic church my family attended, St. John Vianney, ran adjacent to the backyard fence of Bill’s house. I would drive over to the church, park behind Bill’s house, he would climb out his second-story window, scale down the back side of the house and off we would go. I had the hardship driver’s license, of course.

Even after Bill died, his parents were in denial about it. I remember getting into a fight with Jim about it when he said, “That window was double-bolted shut. It’s just not possible.” The lengths people will go to believe what they want.

Bill and Dwight performed together three times that spring. That summer, Dwight and his family moved to Oregon. It was something both teens had known about. Dwight’s dad told him the previous October – before either Bill or Dwight had even heard of the Comedy Workshop – that they would be moving at the end of the school year.

Bill did his first set at the Comedy Workshop sans Dwight before Dwight and his family left for Oregon. He didn’t tell Dwight about it, and he didn’t let me go to the show, either. Bill was very sensitive to the fact that I thought Dwight was funnier than he was. I did, and I thought Bill doing comedy depended entirely on Dwight.

When Dwight announced the previous fall that he was moving away it was a really depressing moment. We were going to lose him from the band, and it was the end of the whole comedy team. I could see Dwight doing comedy without Bill, but I could never envision Bill doing comedy without Dwight because I had seen Dwight do things that were side-split funny.

In speech class, Dwight would do this routine where he would make a cone out of a piece of paper and he would go, “Okay, is everyone ready for some fun … nel?” Then he would hold the funnel over his head and say, “A clown,” then he would hold it over his nose and say, “A Jew,” then he would hold it over his knee and say, “Gout.” Looking back it might not hold up, but for a bunch of teens in the mid-Seventies, Dwight was a cut above his peers. He was already a performer.

I still feel like it’s my job and my mission to tell people, “Look, Dwight was doing this stuff from day one with Bill. Dwight’s not doing a Bill Hicks impersonation. They came up with those bits together.” I still get defensive whenever anyone puts Dwight down.

But Bill took it a step further. He started talking about his parents, started talking about his (still hypothetical) girlfriend. He started talking about personal stuff. Bill also dissected bits that belonged jointly to the two of them. There were certain jokes that you thought, “Okay, this one they wrote together.” Bill went on to take the parts of those jokes he felt were his, and he really made them his own – particularly the stuff about his parents.

When the two of them were together it was the wacky, straight-man/funny-man, classic back-and-forth thing. When Bill got up there without a partner as a net, he tried to lose the innocent kid routine. He tried to be tougher. But at the same time, he became more sensitive to his looks. He hated the kid with the gap teeth, the bad bowl haircut, and the goofy mom-dressed clothes. Bill always was a well-spring of incongruities.

But it wasn’t like something monumental had happened. Sure, it was significant that Bill was now doing stand-up, but it wasn’t a genesis; it was just another point in the evolution. Bill still very much loved rock n’ roll. It’s something often misunderstood about him. It was never a case of “Are you gonna be a comedian?” or “Are we gonna be in a band?”

Stress never died completely. In fact throughout Bill’s life the idea of revitalizing Stress at some point stayed with both of us. But Bill (and Dwight, for that matter) was just a kid doing whatever he was doing. He was on a mission that didn’t really have a specific objective. He was creative and he loved expression. This was part of the early exploration.

The night after Bill and Dwight first did stand-up at the Comedy Workshop, we went to the Zipper Lounge to celebrate. We had known about the Zipper Lounge for a while, but we didn’t know the first thing about what went on inside. We just knew the name and the location, and we knew we had to go there at some point.

There was something intrinsically funny about the name itself. The Zipper Lounge. There was also the mystery of what was behind the door. Was it a strip club? A whorehouse? What the hell was going on in there? The rest of the appeal was its lack of appeal. From the outside the place was pathetically unassuming. In an area where most of the surrounding titty bars had flashing neon “Live Nude Girls” signs or something similarly ostentatious, the Zipper Lounge had the most ordinary of signs. There was no fancy facade. It just sat unobtrusively by a restaurant and a convenience store. In fact, that’s the only reason we found the Zipper Lounge in the first place. It shared the parking lot with its neighbors and we had gone to that convenience store.

So it was something we had wanted to do for a while. We just needed the proper excuse. Bill and Dwight performing stand-up comedy together at the Workshop proved sufficient. We had already spent the first part of the night in the adult nightclub world. We now had the cockiness to match our curiosity. Dwight, Bill and I were under-age, but it was a case of us just walking up “as if.” As if we were old enough. As if this was something we did all the time. As if it was no big deal. Plus, the sex industry, as we would find out time and again in our lives, isn’t particularly picky about whose money it is taking.

We walked in to see a popcorn machine and an unappealing, unkempt older man behind a glass window in the lobby. We quickly figured out this was some kind of adult movie theater. We were kids, but we weren’t stupid.

There was a nominal cover charge and a two-drink minimum. We pay the cover and go into the main room. Great. We’re in. It was dark. Unusually dark even for a movie theater. A grainy porno movie is playing on an undersized screen. There it is: people fucking. Moving pictures of people fucking. It was definitely my first exposure to pornographic movies. And Bill’s. And Dwight’s. And anyone who ever came with us after that.

The Zipper Lounge was a huge revelation. This was long before the ubiquity of porn in any format. The home-video market barely even existed. This was a real education, both in sex and business.

The place only sold soft drinks – no liquor license – and the Cokes were $10 apiece. They were served in a glass without ice. This was going to be a warm and expensive proposition, especially for a bunch of suburban teens on a limited allowance.

Of course, there was another feature of the Zipper Lounge designed to separate you from your money. It wasn’t just an adult movie theater; there was also live entertainment. This wasn’t the kind of place where men in raincoats went in to masturbate. It had women – scantily clad women – who would come to your table and sit on your lap. It wasn’t lap dancing. It was just lap-sitting company.

“Hi, what’s your name? What do you do?” We’d lie. I don’t remember how old we said we were, and we worked in the oil industry. God, could we have been more unbelievably ridiculous? Teen oil tycoons. We were 15, maybe 16 years old. And Bill would have had a hard time passing for 15. He was baby-faced. Even into his twenties, Bill still looked like a teenager. But this place was dark, so the employees probably had as hard a time seeing us as we did them. Thank God: any time the scene in the movie was bright enough to catch a glimpse of the women working there, it wasn’t exactly a pretty sight.

There were about a dozen tables in the place and roughly the same number of women working the room. So usually only one woman would come to the table and she’d pick one guy’s lap to sit on. So, for example, Bill would be sitting there with a girl on his lap trying to flirt with him, while Dwight and I would just be sitting there.

Once on your lap, the woman was pressing you to buy her a drink. Champagnette, it was called: alcohol-free champagne. The stuff cost maybe $2 a bottle; you were getting hit for another $10 a glass. Then there’s the, “Would you like to go back to the party room with me?” That was another $50 for some time in the “party room” where, well, we weren’t really sure what happened at this point. We just didn’t have $50 to blow. “Uh, no thanks. I’m just going to watch the movie.”

After the first time we went, all of us had intense dreams that night.

I had insanely weird sexual dreams. Bill had insanely weird sexual dreams. Dwight dreamed he was gay. At school that Monday all of us were just reeling: “God, I dreamed I was …” etc. It was all clearly precipitated by our first exposure to hardcore pornographic films.

The Zipper Lounge soon became just another one of the things we did. We were going regularly but not frequently; bi-weekly or monthly. The summer after Bill’s senior year of high school, it was even more regular than that. Bill treated the whole experience like it was the most normal thing. He would call down to the theater and ask what movie was showing. He didn’t just want to know the title, he wanted to know what the movie was about, the plot. Jesus cornflakes, this was porn. But he would call down there and the poor bastard running the theatre would have to explain the film like it was the latest blockbuster.

BILL

What’s the movie playing tonight?

ZIPPER LOUNGE MANAGER

Well, tonight’s movie is called ‘Babylon Pink'.

BILL

What’s it about?

ZIPPER LOUNGE MANAGER

Well, it’s got a bunch of people having sexual fantasies to escape their boring lives. It’s directed by Cecil Howard and Henri Pachard. (Pause)

Oh, and it’s got a pee scene in it.

BILL

Geat, we’ll be right down.

And if Bill hadn’t called ahead of time, he’d ask when we got down to the theater, like the decision of whether or not we walked in was based on the plot of the movie. So, we’d pay and go in, and Bill would always get popcorn. The rest of us were worried about picking up hepatitis or some orally transmitted sexual disease from the glasses they served our drinks in; but here’s Bill diving right in. There was a movie, I guess he felt he needed popcorn.

Once we sat down, he was in a different world, just completely at ease, blissfully watching the movie. I’m sitting there half-ashamed even to be in there, thinking either the cops are going to raid the place or someone is going to blow a load that hits me in the back of the head. Something awful. Not Bill. He was in his happy place. Seeing a pornographic film was a hyper leap ahead of anything we had experienced before. Hardcore action was something entirely different than airbrushed shots in a Playboy magazine. It’s what Bill wanted. “Show me the pussy.” It could have been Bill’s epitaph.

But the Zipper also started this delusional pseudo-fantasy that we were somehow better than the other patrons; that we would rescue these girls. We were spiritual. We were artists. We were different and we could take them away. In reality we were teenagers living at home and entirely dependent on our parents for survival. We were full of shit and we were kidding ourselves. We just didn’t know it yet.

One night, Bill spent over $100 at the Zipper. Half of that was to go to the party room. He came back and was so disappointed because, for all of the money he spent, he didn’t get to have sex. He didn’t get to do anything. On the other hand I think he put himself on some higher ethical or spiritual level because he didn’t try to force the girl to do anything.

Girls were the big mystery to both Bill and Dwight in high school. One of the earliest conversations I recall having with both of them – it was right after one of the first times I was fortunate enough to have a girl agree to sleep with me – was my trying to explain sex to them. We sat there for what seemed like hours as they asked me endless questions, trying to get me to describe to their satisfaction the sensation of being inside a girl.

“So, let me get this straight, you actually touched her pussy?” “Well, yeah.” “No way. What’s it like?” How many iterations of

“What’s it like?” are there? Answer: about ninety minutes worth, because that’s how long this went on.

The thing that made Bill and Dwight different was that they weren’t afraid to admit it. Most guys who were virgins would just keep their mouths shut and act like they knew what was going on. Bill and Dwight were really open about how not laid they were getting. They didn’t want to be virgins, but at the same time they wanted their first experience to be more than something cheap.

Especially Bill. He had really bought into the white picket fence fantasy. Maybe the Zipper Lounge skewed that a bit, but not so much that it ever stopped fitting into the picture of how he wanted things to be. He certainly didn’t do anything to make it easier on himself. He didn’t drink, wouldn’t drink. Yet it was such a part of ritual high-school mating. The two were so inextricably intertwined that it almost makes you wonder: how do teenage Mormons ever hook up?

Bill used to make fun of me for drinking. I used to sneak six-packs of beer into his room. I’d sit there drinking as we were hanging out. He’d watch me and make snarky comments like, “Hey, are you a better person now?” I wasn’t special. He used to make fun of anyone and everyone for drinking.

Drinking, that’s simply not who Bill was. Not at that time, anyway. He was too sensitive, too romantic. This is a guy who in high school told me his goal in life was to become enlightened. Shit, most teen dreams fall into one of two categories. One: “I’m gonna score a touchdown at the game on Friday, then go out and drink twelve beers before I have sex with one of the cheerleaders.” Two: “I can’t wait to go to college, graduate, make a million dollars, marry a Playboy bunny, then make all of these assholes who pick on me every day jealous.” Certainly Bill wanted to get laid, and he probably wanted some combination of fame and revenge-cum-envy. But shit, he was serious: he wanted to be enlightened.

Bill. What misfit teen didn’t fancy himself as Holden Caulfield. Bill loved Catcher in the Rye. He also loved the Beatles. Thankfully he didn’t like guns, and was generally mentally stable. But as an archetypal misfit, Bill was a closer fit with Conrad Jarrett, Timothy Hutton’s character in Ordinary People. There’s a scene when Jarrett is sitting in a McDonald’s or something like that, and he goes into this deep, dark moment describing his attempt at suicide. All of a sudden, these jocks come walking in, singing a song, and they grab his hat off his head. It’s the moment he’s trying to pour his heart out, and yet the girl starts laughing at him, and he goes cold and gets mad at her. Moreover, Jarrett is growing apart from his old friends. They are all on the swim team, but as Jarrett starts coming of age, he realizes he has nothing in common with those guys.

That was very Bill.

Dwight Slode

There were two things Bill and I talked about throughout our whole lives.

One of those was spirituality. He was always very interested in it. For him, I think it started to get serious in high school when we got into transcendental meditation. Of course, it helped that Bill hated church, hated everything about it. What he hated most was that he had to go. But with TM he was exploring different spiritual issues. It was huge at the time. We had long late-night conversations about this knowledge that was dawning in our lives. I think many young people have these experiences, but at 14 and 15 in Houston, Texas, most kids are sitting around talking about women and pot or going out and getting beer. Bill and I were talking about metaphysics.

The other, and maybe bigger, overriding theme we talked about throughout our lives was characters. I think Bill was surprised by it, too: “Why are we always talking about these things?” he would ask. It was characters. Characters, characters, characters. Constantly. In fact, that’s how I met Bill. It was because I was imitating a mutual friend of ours and Bill thought it was really funny. So that became something we did. We had two notebook pages listing people in school and parents and whatever we used to imitate.

Later, when we were living together in Burbank, again: characters. Because we were working on a screenplay, we’d invent new characters and do them back and forth to each other.

We went to New York in 1991, and we did a lot of walking. That’s what’s great about New York. Bill loved to walk. It’s an odd thing, but I never met anyone who liked to walk so much. So we would walk and we started to do more characters. It was odd because his career was really starting to go well, and I remember him sensing it and being surprised: “Wow, why are these little characters that I thought were just childhood fun things to do, why do they keep recurring, and why are they so fucking funny?”

A lot of our early stuff – the father characters – that stuff goes deep. It was the first thing Bill and I talked about. One of the most valuable things about my relationship with him is that I was there when the first aspects of his humor started to emerge. I think it’s telling because in stand-up you get out, you exorcize, those things that are most incongruous in yourself; things that cause emotion in you. The first characters we had were the characters of our fathers.

You look at his early stuff and his father character is there all of the fucking time. And it became more and more elaborate and further and further over the edge until it became corrupt. The relationship between the character of the father and the son was corrupt beyond redemption, but maintained that southern civility. That’s why it entertained Bill and me no end.

It was this hopelessly incestual, horribly corrupt relationship, but the affection, odd as it seems, was there. It still makes me laugh. It’s so fucking funny. Bill would call me up – and this was repeated a million times; we never got sick of it, we just loved this character – but he would call me up:

BILL

This is your father.

DWIGHT

Hello, Daddy.

BILL

I have some special news for you.

DWIGHT

What is it, Daddy?

BILL

I’m actually your mother.

DWIGHT

Why’s that, Daddy?

BILL

I have a vagina. You were born from me.

DWIGHT

Are you sure of that?

BILL

Yes, you piece of shit.

DWIGHT

Well, you’re an old fucking coot is what you are, Daddy.

To us it was, well, it was telling. To me, Bill’s humor was about violation. Violation of common sense; violation of personal space. The idea of violation came up in his humor over and over. And certainly in the characters we had and the relationships I saw, there was violation and Bill would stab back with humor.

Bill had a lot of anger towards his parents. Why? I guess the better question would be “why not?” If you met them, you would know in a second; you could see the friction that existed. I’ve thought about them because, like every family, they are dysfunctional; but their dysfunction is phenomenal. It’s deep. There is some secret in that family. And the secret erodes it from the inside. I don’t know what it is; it’s a very odd family.

But I’d heard something, and Bill had heard the same thing, that metaphysically you are made up of three things: 50 per cent is your soul; 25 per cent is your parents; and 25 per cent is what your mom was encountering when she was pregnant. Those aspects are put into you when you are born. He heard that and it seemed to resonate with him; he tried to analyze it.

Later in life – in the late Eighties – I found a channeler. He was a psychic, and he would channel different entities, then he would give you a reading of these different entities. It was really good, so I recommended him to Bill and he had a reading done. In that channeling – and this is something that struck a chord with Bill – something that emerged was that, when Bill came into this life, he chose his parents primarily because of physical attributes.

When Bill heard that it helped to explain the friction in his family, because he felt like he was the odd man out. If you look at the Hicks family their fucking shoulders are just massive. Mr. Hicks is this big barrel of a guy. Bill and Steve – I had never seen guys that were just this barrel of power. I’ve tried to get Mrs. Hicks to talk about the rather odd genetic make-up in the Hicks family. It’s unusual for a southern family to have jet-black hair, a slightly Asian appearance and black eyes. And I said to her, “Where’s that come from? What side of the family?” And she would not talk about it.

Bill was really fast; really powerful. He was a great pitcher. Strong. He took karate early, so his balance and coordination were great. He was also a little ahead in terms of physical development. He was born in 1961; everyone else in the grade was born in 1962. So he had the advantage of great physical prowess and ability, and that gave him a certain confidence throughout life.

He unquestionably had an inner confidence, but when I think about it, it didn’t relate to women. When it came to athletics or stand-up or comedy or spirituality or intellectual conversations, he had that fucking fire in his eyes that said, “You’re not going to win this. So whatever you want to do, go ahead and bring it on.” But the one thing about his relationship with women, especially early on, was that he was over-swinging.

As we were the same age – we went through high school and middle school at the same time – we talked about women a lot. At the time “girls.” But Bill would just try too hard. He was an artist and a romantic; but teenage girls don’t like guys who are overly romantic. The last thing you want is a love letter when you are 16 years old. I know Bill wrote love letters. I know he was writing a lot about women in his journal: that’s one of the reasons he started a journal.

I think he later threw out all of his journals because they included some very, very harsh things about his parents that he didn’t want them to find out. I do know that most of what he talked about in his journal was his anger towards his parents, and girls. Also, early on, his career. Those three subjects were always there.

With regard to women he was extremely romantic. “Why do girls always talk about wanting romance and commitment? They hate guys who just want them for sex. I would never do that. I would always be respectful.” Then you see these turds, these jocks, walk off with your princess even though they are just blind idiots. Of course girls want that because they don’t want a commitment. They just want fun. They don’t want anything heavy at 16. They can’t handle it.

Bill was always confused by the double standard. I think he was always attracted to romance because it draws out the heart. A lot of artistic creative people are drawn to romance and passion. That was how he approached it; that was how he approached women: “What I want to do is be a romantic.”

He must have told me the story of Robin McCullough a million times because there was a lot of romance in it. He really liked that. He really liked going to Toys R Us, or lying in a field, or telling her that she smelled like his dog Chico. He would say: “Don’t take this wrong, but you smell like my dog, Chico, because Chico used to have to be shampooed.” He really liked the smell of that shampoo.

But nothing about his family really connected to him, except for the fact that his mother was very dedicated as a mom, even though it was in a psychotic way. Bill did love his parents, but you wouldn’t know it. That’s what was always so mysterious about Bill. When I was in Houston, I witnessed first-hand these horrible fights Bill would have with his mother and father, saying things to them that I was completely taken aback by. It was traumatic to listen to. Screaming, “I hate you. I hate you. I HATE YOU. I wish you were dead.” Saying that out loud. Yelling that.

And then his parents: “Well, I’d wish I was dead, too, if I had grades like …” Completely unfazed. His parents would not allow him to get to them at all. He wanted to hurt them, but they wouldn’t be hurt.

It was a little nutty in that house. They were a very normal family in appearances, but the crazy part is that there was all of this shit going on that no one ever talked about. I saw his journals. Horrible. Raging hatred. All capital letters. Every teenager has problems with their parents, every teenager has a separation from their parents; but maybe it’s a matter of degree. Maybe we just look at Bill’s personality, and he had that obsessive personality, so when it came time to separate from his parents, he dove in with a frickin’ vengeance. Capital ‘R’ in Rebellion. He took it to the extreme. Fury. Fury. Fury.

But despite all this he really loved his parents. I remember when we were together in New York he would call his mom every single day. It was always in the afternoon. But here’s the thing: what man in his twenties calls his mom every day? I would listen to him. He would be in the chair and he would be slung over, hunched. And it was the same monotone response: “No … No! Nooooo.” He was obviously miserable talking to her. It was strained, teeth-clenched anger. When they started the phone conversation it was friendly …

I don’t know how to define Bill politically, but it would certainly be close to libertarian, social-anarchist, whatever. So to him the fact you had to register your car was: “Why? Tell me why?” He wouldn’t do it. He would rebel against things like that. “Bill, you have to have a driver’s license.” So his mom took care of that. His mom was a bit like his personal manager. And that was a lot of the relationship: she handled his taxes; everything about everyday life she would handle.

In his stand-up and his life Bill really saw things as black and white. He wanted that. That is where the comedy came from: the incongruity, making distinctions. He was also a wise enough soul, when you got down to it; he saw the gray area. He not only saw it, but he could feel it and live it.