Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution

420 Pages·2005·1.6 MB·English

by  Kevin Booth

BILL HICKS
AGENT OF EVOLUTION
KEVIN BOOTH
AND
MICHAEL BERTIN
Contents
Cover
Title Page
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
EPILOGUE
INDEX
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
Kevin Booth
Tripping was very ritualistic for us. It was something we’d prepare for.
Meditation. Fasting. Flotation tanks. We even had meals prepared for the
comedown, and usually had instruments set up as well so we could play
music together to ride out the end of the trip. We weren’t just taking
psychedelic drugs and running around like crazy people.
It almost always involved us going to my family’s ranch near
Fredericksburg, Texas. It was 70 sprawling acres of hill country, pocked
with enormous live oak trees. There was a 2600-square-foot tract home
with a garden and an orchard. Out back was the pond. The reflection of
the sun setting over the water made even the monochromatic Texas heat
come alive with intense color.
Parts of Bill’s routines weren’t comedy or jokes: they were directives.
When he was talking about mushrooms and he said, “Go to nature. They
are sacred,” he wasn’t kidding. Tripping would allow Bill to commune
with nature.
Bill, David Johndrow and I went out to the ranch to trip. We planned
and timed everything out. Shrooms were sacred, but they weren’t the
only thing on the menu. This time we were taking acid. We timed when
we dropped so that we would start tripping right as the sun was setting.
Once we were tripping, full-on tree-vibrating star-dripping wigging out,
we each often had a separate sense of what the others were doing. There
would be times when something bad was happening to one of us, and
one of the others would just appear. We’d come together and work
through it. Then we would have times when we all went out and drifted
off on separate paths, only to reconvene at some unspoken spot hours
later.
At one point on this particular trip I came across Bill as he was looking
pensive and distraught. He was in the yard all by himself, walking in
circles. And he was gradually wearing a groove into the grass. I heard
him muttering to himself over and over, “What is this thing?
Goddammit, what is this thing?” He just kept circling and muttering,
circling and muttering. “What is this thing?”
I asked him: “Bill, what are you talking about? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, dude. There’s just this thing. I don’t know what it is,
but I’ve got this thing in me.” Bill was pointing to his side, right where
his pancreas is, as he was saying this. “I’ve got this thing inside me,” he
said. “It needs to come out. It’s like an upside-down cross inside of my
body. It needs to come out.”
Right when he said that – the “upside-down cross” bit – I broke out
laughing. Sometimes everything seems funny when you are tripping
your nuts off, unless, of course, something is distressing you; and this
was obviously distressing Bill.
Fuck. Too late. It sent Bill off.
“Oh, fucking forget it,” he fired back, and then, visibly agitated, he
stormed off into the woods.
I followed him. “No, I wasn’t trying to make fun of you, Bill. What’s
up? What’s wrong?” This was my friend. We were tripping but, shit, he
was trying to tell me something important. It got fucked in translation.
Drugs can do that.
I tried to assure him I wanted to understand what he was talking
about, but he was not going to risk being laughed at again. “Forget it.
Nothing,” Bill said. I put up a few more weak protests. He brushed them
off. And that was that.
That was the summer of 1982, more than a full decade before Bill died
of pancreatic cancer.
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 upperclass 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