Kitabı oku: «Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution», sayfa 2

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.