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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.