Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution

Bill wanted to be Dave; Dave wanted to be Bill.

Bill still hadn’t figured out that the best way to make yourself attractive to women was just to be yourself. None of us really had. Bill was funny and he knew it. Or at least he had an inkling that he was funny enough for people to take notice and that he was only going to get better at comedy. That was complemented by sheer bravado. That’s why he was in LA when most of his friends were slacking it in college. Sure, Hollywood was littered with delusional kids certain that they, too, were going to “make it,” or whatever. What distinguished Bill was that he was genuinely talented.

Bill never even made mention of interacting with any females, aside from Mitzi Shore, the owner of the Comedy Store in LA. He once wrote me that he was spending a lot of time at the library because he had a crush on a librarian and was “checking her out.” He may even have fabricated that for the sake of a pun, bad as it was.

If Bill had just been his own mostly charming self, he would have been fine. Instead of charm, however, he had schemes, very bizarre schemes. Gags. Bits. Whatever. They didn’t work in high school. They still weren’t going to work because the degree to which they were weird for the sake of being weird was rivaled only by the degree to which they were lame:

I’ve got a great new idea. We go up to the girls, right? And we ask the ketchup question. Whatever the answer is, I’ll go, “Ha ha. I knew it! Pay up, Mister!” And I’ll turn to you and you’ll look all discouraged and start counting out the money to me – five hundred dollars! After you’ve given me the five hundred bucks, I go, “Come on. All of it.” You sigh, shrug your shoulders, and reach in your pocket and hand me three pennies, a nickel, a peso, and a rattlesnake rattle. Then you go,

“Wait a minute, I’ve got a chance to get even … Have you girls ever ridden in the back seat of a bike made for two?” Whatever their answer is, you go, “All right!” I go, “Shoot!” and you stick out your hand and I give you back the peso, the rattlesnake rattle, and the button off my shirt. Pretty weird, huh?

The question was rhetorical, I know, but, yeah, it was pretty weird, as well as creepy, strange and absurd.

In addition to asking Dave to hook him up somehow, Bill was also pleading for stories. He bagged on me for living in a “city where half of the population of Stratford moved to", yet not digging up enough gossip to satisfy his curiosity. “Stories. I want stories.” Despite physically being in La-La land, mentally he was still half in a Lone Star State of mind. These were mostly people Bill had spent a good chunk of time and energy either a) making fun of or b) trying to get away from. Now, Bill wanted to know what they were up to.

He couldn’t cut the umbilical cord. On top of it, Bill was probably trying to experience college vicariously. The luxury of doing trivial things was something he didn’t have. But for someone who actually knew what he wanted to do with his life, and didn’t drink, college was really a poor fit. Plus, he was having trouble masking his homesickness and his general misery, having second, maybe third and even fourth thoughts about his LA plans.

Guess who was at the Comedy Store last week? Richard Pryor! He didn’t go up but he was hanging around. I, of course, wasn’t there that night. DAMBO! Oh well – I guess I’ll be spending a couple of nights at the Comedy Workshop when I’m [in Houston]. Boy, I hope I can stay longer. Not enough time to try out all the new goil gags. I was really going to use this Houston trip as a determiner of my next move, but now it’ll be kind of hard to do in only four days. It’s really tough out here. You have to understand what I’m talking about when I say I want out of here. The Comedy Store is filled with guys that just ain’t superstars. I want to be great, and believe me, that doesn’t happen in just one year. Look at Richard Pryor or Rodney Dangerfield – years and years and years! You see what I mean? There is no hurry for me now. I must think in terms of longevity. Think of the ups and downs those two have been through. Yikerbooes! The Comedy Store is a comic factory for producing these LA modsters. It’s very scary. I don’t know what to do, ya know? Stay out here and take a chance of not becoming jaded and bored with everything, or leave – give up my position out here, and go to college for a few years and work in a club with a more productive atmosphere. See what I mean? I think I’m gonna take off now. Hang loose. Keep cool. Check you later. Gotcha on the rebound. Shoot me in the face.

Your buddy,

Bill

Bill’s letters were like children’s books. They were as much about pictures as words, and almost every letter he sent me from LA had some pictorial history of Stress. It was something he hadn’t given up on and, inasmuch as that was the case, Bill was still half in Houston. The novelty of LA was wearing off.

The thing is, Bill was doing exceptionally well, by any measure. He had been in Los Angeles less than a year and he was getting regular stage time at the Comedy Store and the second location in Westwood by UCLA. That in itself was no mean feat. On top of that, Bill was living the “someone is going to see me on stage and put me in their TV show” dream.

That’s almost how it happened. Bill got a part in Bulba, the pilot for a network sitcom cast in a mold similar to that of Fantasy Island. Starring was Lyle Waggoner of Wonder Woman fame. Bill played the part of Marine Sergeant Phil Repulski, a guard at the Madcap American Embassy Office.

This was still in the days when TV in America was dominated by the three major networks: ABC, NBC and CBS. It’s the kind of break people have probably literally killed for at some point. Bill just kind of backed into it. He always did that. Throughout the early part of his career I heard other comedians marvel about how Hicks got work without ever picking up the phone. Even during the times when Bill was getting his phone cut off for not paying the bill, work was still finding him.

When Bulba happened Bill was totally stoked. His part wasn’t even a stretch for him. Basically he got hired on his impersonation of his father. Do that for twenty-two minutes, and everything else would be cream cheese.

He had some stupid catchphrase like, “Ba-loop baba loop-bop.” Just a nonsense word. And one of his sight gags was raising the flag up the flagpole while his pants were falling down. This was very broad, not heady, comedy. He called me, bragging about that scene in particular. The area around the flagpole was fenced off but there were four or five hundred girls from the local Catholic school gathered nearby watching the shoot. They kept cheering Bill on during his scene.

Bill was going to like TV. I remember thinking: “Wow, that’s it. Bill is going to be a star.”

On one hand, I was happy because, shit, my friend was going to be a fucking star. On the other, I was upset because I thought, “This is the end of Stress.” We had both been operating under the assumption that Bill was going to go out there for a little while and that I was going to get a few things in order, then we would get the band back together. Every conversation we had, every letter he wrote: girls and Stress. Bill acted like Stress was something that was going to happen in the future.

In hindsight, Bill was simply keeping all avenues open. I want to be a musician; I want to be a comedian; I want to be a writer; I want to make films; I want to do television.

Only the pilot was an unfunny piece of crap. The network and the rest of America agreed. The pilot aired once, and that was it. No series. No nothing. The end. And it’s not like any of the schoolgirls went home with him. He got a decent check out of the deal. He said it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $9000 for a week’s work. Not bad.

Bill knew a network sitcom was a completely retarded thing to be doing, but he had just got to LA. To get a sitcom that quickly had been a total coup; he didn’t have the luxury of turning it down. And he had been genuinely excited about it. Moreover, it got him a fucking high-power talent agency. By doing this one stupid thing, he advanced a thousand steps.

It’s strange. Bill was worried about getting jaded and bored. He was homesick, yet if he had left after his first year in LA, Bill could have counted himself a bigger success than 99 per cent of the people that ever cross the Mojave Desert. Considering the amount of human wreckage LA causes on a daily basis, Bill was kicking ass.

But he had something bigger in mind. “As seen on TV” wasn’t who he was. And he wasn’t digging it.

Maybe if Bill knew that the vast majority of the world’s pornography was produced in his backyard, he might have bucked up.

David DeBesse

When we graduated high school, I didn’t really think much of it because it was just this thing that happened. But Bill was so honestly happy for us; it was striking. I remember seeing him right after the ceremony; he was really thrilled. It was just a real honest enjoyment that we were done. It was the stepping-off point for this huge life he envisioned for himself.

It didn’t really occur to me at the time, but maybe it’s because when he graduated, he packed up and started something. For the rest of us, we were sticking to the script. This is what you do: you graduate high school, you go to college. It was a continuation of something that was very much more the norm. Maybe Bill’s excitement was because he had a different sense of what was going to happen, or what could happen.

I don’t know if he had any use for high school other than, if he did well enough to stay in, then he could continue living by himself and work at the Comedy Workshop. It was a means to a much greater end for him. He knew if he graduated, he could then go on and do all of the things he wanted. I think he saw it in a much wider scope than we did.

It was an interesting time for me; it was almost like reading Catcher in the Rye. I had been surrounded to a large extent by people who were like me. And being around Kevin and Bill and Charles made me aware for the first time of how much else there was. Looking at my own life from a different context, I had this strange, bland set-up for myself; a not-very-interesting plan of going to school. I tried to play football in college at Southwest Texas State but I had discovered I wasn’t very good. But I actually approached college very differently because of Bill. It’s hard to give one person credit for that but because of the whole thing that happened — getting in the band, meeting Bill, expanding my outlook – I started doing things I wouldn’t have done otherwise. I said to myself, “I’m just not going to be on this narrow path.”

I took classes in music theory, and ultimately I ended up taking a non-majors acting class for fun. And that hooked me. What had been my plan of economics as pre-law changed to my being an acting major, and going on to having this pathetic career for all of these years.

The whole reason I took the non-majors acting course, was because of Bill. I got interested in acting because at his urging I decided to sign up with a local talent agency. I ended up not getting involved with them when they wanted money and it was clearly a scam, but they later called me to let me know about auditions for the movie Taps. The producers were trying to find the leads from unknowns, and were casting in Houston. I ended up getting down to the final eight, not overall but in Houston, and that was all because of Bill saying, “Do this. Go do this.” He was way more confident about it than I was. “You can do this.” So, I really do have him to blame, now that I think about it.

Anyway, I had transferred from Southwest Texas State to the University of Texas, and changed my major. I was taking a summer course in comedy by a professor, Lee Abraham, and it was a silly class in that the teacher knew in advance he wasn’t sure where it was going to take him. By and large the course dealt with physical comedy, using material from Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin films. We talked about the elements of comedy in taking a normal situation and turning it into something funny. For example, you are having lunch in the cafeteria, how can you make that funny?

I talked to the teacher and told him my friend was a stand-up and maybe he could come in. Bill did. There was this whole discussion about what you could do – everything leading up to something – then it reached this point where Bill would say, “Then you’re funny.” You do something funny or you say something funny. He couldn’t break it down any more than that. Ultimately you have to have this skill. You can talk about it, but you need actually to be able to do it.

Either you are funny or you aren’t. Bill was funny but there was nothing he could tell people to teach them how to do it. And that could frustrate him. He really didn’t understand that he was special and that things were easier for him than for other people.

He experienced that with the audience as well. He wanted the audience to go from A to Z in one show. People show up to get a laugh and maybe they are going to leave at C. And maybe when they are at home they are going to think about it later and perhaps find their way to ? over a few months. It was going to take time. But it was hard for Bill to not have them be Jim Jones converts by the end of the night. He got it. But people weren’t as sharp as he was.

To say that Bill was confident and knew what he was trying to say, and felt the fact that he was right – well, he really did believe the stuff he was talking about – that doesn’t mean he had no concern about the feelings of others. Knowing him well, I also saw the person who was affected by things. On some level you have to think that was one of his best qualities because it is also the genesis of wanting to change the world; wishing to make it better because you really want life to be good for people, not just to show somebody they are wrong. Sometimes that is hard to do with Bill because so much of what we saw of him was his public life.

When somebody is the class clown, as Bill was, it is hard to know when he’s being himself and when he isn’t. People talk about how he was trying to change the world, but he also just loved to laugh. He really enjoyed laughing at things. You get the right people together – and one of the things I remember most about Stress is how much we laughed – and you can laugh yourself silly doing the most ridiculous things.

But I know things did bother him sometimes because there seemed to be something incomprehensible to him on a simple level. For example, when I saw Bill for the last time, he and Kevin had just had a fight about playing music together. It was about playing the blues. Kevin didn’t want to and Bill was really upset about that. He was just bothered by it because he couldn’t understand what the deal was. “Why couldn’t he just play the blues with me?” It wasn’t like he was angry at Kevin. That was never the impression I got. But he just couldn’t understand, and it really mattered to him.

It gets kind of easy to talk about Bill and forget he did things that were black-and-white and things that were controversial. Or to be more accurate about it, for the purposes of his act he saw the world in very black-and-white ways.

Bill as a messenger is not necessarily the same as the message. There are people who espouse the notion that Bill was very spiritual, and in his own mind he was a preacher – he said as much to his mother – and he was really trying to make the world a better place through his belief system. That’s all true, but at the same time he was talking about pornography and drug use and things that were a lot more controversial. Some people want to sweep the vehicle of the message under the rug. It’s: let’s see Bill as this person with really wonderful goals to change society and make the world a better place, but let’s not talk about the way he did it because that’s kind of uncomfortable. I’m not into drug use in any way, shape or form, but so what? That doesn’t mean I couldn’t listen to his stuff and laugh and think about the hypocrisy in his comedy. You don’t have to agree with everything he talked about specifically to agree with the overall message.

Just look at the world in a broader context, even if you are talking about drug use. It’s a horrible thing, then you get the same people going, “Well, we’ve done our job today. We worked on our campaign for ‘Just Say “No” to Drugs.’ Let’s get to the bar because there’s still half an hour of Happy Hour left.” They’re doing the same thing. It’s just a different vehicle.

I find it odd when someone can’t stand back and look at the whole picture. I think people get so close to something in a weird way that they get hooked into an idea that Bill was this way and he was perfect, or he was this way and he was horrible. He was just a human being like everybody else. Albeit one with an amazing energy and gifted in so many ways.

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_646b99a4-65ba-5f47-9138-80b4a1d0fb28)

After it was clear that the The Suburbs wasn’t going to get made, wasn’t going to get bought, wasn’t going to get anything, Hicks was battling a bout of geographical fatigue. It was compounded by a string of gigs back home in the summer of 1982. He used the shows to take the thought of going back home to Texas for a test drive.

In Houston, Bill tracked down Laurie. They went out on a few dates. In Austin, Bill hung out with Kevin and David Johndrow, who along with Brent Ballard had moved into a house together near the University of Texas. Laurie, whom he had never got over, was in Texas. His best friends were in Texas. There were good comics in Texas. Everything Bill liked in the world was in Texas. What was in LA? Everything else?

During the trip to Texas Bill got into astrology and numerology and any “-ology” he could get his hands on. With numerology, Bill found his number. In numerology, numbers are assigned to letters, and you can derive a number from your name. For “William Melvin Hicks” Pythagorean numerology produces a number of six; the characteristics of a six are to be generally responsible but anxious and guilt-ridden. He worked this out for all of his friends as well.

Bill had a favorite astrologer working out of a bookstore in Austin, and took Laurie to get her chart done. Then he got his chart done. Then he got their chart together done. Bill became unglued because his and Laurie’s compatibility was off the chart. Sagittarius and Aries generally have a great deal of compatibility in their signs, but theirs was exceptional. Bill also decided he was going to have his and Dwight’s chart together done. He called Dwight up, very excited because Bill and Dwight were an even better match than Bill and Laurie. “He said basically that if I had been born with a pussy we’d be perfect together,” said Slade.

Bill’s hiatus from Hollywood lasted a couple of months. When he got back to LA uncertainty – where to live, how to approach his career, should he reconnect with Laurie – was permeating every aspect of his life. He and Dwight got it into their heads that the way to make a breakthrough, to get guidance, was to open up to the universe, to allow for any spiritual force to enter their lives.