Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution

Bill called me up, “Dude, I’m back in Houston.” I wasn’t surprised to hear Bill’s voice on the other end of my phone, but I was surprised by what he was saying. “Oh yeah. Cool,” I said. Bill had taken a break from LA once before. It wasn’t for very long, maybe a couple of weeks. But he spent so much time talking about it in advance that it seemed longer. This one was unexpected. The first time, in every phone call and every letter he made mention of how he was taking a brief hiatus from LA. This time he had barely said anything until he was already back.

“Dude, I’m here to stay.” Again a surprise. And a much bigger one at that. “What about Los Angeles?” Never let it be said I didn’t have a flair for the obvious.

“Nope. I’m done. I think Texas is going to be the Third Coast,” he opined. That was a term that had been bandied about regionally in recent years. There was New York and LA, but Texas was teeming with creative types as well who didn’t much care for the arrogance and narcissism offered in either main option. So with the Gulf of Mexico to the right, locals proclaimed themselves the Third Coast.

“We can make it happen here. The Outlaw Comics are as good as anything going on in LA. And they just don’t like me out there. I’m just not getting anywhere.” Bill was certainly selling himself short again – they adored him at the Store and he had already done network TV – but he wasn’t the first Texan to go west, get bummed out and bored, and come home. Hell, Riley Barber and Steve Epstein had both done it within the last year, give or take. Still, his coming back to Houston was kind of like his admitting defeat in Hollywood. On one hand, Bill felt that’s what he was doing. But deep down, he also really did feel that he could do more in Houston. It had a real comedy scene. He had a whole base of friends there. It was a real city (the 4th largest in the US). He could still tour all over the place.

So here he was, back in Texas. Bill wasn’t done dropping surprises on me though, and the next was Hiroshima. “Dude, hear me out.

I know you are going to freak when I say this, but tomorrow night you and I are going to take psilocybic mushrooms together.”

“Yeah, right.”

“No, dude. Seriously.”

All I had ever heard about mushrooms was that they caused people to go insane. My parents had convinced me that tripping had triggered my brother Curt’s schizophrenia. Even all my pot-smoking friends had bizarre stories about hallucinations. I drew a line and became categorical. “I’ll drink. I’ll smoke pot, but I’m never going to trip. I’m never going to take acid and I’m never going to take mushrooms.”

Bill was telling me: “No, it’s not like that. It totally depends on who you do it with. Nothing can harm us because we are so close. We will keep this positive ball of light around us.”

“No, I can’t, Bill. I can’t.”

“Kevin. You’re going to do it. You’re going to do it.”

I’ve always said it: only Bill Hicks could have gotten me to try hallucinogenic drugs. Why? Because he was so against it. He was more against it than my parents – shit, my parents watched what they believed was the destruction of their son at the hands of hallucinogens — than I was, than anybody I had ever met outside of the priesthood! He was against any chemical. He and Dwight, they were like the self-righteous brothers. After getting over the I-can’t-believe-it aspect of it, I started to think about reconsidering my stance.

Even my girlfriend, Jere, who had an extensive drug background before we met, was telling me: “No Kevin, you don’t want to do that. I can’t believe, after all the things you’ve said, putting down people for doing drugs, now you are actually going to go out and do it.”

Bill: “You’re going to try this, Kevin. Trust me.” Bill was Obi-Wan Kenobi: “These aren’t the droids you are looking for.” And this was his Jedi mind trick.

I drove down to Houston from Austin. Late that afternoon Bill came and picked me up, and we took mushrooms. One of the other comics, Steve Epstein, I think, had procured them for Bill. He had been going out to a field by the airport to pick them. A little cowshit. A little rain. A little East Texas warmth. Boom. It really was like magic. These suckers were fresh from the field.

We drove down to the Montrose area where Bill was performing that night. We had dinner in the gay area of Houston at a vegetarian restaurant called The Hobbit. “Gay” couldn’t have been more appropriate because we sat there and laughed our asses off.

Bill went on stage that night and described it afterwards by saying he thought he could read the entire audience’s mind. Collectively. Individually. He had established some kind of connection.

Even before drugs, Bill was trying to push the envelope. He was always saying to me, “There’s gotta be something else out there. There has to be more meaning.” Bill felt like there was something he was missing, some secret psychological passage or some track to try to take things to another level. Suddenly, he thought he had found it.

That night he had an incredible mind meld with the audience, and I was right there with him. Totally in sync.

That launched the next incarnation of Bill. After that night on stage he told me, “This is it. This is the trick. I’ve got to start taking mushrooms every night before I go on stage.” He did. Again Bill wasn’t an 85 per cent kind of guy. Once he made the decision, he was committed. Full on.

Bill spent every night after that chasing the same experience. He was textbook in his failure. The same dosage came up a bit short on night two. “Maybe if I just take more mushrooms.” So night three he took more mushrooms. Same result? Still can’t read the audience’s mind? Night four he took even more. Ad infinitum.

It didn’t work. It never works. That’s the thing about drugs: you can never recapture that virgin moment where you get that rush and that new part of the world just opens up.

His frustration was compounded by the fact he was sharing it with an audience who was watching him bomb more spectacularly each time out. Bill was speeding down a dead-end alley; and the closer he was getting to the wall, the faster he was going, the more fuel he was trying to pump into his body. He was going full tilt when he hit the wall.

Bill lay on stage curled up in a fetal position. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

Throughout his life, Bill made comments about how he felt like an alien on this planet. Like there was something about him that was different. He didn’t know how to have a pleasant but inane conversation, didn’t know how to watch football with the guys; didn’t know how to play golf and would not talk about it like it was a fucking spiritual journey – all of the things that allow you to pass through this world undetected, Bill was no good at. So he felt.

Then you watched him, or you were around him, and he would say and do things that made you think, “God he really is like an alien.” And the way he put it was so funny, because he sounded like someone who had just landed on this planet. He turned to me and asked: “What’s alcohol?”

This was after ages of hanging out in clubs watching people get inebriated and ruthlessly making fun of them; after years of him and Dwight doing impersonations, imitating drunks and the dumb things they say and do. But Bill was looking for what might be next. “What’s alcohol. What does it do?”

I told him: “Well, it kills your inhibitions. It makes it so you don’t give a fuck about anything or what you do in front of other people.” Shit, wrong answer. I mean, it was the right answer but it was the wrong thing to say to Bill.

“That sounds perfect. What’s a drink? What’s a drink people drink?”

“I don’t know?” I was caught offguard and still processing the flip Bill had just flopped. “Tequila. Maybe margaritas. That’s a drink people drink.” This is Texas. It’s hot. Margaritas are a dietary staple and tequila is what makes a margarita a “drink.”

“Okay, I’ll have seven,” Bill announced. He had no patron saint of moderation. Bill knocked back seven shots of tequila before going up to do his set. Bill had his first train wreck to accompany his first drink. The disaster started while Bill was putting back the tequila, when he had the unfortunate pleasure of hearing the paying customers fawning over the mediocre comics performing before him. Bill had brewed contempt for the audience before he even got up there. When he got on stage, it was blind rage.

It wasn’t just being drunk; tequila is a harsh drink, it puts an edge on everything. So if you’re predisposed to anger and hatred, Bill couldn’t have chosen a better (read: worse) way to lubricate his rage. Bill was combustible and the tequila had lit his fire — it was only a matter of time. He tore into the audience, berating them and letting them know how much he hated them, how much they were responsible for the fact that everything in the world sucked.

“You people, you’re the ones responsible for Gary Coleman! You’re the reason why Diff’rent Strokes is the number-one show on TV!” Bill had never had a drop of alcohol in his life. Not. One. Single. Drop. He went straight from that to seven shots of tequila straight. Belligerent. Fuck You. All of that.

He was ranting about how the flag didn’t represent anything and he started talking about America’s Bullshit Wars. Vietnam was a Bullshit War. Korea was a Bullshit War. To all rational observers and armchair pundits, we were on the eve of getting ourselves into another Bullshit War.

There was a couple sitting near the stage who were none too pleased with Bill’s views on foreign affairs. At some point Mrs. Patriot Missile had heard enough: “My husband fought in Korea for your freedom.” She tore into Bill. The husband, a big, older guy with anchor tatts on his arms, sat there as the fireworks started going off. He and the missus were Americans, for sure, right down to their colors: blue collar, redneck and white trash. “He fought in that war so you could have the freedom and the right to stand up there and say what you’re saying.”

Bill fired back: “Your husband didn’t do shit for me. I didn’t ask him to fight for me. I didn’t ask him for shit.”

They exchanged a few “did not” “did too” blows. Then the vet stood up. He was also super-drunk. He flared out his chest and verbally beat on it like a simian: “You don’t know what you are talking about. My friends laid down their lives for your freedom.”

Bill. “No they didn’t. No they didn’t. No they didn’t.” Bill wasn’t backing off. “The price of freedom is high? Bullshit.” Bill didn’t buy into it. “Freedom is free. Freedom is fucking free!”

It’s amazing that episode didn’t end in violence. For all of the inflammatory shit he said on stage, for all of the staunchly political views he took, and for all the antagonizing of audience members he did, it’s somewhere between statistical anomaly and miracle that Bill didn’t get the shit beaten out of him on a regular basis.

When people got up to leave Bill’s shows, Bill didn’t just let them go. He encouraged them to go with epithets: “Go. Go ahead, you fuckers, leave. Go home to your American Gladiators. Go. Get the fuck out.”

It’s not to say that Bill’s shows weren’t without incident, it’s just that the incidents seldom ended up with Bill being on the receiving end of a fist or chair. Not that he didn’t deserve it every now and then.

LA had caused Bill to re-examine some of his deepest-held beliefs. His comedy had been stagnating. And before, when he got into a rut in Houston, he could always blame it on being in Houston: you were only going to go so far when you were a thousand plus miles from the epicenter of showbiz. That excuse was off the table. In LA he had been performing at the same club where Richard Pryor got his start, and that was deeply symbolic to Bill.

Drugs were seeping out of the walls at the Comedy Store in LA. Legend has it that Pryor himself used to have a bodyguard who would escort him from the stage to his car after the show because there were so many drug dealers and hangers-on waiting around who wanted to give him free blow. He needed a bodyguard just to get out of there or it was a three-day coke binge waiting to happen.

People wanted to hand the really good comedians free drugs. That’s just the way it was. It was the Eighties. This wasn’t like a high-school keg party, this was Bill’s workplace. And it was one of the few places in LA that he liked to hang out. So Bill was surrounded by it.

Bill also wanted to take the spirituality and the TM and do something with it. He was sick of talking about levitating, he wanted to levitate. He didn’t want to imagine his third eye, he wanted to see through it. He was ready for all of it. All of the things he had read about and learned about with Dwight, he was ready for them to manifest themselves in some way. Bill wanted it to be something more than a concept. He wanted to open his eyes and see trees talking to him. He wanted to split across time. Static to kinetic.

So, comedy-wise he was feeling stagnant; drugs were all around him, and drugs might help facilitate advancing his spiritual quest. And maybe his deeply held beliefs weren’t that deeply held. For a person of such great conviction, he was hopeless at making radical changes.

Plus, he was getting reassurance from his peers. Guys like Steve Epstein were able to say, “Bill, it’s totally normal. Nothing bad is going to happen. It will only last a few hours. There is no physical damage.” So Bill tried it. And it was, “Oh my God. This is the answer to everything.”

So in just a few weeks Bill had gone from teetotaler to drinker and drug user. Given Bill’s personality, it wasn’t difficult to see where this would eventually wind up.

Bill had spent so much time and energy putting down people who used drugs it was practically a second career. So when he turned up in Austin after the mushroom experience wanting to drop acid, it put me in the awkward position of having to look like a total hypocrite. Among the users Bill had made fun of were my girlfriend Jere and her friends. Now I had to ask Jere, the object of Bill’s ridicule, to get drugs for him and me.