Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution

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.

For example, I disagreed with a lot of the things he said about children. Yet when I looked at Bill, I realized he would be an outstanding father, because children love people who play, people who are passionate; they love interesting people; they love romance and mystery and adventure. The thing is that Bill was really in tune with his childhood self, so he would have been a great father. What he hated was what society made of children. But once he was around kids, he would see the grey areas. He certainly loved his nieces and nephews.