Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution

Me: “Man, that’s not going to last long.” Bill: “Yeah, that’ll work for about two years.”

The booking agent told us we needed to play more popular songs, suggesting we learn “My Sharona” and some other hits that were popular that month. It’s all anyone ever said: “You gotta do covers before you can be in an original band.” That used to bum Bill out. “No, we want to be original right off the bat.”

It was a defeat for Bill. He was hanging a lot more on Stress than Charles Lloyd and I were at this point. Charles was going to college. I was going to college. Without anything to keep us in Houston and keep us in Stress, those two things weren’t going to change.

In addition to this lesson, Bill really was an exceptional comedian. Even at the age of 17. No doubt about it. And, as much as I loved making music with my friend, the truth is Bill was fifty times the comedian that he was musician. He belonged on stage, but he was better off telling jokes.

I went to college. Bill stayed in Houston for his senior year. I returned to Houston regularly so we could still jam together. We were still Stress if only in name. When we weren’t playing music, we were working on film ideas. We had a super-8 camera and we used to concoct scenes. It was very Steve McQueen. We’d block out the shot – usually doing an action scene where we would line the stairwell with mattresses and have some sort of fall or body slam – then “shoot” it. Point the camera and … “Action!”

Oh, there was no film in the camera. We couldn’t afford it.

We also watched the TV show Soap religiously. Bill loved Soap. It was appointment television.

That summer, Bill stayed indoors at all costs. It’s like he was a space alien – like direct sunlight wasn’t good for him. He could only survive in dark, air-conditioned environments. The whole summer consisted of a handful of activities: eat, sleep, play guitar, watch movies, watch Soap. The only difference was that now the episodes of Soap were reruns. It didn’t matter to Bill. He was still parked in front of the TV every Tuesday night. In reality, though, he was just biding his time until he headed out west.

The thinking was: Kevin goes back to college, Bill goes to LA, and in a year or so, when we both get things going, we’ll get the band back together. Exactly how and where that would happen was never addressed.

Bill’s parents agreed to finance his comedy career as long as he would also go to college. So he signed up at LA Community College for a martial arts class. The first day – and Bill was going in there with some experience of the basic moves from previous instruction – the instructor lines them up and has them facing off. The whole class is filled with kids wanting to be in gangs: tatted-up kids with shaved heads in the days before every kid had a shaved head and a tattoo. And it was a lot more scary and dangerous than it is today where half the kids are copping to some gangsta-rap fantasy lifestyle they saw on an MTV video. These kids were the real shit.

So Bill had to face off with one of these kids. The first thing, the first day, the guy punches Bill right in the nose. Didn’t break it, but gave him a nice bloody face. It was all too perfectly Bill. There would be something that he was going to get into, and he was excited about the class. He had his hopes up about how good this was going to be, put a lot of energy into it, then the very second he shows up to get started something goes horribly wrong and he bails out immediately.

It’s rare for kids to be like this, and I didn’t know anyone else at that age who could be so self-deprecating. “I’m goofy-looking.” “I don’t fit in.” He called me up to tell me about it. “Oh my God, Kevin, I got my ass kicked by this guy.” And he was laughing at himself.

Bill had that kind of vulnerability, and it allowed him to capture people’s hearts. It wasn’t contrived or synthetic. Even towards his later days, you still had the feeling when he was on stage that if you yelled something from the audience, even though he might have the perfect comeback and put you in your place, or even explode and start screaming expletives at you, it really would hurt his feelings, because he was always trying to open up his heart to people. It takes a lot more of a man and a lot more of a warrior to stand before people in that way – have an open heart, and put yourself at risk.

When Bill arrived in Los Angeles, September 1980, he took a cab from the airport straight to the Comedy Store. Since he was a naive hick, he might as well play the part. He walked in with his suitcase still in hand and asked Andy Huggins, the comedian minding the store during the day, “When do I go on?” He played the part all the way through his audition for HBO that evening, bringing his suitcase on stage.

Bill didn’t get the HBO special, but he got the attention of Mitzi, who instantly liked him and started giving him regular spots.

His parents paid for the one-bedroom apartment, he rented in the Valley. He had a bed, a TV, a tape-deck, and not much else. He had a small support group with Steve Epstein and Riley Barber, but Bill spent a lot of time by himself: reading, going for long walks in Griffith Park and along Mulholland Drive. He also wrote tons of letters to friends. He didn’t even have a phone.

Sam Kinison finally turned up in LA about four months after Bill. When he got to town, he didn’t get stage time from Mitzi, he got a door job. He had debts from the “Lam” show and he was staying on Epstein’s floor. He asked to borrow $1000 from Bill. Sam thought he’d be flush. Bill balked. Sam went off on him.

A couple of nights later, as Bill was walking down the street, Sam pulled up alongside him in his car and went off. “You’re out here because I put you on that show I lost eight thousand bucks on.” He berated Bill because Mitzi liked Bill more, then he accused Bill of stealing his schtick. “You’re doing me. I brought you out here and you do my act.” Sam threw a can of pop at Bill, then drove off. Bill lent him the money.

The truth of the matter is that despite the fact that Sam might have been the face of Houston comedy when he left for LA, and would go on commercially to be the most successful of the Outlaws, Sam wasn’t nobody’s favorite person, except Sam’s.

Bill had been asking around town and everyone told him the same thing: if you have a good comedy script, you can own LA.

Bill was going to write a comedy. A teen comedy at that. He was 19. He was funny. Never mind that the bulk of his writing to this point had been relegated to private and semi-private papers – letters, love letters and his journal. Because of his age and his chronological proximity to high school, Bill felt he would be writing the first legitimate teen comedy ever. He began hounding Dwight to move to LA and join him. Bill was now the property of the William Morris Agency. He was a client of theirs, and that meant he had a real opportunity to get the script into the hands of people who could make things happen. It wasn’t just getting read; Bill’s agent would certainly read it. If it was good, then William Morris would put it out to people who could turn the words into pictures moving at twenty-four frames per second.

In July of 1981 Dwight moved down to Burbank to join Bill in his tiny studio apartment in the Valley. Bill’s friends were sitting through chemistry classes and studying for midterms, but he was living the dream. Now, best of all, Dwight was in on the script for The Suburbs.

“We worked on it non-stop in July – eight to ten hours a day to get it done,” says Slade. They woke up, started working, broke for lunch, then worked some more.

Shore offered to help Bill and Dwight get the script typed by a professional. They delivered their stack of handwritten pages. About a third of the way through the typist told Bill he was on target for about a 300-page script. The rule of thumb in Hollywood is that a page of script equals about a minute of film. A five-hour teen epic? No agent, no development executive, no development executive’s assistant would do anything but laugh at a 300-page anything. The brief was teen, not Tolstoy.

They began editing, paring down their adolescence to something shorter and more readable.

The pitch: Fast Times meets Catcher in the Rye. Their timing was right: they were actually submitting their script right as Fast Times at Ridgemont High was going into pre-production. But the material was nowhere near as funny as the former nor as poignant as the latter.

The adage is that your first work is autobiographical. And The Suburbs was pulled straight from their Nottingham Forest upbringing. The main character was even named Kevin.

They were trading off the memories of how horrible it was to grow up in the suburbs. The truth is, the suburbs of Houston were actually a pleasant place to be a kid. Nobody was trying to kill you and there was plenty of parking. The only crime against humanity was that it might have been a little prosaic and sterile. The Hicks had a nice house and money. Bill had his own room and never had to go to bed hungry. They were trying to play up the lost childhood – what Bill thought his life had been to that point. The main character realizes he can survive this thing and just be himself.

As real as Bill and Dwight thought The Suburbs was going to be, just because they were teens writing about teens didn’t make it exceptional or even novel. Half of everyone in LA fancied themselves a screenwriter, and half of those people had a quasi-autobiographical script in which they also fancied themselves to be Holden Caulfield. Even those past their teen years were still scarred enough by the experience of high school that it appeared in their writing.

While agent John Levine was impressed with the writing, the script never made it past his desk. A great comedy script was gold. But before you could convert that gold into actual dollars, agents wanted to know you could replicate the feat; that you hadn’t just fluked your way into something brilliant. They wanted you to have not just one, but two, maybe even three scripts. Then they would take you seriously.

According to Slade: “We didn’t know that yet, and when we did finally put it into someone’s lap, which was not until February of the next year, that’s what happened. He said, ‘I want to see another. And I want to see another. Then we’re going to talk.’ It was encouraging because he really did like us, but we had shot our wad and Bill was just not into writing another script, even though we had more ideas.”

Kevin Booth

It seems almost incomprehensible now. Either it really was that long ago or things have changed so much it’s almost ridiculous to entertain the notion, but in LA Bill didn’t even have a telephone in his apartment. There was a payphone downstairs. He would call me at college in Austin frequently – not quite daily, but close to it. On top of that he wrote letters, honest-to-God pen-to-paper handwritten letters. Each began with the same sentence, or a rough equivalent thereof:

Capon,

Maybe Dave is getting mad because he’s having goil problems. Maybe it’s possible to have too many goils … of course only Dave would know.

Kev-sters,

Howdy! Is Dave still getting the girls? I thought so. Karbon,

Dave still getting the goils? Ha, I realize that’s a stupid question …

Carbon Both,

Howz things?! Dave still getting’ the goils? Ha – I thought so … some guys gots all the luck.

Krotkin,

Dave still getting the goils?… some things never change … One time he tricked it up a bit:

Kewy,

Has Dave made any addition to his love harem?

Bill was obsessed by David DeBesse’s ability to meet, pick up, and hook up with “goils,” probably because he was such a failure at it, Laurie notwithstanding. All but one or two of the letters he wrote me start with Bill wondering about the status of Dave’s sex life. It was partially Bill’s ability to take an idea and bludgeon it into submission; it was partly that Bill was lonely.

He had to be. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been constantly hounding me to get Dave to line up some dinner party dates for the next time he came back to Texas. LA was crawling with hot young ass, and Bill was fixated on what his friend two time zones away from him could do to help him get laid. One time he even asked if Dave knew any girls in LA that he could fix Bill up with. Clearly he wasn’t getting any.

There was good irony in this, too. We had got Dave to be the singer in Stress in high school because he was everything that Bill and I weren’t; specifically, super-good-looking, total football player, had chicks.

When Bill went to LA, a sizeable chunk of the Stratford student body went to Austin to attend the University of Texas. It’s an enormous place. Enrollment floats upwards of 40,000 students. In Austin, DeBesse and I got an apartment together our sophomore year. Dave was on the path. He was a business major, and still good-looking; and, while he wasn’t playing football at Texas, he was still very much a jock. He would have been a yuppie by 25, his parents by 30, retired by 50 with some wise investing. Then Dave inexplicably started trying to convince himself that he was as big a loser as Bill and I were. We wanted to be everything he was; or if not, at least we wanted to get the chicks he had. He wanted to be us. Dumbass.

Anyway, Dave and I had this contest in which whoever got the most mail was more popular. To be “mail” it had to be a letter or something personal. Bills and solicitations didn’t count. The object, of course, was to lose, to get the least mail and thereby prove you truly were less popular. Again, Bill and I just wanted to get pussy. And here was Dave, who could get pussy, playing this game because he thought it was somehow leading him down the road to being an artist.

Dave would get the Wall Street Journal. It was my contention that this was mail, and since I was tall enough to reach the tote board we kept score on and he wasn’t, I would mark it as such. It was just this stupid thing to do, but Bill would call almost every day and ask me, “Did Dave get mail today?” Then he would get on the phone with Dave, “Dude, the Wall Street Journal counts.”