Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution. Kevin Booth

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ