Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution. Kevin Booth

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       CHAPTER 2

      On the last day of school, 10th grade, Bill went up to Laurie Mango and asked her out on a date. Tall and dark, striking features: she was Bill’s type. His weakness was Italian women; they didn’t necessarily have to be Italian; just looking it was sufficient. The Mangos had come to Texas from California and, like a disproportionate number of families whose kids lived in the area, her dad (a geologist) worked for an oil company.

      Although she hardly knew Bill at the time, Laurie agreed to go out with him. “He was unlike anyone our age I had ever met and I was immediately attracted to him,” recalls Mango. Bill opened up to Laurie, and shared all of his passions with her: books, movies, music. Bill also showed Laurie the Sane Man comic he had created. Sane Man was a superhero of sorts, a character Bill created that could defeat all of the injustices of the world with the twin powers of reason and logic.

      Bill unleashed the full force of his personality on Laurie. He wrote her long, ten-and fifteen-page love letters. Bill wasn’t just smitten: this was the be-all and end-all. At times it was a little too much for Laurie. This was high school. Laurie would get embarrassed about public displays of affection, holding hands, and kissing. Still, even if a little lopsided, they had a true teen romance.

      For the next year-plus of high school, Bill’s primary occupations – Laurie, Stress, etc. – were anything but school. School was just something he used to facilitate participation in his other interests, including comedy.

      Bill also started taking guitar lessons. He was a natural, of sorts. Despite the fact he was lacking in musicianship, he was fast and had the coordination to run his finger up and down the fretboard quickly enough to sound cool. But Stress had pimped itself into a corner. They had told so many stories and passed around so many action shots of themselves, that everyone at Stratford thought they were not only legit but fully functional as a rock ‘n’ roll outfit.

      The reality was they had parts of songs – chord progressions, melodies, lyrics – but nothing to get from “One, two, three, four …” to “Thank you, goodnight.” It was far too freeform, if you can even use such a word to describe their proto-punk.

      Still, everyone at school assumed the band would play the Stratford Senior Follies, one of the school’s annual talent shows, so Stress now had to put up and perform or look like complete morons. Dwight had long since escaped to Oregon. The floating in and out of Bruce Salmon, and other guys wasn’t conducive to being able to put together consistent performances.

      So Bill and Kevin took on honor student Charles Lloyd as a drummer and later added Dave DeBesse as a singer and as a ringer. DeBesse was everything Bill wasn’t: he was good-looking and popular. Having Dave as the frontman was a way to ensure the girls in high school would take a greater interest in Stress, if only for the eye-candy aspect of it.

      For, as punk rock as they wanted to be in attitude, they were really just a rock band. After opening the Senior Follies set with an original instrumental called “Globe,” they played covers of Alvin Lee’s “Help Me” and the Beatles’ “Slow Down.” Not exactly the choices of someone wanting to be anarchy. Stress played somewhere in the middle of the Follies line-up and, after the remaining acts had performed, also got to close the show. They opted for classic rock staples, first with Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll,” then Hendrix’s “Hey Joe.”

      The joke was that Bill would play a guitar solo out of “Hey Joe” until they shut the band down. He did around twenty minutes of high-speed noodling until finally the principal got someone to go around the side of the stage and literally unplug them. It sounded like a broken record with the same bass riff over and over while Bill maniacally ran his fingers up and down the guitar neck.

      But it legitimized Stress. They were a band in myth alone no longer. They played several more gigs during Bill’s junior year. There was a courtyard near the Stratford where people would hang out on weekends; on a few occasions the band set up there and played for anyone who cared to listen, and even those who probably didn’t care to, for that matter. They had amplification, after all. They also played a few keg parties, putting Bill squarely in the drunken teen environment he dreaded.

      Stratford had an unofficial student group called the Stratford Senior Party Team, the function of which was to throw parties. They would rent houses, clubhouses, or even apartments for a night, then buy kegs and sell tickets to friends at school. Anybody who wanted to could get drunk, a few people made a bit of cash, and everyone went home happy. Because Booth was a member of the Team, he had the “in” to arrange Stress as the live entertainment. They scored a few more gigs that way, but Bill was ambivalent. The upside: he was playing live music in front of people. The downside: he was surrounded by the party people he ruthlessly ridiculed.

      The summer before Bill’s senior year started, Comedy Workshop owner Paul Menzel opened the Comedy Annex, a ninety-seat club converted from a strip bar right around the corner from the Workshop.

      Live comedy suddenly became one of the hip things to do and Houston, Texas, had the only live comedy venue in the South. It started drawing people from around the region: Sam Kinison came from Oklahoma, Jimmy Pineapple (real name James Ladmirault) came from neighboring Louisiana. These people moved to Houston to pursue comedy as a career.

      The scene was exploding, and with it the crowds. With the larger crowds there was more opportunity for the comedians. When Bill first started coming to the Workshop, the open mic nights were just Mondays, then it progressed to Mondays and Tuesdays. It built and built. Originally there was no cover, but as the crowds got larger, they also got rowdier. So the comics eventually insisted the club not only start charging cover but also start paying the performers a cut.

      Steve Epstein recalls: “Even though we didn’t have much material, other than borrowed – I was borrowing a lot – the energy was really cool and the audiences were great, very supportive.” Many of the comedians had been pushing Menzel to expand, but he was happy with the status quo. Epstein and Mike Vance decided that, if Menzel wasn’t going to open up another room, then they were just going to open up their own club.

      They went out and got backing from renowned Houston sports-writer Mickey Herskowitz, whose son had been performing; and from a prominent lawyer whose daughter was also at the club. Once this was in play, Menzel approached Epstein and Vance and said, “Listen if you’ll drop your plans to open a club, I’ll open one.” He converted the strip joint around the corner and the Annex was born. And now the comedians were really starting to get good because they could go at it every day.

      Before the start of Bill’s senior year, his dad was getting sent to Little Rock by General Motors. The original plan was for Jim and Mary to go to Arkansas, have Bill stay behind in Houston for the first half of his school year, then move up at Christmas to join his parents. Logistically things ended up not being that simple; the end result was that Bill got to stay the year. In Houston. By himself.

      A better scenario young Bill could not have designed for himself. The biggest source of tension in his life — his family – would have a much more difficult time annoying him from 500 miles away. And with СКАЧАТЬ