Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution. Kevin Booth

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СКАЧАТЬ mid-May of 1983, Bill packed up the Chevette and made the 1400-mile journey back to Houston where he promptly made a stab at starting a more practical life. He moved in with Laurie … at her parents’ house.

      Moving back to live with your own parents after leaving to go to school or start a career was usually a sign of failure and humiliation; either that or it made you the ultimate mama’s boy. Moving in with someone else’s parents, especially your girlfriend’s, was so unusual that there were no social stereotypes even to attach to it. It was just strange, but Bill got along well with Laurie’s parents.

      That summer, Bill enrolled in classes at the University of Houston. Also known affectionately by the locals as “Cougar High,” U of H was not the most academically rigorous institution. Bill had a couple of standard jokes he told about his foray into college life: “I just couldn’t make it up for that eight o’clock class … And I was in night school.” He studied philosophy: “I found out it all meant nothing and I left.”

      Bill and academia just didn’t make a good couple. But he had his comedy career.

      Until he quit, that is. In 1983, at the ripe old age of 21, Bill retired from stand-up.

      Bill’s first Last Show Ever was at the Comedy Workshop in Austin. By showtime, he was exceptionally drunk. Even by his standards. He got up on stage and started to rant. He was talking about how he wasn’t going to end up like Lenny Bruce. He wasn’t going to end up in a bathtub dead from a drug overdose. He was screaming at the audience. It stopped being comedy about thirty seconds into it.

      One woman in the audience kept calling out to the stage, “We love you, Bill. We love you. Don’t go.” He yelled back at her to get her own life.

      Mercifully some of Bill’s friends got up and spared the audience. Spared Bill. Dave DeBesse was among the mercy killers. “I’m fairly certain I wasn’t alone in doing it, because it wasn’t anything quite that heroic, but I know along with some other people I went up and took him offstage.”

      On stage Bill was enraged and outraged. He was angry at the audience for needing him to tell them what to think. He was fed up with trying to enlighten them, yelling at them for being lemmings, for not thinking for themselves. Offstage Bill was contrite. “I remember taking him back to the green room. He kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I’m sorry.’ He was apologizing for the set, which wasn’t even a set. It feels like he was on stage a really long time, but I’m sure he wasn’t.”

      The retirement didn’t last long. More than a month, less than two. Considering that Bill would “quit” comedy dozens of times over the course of his career, it was actually fairly impressive. His other attempts to get out of stand-up usually lasted just a day or two.

      Kevin Booth

      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 СКАЧАТЬ