Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution. Kevin Booth

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СКАЧАТЬ across town to the get the shots taken. On top of that, Bill was having to pilfer sweaters from his dad so that he could wear something presentable in the pictures. Finally, when the contact sheets arrived at Bill’s house for review, Mary Hicks opened the package before Bill could intercept the mail. That caused another row in the house. One: what the heck were the pictures for? Two: why the heck was Bill wearing his father’s sweater in them?

      A meeting at Universal Talent? That was another 20-mile bike ride across town. Two hours on two wheels for about two minutes in the offices. Beverly the assistant told the sweat-drenched duo, “We’ll give you a call.” Nothing was easy. At least they were staying fit.

      That summer, 1976, Bill attended camp. Church camp, actually. Somewhere out in West Texas. There he did his first solo stand-up gig. “I was absolutely terrified,” he confessed years later. “Not the least reason was that it was a church camp and a lot of the guys who I had been watching were like nightclub comics and Richard Pryor, so obviously I had to edit on my feet a little bit. I felt like I had made a huge mistake and I should have been in the ‘Kumbaya’ chorus that went up before me.” But after the show Hicks was accosted by more than one of his peers wanting to know how he had the courage to get up and do that in front of people.

      “I don’t remember the exact thing that got the first laugh. I know I had, like, fourteen minutes of material, and, like, seven minutes of it was stolen, or someone else’s, like, Woody Allen material which nobody in Baptist West Texas country would ever be able to trace.”

      Bill didn’t tell his parents but it wasn’t like he could keep it a secret. He did have the camp, staff and all, as an audience. One of the jokes he told was: “Ladies and gentleman, I had a rough upbringing. I was breast-fed … On falsies.”

      Mary Hicks found out about Bill’s stand-up performance from one of the other ladies at Sunday School. Mary then went to the church’s assistant pastor to get more details. The pastor told Mary, “You might want to look at how you raised him.” Clearly Bill was correct in thinking no one there would ever be able to source his material. (Allen’s actual line: “I was in analysis for years because of a traumatic childhood; I was breast-fed through falsies.”)

      Another faculty member of the Sunday School told Mrs. Hicks that her son thought Bill’s comedy was the funniest thing he had ever heard. Bill’s first show; Bill’s first rave review.

      In the fall of 1976, Bill and Dwight were starting as freshmen at Stratford High School. Stratford was a shit-brown brick building with a mod-deco facade. And the near-windowless exterior made it look more like the kind of place where you would have line-up and lock-down than you would take roll. It was somewhere between eyesore and oddity. It hadn’t produced any poet laureates. It produced country music star Clint Black.

      Right about the time Bill and Dwight were supposed to start high school, they also got a shot at what could have been the biggest gig of their lives … or the worst. While, over time, the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon has morphed into a parade of has-beens, back in those days it was a fixture of Americana: Elvis, John Lennon and Sinatra all made appearances. Plus, it was raising money for kids with muscular dystrophy.

      The way the telethon works, there is a national show supported by dozens if not hundreds of smaller, regional shows all running concurrently. During the broadcast, the network cuts back and forth from the national to the regional shows. In Houston, this was being held in a restaurant, and the restaurant needed to book acts for the entire forty-eight hours of the telethon.

      Frantic to fill the time slots, the telethon’s bookers called all of the agencies around town asking, “Who do you have? What can you give us?” Universal Talent called Bill and Dwight asking how much time they could do. They had their normal set of about a half hour, and they had the play. Beverly at Universal told them: “We have three hours we need to fill.” Bill replied: “We can fill it all.”

      “Our idea was that it was going to broadcast on TV,” says Slade. “In reality, maybe it was going to be on in the background of the local show.” They had no idea even what kind of gig it was. It didn’t matter. When they went to their parents to ask permission, they got turned down flat.

      Bill spent the bulk of his freshman year working on comedy by using his classmates as his audience. One teacher tried a creative solution to curtail Bill’s interrupting of class: she offered him the first five minutes of class. That time was his to get it out of his system. The rest was hers for teaching. Giving Bill the Sudetenland. Bad idea.

      Mary recalls, “One of the teachers called me and asked me if I could help her get her class back from Bill. She said, ‘I told him he could have five minutes while I was checking the roll,’ and she said, ‘I can’t get it back.’ I said, ‘That’s your problem, you shouldn’t have let him get up there.'”

      At lunch Bill and Dwight would resume their tag team activities by terrorizing the lunchroom. It was a low-paying gig, but it was a guaranteed booking five days a week. It was proto-guerilla theater. They would perform fake fights, do outrageous character pieces, flip tables and chairs. It was adolescent lunacy. And it was non-stop.

      This would continue in track, at the end of the school day. Dwight and Bill would be jogging around the oval. Bill would inch in front of Dwight, slow, then bend over. An oblivious Dwight would unwillingly nail Bill in the ass from behind. Mime sodomy. During the fall, this went on in front of the football team. The team would be practising on the field; Dwight and Bill would be doing their schtick on the track encircling that field. They were performing for their friends on the football team, the people they knew who thought they were funny; but they were also pissing off some of the upperclassmen. It was bad enough that the comedie kids were getting attention in the lunchroom, but carrying it out to the sports arena – that was just showing them up.

      “It was almost like doing antics in front of an ape in the zoo. They were initially just confused, then they would want to kill and beat and hit,” says Slade. “I remember seeing them once look at each other and nod and take off running after us. It was terrifying because these were very large Texas football players.”

      Late in their freshman year, Dwight handed Bill a book by Ruth Montgomery called A World Beyond. The light went on. Dwight had had a very intense dream about death, and something in the book spoke very specifically to him about what had happened. When Bill read the book, he was similarly blown away. Destiny, fate, choosing your life; the way Montgomery wrote about these things Bill found very comforting. Bill and Dwight spent hours together talking about these concerns. Hours and hours. Southern Baptist tenets, those were his parents’ beliefs. Other spiritual avenues were opening up to Bill.

      The Beatles had made the Maharishi a hipster-household name in the late Sixties, but by 1975 he had become mainstream, appearing on the 13 October cover of Time magazine with the teaser: “Meditation: The Answer to all Your Problems?” Still, it was a bit of a coup when Bill got his parents to allow him to attend a transcendental meditation retreat over the Thanksgiving weekend of his sophomore year. While largely a secular celebration, Thanksgiving is one of the top two family-centric holidays in America. For Bill to be able to leave the Hicks family to hang out with strangers (save Dwight), and do things that his parents not only didn’t fully understand but also didn’t subscribe to belief-wise, was astounding.

      It’s no less amazing that Bill and Dwight (this time with Dwight’s older brother Kevin) gained permission to attend a second retreat over Christmas break. It was not only longer – a full week instead of a holiday weekend – it was right as families are about to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. If the Thanksgiving retreat was a coup, the Christmas one was a minor miracle.

      It wasn’t the last bit of karmic kismet the pair had in store. During the following СКАЧАТЬ