Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution. Kevin Booth

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СКАЧАТЬ wasn’t. Bill and Dwight had both been grounded after their first foray into the world of adult nightlife. So the next time and the next time, they sneaked out of their houses. Dwight did the classic pillows piled under the sheets to look like a body in bed, then left a note as to his whereabouts in case his parents checked.

      It has become one of the more famous bits of Bill Hicks lore, that he used to sneak out of his house as a teen to go perform stand-up comedy in nightclubs. It’s true. I ran the getaway car. Aiding and abetting.

      The side parking lot for the Catholic church my family attended, St. John Vianney, ran adjacent to the backyard fence of Bill’s house. I would drive over to the church, park behind Bill’s house, he would climb out his second-story window, scale down the back side of the house and off we would go. I had the hardship driver’s license, of course.

      Even after Bill died, his parents were in denial about it. I remember getting into a fight with Jim about it when he said, “That window was double-bolted shut. It’s just not possible.” The lengths people will go to believe what they want.

      Bill and Dwight performed together three times that spring. That summer, Dwight and his family moved to Oregon. It was something both teens had known about. Dwight’s dad told him the previous October – before either Bill or Dwight had even heard of the Comedy Workshop – that they would be moving at the end of the school year.

      Bill did his first set at the Comedy Workshop sans Dwight before Dwight and his family left for Oregon. He didn’t tell Dwight about it, and he didn’t let me go to the show, either. Bill was very sensitive to the fact that I thought Dwight was funnier than he was. I did, and I thought Bill doing comedy depended entirely on Dwight.

      When Dwight announced the previous fall that he was moving away it was a really depressing moment. We were going to lose him from the band, and it was the end of the whole comedy team. I could see Dwight doing comedy without Bill, but I could never envision Bill doing comedy without Dwight because I had seen Dwight do things that were side-split funny.

      In speech class, Dwight would do this routine where he would make a cone out of a piece of paper and he would go, “Okay, is everyone ready for some fun … nel?” Then he would hold the funnel over his head and say, “A clown,” then he would hold it over his nose and say, “A Jew,” then he would hold it over his knee and say, “Gout.” Looking back it might not hold up, but for a bunch of teens in the mid-Seventies, Dwight was a cut above his peers. He was already a performer.

      I still feel like it’s my job and my mission to tell people, “Look, Dwight was doing this stuff from day one with Bill. Dwight’s not doing a Bill Hicks impersonation. They came up with those bits together.” I still get defensive whenever anyone puts Dwight down.

      But Bill took it a step further. He started talking about his parents, started talking about his (still hypothetical) girlfriend. He started talking about personal stuff. Bill also dissected bits that belonged jointly to the two of them. There were certain jokes that you thought, “Okay, this one they wrote together.” Bill went on to take the parts of those jokes he felt were his, and he really made them his own – particularly the stuff about his parents.

      When the two of them were together it was the wacky, straight-man/funny-man, classic back-and-forth thing. When Bill got up there without a partner as a net, he tried to lose the innocent kid routine. He tried to be tougher. But at the same time, he became more sensitive to his looks. He hated the kid with the gap teeth, the bad bowl haircut, and the goofy mom-dressed clothes. Bill always was a well-spring of incongruities.

      But it wasn’t like something monumental had happened. Sure, it was significant that Bill was now doing stand-up, but it wasn’t a genesis; it was just another point in the evolution. Bill still very much loved rock n’ roll. It’s something often misunderstood about him. It was never a case of “Are you gonna be a comedian?” or “Are we gonna be in a band?”

      Stress never died completely. In fact throughout Bill’s life the idea of revitalizing Stress at some point stayed with both of us. But Bill (and Dwight, for that matter) was just a kid doing whatever he was doing. He was on a mission that didn’t really have a specific objective. He was creative and he loved expression. This was part of the early exploration.

      The night after Bill and Dwight first did stand-up at the Comedy Workshop, we went to the Zipper Lounge to celebrate. We had known about the Zipper Lounge for a while, but we didn’t know the first thing about what went on inside. We just knew the name and the location, and we knew we had to go there at some point.

      There was something intrinsically funny about the name itself. The Zipper Lounge. There was also the mystery of what was behind the door. Was it a strip club? A whorehouse? What the hell was going on in there? The rest of the appeal was its lack of appeal. From the outside the place was pathetically unassuming. In an area where most of the surrounding titty bars had flashing neon “Live Nude Girls” signs or something similarly ostentatious, the Zipper Lounge had the most ordinary of signs. There was no fancy facade. It just sat unobtrusively by a restaurant and a convenience store. In fact, that’s the only reason we found the Zipper Lounge in the first place. It shared the parking lot with its neighbors and we had gone to that convenience store.

      So it was something we had wanted to do for a while. We just needed the proper excuse. Bill and Dwight performing stand-up comedy together at the Workshop proved sufficient. We had already spent the first part of the night in the adult nightclub world. We now had the cockiness to match our curiosity. Dwight, Bill and I were under-age, but it was a case of us just walking up “as if.” As if we were old enough. As if this was something we did all the time. As if it was no big deal. Plus, the sex industry, as we would find out time and again in our lives, isn’t particularly picky about whose money it is taking.

      We walked in to see a popcorn machine and an unappealing, unkempt older man behind a glass window in the lobby. We quickly figured out this was some kind of adult movie theater. We were kids, but we weren’t stupid.

      There was a nominal cover charge and a two-drink minimum. We pay the cover and go into the main room. Great. We’re in. It was dark. Unusually dark even for a movie theater. A grainy porno movie is playing on an undersized screen. There it is: people fucking. Moving pictures of people fucking. It was definitely my first exposure to pornographic movies. And Bill’s. And Dwight’s. And anyone who ever came with us after that.

      The Zipper Lounge was a huge revelation. This was long before the ubiquity of porn in any format. The home-video market barely even existed. This was a real education, both in sex and business.

      The place only sold soft drinks – no liquor license – and the Cokes were $10 apiece. They were served in a glass without ice. This was going to be a warm and expensive proposition, especially for a bunch of suburban teens on a limited allowance.

      Of course, there was another feature of the Zipper Lounge designed to separate you from your money. It wasn’t just an adult movie theater; there was also live entertainment. This wasn’t the kind of place where men in raincoats went in to masturbate. It had women – scantily clad women – who would come to your table and sit on your lap. It wasn’t lap dancing. It was just lap-sitting company.

      “Hi, what’s your name? What do you do?” We’d lie. I don’t remember how old we said we were, and we worked in the oil industry. God, could we have been more unbelievably ridiculous? Teen oil tycoons. We were 15, maybe 16 years old. And Bill would have had a hard time passing for 15. He was baby-faced. Even into his twenties, Bill still looked like a teenager. But this place was dark, so the employees probably had as hard a time seeing us as we did them. Thank God: any time the scene in the movie was bright enough to catch a glimpse СКАЧАТЬ