American: The Bill Hicks Story Page #3

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I just saw it as that I found a kindred spirit.

He was the guy that was out in front,

breaking barriers.

Cos it was a very adult world

and he was like the high schooler

that was telling them what fools they were

for drinking and smoking

and giving them this clear mirror,

and you could tell

they all really respected him.

The good sign for a comic

is not just when audiences

come in and ask for you.

It's when other comics stop what they're doing

and come in the room and watch you.

There has never been anybody funnier

at his age as a stand-up.

Maybe the only other guy that touched him

at that age was Buster Keaton.

The stuff about his family and his parents

and growing up was entertaining to anybody.

Bill should have been famous right away.

Open house night, open house night,

your parents go out, talk to your teachers,

find out you've been lying through your teeth.

"His name is Bill?"

"I thought it was Moltvic."

Come home the next night and my father's

sitting there and he goes, "Hold it, Moltvic.

"Went out to the school last night and I talked

to your teachers and I talked to Miss Jones

"and she said you called her a frothing slut.

"What is that all about?"

"Well, Dad, she's a loser."

"Everyone's a loser, everyone's a jerk?

Tell me, Mr Blister, who's the real loser?"

"Promise you won't get mad, Dad."

Where it really hit me was

one weekend I was home from college

and he said, "Come down to this comedy club

and here was Bill performing

and the place was sold out,

and I remember going and telling all my

friends, "Man, you gotta come, this is unreal."

And it hit me pretty powerfully. It really did.

What Bill's comedy was,

was his view of our life.

He had been able to turn that

into this thing that could entertain strangers.

"Oh, that's what you been doing

the last few years. "

Both of my parents are college graduates.

My older sister's a college graduate.

I'm a college graduate.

Here came Bill and he said,

"I'm going to LA to be a comedian."

What does that mean, you know?

We had no idea.

When Bill basically said, "I'm moving

to LA and I'm not gonna play music any more",

I was really taken back,

it was definitely depressing.

LA was something that had to be

done. It was the next step. You had to go.

I cried, of course, and I said, "Bill...

"nobody will say

a thing if you don't go. "

And he said, "Mom, this is hard for me

so I'm going, so please stop crying.

"If I don't make it, I'll come back.

But I've got to try. "

That's how he lived the rest of his life.

I mean, he had girlfriends and relationships.

But certainly life on the road as a comedian,

there's a lot of time by yourself.

I was working at the Comedy

Store and Bill came up one afternoon.

Pale, bad haircut, had a suitcase with him.

He said, "I'm here to be a comic",

and I explained to him about amateur nights.

I got lucky, and was passed

on my first audition. Bill did too.

The difficult part was stage time

once you became a regular.

Bill was in a hurry too.

He had an impatience about him.

But you went there to be on stage,

to hone your performing abilities,

and, you know, to showcase for producers.

I remember

we went out to visit him.

Being on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles

at the world-famous Comedy Store

where people like Robin Williams and Richard

Pryor and Billy Crystal also performed

and then Bill Hicks.

That was the Mecca for comedy

and Bill got his name up there.

OK, there's one for the books

right there, you know.

He was where he wanted to be,

and that was pretty clear.

You know, he would call me up

in these fits of inspiration

and go, "You have to get down here, we got

to do this script. It's our key out of this. "

I'd already decided

that that's what I was gonna do,

so I left the University of Oregon

and drove south to Los Angeles.

I remember knocking at the door

and it was an intense moment.

I had the map out

and I was going, "Dnde sta..."

And, "Sir, you can't come in here."

"Where... dnde sta the olives? They

chopp the olives?" "Sir, you can't. Please. "

And he goes, "Come on in,"

and of course it was just tiny,

and we would wind up

living there for two years.

I'd driven 11 hours because Steve wanted to go

down to the Comedy Store. I said, "Sure."

We got in his car, and drove down to

Hollywood and I walk into the Comedy Store.

This is it, you know,

the ground zero of stand-up comedy.

He always went up really early in the show

like second or third.

He never swore. He was the clean-cut comic.

It was a nice way to restart

a new chapter of our friendship.

I think we both knew that we weren't

gonna be working together as stand-ups

cos he had already

gone on to be successful.

The whole focus was

all this was leading to a script.

If we could sell a script, well, then,

that's when you get can excited.

We started to come up with an idea

of, how do we evolve these characters?

The father character and the mother character.

It would make a good movie.

We were writing constantly,

pages and pages of scenes

and we knew these characters,

the voices were in our head.

He flew back from LA

to be the best man at my wedding.

He was always gonna be my best man

and we were gonna be there for each other

whenever those times were.

But he had to perform that night,

and so after the wedding

a bunch of people went down there

and, "Yeah, let's go see him. What the helll

Let's go down there, you know?"

I didn't know I had a funny brother.

That was the first I was aware

that that was what he wanted to do

as a serious profession.

He was hilarious.

The guy at William Morris said,

"We all want to meet with you."

He was a big frickin' agent in Hollywood.

He looked at us and he goes,

"You guys are 19?"And we go, "Yeah."

He goes, "How did you get in my office?"

So we kind of told him

the story of being stand-ups

and that we're just out of high school

and we're writing a script

about being from high school

and that really intrigued him.

He goes, "I want you to rewrite it.

It doesn't have much of an ending.

"And I really want to see

another script from you guys.

"After that, I want to talk

about representing you.

"You guys are gonna be good screenwriters."

And I was very excited too.

This was my first break.

Bill was just disappointed

because we'd put so much

into that script, obviously,

and he would have liked to hear

that it got bought.

And in the months that followed that,

he just lost interest in writing,

and I could not fire him up about,

"We have a ton of ideas about scripts.

"Let's just write another one. Let's get him

what he wants and see if we can do this. "

He just wasn't into it. He didn't want to.

He was through being a screenwriter.

He wanted to move on into being a comic.

Hello, this is Bill.

I just needed to talk with somebody and

this tape recorder is all I've got right now.

I haven't been funny in a long time.

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