American: The Bill Hicks Story Page #6

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there's no such thing as death,

life is only a dream,

and you're the imagination of yourselves.

Here's Tom with the weather.

Wow.

All the drinking and drugging too,

some of the club owners were concerned

about how erratic the shows would be.

Alcohol with Bill was definitely

like throwing gasoline onto a fire.

You know, it was kind of a tightrope, cos

you never knew what was gonna happen,

and usually, if there was

a lot of drinks being pounded down,

it was gonna go bad.

I mean he was always like an angry kid

but when he drank the alcohol

he was letting everybody have it.

And so we were like,

"Ooh, this is a new kind of comedy."

# Shout...

Bill was what we used to call

a short ball. He got drunk real quick.

What happened?

The main thing that I always

remember was him getting on stage

and people in the audience

sending him up drinks.

F*** it, I'll drink red wine if no one's

gonna offer me anything real. F*** you.

And people said I couldn't improvise.

He could drink a lot because

he had all the adrenaline of the show

and he said, "I'm a bull,

I can't be brought down. "

Conflict.

Coke dealers

would be giving Bill free coke.

Can I get a shock of Jack up here?

How much can we get Bill

to take on stage? Let's all watch.

It was just like a red flag for club owners.

He was like suddenly

not on Letterman any more.

He started losing bookings.

Just be careful going home tonight,

cos I'm driving right along with you f***ers.

I got there in the middle of the set

and nobody was laughing, really.

But he was laying down on his back

- screaming into the microphone.

- It was awful.

It was terrible. It wasn't a show any

more. It was a drunk on stage is what it was.

I'd taken a friend from work. "You're gonna

love him. He's my brother. He's hilarious. "

You know, to have a room clear,

I felt bad for him.

He called me the next day

and said, "Well, they fired me too.

"Seems to be the thing. Everybody fires me."

I'd go, "Yeah, it wasn't funny."

Bill didn't bring these problems

into the family.

Just the fact that now he drank

and now he smoked, well, so did I,

so how big of a deal was that?

You know, I don't know

what I would have said, had I said anything.

Maybe I should have, but I didn't.

But I knew there was something in there

during that time.

You can see it in his eyes.

That was after he got in that fight

and he broke his leg

and he was performing

and leaning on crutches.

I'd like this man to leave the room. If I could

have that, please. Thank you very much, sir.

Yeah, why don't you pull out the fact that

you're a mobile biped right in front of me?

Why don't you do a f***ing cartwheel

into your stall, sir?

Thank you, I'd like to do

my impression of Ironside now.

Next week we have Helen Keller...

No. I'm delirious. I'm delirious.

It's the heroin.

Seriously.

Aah!

Good evening.

Don't worry, there is no pain.

I just didn't want to spill my beer.

There are priorities even in the world of pain.

I wish that we had been

more worried about him, maybe.

But there was kind of a code that we had,

Kevin and Bill and I,

which was, "You were gonna do

what you were gonna do

"and I'm there for you

but I'm not gonna stop you. "

But it was kind of cool

because it was like we had faith in each other.

We tended to trust

that he knew what he was doing.

I got beaten up by a guy in a kilt!

Are you happy? You wanna see blood?

It suffered.

There were club owners that were willing to

forgive and forget, cos he was that good,

and there were other club owners

that... you know, it wasn't worth it.

It wasn't worth it.

When I saw him at my wedding,

he was clearly enmeshed in substance abuse.

You know, and he'd obviously been up

all night and he looked beaten.

My wife-to-be, and she'd never met Bill,

she didn't know anything about him,

thought he was wild, funny but wild,

could not be contained.

There were half a dozen of us

that were in a bad shape that way,

and we were drinking suicidally,

basically, that's where it was headed.

We were sitting up,

me and Bill, and he just started crying,

and he broke down and he said, "Man,

I've got a problem. My life is out of control. "

My big answer was,

"Well, just stop, then, Bill. Stop doing that."

And he straightened back up real quick

but it was the one thing

I always thought I let Bill down about.

And it was just from ignorance. I didn't know

how to handle it, didn't know what to do.

And when a Bill Hicks show became

more about, "How drunk can we get Bill"

instead of, "Let's see how far

Bill can take us with his ideas, "

that's when the party was over.

You know, realising,

"What the f*** am I doing?

"These people are not my friends, you know?

These people are trying to kill me. "

Led him down the path of knowing, "If I don't

make a drastic change, I'm gonna die. "

That was a moment of clarity for Bill.

That could have been

the wake-up call. I guess he just woke up.

He realised what he was working for

and this was in the way of it.

Bill quit drinking in February of '88,

I quit in April,

and we started going to meetings together

in downtown Houston.

Being the stupid alcoholic I am,

I'm going, "Good, good for him,

"he should go in there not thinking

about what a f***-up I was.

"You need to get sober and get clean.

Good job. "

Bill knew there was no way he was

gonna be able to sustain any kind of sobriety

surrounded by all these Houston comics.

He told me,

you have to get rid of the people,

that you can't be around the same

environment and expect to survive.

Bill realised that he had to jump ship

and as crazy as it sounds, moving to a big

city by yourself is the way to get sober,

and, um... Bill just disappeared to New York.

When you're dealing with drugs

and alcohol, willpower, it's the opposite,

it's when you admit that you don't have,

you're powerless.

I don't think there was ever

a question that he was not gonna continue

even though the struggles

must have been mighty.

He was tapped on the shoulder

and this was what he was going to do

and it doesn't mean

it's gonna be handed to you

and I'm sure that it had to have

been unbelievably challenging.

He told me that it was six months

before he could start being funny again.

That's when he went from being

just an above-average comedian

to being something spectacular.

- Let me hear you say yo!

- Yo!

- Say it! Yo!

- Yo!

- Well, all right.

- All right.

That's it, end of your part. Thank you.

Hope you don't mind if I smoke.

I know it's getting harder

to find a place to smoke these days.

I feel like I'm in high school

with the bathroom window cracked again.

I don't do drugs. I don't think

they tell us the truth about drugs, though.

They tell you marijuana smoking

makes you unmotivated. That's bullshit.

When I was high, I could do everything

I normally could do just as well.

I just realised it wasn't worth

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