Читать книгу Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution - Kevin Booth - Страница 6

Who am I? Well, I’ll give you an idea. The last few months I’ve been doing a one-man show – like a lot of comics these days are doing one-man shows, and I am no exception … The theme of the one-man show is about my life growing up, as I did, in a happy, healthy and loving family. And it’s called “Let’s Spend Half a Minute with Bill.” And uh … Well, hell, it’s such a short show I can do it for you right now:

“Good evening, everybody. Mommy never beat me. And Daddy never fucked me. Goodnight.”

I don’t know if the show will be able to relate with dysfunctional America, but that’s the way I was raised. Sorry. No bone to pick. Supported me in everything I did.

– Bill Hicks

It’s true. Bill’s parents supported him. When Bill wanted to be a musician, his parents dropped $1000 buying him a Fender Stratocaster guitar and an amplifier to go with it.

When Bill decided he wanted to move to LA after high school and pursue a career in comedy instead of going to college, his parents agreed to pay rent on his apartment in the San Fernando Valley. They even bought him a Chevette so he had a car to get around in.

Certainly Bill didn’t mean the bit about his parents to be taken literally. The strand of Baptist fundamentalism that wanted to take everything literally was antithetical to the core of Bill’s identity and everything he ever preached. Still, things were a lot less black-and-white when it came to the doctrine’s notion of the “happy, healthy, loving” family.

I remember the first time I met Bill’s mom. Bill and I were standing in the kitchen of his house, having this hush-hush conversation. To anyone watching, it must have looked like we were doing a drug deal. But we were talking about the stage show for our band, Stress, the one that didn’t even exist yet. Bill already had arena-sized ideas: “We’ll have this one song where we do the explosion thing, and one of the guys will jump out on stage with a fifty-foot papier-maché penis that starts coming over the audience. And the girls …”

Right then Bill’s mom walked into the kitchen. “Who’s your friend, Bill?” Bill’s response was less happy, healthy or loving than I ever could have ever expected.

“Godammit, Mom, I fucking hate your guts.” He stormed out of the kitchen. I was left standing there. Just me and Mary Hicks. “Uh, hi. I’m Kevin Booth.” Thanks, Bill.

His mom’s response was as surreal as it was calm, as in her heavy southern drawl she asked, “Do you want some pineapple, Kevin?” Did she not hear what I just heard? I said no thanks to the pineapple.

My lasting image of Bill’s dad, Jim Hicks, is a lot more pedestrian but no less ridiculous. The neighborhood association where we lived, Nottingham Forest, would award “Yard of the Month” to the spot with the nicest yard. Bill’s dad won the honor frequently enough that Jim could have landscaped in a home for the accompanying sign: it was almost a permanent fixture.

Jim proudly displayed the fuck out of that thing. Tending to the yard – that’s how I will always remember Jim. Outside at the break of dawn; Saturday and Sunday mornings; sporting his black socks and sock garters while mowing the lawn or clipping the hedges. Bill made endless fun of his dad for that, and for other aspects of his character Bill found embarrassing; but he also had deep respect for his father’s work ethic. Still, when Bill started to set foot on the stage it was open season and many of Bill’s characters were just variations on the theme of Jim.

One of my bands wrote a song about Jim years later, called “Yard of the Month.” Jim Hicks was like no other father I had ever met. He wasn’t just Bill’s father. Sometimes it was like he was your father, too.

Anytime anyone went to Bill’s house, they had to get past Jim, who was always doing that classic “father” pose Bill often mimicked on stage – right arm cocked behind his head, lips pressed forward sternly, eyes squinting and laden with seriousness. Bill would coach you that when you entered the house, go straight to his room. Just go past his dad. Ignore. Just keep going. He could do it. His friends couldn’t.

“Where you goin', son?” Jim would start with a heavy southern drawl to match his wife’s – the one that almost made “Bill” into a two-syllable word. The question was like gravity: you couldn’t ignore it. You were now getting cross-examined by Jim. How you were doing in school, how your parents were, etc.

Bill loved his parents, and they loved him. But they were Baptists. Specifically, Southern Baptists. In Texas we have First Baptists, Second Baptists and Southern Baptists. I know Baptists who don’t know the differences between the subsets, but the Hicks were so Baptist that the differences made a difference to them.

My earliest recollections of Bill are in the lunchroom where he used to “perform” on an almost daily basis with his classmate Dwight Slade. For example, they did this one bit in the school cafeteria where Dwight put some raisins into a spoon, and Bill was going to give the raisins to some lucky girl as a gift. Off Bill flew with havoc following. He was running over tables, tripping over chairs, crashing into people. Trays of food and milk were flying into the air. All the while Bill was doing everything necessary to keep the raisins in the spoon. As the commotion grew so did the gathering crowd, as people were trying to see what the big deal was. Well, the “big deal” turned out to be that Bill was presenting a spoonful of raisins to a completely unimpressed young lady. It didn’t really win over the audience, either.

But it’s a perfect image of who Bill was at that age. It was more important to make a lasting impression than to make a good first impression. He could have said something nice to that girl, and been done with it. Maybe compliment her. But no, there had to be a clumsy production to make sure she didn’t forget.

It was also somewhat standard fare of Bill’s formative years with Dwight. Here you had these two little punk-ass kids coming in and trying to be funny by acting weird and wacky. In reality, though, everyone thought they were losers. In fact, they were considered more than just losers. The difference between them and the regular losers was that they were also extroverts. Most of the geekier people in junior high and high school tended to withdraw into themselves. Not Bill and Dwight. They seemed actively to enjoy seeing how strange they could behave in front of people to rile them up.

Still, as a personality, I was drawn to Bill. We talked one day during lunch. Then a couple of days later during track practice I went up to say “hi” again. And before I knew it, we were hanging out together seemingly all the time. Lunch, track, after school. In fact, it was track that helped us become rock stars. “Rock stars” is obviously overstating it, given our modest success in high school as musicians. But track certainly wasn’t exercise; an exercise in convenience, perhaps.

While it was a year-round sport, track was really just another way for the football team to train together in the spring. In Texas there were rules limiting the amount of time high-school football teams could spend practising. Those limits were usually exhausted during the season in the fall. Across the state, shrewd and smarmy coaches alike would sign the entire football team up for track in the spring, football’s off-season. Voilà. They were no longer the “football” team. Rules averted.

So Bill and I were technically running track; however, track was the last class of the school day. And, in the spring, the coaches were generally only concerned with the football players. That meant we were actually doing one of two things. If there was no roll call, Bill and I would leave school, go to my house, and play music. If there was going to be a roll call at the end of class, we would go to sleep on the pole vault mats.

There were advantages to track. Being out there amongst the jocks gave Bill opportunities aplenty to make fun of them. And, of course, when he and Dwight would do these ridiculously stupid things right in people’s faces, it only made people want to inflict bodily harm on them that much more.

There were more than a few incidents when Bill got chased. He and I once did an interview with New Yorker theater critic John Lahr where I talked about one of these incidents. Bill was sitting right next to me as I finished by saying, “They caught Bill and Dwight and beat the shit out of them.”

Bill interrupted me. He was adamant: “No, Kevin, they never caught us. They never caught us and they never beat us.” It wasn’t nit-picking; it was important to Bill that the truth be known. And the truth is, for a guy who looked so thoroughly unathletic, Bill was a damned fast runner at that time. Damned fast. They chased. They didn’t catch.

Bill ran in several track meets before giving it up; and again it wasn’t that he wasn’t good, he just stopped caring. He got more into music; he stopped caring about sports, stopped running track, stopped playing baseball. Sports had definite objectives – score runs, cross the finish line first, etc. Music gave you more latitude. Here’s three minutes of nothing, fill it however you want. Ready? Go! That was clearly more in line with Bill’s ethic.

My parents thought Bill was a terrible influence on my life. I’m sure Bill’s parents thought the same about me, but Bill was actually one of the best things ever to happen to me; and at that point in my life, Bill kept me out of trouble. I don’t think one of our earliest attempts to put a band together, however, would do anything to prove either set of parents wrong. It was born out of misguided anger – inexcusably misguided anger.

We had already been “playing” as Stress when Dwight had a teen crush on a girl, Mila Goldstein, reciprocated. She was, as you might suspect with that name, Jewish. The informal flirtation fell apart and, burned by young love gone wrong, we fought fire with fire by writing a handful of songs. Specifically, songs that made fun of Jews.

We temporarily” changed the band name for the occasion, calling ourselves Joe Arab and the Nazis.

In hindsight it was clearly not the brightest of ideas. In fact, maybe it was the dumbest. Despite how much, prima facie, it looks to the contrary, it wasn’t anti-semitic.

It wasn’t anything more than teen angst. Hell, we didn’t even know what it meant to be anti-semitic. This was long before the History Channel was pumped into every house in America. There weren’t daily documentaries on Hitler and World War II running 24/7 on TV. We weren’t very attentive students, either. Plus, think about it: blue, poo, you, shoe, do, dew, screw … it rhymes with everything. Given our amateurish creative skills, that only served to help.

We just didn’t know – clearly a by-product of our padded suburban upbringing. If Mila had been Italian, we probably would have called ourselves Giuseppe Franco and the Fascists, without knowing what it meant to be fascist. We were kids. Dwight was hurt. We saw our friend suffering. It was a catharsis. That’s all.

We may have been stupid (sorry Mila), but we weren’t that stupid. Only half the reason for putting a band together in the first place was a desire to make music. Less than half: everything always came back around to us trying to find ways to meet girls. Never mind that we were borrowing instruments we couldn’t even play from siblings and friends. We had stage props. We had photos. And we had a good line of bullshit (“Yeah, we’re in a band”). That was enough to make it real. And being a teenage musician, that was a way to meet girls and impress them before you even had to open your mouth. Even better, write a song for a girl. That would get you in her pants, conditional on meeting her, of course.

Bill was smitten with a girl named Tammy Blue and he came up with this song for her called “Moment of Ecstasy.” He told her to come over to my house so we could play a private gig for her. Bill transformed himself into a rock star for the occasion. We might have been standing in the study of my suburban home, but Bill was playing a rock show to a stadium crowd. And there isn’t a bridge long enough to link the gap between what was happening in Bill’s head and what was happening in my house. My drum? The bottom of a plastic trash can. Dwight had a bass I had borrowed from my brother. Bruce was playing an acoustic guitar that had a couple of strings still intact. We dropped a mic into it and ran it through the same amplifier as the drum.

Then we played Bill’s song, which was a really charming number about cuming on a girl’s face.

Our moment of ecstasy I see you laying next to me And I know it’s gonna be right. Cause I’ve got it hot,I’ve got it hot. And you’re not gonna get by Cause I’ll becummin’ in your eye. Cummin’ in your face. Baby it ain’t no disgrace I’m gonna let it rip all over your lip Gonna be cum in your face Cum, cum, cum in your face.

It’s funny because Bill was such an innocent guy with no sexual experience. None. Yet here he was, singing ridiculously nasty lyrics. Everything about Stress was rinky-dink at that point, but it was what we had. It was a doctrine Bill never abandoned. What tools do you have? That was Bill’s only question. What do you have? You have a beat-up guitar with just a couple of strings on it? Fine. What can you play on a beat-up guitar with just a couple of strings on it? Pick it up and find out.

It was a very simple choice for Bill: do you want to sit around doing nothing while waiting for someone to give you some better equipment (or money, or whatever resources) so you can do things how you think they are supposed to be done? Or do you want to use what you have and start right now?

To Bill it was an easy choice. Start. Do it now. All you have is a trash can? Then turn the damn thing over and start banging on it. Now it’s a drum and you’re making music. That spirit and that attitude were infectious. Soon Bill and I were checking out books from the library trying to figure out how to make gunpowder so we could have real smoke bombs to go with our fake band. God, if we weren’t a fire hazard we sure looked like one. We made as much (if not more) smoke as noise. I even got my mom involved and she helped make a sign for the band. I cut out the letters S-T-R-E-S-S (yes, they were lightning-bolt s’s) from cardboard and wrapped them in tinfoil, while my mom poked holes in the letters and threaded Christmas lights through them.

That’s why it was so much fun to be around Bill. He didn’t wait for people to give him permission to do what he wanted. He stayed that way through his whole life. When we were older and still struggling, he never waited; he was happy to cobble together whatever resources he could. He never wanted to waste time. It’s like he knew he only had a limited amount of it.

The state of Texas allows you to get a driver’s license before the legal minimum age of 16 if your family can demonstrate that the child not having one would somehow cause a hardship for the family. Because my family had a ranch, somehow this allowed me to get such a “hardship” driver’s license. It was complete bullshit, but it meant I had a car, a blue and white LTD station wagon with fake wood paneling.

Bill had an uncanny gift of endowing ordinary things with special qualities simply by giving them catchphrase names. For example, he immediately started calling that station wagon the Stressmobile. He just had a way of making everything seem special. When you were doing things with him, you felt like you were part of some secret club.

From then on, whatever I happened to be driving, it was called the Stressmobile. Along those same lines, in the Stressmobile we used to go on what Bill termed “Nipple Tours.” Nipple Tours were just us engaging in harmless teen stalking. It wasn’t actually stalking, and it really was harmless, but looking back … it could easily have been made to look sketchy if lawyers had ever got involved.

We’d pile into the car with the Stratford school directory, and look up the addresses of girls we had crushes on. Then we’d do a drive-by. We’d just cruise by the house. That’s all. We went from house to house with the bizarre hope that we would see the girl or find out something – what, I have no idea, as 99.8 per cent of the time we saw absolutely nothing except the front of a house. Surprise.

On the rare occasion we saw someone, we’d pretend it was coincidence. We just happened to be heading down that street doing, uh, something. It was a form of cruising. The cool kids cruised up and down a central drag; we cruised by girls’ houses.

For a while we did our Nipple Tours in my family’s thirty-foot-long motorhome. My parents had given it to me to drive to school, like it was a normal car. There was another girl, Tracy Scovell. She was really hot but she had some scars on her face from where she had been bitten by a dog when she was young. The mark was not only a social hindrance but earned her the nickname of Tracy Scar-veil. Bill had a big crush on her. So after Stress got going and we were actually becoming competent musicians, we had all of our equipment – amps, guitars, etc. – in the motorhome, which happened to be outfitted with a generator.

One day we set up our amplifiers and a PA in the motorhome, then pointed everything out the window. When we pulled up in front of Tracy’s house Bill took the microphone: “Tracy Scovell … this concert is for you.” Then he let it rip. Don’t know if she was even there to hear it. Surprisingly the cops didn’t show up and tell us to stop disturbing the peace.

The band’s first big stroke of luck came when a friend of ours, Steve Fluke, broke both of his arms in a rope swing accident. Fluke was a better guitar player than anyone else we were hanging out with, but he just didn’t fit in. He was younger, but more importantly he was very “Stairway to Heaven” and we wanted to be “God Save the Queen.” However, Steve did have generous parents who had bought him a sweet-ass Les Paul guitar and an expensive amplifier to go with it.

Don’t ever let it be said that Bill wasn’t opportunistic. The day after Fluke broke both of his arms, Bill and I were over at Fluke’s house pretending we felt bad about his accident. After expressing our supposed sympathies, we turned to our more concrete interests. “Hey, man, since you can’t play guitar for a while, can we just borrow this for a couple of days?” Bill asked. “We feel really bad. We’ll come back and visit you tomorrow.”

We ended up leaving with his guitar and his amplifier (this was before Bill’s parents had bought him his rig); and not coming back to visit the following day. Nine months later Fluke turns up at my place raising a stink: “Dude, I want my guitar back.” Bill is going, “Oh shit, this isn’t mine. Is it?”

I don’t think Steve Fluke was unique in being involuntarily generous to us. Looking back, we would use people. We would act like we liked people just so we could use their equipment. We would beg and borrow just to get what we wanted.

It wasn’t long before we started to get a little more serious. Stress was never a joke, but it was just something to do that we enjoyed until Bill forced the issue by getting his parents to buy him a guitar and amp. Suddenly he was asking, “Well, Kevin, what are you going to do?” There was that bass of my brother’s we had been using. My brother Curt had schizophrenia, and at this point he was in and out of mental hospitals and halfway houses, so I was often using his equipment without even asking him. It was there. He wasn’t. I became a bass player.

It’s funny how Bill’s different worlds collided, but it’s when he and I were headed downtown to shop for guitars that we passed the Comedy Workshop for the first time. Bill stared at it as we drove by, his head careening to hold as long a glimpse of it as possible. “That must be the place I read about in the paper,” he muttered to himself. “People get up on stage and do comedy.”

A high-school kid in Texas in the Seventies? I didn’t even really know what a comedian was outside of Bob Hope or maybe Johnny Carson. Weren’t comedians old guys who stood on a stage in leisure suits making “Take my wife … please” jokes? It was something we equated with our parents.

But suddenly it was a budding sport in Houston where people were getting up on stage in front of a room full of strangers and expressing their thoughts; hopefully getting some laughs in the process. Comedy wasn’t really on the radar back then. There just weren’t many comedy clubs around – probably LA and New York, maybe Chicago – and the fact that one popped up in Houston in 1978 was pretty incredible.

For Bill, opportunity was meeting preparation. The Comedy Workshop had an open mic night every Monday. You show up, put your name on a list and you can perform.

When Bill and Dwight heard that, they said to each other: “Okay, we gotta go try this.” Their friends, myself included, were right there encouraging them because people thought they were hilarious. They were too young to know they were too young to sign up for an open mic night at a comedy club. Bill and Dwight knew they could get laughs in front of their friends; and their friends in turn would tell them, “Man, you guys are really funny. You should do this in front of other people.” There comes a time when you have to jump that chasm.

I told my mom we were going to a music store. Bill told his mom we were going to the library. We went to the Comedy Workshop.

It was the middle of a school day. I can’t even remember why we weren’t in school. We weren’t skipping, but there we were at a comedy club. We knocked on the door. A comic by the name of Steve Epstein answered. Bill asked some basic questions: Can anyone do it? How do you sign up? Does it matter that I’m only 16?

Yes. You put your name on the list. Maybe, we’ll have to check.

Epstein gave Bill a “What It Takes to Be a Comedian”-type speech. Dedication to the art. Hard work. Sacrifices that, with a bowl haircut, it doesn’t look like you are ready to make. Blah blah blah. The irony is that for all Bill didn’t know, he probably knew almost as much as Epstein at that point, if not about the practice of comedy at least the theory. Bill was already well versed in Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, Charlie Chaplin – people he had studied intensely and was already borrowing from.

But Epstein didn’t take Bill seriously at all. Why would he? He was just a kid of 16.

Monday, 10 April 1978: Dwight and Bill performed together at the Comedy Workshop in Houston, Texas. Bill again told his parents he was going to the library; Dwight told his an organ recital. I picked them up that night at the end of Bill’s street and off we went.

Oddly enough, Steve Epstein was the first comic to stand up that first night Bill and Dwight went to perform. They got themselves moved up as early as they could so as not to jeopardize their chances of lying to their parents and getting away with it in the future.

Bill and Dwight did about seven or eight minutes. They got laughs. Legitimate laughs. Some illegitimate or, more accurately, laughs that were a function of the novelty of it all. Here were kids who, legally, were too young even to be in the club (legal drinking age in Texas was 18 at the time), yet there they were. That these boys even had the balls to get up there and do this, wow! But certainly the audience had to be thinking, “Well, this is the first and last time we’ll see these kids.”

It 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 of the women working there, it wasn’t exactly a pretty sight.

There were about a dozen tables in the place and roughly the same number of women working the room. So usually only one woman would come to the table and she’d pick one guy’s lap to sit on. So, for example, Bill would be sitting there with a girl on his lap trying to flirt with him, while Dwight and I would just be sitting there.

Once on your lap, the woman was pressing you to buy her a drink. Champagnette, it was called: alcohol-free champagne. The stuff cost maybe $2 a bottle; you were getting hit for another $10 a glass. Then there’s the, “Would you like to go back to the party room with me?” That was another $50 for some time in the “party room” where, well, we weren’t really sure what happened at this point. We just didn’t have $50 to blow. “Uh, no thanks. I’m just going to watch the movie.”

After the first time we went, all of us had intense dreams that night.

I had insanely weird sexual dreams. Bill had insanely weird sexual dreams. Dwight dreamed he was gay. At school that Monday all of us were just reeling: “God, I dreamed I was …” etc. It was all clearly precipitated by our first exposure to hardcore pornographic films.

The Zipper Lounge soon became just another one of the things we did. We were going regularly but not frequently; bi-weekly or monthly. The summer after Bill’s senior year of high school, it was even more regular than that. Bill treated the whole experience like it was the most normal thing. He would call down to the theater and ask what movie was showing. He didn’t just want to know the title, he wanted to know what the movie was about, the plot. Jesus cornflakes, this was porn. But he would call down there and the poor bastard running the theatre would have to explain the film like it was the latest blockbuster.

BILL

What’s the movie playing tonight?

ZIPPER LOUNGE MANAGER

Well, tonight’s movie is called ‘Babylon Pink'.

BILL

What’s it about?

ZIPPER LOUNGE MANAGER

Well, it’s got a bunch of people having sexual fantasies to escape their boring lives. It’s directed by Cecil Howard and Henri Pachard. (Pause)

Oh, and it’s got a pee scene in it.

BILL

Geat, we’ll be right down.

And if Bill hadn’t called ahead of time, he’d ask when we got down to the theater, like the decision of whether or not we walked in was based on the plot of the movie. So, we’d pay and go in, and Bill would always get popcorn. The rest of us were worried about picking up hepatitis or some orally transmitted sexual disease from the glasses they served our drinks in; but here’s Bill diving right in. There was a movie, I guess he felt he needed popcorn.

Once we sat down, he was in a different world, just completely at ease, blissfully watching the movie. I’m sitting there half-ashamed even to be in there, thinking either the cops are going to raid the place or someone is going to blow a load that hits me in the back of the head. Something awful. Not Bill. He was in his happy place. Seeing a pornographic film was a hyper leap ahead of anything we had experienced before. Hardcore action was something entirely different than airbrushed shots in a Playboy magazine. It’s what Bill wanted. “Show me the pussy.” It could have been Bill’s epitaph.

But the Zipper also started this delusional pseudo-fantasy that we were somehow better than the other patrons; that we would rescue these girls. We were spiritual. We were artists. We were different and we could take them away. In reality we were teenagers living at home and entirely dependent on our parents for survival. We were full of shit and we were kidding ourselves. We just didn’t know it yet.

One night, Bill spent over $100 at the Zipper. Half of that was to go to the party room. He came back and was so disappointed because, for all of the money he spent, he didn’t get to have sex. He didn’t get to do anything. On the other hand I think he put himself on some higher ethical or spiritual level because he didn’t try to force the girl to do anything.

Girls were the big mystery to both Bill and Dwight in high school. One of the earliest conversations I recall having with both of them – it was right after one of the first times I was fortunate enough to have a girl agree to sleep with me – was my trying to explain sex to them. We sat there for what seemed like hours as they asked me endless questions, trying to get me to describe to their satisfaction the sensation of being inside a girl.

“So, let me get this straight, you actually touched her pussy?” “Well, yeah.” “No way. What’s it like?” How many iterations of

“What’s it like?” are there? Answer: about ninety minutes worth, because that’s how long this went on.

The thing that made Bill and Dwight different was that they weren’t afraid to admit it. Most guys who were virgins would just keep their mouths shut and act like they knew what was going on. Bill and Dwight were really open about how not laid they were getting. They didn’t want to be virgins, but at the same time they wanted their first experience to be more than something cheap.

Especially Bill. He had really bought into the white picket fence fantasy. Maybe the Zipper Lounge skewed that a bit, but not so much that it ever stopped fitting into the picture of how he wanted things to be. He certainly didn’t do anything to make it easier on himself. He didn’t drink, wouldn’t drink. Yet it was such a part of ritual high-school mating. The two were so inextricably intertwined that it almost makes you wonder: how do teenage Mormons ever hook up?

Bill used to make fun of me for drinking. I used to sneak six-packs of beer into his room. I’d sit there drinking as we were hanging out. He’d watch me and make snarky comments like, “Hey, are you a better person now?” I wasn’t special. He used to make fun of anyone and everyone for drinking.

Drinking, that’s simply not who Bill was. Not at that time, anyway. He was too sensitive, too romantic. This is a guy who in high school told me his goal in life was to become enlightened. Shit, most teen dreams fall into one of two categories. One: “I’m gonna score a touchdown at the game on Friday, then go out and drink twelve beers before I have sex with one of the cheerleaders.” Two: “I can’t wait to go to college, graduate, make a million dollars, marry a Playboy bunny, then make all of these assholes who pick on me every day jealous.” Certainly Bill wanted to get laid, and he probably wanted some combination of fame and revenge-cum-envy. But shit, he was serious: he wanted to be enlightened.

Bill. What misfit teen didn’t fancy himself as Holden Caulfield. Bill loved Catcher in the Rye. He also loved the Beatles. Thankfully he didn’t like guns, and was generally mentally stable. But as an archetypal misfit, Bill was a closer fit with Conrad Jarrett, Timothy Hutton’s character in Ordinary People. There’s a scene when Jarrett is sitting in a McDonald’s or something like that, and he goes into this deep, dark moment describing his attempt at suicide. All of a sudden, these jocks come walking in, singing a song, and they grab his hat off his head. It’s the moment he’s trying to pour his heart out, and yet the girl starts laughing at him, and he goes cold and gets mad at her. Moreover, Jarrett is growing apart from his old friends. They are all on the swim team, but as Jarrett starts coming of age, he realizes he has nothing in common with those guys.

That was very Bill.