Bill Hicks was no friend of mine.
I'd love to say he was, now that he's become something of a legend. I can say that in the years I knew him, he never spoke an unkind word to me. Which is startling, given the man once compared himself to a camel with a "hump of hate" that required only an annual visit to any dance club to refill. But to call Bill a friend would be overstating the truth for reflected glory. We had a respectful acquaintanceship, we regularly performed on the same six by eight foot stage, and we shared at least one lover.
That last bit occasioned the only mildly annoying thing Bill ever said to me.
The young woman in question had blurted out a strange idea one day while in my company--the possibility of discovering intelligent life in outer space and finding it in distress. I thought this was hysterical, and immediately wrote a couple of lines on having to send money and food to another planet. After seeing me perform it, Bill complimented the brief bit, and I related its origin.
"Fuck! She never gave me a premise," he said. "You know what I could do with that idea?"
I did. He could have turned it into a ten minute piece that left his audience crying and gasping for air. That was just a fact. And so I wasn't really offended. Much.
* * *
The last time I saw Bill he was dying and knew it. He had, at that point, told no one but his immediate family and a few close friends. When we said good bye, he bade me an oddly warm farewell.1 I didn't know what it meant then. I didn't know what it meant to have worked for several years alongside Bill Hicks either. More on that later.
I knew Bill mainly back in the Comedy Workshop days. The Workshop was a pissant little comedy club in Houston Texas that flourished in the 1980's. It consisted of two rooms, neither of which held more than about fifty patrons. I worked mostly in the Cabaret, writing and performing sketch comedy and improv, and the occasional humorous song. Bill hung out next door at the Annex, reinventing stand-up comedy.
Maybe that's a stretch. I don't know that Bill really did much that Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor hadn't done already. But Bill had a raw, aching purpose that has not been matched before or since in the arena of stand-up. Bill Hicks wanted to teach. And what he wanted to teach us was no less than the meaning of life as he had come to understand it through contemplation, introspection, and the liberal use of psychedelic mushrooms. He had a calling and he followed it wherever it took him. No matter the personal cost.
Few who commit to such an ambitious path with the utter abandon and native intelligence of a Bill Hicks fail to make a mark in life. If they survive long enough, that is. Yet Bill was in many ways extraordinary even by those standards. It turns out, though, that being extraordinary on a historical scale is easily mistaken for being merely locally exceptional. We all knew Bill was the best, some of us just thought he was the best in town. In the end it turned out to be much more than that.
* * *
Of course there were clues, when you look back.
I remember a party one late night at Bill's place up on the twenty-somethingth floor of the Houston House apartments. I was hanging outside by one hand from the balcony railing, feet dangling in space, enjoying the looks I was pulling from the other comics there. Being an asshole, in other words.
Bill strolled onto the balcony, cigarette clamped in his lips, and gazed out at the downtown skyline. "Frank," he said without glancing my way, "we're kinda on thin ice here with the landlord already.2" He took a drag off the cig, exhaled. "And if you fall, technically it's littering."
And he walked back into the apartment.
That was Bill's way of saying I get what you're doing, but I'm not playing the game, and don't make trouble, okay? And with his cool and easy brilliance he upstaged my stunt completely. I had been trying in a ridiculous fashion to stand out from the crowd. Bill didn't have to try. It was simply a part of whatever he'd become by then.
* * *
Years later, when he died rather suddenly of pancreatic cancer and the cult of Bill Hicks the Greatest Comic Who Ever Lived really got rolling, many people close and not so close to him had their own stories to tell. Stories about how unmistakably unique Bill was, how his genius had touched us all, how clearly he had risen above every one of his peers. And yes, a handful of comics really did get how important he was.
But I happened by chance to have been there. And I can tell you that many of us didn't fully see it at the time. And by "us" I mean Americans in general. The comedy prophet was not honored on his home turf.
So what else is new?
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1. That was out in the house after his final full length set, at Igby's 11/17/93. The video of that performance is available here
2. Bill and fellow comic, Mark Wilkes, were occupying the luxury apartment at greatly reduced cost in return for the (mostly unfulfilled) promise to perform comedy in the bar downstairs.