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  My first encounter with Hicks was his Gulf War routine, which had been broadcast during the postwar euphoria at the beginning of 1992 on England’s Channel 4. My sixteen-year-old son, Chris, was bellowing from the living room for me to come quickly. It was midnight, and he was sprawled, laughing, on the sofa, watching Hicks at the Montreal Comedy Festival calling a massacre a massacre. ‘So scary, watching the news. How they built it all out of proportion. Like Iraq was ever, or could ever, under any stretch of the imagination, be any threat to us whatsoever. But, watching the news, you never would have got that idea. Remember how it started? They kept talking about “the elite Republican Guard” in these hushed tones, like these guys were the bogeyman or something. “Yeah, we’re doing well now, but we have yet to face . . . the elite Republican Guard.” Like these guys were twelve-feet-tall desert warriors – “NEVER LOST A BATTLE. WE SHIT BULLETS.” Well, after two months of continuous carpet bombing and not one reaction at all from them, they became simply “the Republican Guard” – not nearly as elite as we may have led you to believe. And after another month of bombing they went from “the elite Republican Guard” to “the Republican Guard” to “the Republicans made this shit up about there being guards out there.”

  ‘People said, “Uh-uh, Bill, Iraq had the fourth-largest army in the world.” Yeah, maybe, but you know what? After the first three largest armies, there’s a real big fuckin’ drop-off. The Hare Krishnas are the fifth-largest army in the world. And they’ve already got our airports.’

  Most TV comics trade in brand-name jokes or jokes that play off physical stereotypes. They don’t question their culture so much as pander to its insatiable hunger for distraction. But Hicks’ mischievous flights of fantasy bring the audience back to reality with a thump. Hicks is a kind of ventriloquist of his contradictory nature, letting voices and sound effects act out both his angst and his appetites. Occasionally, the instinct for Goat Boy comes over him, and Hicks, a man of instincts, goes with it. Goat Boy is Pan, or Hicks’ version of him – a randy goat ‘with a placid look in his eyes, completely at peace with nature’ – through which he celebrates his own rampaging libido.

  ‘I am Goat Boy,’ he would say in the act that night, in a grave baritone. ‘Come here, my little fruit basket.’

  ‘What do you want, Goat Boy?’ he answered, in a coy Southern falsetto. ‘You big old shaggy thing.’

  ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha,’ Hicks growled into the microphone. ‘I am here to please you.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Tie me to your headboard. Throw your legs over my shoulders, let me roll you like a feed bag.’ Hicks brought the microphone close to his mouth. He snorted, slurped, and finally screamed, ‘Hold on to my horns!’ Then, as suddenly as the impulse had come upon him, Hicks broke off the fantasy, saying, ‘I need professional help at this point.’

  The secret of Hicks’ psychic survival has always been comedy. He started writing and performing his jokes as an alienated thirteen-year-old in Houston in 1975, and, by his own count, for the last five years he has been performing about two hundred and sixty-five days a year, sometimes doing as many as three two-hour gigs a night. Few contemporary comics or actors have such an opportunity to get their education in public. Hicks uses the stage time to write his material in front of an audience. ‘I do it all onstage, all of it,’ he said, and then began to relate how he’d started on his eccentric journey. ‘When I was about eleven, it dawned on me that I didn’t like where I was,’ he said, speaking of the subdivision where he lived, which was called Nottingham Forest; of Stratford High School, which looked like a prison and where he was bored out of his skull for four years; and of his father, who was a midrange executive with General Motors. The Hicks family lived in ‘strict Southern Baptist ozone.’ The memory still rankled. ‘One time a friend of mine – we were nine – runs over and goes, “Bill, I just saw some hippies down at the store.” I go, “No way.” He goes, “I swear.” My dad goes, “Get off this property! We don’t swear on this property!”

  ‘We were living the American dream. This was the best life had to offer. But there was no life, and no creativity. My dad, for instance, plays the piano. The same song for thirty years – I think it’s “Kitten on the Keys.” I don’t play the piano, but all my friends are musicians. My dad goes, “Do they read music?” I go, “No.” “Well, how do they play it?” I go to the piano and I write a song. What’s the difference? He can’t improvise. That, to me, is the suburbs. You get to a point, and that’s it – it’s over.’

  Once he’d seized on the idea of writing jokes, Hicks closeted himself in his bedroom and went to school on comedians. He started watching Johnny Carson. ‘I thought he was the only comic in the world, because I never stayed up later,’ he said. Soon Hicks began burning the midnight oil, taping other comic acts on television. ‘I’d take their jokes and also write my own. I performed them around school, and what I loved was when both got equal laughs. I knew which one was me and which one I’d seen on TV the night before. I learned how to mesh these things. How to get into character. I was very, very popular and known as a comedian at school. I’d always have to have material, constantly, all day. It got to the point where my English teacher gave me five minutes to do before class. My older brother Steve encouraged me. I typed up about two pages of jokes – whimsical stuff in the Woody Allen vein, which really appealed to me – and slipped them under his door. He came in later that night and said, “What’s this?” I said, “I dunno. I’m writing these things. They’re jokes.” He couldn’t believe it. “These are funny, man. Keep doing this.”’

  Hicks’ first partner in comedy was Dwight Slade, with whom he formed the act Bill and Dwight in the eighth grade. A tape exists of Hicks and Slade giggling through some of their early routines, which involved pretending to be brothers with ‘many many problems.’ ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the comedy sensation Dwight Slade and Bill Hicks. And here they are!’ it begins, and then the two of them collapse into roars of amusement at their own vain attempts to strike adult postures while reading gags about God, sex, abortion, and parents.

  The jokes illustrated Hicks’s precocity, and suggested how comedy both masked and admitted the hostility that kept him sullen and virtually silent around his family. ‘I can remember being at dinner when Bill would come down to eat,’ Steve Hicks told me. ‘He’d sit there with his face buried in a book. Absolutely no conversation from him or to him. Nothing. Then he would go up to his room and close and lock the door. We had no idea what he was doing.’ Hicks’ room, which had nothing on the walls but a guitar, was a cell of rebellious solitude. He kept a typewriter under his bed and hid his pages of jokes inside its case.

  In 1976, there were no comedy clubs in Houston. Except for school, the only outlets for Bill and Dwight’s routines were talent shows and nightclubs. They scoured the paper for auditions, and often rode their bikes the seventeen miles into town and back for a tryout. That summer, when they were both fourteen, a talent agent to whom they’d sent a tape liked it enough to get them airtime on Jerry Lewis’ Telethon from 2 to 2:45 A.M. Their big break posed three immediate problems: (1) they didn’t have forty-five minutes of material, (2) they’d never performed as Bill and Dwight in front of a live audience, and (3) they had to tell their parents. The first two problems were surmountable, but the third proved the sticking point. Hicks’ parents said no. Hicks and Slade had to cancel, explaining that they were too young to drive themselves to the job. But in 1978, when the Comedy Workshop opened on San Felipe, in Houston, they talked their way into the lineup. This time, they made the gig. To get to it, Hicks had to climb out his window, shin down the drainpipe to the garage roof, jump from the roof to the ground, and hightail it to the Catholic church behind his house, where Kevin Booth, a friend who had a car, picked him up and then drove both performers to the club. Bill and Dwight did fifteen minutes – a kind of double solo performance, each doing Woody Allen shtick without the actual give-and-take of a comedy team. ‘What was really funny
was when my friends would come and I’d go, “I . . . uh . . . I have trouble . . . trouble with women,”’ Hicks said. ‘And my friends would go, “No, you don’t!” I’d go, “My parents are very poor.” “No, they’re not!” They were amazed we were in this adult world. They were seventeen and could drive us there, but when they got us there we were in the adult world.’

  The comedy team performed five times before Slade moved to Portland, Oregon, where he still lives, working as a standup comic. Hicks put his anarchic energy into a hapless punk-rock group called Stress, in which he sang a song called ‘I’m Glad I’m Not a Hubcap (Hubcaps Don’t Get Laid).’ At some point in his seventeenth year, Hicks’ parents took him to a psychotherapist. ‘There was no connection between me and my parents – none,’ he said. ‘They had no idea of who I was. They still don’t get what I do. How could they have understood it fifteen years ago?’ The therapist met with the family, then with Hicks. At the end of the session, the therapist took Hicks aside. ‘“Listen, you can continue to come if you feel like it,”’ Hicks recalled him saying. ‘“But it’s them, not you.”’ Soon afterward, at the beginning of Hicks’ senior year, his father was transferred to Little Rock, Arkansas. He and his wife left Hicks behind in the house and gave him the keys to the car. Hicks began doing comedy every night. His parents thought he was studying. The comedy club put him on first, because he had to get home early. Sometimes the phone would be ringing just as he walked in the door. ‘The conversations were like this,’ Hicks said. He fell easily into his father’s Southern accent: ‘“Where were you?” “Library.” “Again?”’ Even after his parents left, his material was almost entirely about them.

  To this day, Hicks continues to mythologize his parents and his relationship with them, in comic routines that spoof their Southern propriety. But this is only professional acrimony, and doesn’t stop Hicks from thanking his parents on his record albums or turning up regularly for ritual family occasions. Hicks, like all comedians, picks at ancient wounds to keep open the soreness that feeds his laughter and to demonstrate his mastery over the past.

  In 1982, Hicks’ parents finally saw him perform. They had been visiting Steve in Dallas, where the family had assembled for Thanksgiving, and his parents decided to surprise him. The plan was to drive the three hours to Austin, see the show, and drive back to Dallas the same night before setting out the next day for the six-hour ride to Little Rock. Steve and his wife waited up for them but finally fell asleep around 3 a.m. At nine, their phone rang. The Hickses had been so appalled by their son’s act that they’d got in their car and driven nonstop to Little Rock. ‘They were in a state of shock,’ Steve says. ‘They didn’t say a word to each other for nine hours. They didn’t even realize they’d driven through Dallas!’

  At one end of Hicks’ long, corridorlike dressing room at the Dominion was a window overlooking the stage. Hicks walked over and looked out at the paying customers. ‘It’s about that time,’ he said. Isolation suddenly fell over him like some fog blown in by his unconscious. Showtime was approaching, and he wanted to be alone. Fifteen minutes later, he brought his aggression roaring onstage. The narrative swung into attack as Hicks, like a man driven to distraction by the media, fought his way free of its overload by momentarily becoming its exaggerated voice: ‘Go back to bed! America is in control again . . . Here . . . here is “American Gladiators.” Watch this! Shut up. Go back to bed. Here’s fifty-six channels of it. Watch these pituitary retards bang their fuckin’ skulls together and congratulate yourself on living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do as we tell you! You are free!’

  Hicks worked at a tremendous rate, pounding away at the absurdities of American culture with short jabs of wit and following up with a flurry of counterpunches. ‘Ever notice how people who believe in creationism look really unevolved?’ he said. ‘Their eyes real close together. Eyebrow ridges. Big, furry hands and feet. “I believe God created me in one day.” Looks like he rushed it.’ Later, near the end of the evening, Hicks drew one final lesson. ‘The world is like a ride at an amusement park,’ he said. ‘And when you choose to go on it, you think that it’s real. Because that’s how powerful our minds are.’ A young Englishman three seats away from me shouted ‘Bollocks!’ And, without missing a beat, completely caught up in the dialogue he was having with his audience, Hicks said, ‘There is a lot of denial in this ride. The ride, in fact, is made up of denial. All things work in Goat Boy’s favor!’ Thrilled by the improvised insight, the audience burst into applause, and then Hicks guided the rest of the show smoothly to its conclusion, which, for all its combativeness, ended on the word ‘peace.’

  Hicks came to my house the next day for tea. He was tired and a little distracted, and was wondering out loud which way to take his quirky talent. ‘Once this stuff is done, it’s over with – I’m not married to any of it,’ he said. ‘Goat Boy is the only thing that really intrigues me right now. He’s not Satan. He’s not Evil. He’s Nature.’ Hicks paused and added, ‘I’m trying to come up with this thing about “Conversations with Goat Boy.”’ Then, suddenly, the interrogator and, Goat Boy started a conversation at my tea table:

  ‘You don’t like America?’

  ‘I don’t see America. To me, there is just a rapidly decreasing wilderness.’

  Hicks stopped and smiled. ‘That is Goat Boy. There is no America. It’s just a big pavement now to him. That’s the whole point. What is America anyway – a landmass including the Philippines? There are so many different Americas. To him, to Nature, it’s just land, the earth. Indian spirit – Indians would understand randy Pan, the Goat Boy. They’d probably have a mask and a celebration.’

  My son wandered into the kitchen and lingered to eavesdrop on the conversation. At one point, he broke in. ‘I don’t know how you have the courage to say those things,’ he said. ‘I could never talk like that in front of people.’

  Hicks smiled but had no response. Saying the unsayable was just his job. He analyzed the previous night’s performance, which had been filmed for an HBO special. (It was broadcast in September to good reviews.) ‘People watch TV not to think,’ he said. ‘I’d like the opportunity to stir things up once, and see what happens. But I’ve got a question. Do I even want to be part of it anymore? Show business or art – these are choices. It’s hard to get a grip on me. It’s also hard for me to have a career, because there’s no archetype for what I do. I have to create it, or uncover it.’ To that end, he said, he and Fallon Woodland, a standup from Kansas City, were writing ‘The Counts of the Netherworld,’ a TV comedy commissioned for England’s Channel 4 and set in the collective unconscious of mankind. Hicks was doing a column for the English satire magazine Scallywag. He was planning a comedy album, called ‘Arizona Bay,’ a narrative rant against California with his own guitar accompaniment. Should he stay in England, where he was already a cult figure, or return to America? He recounted a joke on the subject by his friend Barry Crimmins, another American political comedian. ‘“Hey buddy,” this guy says to him after a show. “America – love it or leave it!” And Crimmins goes, “What? And be a victim of our foreign policy?”’

  As Hicks was about to go, he said, ‘We are facilitators of our creative evolution. We can ignite our brains with light.’ The line brought back something his high-school friend Kevin Booth had told me: ‘Bill was the first person I ever met whose goal was to become enlightened.’ At various times in his life, Hicks has meditated, studied Hindu texts, gobbled hallucinogens, searched for U.F.O.s – anything to make some larger spiritual and intellectual connection. His comedy takes an audience on a journey to places in the heart where it can’t or won’t go without him. Through laughter, Hicks makes unacceptable ideas irresistible. He is particularly lethal because he persuades not with reason but with joy. ‘I believe everyone has this fuckin’ poem in his heart,’ he said on his way out.

  II

  My New Yorker profile about Bill Hicks – Part I of this foreword – sat unp
ublished at the magazine for nearly four months. Hicks’ ban from the David Letterman Show and his subsequent thirty-one-page hand-written screed to me (see “Letter to John Lahr”, pages 300–323) provided the impetus to get the profile into print by November 1st. ‘The phones are ringing off the hook, the offers are pouring in, and all because of you,’ Hicks wrote to me the following week, signing himself ‘Willy Hicks’. ‘I’ve read the article three times, and each time I’m stunned. Being the comedy fan that I am, I’ve ended the article every time thinking, “This guy sounds interesting.’” Hicks continued, ‘It’s almost as though I’ve been lifted out of a ten-year rut and placed in a position where the offers finally match my long held and deeply cherished creative aspirations . . . Somehow, people are listening in a new light. Somehow the possibilities (creatively) seem limitless.’

  Re-reading Hicks’ letter now, ten years later, the parentheses in the last sentence hit me like a punch to the heart. Hicks was suddenly, to his amazement, no longer perceived as ‘a joke blower’, his word for the kind of pandering stand-up he hated. In the two months following the publication of the New Yorker profile, seven publishers approached him about writing a book; ‘The Nation’ asked him to write a column; Robert DeNiro met with him to discuss the possibility of recording his comedy on his Tribeca label; and Britain’s Channel 4 with Tiger Aspect green-lighted Hicks’s ‘Counts of the Netherworld’ (‘Channel 4 wants our first show to somehow tie in with their celebration of the birth of Democracy two thousand years ago,’ Hicks wrote to me. ‘Democracy may have been born then, I just can’t wait till it starts speaking and walking’). The creative possibilities may have seemed limitless to Hicks, but, even as he was writing me letters about ‘the hoopla’ and his newfound calm (‘I’m very grateful for it’), he knew that he was dying.