Love All the People (New Edition) Read online

  In June, touring Australia with the comedian Steven Wright, Hicks had begun to complain to his manager and girlfriend Colleen McGarr about horrible indigestion. He hadn’t had a proper physical exam in ten years; so when they returned, later in the month, to West Palm Beach for a week’s engagement at the Comedy Corner, McGarr booked a check-up for Hicks. On June 15th, his first night at the Comedy Corner, Hicks came offstage clutching his side. ‘The physical had been set up for the following Thursday,’ McGarr recalls. ‘But when I took a look at him, I said “We gotta get you in tomorrow.”’ Hicks was thirty-one. Because of his relative youth, the doctor, William Donovan, seemed convinced that the swelling on Hicks’ side was a gall-bladder problem. He sent Hicks for an ultrasound. ‘The ultrasound guy said, “We have to get him over to the hospital. We have to do a biopsy because this isn’t gall bladder,”’ McGarr says. ‘They looked very grim at the time.’

  On the night of his liver biopsy, Hicks slept at the Good Samaritan Hospital. ‘He was really digging it,’ McGarr says. ‘I was going out to get him his favourite treats – grilled-cheese sandwiches and soup. It was like an enforced rest after all the touring. He was kind of chipper.’ At five the next morning, William Donovan phoned her. ‘Colleen, it’s the worst news possible,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to get down here now. We have to talk to him.’ In person, Donovan explained to McGarr that Hicks had pancreatic cancer; he had only about three months to live. At 7.30, they went into see Hicks, and Donovan told him that he had stage-four pancreatic cancer and that there was very little that could be done about it. At first poleaxed by the news – ‘He looked like he’d been shot,’ Donovan is reported as saying, in Cynthia True’s American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story – Hicks finally said, ‘What’s the battle plan?’ What had to be decided, Donovan explained, was how Hicks wanted to live the time he had left. Aggressive treatment would leave him mostly incapacitated. Since Hicks felt ‘at the peak of his powers,’ according to McGarr, a compromise treatment was arranged, so that he could continue to write and to perform. ‘There was no crying. There was no going nuts,’ McGarr says. ‘It was really, really calm.’ She adds, ‘He’d known for awhile, I’m sure, that something was wrong. I mean people don’t have indigestion for six months.’

  The following Monday, Hicks started chemotherapy. A network of doctors around the country was set up so that Hicks could get treatment wherever he happened to be touring. Hicks responded well to the therapy. ‘No one knew about his illness,’ McGarr says. ‘The only people who knew were my business partner, Duncan Strauss, and Bill’s immediate family. Nobody else. We didn’t tell anyone. That was also Bill’s decision. He had a lot to do – he was finishing the record “Arizona Bay” and he had a ton of gigs.’ She adds, ‘He wanted the work to get out without the taint of any sentimentality.’

  In the months that remained to him, by all accounts, Hicks seemed to inhabit the world in a different way. Instead of scourging it, he beheld it. ‘Things became a lot more meaningful than he’d ever given them credit for,’ says McGarr, who saw him ‘growing on a spiritual level.’ ‘Flowers. The beach. He started swimming in the ocean for the first time, splashing around like a dolphin which is not really Hicks-like – at the beach, when he was dragged there, he was always the guy dressed head-to-toe in black.’ Hicks referred to his cancer as a ‘wake-up call’. Where, in the past, Hicks had styled himself as an outlaw onstage and a loner off it; now he sought out people and engaged them. His spirit and his wardrobe started to lighten. ‘He was astounded by how much love came around him as a result of this,’ McGarr says. ‘He realized that people really did care about him and that he didn’t have to be alone.’ For a time, he moved into McGarr’s West Palm Beach apartment, and he ‘began to take some actual joy’ in domestic life. ‘This is a guy who had been on the road for about fifteen years,’ McGarr says. ‘He’s used to eating crap – spaghetti sauce out of a jar. “I need you to get me some Ragu”, he’d say. I’m like, “We don’t have jarred spaghetti sauce in this house, we have homemade.” Fun stuff like that. It was a revelation to him.’

  Before returning to Little Rock, Arkansas, for his birthday – December 16th – and for Christmas with his family, Hicks celebrated his own unofficial Yuletime with McGarr in Florida. They brought a Christmas tree and decorated it with homemade ornaments. Hicks drew a reindeer on a card and tied it to the front bough of the tree. He told McGarr to open it. ‘Will you marry me?’ it said. The question was academic. By late December, according to McGarr, Hicks was ‘really really bad.’

  ‘On a work level, everything was done,’ she says. ‘He’d recorded “Arizona Bay”, performed his last complete sold-out set at Igby’s in Los Angeles on November 17th, pitched the TV show at Channel 4.’ In just four months, Hicks had acquired what had eluded him for fifteen years – a receptive American audience. But on a physical level he was now fading. Nonetheless, after Christmas, he insisted on meeting McGarr in Las Vegas to watch Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles in concert. ‘I almost passed out, he looked so bad,’ McGarr recalls. The day after the Sinatra show, they flew back to West Palm Beach. The doctors wanted to admit Hicks to the hospital; he refused to go. ‘Things got very tense,’ says McGarr, who had to enlist the help of hospice nurses and of Hicks’ mother, Mary.

  On 5 January, 1994 – against McGarr’s wishes – Hicks did the eight o’clock show at Caroline’s Comedy Club, in New York. In her attempt to prevent Hicks from doing the gig, McGarr rang Dr Donovan. ‘Colleen, Bill is ready to die. He just won’t lie down,’ Donovan told her. She hung up on him. Hicks was about thirty minutes into his set when he looked up over the microphone and scanned the crowd. ‘Colleen, are you out there?’ he said. From the back of the room, McGarr called out, ‘Bill, I’m right here.’ ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ he said. McGarr rushed to the side of the stage. Hicks glanced over at her, paused, then put the mic back in its stand, and stepped into the wings. It was his last performance.

  On 26 January, McGarr put Hicks on a plane to Little Rock. ‘Bill always wanted to die with his parents at their house in Little Rock,’ she says. ‘He wanted the circle complete – that was very important to him.’ On Valentine’s Day, after making a few calls to old friends, Hicks announced that he was finished with speaking. Although he hardly uttered another word, except to ask for water, he wandered around the house, according to his mother, almost every night. On 26 February, at 11.20 p.m., Hicks died with his parents at his bedside. His radiant comic light had burned for thirty-two years, two months, and ten days.

  When a great comedian dies, the culture loses a little of its flavour. The world rolls on, of course, but without the comedian to both witness and illuminate the deliria of his moment. In Hicks’s case, the loss is even more piquant, given that the American public discovered him largely after he’d departed it. ‘This is the material by the way, that’s kept me virtually anonymous in America,’ Hicks joked in his last complete set, after a detour into philosophy. ‘You know, no one fucking knows me. No one gives a fuck. Meanwhile, they’re draining the Pacific and putting up bench seats for Carrot Top’s next Showtime special. Carrot Top: for people who didn’t get Gallagher.’ He continued, ‘Gallagher! Only America could produce a comic who ends his show by destroying food with a sledgehammer. Gee, I wonder why we’re hated the world over.’ At the end of the set – in an inspired moment that was captured on film – Hicks came back on stage for his encore with a large paper bag, from which he extracted a watermelon. He put it on a stool, grabbed the microphone, raised it high above his head and brought it down on the side of the stool. He’d missed the melon but hit the target. The audience howled. As Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name’ blared over the loudspeakers – ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’ – Hicks shouted in unison with the lead singer: ‘Motherfucker!!!!!!’ Hicks made his exit, flipping the finger wildly with both hands to the room, to the world, to the cosmic order that his jokes frequently invoked.

  The revenge th
at Hicks took with laughter – his almost infantile glee at getting even for the credulity of the republic (‘You’re a moron!’ ‘You suck Satan’s cock!’ he frequently yelled to the idiots in his mind and in the audience) – marked him as the genuine comic article. ‘Listen to my message, not the words,’ Hicks told his mother. Composed in equal parts of scepticism, scatology and spirituality, Hicks’ humor gave off a very special acrid perfume. ‘Pro-lifers murdering people,’ Hicks heehawed. ‘It’s irony on a base level, but I like it. It’s a hoot. It’s a fuckin’ hoot. That’s what fundamentalism breeds, though – no irony.’ To the spellbound and the spellbinders, Hicks bequeathed a heritage of roaring disgust. If he wanted to force the public to descry a corrupt society, he also wanted it to descry the low standard of commercial American comedy, which raised laughs but not thoughts and, in his eyes, hawked ‘fucking beer commercials,’ while leaving the public ‘without any kind of social fucking awareness.’

  The white heat of Hicks’ fulminations was meant, in part, to purify comedy itself – a notion explicitly stated in a film script he developed in the last year of his life, which told the story of a serial killer who murders hack comics. ‘I loved those who gave their lives to find the perfect laugh, the real laugh, the gut laugh, the healing laugh. For love, I killed those comedians,’ the murderer explains when he’s finally caught. Hicks wanted to play the serial killer; his act was part of the same search-and-destroy mission.

  Hicks came of age when the sitcom showcase was king. At a time when the romance of the road was over for American comedians, and the goal was to get a development deal – your own show and a big payday – Hicks returned comedy to its essential atmosphere of challenge and unpredictability. In a riff about ‘Tonight Show’ host Jay Leno doing Dorito commercials (‘What a fucking whore!’), Hicks said, ‘Here’s the deal folks. You do a commercial, you’re off the artistic roll-call. Forever. End of story. You’re another fuckin’ corporate shill . . . Everything you say is suspect, everything that comes out of your mouth is like a turd falling into my drink.’

  As the Letterman incident and his reaction to it dramatized, Hicks was as hungry as the next comedian for mainstream success, but only on his own terms. He was not prepared to sacrifice the emotional integrity of his material for popularity. ‘There’s dick jokes on the way’ he’d say to his listeners when he raised ideas that flummoxed them, then he’d put on his cracker accent: ‘“This guy better have a big-veined purple dick joke to pull himself out of this comedy hole”.’ As a comedian, Hicks was never soft and cuddly. For the first-class members of the next generation of American comedians, such as Jon Stewart of ‘The Daily Show,’ the purity of Hicks’ comic quest was inspirational. ‘Hicks was one of the guys fighting the good fight,’ says Stewart, who considered Hicks ‘a legendary figure’ and who worked with him a couple of times on the road. ‘He was the guy you looked to. He wasn’t trying to be mediocre; he wasn’t trying to satisfy some need for fame; he wasn’t trying to get a sitcom; he was trying to be expert.’ Stewart adds, ‘Hicks was an adult among children.’ Among the daring lessons that Hicks’s comedy taught Stewart and other comedians of the next generation was ‘to walk the room’ – if Hicks didn’t think that the room was worthy of him, he would ‘walk it’, that is, drive his comedy further than even he might normally think of doing. ‘The audience’s apathy spurred him on,’ Stewart says. For instance, at one gig, as Hicks was launching into a bit about the Zapruder film, a drunken blonde called up to him, ‘You suck!’ Hicks rolled the words around in his mouth, stepped downstage, and pointed to the woman. ‘Get out! Get out, you fucking drunk bitch! Take her out! Take her fucking out! Take her somewhere that’s good. Go see fuckin’ Madonna, you fucking idiot piece of shit!’ Hicks began to imitate her voice – ‘“You suck, buddy! You suck!”’ – and ended up skipping around the stage in her persona. ‘“I got a cunt and I’m drunk. I can do anything I wa-aant! I don’t have a cock! I can yell at performers! I’m a fucking idiot ’cause I got a cunt!”’ He knelt down. ‘I want you to find a fucking SOUL!!!!’

  As a performer, Hicks was not short on soul or on charisma. In front of the paying customers, he was powerful, unpredictable, and thrilling. ‘He was bigger than the room,’ Stewart says. A great comedian is by definition inimitable. Nonetheless, since his death, and even before it, American comedians like Dennis Leary have made a good living reworking his lines and faking his bad-ass attitude. The indicators of posthumous longevity for Hicks are good. A biography has been published (‘the most outspoken, uncompromising and famous unknown comic of all time,’ the jacket says); Hicks’ record sales are bullish; in a recent TV documentary about censorship, for which Hicks’ expletives were deleted, his name was added to the short list of comic martyrs.

  Since his death, history has caught up with his comedy. In the early nineties, he was already talking about Iraq and the first President Bush. ‘If Bush had died there,’ he said, in a bit about why we should kill Bush ourselves instead of launching twenty-two Cruise missiles at Baghdad in response to his alleged attempted assassination, ‘there would have been no loss of innocent life.’ In a culture made increasingly woozy by spin-doctors, Hicks’ straight-talking about political chicanery was a few years ahead of its time. If Hicks didn’t pave the way for comic civic disobedience in such popular TV shows as ‘Politically Correct’ and ‘The Daily Show’, he was an immanence of subterranean rumblings. ‘When they were putting together “Politically Incorrect,”’ Colleen McGarr says, of controversial American TV show, ‘they were actually considering Bill as the original host instead of Bill Maher.’

  A dream is something you wake up from. It is compelling and significant that the final words on Hicks’s last record, ‘Rant in E-Minor’, are a prayer: ‘Lift me up out of this illusion, Lord. Heal my perception, so that I may know only reality.’ Hicks mocked society’s enchanters – advertisers, TV networks, rock-and-roll icons, religious fanatics, politicians – with the sure knowledge that as in all fairytales only the disenchanted are free. He made that show of freedom by turns terrifying, exhilarating, and hilarious. He was what only a great comedian can be for any age: an enemy of boundaries, a disturber of the peace, a bringer of insight and of joy, a comic distillation of his own rampaging spirit.

  – John Lahr

  January 2004

  Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My name is William Melvin Hicks. Thanks Dad.

  Austin, Texas, 1983

  Part 1: 1980–91

  Climbing Up to Center Stage,

  The Oracle,

  Stratford High School Newspaper

  (1980)

  by Julia Joseph

  Los Angeles has ‘The Comedy Store’. New York has ‘Catch A Rising Star.’ Now in Houston, up and coming comedians have a place to launch their careers. The Comedy Workshop is now in session.

  Since its start a few years ago, the Comedy Workshop has become one of Houston’s most popular night spots. Houston comedians, both amateur and professional, go to the Workshop to try out new material, improve on established material, and receive inspiration for future material.

  Senior Bill Hicks is one of the Comedy Workshop comedians who has aspirations for a career in comedy and entertainment. He has been doing comedy since he was in the 7th grade. Bill and a former Stratford student, Dwight Slade, who is also interested in a career in entertainment, went to the Workshop two years ago and performed on amateur night. Dwight has since moved to Oregon, but plans to return to Houston. He and Bill are going to form a comedy team. As a team Bill says that he and Dwight have ‘something special that will make us the two who become famous.’ ‘There is a rapport with Dwight that makes me come up with things quickly,’ said Bill.

  ‘It used to be just amateur night,’ said Bill of the format in the Annex of the Workshop. ‘They started having stand-ups about two years ago.’ Bill has been hired as one of the regular stand-up comics.

  The Comedy Workshop is now divided into two parts, the Cabare
t and the Annex. The Cabaret houses satirical revues Wednesday through Sunday, and the Flipped Side of the Comedy Workshop – the touring company – Thursday and Sunday. The Annex houses an open stage for stand-up comedians and specialty acts every night, along with regular paid Stand-ups Friday and Saturday.

  Bill is the youngest comic at the Workshop and for him to have gotten this job is no mean feat. ‘Two of the comics were in the National Laff-Off,’ said Bill. He explained that this is a contest held to determine the five best comedians in the United States. Several celebrities, both local and national, also perform at the Workshop. For example, Gary Richardson, a Burt Reynolds look-alike, has opened Charo’s show in Las Vegas. He is also renowned in Houston for the local TV commercials that he does for a weight reduction clinic.

  Stand-up comedy requires as much preparation as any stage performance does. ‘You’ve got to be your best supporter,’ said Bill. ‘Sometimes you feel in control and it’s great, but sometimes you just don’t feel in control and you really have to struggle to get laughs.’ He said that he does not have a specific place or situation from which he gets his material. ‘It just comes to me.’

  Bill is having increasing success with his career. Besides working at the Comedy Workshop, he has performed with other comedians at the University of Houston. Private groups are able to arrange with the Workshop for a group of the comedians to perform at a special function or gathering.