don’t know?” I was caught offguard and still processing the flip Bill had just flopped. “Tequila. Maybe margaritas. That’s a drink people drink.” This is Texas. It’s hot. Margaritas are a dietary staple and tequila is what makes a margarita a “drink.”
“Okay, I’ll have seven,” Bill announced. He had no patron saint of moderation. Bill knocked back seven shots of tequila before going up to do his set. Bill had his first train wreck to accompany his first drink. The disaster started while Bill was putting back the tequila, when he had the unfortunate pleasure of hearing the paying customers fawning over the mediocre comics performing before him. Bill had brewed contempt for the audience before he even got up there. When he got on stage, it was blind rage.
It wasn’t just being drunk; tequila is a harsh drink, it puts an edge on everything. So if you’re predisposed to anger and hatred, Bill couldn’t have chosen a better (read: worse) way to lubricate his rage. Bill was combustible and the tequila had lit his fire — it was only a matter of time. He tore into the audience, berating them and letting them know how much he hated them, how much they were responsible for the fact that everything in the world sucked.
“You people, you’re the ones responsible for Gary Coleman! You’re the reason why Diff’rent Strokes is the number-one show on TV!” Bill had never had a drop of alcohol in his life. Not. One. Single. Drop. He went straight from that to seven shots of tequila straight. Belligerent. Fuck You. All of that.
He was ranting about how the flag didn’t represent anything and he started talking about America’s Bullshit Wars. Vietnam was a Bullshit War. Korea was a Bullshit War. To all rational observers and armchair pundits, we were on the eve of getting ourselves into another Bullshit War.
There was a couple sitting near the stage who were none too pleased with Bill’s views on foreign affairs. At some point Mrs. Patriot Missile had heard enough: “My husband fought in Korea for your freedom.” She tore into Bill. The husband, a big, older guy with anchor tatts on his arms, sat there as the fireworks started going off. He and the missus were Americans, for sure, right down to their colors: blue collar, redneck and white trash. “He fought in that war so you could have the freedom and the right to stand up there and say what you’re saying.”
Bill fired back: “Your husband didn’t do shit for me. I didn’t ask him to fight for me. I didn’t ask him for shit.”
They exchanged a few “did not” “did too” blows. Then the vet stood up. He was also super-drunk. He flared out his chest and verbally beat on it like a simian: “You don’t know what you are talking about. My friends laid down their lives for your freedom.”
Bill. “No they didn’t. No they didn’t. No they didn’t.” Bill wasn’t backing off. “The price of freedom is high? Bullshit.” Bill didn’t buy into it. “Freedom is free. Freedom is fucking free!”
It’s amazing that episode didn’t end in violence. For all of the inflammatory shit he said on stage, for all of the staunchly political views he took, and for all the antagonizing of audience members he did, it’s somewhere between statistical anomaly and miracle that Bill didn’t get the shit beaten out of him on a regular basis.
When people got up to leave Bill’s shows, Bill didn’t just let them go. He encouraged them to go with epithets: “Go. Go ahead, you fuckers, leave. Go home to your American Gladiators. Go. Get the fuck out.”
It’s not to say that Bill’s shows weren’t without incident, it’s just that the incidents seldom ended up with Bill being on the receiving end of a fist or chair. Not that he didn’t deserve it every now and then.
LA had caused Bill to re-examine some of his deepest-held beliefs. His comedy had been stagnating. And before, when he got into a rut in Houston, he could always blame it on being in Houston: you were only going to go so far when you were a thousand plus miles from the epicenter of showbiz. That excuse was off the table. In LA he had been performing at the same club where Richard Pryor got his start, and that was deeply symbolic to Bill.
Drugs were seeping out of the walls at the Comedy Store in LA. Legend has it that Pryor himself used to have a bodyguard who would escort him from the stage to his car after the show because there were so many drug dealers and hangers-on waiting around who wanted to give him free blow. He needed a bodyguard just to get out of there or it was a three-day coke binge waiting to happen.
People wanted to hand the really good comedians free drugs. That’s just the way it was. It was the Eighties. This wasn’t like a high-school keg party, this was Bill’s workplace. And it was one of the few places in LA that he liked to hang out. So Bill was surrounded by it.
Bill also wanted to take the spirituality and the TM and do something with it. He was sick of talking about levitating, he wanted to levitate. He didn’t want to imagine his third eye, he wanted to see through it. He was ready for all of it. All of the things he had read about and learned about with Dwight, he was ready for them to manifest themselves in some way. Bill wanted it to be something more than a concept. He wanted to open his eyes and see trees talking to him. He wanted to split across time. Static to kinetic.
So, comedy-wise he was feeling stagnant; drugs were all around him, and drugs might help facilitate advancing his spiritual quest. And maybe his deeply held beliefs weren’t that deeply held. For a person of such great conviction, he was hopeless at making radical changes.
Plus, he was getting reassurance from his peers. Guys like Steve Epstein were able to say, “Bill, it’s totally normal. Nothing bad is going to happen. It will only last a few hours. There is no physical damage.” So Bill tried it. And it was, “Oh my God. This is the answer to everything.”
So in just a few weeks Bill had gone from teetotaler to drinker and drug user. Given Bill’s personality, it wasn’t difficult to see where this would eventually wind up.
Bill had spent so much time and energy putting down people who used drugs it was practically a second career. So when he turned up in Austin after the mushroom experience wanting to drop acid, it put me in the awkward position of having to look like a total hypocrite. Among the users Bill had made fun of were my girlfriend Jere and her friends. Now I had to ask Jere, the object of Bill’s ridicule, to get drugs for him and me.
“We’re doing this for spiritual reasons,” I excused myself.
We really did want it for spiritual reasons. We were trying to break barriers. Which ones, we didn’t know, but we were experimenting for the same reasons people turned on in the Sixties. We were pioneers, we wanted to go there, too, wherever it was the acid would take us.
We ended up scoring, from the cousin of Jere’s friend. He came riding up on rollerskates to sell us some blotter acid. He had four little postage-stamp-size hits in a dime bag. One each for me, Bill, Jere and David Johndrow. Blue cheers. Pink panthers. Purple hearts. Yellow sunshine. We never even knew what it was, but we dropped it.
We wanted some kind of breakthrough, but the acid trip was fundamentally different from that first mushroom trip. Everything seemed so harsh. When someone would knock on the door it was a bummer. When the phone would ring it was a bummer. When we had to get something to eat it was a bummer. This wasn’t what we wanted.
Bill had read Carlos Casteneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge and some of John Lilly’s work. He was also more interested in naturally occurring hallucinogens than anything concocted in a bathtub laboratory. So the budding psychonaut made a reasonable inference from what he was absorbing: this is a communion with nature you are trying to achieve, ergo, go to nature.
That’s when we first decided to go to the ranch. And that’s where everything changed.
We took this seriously. We prepared for our trips. We fasted for a day and a half before. We did yoga and meditation. It wasn’t just us getting fucked up. Others thought differently, but we behaved differently. They were taking pills and going to titty bars. We were taking mushrooms and sitting by the pond on my family’s ranch until we were transported to the Last Supper and talking