Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution

KEVIN BOOTH AND MICHAEL BERTIN

Contents

Cover

Title Page

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

EPILOGUE

INDEX

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Kevin Booth

Tripping was very ritualistic for us. It was something we’d prepare for. Meditation. Fasting. Flotation tanks. We even had meals prepared for the comedown, and usually had instruments set up as well so we could play music together to ride out the end of the trip. We weren’t just taking psychedelic drugs and running around like crazy people.

It almost always involved us going to my family’s ranch near Fredericksburg, Texas. It was 70 sprawling acres of hill country, pocked with enormous live oak trees. There was a 2600-square-foot tract home with a garden and an orchard. Out back was the pond. The reflection of the sun setting over the water made even the monochromatic Texas heat come alive with intense color.

Parts of Bill’s routines weren’t comedy or jokes: they were directives. When he was talking about mushrooms and he said, “Go to nature. They are sacred,” he wasn’t kidding. Tripping would allow Bill to commune with nature.

Bill, David Johndrow and I went out to the ranch to trip. We planned and timed everything out. Shrooms were sacred, but they weren’t the only thing on the menu. This time we were taking acid. We timed when we dropped so that we would start tripping right as the sun was setting. Once we were tripping, full-on tree-vibrating star-dripping wigging out, we each often had a separate sense of what the others were doing. There would be times when something bad was happening to one of us, and one of the others would just appear. We’d come together and work through it. Then we would have times when we all went out and drifted off on separate paths, only to reconvene at some unspoken spot hours later.

At one point on this particular trip I came across Bill as he was looking pensive and distraught. He was in the yard all by himself, walking in circles. And he was gradually wearing a groove into the grass. I heard him muttering to himself over and over, “What is this thing? Goddammit, what is this thing?” He just kept circling and muttering, circling and muttering. “What is this thing?”

I asked him: “Bill, what are you talking about? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know, dude. There’s just this thing. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve got this thing in me.” Bill was pointing to his side, right where his pancreas is, as he was saying this. “I’ve got this thing inside me,” he said. “It needs to come out. It’s like an upside-down cross inside of my body. It needs to come out.”

Right when he said that – the “upside-down cross” bit – I broke out laughing. Sometimes everything seems funny when you are tripping your nuts off, unless, of course, something is distressing you; and this was obviously distressing Bill.

Fuck. Too late. It sent Bill off.

“Oh, fucking forget it,” he fired back, and then, visibly agitated, he stormed off into the woods.

I followed him. “No, I wasn’t trying to make fun of you, Bill. What’s up? What’s wrong?” This was my friend. We were tripping but, shit, he was trying to tell me something important. It got fucked in translation. Drugs can do that.

I tried to assure him I wanted to understand what he was talking about, but he was not going to risk being laughed at again. “Forget it. Nothing,” Bill said. I put up a few more weak protests. He brushed them off. And that was that.

That was the summer of 1982, more than a full decade before Bill died of pancreatic cancer.

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