“So, let me get this straight, you actually touched her pussy?” “Well, yeah.” “No way. What’s it like?” How many iterations of
“What’s it like?” are there? Answer: about ninety minutes worth, because that’s how long this went on.
The thing that made Bill and Dwight different was that they weren’t afraid to admit it. Most guys who were virgins would just keep their mouths shut and act like they knew what was going on. Bill and Dwight were really open about how not laid they were getting. They didn’t want to be virgins, but at the same time they wanted their first experience to be more than something cheap.
Especially Bill. He had really bought into the white picket fence fantasy. Maybe the Zipper Lounge skewed that a bit, but not so much that it ever stopped fitting into the picture of how he wanted things to be. He certainly didn’t do anything to make it easier on himself. He didn’t drink, wouldn’t drink. Yet it was such a part of ritual high-school mating. The two were so inextricably intertwined that it almost makes you wonder: how do teenage Mormons ever hook up?
Bill used to make fun of me for drinking. I used to sneak six-packs of beer into his room. I’d sit there drinking as we were hanging out. He’d watch me and make snarky comments like, “Hey, are you a better person now?” I wasn’t special. He used to make fun of anyone and everyone for drinking.
Drinking, that’s simply not who Bill was. Not at that time, anyway. He was too sensitive, too romantic. This is a guy who in high school told me his goal in life was to become enlightened. Shit, most teen dreams fall into one of two categories. One: “I’m gonna score a touchdown at the game on Friday, then go out and drink twelve beers before I have sex with one of the cheerleaders.” Two: “I can’t wait to go to college, graduate, make a million dollars, marry a Playboy bunny, then make all of these assholes who pick on me every day jealous.” Certainly Bill wanted to get laid, and he probably wanted some combination of fame and revenge-cum-envy. But shit, he was serious: he wanted to be enlightened.
Bill. What misfit teen didn’t fancy himself as Holden Caulfield. Bill loved Catcher in the Rye. He also loved the Beatles. Thankfully he didn’t like guns, and was generally mentally stable. But as an archetypal misfit, Bill was a closer fit with Conrad Jarrett, Timothy Hutton’s character in Ordinary People. There’s a scene when Jarrett is sitting in a McDonald’s or something like that, and he goes into this deep, dark moment describing his attempt at suicide. All of a sudden, these jocks come walking in, singing a song, and they grab his hat off his head. It’s the moment he’s trying to pour his heart out, and yet the girl starts laughing at him, and he goes cold and gets mad at her. Moreover, Jarrett is growing apart from his old friends. They are all on the swim team, but as Jarrett starts coming of age, he realizes he has nothing in common with those guys.
That was very Bill.
Dwight Slode
There were two things Bill and I talked about throughout our whole lives.
One of those was spirituality. He was always very interested in it. For him, I think it started to get serious in high school when we got into transcendental meditation. Of course, it helped that Bill hated church, hated everything about it. What he hated most was that he had to go. But with TM he was exploring different spiritual issues. It was huge at the time. We had long late-night conversations about this knowledge that was dawning in our lives. I think many young people have these experiences, but at 14 and 15 in Houston, Texas, most kids are sitting around talking about women and pot or going out and getting beer. Bill and I were talking about metaphysics.
The other, and maybe bigger, overriding theme we talked about throughout our lives was characters. I think Bill was surprised by it, too: “Why are we always talking about these things?” he would ask. It was characters. Characters, characters, characters. Constantly. In fact, that’s how I met Bill. It was because I was imitating a mutual friend of ours and Bill thought it was really funny. So that became something we did. We had two notebook pages listing people in school and parents and whatever we used to imitate.
Later, when we were living together in Burbank, again: characters. Because we were working on a screenplay, we’d invent new characters and do them back and forth to each other.
We went to New York in 1991, and we did a lot of walking. That’s what’s great about New York. Bill loved to walk. It’s an odd thing, but I never met anyone who liked to walk so much. So we would walk and we started to do more characters. It was odd because his career was really starting to go well, and I remember him sensing it and being surprised: “Wow, why are these little characters that I thought were just childhood fun things to do, why do they keep recurring, and why are they so fucking funny?”
A lot of our early stuff – the father characters – that stuff goes deep. It was the first thing Bill and I talked about. One of the most valuable things about my relationship with him is that I was there when the first aspects of his humor started to emerge. I think it’s telling because in stand-up you get out, you exorcize, those things that are most incongruous in yourself; things that cause emotion in you. The first characters we had were the characters of our fathers.
You look at his early stuff and his father character is there all of the fucking time. And it became more and more elaborate and further and further over the edge until it became corrupt. The relationship between the character of the father and the son was corrupt beyond redemption, but maintained that southern civility. That’s why it entertained Bill and me no end.
It was this hopelessly incestual, horribly corrupt relationship, but the affection, odd as it seems, was there. It still makes me laugh. It’s so fucking funny. Bill would call me up – and this was repeated a million times; we never got sick of it, we just loved this character – but he would call me up:
BILL
This is your father.
DWIGHT
Hello, Daddy.
BILL
I have some special news for you.
DWIGHT
What is it, Daddy?
BILL
I’m actually your mother.
DWIGHT
Why’s that, Daddy?
BILL
I have a vagina. You were born from me.
DWIGHT
Are you sure of that?
BILL
Yes, you piece of shit.
DWIGHT
Well, you’re an old fucking coot is what you are, Daddy.
To us it was, well, it was telling. To me, Bill’s humor was about violation. Violation of common sense; violation of personal space. The idea of violation came up in his humor over and over. And certainly in the characters we had and the relationships I saw, there was violation and Bill would stab back with humor.
Bill had a lot of anger towards his parents. Why? I guess the better question would be “why not?” If you met them, you would know in a second; you could see the friction that existed. I’ve thought about them because, like every family, they are dysfunctional; but their dysfunction is phenomenal. It’s deep. There is some