Bill wanted to be Dave; Dave wanted to be Bill.
Bill still hadn’t figured out that the best way to make yourself attractive to women was just to be yourself. None of us really had. Bill was funny and he knew it. Or at least he had an inkling that he was funny enough for people to take notice and that he was only going to get better at comedy. That was complemented by sheer bravado. That’s why he was in LA when most of his friends were slacking it in college. Sure, Hollywood was littered with delusional kids certain that they, too, were going to “make it,” or whatever. What distinguished Bill was that he was genuinely talented.
Bill never even made mention of interacting with any females, aside from Mitzi Shore, the owner of the Comedy Store in LA. He once wrote me that he was spending a lot of time at the library because he had a crush on a librarian and was “checking her out.” He may even have fabricated that for the sake of a pun, bad as it was.
If Bill had just been his own mostly charming self, he would have been fine. Instead of charm, however, he had schemes, very bizarre schemes. Gags. Bits. Whatever. They didn’t work in high school. They still weren’t going to work because the degree to which they were weird for the sake of being weird was rivaled only by the degree to which they were lame:
I’ve got a great new idea. We go up to the girls, right? And we ask the ketchup question. Whatever the answer is, I’ll go, “Ha ha. I knew it! Pay up, Mister!” And I’ll turn to you and you’ll look all discouraged and start counting out the money to me – five hundred dollars! After you’ve given me the five hundred bucks, I go, “Come on. All of it.” You sigh, shrug your shoulders, and reach in your pocket and hand me three pennies, a nickel, a peso, and a rattlesnake rattle. Then you go,
“Wait a minute, I’ve got a chance to get even … Have you girls ever ridden in the back seat of a bike made for two?” Whatever their answer is, you go, “All right!” I go, “Shoot!” and you stick out your hand and I give you back the peso, the rattlesnake rattle, and the button off my shirt. Pretty weird, huh?
The question was rhetorical, I know, but, yeah, it was pretty weird, as well as creepy, strange and absurd.
In addition to asking Dave to hook him up somehow, Bill was also pleading for stories. He bagged on me for living in a “city where half of the population of Stratford moved to", yet not digging up enough gossip to satisfy his curiosity. “Stories. I want stories.” Despite physically being in La-La land, mentally he was still half in a Lone Star State of mind. These were mostly people Bill had spent a good chunk of time and energy either a) making fun of or b) trying to get away from. Now, Bill wanted to know what they were up to.
He couldn’t cut the umbilical cord. On top of it, Bill was probably trying to experience college vicariously. The luxury of doing trivial things was something he didn’t have. But for someone who actually knew what he wanted to do with his life, and didn’t drink, college was really a poor fit. Plus, he was having trouble masking his homesickness and his general misery, having second, maybe third and even fourth thoughts about his LA plans.
Guess who was at the Comedy Store last week? Richard Pryor! He didn’t go up but he was hanging around. I, of course, wasn’t there that night. DAMBO! Oh well – I guess I’ll be spending a couple of nights at the Comedy Workshop when I’m [in Houston]. Boy, I hope I can stay longer. Not enough time to try out all the new goil gags. I was really going to use this Houston trip as a determiner of my next move, but now it’ll be kind of hard to do in only four days. It’s really tough out here. You have to understand what I’m talking about when I say I want out of here. The Comedy Store is filled with guys that just ain’t superstars. I want to be great, and believe me, that doesn’t happen in just one year. Look at Richard Pryor or Rodney Dangerfield – years and years and years! You see what I mean? There is no hurry for me now. I must think in terms of longevity. Think of the ups and downs those two have been through. Yikerbooes! The Comedy Store is a comic factory for producing these LA modsters. It’s very scary. I don’t know what to do, ya know? Stay out here and take a chance of not becoming jaded and bored with everything, or leave – give up my position out here, and go to college for a few years and work in a club with a more productive atmosphere. See what I mean? I think I’m gonna take off now. Hang loose. Keep cool. Check you later. Gotcha on the rebound. Shoot me in the face.
Your buddy,
Bill
Bill’s letters were like children’s books. They were as much about pictures as words, and almost every letter he sent me from LA had some pictorial history of Stress. It was something he hadn’t given up on and, inasmuch as that was the case, Bill was still half in Houston. The novelty of LA was wearing off.
The thing is, Bill was doing exceptionally well, by any measure. He had been in Los Angeles less than a year and he was getting regular stage time at the Comedy Store and the second location in Westwood by UCLA. That in itself was no mean feat. On top of that, Bill was living the “someone is going to see me on stage and put me in their TV show” dream.
That’s almost how it happened. Bill got a part in Bulba, the pilot for a network sitcom cast in a mold similar to that of Fantasy Island. Starring was Lyle Waggoner of Wonder Woman fame. Bill played the part of Marine Sergeant Phil Repulski, a guard at the Madcap American Embassy Office.
This was still in the days when TV in America was dominated by the three major networks: ABC, NBC and CBS. It’s the kind of break people have probably literally killed for at some point. Bill just kind of backed into it. He always did that. Throughout the early part of his career I heard other comedians marvel about how Hicks got work without ever picking up the phone. Even during the times when Bill was getting his phone cut off for not paying the bill, work was still finding him.
When Bulba happened Bill was totally stoked. His part wasn’t even a stretch for him. Basically he got hired on his impersonation of his father. Do that for twenty-two minutes, and everything else would be cream cheese.
He had some stupid catchphrase like, “Ba-loop baba loop-bop.” Just a nonsense word. And one of his sight gags was raising the flag up the flagpole while his pants were falling down. This was very broad, not heady, comedy. He called me, bragging about that scene in particular. The area around the flagpole was fenced off but there were four or five hundred girls from the local Catholic school gathered nearby watching the shoot. They kept cheering Bill on during his scene.
Bill was going to like TV. I remember thinking: “Wow, that’s it. Bill is going to be a star.”
On one hand, I was happy because, shit, my friend was going to be a fucking star. On the other, I was upset because I thought, “This is the end of Stress.” We had both been operating under the assumption that Bill was going to go out there for a little while and that I was going to get a few things in order, then we would get the band back together. Every conversation we had, every letter he wrote: girls and Stress. Bill acted like Stress was something that was going to happen in the future.
In hindsight, Bill was simply keeping all avenues open. I want to be a musician; I want to be a comedian; I want to be a writer; I want to make films; I want to do television.
Only the pilot was an unfunny piece of crap. The network and the rest of America agreed. The pilot aired once, and that was it. No series. No nothing. The end. And it’s not like any of the schoolgirls went home with him. He got a decent check out of the deal. He said it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $9000 for a week’s work. Not bad.
Bill knew a network sitcom was a completely retarded thing to be doing, but he had just got to LA. To get a sitcom that quickly had been a total coup; he didn’t have the luxury of turning it down. And he had been genuinely excited about it. Moreover, it got him a fucking high-power talent agency. By doing this one stupid thing, he advanced a thousand steps.
It’s strange. Bill was worried about getting jaded and bored. He was homesick, yet if he had left after his first year in LA, Bill could have counted himself a bigger success than 99 per cent of the people that ever cross the Mojave Desert. Considering the amount of human wreckage LA causes on a daily basis,