On 16 December 1982, Bill turned 21. He celebrated with a set at the Annex in Houston. It wasn’t like he and the Outlaws needed an excuse to party, but give them one and they’d take it and run with it.
Bill’s 21st was supposed to be a monumental event. When Dwight moved to Klamath Falls, Oregon, his address was 2021 Lakeshore Drive. When he moved to Burbank with Bill, their address was 2021 West Olive. That was enough to convince Bill the universe was orchestrating a scheme with the numbers 20 and 21 involved. Bill had concluded that when he was 21 and Dwight was 20, that’s when they were going to make it.
So Dwight called Bill at the Annex on his birthday. Bill was with Laurie, and he was absolutely shitfaced. He was slurring. Dwight was disenchanted. He hung up and thought, “Bill’s gone.”
Two months later, in February of 1983, Jay Leno came to Austin for six shows. Bill drew the opening slot.
For Bill, it wasn’t so much of a break as he was already a known quantity in Austin, but it was six nights in front of locals who might not otherwise make it out to the Workshop. More importantly the friendly relationship the two comedians would forge that week would last Bill’s entire life, both for good and bad.
Leno’s visibility had increased in the previous year thanks to David Letterman. Letterman’s fledging NBC talk show, Late Night with David Letterman, had become the hip channel destination for college kids and insomniacs. Leno had already made appearances on Late Night since the show hit the air in 1982. Letterman would have Leno on and ask him what his current “beef” was, then Leno would tee off. He wasn’t political, it was middleweight ranting. But it was funny and it brought Leno fans.
To wit: Jay packed the house at the Workshop for the week.
Leno hung out backstage with Bill’s friends all week: Bill and Laurie, who had come to town for the week; Kevin and his girlfriend Jere; Mavis, Leno’s wife, talked astrology and gave the couples personal readings.
From his earliest interactions with Bill, Leno knew he was good, recalling: “I was playing in Austin, and he would come and listen. You know, when you’re a comedian, you’ve been on TV, inevitably, the comedy club owner always says, ‘Oh, there’s a group of people in the city, would you talk to them about comedy?’ Okay, so, one of the afternoons, you go down, you talk to them about comedy … I always find when you’re teaching comedy, the one who sort of gets up in disgust and leaves and thinks you’re a jerk is usually the best comedian in the room.”
That was Bill. With Bill opening for him that week, Leno gave him a nickel’s worth of free advice. He had to clean it up if he wanted to do television. That was the best way to make it to the next level, to be seen by millions of people at once. “Fuck” wasn’t going to get it done with Standards and Practices on any network.
In March of 1983, Bill headed back out to LA to collect his things. He brought his new pet ferret, Neil, with him. When he got to the California border he made the mistake of disclosing the identity of his traveling companion to the authorities. The State of California is fairly protective and restrictive on plants and animals entering the state. No ferret for Bill. Bill turned around, drove back up Interstate 10 a few miles to the rest stop inside the Arizona border. He proceeded to nap and loiter for eight hours. Long enough to assure a shift change at the agricultural inspection station on the California side of the border. Bill stashed Neil in a dirty sock, buried it in his dirty laundry, and said nothing as he drove through the checkpoint station.
The guy who arrived in LA four hours later to see Dwight was completely different from the one who had left LA several months before. The tip-off might have been the all-black wardrobe, but the change was one of more than just clothes. According to Slade, “It was almost as if you were watching your big brother come back from college. He left the varsity athlete star and he came back hippie who’s smoking grass.”
It was an accurate description, if a bit off in the details, as marijuana was the one drug Bill didn’t care for. “Well, this person has taken a giant leap in his own evolution and it certainly doesn’t include me. It kind of hurt my feelings but at the same time I had enough respect for him to know it was a step he needed to take. He seemed to communicate that too,” says Slade.
Dwight knew Bill was coming back to move out, but he had established his own life in Bill’s absence. He was going to school, and was taking a playwriting class. The class instructor was so impressed with Dwight’s work that he decided to produce a one-act play Dwight had written. That was occupying most of his spring.
Bill spent the next two months in LA not doing much. LA was the best place in the world to be busy all day doing nothing. He read, smoked, slept, hung out at the Store with his roommate (Dwight, not the ferret). He had a couple of showcases to hang around for. He saw Richard Pryor perform on the Strip, the one “true master” of stand-up, as Bill thought of him.
Bill was also putting together a personal catalogue of his work with Dwight, his past partner to that point. He was collecting and curating himself. Bill wanted to chronicle all of the characters he and Dwight had ever created and preserve them in a less ephemeral format than just mutual recollection. Dwight had an 8mm camera they had played with before. They sat down with pen and paper and brainstormed all the people they had ever invented in the name of comedy.
Although Dwight had continued to build his own life in his friend’s absence, still Bill’s departure affected him, as he concedes: “The reason I moved down there was to finish a project with Bill, so once he left, I was only there for another three or four months.”
In mid-May of 1983, Bill packed up the Chevette and made the 1400-mile journey back to Houston where he promptly made a stab at starting a more practical life. He moved in with Laurie … at her parents’ house.
Moving back to live with your own parents after leaving to go to school or start a career was usually a sign of failure and humiliation; either that or it made you the ultimate mama’s boy. Moving in with someone else’s parents, especially your girlfriend’s, was so unusual that there were no social stereotypes even to attach to it. It was just strange, but Bill got along well with Laurie’s parents.
That summer, Bill enrolled in classes at the University of Houston. Also known affectionately by the locals as “Cougar High,” U of H was not the most academically rigorous institution. Bill had a couple of standard jokes he told about his foray into college life: “I just couldn’t make it up for that eight o’clock class … And I was in night school.” He studied philosophy: “I found out it all meant nothing and I left.”
Bill and academia just didn’t make a good couple. But he had his comedy career.
Until he quit, that is. In 1983, at the ripe old age of 21, Bill retired from stand-up.
Bill’s first Last Show Ever was at the Comedy Workshop in Austin. By showtime, he was exceptionally drunk. Even by his standards. He got up on stage and started to rant. He was talking about how he wasn’t going to end up like Lenny Bruce. He wasn’t going to end up in a bathtub dead from a drug overdose. He was screaming at the audience. It stopped being comedy about thirty seconds into it.
One woman in the audience kept calling out to the stage, “We love you, Bill. We love you. Don’t go.” He yelled back at her to get her own life.
Mercifully some of Bill’s friends got up and spared the audience. Spared Bill. Dave DeBesse was among the mercy killers. “I’m fairly certain I wasn’t alone in doing it, because it wasn’t anything quite that heroic, but I know along with some other people I went up and took him offstage.”
On stage Bill was enraged and outraged. He was angry at the audience for needing him to tell them what to think. He was fed up with