Stress never died completely. In fact throughout Bill’s life the idea of revitalizing Stress at some point stayed with both of us. But Bill (and Dwight, for that matter) was just a kid doing whatever he was doing. He was on a mission that didn’t really have a specific objective. He was creative and he loved expression. This was part of the early exploration.
The night after Bill and Dwight first did stand-up at the Comedy Workshop, we went to the Zipper Lounge to celebrate. We had known about the Zipper Lounge for a while, but we didn’t know the first thing about what went on inside. We just knew the name and the location, and we knew we had to go there at some point.
There was something intrinsically funny about the name itself. The Zipper Lounge. There was also the mystery of what was behind the door. Was it a strip club? A whorehouse? What the hell was going on in there? The rest of the appeal was its lack of appeal. From the outside the place was pathetically unassuming. In an area where most of the surrounding titty bars had flashing neon “Live Nude Girls” signs or something similarly ostentatious, the Zipper Lounge had the most ordinary of signs. There was no fancy facade. It just sat unobtrusively by a restaurant and a convenience store. In fact, that’s the only reason we found the Zipper Lounge in the first place. It shared the parking lot with its neighbors and we had gone to that convenience store.
So it was something we had wanted to do for a while. We just needed the proper excuse. Bill and Dwight performing stand-up comedy together at the Workshop proved sufficient. We had already spent the first part of the night in the adult nightclub world. We now had the cockiness to match our curiosity. Dwight, Bill and I were under-age, but it was a case of us just walking up “as if.” As if we were old enough. As if this was something we did all the time. As if it was no big deal. Plus, the sex industry, as we would find out time and again in our lives, isn’t particularly picky about whose money it is taking.
We walked in to see a popcorn machine and an unappealing, unkempt older man behind a glass window in the lobby. We quickly figured out this was some kind of adult movie theater. We were kids, but we weren’t stupid.
There was a nominal cover charge and a two-drink minimum. We pay the cover and go into the main room. Great. We’re in. It was dark. Unusually dark even for a movie theater. A grainy porno movie is playing on an undersized screen. There it is: people fucking. Moving pictures of people fucking. It was definitely my first exposure to pornographic movies. And Bill’s. And Dwight’s. And anyone who ever came with us after that.
The Zipper Lounge was a huge revelation. This was long before the ubiquity of porn in any format. The home-video market barely even existed. This was a real education, both in sex and business.
The place only sold soft drinks – no liquor license – and the Cokes were $10 apiece. They were served in a glass without ice. This was going to be a warm and expensive proposition, especially for a bunch of suburban teens on a limited allowance.
Of course, there was another feature of the Zipper Lounge designed to separate you from your money. It wasn’t just an adult movie theater; there was also live entertainment. This wasn’t the kind of place where men in raincoats went in to masturbate. It had women – scantily clad women – who would come to your table and sit on your lap. It wasn’t lap dancing. It was just lap-sitting company.
“Hi, what’s your name? What do you do?” We’d lie. I don’t remember how old we said we were, and we worked in the oil industry. God, could we have been more unbelievably ridiculous? Teen oil tycoons. We were 15, maybe 16 years old. And Bill would have had a hard time passing for 15. He was baby-faced. Even into his twenties, Bill still looked like a teenager. But this place was dark, so the employees probably had as hard a time seeing us as we did them. Thank God: any time the scene in the movie was bright enough to catch a glimpse of the women working there, it wasn’t exactly a pretty sight.
There were about a dozen tables in the place and roughly the same number of women working the room. So usually only one woman would come to the table and she’d pick one guy’s lap to sit on. So, for example, Bill would be sitting there with a girl on his lap trying to flirt with him, while Dwight and I would just be sitting there.
Once on your lap, the woman was pressing you to buy her a drink. Champagnette, it was called: alcohol-free champagne. The stuff cost maybe $2 a bottle; you were getting hit for another $10 a glass. Then there’s the, “Would you like to go back to the party room with me?” That was another $50 for some time in the “party room” where, well, we weren’t really sure what happened at this point. We just didn’t have $50 to blow. “Uh, no thanks. I’m just going to watch the movie.”
After the first time we went, all of us had intense dreams that night.
I had insanely weird sexual dreams. Bill had insanely weird sexual dreams. Dwight dreamed he was gay. At school that Monday all of us were just reeling: “God, I dreamed I was …” etc. It was all clearly precipitated by our first exposure to hardcore pornographic films.
The Zipper Lounge soon became just another one of the things we did. We were going regularly but not frequently; bi-weekly or monthly. The summer after Bill’s senior year of high school, it was even more regular than that. Bill treated the whole experience like it was the most normal thing. He would call down to the theater and ask what movie was showing. He didn’t just want to know the title, he wanted to know what the movie was about, the plot. Jesus cornflakes, this was porn. But he would call down there and the poor bastard running the theatre would have to explain the film like it was the latest blockbuster.
BILL
What’s the movie playing tonight?
ZIPPER LOUNGE MANAGER
Well, tonight’s movie is called ‘Babylon Pink'.
BILL
What’s it about?
ZIPPER LOUNGE MANAGER
Well, it’s got a bunch of people having sexual fantasies to escape their boring lives. It’s directed by Cecil Howard and Henri Pachard. (Pause)
Oh, and it’s got a pee scene in it.
BILL
Geat, we’ll be right down.
And if Bill hadn’t called ahead of time, he’d ask when we got down to the theater, like the decision of whether or not we walked in was based on the plot of the movie. So, we’d pay and go in, and Bill would always get popcorn. The rest of us were worried about picking up hepatitis or some orally transmitted sexual disease from the glasses they served our drinks in; but here’s Bill diving right in. There was a movie, I guess he felt he needed popcorn.
Once we sat down, he was in a different world, just completely at ease, blissfully watching the movie. I’m sitting there half-ashamed even to be in there, thinking either the cops are going to raid the place or someone is going to blow a load that hits me in the back of the head. Something awful. Not Bill. He was in his happy place. Seeing a pornographic film was a hyper leap ahead of anything we had experienced before. Hardcore action was something entirely different than airbrushed shots in a Playboy magazine. It’s what Bill wanted. “Show me the pussy.” It could have been Bill’s epitaph.
But the Zipper also started this delusional pseudo-fantasy that we were somehow better than the other patrons; that we would rescue these girls. We were spiritual. We were artists. We were different and we could take them away. In reality we were teenagers living at home and entirely dependent on our parents for survival. We were full of shit and we were kidding ourselves. We just didn’t know it yet.
One night, Bill spent over $100 at the Zipper. Half of that was to go to the party room. He came back and was so disappointed because, for all of the money he spent, he didn’t get to have sex. He didn’t get to do anything. On the other hand I think he put himself on some higher ethical or spiritual level because he didn’t try to force the girl to