The Billy Bob Tapes

by Billy Bob Thornton

  We stayed in San Diego for three or four months and Tom ended up getting engaged to a Mexican girl in Tecate, Mexico. I got her sister’s name tattooed on me.

  “THE TOM EPPERSON STORY” BY TOM EPPERSON

  (AS TOLD TO TOM EPPERSON)

  Part V

  We fell in love with California as soon as we stepped off the bus. The mountains, the palm trees, the ocean, all seemed magic to us. Billy’s uncle Bill worked as a border guard at Tecate, the Mexican town east of Tijuana where the beer comes from. One Sunday afternoon, Billy and I went to Tecate with Billy and Sally and their teenage children, and we found ourselves in the midst of a fiesta. We saw two beautiful Mexican girls looking at us and smiling. We introduced ourselves. They turned out to be sisters. Rosa, who was seventeen, knew a little English. Guillermina, nineteen, knew none at all. We instantly fell in love, Billy with Rosa and me with Guillermina, and decided to move to Lakeside. We took the bus across the country back to Malvern, packed up the Buick again, then set out for a new life in California.

  The Eagles were our favorite group, and “Hotel California” was constantly playing on the radio, which we took as a sign that this was all meant to be. We got an apartment on Wintergarden Boulevard.

  Strangely, both our heroes, Presley and Nabokov, died within the first month of our living there. We took that as a sign too, though we weren’t sure of what.

  We drove over a winding mountain road to Tecate every chance we got. We met Rosa and Guillermina’s very large family. There were nine daughters, all beautiful, but Rosa and Guillermina were the most beautiful. The family was very poor. They got their water in buckets from a well. The toilet was an outhouse. But they couldn’t have been any more welcoming and warm to us, and I spent in that house some of the best hours of my life. I asked Guillermina to marry me, and she said yes.

  But back in Lakeside things were not so fun. What little money we’d brought from Arkansas was running out fast. We didn’t have any luck finding jobs. And as often happened with Billy and me when we were under pressure, we began to fight with each other. After a couple of months Billy had had enough and took a bus back to Arkansas. And that was the end of the line for him and Rosa.

  I managed to stick it out a little longer. I got a job as a night clerk in a convenience store for two bucks an hour. Billy and I had somehow escaped the clutches of the Son of Sam in New York, but somebody was going around robbing and shooting convenience store clerks in the Lakeside area, so every night in UtoteM was a long and scary journey to dawn. The mountains and Mexico and Guillermina were great, but my situation became untenable when I got laid off by UtoteM around Christmas. I couldn’t even cut it as a convenience store clerk. So I hatched a new plan. I would return to Arkansas, go back to college for a semester and get certified to teach in high school, get a job and make some money, then go back to Mexico and marry Guillermina, then bring her back to Arkansas. All of which I almost did.

  A year later found me in Augusta, a tiny town in the middle of the cotton fields of east Arkansas. I thought it a bleak and lonely place. Before it turned cold, the mosquitoes would be so thick around the streetlights at night that they looked like smoke. And then winter came, and the fields were dull and dreary and dead and endless.

  I was the ninth-grade English teacher at Augusta High School. In three weeks, Guillermina and I were going to be married, in Tecate, in a Catholic church, and then I would be bringing her back to Augusta. And then I was summoned, via an ominous intercom message, to the principal’s office.

  As in some noir movie or novel, I walked through the door of the office and found trouble in the personage of a very pretty girl sitting demurely across the desk from my principal, Mr. Matlock. Mr. Matlock explained to me that the pretty girl was a senior in college and was being assigned to my class as a practice teacher.

  I became immediately smitten with the girl, and my smittenness was reciprocated. Guillermina and her family didn’t have a phone, so I wrote her a letter (partially in Spanish—each of us had been studying the other’s language) telling her that I’d realized I was too young and immature to be married (which was quite true) and that I wouldn’t be coming to Tecate for the wedding. In a few days, I received a collect phone call from Guillermina. Rosa was on the line too, to act as our translator. Guillermina wasn’t sure she understood what the letter meant. I started with the too young and immature thing again, but Guillermina wasn’t buying it. Finally I admitted that I’d met somebody else. By this time I was crying, and Rosa, as she translated for us, was also crying, but Guillermina didn’t cry. She said a simple but devastating sentence to me in her newly acquired English: “I have a dress white.” Guillermina and Rosa were so beautiful and so sweet and deserved so much more than they got from Billy and me. I often wonder what became of them.

  From a cosmic justice standpoint, things worked out. Two months after our romance began, my practice teacher, who had returned to classes at her college, disappeared. After several frantic days, I tracked her down. She informed me that she felt we had entered into a relationship too hastily and that it was over between us. Then I got another one of those ominous calls to the principal’s office and was told by Mr. Matlock (six-foot-nine, the former basketball coach) that the school board had decided not to renew my contract (I never really fit in in Augusta), and then a few weeks later I found out they’d hired my practice teacher to replace me!

  I moved to Little Rock. Rented the bottom half of a dumpy duplex in a bad neighborhood near downtown, just up the hill from a liquor store. (The down-and-up walk between duplex and liquor store would be made with increasing frequency over the next two years.) I began piecing together a living. I wrote some articles for a couple of local magazines, taught freshman English part-time at a couple of colleges, and had a six-month stint as the editor of a weekly newspaper called The Voice, where I made history. (When I quit to take another job, the publisher told me: “You’ve been the worst editor in the paper’s history.”)

  Meanwhile, I was writing. From when I’d begun during my freshman year, I’d written two novels, dozens of short stories, and hundreds of poems. But with the exception of five or six poems and a single short story, none of it had been published. I’d diligently been sending my stuff out but had been met with a blizzard of rejection slips. I was nearing thirty and was barely making enough money to keep a roof over my head. And here I was stuck back in Arkansas when I had wanted to venture forth and explore the world. So I conceived a new plan.

  I would move to Los Angeles and become a Hollywood writer. Going back to Attack of the Crab Monsters, I’d always loved movies and was confident I could write them. But it felt too daunting to tackle this task by myself. I wanted a partner.

  Billy was living back in Malvern. When he’d returned from California, he’d settled down a bit. One of his mother’s friends was the secretary of the dynamic first-term governor of Arkansas, hardly older than me, Bill Clinton. Strings were pulled, and Billy got hired on at the highway department.

  We’d parted on such bad terms in Lakeside, I didn’t think we’d ever speak to each other again. I would go back to Malvern pretty often to see my mother. (My father had died years before, a victim of obesity, cigarettes, and alcohol.) My mother and Billy’s mother were best friends. I’d run into Billy sometimes. We began to hang out again. After a while we were back to being best buddies.

  He was still playing in a band, a ZZ Tops–like group called Tres Hombres. But in terms of getting a career going, he’d been about as successful musically as I’d been litera-turely. Billy had a lot of charisma as a stage performer, and he’d done some acting in high school. His marriage broke up, which meant he was free to travel again, so I tried to convince him to come out to California with me and become an actor. (I don’t remember this, but Billy has told me that as part of my persuasion campaign I kept telling him he looked just like John Travolta.)

  Except for songs, Billy hadn’t done any writing, but he had a great way with words.
He was always having bizarre adventures and telling hilarious stories about them, where he’d provide the voices for all the different characters. He, too, was a movie lover, so we decided to write scripts together. I went to the library and checked out a how-to book on screenwriting, along with the screenplay for The Exorcist. In the spring of 1981 we wrote a script called “Run for the Hills,” about a star high school quarterback who gets in trouble with the law and has to go on the run. (It was a very bad script with patches of very good writing, and later proved useful as a writing sample.) Then we started making plans to return to the West Coast.

  I was teaching freshman English at UALR, so we had to wait for the semester to end. We used to climb to the roof of Billy’s house with a six-pack of beer, and we’d watch white clouds drift across the blue sky and drink and dream about all the wonderful things waiting for us in California. We were absolutely positive that we were going to be big successes, that we were going to tear Hollywood apart. We were pretty sure it would all happen by Christmas.

  The semester ended. Billy quit his job at the highway department. After the usual tearful good-byes with our mothers, we left Malvern on a rainy Friday morning in early June. We had a tape player, and we put in a Beach Boys cassette so that “California Girls” was playing as we pulled out of town, with the windshield wipers sloshing back and forth.

  I had traded in my black Buick for a sky-blue Mustang. We stopped off at a gas station and bought a road map. We had $500 between us. When we reached L.A. after three days of traveling, we had $400.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “An Island of My Own”

  There’s no trees, no sand, no sky

  In this loser’s paradise

  But it was cheap enough to buy

  I guess you’d say I set the price

  Lookin’ at the wild rough sea

  Where souls like mine are grown

  I’ve washed up on an island of my own

  —“An Island of My Own” (Thornton/Andrew)

  NOW, YOU GOT TO UNDERSTAND THAT TOM AND I WERE NOT EVEN living in Hollywood yet. We ran out of money. When we first got to L.A., we had $500 and Tom’s old beat-up Mustang. Remember when Mustangs were ugly? There were like three or four years in the late 1970s when Mustangs were ugly as shit.

  Every night when we were looking for jobs, we stayed in a different motel. The first one we stayed at was in Inglewood near the airport, with airplanes taking off every night. Then we went to Westchester for three or four nights, then Santa Monica for a couple of nights. We stayed all over the place, until we had $20 left, not even enough to stay at a motel. Tom and I drove out to Santa Monica, and we were sitting on the Santa Monica pier with $20. We were officially street people that day in 1981.

  We were there sitting on this bench where the telescopes are looking out over the ocean, and we had nothing. You know how sometimes when things are just over and you’re literally at the bottom of the barrel and then there’s a certain calm? People who have had a gun to their head and ended up living through it somehow have described that feeling, and they say, “Once the gun was to my head and it was cocked, I had this calm—it’s like, this is it, this is my last day.” Well, we had that.

  We were sitting next to this old man, old even by our standards now. He was probably late eighties or something and looked like pictures you’ve seen of Karl Marx, with a long beard. He had a little hat on and was sketching with a pencil as he looked out at the ocean. He knew just enough English to communicate with us, and we got enough out of him to know that he was from Russia and lived out in the Wilshire District downtown with his sister. His visa was about to run out, and he was going to have to go back to Russia. He was very sad because he loved his sister and he loved this country. He didn’t want to leave America. So he ended up sketching pictures of me and Tom. Tom still has the one he drew of him. Me, I lose every fucking thing.

  So the three of us were sitting on this bench looking out on the ocean. Tom and I were going to have to go away, the Russian guy was going to have to go away, we had twenty bucks, he had nothing. We didn’t have a way to get out of town and back to Arkansas. We had no idea what we were going to do.

  I knew I had a $500 check coming from the Arkansas Highway Department from when I shoveled asphalt for them just before we came out to California. They owed me that much on my retirement fund, which you pay into when you start working for them. So that was going to come sometime, we just didn’t know when.

  “THE TOM EPPERSON STORY” BY TOM EPPERSON

  (AS TOLD TO TOM EPPERSON)

  Part VI

  It was my intention to follow in my dad’s footsteps and become a lawyer, but when I got to college, I changed my mind. I had a wonderful freshman English teacher named George Horneker, who thought I had talent as a writer. Late in my freshman year, I decided to change my major from political science to English. I felt it was my destiny to be a writer, and I’ve never looked back or had one second of self-doubt since then.

  I got a BA from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and an MA from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, and then I applied to and was accepted by the PhD program at the University of Texas at Austin. My plan was to become a college professor. I’d taught freshman English as a grad student at Fayetteville and enjoyed teaching, and I loved the calm campuses and pretty coeds and hushed libraries of academia. It seemed like a good way to make a living until my writing started to pay off. But then I changed my mind again.

  I’d lived my life almost exclusively in the world of books, and I realized that, both as a writer and a person, I needed to experience more of what some have called the “real” world. I wrote Texas and told them I wasn’t coming.

  Exploring the world can be a daunting task, especially when you’re the shy, quiet type like I was. Fortunately, I found a partner.

  But Los Angeles was gigantic. We didn’t know a soul. Used to Arkansas prices, we’d thought we had plenty of money to get us into an apartment. That assumption proved incorrect. We’d arrived in the middle of a scorching heat wave. Indeed, that June turned out to be the hottest in L.A.’s history. We drove around in my un-air-conditioned car sweating through our clothes and searching for an apartment and for jobs that didn’t seem to exist. We moved from cheap motel to cheaper motel and became increasingly desperate as we watched our money running out. Ten days after we’d got there, we were down to $20. Not enough for another night at the motel in Westchester near the airport we were staying at. We packed up our car and left.

  We drove to the ocean. We went out on the Santa Monica Pier, sat down on a bench, and tried to figure out what to do. We didn’t have the money to get back home. We could call up our mothers (collect) and have them send us some money, but that thought was horrible. It would be New York all over again. Leaving with much fanfare to seek our fortunes in the big city, then sneaking back into town only a couple of weeks after we’d left. We sat there for hours. The sun began to go down in Santa Monica Bay.

  “You know, Tom,” I said, “my cousin Jane lives out in Rialto. I haven’t seen her since I was a kid, but maybe we could go there and stay.”

  So I make a collect call to my cousin Jane, who’s married to this guy Nick, a truck driver. They had been married forever. They’re my cousins, but they were, like, older cousins—more like an aunt and uncle to me. They had kids and everything, so I felt bad about calling people who I never call and imposing on them. But I didn’t know what else to do, they were the closest people I knew.

  I said, “Can we come out and see you?” but not stay with you, and they say, “Yeah, we would be happy to see you.”

  We went out there and slept in their garage. Tom slept on the pool table, and I slept under the pool table. Tom’s four years older than me, so he always got the best seat in the house.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Rewriting Othello: The Othie and Desi Show

  THERE WAS ONE GUY WE KNEW TO CALL IN L.A., THIS GUY JEFF LESTER, who was playing a depu
ty in a TV series based on the movie Walking Tall. Tom was a substitute teacher back in Arkansas and had taught with Jeff’s girlfriend’s mother. (The girlfriend had a part in the TV series too.)

  Jeff was real nice to us. Tom and I told him we had written a screenplay that wasn’t worth a shit—I mean, the writing was pretty good, but it was like 190 pages long and structured totally wrong. We didn’t know what we were doing, but Jeff said, “Why don’t you just come to this acting class and check it out?” And I said, “How much does it cost? I don’t have any money.” And he said, “You can just audit the class.”

  I didn’t know shit about any of what was going on in that class. There was one chick in there that I had seen on a commercial, so, to me, she was like fucking Laurence Olivier. This acting class was taught by a guy named John Widlock, who I thank every day of my life. I can trace everything I’m doing now, any success I’ve ever had, to that acting class at Crossroads of the World, Maudie Treadway, and Billy Wilder, who I’ll get to later, because of one simple thing: encouragement.

  I didn’t start out to be an actor. I was in a rock-and-roll band, and I played baseball. But to this day—and I’ve had different acting coaches and teachers over the years—I’ve never seen an acting teacher or an acting class make a bad actor good. I have, however, seen acting teachers make a good actor worse. A lot of acting teachers take you from point A to point Z by going through point Q, as opposed to going straight for point Z. What I mean by that is—and if you live in L.A., you understand—if I’m living here in Beverly Hills and I want to get to Glendale, I don’t go through Downey to get to Glendale, I go straight to Glendale.