The Billy Bob Tapes

by Billy Bob Thornton

  So I was in the shower one day, getting ready to go deep-sea fishing with Phil Bruns. See, Bruns told me, “If you ever want to go fishing sometime, you can go deep-sea fishing out at the marina, $17.50, and they give you the rod and reel, the bait, and they take you out on the boat for three hours. It’s fun, and I’ll pay for it because I know you’re broke.” This deep-sea fishing was for rock cod. You have five hooks on your line, you lower it to the bottom of the ocean out there, and five rock cods would hop onto it instantly, like fleas. Your limit is fifteen, and you catch your limit in like ten minutes. You can pay the guys there a couple of extra dollars and they’ll fillet them for you, but I didn’t do that. I brought them home, sawed their heads off, and cleaned them in the bathtub so that Tom and I could cook them in the toaster oven.

  Anyway, I was taking a shower getting ready to go down to the marina to go fishing with Phil Bruns and somebody’s banging on the door. Tom’s not home, I had no idea who it was. I had really long hair then because, like I said, I had been a hippie musician back home and I hadn’t caught on yet that if you were going to be an actor you had to get a haircut. So I got this wet hair hanging down, I got a towel on, I open the door, and it’s her. Scared the shit out of me. She scared the shit out of me all the time when I saw her. Not any disrespect to her, it’s just that I couldn’t help it. If I open the door and there’s a burned person like out of House of Wax there, I jump.

  She asked me, “Can I have a picture of you?” and I said, “A picture of me? I dunno. What do you want that for?” “I want to be able to look at beauty like you,” she says to me. And I go, because I got a little bit of an ego, I go, “Yeah, sure.”

  So I had two Polaroids, one was of me and Tom with a stripper in Nashville and the other one was some Polaroid of me sitting there somewhere like an idiot. So I give her this Polaroid, and she says, “Thank you,” and she wants to know if I would come down to her room sometime, hang out with her and her roommate. Her roommate, who was a big, heavyset blond woman, used to get in fights with this dude in the middle of the street. Tom and I used to watch it out the window.

  “Yeah, I’ll get back to you on that.”

  Another time I was running across the street to use the pay phone—since we didn’t have a phone, every now and then I would take one of my quarters and go to the Korean market on the corner where there was a pay phone and make a call to my mom back home—I turned the corner, and the melted woman was standing right there. I screamed, “Goddammit!” because it was like out of a horror movie. She started crying and—I’ll never forget this because her face was like a road map of big, melty, waxy-looking stuff—the tears were going, like, not straight down. Now that’s a great image, of these tears that had to go down these trails.

  We ultimately found out—and I’m not sure how we found out, I think Tom found out—that it was a guy. The melted girl was a guy.

  I wish now that I had just hung out with this cat and found out his story and his mentality, but I wasn’t psychologically prepared to get involved in a friendship with him at the time. I wasn’t grown up enough to see the beauty in it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “Dead End Drive”

  Some of us are broken from the very start

  And we don’t know how to fix ourselves

  It seems, like me, you’ve been torn apart

  There’s a lot of us on the shelves

  It’s easy to escape through an open door

  But the jail inside won’t die

  Feelin’ claustrophobic and waitin’ for

  The exhale of a sigh

  —“Dead End Drive” (Thornton/Andrew)

  I DON’T REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I EVER SAID ANYTHING PUBLICLY about these phobias I have. I don’t know if you call them phobias exactly. I just get creeped out by stuff. I don’t like real old things. I like modern. If I were given the opportunity to eat in an old English restaurant with old velvet drapes and castle-y-looking chairs, stone walls with mildew on them, or a bright spanking brand-new Japanese restaurant, I’ll take the Japanese restaurant, that’s just the way it goes with me.

  I can’t watch those real old-time movies while I’m eating, especially silent ones from the twenties, even the sound pictures from the early thirties, when they’re about England, or Scotland, or France. If I see some big old gold carved ornate chair with a velvet cushion on it, I get spooked. It’s just something about that time period. I would have weighed about twenty-five pounds if I lived back then, because I couldn’t have eaten around any of that stuff. I can’t ladle out some gravy while I’m looking at some big old fat king sitting in one of those chairs with all the cobwebs in the corner.

  I have a fear of Benjamin Disraeli’s hair. And I don’t know if it’s a fear, because I’m not worried that Benjamin Disraeli is going to show up one day and get me with his hair. It started when I saw this movie on Disraeli. I was broke at the time, and I was living in Arkansas in the house I grew up in. My mom had gotten remarried after my dad died and had moved to Louisville, Kentucky, with my younger brother. I was working for the county road department, and I lost my job in the winter. It was snowing, I didn’t have any money, but every now and then my mother would send me ten or twenty dollars, whatever she could. My stepfather had money, he was a doctor, but he wouldn’t give her any, and he sure as hell wouldn’t send me any. I got the gas turned off after a while. I would sit in this old easy chair that was my dad’s. It had holes in it by then. Somehow I had cable television even though I didn’t have any money. I didn’t pay for it, and they didn’t know I had it. I think I paid to have it hooked up, but then I couldn’t pay for the subscription and they left it on for some reason. This was around the time when cable television first came out.

  Anyway, I was sitting in a freezing cold house wearing a coat. I slept in this easy chair every night in a big coat with a blanket on me. You could see your breath in the house, but I had cable TV. I’ll never forget it. I walked about a mile and a half up to the store with the ten dollars my mother had sent me. It was freezing cold. I bought myself a Swanson TV dinner—a chicken dinner, which was my favorite—some Hostess Sno Balls, a Dr Pepper, and some Lance cheese crackers. At the time, having all this food was a thrill. I was going to make my TV dinner and I was going to watch me something good on cable TV.

  I had no gas, but the oven worked because it was electric, so I put the TV dinner in the electric stove, cooked it all up, and sat down to watch something on TV. I was starving and about to eat my TV dinner when I switched channels and, just for a second, saw this guy, George Arliss, who was playing Disraeli. He had this big old weird face and teeth and that creepy wispy hair sticking back like Larry from the Three Stooges. And the set showed heavy drapes and those big old chairs and a stone-looking table. I couldn’t eat my TV dinner just from seeing that. I switched the channel right off the bat and ended up watching a movie. Later on I was able to eat my TV dinner, but it was ruined at that point, because I had to reheat it. So that’s how that whole Benjamin Disraeli thing started.

  I also have a real live fear of Komodo dragons. People say, “Well, why would you be afraid of Komodo dragons, because what are the chances you’re going to be walking down the street in Beverly Hills and run into a Komodo dragon?” I don’t even want them in the world, that’s the fact of the matter. One time a guy sent me a letter from some “save the animals” group—now I’m all for saving animals, but Komodo dragons are dinosaurs and they have no business here. They don’t do a thing for anybody except kill things and eat them. And the way they kill—they recently discovered Komodo dragons actually have pockets of venom. They used to think that it was just the bacteria in their mouths that made them so poisonous, but now they know they have venom. They bite you and the poison starts to work and you go blind and start to lose your muscles. They’ll sit there for however long it takes you to die, then circle around you and then they’ll eat you. Well, that creeps me out. Why would we want them?

  In the stori
es we read growing up, guys slay dragons. They don’t have classic stories about a little boy getting his first dragon. (Well, except the song “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”) They’re dragons, you’re supposed to kill them. They generally only exist on one island in the world, the island of Komodo, in the Indonesian Islands, and it’s not like I want to go there, but they got one in the zoo here in San Francisco. Sharon Stone took her husband there for his birthday—apparently, he wanted to walk with the Komodo dragons. I understand swimming with the dolphins. I don’t understand walking with the Komodo dragons, it doesn’t make any sense to me. Sure enough, he got bit and ended up in the hospital. I just don’t see any reason to have them on the planet.

  I don’t like to use real silverware, I never could. It doesn’t feel good in my mouth, and I hate it when it hits my teeth. And it’s too heavy. It’s just too goddamn heavy. You know, I like things streamlined. I prefer plastic spoons and forks. At the same time, I’m all for getting rid of this big wad of plastic out in the Pacific Ocean. I’m a recycler. At the house we have plastic stuff for me, but it’s the kind of stuff that’s made out of corn and hemp and bamboo. We just don’t use that regular plastic. I support not having plastic. I think people are too lazy these days. Just wash the dishes! I use everything else, real plates, real bowls, and the rest, but I prefer to use the phony forks and spoons.

  I wish food and sleep weren’t necessities, that they were just pleasures. I love food, the kind I have these days, but I wish you only ate for pleasure and it didn’t put any weight on you and it didn’t suck for your system or anything like that. I wish it were possible that if you don’t want to eat for five days, you don’t eat for five days, and when you do want to eat, you just eat. Just eat some fucking ice cream with hot fudge on it and not worry about any bad side effects to your health. I wish you didn’t have to sleep and could stay up for three weeks and then one day think, You know what I’d love to do today? I’d love to sleep. Then just sleep for a week. Or three hours, or whatever you want. That’s one of the things that really makes you think that there has to be some kind of intelligence behind this. That maybe we are just stardust, and it’s this universe and the black holes and the big bangs and everything else, but that somehow, way back there somewhere, in the midst of all this, or in all of us or something, there’s got to be some kind of spirit, some kind of thing that started us all, because otherwise why would Ding Dongs and butter and just everything be bad for you? That naturally fucking happened? Why is it that sex and food and drinking and smoking and all that kind of shit are bad for you? That seems like a rule to me. That doesn’t seem like the natural order. It doesn’t seem like evolution. It’s just that that’s the way our systems are. That all the good stuff is bad for you and all the stuff that tastes like cardboard and mud, or smells like ass and nutsack, those are the things that are good to eat. How can that be? You’ve got things to do, you want to stay up and have a party with your friends, you want to record for three days without stopping, but you’ve got to do this thing where you go to sleep and don’t know shit and waste eight hours of your life. For eight hours of your life and you didn’t know shit. If you want to know what’s going on all the time, why not just be able to stay awake all the time? Somebody made a rule somewhere, that’s all I’m saying. Somebody made a rule that the good shit is going to suck, and there are going to be a lot of people out there who really believe in this thing or person that made these rules, and they’re going to judge people and talk bad about everybody who likes all those things that suck for you. Except for the food, by the way. I never met a real over-the-top, intense, churchgoing, fanatical-type religious person who didn’t like food. Gluttony is supposed to be a sin, I’ve heard. Well, go to church sometime, there’s a lot of sinners in there, believe me. So evidently, food is the one thing they don’t mind breaking the rule on, the really religious people. It’s just all the other fun stuff they judge you by.

  There are certain phrases that get inside my skin. There are words that I can’t hear or say. When I was young, we had Tastee Freez and Dairy Queen. They had a certain kind of fried potato item at these places called T-A-T-E-R T-O-T-S. I can’t say the word, I have to spell it. It just bugs me that they’d name something that. I don’t like it when they name food anything cute.

  I went to a shrink a couple of times because whatever girl I was with at the time wanted to go to couples therapy. I found it to be horseshit, because you go to this person and all they’re going to do is sit there and blame you for everything. All going to a therapist has ever done for me is get my ass chewed out by two people that day. So I never really did understand that. Well, you know the old saying: you split that word in half and it’s “the rapist.”

  All that stuff seems normal to me, it doesn’t seem weird. I think crazy people are people who don’t know what they’re doing. They have delusions. In other words, they’re too crazy to function in life. I just don’t like some things. I don’t go bonkers and not know who I am, or start acting like a chicken. I just say I don’t like creepy old castles. Which is not that weird. So if somebody thinks you’re crazy because you don’t like Benjamin Disraeli—I don’t know, people have thoughts all the time that they just don’t express. I make the mistake of saying them every now and then, that’s the problem with me. I don’t think van Gogh was crazy. Most people say, “He cut his ear off, that’s insane!” No, the guy was so passionate over something that in the moment he went too far, but I don’t think he was a crazy person, just intense.

  “THE TOM EPPERSON STORY” BY TOM EPPERSON

  (AS TOLD TO TOM EPPERSON)

  Part VII

  Obviously, we found a way to stay in Los Angeles. I could write a book about what happened to us over the next decade, but a few sentences will have to suffice for now. In visual terms, I see that period as a dark, turbulent cloud, with occasional flashes of beautiful golden light. It was a time of frustration, conflict, physical hunger, booze and parties, broken hearts and broken-down cars, life-threatening illnesses, deaths in the family, hopes raised and dashed …

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Was That My Only Ride?”

  Surely this is a ghastly joke

  Seems I was born but never awoke

  Years have passed so the calendars say

  It’s hard to remember a given day

  Did I really have my turn?

  Did I really watch it burn?

  Was that my only ride?

  Did I sleep through it?

  Did I lose my guide?

  Before I knew it?

  Was that my very best?

  Did I just blow it?

  Did I live in jest and never know it?

  I can’t believe it’s been a waste

  Can’t I have just one more taste?

  Will anybody cheer for more?

  All I need is one encore

  —“Was That My Only Ride?” (Thornton/Andrew)

  AS YOU CAN IMAGINE, WHEN TOM EPPERSON AND I WERE FIRST IN L.A., we didn’t have anything nice to wear. We had one jacket that we shared. It came from the only suit I ever owned.

  When I was in my late teens, a friend of my mom’s gave me her son’s suit. I didn’t have any money, my mom didn’t have any money, and my dad was dead. It was a three-piece suit, green tweed, and it had a vest. I didn’t bring the vest or the pants to California with us, I just brought the jacket, and when Tom and I had meetings, we would take turns wearing the jacket. Seriously, it was like, “I get to wear the jacket today.”

  There was one guy from my hometown who had ever been on-screen—movies or TV. He was on a pretty popular sitcom. This guy was a lot older than us, but I had gone to school with his sisters and got his number through them. Somehow we had managed to get an old answering machine that had a tape in it. You just had to push the button to listen to messages. Remember those? Anyway, one day we came home from some miserable shit, because every day was fucking horrible, and we had a message. It was this guy returning a bunch of me
ssages we had left for him. Now, he wasn’t like a big famous guy, but he was on a TV show, and to us he was, like, a big deal. “Sure, hometown boys,” he said on his message, “I’ll meet with you.”

  So we called him back and he was friendly. He said he wanted to meet us at Dan Tana’s. At that time we didn’t have a clue what Dan Tana’s was. But we asked around a bit and learned that it was one of those places where a toothpick is $25. It was Tom’s turn to wear the jacket.

  We had to park down the road two blocks away because we couldn’t just pull into the parking lot in Tom’s shitty old Mustang that he never washed. It was light blue, but it had a coat of whatever the fuck he parked under on it, for years. You couldn’t wash it because the paint would come right off—it was just glued onto it. Of course, it also had crap piled up in the backseat and was torn up everywhere.

  Anyway, we went into Dan Tana’s and stood at the bar—Tom wearing that lime-green tweed jacket and God knows what I had on—and ordered a beer or two. Spent all our money. That’s the thing when you’re broke. If somebody wants to meet with you, it’s like, I hope this son-of-a-bitch pays for it because otherwise I’m fucked. We stayed at the bar for an hour or two waiting on this guy, and the staff kept getting on our asses at the bar for not doing anything.

  “We’re waiting on this guy, you know?” I said, trying to appeal to their better nature.

  “Oh, okay, would you guys mind having a seat on the chairs we have right when you come in the door and quit hanging around at the bar?”

  We waited on this guy forever, and he never showed up. This guy was, like, the seventh lead in a sitcom, but as I said, to us, in those days, if you had any connection with anybody, it was a huge fucking deal. This guy was the ticket. Because of this guy, we were going to make it. So, of course, we were devastated, just devastated. We trudged back to that piece-of-shit car with no fucking money, no ticket.