Love All the People (New Edition)

by Bill Hicks

  Bill: Not at all. No. They come to see me all the time. They still . . . they don’t get it, you know. My dad: ‘Bill, do you have to use the F word in your act? Bob Hope doesn’t need to use the F word in his act.’ Yeah well Dad, Bob Hope doesn’t play the dives I play.

  Male Interviewer: Yeah, right. So you don’t so much give them what they want, you give them what you want. (laughs)

  Bill: Sure. You know why? Cos I honestly believe that we’re all the same, and I think to go, ‘Well, I’ll give them what they want,’ is very condescending. And I don’t try to condescend to people, you know? And that’s why I treat ’em like my friends. And I guess that’s a shocking way to behave in this world . . . for some people.

  Male Interviewer: I think that’s admirable, actually.

  Bill: For some people. But I don’t sit there and go, ‘Well, you’re all a bunch of idiots so I will do things I don’t believe in to amuse you!’

  Female Interviewer: But they want to be entertained, don’t they! I mean, they want to laugh. They don’t wanna think.

  Bill: Well, when did thinking not become entertaining?

  Female Interviewer: They don’t wanna think.

  Bill: You think they don’t wanna think?

  Female Interviewer: No, they want to laugh.

  Bill: Well, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to go out and tickle them individually? We have to express an idea here.

  Male Interviewer: Well, this is why we want to put something on TV that does question these . . . where one draws the line. What is . . .

  Bill: There are no lines.

  Male Interviewer: . . . acceptable and what . . .

  Bill: There are no lines. I say erase all the lines. Erase–

  Female Interviewer: Yes, but that’s what our programme is all about. It’s–

  Male Interviewer: Well, it’s all very well for you to say , but . . .

  Female Interviewer: It’s where you can draw the line. It’s where you can draw the line.

  Bill: Can . . . can I recommend some jugglers you might like?

  Thoughts on Love and Smoking

  (November 1992)

  (My first love was like smoking – both bad habits and both totally seductive – and as time goes by, my addiction to both lingers until they intertwine, interchange, become inseparable in my mind – forming a nostalgia on the brain, for which there is no cure.)

  Autumn in New York. Spring in the step. Rosy-cheeked women dressed in black go bouncing down the avenues. Their coolest coats and jackets hunched against the whipping winds. Their brightly colored scarves dancing under the slate-grey sky. They threaten to turn the clock back to 1964, and everywhere you look is like the cover of a Dylan album – pre-Jesus, post-folk, ultra-cool. This is why I smoke.

  A cafe spills out into the street. It’s warm, roasted light and cappuccino steam drawing mods and spectres and VAMPIRE QUEENS with the promise of fresh-brewed blood from the bean. On the sidewalks nearby, the multitudes flow by. Red lips giving cigarettes a tug, making embers flare like lightning bugs. Fir and woodsmoke fill the sparkling air, the breath exhaled just hanging there like some frozen joyous scream. And all the girls evoke the dream of Autumn in New York.

  It’s on nights like this I think of her the most . . . When we first met, I was a roaring drunk. I was twenty-six years old and in a grave deep rut. She was a southern girl, which is the same as saying she was insane. All southern women are insane. Some are cold blooded killers and some are harmless eccentrics, but the best of the breed exhibit both of these characteristics and always the one you expect the least at the time you least expect it. She was the best of the breed and the best I’ve ever had. The night of our third date, I grabbed her by the neck and punched holes in the wall around her head, then tried to hurl her off the balcony of my 22nd floor apartment. That was the night she fell in love with me. She liked my style. See, she was an addict too, just like me . . . Later, we smoked and had a good laugh over it all.

  I flipped her every which-a-way like a cat batting around a half-dead mouse, for its own amusement, staving off the kill. She whimpered and cried and begged for mercy until I found her hot pulse throbbing and bit down deep. Closest to the bone is the sweetest meat. Her hands grabbed my hair and her feet fluttered against my back as I gulped all the life in her greedily down my throat. Then she lay very still. I rolled away and stood swaying next to the bed, letting the blood rush from my head, trying to remember where the hell my cigarettes were. I crashed about in the dark, knocking over tables and lamps and chairs, finally finding my pack in the pocket of the shirt I was wearing. I smoked a few while strumming my guitar, then I wrote a song and sang it at the top of my lungs. A baby cried next door, and a fire truck thundered down the street, its sirens wailing. And all the while she never stirred.

  In the morning I awoke, curled next to her like a spoon, feeling her bottom pushing repeatedly against my lap while she whispered breathlessly to some dream lover. I got up and put some water on to boil, then sat at the kitchen table, smoking, my back to the bed. Suddenly, her arms were around me and I was smothered in her charm. Her need was ferocious and I lay helplessly on the floor as she exacted her sweet revenge, biting down deep again and again until the shriek of the steam and the sound of my screams was all that filled the room.

  New York is where we moved when Texas got too small. It was summer time. New York in July is hotter than I care to describe, but I will try. Imagine, if you will, the hottest part of hell. The place where advertisers and marketing executives go to dwell. And now try to think of even hotter still, where bankers and landlords and like-minded swill, go to spend all the profits that they’ve made, eternally. And now, if you can, go even one step further into the furnace, back where the coals glow white with rage, where child molesters, bureaucrats, and arms dealers play, and even further still, where the guy who stole my stereo will spend his lonely never-ending night. Picture a heat that hot, only now add to it ninety-eight percent humidity. This is New York in July. We had a ball, living in an unair-conditioned railroad flat whose kindling walls bulged under the weight of the infernal heat.

  I’d come to in the worst part of the day, gasping, and kicking away non-existent sheets and covers. She’d already be up, pressing a cold water jug to her forehead, leaning naked against the fridge. My dry voice croaked for her to bring me the water. As she walks towards me, I feel her heat cut through the New York summer, and her wetness damper than the July air. She sees the look in my eye but reacts too slowly, stupefied by the temperature in the little wood oven we called home. The water jug falls to the floor, forgotten, as I pull her down on top of me and drink from her, long and slow.

  As the days grew longer, the heat gave birth to some truly inspired inventions. More than once the blistering sun found us lounging in a tub of water, while a fan blew through the cool material of a moistened sheet draped over us from head to toe. Voila! An air conditioner! Rather primitive, to be sure, but that embodied its allure, we were immigrants, setting about exploring our new love, filling the places where others had things, with simple pleasures and ecstasy’s screams, from where in the tub we reflected the glare of the sun. Smoking away the heat of the day. Our lighter flicking repeatedly, fighting fire with fire until the sun would retreat.

  At night we’d crawl through the streets of the city, tracking the shy breeze that had poked its nose through our open window, then withdrawing with an almost imperceptible tug on our threadbare curtains, all the ‘oomph’ of an inaudible sigh. People lolled about in doorways and on stoops, half-dressed and blinking stupidly. The women fanned themselves through damp see-through blouses, their legs apart and skirts hitched high above the knees. Inviting our shy breeze to poke its nose anywhere it likes. The neighborhood crazies were out in force. The Man-with-no-nose oozed by, eyeing me conspiratorially I wonder if he heard us earlier? Me yelling ‘I love you’ as I drove my point home, again and again? Ah, who cares? We’re all nasty, rutting beasts and those who aren�
��t are dead. It was too hot to care or to think, so we just walked along smoking, absorbing whatever hope the night could bring.

  Once, a careless drunk staggered into the traffic and got sent airborne by a tourist bus late in leaving this freak show of a city. The tourists’ cameras started flashing in hope of capturing the drunk as he sailed through the intersection ahead of the bus and finally coming to rest in the gutter he’d just left as the bus trundled on down the street. Everywhere a stillness, a quiet broken only by the sporadic moaning coming from the drunk. ‘Shaddup!’ the Man-with-no-nose ordered, and sniffed disgustedly. Then the stillness would return and everyone sat smoking, lazily pondering their existence. She and I would hold onto each other tightly and come to no conclusion other than IT’S TOO DAMN HOT. We’d buy ice cream and return to the tinder-box. We’d play chess in our underwear, smoking, eating ice cream. She moves. I move. She moves. Check. She looks innocently up at me, licking the last of the ice cream from the spoon. The sun starts to rise behind her. I start to rise in front. She chooses me over the sun, and we tumble into bed where I make my final move. MATE.

  It all ended rather quickly. One day I came home and found her gone. She’d cleaned the place and baked a cake which sat next to a note on the kitchen table. I ate the note with a glass of milk, then tore the cake into a thousand little pieces. Her dresser drawers were empty as was the clothes hamper. I was hoping she’d overlooked a pair of knickers from which I could inhale her scent again before beginning the arduous task of tracking her down to the ends of the earth and . . . and . . . and what? I had no idea. There was nothing I could do, except fall into bed with my guitar, which I banged away on for a month. Playing what was left of my heart out, and crying what was left of my tears, and smoking all the cigarettes North Carolina had exported that year. Classic withdrawal. Finally, I reached the end. I stumbled into the bathroom and a tub of hot water, where every ache and pain was left running down the drain. I smiled rudely to myself, feeling like a new man. It would be hard of course, but I’d make it. This was life, my friend, get used to it. Buckle up! You’ll be fine. In the mirror I gave myself a self-mocking scowl, then I reached up on the shelf for a towel, and a pair of her knickers wafted down, landing crotch first on my face. That night, the hunt began . . .

  Years later we bumped into each other at the club. She was waiting for me, really, but I didn’t mind. There will always be something about her that just kills me, and she knows it. Is that why she’d come? What do I care? I’d been lonely for too long. When she saw me, she took a final puff from her cigarette, then stamped it out and looked up at me – hopefully and a little afraid. So I said ‘hey’, as though nothing had gone down. As though we’d parted only moments ago. As though . . . As though . . . As though . . . I said ‘hey’ and she smiled and breathed a slight sigh of relief and then she said ‘hey’ back to me. Then arm-in-arm we marched right to my bed. God, how I loved her. I thought there must be some hope, some way, some future we could share. I thought of fate and destiny, past lives and tea leaves, of black magic and voodoo and anything else that might explain our recurring rendezvous, as we went about the serious business of washing my sheets in tears and sweat. As usual. God, how I loved her then. I was addicted to her, and she to me. And we always found ourselves rather easily lowering ourselves into each other’s hottest fires. Fearlessly leaping into the abyss, mouths locked together in a kiss that killed us long before we ever hit the ground.

  Afterwards, we lay there smoking, legs entwined. She spoke softly everything that came to mind, avoiding only that which was real, and the thousand pieces of my heart each broke again, into a million, leaving a fine layer of bittersweet dust on my tongue which then burned away with every inhalation of my hot smoke.

  She could still have me, if she’d only let me go. But she won’t, ever, and even now she holds me tight with her milky-white thigh and her flat stomach pressed against my hip and her soft, firm breasts pushing against my chest. And I just wanting to die, to disappear behind my cloud, and listen to her prattle on forever and ever . . .

  EPILOGUE

  London, England, November. I sit staring at the phone and my pack of smokes which sit side by side on the table before me. The cold grey skies bring out the veteran Heathcliff complex which resides in me, near the surface, always ready to rise. She’d never been to England. She would love it here. My hand reaches towards the table, tentatively rests on the phone. She’s a call away, waiting. Pain is one plane flight away. Ecstasy on delivery. My hand leaves the phone and swoops up my pack of cigarettes. I light one up and inhale deeply. No, I won’t call. I must drop these bad habits one at a time.

  And I must start now, with her. ‘Goodbye, Catherine,’ Heathcliff whispers from the thickening cloud of smoke that surrounds him to this day.

  Touch Me, I'm Hicks!

  (14 November, 1992)

  Following BILL HICKS’ recent ‘it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in’ rant against the American presidential campaign in these pages, we invited him to sit in a room on election night with STEPHEN DALTON and explain why he’s mellowed to the idea of Clinton

  ‘Is this making any sense or am I just jetlagged?’ Erm, no, please carry on. Could you repeat the bit about the insect-headed aliens gazing down from the spinning globules of light?

  ‘That night we had a lot of insect realizations. The crickets were not just rubbing their f— ing legs together, it had deep meaning there were these balls of light and inside were these little insectlike beings . . . I don’t know what all this means.’

  Earth calling Bill Hicks, your signal is breaking up. You may well be America’s funniest stand-up surrealist on a whistle-stop tour of Britain. But here in this London hotel, detailing your UFO abduction anecdotes with a perfectly straight face, you are starting to sound like a fruitcake from Planet Drugs.

  ‘I should perhaps first say that I was tripping.’

  Ah.

  ‘That’s what bugs me about the experience. That’s why I quit tripping, but it opened a door and I believe there will be another time. People are starting to realize what is real, what is imagined what’s the difference? It’s very tempting to go into the desert with a bag of mushrooms right now, but I’m not going to because I want the experience to be real.’

  Were these extra-terrestrial insects trying to tell you anything, Bill?

  ‘We’re just bugs!’

  Of course. It all makes sense now.

  Bill Hicks has been almost as ubiquitous in our media during recent weeks as Bill Clinton. Usually, the former has been talking about the latter. Whether snuggling up to Cindy Crawford on TV-AM, riffing madly on late-night comedy shows or dissecting the US electoral circus in these very pages. Hicks displays a rare gift of extracting informed humor from randomly assembled streams of bemused observation.

  We meet as the first polls are coming in, but Hicks is rightly confident of a Clinton landslide. ‘It’s like voting for your dad or for your wacky cool uncle who plays the sax. It’s a generational thing, a big deal. Both him and Gore smoked dope, or said they did. They might be lying . . .’

  But in the article he wrote for NME two weeks back. Bill was understandably cynical about the whole two-party farce. Why is he getting so affectionate for Clinton now?

  ‘I am cynical, but I believe he offers a very small, narrow, tiny window of opportunity. The rhetoric alone will open people’s hearts. It already has. It really is the difference between hope and fear.’

  Hope and Fear’s crazy bus, maybe (top ’70s joke for Pulp and Denim fans). So what does that make Ross Perot?

  ‘Perot is just some screaming bat out of hell. If it’s a choice between your dad and your cool uncle, Perot is your grandad who wants to take us all back in time and harness us behind mules!’

  Surely Clinton’s presidency will be a double-edged sword for comics like Hicks? Who can possibly replace barn-door-sized targets like Bush’s evil drawl and Quayle’s retarded ramblings?
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  ‘They should give Quayle his own network and just ask him questions, that’s the show. He’s brilliantly funny, there’s nothing there, he’s a cypher. And it’s just wonderful he has to feign emotions, he has to be coached on emotions. When he does anger he smiles!’

  Hicks traces the explosion which created America’s current comedy network back to Reagan’s first election victory in 1980, ‘which is no coincidence, all this propaganda bullshit being shoved down our throat.’ So how will Bill and his fellow dissidents react to a presidential team who can spell the names of major vegetables?

  ‘Obviously a Clinton victory will be bad for comedians. Comics have had the greatest punchbags and been the antidote to 12 years of Republican rule. Now the enemy’s all deflated and dead. I feel like all my friends and all the artists were like little pygmies and we’ve been trying to kill this elephant all these years with little arrows, and finally tonight . . . CRUNCH! Now what? We’ve got to go hunting again.’

  You won’t have too long to wait. No doubt Clinton will soon be as shit as every previous president: breaking promises, screwing up the economy, stomping on small countries.

  ‘You’re right; even when Kennedy was in office we were undertaking policies that were absolutely horrible, unknown to Americans, as they still are. So what does it all mean? But also during that time there was Martin Luther King and the music and everything. There was hope. My theory is we’re going into this horrible downward spiral and Clinton is a poor imitation of Kennedy, Madonna’s a poor imitation of Marilyn. If they hook up and Clinton is assassinated, it’s just going to be too corny.’

  In his new live video, Relentless, Hicks plays a boggle-eyed Pied Piper leading several hundred frightened Canadians into a customized universe inhabited by hillbilly aliens, imaginary Iraqi soldiers and moths who fly all the way to the sun. There are no actual jokes. It is hilarious.