THE BILLY BOB TAPES
A Cave Full of Ghosts
BILLY BOB THORNTON
with Kinky Friedman
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Billy Bob Thornton
Behind the Scenes
“Why a Book Now?”
“Cave Full of Ghosts”
Chapter One: Alpine, Arkansas: God’s Country
Chapter Two: Character Study
Chapter Three: It’s Real Hard to Get Away with Shit
Chapter Four: My Mom and the Gift
Chapter Five: Don’t Ever Call Him Daddy
Chapter Six: Uncle Don and Them
Chapter Seven: Testifying Turkey Ass and Pawn Shop Prosthetics
Chapter Eight: “Dangerous News in Safe Town”
Chapter Nine: “In the Day”
Chapter Ten: “Saturday Afternoon a Half a Century On”
Chapter Eleven: “Providence”
Chapter Twelve: My Unremarkable College Career
Chapter Thirteen: “The Acid Room”
Chapter Fourteen: Dear Billy Bob
Chapter Fifteen: “Breakin’ Down”
Chapter Sixteen: “Pie in the Sky”
Chapter Seventeen: “An Island of My Own”
Chapter Eighteen: Rewriting Othello: The Othie and Desi Show
Chapter Nineteen: Let’s Don’t Start No Circus
Chapter Twenty: “When I Come Around”
Chapter Twenty-One: “Dead End Drive”
Chapter Twenty-Two: “Was That My Only Ride?”
Chapter Twenty-Three: “Hey Joe Public”
Chapter Twenty-Four: “Never Been Dead in My Life”
Chapter Twenty-Five: “The Walking Extinct”
Chapter Twenty-Six: To Billy Bob, from a Big Fan–Billy Wilder
Chapter Twenty-Seven: October 3, 1988
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Burt Reynolds Prophecy
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Sling Blade
Chapter Thirty: John Ritter
Chapter Thirty-One: You People
Chapter Thirty-Two: Viva la Independence
Chapter Thirty-Three: Black and White
Chapter Thirty-Four: A Singular Vision
Chapter Thirty-Five: Things Are Fucked Up at the North Pole
Chapter Thirty-Six: On the Front Porch: Conversations with Daniel Lanois
Chapter Thirty-Seven: A Simple Plan
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Pushing Tin
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Bandits
Chapter Forty: Angie
Chapter Forty-One: My Term as Mayor of the Sunset Marquis
Chapter Forty-Two: “Game of Shadows”
Chapter Forty-Three: The Ballad of the Alamo
Chapter Forty-Four: “There’s Always Somebody Watchin’”
Chapter Forty-Five: I Don’t Hate Canada
Chapter Forty-Six: My New Year’s Resolution: Try to Calm the Fuck Down
Chapter Forty-Seven: Jayne Mansfield’s Car
Chapter Forty-Eight: High Definition in a Cracker Box
Chapter Forty-Nine: Let’s Go See Movies Again
Chapter Fifty: Billy the Dad
Acknowledgments
Photo Section
About the Authors
Copyright
About the Publisher
Billy Bob Thornton
by Angelina Jolie
WHERE TO BEGIN? I FIRST HEARD FROM SHARED FRIENDS THAT THERE was this man who was “like the hillbilly Orson Welles.” I couldn’t imagine how that description would manifest itself. Then I saw Sling Blade.
I sat alone in a theater full of strangers equally engrossed in the film. Every nuance. Every facial gesture. The sound of the chair as it’s dragged along the floor. The characters. Each one completely original and yet it’s as if you knew them intimately. You watch as the filmmaker helps you to understand a place in time and people who he knows so well. You are getting to know him. His mind. His humanity.
Through the years I’ve known Billy I’ve learned that not only was he as interesting, as truly original, as had been told to me, but that he was also so much more. I smile as I write this, as my instinct is to say, simply, he is not a “normal person.” But he isn’t. I have known him now for more than a decade and I still haven’t quite figured him out. Not that I want to. The puzzle is so much fun.
But I know this—
He has an unmatchable wit and can make you laugh until your face hurts.
He has insomnia; he uses it to work obsessively on music until the sun comes up. My favorite recordings are when he tells a story. I like his raw voice with only hints of sounds that illustrate the feeling behind the story. He knows what I mean. “The sound of the rain hitting the tin roof …”
He had a talking bird he trained by forcing it to listen to hours of Captain Beefheart. She liked to swear.
He’s a bit agoraphobic, and it’s really a miracle that he gets out of the house to make films. If he could shoot them in his basement he would.
I threw a surprise party once, ignoring the fact he hates crowds and being social. When they said “Surprise,” it was as if he had been stabbed in the gut. He went pale and had to hide in the kitchen.
He did eventually come out.
Billy’s mother is psychic, and he worries he, too, has the gift. He can’t tell the difference between a dream, a thought, and a dangerous premonition. It’s why he has to correct it in his mind. He has to put things back into alignment. To be with him is like being with a mad mathematician. He is constantly counting and repeating.
To him, I am the number four. May sound strange, but it means a lot to me.
We often joke about how much I loved Ed Crane, the character from The Man Who Wasn’t There. He was beautiful in that. But I also knew things that others didn’t notice. I remember there was a courtroom scene, and when the judge would bang the gavel, Billy would squirm. The thing is, it wasn’t because of the scene, it was Billy trying to work out his OCD and the judge kept hitting the gavel a different number of times. Sometimes a good number. Sometimes not. And Billy was squirming trying to will him to hit it again.
He hates Komodo dragons, and even reading this he will shiver at the name. There was one incident … hard to explain. Can’t really.
He watches old sixties TV shows to remember better, simpler times when he feels down. If he’s not watching that, he’s following baseball.
One of my favorite things is to watch Billy play an entire game of baseball with himself on the tennis court. Only himself. Not easy to do. He throws the ball, calls out the action moment to moment. He catches the ball. Scolds or congratulates his teammates. It’s fascinating. Some who don’t know him well might call it crazy if they watched it for hours on end. But then, you don’t know Billy.
Billy still writes all his songs and film scripts on yellow legal pads. He scribbles on them and often draws pictures of ugly characters doing something ironic. I remember one morning waking up and he had been up all night filling one of those yellow pads with a story. Just one night and it was done. Perfectly done. And then, being Billy, he put it away and didn’t write again for years.
I keep trying to convince him to go spend time on a porch in the South and write the Great American Novel. I know it’s in him. I hope we get to read it one day. Maybe he’s already written it, on one of those yellow pads. And he’s put it away somewhere. Somewhere that may never be seen. I wouldn’t put it past him.
Most of all, he would die for his family. He has a big beautiful heart.
Some people walk through life able to quiet the voices in their heads. He can’t. And I, a
nd everyone else who knows him well, we love him for it. I know one thing: the world would certainly be a hell of a lot more dull if that man weren’t in it.
Behind the Scenes
ONE WORKING TITLE FOR WHAT YOU HOLD IN YOUR HANDS WAS Billy Bob Talks, and that’s literally how the book came into existence. An ever-changing cast of characters assembled by Kinky Friedman gathered at Billy’s place night after night, assigned the task of getting him to talk—and keeping him talking—with the tape recorder running. It’s not that Billy was reluctant to talk. He wasn’t. But it was hard for him, as it would be for anyone, to talk without people listening. As Kinky said of us, Billy’s audience, before one of the final sessions, “We’re all just furniture.”
Some of those gathered weren’t content, however, to be simply furniture. Danny Hutton, a founding member of the rock band Three Dog Night, who came to one recording session, matched every one of Billy’s stories with one of his own—much to the consternation of Kinky, who was there to get Billy’s stories, not Danny’s. Billy, a Three Dog Night fan since he was a teenager, didn’t mind and saw Danny’s visit as an opportunity to play him a few tracks by Billy’s own band, the Boxmasters. Billy’s politeness wasn’t shared by Kinky when it came to Ted Mann, writer for the television shows NYPD Blue and Dead-wood and frequent guest during the recording sessions for this book. Kinky had to keep reminding him to “shut the fuck up.” Ted’s response, using a line cribbed from another attendee: “You’re stealing my humanity!” There was general agreement, though, given the stories he told, that a Ted Mann book wouldn’t be bad either.
The sessions—recorded by J. D. Andrew, cofounder of the Boxmasters—were fueled by beer, cigarettes, espresso, and, in Kinky’s case, cigars, and often ran hours past midnight. One night, Billy slipped into the guise of Karl from Sling Blade—voice, facial expression, hand-rubbing, mm-hmms, and all—for an improvised monologue about his guests, and then went right back to being Billy to demonstrate that getting into character isn’t all that difficult, despite the big deal some actors make about it. Another night, actor J. P. Shellnutt came by with ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons. One of the final recording sessions concluded with Louie Kemp, who put together Bob Dylan’s midseventies Rolling Thunder Revue tour, explaining to Billy how Orthodox Jews such as himself prepare food to ensure it’s kosher.
Amazingly, even with all the distractions, entertaining though they were, Billy Bob did, in fact, talk, and the book you’re reading is the result. Not everything made it into print, though, and a lot of the stories that ended up on the cutting-room floor—including one bawdy tale about Billy’s underwear drawer from his teenage years, which he feared would embarrass his mother should it be included here—are as entertaining as what was included. Maybe they’ll end up in the sequel. And perhaps that book will get the title that, to the disappointment of some of us “furniture,” was ultimately rejected for this volume: It Only Hurts When I Pee by Billy Bob Thornton.
—DANIEL TAUB (A FIRSTHAND OBSERVER)
“Why a Book Now?”
A LOT OF PEOPLE HAVE WANTED TO DO A BOOK ON ME OVER THE YEARS. Usually journalist types who wanted some cheap Hollywood biography, where I talk about fighting with an actor on the set, or who had sex with whom, and I would never do that. No one should. But when Kinky said, “Hey, let’s do a book with some weird and funny stories about growing up and you can also bitch about whatever’s on your mind,” I said, “Okay, not such a bad idea.”
If I ramble and curse a lot, it’s because this book wasn’t written, it was recorded, and a lot of it isn’t edited. It’s just as it came out, so there’ll be some of that, so please forgive me.
The other reason I did this book is because I wanted to put my two cents in about how I truly believe our culture is crumbling before our eyes and a lot of people seem to be pretty apathetic about it. I believe that we are in a society that is encouraging, funding, and rewarding laziness, cynicism, mediocrity, and cruelty. And for some reason we’ve become a society that believes that it is judge and jury. Puritanical when convenient for itself, and just the opposite when that is more convenient.
There is a lot of selfishness, hatred, and self-entitlement going around. And we’re being hoodwinked by companies that sell stuff to us because they know our weakness, the need to be accepted and noticed. I believe we need a cultural revolution, and I don’t mean simply “It sucks”; I mean “It’s an emergency!”
And one real problem is that a lot of people from my generation will play devil’s advocate for this horseshit just so they can be part of what’s hip and to hang on to their own popularity by selling shit that, at the end of the day, they don’t even believe in. These people fought for a certain type of freedom back in the day, and now they are selling it down a muddy river. Freedom does not mean creepy, cowardly, social warfare.
More than ever, art has become a product. And where our souls are concerned, it’s really expensive.
Other than that, I guess everything’s okay; how ’bout you?
“Cave Full of Ghosts”
Nobody’s ever up when I call anymore
I’m always here but there’s no knock at my door
Nothin’s going on after midnight these days
Those crazy friends have all changed their ways
So I sit here underground
With a bottle in the smoke
In the cave where I’ve been bound
To laugh at my own joke
The blame is mine
They all tried to find me
The only place they didn’t look is behind me
Sometimes I see shapes in the air
Sometimes I see the faces that they wear
Maybe they’re old friends that don’t mean any harm
Could be the chill I feel is meant to keep me warm
As I man my lonely post in this cave full of ghosts
Sleep won’t come but exhaustion never goes
My consciousness is haunted by dreams that never show
My way of life grew up and moved right out of town
And left a body that no one ever found
So I sit here underground
With a bottle in the smoke
In the cave where I’ve been bound
To laugh at my own joke
The blame is mine
They all tried to find me
The only place they didn’t look is behind me
Sometimes I see writing on the wall
Sometimes I hear laughter in the hall
Maybe it’s just old friends leavin’ me a note
Reminding me the future is something they rewrote
To close the book on a cave full of ghosts
—“Cave Full of Ghosts” (Thornton/Andrew)
CHAPTER ONE
Alpine, Arkansas: God’s Country
I’LL GET INTO ALPINE BY TELLING A STORY.
My great-great-great-great-uncle or however many greats he was, was a captain in the Confederate Army. His name was William Langston. I named my son Willie after him. William Langston Thornton. Sounds kind of dignified, right?
William Langston—whose brother James Langston was my however many greats-grandfather—was from Alabama, and he had a sweetheart before he went into the Civil War. They loved each other madly. She was a great gal and wanted nothing more than to marry this man and have a family with him. But William was about to go into the Civil War and he didn’t want to marry her, even though she was the love of his life.
“I’m not going to make you a widow,” he said, “because I don’t know if I’ll come out of this thing.”
In one of the battles, he was injured. The polite way to say it is that he suffered a war injury that prevented him from having children. The not-so-polite way to say it is he had his nuts shot off. I think maybe the whole rig, you know what I mean? But when he got out of the war and came back home, she still wanted to marry him.
“The most important thing in the world to you, your dream, was to have ch
ildren and a farm and raise a family,” he said. “I can’t do that.”
She said, “I don’t care, I love you, I want to marry you anyway.”
“I’m not going to do that to you,” he said, “because you will at some point, someday, meet someone, marry them, and have a family. I’m not going to ruin that for you. I’m not worth being married to because I can’t give you a family.”
So William left and became a drifter. He drifted through Texas and ended up in this place called the Chalybeate Valley. I’m not sure how the French might pronounce it, but the way they say it in Arkansas is KU-lee-bet.
So William Langston got to the Chalybeate Valley, and he stood on top of this hill that overlooked the valley. That hill is now a roadside park with one or two picnic tables and maybe one of those stone grills where you could barbecue something if you want to. He was looking over the valley there when he wrote a letter to his brother, James Langston.
I’ve seen God’s country, he wrote. I’ve seen the most beautiful little valley in the world. I plan on homesteading here and you should come too. So his brother moved his family there, and that valley became Alpine, Arkansas.
When my son was born in 1993, I thought it would be nice to name him after a guy who could never have kids. Here’s this name, William Langston, a name that ended there in the Chalybeate Valley, so I named my son William Langston. But one way or the other, that’s how my family came about in Alpine, Arkansas.
CHAPTER TWO
Character Study
The friends that came along
Are characters in songs
The tune’s not always strong
But the truth’s not right or wrong
Nowhere, nowhere
Gave me a home for free
Somewhere, somewhere
Is always calling me
—“Somewhere” (Thornton/Andrew)
I NEVER SET OUT TO BE LIKE SOMEBODY. THAT’S NOT TO SAY THAT INFLUENCES don’t creep in over the years. You watch things, you love people, you have heroes, and you get influenced eventually. I was obsessed with short stories and Southern novelists like John Faulkner, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O’Connor, that kind of stuff. But from the time I was born until now, my writing process has always been about my observations and experiences.
The Billy Bob Tapes Page 1
