The Billy Bob Tapes

by Billy Bob Thornton

  I didn’t have a car, so we rode out there to the woods with a fraternity brother buddy and his girlfriend. He was a cat older than me who looked like James Dean and had a 1964 Plymouth Valiant that had a push-button transmission.

  We didn’t say a lot to each other on the way out there. It was like a blind date, even though I had met her a time or two. I was real nerved up. Here I was with my dream girl, who was wearing one of those sweaters that made her breasts look real good, and the only thing going through my mind was that I was going to sleep with her that night and that I was going to get good and shit-faced because I was nervous being around her. I told myself it was going to be okay if I was drunk.

  For the Wine Festival they would take a bunch of number-ten washtubs out there in the middle of the woods where there were a few remaining metal pieces from an old abandoned fire tower with the concrete foundation still intact. Then they would get a bunch of blocks of ice from the icehouse, put them in the tubs, and pour them full of pure grain alcohol and punch. Everybody was supposed to bring their own glass or mug. Of course people would be drunk in about ten minutes, but that helped you out there in the Arkansas woods in winter because it was freezing cold. It was a stupid time to have a party in the woods, but that’s what we did.

  I had my Tupperware glass and started dipping it in the “wine,” and the shit tasted like nothing. Within minutes I was so drunk I didn’t even know who I was. The last thing I remember, I was lying in the backseat of my buddy’s car in this chick’s lap, and it was real cold. I saw the dome light on the ceiling of his car come on when he got in, but I was so drunk I felt like I was hallucinating. Everything was just spinning so fast.

  When I came to, I was bleeding and lying facedown in the grass. Something real wet and sticky was all over me, and I had a big lump in my chest. I figured I’d either been shot or I had a huge tumor and it was bleeding. There was wet shit everywhere. I couldn’t raise my head up, because I had a blazing headache, and my head was so heavy I couldn’t get it up off the grass. I heard a football game going, so I thought, I’m lying facedown in the grass at a football game. I heard people yelling and cheering behind me, screaming at the ball game, and so I’m thinking I must be on the sidelines. Really I don’t know what the fuck is going on. I finally managed to raise my head, and when I looked up there was a TV set about five or six feet in front of me and a ball game was on. I was lying facedown on the shag carpet in the fraternity house.

  I turned around, and the whole fraternity was watching the football game, and here I was, passed out in the middle of the fucking thing with matted-up, dried-up puke in my hair. When I tried to get up, everyone started yelling, “Get the fuck out of the way of the game!”

  I looked down and saw I had a cheeseburger in my shirt that had separated. Buns on one side, mustard and ketchup on the other side, mayonnaise all over me. Later my buddies reconstructed the night for me. They said I had gotten so drunk I was trying to climb some tree out in the woods and then started trying to hump this girl. I had my britches down, running all around, and when they finally got me in the car to take me back to town, I puked all over her and all over the car. My buddy said I kept screaming at him that I was going to kill him if he didn’t get me a cheeseburger. They said that I tried to climb over the seat to come after him. So he went and got me a cheeseburger, told me to go fuck myself, and threw it down my shirt. The girl just wanted to get the fuck away from me as soon as she could, so they took her back to her house, then took me back to the fraternity house and threw me on the floor with this cheeseburger in my shirt. I woke up the next day.

  Years later I was trying to find a buddy of mine who was a fraternity brother there and probably my best friend in the whole outfit, so I just called. I’d been out of college for twenty-five years, but when I called and this guy answered the phone for the fraternity house there, I told him my name and he went, “Oh! Dude! The Cheeseburger Man!”

  I dropped out of college and never did end up being a full fraternity member, but I had a great time with those guys.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “The Acid Room”

  Why is everything so round?

  Why do I hear that sound?

  Who is that rainbow child?

  Why’s my imagination goin’ wild?

  I hear the music say

  Why don’t we fly away

  I’ve never been this tall

  Is that my face meltin’ down the wall?

  —“The Acid Room” (Thornton)

  I TOOK TOO MUCH SHIT ONE TIME, AND THAT’S WHEN I KNEW THAT drugs were not my thing. When you get too high, you start thinking up crazy things that will help you come down. That night, not only did we do a lot of mushrooms, we were drunk, had been smoking pot, and took half a bottle of caffeine pills before we did the mushrooms.

  I remember when I was first in California and somebody had a baggy of mushrooms. They said, “Hey, we’re going to do some ’shrooms,” which we didn’t say because we were never big on cute words in Arkansas. We just said “mushrooms.” At first I thought they were dried apricots. “Those are mushrooms?” I said. The guy said they were. I started to feel the baggy, and sure enough, they were all dried up.

  We used to get mushrooms out of cow shit, and they were big old fluffy things. You would just take a bite out of a mushroom and then swallow something carbonated and the mushroom would just disintegrate in your mouth, kind of like malted milk balls. You’re not really supposed to do that because there’s strychnine in the stems, but we did anyway.

  When I was in college, we knew a guy—someone I grew up with—who lived in the basement of some guy’s house in Arkadelphia. He seemed real straitlaced—he looked like a golfer. But we also knew that he used to go out in the field to collect mushrooms and that he kept them in grocery bags in the refrigerator. One night we decided to pay him a visit.

  By this time, I was living back at home in Malvern with my mom. I had a childhood buddy who was kind of like Stephen Wright, the comic—he had that kind of dry vibe about him. He picked me up in his Pontiac at my mom’s house. We dropped by and picked up another buddy of mine who was a total pothead. Our destination was an Airstream trailer, owned by a buddy of mine who I used to roadie with sometimes. It was one of the smaller Airstreams, where you had to kind of walk sideways through the door to get into the bathroom. On our way to the trailer we went by the mushroom guy’s place.

  We had been drinking tall malt beverages all day long and smoking pot, which I don’t do well with. I could do other shit and be fine, but if I smoked a joint, my heart would beat too fast and I would start thinking the FBI was after me. I never did well with it. Anyway, we had been smoking dope and drinking tall beers all day. I wanted to stay up all night, too, so I took some caffeine tablets. We went by that guy’s place, and he gave us a paper grocery sack full of big, wet, fluffy mushrooms—sand, bugs, cow shit, the whole thing—and then we continued on to my buddy’s little trailer house.

  We sat in the living room, which was real small and had a little black-and-white TV with a coat-hanger antenna. In that same room there was this little stove where we cooked up some mushroom tea.

  I drank a glass, but that wasn’t enough. I really wanted to get fucked up. So I ate a few mushrooms and washed them down with a beer. See, I later learned that when people do mushrooms, they usually bite off a piece of this little apricot-looking thing. Well, that’s not the kind of shit we did. We went way too far with it. I had already drunk a jelly jar full of this tea, which is some horrible stuff that tastes like horse shit, and I ate a couple of big mushrooms. This was after I had taken the caffeine tablets and was drunk and high all day.

  The configuration in the room worked out so I was on this little tiny sofa thing and there was a guy sitting right next to me, then the other two guys were on chairs sitting close by. All this was in an area of about eight square feet or less.

  When you’re doing shit like this, there’s a moment of panic that hits you, wher
e you know you just fucked up and that you should not have done what you’ve just done. We were watching The Honeymooners or something on this coat-hanger television, and my friends started doing shit that I knew goddamn well they weren’t really doing. One buddy was sitting right next to me, and I didn’t want to look at him because I knew it was not going to look like him in a bad way. But I couldn’t help it, and when I finally looked over, he was melting all over his chest. His face was just all the way down his chest. I could tell that none of them wanted to look at me either, so I closed my eyes. Suddenly, I was in a cartoon with Yosemite Sam. I was actually in the cartoon and I was running from Yosemite Sam. He was saying, “I’ll blast you!” and all that kind of stuff. It’s like, okay, closing my eyes is not going to help. Now, I had had some hallucinogenic experiences before—some bad, some good—and I knew that this one was not going to be good. When I talk to people who say, “Yeah, we did some acid and we did some mushrooms and then we went to the movies and laughed our asses off,” I can’t believe it. I’m like, “Wait a minute, you did acid and you drove to the movies?” We didn’t have those experiences. We sat in a fucking closet talking to an eleven-foot caterpillar with a top hat on. If you’re telling me that you went to the movies and laughed your asses off, you must have had different kind of shit than we had. We couldn’t get out of the fucking room. We didn’t dare. We went into a whole world where going outside and getting into a car never occurred to us because we didn’t know it even existed. All that existed was right here in this fucking nightmare. We didn’t laugh, it was not funny. And yet we kept doing it.

  That night I started going into this dark place where I knew things were going to be bad, and that was only the beginning. As fast as I was speeding, and with all the shit that was happening when I closed my eyes and how my friends looked and what Ralph Kramden was doing, I knew fucking well that this was not going to end up good. It was going to be a long night, and this was just the kickoff. I figured if I could only get into the backseat of the car I’d be okay. So I walked out of this trailer, but I felt like I was that “keep on truckin’” cat with the leg that’s a fucking mile and a half long. As I stepped out of the trailer it felt like my foot went down thirty feet. When I stepped onto the ground, it felt like this big fucking cotton ball. So I was walking in this cotton, and I saw the car. If I can just get into the backseat, everything will be okay.

  But the hood of the car looked only about a foot long while the rest of the car went all the way down to the end of the block. I was trying to get into the backseat, so I started scaling the car like Batman and Robin used to do when they were climbing a building. Finally, after what seems like hours, I got to the back door handle. I opened the door, which felt like it was made out of rubber, and the door started shaking like one of those tin things they used to use to make thunder in movies back in the old days. I got into the backseat, lay down, and sunk like twenty or thirty feet. Then I just puked everywhere.

  I got up out of there and headed back to the trailer, the whole time with cartoons going off in my head. I opened the trailer door, which seemed fucking huge now, and my three buddies were in there running. Mind you, this whole trailer is probably like twenty feet, and they’re literally in single file running from the living room to this little bedroom, throwing themselves onto the bed on top of one another, then getting up and running back to the living room. They were doing this over and over. I got in line with them and started running back and forth behind them. We did this for God knows how long until we finally went back and sat in the living room. One of my buddies started crying and telling this awful story. All my buddies started looking kind of like pigs. Their noses were turned up, and they had these big, hollow eyes.

  I went into the bathroom, which had a lightbulb in front of the mirror with a chain on it. At that time I was even skinnier than I am now, with long hair and sunken eyes. I turned on the light, and I looked at myself in the mirror. Big fucking mistake. The mirror was about an inch from my face, and I looked exactly like that guy from Beauty and the Beast. Not the cartoon, the French version. I don’t mean kind of looked like that, I mean I was that guy. Well, that freaked me out.

  Finally I told my buddy that we had to get back to town. We got in his car and tried to drive the twenty-seven miles back into town. Whenever we went around a curve, the road became a rubber band—the road would go way the fuck out there like in a cartoon. I said to my buddy, “Are you really able to do this?” And he said, “For some reason, I am.” And so we got back to town.

  It was already dawn, about six thirty in the morning. Everything looked real yellow to me. I had just finished with this rubber-band ride, my buddy still looked like a pig with hollowed-out eyes, and the whole world was yellow. I lived over at my mom’s house at the time, and I didn’t want to go home real fucked up. I didn’t want to go to my buddy’s house either, because his parents were real fucking not fun and they didn’t like me anyway, high or not. In this fog, I told my buddy to take me to this guy’s house—this guy I used to be in a band with when I was in junior high but probably hadn’t seen in three or four years. The last time I saw him I chewed his ass out, then got him down on the ground in a choke hold, threatening him because he stole a bunch of my brother’s records. For some reason I told my buddy, “Take me over there, I want to hang out with him today.”

  He dropped me off, and I went up the stairs to this cat’s place. Somehow I knew he had a stand-up job now and was living in this duplex apartment, married, like a regular Joe—and when I knocked on the door his wife answered. I knew her a little bit, she was a couple of years behind me in school. She opened the door and looked at me like, What in the fuck are you doing standing in my doorway? But she just said, “Hi.” God knows how I looked. I had long stringy hair that was probably greasy, and I was wearing some kind of shit that said Allman Brothers—I had painted it on there myself—and I go, “Hey, how you doing?” And she goes, “Fine.” And I said, “Hey, is the guy here?” She goes, “Yeah.”

  He came up behind her, and he didn’t have a shirt on. They had just gotten up and were making breakfast. I could smell bacon and hear it crackling. He goes, “Hey, so … what’s up?”

  “Oh, I just came by to see you.” Well, who the fuck “comes by to see you” at seven in the morning looking like I did? But he just said, “You want to come in?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re having breakfast, you want anything?”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  And they were just staring at me like, as my buddy Jim Varney used to say, a pig staring at a wristwatch—like, Why is this guy at my fucking apartment? But the guy invited me in and said, “Well, have a seat.”

  They sat down and had breakfast for like thirty or forty minutes while I sat there about twelve feet away from them. They were real quiet. The news was on, and we were all just kind of watching it, but I knew they were thinking, What is he doing here? Has he turned into a fucking lunatic? Is he going to stab us?

  They finished breakfast and went and got ready for work—she worked at a department store, and he worked at a real estate office or something. They came out into the living room, and I was still just sitting there. One of them, I can’t remember which, said, “Listen, we’re going to work now. Did you want to stay here, or were you going to go?” I said, “If you don’t mind, I’ll just wait until you guys get off work.” They said okay, but I could see they were nervous. They were nice people, other than the time he ripped the albums off and I choked him.

  So they went off to work and I got into their bed, which was unmade and smelled like “other people.” I lay facedown and passed out into this sort of psychedelic world that was kind of the leftover effect from the night before. When I came to, I heard people in the kitchen and plates clanking. I had been asleep all day, and they had come home and were making supper. I got up and walked into the kitchen, drool going down my chin, and they were sitting down to eat again. I said, “Hey, guys, thanks for lett
ing me hang.”

  “Well, yeah, it was good to see you.”

  “Yeah, it was good to see you guys too.”

  The guy got up and walked me to the door. He said, “Okay, well, see you around.”

  “Yeah, see you around.”

  I walked down the stairs feeling kind of weird. Everybody still looked a little bit funny. I was several miles away from my house, so I just started walking. On the way, I went by this trailer where this girl, who had the most perfect legs I’d ever seen in my life, lived with her mom. I always wanted to get with that girl, and for some reason I thought this might be the time. So I stopped by there and knocked on the door. The girl I barely knew but always wanted to hook up with answered and let me in.

  I hung out with her for a few hours, but I was too much in another world to even ask her about anything meaningful. I talked to her for a while, and she just looked at me. Then I finally walked home, and I ended up sitting outside my house for three days. I mean, I would go in at night, sleep, talk to my mom a little bit, but mainly I just sat outside on this concrete square where there was a basketball hoop, thinking that my life was over. Everything still looked really yellow and I was real depressed. My Boston terrier, Butch, sat next to me. You could see tears in his eyes. He was real sensitive and would actually cry when you were upset. He knew something was wrong with me.

  I sat there in this depression for three days, after which I decided that I was never going to be a drug addict. That life was not for me. It wasn’t the actual day I quit, but it was the day I decided that I was not going to be a drug addict.

  “THE TOM EPPERSON STORY” BY TOM EPPERSON

  (AS TOLD TO TOM EPPERSON)

  Part III