Billy Bob Thornton - The Billy Bob Tapes: A Cave Full of Ghosts

A Cave Full of Ghosts

BILLY BOB THORNTON

with Kinky Friedman

by Angelina Jolie

W HERE TO BEGIN? I FIRST HEARD FROM SHARED FRIENDS THAT THERE was this man who was like the hillbilly Orson Welles. I couldnt 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 its dragged along the floor. The characters. Each one completely original and yet its 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 Ive known Billy Ive 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 isnt. I have known him now for more than a decade and I still havent 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.

Hes a bit agoraphobic, and its 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.

Billys mother is psychic, and he worries he, too, has the gift. He cant tell the difference between a dream, a thought, and a dangerous premonition. Its 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 Wasnt There. He was beautiful in that. But I also knew things that others didnt notice. I remember there was a courtroom scene, and when the judge would bang the gavel, Billy would squirm. The thing is, it wasnt 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. Cant really.

He watches old sixties TV shows to remember better, simpler times when he feels down. If hes not watching that, hes 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. Its fascinating. Some who dont know him well might call it crazy if they watched it for hours on end. But then, you dont 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 didnt 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 its in him. I hope we get to read it one day. Maybe hes already written it, on one of those yellow pads. And hes put it away somewhere. Somewhere that may never be seen. I wouldnt 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 cant. And I, and 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 werent in it.

O NE WORKING TITLE FOR WHAT YOU HOLD IN YOUR HANDS WAS Billy Bob Talks, and thats literally how the book came into existence. An ever-changing cast of characters assembled by Kinky Friedman gathered at Billys place night after night, assigned the task of getting him to talkand keeping him talkingwith the tape recorder running. Its not that Billy was reluctant to talk. He wasnt. But it was hard for him, as it would be for anyone, to talk without people listening. As Kinky said of us, Billys audience, before one of the final sessions, Were all just furniture.

Some of those gathered werent 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 Billys stories with one of his ownmuch to the consternation of Kinky, who was there to get Billys stories, not Dannys. Billy, a Three Dog Night fan since he was a teenager, didnt mind and saw Dannys visit as an opportunity to play him a few tracks by Billys own band, the Boxmasters. Billys politeness wasnt 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. Teds response, using a line cribbed from another attendee: Youre stealing my humanity! There was general agreement, though, given the stories he told, that a Ted Mann book wouldnt be bad either.

The sessionsrecorded by J. D. Andrew, cofounder of the Boxmasterswere fueled by beer, cigarettes, espresso, and, in Kinkys case, cigars, and often ran hours past midnight. One night, Billy slipped into the guise of Karl from Sling Bladevoice, facial expression, hand-rubbing, mm-hmms, and allfor an improvised monologue about his guests, and then went right back to being Billy to demonstrate that getting into character isnt 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 Dylans midseventies Rolling Thunder Revue tour, explaining to Billy how Orthodox Jews such as himself prepare food to ensure its kosher.

Amazingly, even with all the distractions, entertaining though they were, Billy Bob did, in fact, talk, and the book youre reading is the result. Not everything made it into print, though, and a lot of the stories that ended up on the cutting-room floorincluding one bawdy tale about Billys underwear drawer from his teenage years, which he feared would embarrass his mother should it be included hereare as entertaining as what was included. Maybe theyll 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: