1
Alabama in August, man. How humid is it? It's so humid that there's a heavy petrichor scent in the air—like it just rained, even though it hasn't—and the sidewalk concrete is dark is how humid it is. Everyone is miserable is how humid it is. The roadies and sound guys go from tour bus to venue to tour bus to venue, sweating from their bald heads into their creatively shaped beards and onto their black T-shirts and down into their camouflage shorts. One of the guitar players keeps going to the bus's thermostat to check and see what it's set at, making a noise of frustration like maybe somebody keeps turning the temperature up too high (somebody does). The only person not bothered by the heat is Billy Bob Thornton, who weighs less than the smallest box of the band's equipment, has a body-fat percentage of minus 42 and a BMI of 1, and who is shivering like a Chihuahua in his jeans, which, so you know, are Old Navy brand, women's, size 6, and the imprint on the inside of their waistband says DIVA in lady script. He tells me he's built like Homer Simpson's boss, Mr. Burns, “so I can't have baggy pants”—something about his toothpick legs knocking around in all that fabric. Keeping these jeans up requires a white leather belt that says FOREVER on the back. There's a story there. There are stories here everywhere. There are hillbillies at the bar next door, drunk since the morning, waiting for the band. There's a groupie in a halter top who keeps showing up at the entrance of the bus, hours before showtime, just wanting to hang with the band. Alabama in August, man.
Billy's in a mood. No one on the bus got more than three hours of sleep last night out of Huntsville. It wasn't Huntsville that pissed him off; Billy loves Huntsville. Each tour, the Boxmasters play at the Merrimack Hall Performing Arts Center and all the proceeds go to the center's special-needs program. Before last year's show, Billy taught the students a creative-writing class, and he left the class and wrote a song—wrote a song right there on the spot!—about how magical and moving the experience was and performed it that very night. But after last night's gig, it took forever to get through the sea of fans, and everyone knew the longer that took for Billy, the less sleep everyone would get since we had to drive into Muscle Shoals first thing in the morning, and people are tired. Billy wants to lay down three new songs today, one of which he's written literally just a few minutes ago, so here we are, parked outside the studio, “early as possum fuck” someone says, and the roadies unpack instruments and the owners of the studio ready Billy's array of gluten-free snacks and organic vegetables and Billy sits on the bus and eats his breakfast. Three hours of sleep and he wants to record three songs in full in one day? This feels like a mathematical impossibility to everyone but him. That's part of why he's annoyed—he can sense that everyone doesn't really feel like they can get this done, which means maybe they won't push themselves to get it done, you know?
So he eats his breakfast and seethes a little. A word on his breakfast: It is absolutely horrifying. He's allergic to just about everything—eggs, wheat, dairy. He can't eat red meat: “I have type AB- blood, which is the rarest blood type. It's less than 1 percent of the whole population of the world, and it means that you don't have as many digestive enzymes,” and the part about AB- blood being the rarest is true if maybe the digestive enzymes thing is maybe absolutely not at all true. Most of the remaining foods he isn't allergic to rub his legendary OCD in ways wrong enough to keep him at about 135 pounds and in those size 6 Divas. Just the other night, the band went out to dinner and they were presented with a roast chicken that was posed standing up—like, Ta-da!—and Billy was just out. “That's a little guy,” he'd said. “I'm not eating a little guy.”
But he's got breakfast nailed. Breakfast every morning is these Bobo's Oat Bars—“the closest thing I get to cake”—but that's not the horrifying part. The horrifying part is that he has a vat of Earth Balance, which is a butter substitute, or maybe it's actually a margarine substitute, and he takes a heaping spoonful and he coats each bite with the whole thing until maybe half the vat is gone by the time this one tiny bar is consumed. In the refrigerator on the bus there is a produce drawer marked BILLYS ONLY [sic], and in it are blueberries, which he eats by the plastic carton, a couple of avocados, and the Earth Balance.
Anyway, Huntsville had been fun. The Boxmasters have played Huntsville at least half a dozen times, and the crowd came out and sang along to all the songs, danced in their blousy shirts and boot-cut jeans. But then there were two more hours when he took pictures not just with the people who had paid the $100 for the VIP Meet and Greet before the show but also with the fans who lingered after, and he loves doing that, but too many people told him that they loved his band, which maybe seems like an innocent compliment, which maybe seems like the exact thing you're supposed to say to someone who just performed a bunch of songs for you. But this only annoyed him because those people seemed to be talking about his band and not about his songs.
“You like my band?” he says now, a plastic fork full of Earth Balance in his hand. He can wave the fork around vigorously without worry because the double carbon bonds that form Earth Balance's monounsaturated fats cling to the fork in a death grip. “What was I, just fucking masturbating up there? I wrote every fucking word to those songs.”
Then there's the way people phrase things, like they say, “Oh, you have a band now” and “It's nice you get to play music, too,” which may sound like someone is just trying to make conversation, but it's actually really patronizing, treating this thing he does, which he's done since way before he ever acted and before he ever wrote or directed, like it's a hobby, like he wasn't recording in Memphis back in the 1970s in the studio right in between the Cramps' and the Bar-Kays'. He's an artist, and he doesn't appreciate the micro-aggressions that come with so many fan interactions, the ones who imply that this whole band thing is a vanity gig like it is for oh let's not name names here, or that a man who acts should only be a man who acts. He's not your robot! Billy Bob Thornton is not your single-faceted monkey!
And do not, please do not, get him started on the people who approach him after the show with a Sling Blade DVD to sign. You just watched him perform his heart out for you and you are going to present him with a Sling Blade DVD? “Sure, I'll sign your Sling Blade DVD,” he says now. “And you can go home and fuck missionary like a metronome and never have an original creative idea in your life.”
But what is he going to do? These are things that famous people who make themselves available to their public generally find, that Suzy and Dale will perpetuate again and again (in all of Billy's examples, generic women and men are always named Suzy and Dale) but they don't realize how it makes the fight to create some decent art even harder. He's already been reduced from the writer and director we first met more than 20 years ago, in the brilliant and heartbreaking Sling Blade, your DVD copy of which you can ask him to sign, really, just not right after he performed music. He has already decided that he will no longer write and direct movies, just star in them and maybe re-write his parts in them, so destroyed was he by his last two stabs at auteurism.
But we'll get to that. Right now we just have to get through this day. He is quiet for a minute, bracing himself for disappointment. Everyone will do their best. He believes that. But they won't really appreciate where they are, which is the greatest town for recording outside of Memphis. They won't care about that. They'll want to know where the steak house is. They'll want to know when it's quitting time. Not Teddy and J.D., of course. Not the main guys in the band. But the guys who play in the tour band—and he's giving them a chance to be on the album! And the roadies—what do they care? “We'll go in here and people will drag ass and they'll discuss shit and they'll talk about this, that, and the other, and they'll wonder what we're going to have for fucking lunch.”
He stands up and goes to the thermostat, wondering how it got so cold again (it is not cold), and raises it to a temperature that is less a number and more the tail end of a three-hour wait on a New York City subway platform on an August day, a day when you accidentally woke up thinking it was winter but also that you were going surfing and so only wore layers of wool and neoprene.
“You're either born with it or you're not,” he says, meaning: the drive to create. “There aren't any people aligned with me passionately.” Not here on this bus. Not there off the bus. Not anywhere. And he leans in and he shakes his head like you've seen him do a million times, and he over-enunciates the last syllable on every word in his Arkansas smart-ass accent, and you can roll your eyes, but you could just as easily feel a punch in your gut, because what he is saying is absolutely true.
“Nobody will ever see the importance the way you see it.”
2
The Southern Gothic that is the Boxmasters' tour rolls along in a rented Le Mirage XL II, which is equipped with two lounge areas, four thermostats, and two large-screen TVs—one that is perpetually on sports, another that is perpetually on a nature channel, both perpetually muted. The back lounge, where people hang and where songs are written and where the occasional guest sleeps, has a U-shaped couch. There are 12 bunk beds that Billy says feel like the womb but to a discriminating viewer might also look like coffins. Each bunk has a little curtain, and Billy's is the bottom back one; when he sleeps his foot falls out from behind it, and there is something somber and moving about it, the only thing cluttering the dark hallway in the night, this foot that's fallen out-of-bounds.
The mainstays on the bus include Billy, of course, but also: J.D. Andrew, the rhythm guitarist, who was a recording engineer for Billy's solo work, and who showed no range of emotion whatsoever over the four days I traveled with them, except very briefly, once, when he mistakenly thought it was the first day of college football season, then returned to baseline when he realized he was a day off; Teddy Andreadis, on keyboard and harmonica, who was once the lead singer of Slash's post-Guns N' Roses band, Slash's Blues Ball, which is a terrible name for a band; touring drummer Eric Rhodes, a.k.a. Meat Sweats, which is what Billy has called him ever since that time in Amarillo when he took Billy's bet that he couldn't eat 72 ounces of meat in one meal in order to get it for free, and about
50 ounces in (!) he just started sweating meat out of his pores and had to pay for the meal. There is a guy named Kim, in charge of merch, who throws his socks away every day on the road instead of washing them, so offended is he by their smell. There is Joani, who does Billy's makeup, and her husband, Bubba Bruce, who used to play drums on tour for the Boxmasters but hasn't since he got hit by a buck while driving his motorcycle—that's all he remembers. There is Kirk McKim, who plays lead guitar and who toured with the Pat Travers Band. There is Dave Fowler, who plays bass guitar and who has also taken on tour-management duties (he has been tour manager for Dolly Parton, too) plus Billy's food specifics. Then there is Diva Zappa, youngest daughter of the late Frank, in charge of photography and wardrobe and also manning the teleprompter that Billy uses when he sings. She is knitting the beginning of what looks like a scarf, but she keeps checking in with the object to see “what it wants to be.” It feels appropriate to save this reveal for the end. She is also a yoga teacher and an energetic healer, but you already knew that. In Huntsville, J.D. walked into the greenroom and asked if she could do some healing on his neck because it's been bothering him. And she said, “I just did while you were outside!” and J.D. rolled his neck around for a minute and said, “Well, I'll be.” All these people will be on this bus for the full duration of this six-week-long tour, except for a couple of them who have “blemishes on their records” and will not be permitted to enter Canada.
It is a miracle any of them are allowed to enter Canada, to tell the truth. During a 2009 tour, they visited our neighbor to the north and did a spot on CBC. Billy said he was very clear up front that CBC had to interview them as a band, that the host not talk about Billy's movie career, since Billy was there on band business. But what happened? You guessed it. The band got there and, according to Billy, the guy barely introduced them. He talked only to Billy, only about his movie career, according to Billy. (In fact, according to the 14-minute cringe-a-thon video of the interview, which will make you wish you were dead, Jian Ghomeshi spoke only about the band, briefly mentioning that Billy had an Oscar.) Well, Billy wasn't having it, and he shut down in the most awful way, right there on live radio. The host asked him when the band formed, and Billy said he didn't know what he was talking about. The host asked about touring with Willie Nelson, and Billy said he never met the guy. The next night, they did a show in Toronto and got booed because everyone there is erudite and listens to public radio, and then the Boxmasters canceled their remaining Canadian dates due to an, um, outbreak of flu on the bus.
For the record, Billy is more than happy to talk about his movie career with someone who asks about it respectfully, in the right place at the right time. Why shouldn't he be? Has anyone on-screen looked us so boldly in the eye and spoken truth to bullshit the way Billy does in every role he plays? When he talks in real life, he talks like he talks on-screen—eyes narrowed, quiet, side of his mouth, head micro-shaking, telling you something only you'd understand. This is so his thing that when he played Lorne Malvo in the first season of Fargo, maybe the most chilling and soulless hit man prestige cable has ever seen, he somehow came off as the show's protagonist.
But that's what he does: He subverts norms, he exceeds expectations. Now, in the weeks before the release of Bad Santa 2, it is remarkable to remember how in 2003 the original created an entire genre of funny anti-heroes who are dark beyond true redemption. “I mean, now they have fucking Bad Grandma and Bad Teacher and Bad Aunt and Uncle and everybody,” he says. Movies whose creators just insert the misanthropic character that is Billy's birthright into a formula he and the filmmakers invented and then wait for the money to roll in.
Bad Santa 2 is a lot like Bad Santa—it even includes the same dumb kid, all grown now, and the same nasty elf. But the world has changed; the world expects more. They had to make the sweet and sad parts sweeter and sadder, and the nasty parts nastier. There has been a tidal wave of dark comedy and ugly Internet since 2003, and now what it takes to surprise or subvert an audience is far more extreme than it was back then.
“People have made sure of that, that you can't shock anybody anymore,” Billy says. “It's not just because of movies and TV. It's because of what's happening in the world. It's like, well, surely no one's ever, like, killed a bunch of rabbits with a hatchet and then ate them in front of a group of kindergartners, and you look it up and, sure enough, somebody did it.”
But he thinks he has something original and surprising with Bad Santa 2—well, as original as it can be for the same movie with the same characters—and so he's bracing himself for the inevitable criticism. After the first movie came out, some woman at some panel somewhere stood up and said that they'd ruined the name of Santa Claus and Christmas and Jesus. Billy said, “Well, ma'am, just so you know, I've read the Bible. Santa Claus is not in it. Second of all, I'm not really playing Santa Claus. I'm a thief who dresses like Santa Claus. So, let's not get it mixed up. This is not supposed to be a movie about Santa Claus.” He lets out a tired breath. “I'm pretty sure she just hated me for whatever reason.”
Plenty of people out there hate him for whatever reason. They think he's entitled—him! Billy! Who grew up in abject poverty! They think he's privileged. Privileged! He hunted and ate squirrel for dinner! Hatred for Billy for whatever reason is all over the Internet, where people in chat rooms are seething over his very existence. He doesn't go out looking for comment boards that call him an asshole; he just finds them. Here's how it happens, according to Billy: “I wonder what Abraham Lincoln's birthday was.” Click. “Oh, it was in February. Interesting. Let's see if there's any more.” Click. “Oh, there's no more about it, but there's an ad: ‘Learn about the one food that you can't live without.’ Oh, wait, I better read this.” Click. “Fuck! ‘Beets.’ Oh, no, wait, that's another ad.” Click. “ ‘Billy Bob Thornton's an asshole.’”
His wife, Connie, tries to soothe him when this happens. She reminds him that the people who comment are imbeciles, that he should be above reading them, that he's plenty validated in his profession and in his world. And maybe this would work, maybe, if there weren't already critics out there—God, the critics. Don't bring up the critics.
The critics are going to ruin Bad Santa 2 for him. They have to, he thinks. No matter its merits, critics are mandated to hate sequels. “ ‘Oh, my God, did you see Joe Dirt 2? It's atrocious.’ Who gives a shit? Then don't go see it. Don't write about it, you know? You take away people's right to like what they want to like by influencing people who are very easily influenced.” (For the record, Bad Santa 2 is somehow every bit as good as its predecessor at provoking surprise choke/snort laughter.)
He sits back. We're now in the back room of the bus, where he and Teddy and J.D. were going to assemble to finish one of the songs before recording time. Now that he doesn't write movies anymore, his songs are how he channels his southern-lit inspirations into some kind of art form. He writes songs about people on death row, fatherless children, gruesome murders. He writes songs about what he's seen.
But now he can't concentrate because he's thinking about critics. Critics. Why do critics exist, anyway? He thinks critics should only talk about movies they like and politely decline to write anything about movies they don't. “I would only write about the ones you do like because that's helpful. I don't understand a critic thinking they are responsible for warning the world about this atrocity.”
This world of calling people out makes no sense to him. “Why do we live in a society that wants to get people?” On the TV a leopard eats an animal we can't identify. He hates that everything is a competition. He hates reality TV. Why do there have to be cupcake wars? Can't you just bake and feed people?
But critics are only doing their job, he knows that. Don't miss his point: that these are the little things that chip away at someone's will to do good work, to open your heart and to share what it's seen. Nobody can just let you create anymore. Forget the critics—think of the executives.
He does. In 2000, he adapted Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, with a score he loved and a running time of just under three hours. Harvey Weinstein wasn't having it—he had to cut the movie down to a paltry 116 minutes, a movie that barely made sense at that length, according to Billy. This was after, he says, his financial backers tried to force him to cast white actors in the Mexican roles. This was after they destroyed his beautiful and spare electric-guitar score with something The New York Times called “a tasteful blend of mariachi, norteño, and western swing (among other things),” which “covers the movie like wall-to-wall carpeting. Once or twice, it would be good to contemplate the vastness of the desert landscape in silence.” The movie flopped. No one has ever seen Billy's cut.
He tried again in 2012 with Jayne Mansfield's Car, a multi-generational family drama, and that flopped, too. “Nobody saw it,” he says. “Nobody cared.” By then, the wave of indie appreciation that had gotten him financing on Sling Blade was long over.
And since then, he's just out. He can't have his heart broken anymore. He can't abide people telling him what to do or how to express himself. At least with acting, they can't change the way you said something. At least with his own band, no one's in charge but him.
He's not going to beg. He doesn't want to be where he's not wanted. “I never was the kind of guy who if somebody didn't want me I'd press the issue, you know what I mean? Like, if a girl broke up with me when I was in high school, I wasn't the guy who drove by her house and threw paint balloons at it or something. I was done.”
The studio is almost ready. Billy goes in and sits with Teddy and J.D. and puts the finishing touches on a song called “Here She Comes,” which sounds like it's about a woman who keeps recurring in Billy's life, but what it's actually about is a tornado.
3
Every night on the bus, after the performance, after the fielding of the inane questions by clueless and well-meaning fans, the Boxmasters participate in their end of what is known as “the nightly ass-chewing.” They'll be sitting, delighting in the details of the musical event they just emerged from, and one phone will go off, then another, then another. It's the wives. They'll each pick it up, and it will go from smooth “Hi, honey, I miss you” to something that sounds more like “I can—well if you'll—let me talk—if you just let me talk, I'll tell you, I'll explain it to you—I didn't fucking say that. No, before I left I specifically told you it's in the garage. I told you exactly where it was.” They all understand. They left their wives holding the bag. I suggest they maybe text a “good night” and avoid the confrontation, but Billy says it wouldn't work. “It'll just mean a bigger ass-chewing the next day.”
But here's a secret: Billy cracks jokes about the nightly ass-chewing, but in fact, he sneaks off often to his cocoon-womb to FaceTime with Connie, and their 12-year-old daughter, Bella—his fourth child and the crazy-cute, crazy-smart apple of his eye—at just about every opportunity.
Connie is the sixth wife Billy has taken in his short 61 years on this earth, and he doesn't like confirming that. Yes, she's his sixth wife. Yes, there were five before her. But he didn't marry her when he fell in love with her because he felt he'd finally found the absolute one, and he didn't want her to be a number. “I didn't want her to be called number six. You know?” Now they have Bella, and in 2014, for her sake, they thought maybe they'd make their union official, as if his tattoo of Bella's name and his tattoo of Connie's name down his spine wasn't official enough. Maybe it wasn't. He has two tattoos of his fifth wife's name, Angelina Jolie. One is still right there on his leg, with no heroic measures to cover it up. The other is on his arm, and covered with an angel. “See, it's just resting there,” he says. “You can still see the name.”
Billy and Angie had a great relationship, really: You always remember the first person whose blood you drained and carried in a locket around your neck. You always remember the first person who gnawed on your face while some poor red-carpet reporter tried to get you to say something semi-freaky and so you said, “We fucked in the car on the way here.” (Youngsters: YouTube it.)
So there were no problems in that department. The problem was, he says, “I never felt good enough for her.” She was always going off to meet with the U.N. people or the president or the adoption agencies, and he just wanted to stay home and watch baseball. Still, that was okay. What wasn't okay was that they'd get invited to George Lucas's house or something, “and I'm real uncomfortable around rich and important people.” He doesn't really know which fork to use; he doesn't know how to act fancy. But also, and here was the thing, he doesn't really want to know which fork to use or how to act fancy. “I like how I am.” He didn't want to have conversations about how the restaurant in the lodge at the resort has gone downhill so let's all go to Idaho instead next year. He and Angie are still friends, though, he says. They talk every few months, she's just so busy with the kids and work and the many houses in the many countries, but the minute they connect it's like old times (minus phlebotomy and face gnawing).
Connie is far more his speed. She's a homebody, just like him, and Bella is homeschooled, so when Billy's not working, he gets to be at the house with them. Sometimes they drive around and listen to pop music together—he likes to hear what Bella's listening to, and he thinks the messages in all the Christina Perri-Taylor Swift stuff these days are good and empowering—but when his anxiety acts up, he prefers to be at home.
His phobias are a storied thing: He doesn't like swimming. He is afraid of antique furniture. He's afraid of Komodo dragons. (“Why wouldn't you be afraid of a Komodo dragon? It's a dragon. It's a dinosaur.”) He's afraid of silverware. He's afraid of Benjamin Disraeli's hair (I shit you not). He puts his hand over his phone before he shuts it off, because it's Bella's picture on the screen and he thinks he is summoning harm for her if he ever causes the screen to go black right there in front of his eyes.
A lot of living with Billy involves helping to manage his anxiety. There's a channel on cable called DOGTV, and it's for dogs; dog owners leave it on while they're away. I've seen it. It contains really nutso psychedelic images of rainbows, but also just some footage of dogs sniffing each other's undercarriages. Someone who is really tapped into the whole canine psyche came up with it—dogs are mesmerized by it. So is Billy Bob Thornton. When Billy gets anxious, he sits with his Cavalier King Charles spaniel on his lap, and he tries to ride the current of DOGTV. It doesn't always work. Sometimes the action on the screen stops and his dog gets antsy, and then Billy gets antsy, and he wanders into the kitchen and asks the Alexa cylinder to play some of what he calls “massage” music, like you'd hear at a spa, and it calms him down, even though he doesn't really like that kind of music.
He and Bella used to watch My Little Pony together, and she grew out of that, but recently he longed to see it again and searched for it and found another My Little Pony, an updated tweeny kind of version, and they started watching it together. He's been thinking about and relating to one particular multi-episode arc lately. In Ponyville, everyone has cutie marks, which are kind of like tribal tattoos on a horse's hip—Applejack lives on an apple farm, so she has three apples on her hip. But Starlight Glimmer creates this new village where everyone instead has cutie marks that are equal signs, like: =.
I'll let Billy take it from here: “This was amazing because the Mane Six ponies, who are the stars of the show, they go out there because Celestia, who runs Equestria, she will tell Twilight Sparkle she needs to go somewhere, but she doesn't tell her why.” Bear with him, it's worth it, I promise. “So anyway, suddenly they get captured by them and told that they have to remove their cutie marks and get equal signs. But they said, you know what? No. So Fluttershy, who is my favorite because she kind of talks like Marilyn Monroe, says, ‘Oh, yes.’” (He says this like Marilyn Monroe.) “Fluttershy acts like she wants to become a member, you know? And so they give her the cutie-mark equal-sign stamp and everything. And then she notices something, like it rains, and it washes off Starlight Glimmer's equal sign, and she's got her own cutie mark. So she's like a Jim Jones cult, you know, right?” Suffice it to say that Billy considers these to be essential lessons for his daughter: Don't be like the phonies. Don't go looking to homogenize everyone like Starlight Glimmer. Wear your own cutie mark. It's yours. And when he can do this for his daughter—focus on ways to bring the world into focus for her—that does his anxiety more good than all the spa music and DOGTV in the world.
He can trace the OCD back to his Arkansas childhood, when he'd watch the clock and feel the knot of fear snowballing as he anticipated his father's homecoming. His father would yell and hit and terrorize the family—Dwight Yoakam's character in Sling Blade was a depiction of Billy's father, as was Mr. Woodcock, as was Hank in Monster's Ball. And Billy would begin to count to 100 in the three or four minutes before his father was expected at the door, and if he could do that nine times before he heard the car in the driveway, everything would be okay.
When he was 6, a man was killed by a hit-and-run in front of his house, and he ran outside in his Roy Rogers pajamas to see the body and heard a neighbor say, “Oh, it's just a damned n——.” He later worked for the highway department, cleaning up after car accidents; he's still haunted by the grisly things he saw there. “I've been traumatized to the point where I'll never come back from it.”
His mother is a psychic—his great-grandmother had the gift, and so did his younger brother Jimmy—and when you are prone to magical thinking like Billy is, every impulse you have feels like a premonition. When Billy was in his 20s, he woke up one night with his heart racing, and he looked over at Jimmy in the bed next to him and Jimmy appeared to be dead. A minute later he shook it off—his brother was fine. But years later, when Billy was 33 and Jimmy was 30, Jimmy died suddenly from ventricular fibrillation, from his heart racing. Billy realizes now that that night had been a vision. His mother agrees; she told Billy she'd known she was going to lose Jimmy young all her life. After that, Billy never again let anyone tell him his thoughts and fears were outlandish. And so he sits in his home in Los Angeles, enacting the only behaviors that will help fend off the utter destruction of his world, feeling validated in his anxieties because he knows they're the truth.
By day's end at the recording studio, they'd finished all three songs; the tracks just needed some finishing touches. After midnight, as we board the bus, we're all still humming the lyrics and melody of one of the songs—I think I hear you crying sometimes, or maybe just sighing sometimes / It's probably the wind, probably just the wiiiiiind—which you'd think was a sad love song, but it's actually about a man on death row and the woman he killed, who still haunts him to this day.
4
We arrive in Dothan the next day and park in a lot that is home to both a shack that sells boiled peanuts and “produce” as well as a roughneck bar called Cowboys. Kim, the merch guy, informs me that a man inside at the bar told a joke that was so disgusting, he can't bring himself to repeat it because I am a lady and this joke might literally hurt me. There are men with mullet ponytails—“a coonskin cap,” Kirk calls those—drinking at the bar at 9:30 A.M., almost 12 hours before showtime. There's no Wi-Fi. It's terrifying.
The Boxmasters, fronted by Billy Bob Thornton, began as an opening act for Billy Bob Thornton and his tour band, which was also fronted by Billy Bob Thornton. Take that in for a minute: The Boxmasters are a band conceived to open up for themselves. Solo Billy did mostly rock songs—lyrically edgy love songs, like the one where Billy whispers to a woman for two minutes to hurry on up because he's wearing her pink underwear right now and getting turned on as hell—but he started really liking the sound that his opening band made: It was a unique mixture of British invasion and hillbilly country. They called that sound modbilly, and they dressed up like the Beatles in skinny suits with skinny ties, and they made a pointy midcentury logo and they called themselves the Boxmasters, which means they who are in charge of a woman's genitals. They made records and eventually he decided to dump himself and focus solely on the Boxmasters.
In Kansas City, fans screamed “Sign my tits!” from the audience during the show. In Emporia, a drunk guy raised his hand and it was so weird that Billy just called on him, and the guy said, “What are you even doing here?” And Billy said, “I don't fucking know.” He called the guy onstage and they sat at the edge of it and the guy showed him he could eat his own foot like a corn on the cob. They ended up singing “You Are My Sunshine.” In Knoxville, this girl in the front row put her head in her hands and looked so glum, and the band took that as a challenge and poured all their attention and charisma onto her, hoping she'd lighten up and stop killing their collective performing buzz, but she never stopped looking like the most miserable person in the world, and finally Billy stopped and said, “Hon, what can we do? What can we do to make you smile?” And she said, “Sorry. I broke my leg and I'm out of pain meds.” So the girl moved to the side and they continued.
All of this is fine with Billy. The bus is the place for him—even when he's annoyed, even when he wakes up and gives us the finger before he takes his morning piss in his plaid pajama pants. What people don't ever seem to understand is that he's Bad Santa in a way that Cameron Diaz has never been and never will be Bad Teacher. He plays Bad Santa as the abused child he was, all grown up, angry and lashing out. What was Cameron Diaz bringing to Bad Teacher? And, considering that, considering the authenticity and the originality, how is it okay that Bad Teacher grossed a bazillion times more than Bad Santa?
But here's another secret: Sometimes, when no one is looking, he'll start to write a screenplay, and he'll get really excited about it. But then he'll remember that nobody cares and he'll stop. Well, he'll kind of stop. When I asked to see the Bad Santa 2 shooting script so that I could present you with a couple of the grossest and most amazing lines in it, I found out the script would do me no good—the best lines in the movie were ones he massaged during shooting. So he'll do that, but he won't put his name on anything. Suzy and Dale don't want to make his movie. Suzy and Dale don't want to see his movie. They don't get it. No one does.
“I'm just going to be in the Boxmasters,” he says. “I'm just going to be in a band and be an actor. That's it. It takes too much out of you to write a movie and direct it and spend, you know, a year and a half of your life on it and then have people either shit on it or not see it. Maybe if I make it to 85 or something, I'll sit around and write a novel.”
So you'll forgive him, but he's just out. For the Starlight Glimmers of the world have won. They have created a society in which everyone is equal and everyone is the same and everyone watches superhero movies, the same ones with different actors. And because we were all exposed to one thing, we became one thing and we wanted one thing. We are all Starlight Glimmer now, fucking missionary like a metronome, back and forth, back and forth, feeling nothing new and wanting nothing scary. We have lost our right to have art.
Billy isn't ready to get off the bus yet. He wants to have the pre-show Meet and Greet on board instead, maybe avoid the drunken Cowboys crowd—too drunk, too country even for Billy—till he can't anymore. He sits with J.D. and Teddy at the front as Diva takes pictures of them with their excited fans: two overdressed young women, a local afternoon radio host, a man in a shirt that says GOD, GUNS & TRUMP.
Just as they're about to leave the bus to go onstage, Diva stands and holds her knitting up against her, looking in one of the mirrors on the back wall of the bus. “I think it wants to be a dress,” Diva says. The day before, it wanted to be a bolero.
“No,” says Billy. “It's like a vest.”
“A vest,” Diva says, considering. “A vest.”
“Yes,” says Billy. “It wraps around and then just hangs down.”
“A vest,” Diva says. It's decided.
Billy changes out of his tiny jeans into a pair of tiny pants that Diva has presented him with. Man, how the world can take the heart right out of you. So let's end it here, just like a real, uncut Billy Bob Thornton movie, no happy ending, no comforting resolve, no real hope for a better future. Let's end it honest. What would be the point in hope? He knows too much—he knows all the disappointments, all the petty horseshit. Soon the tour will be over, and he'll have to return to a world that doesn't make sense. He'll have to steel himself for the stupid comments and aggressive questions that will accompany his next tour, which is when he does press for Bad Santa 2, which is a movie that seems like it's about a crazy, mean drunk but is actually about a guy who can't catch a fucking break.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a GQ correspondent.
This story appeared in the November 2016 issue with the title "All the Petty Horseshit
