the years Billy’s performing style has become refined to the point where you think he’s simply talking to you in your living room, over a cup of tea, and making you howl. It’s effortless, seamless. He paints magical mind-pictures that force every last bit of air from your lungs leaving you gasping and sore of stomach. No one else in the world can do that. I’ve been watching him for thirty-odd years and I’m still a fan.
Billy says the best thing about being nearly seventy is not thinking about it. ‘But there’s something good about it when you’re upright,’ he confessed, ‘and when you look like me rather than one of those guys who’ve gone for the saggyarsed trousers.’ An anti-beige campaigner for many years now, Billy is proud of not looking like his father’s idea of an old man. ‘It’s nice to have hair,’ he boasts. ‘I’ve been very lucky with my genetics.’ One of Billy’s life ambitions was never to act his age. ‘Acting your age is as sensible as acting your street number,’ he says. ‘Acting the goat is much better.’
‘And another thing,’ says Billy, on a roll about the ageing process, ‘I seem to have gone off Indian a bit. Curry’s still my favourite food but I can’t eat it at night after a gig now.’ But he still keeps the toilet paper in the fridge just in case. Billy is also off Liquorice Allsorts. ‘I can’t stop until I’ve eaten the whole packet, so now I don’t start.’ He’s like that with Cadbury’s Chocolate éclairs and Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers, too, while understandably, broccoli remains the bête noir of his gastronomic realities. Oh, and he has never made friends with wobbly food. ‘Anything gelatinous is not to be trusted,’ he insists, ‘like aspic in pork pies. It’s a close cousin of snot. You shouldn’t be eating things you find in the wee corners of your body.’
For Billy, the worst thing about turning seventy is its transparency. ‘People feel duty-bound to remind you about it because your birthday is in the paper,’ he complains. ‘And my eyebrows seem to have taken on a life of their own.’ It’s true. Recently, Billy told me his spectacles were out of focus and that he thought he needed a new prescription for his lenses. Being a bit of a fashion maven, he has an impressive wardrobe of eyewear and he was exasperated at the thought of having to change all those glasses. Now, I’m no optometrist, but I did have the answer for this one. ‘Trim your eyebrows,’ I said. They were so unruly they were pushing his spectacles askew, thus blurring his vision.
Billy has come to love crossword puzzles. ‘What do you get from them?’ I asked. ‘The fact that I’m not dead yet,’ he replied. ‘It’s proof that my brain’s still alive. When I get a clue I go, “Yes! I don’t have dementia!”’ Word games were not so appealing to him in his earlier years; he had more sanguine passions. ‘What was your favourite decade?’ I asked. ‘When I was a teenager they invented rock ’n’ roll, so the Fifties were very good. The music was unbelievable – Little Richard, Fats Domino, Lonnie Donegan, Jerry Lee Lewis. We knew something had happened, and it wasn’t for your parents. It was for you. So I was listening to all this brilliant stuff and fancying women – wonderful.’ ‘What was the most fun you ever had?’ I asked, in vain hoping for some warm and fuzzy anecdote about the children and I. ‘Scoring a goal for a team called St Benedict’s Boys’ Guild,’ he replied, unabashed. ‘It was the only goal I ever scored playing for a team. I was an outside right, against a team called Sacred Heart. It was a real fluke – I shot at the goal and would have missed but the ball hit one of the players, bounced off him and went into the net. But I got it; I don’t give a shit how.’
Our conversation turned to religion. In the Epilogue of this book, Billy expounds his theory of the universe, and I was wondering if he had revised it at all. ‘Does the teacup theory still hold up?’ I asked. ‘Yes, more so than ever as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘I really think I’m on to something. After I’m dead they’ll discover I was a seer. It’s perfection. See, the earth’s a virus or a disease, a wee cell in the scheme of all the greatness that surrounds it. That’s why I don’t believe any other planets are inhabited.’ The theory seemed to have become so complex, only Billy’s very special brain could comprehend it. I decided not to ask him to expand. Better just suspend disbelief and move on. ‘What do you think heaven’s like?’ I asked. Billy smiled happily. ‘In my idea of heaven there would be great music playing all the time,’ he said, ‘and Sandra Bullock would be wandering around, showing great interest in me. And that wee newsreader who used to be on breakfast TV in New York – the one whose husband died – she’ll be there.’
‘But, say you go to hell,’ I said sweetly, with only a soupçon of passive-aggression, ‘what would that be like?’ ‘Hmmm,’ he frowned. ‘A lot of my school teachers are there, and you have to do the nine times table every day.’ ‘And what would you do if you discovered the end of the world was in three days’ time?’ I asked. ‘Oh.’ Billy actually looked mildly excited about that possibility. ‘I would put on my favourite records – Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, John Prine, The Rolling Stones, and Loudon Wainwright – and have cups of tea and just … wait for the end. Now, if you were any kind of wife you’d realize that I’m horny and get your arse over here …’ Interview over.
Although Billy has long since turned his back on organized religion, he recently had the most profound spiritual experience of his life in a ‘sweat lodge’ when he was filming in northern British Columbia among the Nisga’a tribe. ‘The lodge is igloo-shaped,’ explained Billy. ‘It’s many layers of leather and canvas, and there’s a hole inside where the fire goes. The fuel for the fire is lava rock, which you have to gather yourself along with the medicine man. They make a big fire outside the hut, then carry in the rocks when they’re red-hot and place them in a pit. The medicine man sprinkles water on them to make the steam. First, you smoke a pipe of some herbs and waft sage over yourself. Then you have to crawl inside the small door to the lodge on your hands and knees. The idea of this wee door is that when you leave you’re like a baby reborn. The sweat lodge is your mother. Then we all sat in a circle around the fire pit. You can’t see a single thing. There’s a faint glow in the pit of lava, but you can’t see the others. You can only hear them, like spirits. It’s a bit like confession. The medicine man plays the drum, sings, and chants, and one at a time people unload things that are bothering them, or things they think they’d be better off without. I joined in. I was talking about being ungrateful. I felt that amazing good fortune had come my way over a period of many years, but that I took it for granted. I was not suitably grateful. The whole thing took around three hours. I didn’t think I could stand it after the first fifteen minutes, the heat was so intense, but I managed to regulate my breathing, and got to like it. It was a truly deep emotional experience. Afterwards, I found that I cried more easily than before. Tears would easily run down my face and I felt closer to myself. I recognized myself. They made me a member of the tribe. My name is something that sounds like “hissacks”, with a bit before that that sounds like alphabet soup. It means “Prince of Comedy”. And I’m a member of the killer whales. In the tribe there are wolves, salmon, killer whales, and bears. I’m a killer whale, an orca.’
For the first edition of Billy I asked my husband for his bucket list of things he wants to do before he dies. It was a terrible mistake to ask him for an update this year, because unfortunately he’s now got it into his head that he’d like to do a free-fall parachute jump out of an airplane on his seventieth birthday. But I’m afraid that would probably make his Route Sixty-Six mishap a walk in the park, so I’m hoping to dissuade him. He is also threatening to reinstall his nipple rings, which were removed for a shirtless scene during the filming of Mrs Brown and never replaced. ‘I kinda miss them,’ he says, ‘and I’m tempted to put them back in. But then I might have to wheek them out again …’
In fact, nipple rings would have been perfectly appropriate for some of Billy’s movie roles, especially the ‘hard man’ characters. He does love playing violent scoundrels, and particularly enjoyed being the gun-toting Irish crime family patriarch in The Boondock Saints and its follow-up, The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day. He gave each one of our children the T-shirt of him with his
