At the Hands of a Stranger (20 page)

Bridges: And what did you do at that point?

Hilton: We broke up, and by then I was destroyed. Totally destroyed. I mean, here I am now. I'm deep into downs now. Barbiturates are physiologically addicting. Well, so are quaaludes for that matter. But quaaludes are psychologically addicting. The hypnotic class of drugs. And now I've been taking those for years, heavily, through her. A lot of them and I had lost my job. My good job. Got fired from that. My hair had grown long. I was homeless.

Bridges: So what did you do?

Hilton: Started working in what would now be called telemarketing, but it was no such thing back then. Back then, there was no telemarketing. Telephone sales really consisted of people in phone rooms—boiler rooms they were known as—impersonating police officers, labor union officials, civic leaders, and firefighters is what it was. You would be working in a FOP (Fraternal Order of Police) phone room and there would be detectives in there with their guns and the phone gang would be sitting around going, “Hey, Joe McGuire, National Police Officers' Association. I think you know an officer can't give you a license to go ninety miles an hour down the expressway or beat your wife, but I think you understand we'd appreciate donation.”
You'd never directly tell them you were a police officer. You just imply that you were. Same with a firefighter. Same with labor union officials. You know, you'd say, “Hey, I'm Phil, CIO, we're putting together a book for our convention. Supporting the kids at the same time. Going to have the governor in. Going to have a nice event. I think you understand that any support you give to organized labor will never hurt you.”

Hilton: Yeah. I moved to Atlanta.

Bridges: About what time frame are we talking about you moved to Atlanta? Seventy-three?

Hilton: Yeah, it was several months after we had broken up and I was just homeless. I was working phone deals down in Miami-Dade, and getting my teeth cut. You know Dade County was really a hotbed of this type of phone fraud. So was Atlanta. A lot was going on in Atlanta, but the reason I came up to Atlanta was I'd been born here, but yet it was the only place I hadn't been to, 'cause I grew up on racetracks all around the country. I left Atlanta when I was six years old. My mother moved us to Tampa, and then a year later she married my stepfather.

Howard: How old were you when she got remarried?

Hilton: Seven. And so Atlanta … hadn't been … There was a lot of phone jobs here then of that type. Junior Chamber of Commerce, police, all kinds of police organizations.

Bridges: You said phone fraud? Did you actually—

Hilton: Here's the difference between phone fraud and legal phone work. In legal phone work, they took your money from you and passed it around and split it. I'm not going to lie, guys, okay? The phone fraud, I'd take the money and keep it all myself. That's the difference. Can you dig it? Two for ten would go to the cause, and then it would be split among the telemarketers, the laborers, and sponsors. So they'd take that basket of money and pass it around. Everybody would take some. That made it legal. If you took the basket of money and just kept it all yourself, that was fraud. That's the difference. I know very few charities these days that are truly what people think they are.

Howard: What attracted you to getting involved in that?

Hilton: Oh, because you could work fucked up, with long hair. It wasn't a job.

Howard: Appearance wasn't a big deal and all that.

Hilton: No. If you sat there with a glass of beer or a bottle of whiskey in your coat jacket, or a wine cooler in a glass, yeah, you could be fucked up on that stuff. I mean, the promoter would often advertise the job and say, “Habits are okay, if you can afford them.” If he was real strict, he would say “no habits,” and these jobs would be advertised in a billboard publication known as the
Amusement Bulletin.
That was a newspaper for outdoor expositions, state fairs, arenas, that kind of thing. Quite often the calls that you were pitching was going to be a benefit show or a state fair or something like that. So you would be calling a million of them, and you would be bringing in a country-and-western show. We want to bring in a bunch of under-privileged kids to it, just a dollar a kid, and all the proceeds are going to the boys' farm. You know, the boys' ranch.

Bridges: Did you ever get back on your feet in Atlanta or just continue to do that?

Hilton: I never did, because I'd been deep into downs, and now reality is setting in. I can't get any more downs and for a person that has an addictive personality toward downs, what the problem is … What makes a lot of alcoholics alcoholic and so forth is that they have a high level of anxiety within them.

Bridges: Uh-huh.

Hilton: You see this in heroin addicts, too. Same thing. I mean, white, intellectual heroin addicts that manage their habit or the habit manages them. You have a high anxiety level. They can't turn the motor off. They can't relax and the thing about what makes alcohol and all these central nervous system depressants so addictive is that here you have a person that has a hard time relaxing, who has a hard time partying, you might say, has a hard time being loose, is always anxious and worried. In my case it was just a high level of what they call existential anxiety, which is the awareness of your future. You know you're going to die and there's a psychiatric school of thought that says existential anxiety is responsible for most of human neurosis.

Bridges: Did that bother you back then?

Hilton: Since I was four years old, my earliest thoughts were of death and that I was going to die.

Bridges: Really?

Hilton: At four years old I could place it because of a situation I was in when I thought of it, and when I was four years old, I was pondering the fact that this hand one day will be a skeleton. Yeah, when I was four years old.

Howard: What was the situation, if you don't mind me asking?

Hilton: It was an intellectual thought. It was the awareness that my future …

Howard: Oh, okay.

Hilton: The humans are the only animal that I know of that really has to cope with it, although it's really hard to tell. Hard to tell. It's a tremendous psychic load and the knowledge of our future nonbeing, or of the inevitability of our death, is the thing that shapes our entire life. Your life, my life, and everybody else. It's the thing that is responsible for the activities you do which came from the thought.

Howard: Or don't do.

Hilton: Okay, you're so busy. You have your family. You have your activities. You have your work. You have your church. What you're doing is running from existential anxiety. If you stop for one second and there's nothing to distract you, like your kids and everything else, or that are “the most important thing in the world to you,” and if that was just emptied out of your mind, the existential anxiety will catch up to you and it's just hell without the comfort of believing in an afterlife.
Believing in supernatural ghost stories, you see. I mean, we have the president of the United States, the most sophisticated and powerful country in the world, standing up there telling the world that he believes in a ghost story, which is what Jesus Christ is, and that kind of thing. Talking about Jesus and that—that's a ghost story. That is one of the supernatural, you know, and—and here we are, the most advanced people ever, and we're talking about ghost stories. They all do it.
You see how stupid they are? They're total fucking idiots, but they're just being human beings, you see. They're just being human beings. They're running from their existential anxiety. That's what's responsible for being so busy. Why are you wearing that tie? Why are you devoting yourself to work for the betterment of society? Hey, son, forget it. Any good anthropologist can tell you. Hey, don't you know that there [is a] supervolcano under Yellowstone? There's over seventy supervolcanoes. The supervolcano that is the Yellowstone Plateau. These things are so big that they're hundreds of square miles in size. They may have magma chambers that can take a million years to fill. The supervolcano under Yellowstone has erupted three times in the last two million years. It has an average cycle of six hundred thousand years. When it erupts, it basically wipes out, downwind, the eastern part of the U.S. If you're looking at a map of the U.S., Yellowstone is here and projects to come like that, and it basically, you know, it will cover the whole eastern seaboard in several feet of ash and just destroy any civilization in that area. Well, it's erupted three times in the last almost two million years, and guess what? It's got a cycle of six hundred thousand years, and guess what? It's been 630,000 years since it last erupted. That thing could pop off any minute, pal.

Okay. They know the power of that.

Howard: Meteor—I'm always talking about.

Bridges: Matt's always talking about that.

Hilton: Well, that's another thing. That is more unpredictable. It's going to happen, but when? We don't know. We know this is going to happen. We know the time scale. Hey, checking out the Olympic plate up there in the northwest, okay? In 1967, they had a mega, and a super … a superearthquake in Alaska, over nine points on the Richter scale. It's only the third one ever known to human beings, and in this case, they were able to observe the effects. Relatively few people were killed because at that time Alaska was sparsely populated. But geologists had an idea of what a mega over-point-nine earthquake would do, geologically speaking.
But they were only theories, and they were able to study the effects of this to confirm it, and they had found that the Olympic plate has, in the last twenty thousand years, shook itself out with a plus-point-nine earthquake eighteen times. Okay? And not only have they confirmed it, they have geological evidence by studying the continental shelf under the ocean and then it goes down to the depths of the ocean, and in that were kind of like ravines, sort of, or canyons.

Hilton: Geologists had a theory that a mega-quake was made under the sea and it would leave a record. They were able to study the effects of the Alaska earthquake and see that that was so. So they drilled off, like, Washington State, okay, into these ravines right at the edge of the continental shelf. That's how they found it had shook itself out, plus nine earthquakes eighteen times. It was right there in the layers, pal. Okay? Now, at an average of about five hundred and something years between shakeouts …

Bridges: Uh-huh.

Hilton: Guess. You know when the last one was?

Howard: About seven hundred years ago?

Hilton: Well, we got a little ways to go. We're in the zone, though. It was Christmas Day, 1700 or 1699. We can dig up the redwoods that were buried in the tsunami tidal wave now. And, of course, they're dated, and now that we know what we're looking for, that, in fact, is what happened. Okay? Hey, I'll tell you about Rainier. You've got to see Mount St. Helens. That's the most awesome sight you have seen. Okay? They say it erupted with the power equivalent of four hundred atom bombs. You'll believe it when you see that. Oh, I hiked up into the blast zone, where the road ends, and right up there, where the blast came right out, where you see—

Howard: How close to the earthquake was it?

Hilton: Oh, that was in '95.

Howard: Grown back by then?

Hilton: No.

Howard: In '95?

Hilton: Fifteen years after it. No, it still looked like the moon. You would still see a few sprigs. All on west, unless you were on the east side of the Olympic Mountains, which is only a coastal strip about a hundred miles. The rest of Washington and Oregon are deserts. They grow a lot of stuff because they're just irrigated heavily, and all those states are just basically volcano deserts. If you drive through western Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington State, except for that coastal strip, you'll come to realize that this place is all volcanic. Everything there is volcanic. All the rocks are volcanic. There's no dirt out there, so it's kind of volcanic.
You carry a duffel bag down there and you realize this place is going to blow the fuck up one of these days. What about Mount Rainier, man? I mean, Mount Rainier just looms over Seattle, okay? The western face of Mount Rainier is just rock. It's just really mud and rocks glued together with ice. All that has to do is be heated and you'll have these huge mud flows. That mud flow that killed forty or fifty thousand people down in South America, about fifteen years ago, you remember that little girl was trapped in it and they tried to get her out?

Howard: Guatemala or Venezuela.

Bridges: You're obviously well-traveled. You've been … you've been to several places.

Hilton: Anyway, the point is
listen.
Again, I'm not judging you because I understand. You're doing the best you can to handle your psychic load. You're doing …

Howard: I know you had a Camaro for a little bit. Was that in the '70s?

Hilton: It was 1980. Brand-new Camaro.

Howard: Was it a
Smokey and the Bandit
type or …?

Hilton: It looked like it, although it was just a six-cylinder. But it was a California Camaro in the Van Nuys, California, Assembly types. Light, clean, black, no—

Howard: What made you get that? Just out of curiosity? Marketing or …?

Hilton: Well, no. I started fraudulent telephone solicitation after I got up here. Within about a—

Howard: On your own?

Hilton: No, just printing invoices and selling them.

Howard: Oh, okay.

Hilton: Making up Southeast Regional Council of Georgia.

Bridges: During that time, did you make good money doing that?

Hilton: Well, yeah, but I was so drunk … sick drunk. I stayed sick drunk until September of '77.

Howard: September?

Hilton: And then I quit.

Howard: Cold turkey, or did you go to rehab or anything?

Hilton: No, I did. I got medical help on that.

Bridges: Where did you get that at?

Hilton: A private doctor in downtown Decatur, and what I had been doing was going to Grady because my blood pressure had gotten so sky-high, just tremendously high. Like 145/115. Just tremendously high. They were giving me experimental drugs, so I had a couple of convulsions and the handwriting was on the wall. I got married to a prostitute, and on the day I married her—you know, I had courted her and married her drunk—and … and the day we got married, I quit. Bad mistake, really.

Howard: Do you remember her name?

Hilton: Yeah. Yvonne. Yvonne Ball was her name. Her real name was Dina Yvonne Call, but she went by—

Bridges: Diana?

Hilton: Dina.

Bridges: Okay. Is she still around or is she—

Hilton: I haven't seen her for decades. Over twenty years. I run into her on Highland, twenty years ago. I was running, you know, down the street and I ran into her, and we … I just said a few words. “Hi, how are you doing?” I said. “Are you working?” and what I meant is, did she have a job? In retrospect … in retrospect I realized what she took that—that question to mean. She said yes.

Bridges: She was still a prostitute?

Hilton: Yeah, and then, “See you.” I didn't know what else to say to her. The poor thing. I just felt sorry. She didn't have a chance in the world. That poor girl. She was dumb, man. She tried to enlist in the marines and she was too dumb to get in. Literally.

Bridges: How old was she when you guys got married?

Hilton: She was about my age, and we got married in '77. So that would have put her at around thirty-one. But I quit drinking. The problem is, I stayed sober …. I fell off the wagon for six months in '82, quit again, and stayed sober until 1985. Then I stayed drunk for four years, until '89, and I haven't had a single drink since '89. But the first time I quit, yes, I went to a private doctor. He put me on Mellaril. It's called an antidepressant.
(Editor's note: Mellaril is a powerful medication in the thioridazine class.)