Chapter 1Yakima

Foreword

He was sober for about two months, and six days married when he died.

The wedding was in Las Vegas on the fourth of April, 1992. On the tenth he was driving to a sold-out show on the Laughlin riverfront, on a stretch of U.S. 95 north of Needles, when a pickup came across the center line. He was thirty-eight. The driver of the pickup was seventeen.

Almost every account of Sam Kinison stops on that highway, and I understand why. It is a clean ending and it has the shape of a moral, which is a dangerous thing for a life to have. What the highway conceals is the short stretch in front of it. He got sober in the early weeks of 1992 — six to eight weeks before the crash, after years of attempts that did not hold, which Chapter 14 sets out without softening — and in that time the body was recovering and the work was coming back. The story does not end on a decline. It ends a few weeks into the best stretch he had had in years, cut off by a stranger's steering, which is a worse ending than a moral and a truer one.

I came to this book from a different direction than most people who write about comedians. My subject has usually been performers whose technique arrived from somewhere else: actors who learned timing in repertory and spent careers spending it, screen people who were formed by a stage discipline they had abandoned. What interests me is the transposition, the moment when a form built for one purpose is carried across into another and turns out to work better there.

Sam Kinison is the purest instance of that I have ever found, and almost nobody describes him that way.

The scream is not an invention. It is a liturgical object. He was born in Yakima, Washington, in 1953, the son of a Pentecostal evangelist, and he was preaching the revival circuit before he was old enough to have chosen any of it. Pentecostalism is America's most native religious form, bypassing Europe entirely and coming up instead out of the camp meeting and the tent revival, out of congregations too poor and too hungry for the direct experience of God to be satisfied by the measured rituals of mainline Protestantism. It is loud because it must be loud. It is physical because it holds that the Spirit inhabits the body. The cry that signals the Spirit's arrival is a trained sound produced by a trained instrument, and Sam had the instrument and the training before he had anything else.

What he did, when he walked onto a stage at the Houston Comedy Workshop and later at the Comedy Store, was not to invent a persona. It was to carry the sound across. The architecture is identical in both rooms: the quiet observation that darkens, the voice climbing, the release that arrives as physical relief. A preacher wants transformation and will raise his voice until he gets it. So did he. The audiences that came out of his shows describing something closer to catharsis than to entertainment were not being fanciful. They were describing the effect the technique was designed to produce, applied to different content.

He did not theorize this. I have found no evidence that he ever thought about it in these terms, and I do not think he had to. The two traditions were, for him, one tradition. He simply took the only instrument he had been given and used it on the material he had, which was his own life.

Now the harder part, which I would rather set out at the front than have a reader wait for.

A great deal of his material was cruel. The misogyny is not a matter of interpretation, and neither is the homophobia, and the AIDS routines, performed while the epidemic was killing people in the cities he was playing, were genuinely harmful and were understood as harmful by people at the time. This book names all of it. It does not name it in order to get it out of the way, and it does not treat it as a stain that can be cleaned off the achievement, because it will not come off. The refusal to moderate is what produced the power and it is what produced the damage, and they came out of the same place at the same moment. Any account that separates them is describing a comedian who did not exist.

The reassessment that followed his death, in which the faults were named at last, was necessary and overdue. It also carries its own risk, which is the mirror image of the eulogy: the reduction of a significant performer to his worst five minutes. The eulogy was false. The reduction would be false too. What I have tried to do is hold both, and to let the discomfort of holding both stay on the page rather than resolving it for the reader's convenience.

A word about sources, and one caution that matters more here than in most biographies.

This is written from the public record: his brother Bill Kinison's memoir, Carl LaBove's interviews given consistently across two decades, the Howard Stern archive that documents his voice across the last six years of his life, the HBO specials, the contemporaneous press, and the published interviews and oral histories left by the comedians, club owners and promoters who worked alongside him. I conducted no interviews for it.

The caution is about the routines. Where a bit is set out in these pages as dialogue, it is a reconstruction and not a transcript. His act changed nightly, much of it was never recorded, and a great deal of what survives lives only in the memory of people who were in the room and who are, like all such witnesses, improving it slightly every time they tell it. Read those passages as the shape of a bit rather than the wording of a particular night. I would rather give you an honest reconstruction and label it than a false transcript and let you trust it.

The thing itself is not recoverable, and I should say so plainly. The specials capture the material. They do not capture the room. Everyone who was actually present describes the same physical sensation, of a sound that seemed to originate below the throat, and no recording I have listened to reproduces it. This book can tell you where the sound came from, what it was for, what it cost him and what it cost other people. It cannot put you in the room. Nothing can. That room closed on the tenth of April, 1992, on a two-lane highway in the desert, and the man in it was six days married and a couple of months sober and about to be very good again.

Chapter 1 · Yakima

Samuel Burl Kinison was born on December 8, 1953, in Yakima, Washington, a city of forty thousand people in a river valley surrounded by orchards and volcanic dust, where the air smelled of apples in autumn and wood smoke in winter, and where the Pentecostal churches outnumbered the bars by a ratio that pleased the faithful and bored the young. He was the third of four sons born to Samuel Earl Kinison and Marie Florence Kinison, and from the first hour of his life he was loud.

His father was a Pentecostal preacher. An evangelist of the old school, a man who believed that the Holy Spirit moved through the human voice, that the purpose of a sermon was to transform, that the congregation should leave the church changed in their bodies as well as their opinions. Samuel Earl Kinison preached the way his tradition demanded: with volume, with physical intensity, with the unshakable conviction that the eternal fate of every soul in the room depended on what he said and how he said it. He sweated through his shirt. He wept. He shouted. He walked the aisles and placed his hands on people's heads and prayed in a voice that rattled the windows of whatever storefront or tent or cinder-block church he happened to be filling that week.

The Kinison household was organized around this fact. Everything in the family flowed from the ministry and returned to the ministry. The boys were expected to be present at every service, to behave with the seriousness that the work demanded, to understand that their father's calling was not a job but a covenant. The domestic and the sacred merged completely. The dinner table was an extension of the pulpit. Conversations about school, about chores, about the ordinary business of childhood, were conducted within a framework of faith that treated every human action as either obedience or sin, with very little space in between.

Yakima was a birthplace, not a hometown. The family barely paused there: when Sam was three months old, the Kinisons left the valley and drove east, to East Peoria, Illinois, a working town on the far bank of the Illinois River from Peoria proper, and East Peoria was where the family put down what roots the ministry allowed.

From that base, Samuel Earl remained what he had always been: a preacher of modest congregations, not permanently settled in one pulpit but moving among churches, filling in, reviving, evangelizing, never earning much along the way. The itinerancy was not unusual for families in that tradition. The ministry was understood as a calling that overrode the ordinary comforts of settled life, and the wives and children of traveling preachers were expected to adapt without complaint.

Marie Kinison adapted. She was a preacher's wife in the fullest sense of the term: managing the household, managing the children, managing the logistics of frequent moves, and doing it all within a theological framework that defined her role as supportive, secondary, and sacrificial. She never preached, never led. She organized, she cooked, she cleaned, she made sure the boys were dressed and presentable and in their seats when their father took the pulpit. Her thoughts about the constant relocations, her feelings about the demands the ministry placed on her family, she kept to herself or expressed in the private language of prayers that no one else recorded.

Sam was the difficult one. His brothers occupied their assigned roles with varying degrees of comfort: Richard and Bill, the two older boys — Richard steady, Bill reliable and responsible; Kevin, the youngest, trailing behind them all. Sam resisted from the beginning. His rebellion took a different form than the usual childhood defiance. He never refused outright, never ran away, never articulated a philosophical objection to the life he had been given. He was simply too much. Too loud, too physical, too hungry for attention, too unable to sit still. He had the energy of a child who needed to be the center of every room he entered, and in a household where the center of every room was occupied by God and God's representative on earth, his father, that energy had nowhere to go except into trouble.

The trouble was ordinary. Hyperactive before anyone thought to medicalize the word. He talked too much, moved too much, laughed too much, cried too much. In church, he fidgeted, whispered, and drew the disapproving attention of the congregation, unable to sit through a two-hour revival service without squirming visibly. For his father, whose entire public identity depended on the appearance of a well-ordered family, Sam's inability to perform the role of the preacher's obedient son was a source of genuine frustration. For Sam, his father's frustration was the first audience response he ever received. The pattern it established, do something excessive, receive an intense reaction, would define the rest of his life.

East Peoria — flat, industrial, culturally conservative, in the orbit of a city whose name had become a national punchline for American averageness — placed the family in the center of the country in more ways than one. Greater Peoria was where Sam would spend the formative years of his childhood and adolescence, where he would attend school, discover comedy, experience the ordinary cruelties of American boyhood, and begin to develop the voice that would eventually change the shape of stand-up comedy in America.

Early in the East Peoria years there was an event that his brother Bill would place near the center of the family's understanding of Sam, and that needs to be addressed directly because it is the kind of biographical fact that shapes everything that follows. When Sam was three years old, he was hit by a truck. The injury was to his head, and it was serious: the record speaks of brain damage and of epilepsy in its aftermath. By his family's account, the boy who recovered was not quite the boy who had been struck. He looked like Sam, but he did not act like him. The easygoing, even reticent child receded, and in his place emerged a rambunctious, aggressive one — a boy who could not sit still, could not stop pushing, could not modulate. The family's response was shaped by the theological and cultural framework within which they operated: the recovery was received as a mercy and processed through prayer, and the change in the boy was something to be disciplined rather than diagnosed.

The biographical temptation is to draw a straight line from the accident to everything that followed: the rage, the excess, the self-destruction, the screaming. That temptation should be resisted, not because the injury was insignificant, but because straight lines are the enemy of biographical truth. What can be said is that Sam Kinison's temperament was altered by a catastrophic, random event at an age when he had no capacity to understand it, within a family and community whose framework for adversity was prayer rather than neurology, and that he carried the consequences of that collision into everything he subsequently became. Whether the injury caused his rage or simply intensified a rage that was already latent in his temperament is a question that no biography can definitively answer. What is clear is that the screaming, the famous, career-defining screaming, came from somewhere deeper than a comic's desire to get a laugh, and that the somewhere was established very early.

The Pentecostal world in which Sam grew up was, for all its strictures, a world that valued emotional intensity. This is the crucial point. Mainline Protestantism in mid-century America was a religion of restraint, of quiet hymns, measured sermons, and emotional control. The tradition Sam's family belonged to was its opposite. Tracing its modern origins to the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles in 1906, it was built on the belief that the Holy Spirit manifests itself through the human body, through speaking in tongues, through physical ecstasy, through weeping, through shouting, through the full and unrestrained expression of spiritual experience. A service in this tradition is not a performance, but it is performative. The preacher's job is not to explain the scripture but to channel the Spirit, and the congregation's job is not to listen politely but to respond: to shout, to weep, to fall, to be moved.

Sam grew up watching his father do this every week. He grew up in a world where the most powerful person in the room was the one who could produce the most intense emotional response in his audience. He grew up understanding, at a level deeper than conscious thought, that the human voice raised to its maximum intensity was the most powerful instrument in the world. The knowledge that this understanding would make him a comedian, would make him anything at all, lay years ahead. He was a child in East Peoria, sometimes on the road with his father's ministry, absorbing the rhythms and intensities of a tradition that would shape everything he ever did on a stage.

The other thing he absorbed was the content. The theology is not subtle. It deals in absolutes: salvation and damnation, obedience and sin, heaven and hell. The sermons Sam heard as a child bypassed moral complexity entirely, delivering instead urgent, terrified warnings about the consequences of wrong living, delivered with the conviction that the people in the room were in immediate danger of eternal suffering. The emotional register was desperate. The preacher offered something far more urgent than opinions. He tried to save lives. He screamed because the building was on fire and no one else seemed to notice.

Sam would later transfer this exact emotional structure to his comedy. He did not know that yet. No one knew it yet. But the blueprint was there already, the gradual escalation, the building pressure, the climactic release through the voice. The blueprint was being drawn in cinder-block churches and canvas tents while Sam sat in the pew, too young to understand what he was absorbing, old enough to absorb it completely.

But all of that was in the future. In the early East Peoria years, Sam was just a preacher's kid who couldn't sit still, in a family whose father was too often on the road, in a tradition that valued the voice above all other instruments. He was learning things he didn't know he was learning. He was being shaped by forces he wouldn't understand for decades. He was loud, and in the one American religious tradition where being loud was considered a sign of the divine, his loudness was at once a problem and a prophecy.

The ministry kept moving even when the family's address did not. Samuel Earl followed the congregations that needed a preacher who could fill a room with the Holy Spirit and the sound of his own conviction, and at times the boys went with him: Sam packed into the car with his brothers, his mother managing the logistics, his father driving toward the next church, the next revival, the next town that needed saving.

He was still a small boy. He had already been hurt in a way that would never fully heal. He had already learned that the human voice at full volume could make a room full of people do whatever you wanted. He had already begun to understand, in the wordless way that children understand, that the world was divided into the people on stage and the people in the seats, and that the people on stage had all the power.

The choice of stage lay far ahead. So did the knowledge that a choice existed. He knew only what every preacher's kid knows—that his father's voice was the most important sound in the world, and that someday, somehow, he would need a voice of his own.

Sam carried no memories of Yakima at all; he was an infant when the family left, and whatever he later said about his birthplace was reconstruction, not recollection. His earliest sensory impressions belonged to Illinois. The smell of the church. The sound of his father's voice echoing in rooms too small for the volume he produced. The feel of a hard pew under him during services that seemed to last forever. East Peoria, and the larger city across the river, would be where the story actually began.

Peoria, Illinois, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was a city of approximately 100,000 people, situated on the Illinois River in the center of the state. Its economy was anchored by Caterpillar Tractor Company and by Hiram Walker's whiskey distillery, a pairing that said everything about the city's character. Peoria built heavy machinery and made hard liquor and apologized for neither. The phrase "Will it play in Peoria?", meaning, will it succeed with ordinary Americans, dated back to vaudeville, and by mid-century it had become a national shorthand for the tastes and tolerances of the American mainstream. To say that something would play in Peoria was to say that it was acceptable, conventional, safe. Sam Kinison would spend his childhood just across the river from it and then spend his career doing comedy that would absolutely not play in Peoria.

The family settled into a house in East Peoria that was modest by the standards of the neighborhood and luxurious by the standards of itinerant ministry. Samuel Earl found a pastoral position that offered more stability than the road had provided, and the boys enrolled in local schools, and for a period the Kinison family approximated something like a normal American household. The approximation was imperfect. The ministry still dominated. The rules were still strict. The expectations were still framed in the language of sin and salvation. But there was a house, and a school, and a neighborhood, and the ordinary social world of American childhood that Sam had previously experienced only in fragments.

He struggled in school, though intelligence had nothing to do with it. Everyone who knew him, from childhood through his death, described him as exceptionally smart, with a verbal facility obvious from an early age. School required the one thing beyond his capacity: sitting quietly and following instructions. He disrupted every classroom he entered, became the class clown. He discovered, in the classroom, the same thing he had discovered in church: that being loud and being funny and being the center of attention were all, in some fundamental way, the same thing, and that he was better at all of them than anyone else in the room.

The class clown is a recognized American archetype, and the temptation is to treat Sam's classroom behavior as the first chapter of a conventional comic biography, the funny kid who disrupted class and made everyone laugh and eventually turned professional. But Sam's version of the archetype was different, and the difference matters. Most class clowns are seeking approval. They want the other kids to like them. They want to be popular. Sam was seeking something else, something closer to the experience his father had on the pulpit. He wanted more than laughter. He wanted to change the temperature of the room. He wanted to make something happen that wouldn't have happened without him. He wanted the power that comes from being the person who controls the emotional state of everyone around you. That desire belongs to a preacher, not a class clown. Or a comedian. Or both.

His brothers were following the expected path. Bill, one of the two older brothers, was the most conventional: reliable, responsible, the kind of son a preacher could present to his congregation without embarrassment. Kevin, the youngest, grew into the handsome one, and as an adult would set his hopes on modeling. The family system was functioning as family systems do, with each child occupying an assigned role. Sam's role, the difficult one, the wild one, the one who couldn't be controlled, was as fixed as any of the others. Family systems need their outliers. They serve a function. The difficult child carries the family's unacknowledged chaos, expresses the emotions that the family's public identity cannot contain. In a family organized around religious certainty and moral order, Sam was the repository of everything that certainty and order could not accommodate. He was the doubt. He was the desire. He was the anger that had no legitimate outlet in a household where anger was a sin.

He was also, from an early age, funny. Not funny the way children are funny, accidentally, by being naive or confused. Funny the way people with genuine comic talent are funny: intentionally, precisely, with an instinct for timing and audience and the manipulation of expectation that cannot be taught. He could make his brothers laugh. He could make his classmates laugh. He could, when he chose to, make his mother laugh, which was a minor miracle in a household where laughter was not a priority. His father was harder. Samuel Earl Kinison did not find disruption amusing, and Sam's humor was, from the beginning, fundamentally disruptive. His humor bypassed the cute observations of the well-behaved child. Instead, he saw the absurdity in the system and could not resist pointing it out, even when pointing it out resulted in punishment.

The punishment was physical. Samuel Earl Kinison disciplined his sons in the manner common among conservative Protestant families of that era: with a belt, with force, with the theological justification the Book of Proverbs provided for corporal punishment. "Spare the rod, spoil the child" was not a metaphor in the Kinison household. It was policy. Sam was disciplined more than his brothers because he misbehaved more than his brothers, and the cycle was self-reinforcing: the punishment increased his anger, the anger increased his misbehavior, the misbehavior increased the punishment. There was no exit from the cycle that either father or son could find.

What Sam learned from this, and he learned it thoroughly, at the cellular level, was that intensity was the currency of his family and his world. His father's love was intense. His father's anger was intense. His father's preaching was intense. His father's discipline was intense. Everything in the Kinison household operated at maximum volume, maximum stakes, maximum emotional pressure. Moderation had no place. Saved or damned. Obedient or sinful. Loved or punished. And the distance between any two of these states could be crossed in an instant, with no warning and no appeal.

The household did not stay intact. Samuel Earl and Marie Kinison divorced when Sam was eleven, and the family split along a fault line that ran straight through his childhood. Bill went to live with their father. Sam remained with his mother and the rest of the family, over his own protests. The most powerful voice in his world, the father whose intensity had set the emotional temperature of every room, was suddenly and largely absent from the house. The belt, the fear, the sermons at the dinner table, the whole apparatus of the father's authority belonged mostly to the years before the split. The adolescence that followed was shaped as much by his father's absence as by his presence, a vacancy that Sam would spend a career trying to fill with the roar of other rooms.

This is the emotional world that produced Sam Kinison's comedy. Not just the screaming, though the screaming is the most obvious manifestation, but the entire structure of his performance. His comedy had no moderate register either. Quiet setup followed by explosive payoff. Calm observation followed by volcanic rage. It was the comedy of a man raised in a world of emotional extremes who had internalized that world so completely that he could not imagine any other way of communicating. When he took the stage, he recreated the emotional environment of his childhood, the tension, the fear, the sudden eruption, the release, and the audience experienced it the way a congregation experiences a revival: as a catharsis they hadn't known they needed until the screaming started.

But that is the analysis of the adult comedian. The child in Peoria knew none of this. He knew only that he was loud and funny and angry and punished and that the world seemed to require something from him that he could not identify and could not provide. He went to school. He disrupted class. He made people laugh. He went to church. He sat in the pew and watched his father scream the gospel at people who had come to be screamed at, and he learned, without knowing he was learning, every technique his father employed. The pause before the escalation. The quiet voice that preceded the shout. The eye contact that made every person in the room feel individually addressed. The physical movement that turned a sermon into a performance. The sweat, the tears, the raw throat, the absolute commitment to the moment that made it impossible for the audience to look away.

He was learning to be a preacher. He just didn't know yet that the church he would preach in had a two-drink minimum.

The other education Sam received in Peoria was cultural. The late 1950s and early 1960s were the last years of a particular kind of American childhood, before television had fully colonized the imagination, before the upheavals of the mid-sixties had shattered the postwar consensus, before the culture wars that would define Sam's adult life had begun in earnest. But the seeds were already present. Rock and roll had arrived. Elvis Presley had appeared on Ed Sullivan in 1956, and the community's response to rock and roll was the same as its response to everything it could not control: it was the devil's music, and exposure to it was sin.

Sam was drawn to it immediately. Rock and roll, like the worship he knew, operated on the principle of physical and emotional release. It was loud. It was transgressive. It bypassed the rational mind and spoke directly to the body. For a child raised in a tradition that valued ecstatic experience above all else, rock and roll was not a departure from his upbringing. It was a secular translation of it. The screaming at a Little Richard concert and the screaming at a tent revival were, at the neurological level, the same screaming. Sam understood this instinctively, even if he couldn't have articulated it. He was drawn to the music because it felt like church, and he was drawn to it because it wasn't church. The tension between those impulses would power his entire career.

He also discovered comedians. The pathway is not precisely documented, whether television, records, or the mimicry of older kids, but by his early adolescence Sam had begun to pay attention to stand-up comedy the way a musically talented child pays attention to music. He watched. He listened. He studied the mechanics without knowing he was studying them. The comedians available to a kid in Peoria in the early 1960s were the comedians of that era: Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Jerry Lewis on television; Lenny Bruce and Redd Foxx on records that circulated among older kids and were absolutely forbidden in the Kinison household. The gap between what was permitted and what was compelling was enormous, and Sam learned to navigate it the way preacher's kids have always navigated it: maintaining a public face of compliance while privately consuming everything he wasn't supposed to.

Jonathan Winters, whose work saturated the television comedy of those years, offers the instructive parallel, whether or not Sam ever named him as an influence. Winters was a performer of extraordinary improvisational gifts, capable of inhabiting characters spontaneously and with total commitment, who operated in the mainstream of American comedy while hiding within it an emotional intensity that had nothing to do with safety. Winters had spent time in psychiatric institutions; his comedy contained in its deepest registers the unmistakable quality of a man who understood what it was to have a mind that would not moderate itself. A kid watching television comedy in Peoria in those years could absorb from Winters the lesson Sam's whole career would later demonstrate: you could be the most intense person in the room and the funniest person in the room at the same time. The intensity and the humor were not opposed. They were the same current running through different wires. The comedy world often misread that quality as instability. It was not instability. It was intensity. The difference mattered.

Lenny Bruce mattered. Bruce was, in the early 1960s, the most dangerous comedian in America, the one being arrested for obscenity, discussed in the newspapers as a threat to public morals, the one who treated the comedy stage as a space for radical truth-telling. Bruce's comedy, like the preaching Sam knew, was built on the conviction that the truth must be spoken regardless of the consequences, that polite silence was a form of complicity, and that the audience's discomfort was evidence that the performance was working. Sam did not have access to Bruce's full body of work as a child in Peoria. But the idea of Lenny Bruce, the comedian as truth-teller, the comedian as provocateur, the comedian as figure of danger, entered his consciousness early and stayed.

Richard Pryor, who grew up in Peoria in a brothel run by his grandmother, had already left town by the time Sam was old enough to be aware of him. But Pryor's Peoria origin story, the funniest and most dangerous comedian of his generation emerging from the most unlikely and most painful circumstances in the most average city in America, would later serve as a kind of local mythology for Sam. If Pryor could get out of Peoria, anyone could. If the worst childhood could produce the greatest comedy, then pain was not an obstacle but a resource. Sam would not articulate this connection for years. But it was there, in the background, part of the cultural atmosphere of a city that had produced one genius and was quietly producing another.

The teenage years in East Peoria were difficult in the ordinary ways that teenage years are difficult, compounded by the diminished circumstances the divorce had left behind. Money was scarce in the household Sam grew up in, as it had been throughout Samuel Earl's ministry. There was food, shelter, and clothes, meeting the basic thresholds of survival. But surplus, comfort, cushion against the unexpected: these remained out of reach. The boys wore hand-me-downs. The house was adequate but not generous. The car was old. The message, implicit in every aspect of their material circumstances, was that worldly prosperity was not the point, that the ministry was its own reward, that the treasures being accumulated were heavenly rather than earthly, and that any desire for material comfort was a form of spiritual weakness.

Sam saw through it. He may have been the first member of the family to see through it explicitly, though he was certainly not the last. The gap between his father's theological certainty and his family's material reality was, for Sam, the first and most fundamental joke of his life, the first instance of the absurdity that he would spend his career identifying and screaming about. His father told people how to live while barely affording to feed his own children. His father claimed to speak for God while failing to control his own son. The contradictions were not subtle, and Sam's instinct for identifying contradictions, his almost pathological inability to let one pass without comment, the quality that made him impossible to live with as a teenager and indispensable as a comedian.

His schooling ran through East Peoria Community High School, and its end felt less like a triumph than an escape — the record preserves his attendance there rather than any diploma ceremony, and by his mid-teens the pull of the ministry had already begun unraveling the ordinary adolescent track. He had survived East Peoria, survived his father's discipline, survived the rigidity of a household that had no room for what he was. He did not yet know what he was. The screaming he had learned in church, the contradictions he had identified in his family, the rage he carried from his childhood, and the comic instinct he had discovered in school—all of these would combine into something that had never existed before in American comedy, though the combination remained invisible to him. He knew only that he needed to leave, and that whatever came next could not possibly be as confining as what he was leaving behind.

What came next was the last thing anyone, including Sam, would have predicted. He followed his father into the ministry. He became a preacher.

The reasons were complicated, and they were simple. The complicated version involves the psychology of sons and fathers, the magnetic pull of the very thing you're trying to escape, the way that rebellion and imitation can be the same gesture. But the simple version may be more accurate. Preaching was the only thing Sam had ever seen anyone in his family do, and he was good at it, and he needed something to be good at. He had spent his entire childhood watching a man command a room with nothing but his voice and his conviction, and he had absorbed every lesson. The ministry was, in a sense, the family business. And Sam, for all his rebellion, was still his father's son.

He would preach for several years. He would marry. He would believe, or try to believe, or perform belief so convincingly that the difference between belief and performance would become impossible to determine. Which is, if you think about it, the definition of faith, and also the definition of acting, and also the definition of stand-up comedy. The boundaries between these things were never clear for Sam Kinison. They were never clear because, for him, they did not exist.

He left East Peoria carrying all of this. The preacher's voice. The comic's instinct. The hurt child's rage. The teenager's hunger. The knowledge, not yet conscious, that the most powerful thing a human being can do is stand in front of a room full of people and make them feel something they were not expecting to feel. The destination remained invisible. What was visible was the next step, which was a Bible school in upstate New York and, before he was twenty, a pulpit of his own back in Peoria. He was going to become a preacher. He was going to become the thing his father was, and then he was going to become the thing his father could never have imagined, and the distance between those two things would be measured in decibels and broken marriages and cocaine and laughter and screaming and a few brief weeks of sobriety before a drunk driver ended it all on a highway in the desert.

But that was later. First, he had to preach.