Listening to: “Edison Machine Rehearsal” (1914)—Harry Houdini
THANKSGIVING —IF YOU WON’T PUT YOUR DICK IN IT, I’M NOT GOING TO EAT IT
THE TITLE IS PERFECT. Why put legs on a snake and paint it? I should leave it at that, but I’ll tell the story.
I was fairly young when I bought my first house, with showbiz money. I made the money doing street performance, Renaissance festivals, and small theater. Penn & Teller were completely unknown, but we were able to make good solid livings doing shows in the mid-seventies. We never planned on being famous, so as far as we were concerned, this was going to be it. Teller lived in Hollywood and I lived with my girlfriend in Orange County. My girlfriend worked in a topless bar, and we had enough money to buy her parents’ house when they retired. We took over the house she had spent some of her childhood in. I had a nice suburban, cul-de-sac house in Cali that I owned with the woman who inspired me to drop my cock in a blow-dryer.
Teller and I had just done a production of a show that we wrote together called Mrs. Lonsberry’s Séance of Horror. Teller starred and I directed. It wasn’t good. We were two young men who hadn’t experienced the death of a loved one, writing about the death of loved ones as an excuse to do magic tricks. We should have written a play about driving around the country eating doughnuts—that was something we had experienced. I’m such a bad director. I hate telling people what to do and I don’t have any vision. I haven’t directed anything since.
Because of producing and financing that play, we’d lost all our money and didn’t have any work, though we still had places to live. There was a few months’ lag between booking the gigs and doing them. I went crazy. I wasn’t mentally ill. I wasn’t a danger to others or myself. Maybe you could say I went eccentric. I stopped wearing clothes. I played croquet by myself in the backyard for hours, naked, with my stereo speakers in the window playing Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music over and over. That record is just feedback, and one track is a closed loop so the same few seconds repeat over and over until the power goes out. Andy Warhol wrote the liner notes to Metal Machine Music, but he never listened to it. It’s difficult listening. It can make a crazy fellow crazier. I was obsessed with topiary, and we had a big hedge. I let it grow and tried to use a mirror and hedge clippers to do a self-portrait of myself naked, in bush, in the backyard with loud feedback playing and croquet set up for one. I have since found out that many of the “topiaries,” especially the ones at Disney, have wire frames underneath and aren’t bush all the way down. It bothers me even more than the Legoland Lego structures having frames underneath them. If you’re creating something of bush or Legos, use bush or Legos. (I also don’t like the Lego sets that tell my children what the set is supposed to build. That’s not creating, that’s following directions, and they ask me to help and I fuck it up.) Finding out that there were wire frames under the topiary was harder on me than finding out there was no god. Fuck those wire topiaries. My naked backyard topiary was a failure, but it was bush all the way down.
Penn & Teller were just a pop-and-pop shop at this point. We called ourselves Buggs & Rudy Discount Corporation. Our operation is still called that. Buggs and Rudy were the imaginary business guys who handled Penn & Teller. I answered the phone as “Buggs,” and silent Rudy did all the contracts and the graphics. I read one cheesy business book that suggested that while negotiating it was helpful to know something the other party didn’t know. I took that to heart on a drive to Tijuana, where I bought a donkey hat. It was a straw cowboy hat with straw donkey ears sticking out, and a straw donkey tail down the back. I had painted my office fluorescent orange and green. I figured no one I was negotiating with by phone would know I was naked, save for a donkey hat, in a fluorescent orange and green room. I could drive a hard bargain.
Yup, I went a little bugnutty. I was naked in that hat all the time, playing crazy music, and thinking. I would just sit and think. I didn’t really talk to anyone. I had a really nice stereo and I played it loud all the time, not just Metal Machine Music, but Sun Ra and Tiny Tim. I was afraid the neighborhood suburban teenagers in our cul-de-sac would steal my stereo (but not my music), so one of the few times I put clothes on, I put on a pair of gym shorts, my donkey hat and flip-flops and told the local teenagers stories about “Nam.” It worked. They stayed away from the house. I don’t know if it was the lies about combat, the donkey hat or the gym shorts, but my stereo was safe.
The silent, loud, naked, brooding phase was coming to an end. Teller and I had to get back on the road and do shows. I can pull it together to be normal enough to do a Penn & Teller show, but that’s as far as I go. My girlfriend could now convince me to put on jeans and a shirt, so we decided to have a Thanksgiving celebration at our house.
We invited a creepy elderly sideshow sword swallower, a lighting designer, Teller, a guy who had just quit dealing angel dust in Fresno and was hanging out with us to help him stay clean, and a geologist. It’s always important to have a geologist around so that if you end up in space, there’s someone to die first. At least that’s what happens on Star Trek.
I love Thanksgiving. I just love it. My mom would make this great tuna dip and we’d eat it with Bugles. We had cranberry sauce from the can that I could squeeze through my teeth, celery with cream cheese spread on it, turkey, gravy, stuffing that was really just wet bread and goodness and none of that raisin, mushroom, or chestnut hippie shit, and lots of pie. It had no religious overtones for us; we didn’t say grace. And no one in our family watched football, so after the Macy’s parade, the TV was turned off. It was a pretty great day. We had little pilgrim name tags that I’d made as a young child and my mom still used them to show where we’d sit, even though we’d been sitting in the same places my whole life. My childhood Thanksgivings were Norman Rockwell. Norman Rockwell’s stuffing didn’t have fucking cornbread and chestnuts in it.
We didn’t really have to invite the former angel dust dealer from Fresno to Thanksgiving because he was living with us. We took a liking to him, and he was living with us, until he went to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, my own alma mater. My girlfriend was the only one in the household who worked, and she was going to do the cooking for our Thanksgiving. Right before I went into my naked donkey-hat phase, I had told her that since she was working and I wasn’t, she could just name a kind of food that she liked and I would take a continuing education course in cooking at the community college, and cook her supper every night at two a.m. when she got off work. She suggested Chinese food. Others in the cooking class seemed to be there to meet people and get laid, but I was there to learn. I took a lot of notes, paid attention, bought a wok and every night after work, we had a home-cooked Chinese meal for two. I made my own fucking dumplings from scratch. The teacher said I was the best student she’d ever had. After three weeks, my girlfriend said, very politely, “I love all your Chinese cooking, but some night could we have something else?” I never cooked again. She was cooking the Thanksgiving turkey. If she needed me, I’d be working on my topiary.
As part of his transition from drug dealer to clown, our friend decided to get a big laugh on Thanksgiving morning. I don’t know what got into his head, but he listened to my girlfriend complain about what time she had to get up to start the turkey and then set his alarm for ten minutes earlier. As she groggily walked to the kitchen, she heard a slapping sound and his voice saying in a Spanish accent, “C’mon, baby, you can take all of me.” She tentatively walked into the kitchen to see our housemate, with his boxers around his ankles, slapping the turkey and fucking it. I didn’t see the event, and it wasn’t clear from the story how simulated the sex with the turkey was. At Clown College they teach us to commit completely, but he hadn’t been to Clown College yet, so I don’t know whether there was an actual erect penis in our turkey, or just a limp one bouncing against it, but it was enough to make her scream. She thought it was real, then thought it was a joke, and then settled on it was real and now being passed off as
a joke. He had to wait for me to wake up before he got his full laugh. I couldn’t stop laughing, and I still can’t see a turkey without hearing “C’mon, baby, you can take all of me” in a Spanish accent.
As we sat around our beautiful Thanksgiving dinner table in Orange County, I told the other guests what had happened as we ate the turkey. I spooned the non-hippie stuffing onto my plate and bragged how our friend’s dick had been in that cavity. The lighting designer seemed a little put off, so I asked her, not completely rhetorically, “Why would I eat something that he wouldn’t put his dick in?”
Since there was no good answer, we all enjoyed our turkey and stuffing, and then it was time for dessert. Our geologist hadn’t been killed by giant falling rocks in space, so he proudly displayed a flourless chocolate cake that he’d been working on for a few days. It was perfect and beautiful. I had one question, “Did you put your cock in it?”
“No.” He laughed a lot.
“Then I’m not eating it.”
“Me neither,” a few people chimed in.
He laughed more and then realized we weren’t kidding. Well, we were kidding, but we weren’t bluffing. He begged us, “C’mon, man, I worked really hard on this, and I want you to enjoy it.”
“Not if you won’t put your dick in it.” I can be like that. Or rather, I’m always like that—she questioned me once, and I never cooked Chinese food again.
There was a long hesitation, and the geologist proved himself. He pulled the flourless chocolate cake over to his place at the table. He stood up, unbuckled his pants, and dragged his cock all over the cake, while saying, “C’mon, baby, you can take all of me” in a Spanish accent. Thanksgiving is a holiday I can get into.
The cake was way good.
Eventually that girlfriend left me. It kind of tells you everything about me: naked in a donkey hat, talking as much as Teller does onstage, my girlfriend stayed with me, but when I started putting clothes on and chatting, she left me and took my donkey hat. She took the house, the car and the donkey hat and all I miss is the donkey hat. A lot of friends have promised they would find me another donkey hat, and they have all failed. One friend even went to Tijuana insisting she would find me a donkey hat, but no soap. Another friend made one. It was lovely, but it wasn’t the right hat. If you know what I’m talking about and can find a real donkey hat for me—get in touch—for a perfect donkey hat that fits, I’ll pay you a hundred dollars cash money (I can drive a hard bargain even as I sit here in jeans wearing a sandwich hat). I haven’t felt right since I lost my donkey hat.
I don’t know what got into my head, but I still need that donkey hat. “I don’t know what got into my head, but…” When guys are sitting around telling stories, or as the carnies say, “cutting up jackpots,” those are the words I want to hear. It seems like all great stories have that phrase in them. I was on Miami Vice in the eighties because there was no other time to be on it. While we were shooting in NYC and Miami, I was also shooting a feature film with Judge Reinhold and doing eight shows a week Off-Broadway. I went almost three weeks without ever sleeping more than two hours at a time and most of that in limos and mobile homes. It’s as hard as you can work without having a job. The hardest work in showbiz is easier than any other job you can have in the world except the job of driving those big billboards on a trailer up and down the Vegas Strip. That job looks easy and fun, but doesn’t pay as well as showbiz. All that being said, you spend three weeks with Don Johnson and see how much you want to be alive.
One of the security guys on Miami Vice was a former professional wrestler. While I was half asleep waiting for someone to apologize to Don so we could get back to shooting, my security guard buddy would tell me wrestling stories. This was years ago and I was sleep-deprived, but the way I remember one of his stories, he was having Thanksgiving with a bunch of professional wrestlers and he didn’t know what got into his head, but he bet Captain Lou Albano five hundred bucks that he couldn’t get the turkey out of the oven and throw it out the window without the other wrestlers stopping him. It turned their Thanksgiving into a bunch of guys screaming and laughing covered with really bad grease burns and the turkey thrown out a closed window—broken glass and dirty turkey.
I love my life now, but sometimes I’d sure like to be naked with my donkey hat listening to feedback and clipping a hedge to look like me. Maybe that’s when I’m at my best.
Listening to: “Metal Machine Music”—Lou Reed
Showing off, kind of, during a B&E at a house in the swamps of Jersey where I didn’t know anyone. We kinda broke in. Let’s say it was around Thanksgiving time and let’s say that I was kidding about the B&E.
THE MAGICIAN STANDS LAZILY HALF NAKED BEFORE THE WORLD
IN MY LAST BOOK, I WROTE ABOUT my friends and fellow Vegas magicians Siegfried & Roy. In describing the purity and honesty of their showbiz glitz, I tried to quote Lenny Bruce as saying, “The purpose of art is to stand naked onstage.” I’ve been quoting that wisdom since I was a child. I was a small-time New England Christian teetering toward atheism, and becoming obsessed with the idea of people telling the truth onstage. I was listening to Lenny Bruce and anything else that represented New York City and real art to me. That quote kind of summed up what I was looking for. The problem was that when I checked the Lenny quote for my book, I couldn’t find any evidence that Lenny Bruce had said it. I Googled, I listened to all my Lenny recordings, reread the books and I couldn’t find the quote anywhere, not by Lenny, nor by anyone else.
So I wrote that I couldn’t find the quote and then took credit for the line myself. It was just a joke—I knew it wasn’t mine; that’s too important an idea for me to get on my own. No one who read the book before its release could place the original quote. The book made the New York Times bestseller list for a bunch of weeks, people must have read it, but no one told me where that quote was really from. I said, “The purpose of art is to stand naked onstage,” during my book signings and readings, and no one corrected me during the Q&As. I have more than 1.7 million “followers” on Twitter and they love to bust me on anything, but none of them called me an idiot for not knowing who put that idea in my young brain where it would stay, without the correct attribution, for over forty years. No one seemed to know that quote.
I did a lot of traveling to hawk my book. I was up in Frisco (they love it up there when you call it that, it makes it seem like you’re a native) doing interviews and book signings. I had time for lunch before my flight home, and Scotty and Katrine, a couple of juggler friends, took me to a restaurant in North Beach. I was delighted to walk down Broadway, where just up from Carol Doda’s Condor Club—which has an official government plaque citing it as the first “topless” and “bottomless” strip club—there is a small Afghan restaurant (what’s their special of the day, IED and heroin?), which used to be the Phoenix Theater. Back when the Mabuhay Gardens had Jello Biafra and the other Dead Kennedys making music important again on the stage, Teller and I were across the street in our old performance group, the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society, trying to punk out magic. We did 965 shows over three years, closing on Halloween in 1981. We’ve done tens of thousands of shows since then, and our old theater has become a little restaurant now, but it made my heart go pitter-pat.
As I strolled with my San Francisco friends from my former theater to the restaurant, we walked past the Beat Museum in North Beach, nestled among the strip clubs. A storefront museum and gift shop dedicated to what San Francisco writer Herb Caen called “the beatniks.” They had lots of Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg and all the others. I had recently read the scroll version of On the Road, and I pointed out to everyone that Lowell, Massachusetts, where Kerouac was from, is just a short patch of holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any nightmare senseless American road, kissing his left front tire fraught with eminent peril and wild wild, mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything, to Greenfield, Massachusetts, where I was born.
Every Day is an Atheist Holiday! Page 7