The beatnik store had lots of old sexy Evergreen magazines. I think I saw one issue when I was a child, and it was and still is perfection to me—black and white naked beat women having sex, smoking cigarettes, or reading in New York City apartments, dirty stories, and real literature and culture. The first one I picked up in the Beat store felt just like the one I saw as a child and got my heart and cock going. It had a woman on the cover. I swear I’d still give it all up for an advertisement for Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s first album, Freak Out! I wanted to live in the spirit of that magazine, and instead I’m featured on Vegas.com. Oh well. They had paperback translations of On the Road in all different languages. They even had Kerouac’s jacket. For a Beat fan, beatnik, peacenik, old hippie capitalist guy like me, this is the only museum that matters. Who needs dinosaur bones?
When I picked up Evergreen and thumbed through it to see the model in the flat lighting on her apartment, with slightly crooked teeth, fat bohemian hair on her head and curly wild hippie untrimmed pubic hair, standing there smoking with books all around her and breasts she was much too comfortable with the hang of, I could feel a sexual flush in my face. You can’t get that flush at fifty-six years old; you can get that flush only as a teenager. But these magazines made me time travel. I love naked pictures. There is no one I wouldn’t rather see naked (and I’ve been tested—Ernest Borgnine? Yes!). There on the wall of the museum was a big black-and-white picture of the young poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso standing side by side, naked, their hands cupped over their genitals. I’m one of those guys who reads all the little description cards at museums, and this one explained…
ALLEN GINSBERG AND GREGORY CORSO, 1961
There are many photographs and stories of Allen Ginsberg getting naked in public. Some of the stories are legendary—being heckled by an audience member while onstage at a poetry reading, Ginsberg would proceed to take off his clothes. “The poet stands naked before the world!” he would say, challenging the heckler. “Are you willing to stand naked before the world?”
Allen would sometimes show up at a party and after a certain amount of time step into the restroom, pile all his clothes in a neat pile and step back in to the party completely naked. Legend has it he did this to John Lennon once at a party in New York. John quietly left telling a friend, “I don’t want anyone pulling out a camera and taking a picture of me and a naked Allen Ginsberg.”
There was my quote. When I was young, I was sucking up everything I could about all these beautiful mysterious people. To my fourteen-year-old goyishe kop, Lenny Bruce and Allen Ginsberg were the same. To my fifty-six-year-old epikoros kop, Lenny Bruce and Allen Ginsberg are still more alike than they are different. They were both poets. “The poet stands naked before the world!” is way better than “The purpose of art is to stand naked onstage.” I’m not Lenny or Allen.
Let’s look at how I weakened the quote. I start with “The purpose of art.” The word “purpose” is an ugly word in there. Ginsberg doesn’t need “purpose,” standing naked is not to be a task: it’s a state of being. Of course, I would think, “purpose.” I was trying to make art, Ginsberg was art. And I end with “onstage.” I was trying to be on a stage, Ginsberg was just being.
I thought about my failures as a poet for a while and then called Scotty, Katrine and the curator who was showing us around over to the naked picture. I told them how important this quote was and is to me. I talked about how much better it was than I had remembered. I asked Katrine if she had a camera on her cell phone. I started stripping off my clothes.
I didn’t think I deserved to be the same as the poets. I don’t deserve to stand symbolically beside them naked before the world. I was too lazy to take my shoes off, I didn’t want to crawl around looking for my clothes, and I didn’t want to get dressed after the picture was taken. I left my shoes on, I dropped my baggy jeans in a rumpled pile over my shoes. I pulled my boxer-briefs down to my knees, at prostate exam level. I unbuttoned my workshirt to show my fat stomach, but I didn’t take it off and throw it. I glanced over at Allen and Gregory’s picture, and I tried to match their hands on my penis and testicles.
I wanted to stand naked with the poets in the public museum, but I didn’t want to have to lace up my shoes again. So I just pulled down my jeans and underwear and unbuttoned my workshirt. I also felt that to stand completely naked would be to call myself a poet, and I just couldn’t do that. If Allen and Gregory had been there, and stripped, I couldn’t have put myself in the same category. I aimed for poet and hit Vegas headliner. Billy West, the greatest voice guy in the world (he’s Futurama, Ren & Stimpy and the best M&M—red), once said there was just one showbiz and we were all in it. Teller says art is anything we do after the chores are done. I agree with them both very much. I believe that Ron Jeremy has the same job as Picasso and Bach. I know that the mall Santa is the same as Bob Dylan and Katharine Hepburn. I know all that and I believe all that. But still, magician has to be a damn sight lower than a poet. We’re above ventriloquists, but not near poets. Imagine if someone said, “A magician stands naked before the world.” The answer wouldn’t be, “Isn’t that brilliant” but rather, “Isn’t that illegal?”
I am one of two magicians who has stood naked, if not before the world, then at least before a paying crowd in a casino showroom in Las Vegas. The other magician is not Houdini, who always had chains in front of his junk and always wore a swimsuit. The other magician is Teller. In the history of Vegas, Teller and I are the disappointing first male full frontal nudes onstage. Yup, Vegas has male strippers—Chippendales, and Thunder from Down Under (which always struck me as an unpleasant name, bringing to mind ripping loud farts instead of sexy ripped Australians). Vegas has had a bunch of shows full of gorgeous, hunky, hung, ripped, sexy men, and yet, the first guys to stand totally naked onstage there were two middle-aged magicians. If that doesn’t prove to you that there’s no god, I don’t know what would. Teller and I ended every show for a few runs at Bally’s (the same stage Sinatra and Dino played on, and Dino and Tom Jones were still doing runs there while we were) stripping completely naked. The joke was simple—magicians are always accused of having something up their sleeves, and we wanted to prove we didn’t. We would take our shirts off, and then our T-shirts, and then with a few jokes to shoes and socks, and finally down to just boxer shorts. It was a drag, because I wear my microphones in my glasses and the battery packs go in a pouch on my T-shirt, so I had to take all that off and go to a hand mic.
Teller would get a couple volunteers from the audience, usually an older woman and a young guy, and we’d bring them onstage to examine us. A pair of crew guys would bring out a thin band of translucent plastic and we’d take our boxers off and have the audiences members check out everything. We showed them everything we had, lifting our penises and testicles and letting them check for hidden bunny rabbits. The plastic didn’t really cover much and people could always see over, under, and around it. This wasn’t a flash—this was a genital tour. The audience members would then examine a couple of long white tank tops and we’d put those on and nothing else. They were short enough that when we lifted our arms, well, on a warm or exciting night, the shirts wouldn’t cover the full frontal even during the magic.
Big-band Penn & Teller theme music would play and, out of nowhere, we would produce a few liters of stage blood each and cover ourselves from head to toe with it while doing a little dance routine, soaking the T-shirts. That would be the end of the show, and we’d appear afterward in the lobby to meet people and sign autographs wearing Carrie-like, blood-soaked T-shirts with our little Houdinis hanging out. It was pretty great, because instead of having to sign autographs, we could just slap our chests and give them a bloody handprint on their souvenir programs.
In Atlantic City once, a professionally beautiful woman came up to me, wearing a white minidress without undergarments just like me, and gave me a big hug. The blood left her dress slightly transparent and imprinted all of
the private parts of my body onto hers. So sexy. It was a great moment. I felt I should invite her backstage to shower with me, help her pack up her souvenir minidress, give her a P&T T-shirt, but the girlfriend at the time wouldn’t have been cool with that. I’m such a loser. But it’s a great memory. Wow. I should have gotten her e-mail address and I could see that great tit/cock blood live gravestone rubbing. Shoot.
I’ve stripped naked in public other times too, maybe not as much as Ginsberg, but a lot of times and I learned a few tricks and tips. I stripped in Zero-G on the Vomit Comet, and I stripped a couple times in business meetings (I once stripped naked for all the Disney execs and served them doughnuts to show I didn’t think a certain deal with us was going to happen), and on radio shows.
Once while co-hosting radio with Alex Bennett in Florida, we had some Hooters waitresses on who served everyone chicken wings, including the whole live audience. Alex always had a live audience of about thirty people, and the women had brought enough Buffalo wings for everyone. They got to talking about how they themselves weren’t bad people like the topless dancers we’d had serving doughnuts on the air the morning before. Alex and I argued that the name Hooters was a joke about breasts, and it just wasn’t a classy organization. Alex asked the self-righteous servers if they would go topless if Hooters changed their policy and offered them more money. One of the women said, “Would you take your clothes off for a million dollars?” She thought that was a rock solid argument. She didn’t know whom she was saying it to.
I took off all my clothes as fast as I could and threw them into the audience. I stood naked, not in front of the world, but in front of a Florida radio-station audience. I was standing on top of the engineering board. My friend’s elderly parents were in the audience to see me, and there was their son’s buddy naked. A few nights later the same couple came to see our show, and Teller, accidentally, picked my friend’s mom to come onstage for the stripping bit. My buddy called me up and said, “What is it with you exposing yourself to my mom?” He had a point: she had seen my penis twice in one week. That’s not right.
I learned that day in the radio station why professional strippers don’t throw their clothes into the audience. When Alex threw to commercial and I wanted to get dressed, I had to walk naked among the audience trying to find all my clothes to get dressed again. No matter how humiliating the scene standing on the radio desk had been, bending over naked to pick your boxer shorts up from under an elderly woman’s chair is worse. “Please excuse me” doesn’t help much.
The poets stand naked before the world. The magician is always just left clutching his naked penis, wearing half a shirt and a proud satisfied smile.
Listening to: “Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance”—The Mothers of Invention
A TELEPHONE CONVERSATION WITH GILBERT GOTTFRIED ON JANUARY 13, 2002
PENN: Are you the Aflac duck? Is that your voice?
GILBERT: Yeah.
PENN: Is it just saying “Aflac”?
GILBERT: Yeah, and a few other sounds.
PENN: But no words, right?
GILBERT: No, just kinda quacking.
PENN: I can’t bring it to mind. Just do the voice for me once—just do “Aflac.”
GILBERT: I’m not going to do a voice for you.
PENN: C’mon, I want to hear it.
GILBERT: “Do the parrot.” “Do Comedy Central.” I’m not doing a voice for you. I’m not performing for you.
PENN: Listen, you little fucking bastard, do the fucking duck or I’ll slap you. I’m not kidding.
GILBERT: Is that technologically possible over the phone?
PENN: I’m coming to New York tomorrow, asshole.
GILBERT:…… Aflac.
“Little White Duck”—Burl Ives
NEW YEAR’S DAY, GYMS, WHORE-HOUSES, AND MOURNING WITH PROSTITUTES
NEW YEAR’S DAY IS A BIG HAIRY DEAL DAY FOR ME. On New Year’s Day 2000, my mom died after spending the last few days of 1999 relaxing in a coma. January 1 of every year our family releases balloons into the sky in memory of all the people we’ve loved and lost. My mom’s final conscious days were spent watching some helium balloons that dear Teller got for her, tied outside her bleak Massachusetts winter window, dance around in the wind. Mom asked if I would let her balloons go free right after she died.
New Year’s isn’t the only day I show our children pictures of the grandparents they never knew and tell them family stories that now are theirs, but I always do that then. We give the children a ton of presents that day, one week to the day after Christmas, to make up for all their Christian friends who taunt them about not having presents from Santa and Jesus. I believe in this arena the theological debate can be won with more toys. Penn & Teller don’t do a show on New Year’s Eve, so it’s a rare evening at home, hanging with friends, watching movies, and eating ice cream. I like to start the New Year with friends and family, not selling people our show with a glass of champagne added for three times the price. If the gift battle for the hearts and minds of our non-Christian children continues to escalate, Penn & Teller may have to go back to New Year’s Eve shows, so I can afford to buy my children a dozen ponies with Richard Dawkins’s picture stenciled on their sides in Sour Patch Kids, but until that time, we’ll take it as a day of rest.
The private Jillette New Year’s Day is spent at home with the family. But public New Year’s for sub-star celebrities means writing up our jive-ass New Year’s resolutions beforehand to sell tickets. These are unabashed advertisements for our show: “I resolve to try to go another year without blowing Teller’s brains out on the Penn & Teller Theater Stage at the Rio All-Suites Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, during our World-Famous Bullet Catch—featured as the #1 Best Magic Trick of All Time by TV’s Fifty Greatest Magic Tricks.” We’re always trying to put asses in the seats, but I’ve never made a genuine New Year’s resolution.
I’m the essence of a sixteen-year-old Midwest mall girl in the body of the three-hundred-pound fifty-six-year-old Las Vegas man. I don’t watch any sporting events. I’ve never seen any whole game of anything live or on TV. Paul Simon and Lorne Michaels took me to one Yankees game. We arrived late, talked, ate hot dogs, and left early. I once escorted a woman who worked in our Penn & Teller office to a local Vegas hockey team. She was trying to explain “icing” to me when the guy in the Thunderbird mascot suit recognized me through the face mesh of his sweaty heavy suit and decided that we would do improvisation together while the hockey game was going on. I stood up and waved when he beckoned me to do so. I did a little dance in the aisle with him. Then he sat on my lap. Then we stood up again. He left and came back a bit later and we did all of our bits again. When he left again, I snuck out. I was out of material. My repertoire for interacting with a guy dressed in a blue suit is waving, laughing, dancing and receiving an ever so slightly too-sexual-for-public smelly lap dance. Once I’ve run through that whole show twice, I think it’s time to tag it and bag it. I believe I could have been there for days without any Thunderbird character distractions and still wouldn’t have understood icing.
When I was a kid, my mom and dad took me on a yearly trip to the numismatics convention in Houston, and my mom took me to a baseball game at the Astrodome. She was doing her best to make me act like a normal boy. Mama Tried. I loved the tour of the Astrodome, but I insisted on leaving before the first game of the double header was over. I don’t know who was playing, but I do know that the inside space of the Astrodome is so big they have their own weather system, but it’s not as big in terms of open cubic space as the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral. A buddy of mine was almost fencing in the Olympics, so I saw half of one event there. He taught me to fence in my apartment. As soon as our first practice match started, I said, “Watch out for the TV.” He turned; I stabbed him and retired. A few weeks later, I tried that with a smarter friend who was teaching me boxing out in the alley behind our house. “Watch out for the car!” I said, and he punched me hard in th
e face. I retired from boxing after one round too.
I can explain what bugs me about sports and games in general. For some Caesars Palace PR thing, they invited Penn & Teller to a real boxing match. It wasn’t heavyweights, but it was heavy. There were billboards and building and bus ads with the fighters’ faces all over Vegas. This was real boxing, and Penn & Teller were right up front in our sub-star position, waving and waiting to dance with any bird-suited boxing mascot who happened to show up. I thought I was going to get all acoustic-guitar-I’ll-get-laid-by-being-a-pussy-peacenik about the whole thing. I thought that the real blood would freak me. I love the artistic depiction of violence, but I don’t like the real thing. Hillary Clinton gets all high and mighty about video games and how violent they are. Fuck her—they aren’t violent at all. Video games depict fantasy violence and someone in her position should know the difference. Real violence is what her boss does with the real drone planes really killing real people really spilling real blood. Drones may also be run by joystick, but there’s no fantasy and no joy. People who love artistic depictions of violence are celebrating being alive with art. Art is life. Drones mean death. Even though the people bleeding in a boxing match are choosing to take the chance to bleed, I thought the real violence of boxing would freak me and I’d get all emo about it. But my problem was the opposite. I was driven crazy by how little the guys got hit. Most every punch was blocked. One guy is trying to get a punch in and the other guy is stopping him. The frustration of all these little plans being foiled was nerve-wracking. “Get your arms out of the way and let that guy hit you in the face.” Later I read a great quote from Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan until they get hit.” That’s what really bugged me. I hated that every one of these guys had a Rocky story and a coach and a plan and the plans never worked because the other guy knew how not to get hit. I hated the frustration.
Every Day is an Atheist Holiday! Page 8