God, No!

by Penn Jillette

  “YMCA”

  —The Village People

  Scuba Fucking

  I wanted to be published in Reader’s Digest and Penthouse since I first jerked off to each of them (Penthouse, with all those letters, and Reader’s Digest, with “I Am Jane’s Breast” and “I Am Joe’s Man-gland”). It would have been cool if RD and PH printed the same article, but that’s too much to hope for. I didn’t want them to hire me or do a Penn & Teller story (I think they both did that anyway). I wanted to do it for real. I wanted to submit something like a citizen. Some “Humor in Uniform” for Reader’s Digest and some jack-off story for Penthouse. I’ve never been in uniform, but I have jacked off, so I sent something to Penthouse. I’ve told people that my letter got printed in Penthouse, but I don’t think I’ve ever really seen it in print and I can’t find it online; however, I found my letter on my computer. I remembered it having the line “I was in San Francisco working in a comedy/magic duo, I’ll call it Penn & Teller,” but as it turns out, that’s not in there.

  I wrote this (and did the fucking underwater) way back in the days before Bullshit!, so I still thought I had to be a little careful about image. Since I’ve had my cock out on Penn & Teller: Bullshit! and written about going to a gay bathhouse, this seems pretty tame, but it’s still fun. I sure hope someone somewhere can masturbate to this. (If you can, let me know, because it would really be a dream come true. And if you’re in uniform when you rub one out, maybe we can sell that to Reader’s Digest together.) What follows is what I sent them.

  And yes, it’s a true story.

  Dear Penthouse,

  This is a true story. I wrote it up for some guys on my computer BBS and they suggested I send it to you. Now, I may have been born yesterday, but I stayed up all night. I’m aware that the letters in your magazine are not entirely written by real people but rather by you, the fake person reading this letter. But I didn’t know that when I first started using Forum to jerk off, and it’s been a dream for some time to write a Penthouse letter, so I figured I’d send it on. I know it’s really long but this is the way it happened. If you want to use it, you edit it.

  I’ve asked Alex about using his name and he says fine, and he’s a public figure in San Francisco, so I think it’s way funny to say, “I’ll call him Alex Bennett.” I DO NOT want to use my name because it might confuse the little Penn & Teller image we have, but those who heard me on the air in SF will recognize the story anyway and get a good laugh.

  If you can use it, great. If you can’t, thanks again for all the great jerking off you’ve given me.

  Every Inch of My Love,

  Penn Jillette

  Letter to Penthouse Forum:

  Dear Penthouse,

  I never thought I’d write a letter to Penthouse, but I finally had an experience that I think might interest your readers.

  I was a guest on a morning talk/comedy radio show in San Francisco. The host of the show—I’ll call him Alex Bennett—is a good friend, and I’m on the show often. We were discussing a vacation I was planning with a girlfriend to the Caribbean. We were planning a trip to a small island near the equator to do lots of scuba diving. Because discussions of scuba don’t hold people’s attention during “drive time,” Alex asked if my date and I were going to be able to have sex underwater. I said, with a great deal of bravado, that it was a done deal, of course we would have sex underwater.

  Alex asked me to put my money where my mouth was and bet me, on the air, $100 that I could not have an orgasm under forty feet of seawater. He had thrown down the gauntlet, and I took the bet. When he found out that my “dive buddy” was to be a model he had seen on TV, he began to worry, but in the end felt secure that the pressure (of winning the bet, rather than the pressure of forty feet of water) would stop me from spurting in Davy Jones’s locker.

  I am not a very experienced diver, but I have access to some real pros who were more than happy to give me advice. They assured me that Alex had taken a “sucker bet.” I would win. The only problem, they said, was keeping the pussy moist enough to fuck. The salt of the sea “dries up” the mucous membranes and it can be a really gritty fuck if you don’t plan ahead. The divers I talked to had experimented with many lubricants (one even claimed to have done it with the silicone used for ship motor lubrication) and they concluded that coconut oil was the way to go. Their other piece of advice was to apply the oil on shore, topside. “Get her wet on the inside before she’s wet on the outside” seemed to be the aphorism.

  I planned all this with my “dive buddy,” and she felt confident that the $100 was as good as in the bank. She has a professional model™–quality body and face. She’s five feet ten with firm medium-size tits, a perfect ass, and a face that, alone, can get anyone’s dick hard. This woman can make a dead man cum. She was ready.

  We arrived on the island and took a few dives to get into the swim of it. It was the best diving I’ve ever seen, and because the hotel is just for divers, air tanks were always available and anyone was welcome to dive the reef off the wharf at any time.

  When the day arrived, we decided I would wear boxer shorts and she would wear a tiny string bikini. My dick would come right out the fly, and the fabric of her bathing suit would only have to slide to one side to make her completely accessible. We started preparing in our room. She sucked my cock for a while, greased my hard cock up with coconut oil, and carefully put my cock back in my boxers. I ate her cunt, and even though the coconut oil seemed redundant in her dripping pussy, I applied it liberally with my fingers. We were pretty greasy.

  We went down to the dock and got all our equipment. Scuba is a very proppy sport, and it was hard to do all the buckles and read all the gauges when we still felt in the middle of fucking and a little glazed. It was a bit scary. We swam out to the side of the reef, went down until our depth gauges read about fifty feet, and found a place to stand. We were told by other divers that it was much cooler if you were just floating, but we wanted to get our bearings to start. She had undone her top while swimming down and as she stood on the reef with the vest straps flanking her naked tits, she was ready.

  I took the regulator out of my mouth, held my breath, and sucked on her tits. She has big nipples anyway, and the cold of the water and the blue tint of the filtered light made them look amazing. I sucked on her nipple hard until I needed air, took a breath off the regulator, and went back to sucking. After repeating that process a few times on each breast, I pulled her bikini bottom aside, licked her clit, and exhaled, tickling her cunt with the air bubbles. She pulled my head up; we both took our regulators out and kissed really hard and salty. She climbed down my body and pulled my dick out of my boxers. The magnification of the water does wonders for one’s ego, and the blue tint of the water gave my hard-on a really pleasant purple hue. She did a remarkable job of breath control, sucking my cock between breaths and blowing air bubbles against my balls.

  During all this we went away from the reef to be “weightless.” It was really difficult to keep the buoyancy and depth constant with the two of us, with no reference points and our minds wandering away from gauges and toward fucking. There were lots of fish around, and I was keeping an eye on my dick (this is not a joke, yellowtails are used to being fed underwater and they will bite).

  She likes sex fairly rough, so I took my regulator out of my mouth again and bit her nipple hard. I heard her scream with pleasure through her regulator, and this may have been the best part of the whole experience. We were really excited at this point, breathing hard and going through our air like crazy.

  It was time to fuck. I don’t think we needed the oil, my cock went in easy, and the “weightlessness” was really trippy. This woman always enjoys sex, and as we fucked underwater she completely forgot where she was and began screaming, sending us up and down, which scared me a little (it’s very dangerous to change pressure too fast, you can get little bubbles in your brain that kill you). We fucked really hard; I was able to spin us around and upside d
own and get my finger up in her asshole. She came a couple of times, and even through the water I heard her screaming out of the regulator. It was really an out-of-the-world fuck.

  Now (here’s the important part for the bet), while I had my dick in her cunt I felt that kind of half-cum thing (where you feel an orgasm and you want to take a little break but you know you’re going to cum again in a little while and really spurt) inside her. My dick was jumping around in her cunt and I was making those white-boy-James-Brown sounds and stuff. After that I pulled out of her, grabbed my dick, and started jerking off while she played with my balls.

  We’d been there a while and ALL these fish were around (yellowtails, parrot, and trumpet fish—I don’t think they were watching us, I think they thought this might be our way of getting food for them), and we had gone from forty feet to seventy feet and back again a couple times. She took her regulator out of her mouth and tried to make me cum in her mouth, but I knew that timing was going to be way too complicated. I jerked for a while, looking at fish and her hard cold nipples, and then I looked at my air supply. We’d only been down eighteen minutes, but I was way below 1,500 pounds. That means I was using air more than twice as fast as normal.

  We headed back, skipping our decompression “safety stop” (which we could have really needed), and went back home. My “dive buddy” was freezing from diving without her wet suit. When we got into bed we fucked for a long time and I came hard. When we finished this shore fuck session, she was elated because we had won the bet and I was bummed because we’d lost. She said she felt me cum inside her. I said that I felt that Alex wanted a spurt, he wanted a “money shot.” Now, on this trip we were averaging three fucking sessions a day, and even though we always had fun, sometimes I just didn’t “have that much jam.” It would feel like I was cumming but nothing would squirt out. This is what had happened underwater.

  We tried one more underwater fuck, but right after I put it in we started floating up—I’d hit the wrong button on my buoyancy control vest and we went up almost twenty feet fast. This is very dangerous and it freaked us enough that that was the end of that session. These were the only two fuck sessions that we planned. We couldn’t do it spontaneously, because my “buddy” really needed a wet suit to dive without freezing and we couldn’t fuck with her in a wet suit. Also, she might have been wet enough without the oil, but we weren’t sure and she wasn’t comfortable greasing up in front of the other divers on the boat.

  I really didn’t know if I won or lost. I felt Alex wanted a “money shot” underwater, with fish gobbling up my sperm like so many yellow-tailed biker chicks, but maybe just orgasm was fine. I’m sure I could have given a good spurt if we laid off sex for twenty-four hours beforehand, but fuck that shit, it was only a hundred bucks and some pride, for Christ’s sake. I talked to Alex, and we decided we would call it a tie. I didn’t make a penny, and I didn’t pay anything. But all things considered, I won.

  Plan the dive

  Dive the plan,

  (Name and address withheld by request)

  “Divers Do It Deeper”

  —David Allan Coe

  The Bible’s Fifth Commandment

  Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the lord thy god has given thee.

  I have a very good friend who read this one and said that it really has to depend on who your family is. I guess, if I want to be logical, I have to accept that that’s true. But it breaks my heart.

  ONE ATHEIST’S FIFTH SUGGESTION

  Be there for your family. Love your parents, your partner, and your children. (Love is deeper than honor, and parents matter, but so do spouse and children.)

  Sister

  I was at the Terrorist Starbucks with Sister and a bunch of my goofball friends. It’s the Terrorist Starbucks because they say the 9/11 religious people planned part of their murders at this Vegas Buckys. If you went there for coffee in the first few years after the Twin Towers attack, some of the baristas would claim to have watched them plotting for god. I don’t believe the killers were really ever there. After that much evil hits, our memories all get a little fucked. But I still call it the Terrorist Starbucks.

  I didn’t leave out the word “my” before “Sister.” That was what I always called her. Her name was Valda, the same as my mom’s name, but calling her by her first name would have seemed disrespectful. My sister was twenty-three years old when I was born and married when I was three years old. I was her ring bearer and I was cute as a button, motherfucker; I’ve seen the pictures.

  Sister and I were full siblings and have no other brothers or sisters. No one between us. I suppose it’s possible that our parents planned to have two children twenty-three years apart, but it seems more likely that I was a mistake. They might have used the word “surprise,” but I never talked to my parents or Sister about sex. They weren’t the kind of people who talk about sex. I am the kind of person who talks about sex a lot. I’m hoping that I can get through this tearful writing about Sister without writing about my cock.

  Reading about Jack Nicholson and Bobby Darin each finding out, as adults, that their sisters were actually their moms, I was kind of ready for that surprise. I was so close to my mom, but I guess I could have been that close to her as my grandmother. However, there was no deathbed confession from Mom and no deathbed confession from Sister, so I guess I’m not destined for anything as great as Chinatown or that psycho translation of “Mack the Knife.” There were people in my hometown who had been in the hospital with Mom when I was born, so if they were lying about it, they sure did a good job.

  I had Mom and Dad in my life for half of their lives. I was born when Mom was forty-five, and Mom and Dad both died at around ninety. I was fifty when my daughter was born. Having older parents is great, except for that dying thing. Sister being older was wonderful, but she recently died too. She got to watch me on Dancing with the Stars with her friends at her very nice nursing home, and she got to meet my children before she died. Going on Dancing with the Stars sure is goofy. It can knock out of one’s head any illusions one has about being in the “arts,” but if you have elderly people you love, it’ll make them very happy and popular with their friends.

  Sister died a little young of old age, and when she died, there went the only person I was in contact with who knew me as a child. There was no longer anyone to call every day and talk about what my toddlers, Mox and Zz, had done that day and compare it to me when I was a child. When my mom and dad died, it seemed impossible that I could miss anyone more. When Sister died, I missed her more.

  People used to say that Sister and I were opposites. She was so quiet and polite. I’m not quiet. She was sweet. I’m not. Everyone liked her. There wasn’t a Facebook page dedicated to calling her a cunt, like there is for her brother. Being a tour guide at Historic Old Deerfield, taking three people at a time through the collection of two-hundred-year-old crafts, was as showbizzy as she ever got. Her brother was on Dancing with the Stars and knows Wayne Newton.

  Because of all our fucked-up generations, I guess you could say she assumed the role of grandparent for me. She would take me on Sundays when Mom and Dad went to numismatic shindigs. Sister would care for me and give me all the candy I wanted. She had her own children, so Mox and Zz’s first cousins are now knocking on fifty years old.

  If you want to raise a monster like me, just fill your children with unconditional love. Not just California heart-on-the-sleeve-hug love (when Mom was on her deathbed, I told her I loved her. She said, “Well, of course you do, you always do, why did you think you had to say something like that?” Saying I loved Mom and Dad was like saying I was breathing; it really didn’t have to be mentioned. We didn’t hug much, but our hugs were not like hugging my agents in L.A.), but real love. And while you’re at it, throw in pure unconditional love from a sibling. That will give you a person who is twelve feet tall and bulletproof.

  Back to the Terrorist Buckys. The conversation turned from
the 9/11 terrorists to the Unabomber. Everyone took turns commiserating with the brother of the Unabomber turning in his dangerous and mentally ill brother. Each one of the show folk at the table talked about how hard it would be to make that decision.

  Sister didn’t get it. She was sincerely puzzled. She was often left out of our conversations—we talked about music she hadn’t heard or movies she hadn’t seen—and she’d sit politely as we rudely left her out.

  I still hadn’t said anything myself about the Unabomber’s brother. I was watching Sister. She was really confused and showing it. Sister knew about what was going on in the world; it was hard to believe she didn’t know about the Unabomber being turned in by his brother.

  “Sister, you know the Unabomber, right—the environmental guy who killed and wounded those scientists? His brother turned him in.”

  “Yes, I know. I just don’t know what’s hard.”

  “They’re talking about how hard it would be for his brother to turn him in to the Feds. The brother figured out his brother was the Unabomber. His brother turned him in; that must have been hard.”

  “Yes, I know about the Unabomber and his brother, but I don’t see what’s hard about it.”

  Everyone got ready for Sister to explain that if someone was killing people, you had to stop them. She was such a gentle person. She had raised money for the police of Greenfield, Massachusetts, to buy bulletproof vests.

  Nope. That’s not what she meant.

  “I would never turn in a member of my family. Never. Not to anyone for any reason. I would never turn against Penn. Never.”