I owe my family and Teller my full attention no matter what tripe they want to babble, but those people never babble tripe. I owe Aiken jack shit, and yet I was letting him tell me how I should act. He’s not fit to eat shit off Teller’s shoes, and I gave him more time than I’ve ever given Teller? The time didn’t mean anything to Clay. He would have a heart-to-heart talk with a salmon if there were a chance it would be broadcast. If you’ll listen, he will talk. He’s used to having cameras around him all the time, and he knows how to create an improvised soap opera for TV. When he said he wanted me to treat people differently, I said “Okay” and I changed how I was. Everyone who was on the show or watched the show noticed that I took all his advice and changed how I acted. I did that instantly. I told him I’d do that in the first five minutes of our talk. He got that promise from me and I kept that promise—it’s on video. But he wasn’t telling me things to have me change. What I was doing didn’t matter; it was the talk itself he wanted to have on camera. He was gathering evidence and not actually talking. Crazy world this showbiz thang.
I try to have an honest relationship with my wife, so that night I called her and told her that I’d had a heart-to-heart with Clay Aiken. I could have told her that aliens had come down and given me intergalactic herpes on my asshole and she would have been more credulous and less disgusted.
So the morning after my heart-to-heart with Clay, I’m sneaking out of Trump International, as part of my quest to have my fake business abilities judged by Trump. I’ve run a very successful business for almost forty years and have always been in the black. Always. Teller and I never went bankrupt. We’ve paid all our bills and supported our families and the people who work with us. Before Clay Aiken touched me, I was a fucking artist.
I’m walking beside Dee Snider. We’ve got our hair and makeup done, and we still look like men in their fifties with long stupid hair. We get out of the loading dock, and there’s freezing rain and wind hitting us in the face. Dee had broken his finger falling off a horse, while dressed in drag, for a medieval dinner theater show in Jersey that I made him do when I was The Celebrity Apprentice “team leader.” We were both a little damaged, bleary, worse for the wear and tear, and Dee turned to me and said, “I’m getting so paranoid, I’m starting to think that the show’s producers made this weather happen just to fuck with us.”
Dee had nailed it. His broken finger had not beaten his real-world perspective, the way Clay’s heart-to-heart had broken mine. He still had some non-reality reality left. When Dee said that, I realized that was what I was feeling, without the “I’m getting so paranoid” part. Right before Dee spoke, I was feeling that the freezing rain was some sort of TV producer plot. That they had planned it to see what we would do, that they had done it to make “good TV.”
Why people act worse on reality than they would in reality, is a mystery. Other than avarice and desire for empty fame, the main reason I did TCA was to feel what it would feel like to be in that situation. I did it to see what made people act like that. Not everyone falls off a motorcycle without a helmet to become Gary Busey. Some people do it just because there are cameras around. When you’re in it, it seems like the producers must be making this shit happen, but I don’t think they were. I don’t think they have to do much to drive people like us crazy. We start with a leg up.
Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow introduced me to the idea of “ego depletion.” I read it after my tour of duty on The Celebrity Apprentice, and it explained some of the mysteries I experienced doing that show. Studies have shown that if you make someone very self-conscious about everything they do and say, their self-control just gets tired out. The ego can be exhausted. It’s the very trying to be one’s best on camera that puts one at one’s worst on camera. You just can’t keep it up that long. You want to be at your best, but pretty soon the internal censors are exhausted, take a break, and pretty soon sweet Arsenio is yelling things like, “I’ll tell you what a fucking bitch whore she is!”
The non-sexual question I’ve been asked the most since TCA is “Were those others just faking?” It’s a question I can’t answer. I know Lisa Lampanelli pretty well. She did our movie The Aristocrats and we’ve been out together socially. We’ve talked. I sat with her in a room while she was yelling at Dayana Mendoza (who had been Miss Universe). Lisa and others had problems with Dy (she let me call her that), but I had no problems with Lisa or Dy. I just didn’t like Clay having a heart-to-heart talk with me. Lisa was really yelling. She was really crying. It was really real. I felt it was sincere. I felt that Lisa was really frustrated and really upset. I sat there. When people are really upset, I sit there. You can find a few ex-girlfriends who will vouch for that and not as a good thing. While she was yelling, she yelled something like, “I’ve been putting up with this shit for eight weeks.” I don’t remember the exact number of weeks she said. But I do remember it was way, way more weeks than we had been there. And I remember it was the right number of weeks it was going to be when it aired. It was both of those things. The show is shot with about two days for every week. We shoot six days a week and during most weeks we do three tasks and each one of those tasks is a week of broadcast. The first task was three days and some of the broadcasts used more or less than one task, but . . . overall, the amount of time we were there was about a third of the amount of time that it took when broadcast. Lisa was really upset, but the amount of time she said she’d been disgusted with Dy was the amount of time the show would be on the air, not the real amount of time we’d been there. So, they could use that video and not violate the chronology of the show. Lisa wasn’t lying, she wasn’t faking, but she was aware she was on TV. We were all professionals, we were all aware of the camera, but we were also living our lives. It makes it very crazy. I spent a lot of time saying to Paul Sr., whom I love, “It’s not real.” But that’s not true. It’s also not TV. It’s really not TV. When I was having my heart-to-heart with Clay, the full endless horror of it was never broadcast. It was edited down to a minute. When I’m on Piers Morgan and he’s ripping me a new asshole, that’s TV, I know that every word he says is going out. But The Celebrity Apprentice is so long that you know the vast majority of stuff will never be seen, but cameras are still on; it could be seen. It’s Schrödinger’s showbiz: it’s all fake and it’s all real at the same time. The situation itself makes everyone crazy.
The production isn’t entirely blameless. There was a lot of alcohol available at any time it could be even slightly justified, but most of us never drank a drop, and even the drinkers were moderate. But the producers didn’t need anyone drunk; they got their telegenic outbursts from ego depletion. And after someone had an ego-depleted outburst, they’d reward the impropriety. In real reality, there would have been hell to pay for screaming epithets at people, but in TCA world, there are no repercussions. No one loves anyone on the set enough to say, “Hey listen, man, take a little break and think about this.” No one cares. We’re all trying to save our own sorry asses. Then the next day, Trump says something insane like, “I’m glad you showed some backbone. I like passion.” He means, of course, he likes passion for his little TV show, but it feels like he’s saying the outburst was a good thing. We’ve chosen to make this whackjob, with the cotton candy piss hair and the birther shit, into someone we want to please.
I made a deal with the producers and myself that I would pretend to care what Donald Trump thought of me. I believe, in the real world, that I care less about what Trump thinks of me than he cares what I think of him. When he was into his free-form rants in front of a captive audience, he would talk about articles written about him and defend himself against charges made, as far as I could tell, by random bloggers with a few hundred hits. Attacks that could have no impact on his life at all. It sounded like this cat was Googling himself, being bugged by what was written, and then defending himself to people who were trying to improve their careers by playing a TV game with him. He sat on this throne, and told us he’d ma
de a good business decision by selling a house of his for much less than the asking price and these bloggers should know that. They should know he was a good businessman. The nightmare of Trump is not that he doesn’t care what people think; it’s that he desperately cares what people think and . . . he’s doing the best he can. I don’t know Donald Trump. We’ve crossed paths a few times, but I’ve never talked to him. He talked to me, but I was on a show where I wasn’t supposed to talk back. I still did, but only a little. I disagree with him about a lot, but you know, I disagree with you about a lot, and we still get along. He was wicked wrong about the birther shit, but I’m wicked wrong about a lot, and we both have stupid hair.
So, in order to sell more tickets to my Vegas show, I abandoned my family for weeks, was sequestered in a gaudy hotel, and pretended to care what Donald Trump thought of me. You can’t pretend to care about something for more than a day without starting to care about it. Pretending to care and caring over time are the same thing. So, Arsenio blows up, Trump singles him out and shakes his hand, I listen to Clay tell me how I should act, and that’s the new norm. Our egos are depleted and we’re still on camera. That poor Loud family. At least we knew what we were getting into.
I cracked in a different way. I never raised my voice, except in jest. I’m not a yeller. Yelling in my family was always a joke. Our family pouts. I will never see TCA. I don’t watch anything that I’m in and it’s not the kind of show I watch anyway, but I hope my pouting doesn’t look too bad on camera. If it does, I’m sorry, I’m a pouter. From what my wife says, the show depicts me fairly accurately. So there.
I suppose there’s a chance that some of you are reading this book because you saw me on The Celebrity Apprentice. Collectively, the people who have seen Penn & Teller’s Letterman and SNL appearances, bought my books, seen my movies and acting roles do not add up to the viewers of that one show.
So, thanks, Mr. Trump, and thanks, Clay. Doing the show was a great thing for me and, all things considered, I really like and respect you both.
I should have jumped out the fucking window.
Listening to: “Sweetheart Like You”—Bob Dylan (This REALLY explains all of Celeb App)
Left to right: Michael Andretti, Dee Snider, Your Humble Reporter, George Takei, Paul Teutul Sr., and Lou Ferrigno.
NOVEMBER 9, 1909—EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD IS ENOUGH
“I WANTED A MISSION, and for my sins they gave me one.”
The first time I went on Piers Morgan’s show on CNN, it was right before I started shooting The Celebrity Apprentice. Piers had also done TCA, and for his considerable sins he had won it. Everyone gets everything he wants. Before we went live on the air, we sat and chatted. Piers was pleasant, but not polite. While we made small talk, he answered texts on his Porsche BlackBerry. You didn’t even know they had a designer Porsche BlackBerry. I’ve given you that information and, in the same breath, told you who would fucking buy and use a Porsche BlackBerry while someone was talking to him. Piers told me that I’d have a blast on The Celebrity Apprentice and how much he liked my magic show. He was slamming down Red Bulls like they were going out of style, and indeed they had gone out of style a decade earlier.
The floor manager counted us down from five seconds for the broadcast to go live, and Piers started his interview with a big smile, a quick intro and then got right to a quick and sloppy reading from my book God, No! I believe what he read on the air was all he had read of the book. Then he said something to the effect of “I don’t like you, and I don’t like your book.” He hadn’t read it, and he didn’t know me, but he thought he had a sense of good TV and good TV is sometimes just about being rude and ignorant. He had that in spades. We must always remember that we can never know what’s in someone else’s heart, but in order to function, we must guess. It sure seemed that as Piers argued with me about religion, he didn’t believe a word he was saying. We must go with what he says, and he says he’s a religious man and we must believe him, but from a couple yards away, my bullshit detector was pinning the needles. You must trust him and not me, but goddamn, from the guest chair his faith sounded like jive.
It took me until I was fifty-six years old, but for the first time in my life, on Piers’s show, I took my parents’ advice on how to treat people. I was polite. Completely polite. I sat, as Piers attacked me, and found that simple politeness brought a calm over me that no yogi could match. Under his rudeness, I found nirvana. I didn’t once raise my voice and I didn’t once say anything like, “Would you please let me finish?” It was his show, and if he wanted me to finish my sentence, I would. If he didn’t, it was his show.
Before I went on the show, my buddy Jonathan Ross told me a joke ad-libbed on a British TV show called I’m Sorry I Haven’t Got a Clue by another buddy of mine, Stephen Fry. On that show, Stephen defined the word “countryside” as “The killing of Piers Morgan.” When Jonathan sent it to me in an e-mail, it took me a few moments to get it. In case you have trouble, try spelling “countryside” phonetically. “Cunt-re-cide.” Stephen Fry is wicked funny and in my experience is right about everything.
The first Piers Morgan show that I did (yes, it’s called show business, and now I’m a regular on Piers Morgan, because that’s my job and I enjoy doing his show) is perhaps still my favorite interview, because it was the first one I did that I believe my parents would have been proud of. That’s a lie. My mom and dad were proud of everything I ever did, that was their default setting, but it might have been the first interview where I was myself. There was no jive from me. I was polite and honest. I can be ashamed that it took me fifty-six years to be polite and honest in the face of an attack, but at least I got there. If you heard me a few times on Howard Stern, you may have bet that I’d never ever be able to hit politesse and honesty at the same time.
That first Piers Morgan interview changed the way I acted on TV and in my overall public life. I’ve always respected honesty in showbiz, but somehow I never considered being polite to be honest. Piers taught me that I could be myself on TV and it would be okay. I could be my mother’s son and still be a motherfucker. It’s a great feeling.
At one point in the discussion, Piers asked me about fearing death. He hit below the belt and talked about the deaths in my family. He moved it from theoretical and theological to personal and cruel. During that moment, it wasn’t my mom and dad going through my head (that would have been self-cruelty), it was the Stones, “All your sickness, I can suck it up, throw it all at me, I can shrug it off.” For that moment on live TV, I was rich enough, strong enough, hard enough and, most important, in love enough. It seemed Piers was making the argument that he believed in a life after death because not believing in it scared him. This argument is empty on so many levels. Should I argue that I believe I’m Bob Dylan because being Penn Jillette depresses me? I can argue that I’d like to be Bob Dylan: I’d like to have written the line “It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be,” but I didn’t. That is the answer. The frightening sweetness of life is not an argument for life after death. Wanting to believe something is not any reason at all to believe it. If anything, it’s a reason to question it.
The other part of that argument or assertion is that death is scary. The loss of life is sad, the wonderful rickety carnival ride being over, but the atheist view of death could not be less scary. The religious view of death, the spook show, is scary. Whether benevolent or not, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent creatures up in all your shit is scary. I certainly wouldn’t tell my children there is a hell they might go to. Even the idea of purgatory is horrific. I won’t go head to head with Mark Twain, so read his Letters from the Earth to imagine how even the Christian heaven is just real human hell. Add eternal to anything, even eating pussy while listening to Dylan, and you get hell.
After Piers tried to crack me with my mom’s death and scare me with my own death, I answered, “1909.” That’s not true. I don’t think I really answered, “1909.” If you check it out on the I
nnerTube you’ll hear me say another year. I answered whatever year happened to pop into my head. I didn’t have my answer planned. I want to believe I said “1909.” My answer confused Piers. He stopped insulting me for a moment and cocked his eyebrow in mock TV wonder. Why would I answer a question about death with a year? He ad-libbed something like “What?”
I asked if 1909 terrified him. This is the question to ask anyone who is afraid of the atheist view of death. How frightened are you of 1909? How frightened were you in 1909? I’ve now picked November 9, 1909, because that’s the day my mom was born, and I figured, since she would be over 103 years old now, it’s pretty safe that if you’re reading this book, you weren’t alive in 1909. So, 1909 is exactly the same as 2109 for our purposes. You most likely weren’t alive in 1909 and you most likely won’t be alive in 2109. You won’t have any effect on anything then. You won’t know anything and no one will know about you. Game over or game hasn’t started—there isn’t much difference.
I would love to be alive in 2109. I would love to talk to my possible grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. I would love to see what people are wearing. I would love to see if we have flying cars, world peace, and a better song for twelve-year-old boys than “Stairway to Heaven.” Will we finally get to wear silver jumpsuits and have big foreheads?
I’m not sure I want November 9, 2109, more than I’d want November 9, 1909. I would love to meet my grandparents and maybe my great-grandparents. I never knew my grandmother, and I knew my grandfather only as an old man. I’d love to meet him when he was young, dumb, and full of cum. I would love to sit and tell my infant mom what her grandchildren would be like when they were her age. I would love to see the horses and buggies and know we would eventually be going to the moon. I would love to put a few bucks in a compound interest account for myself and leave a note to throw some money at the guys from Microsoft, Apple, Google, PayPal and Facebook, and to get credit for coining the term “CamelCase.” I’d love to be around for the invention of swing, bebop, and rock and roll. There’s so much we miss by being stuck in time. But life is time, and nothing more.
Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! Page 5