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.
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.
Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! Page 8