After I was cleaned up, I put on my boxers in 1.8 and felt mostly better. We only had a couple of zeros left and I enjoyed them quietly. I really enjoyed them. I floated in my boxers. The girlfriend gave up on getting her top off; she was never able to do it—it takes a man to strip in space.
We were done and had to fly all the way back to the airport. It was about an hourlong flight. I was uncomfortable but elated. I sat down next to the vomiting medics (great name for a band), who hadn’t had any fun, and I talked to one of the NASA guys about having spent his first two days in space really, really sick. They said I was over the worst, and next time up even the 1.8 wouldn’t bother me much. My whole body was different. Every time the plane took a little dip, I got ready to lift off. Man, my body knew what it was to fly and I couldn’t let that go.
It was a long flight back to base. I came off the plane in my boxers. I got dressed. I didn’t know what I was feeling. I wasn’t even excited. As Billy said, I had to “get back my sea legs.” I didn’t know what to feel.
Billy, the NASA guys, and I went to a Mexican bar and restaurant. I was hungry. Throwing up in your hair gives you a hell of an appetite. We talked. I pitched an idea for the Zero G ZZ Top/P & T video to Billy, thinking we needed to find some way to do this again. We talked about how to get the Zero G guys to make a ton of money off this and how to get through the rest of the red tape that had already held them up for six years. I see they’re selling rides now, so I guess they solved it, and I hope they’re making money. Billy and I never did the video, but we’ll share that day forever. He calls me once in a while and there’s that special bond you have with a guy who’s played guitar while you’ve floated around naked in zero G.
After four hours in the bar I got a lift to the real airport and flew back to Vegas. I slept on the flight, and every time there was a little bump, my arms went to the arms of the chair, and I was ready to push off and fly.
In bed that night I could feel myself getting light. I was sore and tired the next day, but every ten minutes or so I would feel like I was able to spin in the middle of the room. And even today, just sitting here, I have the feeling that I might be able to just float away.
My body has learned that it can fly.
“Tush”
—ZZ Top
Supreme Court Justice Ron Jeremy
I live in a nutty house. We call it the Slammer. It looks like a prison. It’s very industrial, lots of concrete and chain link, but it’s not called the Slammer because it looks like a correctional facility or because my dad was a jail guard. It’s called the Slammer after the groovy quarantine facility at USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, at Fort Detrick in Maryland. USAMRIID’s stated purpose is “to conduct basic and applied research on biological threats resulting in medical solutions to protect the warfighter.” Cool!
Around the time I was moving from New York City to Las Vegas (when you’re doing Off-Broadway and Broadway in New York City, and you tell your peers that you’re moving your show to Vegas, it’s a little like being a New York City fine artist and telling everyone in SoHo that from now on your media will be fluorescent paints on black velvet and your subjects will be exclusively Elvis Presley and Jesus Christ sweating and crying, respectively and vice versa), we did a Penn & Teller run at the Capitol Theatre in Washington, DC. In that show I had a broken-bottle juggling routine that was about thirty seconds of juggling broken liquor bottles and fourteen minutes of monologue that rambled a bit, like this book. During that monologue I talked about how the audience didn’t have the proper sympathy for me. They didn’t have enough empathy to fear my getting hurt juggling the impossibly difficult, jagged glass bottles. I told them, “Even if I were to dip these bottles in fresh Ebola Zaire virus, cut myself, come down with hemorrhagic fever onstage, and have my eyeballs pop, most of you would turn to the person next to you and say, ‘I hope Teller doesn’t catch it, he’s kinda cute.’”
The big cheese from USAMRIID was at the gig that night, and my hemorrhagic fever reference suggested to him that I might be interested in a tour of his facility. He allowed me to invite our crew to join us for the tour, and most of them did. It’s still the most P & T crew members who have ever shown up for a field trip. When we were all invited to see U2, I could get only my manager and my wife to come along. With the USAMRIID tour, our guys had found what they were looking for.
The tour was amazing. I wanted to sign up to do some “guinea pigging,” which is being used as a test subject to see how people react to catching a certain virus. It would be a way for me to help people without having to do any work. I could sit in a room, read, and have blood drawn every few hours. They wouldn’t let me do it.
We learned a lot on the tour and saw a lot. I looked through the thick glass of the negative-air-pressured room at the woman who works with airborne, fatal, incurable diseases all day long. We flirted, as best we could, through the glass. I found her intact airtight positive-pressure suit so sexy. It was the kind of suit Dustin Hoffman wears in Outbreak. That movie was bullshit, of course, but I would have loved to watch it with the cats and kitties from USAMRIID. It would be like watching Silence of the Lambs with Jeffrey Dahmer. You got to hand it to Dustin Hoffman; you have to be a pretty serious actor to look like Dustin and wear that stupid hat with a magnifying glass over your nose. The USAMRIID woman in the serious infectious disease room filled out the crucial bunny suit very nicely, and I found her job so sexy. This is a woman with some serious balls. So sexy. She’s not going to worry about that little cold sore on your lip before she kisses you. I never got to talk to her, though; it took her too long to get through the showers, so she couldn’t greet tour guests.
Right after I watched Ms. Ebola in her room, our host showed us “the Slammer.” It was a room that nothing went out of; every molecule of air was treated. If Ms. Groovy Diseases had ripped her suit on a broken infected monkey tibia, she’d have been rushed into this room for extreme quarantine and kept there until she died. I had been working on Broadway and doing TV for a while, and I thought that my Fortress of Solitude should be extreme quarantine, a place where I could stay until I died. As I began to plan my house, I decided to call it the Slammer, and the name stuck.
I built most of the Slammer before I had even met my wife or thought about having children. It’s like it was designed by a twelve-year-old boy with a lot of money and no legal guardian. There’s a fire pole coming down from my office to the courtyard. There are secret rooms behind bookcases (so much for secret, but there are others too). There was a sex dungeon off the bedroom that has since been turned into a nursery (the wonderful story of my life). My office has a urinal and a sink (I still don’t know why you need both), there’s a band room with rock and roll and jazz instruments set up all the time, and there’s a big home theater. All this, and it looks like an industrial complex with real human skeletons hanging here and there. When it was being built, the only real grown-up in my life was my business manager, and he worried about the Slammer’s resale value. “No one is going to want to spend money to buy Penn Jillette’s house. You’re not Elvis. It’s not Graceland. So you’re killing your resale value by making it this crazy. Put in marble floors or tile or something expensive to misdirect from the fire pole.”
While I was ignoring my business manager’s expensive advice, my senior adviser, LOD, whom I don’t pay at all, was in Vegas visiting. Lawrence O’Donnell Jr. was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s senior adviser, a big-cheese writer on The West Wing, and now host of The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on Fox News Channel (just kidding, it’s on MSNBC). We’ve been friends forever, and I go to him for advice.
I was telling LOD about some sort of Halloween fetish ball that I’d just been to. Someone had taken pictures of me with some very attractive women who were not dressed for climbing Everest. I don’t do drugs, and I don’t drink, but I still enjoyed this shindig. I asked LOD if I should be worried about the pictures showing up
in the future.
LOD went into a flattering speech about how he personally thought that I would make a pretty good Supreme Court justice. The Constitution said nothing about needing a law degree or even being smart. LOD thought I’d do a good job and look cool in the robes. “But,” he said, “it isn’t going to happen. No one is going to offer you a position on the Supreme Court, so you don’t need to worry about the pictures showing up at the confirmation hearings. You’re a fucking juggler! Who cares? It’s like your house, the so-called Slammer; you’re never going to be able to sell it anyway. But you don’t need to sell it, so don’t worry about resale value. Accept who you are and do whatever you want.”
I found that when I stopped lying to myself and stopped planning for futures that weren’t going to happen, I got happier. It was easy. I like that my door to the Supreme Court was slammed in my face. I liked realizing that it would be okay to shave my eyebrows and replace them with calligraphy tattoos of “fuck” over the right eye and “you” over the left eye.
I was taken with these thoughts, and I was preaching this new freedom. My girlfriend at the time was quite taken with the idea as well. She was an actress, and she found it liberating to think that she didn’t have to worry at all about whether she showed her tits in movies or not. Who cared? She wasn’t going to be on the Supreme Court. (She still hasn’t shown her tits in a movie; she married some guy and got knocked up, and I still see her pop up grieving on police shows, but I’ve never seen her tits on TV. I don’t know if she still thinks about it, since like a few ex-girlfriends, she doesn’t talk to me much anymore.)
Besides convincing this woman she was never going to be on the Supreme Court, and giving her a party with a cigarette-smoking monkey in a diaper that she could laugh at (in some ways I was a pretty good boyfriend), I also introduced her to Ron Jeremy (make your own call as to whether that introduction is “good boyfriend” or “bad boyfriend”).
Ron Jeremy is not a porn star, he is the porn star. He will show his big dick to anyone. He’s not all that attractive and never was all that attractive. He’s older than you by a lot and he still gets paid to fuck. If that’s not the American dream, I’m a self-fellating blue-nosed gopher. I have gone out in public with Debbie Harry, Jay Leno, Madonna, and Johnny Depp. None of them gets the same attention or is as recognized as Ron Jeremy. It’s amazing; guys will knock over naked porn women just to get near Ron. He’s a superstar.
I introduced my girlfriend to Ron Jeremy, and a few weeks later they got together with some other people for lunch. I wasn’t there. Ron was discussing some decisions he was making. I can’t even make up an example of what those might be. My girlfriend decided it was the perfect time to share the new LOD wisdom with Ron and the gang. “Don’t worry about it, Ron. You’re not going to be nominated for the Supreme Court; these choices will not be revisited in your confirmation hearings.”
She said Ron froze. He didn’t know what to say. He was heartbroken and angry. “What? You can’t know that. You can’t say I have no chance of being on the Supreme Court.”
She hung tough. “Yes, I can. We all can.”
“No, I could be on the Supreme Court.”
“You’ve made over a thousand pornographic movies. You blew yourself on camera for money—repeatedly,” she reminded him.
“But you can’t say that I wouldn’t be on the Supreme Court. You can’t say that for sure.”
He is right. We can’t say that for sure. We really can’t.
I read something Thelonious Monk wrote for his band members, rules they should follow about his music and art in general. One of them was, “The genius is the one who is most like himself.”
LOD’s advice was a cheap shortcut. It’s easier to be yourself once you decide you have no chance of being on the Supreme Court. The genius way to be yourself is to accept that you might be on the Supreme Court and still star in movies where you blow yourself. That’s the real genius.
It’s very, very unlikely that we’ll have Supreme Court Justice Ron Jeremy. Extremely unlikely. But not impossible.
And if we do . . . oh man, we’ll all be geniuses.
“You Sexy Thing”
—Hot Chocolate
I Also Couldn’t Get Laid in a Women’s Prison with a Fistful of Pardons
I spent several hours one Sunday evening in 1981 in the Club Baths, a gay bathhouse in San Francisco. I’m nervous and uncomfortable writing the story of that night, not because I had gay sex in public, and not because I couldn’t have gay sex in public. It was a wonderful night full of many emotions and a lot of laughing, and I was embarrassed then, but I’m not ashamed now. I’m cautious because of all the sadness that must be associated with that time and place. I don’t remember the exact date of my visit, but it was a Sunday in 1981. Any Sunday in 1981 was a bad time to have enjoyed a gay bathhouse. In June of 1980, flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas was diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma. He would continue flying cheaply around the world, having lots of unprotected gay sex. He did much of his fucking in bathhouses. The legend and myth is that he was “patient zero” (from a misunderstanding of a CDC paper that dubbed him “patient O” for “Out of California”). Dugas had a zillion sex partners, and would even tell some of them after sex that he had “the gay cancer” and maybe now they would get it too. Gaëtan went to the Club Baths in San Francisco in 1981. I don’t know the dates he was there and I don’t know the date I was there, but there were a lot of people fixing to die whenever I had my little night of gay exploration.
I’m going to change some of the names of the main characters in this story. My girlfriend at this time was Tracy. I’m still friends with her, and she’s still just as wonderful, and she’s happy for me to use her name. But I’m going to call my “breeder friend” “Bernard” because I’ve fallen out of touch with him, and I don’t want to connect again to get his okay. I don’t feel like talking to him about twenty years of not talking. Most of the sex at the Club Baths was anonymous and most of the other people in this story are anonymous. I’m going to call my “gay friend,” the star of this story, “Charles,” because I don’t want to hunt down his family and get permission to tell a cute funny story about their dead son.
Charles died of AIDS in the late eighties. I’m sure many of those anonymous people I spent the evening with are also dead. See? It’s not a good backdrop for a sweet little story. We all have lost many wonderful, loving, talented people to AIDS. We all know the heartbreak. Please don’t confuse the lighthearted moments of this story as a lack of grief. I still grieve for friends I’ve lost to AIDS, but you have my word that Charles would laugh his well-fucked ass off at my putting this story in a book.
From 1979 to 1981 Teller and I were doing a three-man show called The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society at the Phoenix Theatre on Broadway in San Francisco. The third member was a guy named Wier Chrisemer. He played xylophone and pipe organ, did funny monologues, and believed in god. He finally got his fill of working with a couple of heathens, but we did 965 shows together in that theater in North Beach. We were down the street from the Condor Club, where Carol Doda, the most famous topless dancer in the sixties, was still shaking her beautiful early aftermarket “twin 44s.” We were across the street from the Mabuhay Gardens, where Teller and I would see the Dead Kennedys, Flipper, Black Flag, and a great band called Eye Protection.
The audience at the Phoenix Theatre outnumbered the performers by only 140. There wasn’t a very large staff—a couple box office people, a manager, and Charles, the bartender. It was San Francisco and it was theater, so most everyone working with us was gay. Three years is a long time for a little theater show, and we all got to know each other pretty well. There was no stage door to the theater, and I’d walk in the front and greet Charles every night. If I was early enough, we’d chat for a while as he was preparing the bar for preshow.
Charles was just talking:* “You know, Penn, you don’t know how hard it is to be a gay man living in a straight world.”
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br /> “What the fuck are you talking about? This is San Francisco. I’m a straight man living in a fucking gay world.”
“No, seriously, you don’t have to go to restaurants and see two gay men making out, but I have to see breeders making out all the time.”
“And that bothers you? Really?”
“How would you feel if men were making out all around you when you went out to dinner?”
“I’d feel fucking great. Why would that bother me? Men do make out on Castro and that doesn’t bother me at all. Not one bit. I’m telling you, really, I wouldn’t mind men fucking each other in the ass while I had dinner. I like people having sex.”
“No, you wouldn’t be comfortable. You just wouldn’t. I don’t see you hanging out at Club Baths.”
“I would. Sure I would. I mean . . . sure. Fuck, I’d love to go. When are you going next? I’ll go with you.”
“You can’t go to Club Baths.”
“Why not?” This might be a civil rights issue.
“Straight guys don’t go.”
“How will they know I’m straight?”
Charles laughed. He laughed a lot. He kept laughing.
I didn’t really know what he meant. Even after my night at the Club Baths, even after all these years, I still don’t really know what he meant. He certainly demonstrated what he meant, but I still don’t understand it. Was I born this way? Conditioned this way? Did I make a choice? I don’t know. But Charles had thrown down the nicely decorated, fabulous gauntlet. Now I had something to prove. “They can’t stop me from going. How will they know I’m straight?”
Charles laughed. “You’re not going to go to Club Baths with me.”
“Sure I am.”
“You have to be a member.”
“Bullshit. I mean, the initiation can’t be much different from what people go there for anyway, right? I’ll become a member.”
God, No! Page 11
