The blow-dryer was cool by now. I couldn’t imagine what would happen if lesbian Mary found pieces of Penn’s cock in her blow-dryer. I looked into the end of the blow-dryer, and then reached in with my fingernail and cleaned the pieces of my grilled cock from the grating. I’m sure people have done things more sickening than that, but not in the United States of America. I put the blow-dryer back in place, carefully put my pants on over my underwear, and went out to sit in the living room and wait for the new day.
Mary got up first and went into the bathroom. I trembled as I heard her using the blow-dryer, but she got ready and left without a word.
Heather got up. She had slept well. She was in a good mood. She asked how long I’d been sitting there. I lied. She asked how I had slept. I lied. She asked if I wanted breakfast. I lied. She made us breakfast. I didn’t have to go to the airport for a while, and she didn’t have anything to do. We sat on the couch and talked. It wasn’t breakup talk. It was friends talk. I forgot about the horror oozing in my pants. I even made a few jokes. Out of the blue, she leaned over and kissed me, a good kiss. Heather was sexy. Heather moved fast. She put her hand on my thigh and slid it over my jeans to my crotch. I grabbed her wrist. I uttered the worst sentence anyone has to say: “Um, before you do that, I have to tell you something.”
Her hate level hit Mary’s as she waited for what I would say next.
I’m a smooth talker. I earn my living talking. Teller once said that I “tell the truth well.” I can spin. Heather was the first to hear “the blow-dryer story.” She found neither charm nor sympathy. She said two hateful words: “Show me.”
“No.”
“Show me.”
“No. I can’t. I don’t want to.”
“Show me. Stand up, take off your pants, and show me.”
“No.”
“Show me your cock that you dropped in my lesbian roommate’s blow-dryer.”
I know that some people get off on sexual humiliation. I suggest they show their burned genitals to an ex-girlfriend. I’ve never experienced such humiliation, and I was the first one thrown off Dancing with the Stars. I dropped my pants and peeled the underwear off the blistered head of my penis. I stood there with her staring at my wounded, limp cock.
“Put your pants back on and get out of here.”
“Hey, listen, we were doing well. It’s not my fault. I didn’t do it on purpose. It was just an accident.”
“Things like this happen to you. Things like this don’t happen to normal people. I want a normal life. Get out of here.”
I put my pants on and went to LAX. I sat at the airport with my penis scabbing to my underpants. I flew back to NYC to continue being a star of stage, screen, and television.
Believe me, if I had had a cell phone with a camera back then, there would be the coolest picture in the world right fucking here!
“New York, New York”
—Frank Sinatra
Hello Dere
Marty Allen and Steve Rossi were on The Ed Sullivan Show forty-four times. They were also guests three of the four times the Beatles were on that show. They were a big comedy team back when there were comedy teams.
Comedy teams are out of fashion. The Smothers Brothers announced their retirement recently in Vegas, and during the announcement Tommy said that the only working comedy team he could think of was Penn & Teller. When Entertainment Weekly did their “Funniest People” list, they called our office to say we were going to lead their sidebar on top comedy teams. Then they called back and said they’d realized we’d be the only ones in a comedy team sidebar, so we’d go between Janeane Garofalo and Goldie Hawn on the big list.
When we were on Broadway, I got a phone call from an interviewer who had interviewed me before. She said, “I used to work for People, then I worked for Us, now I work for Self.” Yup.
Partnership got a bad rap. Friendship and loyalty started getting called “codependence.” I love Ayn Rand as much as the next guy, and would have loved to have been the next guy if I’d been born a bit earlier, but sometimes you can be more of an individual as part of a team than alone.
In the fifties, comedy teams were everything. The biggest stars in the world at the time, and in the history of the United States, were Martin and Lewis. By just about any way you want to measure, Dino and Jerry were bigger in their day than Sinatra, Elvis, or the Beatles in theirs. Their crowds of fans stopped traffic when they were in New York City.
Teller and I have been working together for over thirty-five years. This partnership is the only serious job I’ve ever known. I met Teller when I was in high school, and we started working together right after. I guess Teller and I are friends. We were together around the deaths of our parents and the births of my children, but we don’t really socialize. We see a movie and have dinner together without a business purpose maybe once or twice a year. I’ve been to Teller’s house fewer than a dozen times in the past twenty years. We’re business partners. It’s like we own a dry cleaning business together. We’re a pop-and-pop shop. We’re not partners because we love each other or we’re best friends; we’re partners because we do better stuff together than we do alone. Our partnership is not monogamous—we do lots of stuff solo and with other people—but the stuff we do together is better. I really hope you like this book, but you know it would have been better if Teller helped me with it; he was busy doing Shakespeare, so you get me alone. Sorry.
In the nineties, Penn & Teller were playing Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. We were headlining. We were in the big room. I remember talking to Elvis Costello, Don Johnson (back in the Miami Vice days), and Billy Gibbons. The conversation was going well, and we talked about getting together the next day. None of us really thought we were going to, but we were being polite. Elvis said we should give him a call at the hotel and told us he was registered under the name of some famous forties crime writer. Don gave his checked-in name as that of a famous war hero. Billy Gibbons was registered under a famous nautical name. It was my turn, and I said I was registered “under the name Penn Jillette—Jillette with a ‘J.’”
We were headlining the next night at Trump Plaza, and I was registered in my star suite as “Penn Jillette.” The hotel room phone rang about noon and it was Steve Rossi. He introduced himself and said he and his partner, Marty, were playing in the lounge. I had never met him, but I was thrilled to hear his voice. At a casino, there are showrooms and there are lounges. Showrooms are theaters; they have seats and they’re quiet except for the noise of the show itself. There’s a bar, but it’s out of the room. There are ushers and assigned seats. Lounges don’t usually have walls; they are open to the casino, and you hear the jangle of slot machines and people talking and screaming while the show is going on. There are tables and a bar for people to drink at. When Louis Prima played the lounge, I’m sure all the attention in the whole casino was on his band, but for most entertainers, it’s hard to feel like you’re holding anyone’s attention in a casino lounge.
Mr. Rossi was on the phone and he was inviting us to see Allen & Rossi in the Trump lounge that night, since we didn’t open our own show until the next night.
I remembered watching Allen & Rossi with my mom and dad when I was a child. I saw them on Ed Sullivan with the Beatles. I was very excited. On a whim, I called Teller’s room (he was registered under the name Teller, “like a bank clerk”).
Teller wanted to join me for Allen & Rossi. This would be our social outing for that year. The crew was busy with load-in, so it was just the two of us. We met at the lounge, ordered our sodas, and sat at a table. Just the two of us, ready to watch a comedy team work.
There weren’t many other people in the showroom. There was a TV on a wheeled cart on the stage next to the grand piano. It was showing A & R’s greatest Sullivan appearances, Marty Allen with his fright wig hair (look who’s talking) saying, “Hello dere!” Just as funny as you could be in black and white. I think Marty Allen’s wife opened for them, singing standards to grand piano ac
companiment. She sang well, and soon the clang and clatter of the slot machines left our consciousness and we were just watching a show.
Marty and Steve hit the stage. I think they had broken up about when the Beatles did and gotten together and quit a few times since then. There was some modern material, some Michael Jackson and Viagra jokes here and there. Some new movie titles and busty starlet names were slugged in. Steve sang well and was the perfect straight man. Marty was funny. They committed like motherfuckers. They were working like they were on the most important show in television, with people still screaming from the Beatles. They were on and focused. They were great.
If you were doing a movie, this would have been a sad scene. Of the fewer than a couple dozen people in the lounge, some of them weren’t even there for the show. The sound system was fighting to get over the casino noise. Some of these routines they had been doing the same way for forty years. They were still a great comedy team, but this wasn’t the high point of their career. A couple of fucking magicians were playing the big room.
I looked over at Teller and watched him watch them. He was totally focused on their every word and move. He was watching Hendrix at Woodstock. He was watching the debut of the Rite of Spring, the opening of Psycho. He was there.
I once met Lisa Lampanelli for dinner before one of her headlining shows in Vegas. She said to me, “Now that I’m playing these big rooms and getting all this money and respect, I don’t want to go back to the shit holes. I can’t do it. I can’t go back down. I just can’t.” I shrugged.
I was once talking to a Vegas headliner magician. He said to me, “Now that I’ve had theaters with my name on them, I can’t go back to playing shit holes. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.” I shrugged.
As I watched Teller at the Allen & Rossi show, there was a break in the action while people were applauding and laughing from the last bit and waiting for the next bit. Teller’s attention wavered for a moment, and I saw him look around at the room with the few people, and the shabby stage, and the sound of the casino insulting the purity of the show. I pictured us coming out on that stage after a TV had shown us doing the cockroaches on Letterman and the upside-down bit on SNL. I leaned over and quietly said to Teller, “You know, this is us in a very few years.”
Teller looked around the room. He took it all in again, doing a slow pan like a movie showing that our heroes were now playing the toilets.
He looked over at me and smiled a big smile and said, “I am so okay with that.”
I began crying just a little, with happiness. Teller is my business partner, we work together, we’re just two guys working together to make a buck.
But, in that smile and that sentence, I loved him so much.
“More”
—Steve Rossi
• AFTERWORD •
Atheism Is the Only Real Hope Against Terrorism:
There Is No God (but Allah)
The enemy is not Muslims. Muslims are people. The enemy is not people. People are good. The enemy is not Islam. The enemy is not god. There is no god.
The enemy is faith. Love and respect all people; hate and destroy all faith.
What the fuck was George W. Bush talking about when he said:
The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran itself: “In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.” The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.
W certainly knows more about Islam than I do. What the fuck do I know about Islam? I don’t know jack shit. One of my fleeting goals a few years ago was to learn to read Arabic well enough to read the real Koran, but I decided to learn to bow Bach on my upright bass instead. Maybe I’ll learn Arabic next year and see if I can get added to a few more watch lists. I won’t change my name to Cat Stevens or anything, but just chatting on the iPhone in Arabic might get me flagged faster than a squishy bomb in my panties and my dad ratting me out.
I didn’t learn Arabic, and I haven’t read the Koran, not even in English. I’ve read the Bible three times cover to nutty cover, but I’ve barely thumbed through the Koran at the Vegas Barnes & Noble. I have no idea what’s in it. I have no reason to attack Muslims. I don’t know anything about the revealed wisdom or even the culture. I have no beef (or pork) with any Muslims. None. Muslims are people.
I have been to Egypt. Teller and I shot some TV show there. Our hotel in Cairo had “This way to Mecca” arrow stickers on the dressers to point everyone in the right direction for prayer. Teller’s room was directly below mine and the same size and shape, but someone had moved his dresser to the perpendicular wall. The sticker had not been reaimed, so if Teller had trusted the sticker, his salah would have pointed the wrong way. Remember, it wasn’t us that moved the dresser. We were in the Middle East; we were scared to monkey with anything.
In the USA, I’m an asshole, and that can get some idiots writing angry letters. So what? I’m committed to my beliefs deeply enough to have an assistant read some angry letters written in crayon, but I’m not committed enough to actually risk anything. Calling Mother Teresa “Motherfucking Teresa” on TV in the USA wasn’t a big deal. It just got one more dipshit in his garage somewhere who calls himself Catholic even after his divorce, and claims by his lonesome to be a “league,” to take offense. He wrote a few threatening letters and added me to his thinly veiled death-wish list with Bill Maher, Sarah Silverman, and Trey Parker on his FrontPage–produced, Geocities-hosted cheesy website. Matt Stone and Teller weren’t on his hate list. Catholic boy was too stupid to realize that the partner who doesn’t do the specific voice might still do some writing. Saying “Motherfucking Teresa” a zillion times on TV got me less flack than giving my daughter the middle name “CrimeFighter.” I think that shows you how much serious power religion in the USA has nowadays.
But we’re careful with Muslims. Again: Christopher Hitchens said, “There are no atheist martyrs.” That’s good thinking. If Penn & Teller were ever going to seriously punk a religion, we’d pick the Amish. Fuck them all and the nonviolent horse and buggy they rode in on.
In Egypt, loudspeakers would call people to prayer while we were trying to shoot our stupid TV show, and every time I heard the English translation of the Shahada, “There is no god but Allah,” I would hear the first four words and think it was great. I really agreed with the first four words, “There is no god . . .” Man, I am so down with that. Agreeing with two-thirds of something religious is a personal best for me. In “Jesus died for our sins,” there’s nothing I agree with. I’m not sure Jesus ever lived. I don’t believe dying helps anything, and I’m not down with the idea of sin. I’m not even happy with “for” or “our,” those jive little pissant words. There’s nothing in Jesus for me.
Of the 1,200,000,000 Muslims in the world today, about 1,200,000,000 of them are good people who will never hurt anyone. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are good because the overwhelming majority of people are good. But of the terrorists who have attacked the USA recently, a lot of them were followers of Islam. George W. Bush and Obama have to say how it’s just a few bad Muslim apples, and that’s just true. The number of Muslim bad guys attacking the USA is very low, but the Muslim percentage of terrorists attacking the USA is pretty high. Even if you call the antiabortion murderers and PETA whack jobs terrorists, the Muslims still have a high percentage. The 9/11 guys, they were followers of Islam. The would-be shoe bomber was and is a follower of Islam. The (would-be in one sense, and actually in another sense) dick bomber was and is a follower of Islam, and is still a dick. The Fort Hood guy was Muslim, but a lot of people seem to want to say he “went postal” instead of “he went Islam.” Being a letter carrier is a job; Islam is a faith. Any job deserves respect; faith does not.
It’s not fair to blame all
the Muslims for the horrible acts of a few people. That’s wrong. You cannot blame all those people. And we shouldn’t blame a particular faith for the horrible acts of a few people. At least we shouldn’t blame just Islam. We should blame all faiths. We should blame faith in general. But Bush and Obama couldn’t do that. No religious person can do that. Being religious means being okay with believing in things without evidence. That’s the most important part of any faith. Catholics say that questioning is bad; Jews say questioning is good; but they all say that faith is a-okay. They have to. The deal religious folks make with each other is: we’ll argue about the specifics of our separate bugnutty crazy, but the general idea of being bugnutty crazy is good. Once you’ve condoned faith in general, you’ve condoned any crazy shit done because of faith.
The only people who can really speak out against religious terrorists are atheists. We’re the only ones who can say, “We don’t respect crazy shit that you believe.” If someone believes they have the intellectual and moral right to believe that there is a positive force in the universe that watches over us and created us, well, that’s not just the camel’s nose under the tent on a slippery slope, it’s the whole camel on roller skates living in your kitchen.
If you can say that you believe something just because you feel it, what do you say to Charlie Manson? Are you going to attack Charlie Manson for not being faithful enough? Look in those crazy eyes, just south of the crazy swastika carved into the crazy skin of his crazy forehead. There’s some real faith in there. There are things that Charlie Manson takes on faith. And how is that faith different? Is the argument against Charlie that not enough people share his faith? Of course it’s not true that the Beatles were sending Chuck messages to kill those people, but Charlie sure had faith that they were. If you assert that you believe shit you can’t prove because you feel it, don’t you have to give everyone that right? I’m not just talking about obvious crazy shit like virgin birth, arks full of critters, and seas parting. I’m talking about any kind of faith.
God, No! Page 22
