In the twentieth century, we got pretty good at one-way time travel. Since language developed, we have been able to travel to the past, and more and more people since Gutenberg (not Steve, he was off Dancing with the Stars almost as fast as I was) have been able to write messages to the future. In the twentieth century, we learned to send pictures to the future and now video. I have a picture of my mom at two years old and another of her at seven, about the same age as my daughter now, and about one hundred years apart.
We have the imagination to imagine our daughters and our mothers playing together at the same age and we have the technology to feed that imagination. I daydream about my mom, seven years old, in her little wool coat and hat, knocking on the door and coming over for a playdate. I see Valda and Moxie being nice to me for a while, and then running up to Mox’s room to play princesses. I imagine my mom coming down wearing my little girl’s plastic shoes and yellow princess dress. It would take my daughter about two minutes to teach her grandmother to play Plants vs. Zombies, and they would have the unstuck time of their lives. They could be mean to my son, Zolten, together and leave him out of their little girl play and then make him laugh that pure laugh that explodes my world and frees my heart. The daydream of my mom and my daughter at the same age breaks my heart. I want it so badly. I promise you that I want it more than Piers Morgan wants there to be a god and an afterlife. My desire for something impossible does not make it less impossible. My imagination is not bad. My imagined Val/Mox playdate is a real part of me. It informs my love of my daughter and my love of my mom. That loves exists. That love is not imaginary. That love is in me. And as far as memories count, and they do count, my mom lives on, and she lives on as that seven-year-old girl in that wool hat from the time-traveling picture. She lives on in a way that I never experienced her for real and never will experience her. It’s just a picture, and that’s okay.
We do have time travel. Depending on whatever shitty sci-fi story you’re following, the rules of time travel change, but they often allow you to go back in time, allow you to know what’s happening, even though you can have no effect on the events themselves. I look at the picture of my mom from 1916 and I can see her little wool hat and her smile, the smile I recognize from her deathbed eighty-four years later. By any real definition, we’re time traveling. I’m time traveling in any real sense.
New generations will be seeing more and more high-quality video from times they weren’t alive. They’ll be experiencing part of a time when they did not exist. This is a fairly new thing. I have home movies my brother-in-law and my nephew ripped to computer video that I can watch of myself learning to juggle at age twelve. The sixties and seventies are pretty well documented, and lots of people alive today weren’t alive then. My high school girlfriend, Anne, who is some sort of genius scientist now, thinks any theory about the modern world changing human nature is bullshit. Anne points out that what humans do is adapt. It’s what we’re best at. We got good at going faster than the speed of sound and being able to talk to people all over the world at once. That doesn’t fuck with our attention spans. None of that changes our humanity.
But I wonder what all this time travel does to our sadness. I know we’ve adapted, but how is sadness affected? Just one hundred years ago, the old lady down the street was always and eternally the old lady down the street. You could hear stories about her as a young person, and you could read things she wrote as a young person, and maybe even see a drawing or photograph of her as a younger person, but these were little glimpses. Soon we’ll have hi-def 3-D images of our grandmothers sexting.
Davy Jones died in February 2012. We have a lot of pictures of him at age twenty. We have video and shows of him at twenty and now he’s dead at sixty-six and it’s all laid out there. Mortality is rammed down our throats through our eyes and ears. Paul Newman is the most attractive human being I have ever seen in person. I saw him live and realized the camera was not kind to him. The camera made him uglier. The camera makes David Letterman look better. Off-camera, in person, Julia Roberts is wonderful, but looks a bit like a tapeworm. That’s a lot of mouth to see up close. We don’t have the technology yet to capture the beauty of Paul Newman. But we do have enough technology to watch him get old. Paul never got ugly and that helps my heart, but he got old. Pretty doesn’t always hang in there, Mr. Gibson. Things you’ve felt can show in your face sometimes. Movies can show us aging at its prettiest, and that’s Paul Newman, but it’s still sad. It’s still a bit melancholy to watch The Left-Handed Gun become Nobody’s Fool. We live so much longer now than we used to. We are more aware of how time flies and what changes have happened and will happen. I can no longer remember the feeling of holding my daughter in one hand and her being barely bigger than my one hand. She’s now a little girl. And she will be a young woman, then a woman, then an old woman. I show her pictures of her daddy as a baby. “Did you poop your pants?”
“I sure did.”
Piers Morgan was trying to scare me with death. Fuck death. He can’t scare me with death. I got death hanging. Death is November 9, 1909—death is nothing. I’m not afraid of nothing. But time passing is something different. I’m terrified of time passing. I tremble at the thought of my little girl growing up. I can’t face my son growing stronger than me and helping me up the stairs. I quake at the prospect of looking at my adult children’s faces with eyesight worse than I have now.
Motherfucker.
Piers, you have no chance of scaring me with death, because all the fear possible is contained in life. The awful truth of how sweet life can be is enough to crack me every second. That black-and-white picture of my mom, alive, and bursting with her future in her little wool hat and matching mittens—that, Piers, is what scares the shit out of me, and your TV religion can’t protect any of us from that. I’m not afraid of a hot lead enema followed by some serious ass-to-mouth with Satan—give it your worst. I’m afraid of a life that is so full of joy and love that every second just bursts by and is gone. It’s a gorgeous, detailed, 3-D, surround sound, no-flutter-in-the-bass mural done by 10 billion artists, and it’s whipping by the car window at the speed of sound, and I’ll never come back to it. I can take pictures of it, but in the time I hold those pictures up, I’ll have missed another billion images and experiences.
You want to scare me, Piers, try that. But no one claims god can change that. God might promise everlasting life, and the possibility of seeing my loved ones again, but he can’t promise that this life that I’m living right now won’t go by. I want every time I touch my son’s hand to never end, and I want to experience the next time I touch his hand after not touching his hand for a while.
I want the impossible. But I’ll settle for what we have. Everything in the world has to be enough. Everything in the world is enough. I’m rejoicing that what scares me and breaks my heart is the beauty of what I have right now.
Are you afraid of death?
November 9, 1909.
I’m making my mom’s birthday a holiday. I’m afraid of a life stuck in time, but so what? I’m not afraid of death.
Listening to: “Up to Me”—Bob Dylan
My mom, 6 years old.
Mox, age 6, and me.
I DEFY THE JAILS OF THE WORLD TO HOLD MY SON
WHEN THE FUTURE LOOKS BACK ON American entertainers of the twentieth century, it’s all going to come down to Houdini or Elvis. A friend of mine who teaches some bullshit rock-and-roll course at UNLV was asked by a student, one who was “studying” rock and roll, who George Harrison was. A teacher at our child’s preschool had never heard of Johnny Carson. There’s your legacy—but ask anyone in America to name a magician, and they’ll name Houdini as often as anyone who’s working today. A few years ago, my buddy Eddie Gorodetsky looked at the figures and predicted that by the year 2053 every man, woman and transgendered child in the USA would be in Vegas impersonating Elvis.
I think Houdini will win. To disappear by “pulling a Houdini” is already a phrase in dicti
onaries. Houdini was born in Budapest, claimed to be from Appleton, Wisconsin, and stood in front of a nation of immigrants at the sharp turn into the twentieth century and screamed, “I defy the jails of the world to hold me!” My buddy Larry “Ratso” Sloman wrote that Houdini was “America’s First Superhero.”
Let’s forget about Houdini for a second and concentrate on my buddy Ratso. The births of my children were wonderful events, but even that joy has been eclipsed by becoming an adult who has a buddy called Ratso. My cell phone rings, the name “Ratso” pops up, and the voice of pure NYC says, “Hey, Penn. It’s Rats.” What more could a man accomplish in life than getting that phone call? Well, I’ll tell you: Kinky Friedman is a two-Ratso man. When Kinky gets a call from Ratso, he has to ask which one. Hard to beat that, but my caller ID flashes “Kinky” when he calls, so maybe we’re even.
Most people go through a Houdini phase. They read a bio in junior high school and get caught up in the escape artist and magician. Even David Copperfield has admitted that Houdini had a great press agent.
I read Kenneth Silverman’s book Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss: American Self-Liberator, Europe’s Eclipsing Sensation, World’s Handcuff King & Prison Breaker in the mid-nineties, at a time when I was doing the Howard Stern show a lot. I was on with Gilbert Gottfried, Sam Kinison and other comedy monsters. I struggled those mornings to get a laugh in and plug the show we were doing then on Broadway.
Since my childhood Houdini phase—watching the old Tony Curtis movie on TV and reading encyclopedia entries—I had felt a kinship to Houdini. He worked in magic, I worked in magic. He hated fake psychics, I hated fake psychics. We were both momma’s boys. I lied to myself that Houdini was an atheist not a Jew and that we had the same goals in showbiz. But while I was reading Silverman’s book, I was disabused of that kinship. Being a magician and skeptic didn’t matter to Houdini; he was first and foremost a superstar. After that time, when interviewers would ask me about Houdini, I stopped giving an opinion of my own. I would answer, “If you want to know about Houdini, don’t talk to us or Copperfield, talk to Bob Dylan. Dylan knows what it’s like to sum up a generation’s dreams and goals. I don’t.”
By the end of the eighties, Teller and I were far more successful than we had ever expected to be. The Penn & Teller pop-and-pop business plan was to eke out a couple of livings doing shows that we loved. We accomplished that within a few months of working together, and we were pretty satisfied. We kept working, just because we loved working, but every larger accomplishment just amazed us. We figured when we started that a couple hundred creeps a night might want to see our weird-ass shit, and we were off by an order of magnitude. A couple thousand creeps a night wanted to see our weird-ass shit. Creeps wanted to see us on TV. It still shocks us how many fucking creeps there are.
After I read the Silverman book, I realized Houdini was nothing like me. In the nineties, Stern was “The King of All Media.” As brilliant as Stern was, as far beyond anyone’s expectations that he’d risen, Stern was never satisfied. King of all media wasn’t enough. He was disgusted that people listened to anyone on the radio besides him. Similarly, when I talked to Madonna in the eighties, it was clear that she didn’t even consider the possibility that she had peaked or ever would—people needed to forget there was ever a Marilyn Monroe or Debbie Harry or Elvis, and she still wouldn’t be satisfied.
I finished the Silverman book in the bathtub at about two a.m. and the alarm went off at five a.m. to get in the limo and head uptown to do the Stern show. As I sat in the limo, thinking about Houdini, I realized that if I wanted to know what Houdini was really like, I should not look into my own heart, but I should look into Stern’s eyes. Stern and Madonna were driven beyond anything I’d ever imagined. I enjoy working in showbiz, but they need to be famous and that’s all the difference. Houdini could have talked to Stern and Madonna, and they could have argued about who was more famous. Houdini would have had nothing to say to me, not a word. Houdini would have said that he heard that the little guy and I did a cute little show for a few creeps. Hating psychics was not the point; fame was. It was during that limo ride, that I decided that it wasn’t only lack of talent and looks that put the cap on my career. It was also my own satisfaction with my success. I didn’t know it—it didn’t happen until decades later—but it was that morning that I decided to try to become a good father. I still worked really hard and wrote and did TV and radio and shows, but I knew I wouldn’t ever speak for anyone but Teller, let alone a whole generation. I would never define anyone but myself. That shouldn’t have been a revelation. Everyone else knew what league I was in, but I needed to read that book to realize I wasn’t in the league with Harry, Howard, and Maddy. They weren’t having fun doing shows; they were walking on the moon.
About a decade later, another Houdini book came out and again I was reading it at two a.m. in the bathtub, and again had an epiphany. This was Ratso’s biography, The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero. I wasn’t at the end of the book. This time I was on page eight. I wasn’t into the juicy parts where Ratso speculates that Houdini could have been a spy, might have been poisoned, and could have been banging one of the spiritualists. I was just in the early nuts and bolts. Ratso and his co-author, Bill Kalush, were writing about Houdini’s father. Mayer Samuel Weisz, a lawyer in Budapest who moved his family to Appleton, Wisconsin, and supported them by pretending to be a rabbi.
Before I started the book, I knew I wouldn’t identify with Houdini, but with a warmth in my heart that heated up the bathwater, I realized I identified with Mayer Samuel Weisz. I’m much less of a rabbi than Mayer was. Our different philosophies didn’t matter. I couldn’t even lie to myself that Rabbi Weisz was an atheist. But Mayer was a dad, and as I read in the bathtub, my infant son slept in the next room. I loved thinking that one day I could be fewer than eight pages into my son’s 608-page biography. That would be enough for me.
I don’t need or even want my son, Zolten Penn Jillette, to have a biography written about him. I don’t want him to be in showbiz. I don’t want him not to be in showbiz. I don’t want him to be driven. I don’t want little Zz to grow up to be Houdini, Stern or Ciccone, but I don’t want him not to be like them either. I don’t really have any plans or dreams for him. If he’s an alcoholic pastor who listens to the Grateful Dead, I’ll still love him. What I want most for him is for me to love him, and again that goal has also been surpassed. Perhaps the greatest thing about overshooting my goals, being more successful than I deserve or I had planned, is there’s nothing I need my children to finish for me. Earl Woods got too late of a start to ever be the golfer he really wanted to be, so he helped Tiger be the greatest golfer of all time (so my wife tells me, I don’t even know what end of a golf club to blow into).
My mom and dad didn’t push me. They were older when I was born, and they didn’t want anything for me except for me to be happy. As far as my children are concerned, I’m not even sure I need them to be happy. We all want happiness for our children, but they don’t have to be happy about everything all the time. Life must include sadness, and there’s peace and truth to be found in sadness. The best times are not always the happiest times, but the times spent in the flow, the times spent getting things done, the times spent living.
Right around when Zz was born, I took a set of clothes that I wore performing the Penn & Teller show and put them aside for Zz in the future. The Keith Richards belt that I’d worn in every show since the first Off-Broadway run, the Dr. Martens, the pork pie hat that I wore to play pre-show jazz, the gray suit, even my boxer shorts. I had them all vacuum-packed like a wedding dress and put into storage. I don’t know what he’ll do with them. Maybe he’ll keep them for his children, if he has them, and let them throw out the vacuum pack if they don’t want it. I like the thought of that generation throwing away my show clothes. But if he wants, Zz will be able to see what his dad wore onstage around the time he was born.
My mom a
nd dad (and most moms and dads) said that I would never understand how much they loved me until I had my own children. I’ve started saying that often to my children. I want Moxie and Zz to know that they don’t understand that yet, so that when they do understand, their hearts will explode in joy. It’s the love you don’t choose, the animal love that gives the reason to live.
Love for one’s children is like a hard-on in a strip club. It’s purer and stronger feeling than the place in my brain where I make decisions. I chose to love my friends. I chose to love my wife. I think I even chose to love my parents as I got older. But I had no say in loving my children. The love for my children is beyond my control. It’s animal. It’s like hunger. It’s more than hunger—there have been times I could control my hunger (although I can’t remember any off the top of my head). I love my children like I need to breathe.
One of the things I love about going to strip clubs is getting turned on by women I don’t like. I love that I can see a woman naked except for a cross around her neck and feel my cock getting hard. That cross around her neck means I would never want to hang out with her, but my body doesn’t know that. My body thinks that I need to be fucking her soon, so we better get the cock ready.
The one thing that every one of our ancestors back to single cell sludge had in common was they reproduced and their offspring reproduced. If an organism failed to reproduce, that organism was a dead end, not an ancestor. The love that I feel for my children is different from the love I have for the cute things they say that get quoted by my wife on Twitter and the fun I have with them. It’s different from the hugs and the kisses they give. The real love is a biological urge. Love that is like breathing.
Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! Page 6
