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

by Jillette, Penn

  I was the center of my parents’ lives. Every one of my accomplishments meant more to them than it did to me, and I was sure the center of my own life. In the bathtub that night, reading Ratso’s book, I went from thinking of my own biography to thinking of being a few pages into Zz’s biography and that brought me so much joy. I felt a new kind of peace after the Silverman book when I realized I wasn’t like Stern, that I could be happy as the center of my own life and I didn’t have to be the center of everyone else’s.

  The next feeling of peace came in the moment when I didn’t even want to be the center of my own life anymore. The peace of wanting to be just a few pages in Zz’s life.

  Zolten Jillette’s father was named Penn Fraser Jillette. Zolten’s first name was his mother Emily’s maiden name. “Zolten” means “King” in Hungarian, and Zolten’s father often weakly quipped that they’d named him after Elvis (Elvis was a popular singer in Houdini’s century who was also called “The King” of the popular music at the time). Zolten’s father was born in 1957, in Turners Falls, New Hampshire [writers never get that shit right]. The older Jillette was not a well-educated man. In his early life, Penn was homeless, worked carnivals and teamed up with Rudy (?) Teller to work as a comedy/magic duo, called Teller & Penn. The Teller & Penn show moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, at the sharp turn into the twenty-first century. Emily Zolten, then a golf producer, met Penn Jillette after a show. The two were married, and Zolten’s sister, Moxie Crimefighter Jillette, was born in 2005. Zolten Penn Jillette was born May 22, 2006. He would, of course, go on to lead the overthrow of the United States government and . . .

  It goes on for another 607 pages, but that’s the only place I’m mentioned.

  Listening to: “Powderfinger”—Neil Young and Crazy Horse

  Zz and his dad.

  AND SPEAKING OF . . . KEVIN POLLAK NEEDS TO PLAY HOUDINI IN A GREAT MOVIE

  IT’S A PAIN IN MY ASS THAT KEVIN POLLAK IS FUNNY. It makes him fun to have supper with, and he was good in The Aristocrats telling dirty jokes, but it fucks up my dream. My dream is to have Kevin Pollak play Houdini. Hey, Martin Luther King got his dream—what the fuck am I, chopped liver? Kevin looks like Houdini. Kevin sounds like Houdini (Kevin always sounds really lo-fi recorded on an Edison cylinder). In the world I want to live in, Kevin is playing Houdini in a movie that isn’t campy like Tony Curtis’s, or jive-ass like that Broadway musical with Hugh Jackman playing Houdini is going to be. I love Hugh Jackman. He’s been to our show, and he was fiercely nice and talented when he came backstage. He was more talented backstage than I am onstage. Hugh can sing and dance and everything, and his family is sweet and kind and he’s wicked good-looking. So, why the fuck is he playing Houdini? Houdini didn’t sing, dance, and he wasn’t fucking good-looking. This is why Kevin is perfect. Ugly-ass Kevin would be better than piece-of-ass Hugh. Also, Hugh is Australian, and Houdini was so American he was born in Budapest and pretended to be from Appleton, Wisconsin. Did Hugh ever claim to be from Wisconsin? Not that I know of, but what the fuck do I know. I don’t stalk Hugh’s hot sexy ass. Kevin could claim to be from Wisconsin, and not Frisco or whatever bullshit city he’s from. And if Hugh Jackman were from the USA, like Kevin is from the USA, I bet the assholes in his school would have called him “Huge Jack-off.” Assholes do that. Assholes make fun of your name even if it doesn’t mean anything. I sure would have called him “Huge Jack-off,” and I bet Kevin would have too, because Kevin’s funny and Kevin can be an asshole, and you can bet your huge jackman that Houdini was an asshole. Hugh Jackman is a great singer and dancer, and Houdini didn’t fucking sing and dance in his show. Hugh is going to play Houdini, and The New York Times will write another great blow job on him, because he sings, dances, and eats pussy, and that shocks the Times. I can stop Kevin from singing and dancing . . . I’m way bigger than he is. I can’t stop Hugh Jackman from dancing and singing because he has big Wolverine claws. Houdini didn’t have big Wolverine claws. Kevin doesn’t have big Wolverine claws, so why the fuck isn’t Kevin playing Houdini? There’s an intensity to Kevin that he disguises in his stupid stand-up act. If Kevin weren’t funny, we would be more likely to see that focus, playing Houdini. Kevin would be a great Houdini. A non-dancing, non-singing, not funny, not jack-off Houdini. Kevin’s name doesn’t sound like “jack-off,” but don’t bring up Polish jokes or short jokes with the little fellow, whose name sounds a lot like “Pollock.” I bet assholes called him “Pollock” and I bet Hugh Jackman never called Kevin “Pollock,” because Hugh is a gentleman. Houdini was a pure little fireplug of intensity. Who knows, maybe Houdini did the first Shatner that every other two-bit piece of shit comic rips off. How would I know? I think Kevin would be great as Houdini, so let’s have him star in a serous movie about Houdini, okay? You know, there hasn’t been a good Houdini movie. Harvey Keitel sure was good as Houdini (and I bet assholes made fun of the name “Harvey,” don’t you think? It’s kind of a goofy name) in that shitty movie about fairies. But that doesn’t count because the movie was shitty. Was Harvey better than Kevin, the Pollock, would be? I don’t know, but Harvey didn’t ask me to write jackshit for his book like Kevin asked me to write something for his book and Harvey was in The Piano and that sure blew. I wonder if Kevin would be naked in his Houdini movie like Harvey was in The Piano. Houdini stripped during his escapes, so naked wouldn’t be completely gratuitous, but I love gratuitous nudity anyway. I’d like to see Kevin’s cock playing Houdini’s cock. But I’d probably rather see Huge Jack-off’s cock, for lots of obvious reasons. Anyway, Houdini died at fifty-two, and Kevin is fifty-five now, so tick tock tick tock, people, let’s get this movie fucking made. Kevin will be great. Let’s all work together and make Penn’s dream come true and let Kevin play Houdini! Is that too much to ask? I mean, that and a cure for AIDS with the patent in my name, and an eleven-inch dick like Huge Jack-off—I bet that’s why he got the part.

  Listening to: “Edison Machine Rehearsal” (1914)—Harry Houdini

  THANKSGIVING —IF YOU WON’T PUT YOUR DICK IN IT, I’M NOT GOING TO EAT IT

  THE TITLE IS PERFECT. Why put legs on a snake and paint it? I should leave it at that, but I’ll tell the story.

  I was fairly young when I bought my first house, with showbiz money. I made the money doing street performance, Renaissance festivals, and small theater. Penn & Teller were completely unknown, but we were able to make good solid livings doing shows in the mid-seventies. We never planned on being famous, so as far as we were concerned, this was going to be it. Teller lived in Hollywood and I lived with my girlfriend in Orange County. My girlfriend worked in a topless bar, and we had enough money to buy her parents’ house when they retired. We took over the house she had spent some of her childhood in. I had a nice suburban, cul-de-sac house in Cali that I owned with the woman who inspired me to drop my cock in a blow-dryer.

  Teller and I had just done a production of a show that we wrote together called Mrs. Lonsberry’s Séance of Horror. Teller starred and I directed. It wasn’t good. We were two young men who hadn’t experienced the death of a loved one, writing about the death of loved ones as an excuse to do magic tricks. We should have written a play about driving around the country eating doughnuts—that was something we had experienced. I’m such a bad director. I hate telling people what to do and I don’t have any vision. I haven’t directed anything since.

  Because of producing and financing that play, we’d lost all our money and didn’t have any work, though we still had places to live. There was a few months’ lag between booking the gigs and doing them. I went crazy. I wasn’t mentally ill. I wasn’t a danger to others or myself. Maybe you could say I went eccentric. I stopped wearing clothes. I played croquet by myself in the backyard for hours, naked, with my stereo speakers in the window playing Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music over and over. That record is just feedback, and one track is a closed loop so the same few seconds repeat over and over until the power goes out. Andy Warhol wrote the liner notes to Metal Machine
Music, but he never listened to it. It’s difficult listening. It can make a crazy fellow crazier. I was obsessed with topiary, and we had a big hedge. I let it grow and tried to use a mirror and hedge clippers to do a self-portrait of myself naked, in bush, in the backyard with loud feedback playing and croquet set up for one. I have since found out that many of the “topiaries,” especially the ones at Disney, have wire frames underneath and aren’t bush all the way down. It bothers me even more than the Legoland Lego structures having frames underneath them. If you’re creating something of bush or Legos, use bush or Legos. (I also don’t like the Lego sets that tell my children what the set is supposed to build. That’s not creating, that’s following directions, and they ask me to help and I fuck it up.) Finding out that there were wire frames under the topiary was harder on me than finding out there was no god. Fuck those wire topiaries. My naked backyard topiary was a failure, but it was bush all the way down.

  Penn & Teller were just a pop-and-pop shop at this point. We called ourselves Buggs & Rudy Discount Corporation. Our operation is still called that. Buggs and Rudy were the imaginary business guys who handled Penn & Teller. I answered the phone as “Buggs,” and silent Rudy did all the contracts and the graphics. I read one cheesy business book that suggested that while negotiating it was helpful to know something the other party didn’t know. I took that to heart on a drive to Tijuana, where I bought a donkey hat. It was a straw cowboy hat with straw donkey ears sticking out, and a straw donkey tail down the back. I had painted my office fluorescent orange and green. I figured no one I was negotiating with by phone would know I was naked, save for a donkey hat, in a fluorescent orange and green room. I could drive a hard bargain.

  Yup, I went a little bugnutty. I was naked in that hat all the time, playing crazy music, and thinking. I would just sit and think. I didn’t really talk to anyone. I had a really nice stereo and I played it loud all the time, not just Metal Machine Music, but Sun Ra and Tiny Tim. I was afraid the neighborhood suburban teenagers in our cul-de-sac would steal my stereo (but not my music), so one of the few times I put clothes on, I put on a pair of gym shorts, my donkey hat and flip-flops and told the local teenagers stories about “Nam.” It worked. They stayed away from the house. I don’t know if it was the lies about combat, the donkey hat or the gym shorts, but my stereo was safe.

  The silent, loud, naked, brooding phase was coming to an end. Teller and I had to get back on the road and do shows. I can pull it together to be normal enough to do a Penn & Teller show, but that’s as far as I go. My girlfriend could now convince me to put on jeans and a shirt, so we decided to have a Thanksgiving celebration at our house.

  We invited a creepy elderly sideshow sword swallower, a lighting designer, Teller, a guy who had just quit dealing angel dust in Fresno and was hanging out with us to help him stay clean, and a geologist. It’s always important to have a geologist around so that if you end up in space, there’s someone to die first. At least that’s what happens on Star Trek.

  I love Thanksgiving. I just love it. My mom would make this great tuna dip and we’d eat it with Bugles. We had cranberry sauce from the can that I could squeeze through my teeth, celery with cream cheese spread on it, turkey, gravy, stuffing that was really just wet bread and goodness and none of that raisin, mushroom, or chestnut hippie shit, and lots of pie. It had no religious overtones for us; we didn’t say grace. And no one in our family watched football, so after the Macy’s parade, the TV was turned off. It was a pretty great day. We had little pilgrim name tags that I’d made as a young child and my mom still used them to show where we’d sit, even though we’d been sitting in the same places my whole life. My childhood Thanksgivings were Norman Rockwell. Norman Rockwell’s stuffing didn’t have fucking cornbread and chestnuts in it.

  We didn’t really have to invite the former angel dust dealer from Fresno to Thanksgiving because he was living with us. We took a liking to him, and he was living with us, until he went to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, my own alma mater. My girlfriend was the only one in the household who worked, and she was going to do the cooking for our Thanksgiving. Right before I went into my naked donkey-hat phase, I had told her that since she was working and I wasn’t, she could just name a kind of food that she liked and I would take a continuing education course in cooking at the community college, and cook her supper every night at two a.m. when she got off work. She suggested Chinese food. Others in the cooking class seemed to be there to meet people and get laid, but I was there to learn. I took a lot of notes, paid attention, bought a wok and every night after work, we had a home-cooked Chinese meal for two. I made my own fucking dumplings from scratch. The teacher said I was the best student she’d ever had. After three weeks, my girlfriend said, very politely, “I love all your Chinese cooking, but some night could we have something else?” I never cooked again. She was cooking the Thanksgiving turkey. If she needed me, I’d be working on my topiary.

  As part of his transition from drug dealer to clown, our friend decided to get a big laugh on Thanksgiving morning. I don’t know what got into his head, but he listened to my girlfriend complain about what time she had to get up to start the turkey and then set his alarm for ten minutes earlier. As she groggily walked to the kitchen, she heard a slapping sound and his voice saying in a Spanish accent, “C’mon, baby, you can take all of me.” She tentatively walked into the kitchen to see our housemate, with his boxers around his ankles, slapping the turkey and fucking it. I didn’t see the event, and it wasn’t clear from the story how simulated the sex with the turkey was. At Clown College they teach us to commit completely, but he hadn’t been to Clown College yet, so I don’t know whether there was an actual erect penis in our turkey, or just a limp one bouncing against it, but it was enough to make her scream. She thought it was real, then thought it was a joke, and then settled on it was real and now being passed off as a joke. He had to wait for me to wake up before he got his full laugh. I couldn’t stop laughing, and I still can’t see a turkey without hearing “C’mon, baby, you can take all of me” in a Spanish accent.

  As we sat around our beautiful Thanksgiving dinner table in Orange County, I told the other guests what had happened as we ate the turkey. I spooned the non-hippie stuffing onto my plate and bragged how our friend’s dick had been in that cavity. The lighting designer seemed a little put off, so I asked her, not completely rhetorically, “Why would I eat something that he wouldn’t put his dick in?”

  Since there was no good answer, we all enjoyed our turkey and stuffing, and then it was time for dessert. Our geologist hadn’t been killed by giant falling rocks in space, so he proudly displayed a flourless chocolate cake that he’d been working on for a few days. It was perfect and beautiful. I had one question, “Did you put your cock in it?”

  “No.” He laughed a lot.

  “Then I’m not eating it.”

  “Me neither,” a few people chimed in.

  He laughed more and then realized we weren’t kidding. Well, we were kidding, but we weren’t bluffing. He begged us, “C’mon, man, I worked really hard on this, and I want you to enjoy it.”

  “Not if you won’t put your dick in it.” I can be like that. Or rather, I’m always like that—she questioned me once, and I never cooked Chinese food again.

  There was a long hesitation, and the geologist proved himself. He pulled the flourless chocolate cake over to his place at the table. He stood up, unbuckled his pants, and dragged his cock all over the cake, while saying, “C’mon, baby, you can take all of me” in a Spanish accent. Thanksgiving is a holiday I can get into.

  The cake was way good.

  Eventually that girlfriend left me. It kind of tells you everything about me: naked in a donkey hat, talking as much as Teller does onstage, my girlfriend stayed with me, but when I started putting clothes on and chatting, she left me and took my donkey hat. She took the house, the car and the donkey hat and all I miss is the donkey hat. A lot of friends have promised they wo
uld find me another donkey hat, and they have all failed. One friend even went to Tijuana insisting she would find me a donkey hat, but no soap. Another friend made one. It was lovely, but it wasn’t the right hat. If you know what I’m talking about and can find a real donkey hat for me—get in touch—for a perfect donkey hat that fits, I’ll pay you a hundred dollars cash money (I can drive a hard bargain even as I sit here in jeans wearing a sandwich hat). I haven’t felt right since I lost my donkey hat.

  I don’t know what got into my head, but I still need that donkey hat. “I don’t know what got into my head, but . . .” When guys are sitting around telling stories, or as the carnies say, “cutting up jackpots,” those are the words I want to hear. It seems like all great stories have that phrase in them. I was on Miami Vice in the eighties because there was no other time to be on it. While we were shooting in NYC and Miami, I was also shooting a feature film with Judge Reinhold and doing eight shows a week Off-Broadway. I went almost three weeks without ever sleeping more than two hours at a time and most of that in limos and mobile homes. It’s as hard as you can work without having a job. The hardest work in showbiz is easier than any other job you can have in the world except the job of driving those big billboards on a trailer up and down the Vegas Strip. That job looks easy and fun, but doesn’t pay as well as showbiz. All that being said, you spend three weeks with Don Johnson and see how much you want to be alive.