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

by Jillette, Penn

  The private Jillette New Year’s Day is spent at home with the family. But public New Year’s for sub-star celebrities means writing up our jive-ass New Year’s resolutions beforehand to sell tickets. These are unabashed advertisements for our show: “I resolve to try to go another year without blowing Teller’s brains out on the Penn & Teller Theater Stage at the Rio All-Suites Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, during our World-Famous Bullet Catch—featured as the #1 Best Magic Trick of All Time by TV’s Fifty Greatest Magic Tricks.” We’re always trying to put asses in the seats, but I’ve never made a genuine New Year’s resolution.

  I’m the essence of a sixteen-year-old Midwest mall girl in the body of the three-hundred-pound fifty-six-year-old Las Vegas man. I don’t watch any sporting events. I’ve never seen any whole game of anything live or on TV. Paul Simon and Lorne Michaels took me to one Yankees game. We arrived late, talked, ate hot dogs, and left early. I once escorted a woman who worked in our Penn & Teller office to a local Vegas hockey team. She was trying to explain “icing” to me when the guy in the Thunderbird mascot suit recognized me through the face mesh of his sweaty heavy suit and decided that we would do improvisation together while the hockey game was going on. I stood up and waved when he beckoned me to do so. I did a little dance in the aisle with him. Then he sat on my lap. Then we stood up again. He left and came back a bit later and we did all of our bits again. When he left again, I snuck out. I was out of material. My repertoire for interacting with a guy dressed in a blue suit is waving, laughing, dancing and receiving an ever so slightly too-sexual-for-public smelly lap dance. Once I’ve run through that whole show twice, I think it’s time to tag it and bag it. I believe I could have been there for days without any Thunderbird character distractions and still wouldn’t have understood icing.

  When I was a kid, my mom and dad took me on a yearly trip to the numismatics convention in Houston, and my mom took me to a baseball game at the Astrodome. She was doing her best to make me act like a normal boy. Mama Tried. I loved the tour of the Astrodome, but I insisted on leaving before the first game of the double header was over. I don’t know who was playing, but I do know that the inside space of the Astrodome is so big they have their own weather system, but it’s not as big in terms of open cubic space as the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral. A buddy of mine was almost fencing in the Olympics, so I saw half of one event there. He taught me to fence in my apartment. As soon as our first practice match started, I said, “Watch out for the TV.” He turned; I stabbed him and retired. A few weeks later, I tried that with a smarter friend who was teaching me boxing out in the alley behind our house. “Watch out for the car!” I said, and he punched me hard in the face. I retired from boxing after one round too.

  I can explain what bugs me about sports and games in general. For some Caesars Palace PR thing, they invited Penn & Teller to a real boxing match. It wasn’t heavyweights, but it was heavy. There were billboards and building and bus ads with the fighters’ faces all over Vegas. This was real boxing, and Penn & Teller were right up front in our sub-star position, waving and waiting to dance with any bird-suited boxing mascot who happened to show up. I thought I was going to get all acoustic-guitar-I’ll-get-laid-by-being-a-pussy-peacenik about the whole thing. I thought that the real blood would freak me. I love the artistic depiction of violence, but I don’t like the real thing. Hillary Clinton gets all high and mighty about video games and how violent they are. Fuck her—they aren’t violent at all. Video games depict fantasy violence and someone in her position should know the difference. Real violence is what her boss does with the real drone planes really killing real people really spilling real blood. Drones may also be run by joystick, but there’s no fantasy and no joy. People who love artistic depictions of violence are celebrating being alive with art. Art is life. Drones mean death. Even though the people bleeding in a boxing match are choosing to take the chance to bleed, I thought the real violence of boxing would freak me and I’d get all emo about it. But my problem was the opposite. I was driven crazy by how little the guys got hit. Most every punch was blocked. One guy is trying to get a punch in and the other guy is stopping him. The frustration of all these little plans being foiled was nerve-wracking. “Get your arms out of the way and let that guy hit you in the face.” Later I read a great quote from Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan until they get hit.” That’s what really bugged me. I hated that every one of these guys had a Rocky story and a coach and a plan and the plans never worked because the other guy knew how not to get hit. I hated the frustration.

  I spent most of my childhood juggling. Hours and hours and days and days and weeks and weeks and years. I juggled and I masturbated and once I tried them at the same time. I didn’t have video equipment then; otherwise I hope you would be watching it on the Web right now. I practiced all the time (juggling, that is; I was a natural at masturbation). I did shows (juggling, not masturbation; supply and demand). And I practiced some more. And I’d do a show with cheerleaders and masturbate a little more and then do more shows, then practice more, and as I got a little older, fucking and unicycling were added to my activities. I had a high school girlfriend who I’m sure was small enough for me to fuck on the unicycle, and although we fucked everywhere else, we never did it while riding. I bet the Web would have inspired us to go the extra mile—well, I was sixteen then, so it would have been only the extra fifty feet, but we should have done it. There must be video of someone getting fucked on a unicycle but I haven’t found it yet. It would crush the guy’s balls something wicked, but it would be so worth it.

  When Teller and I are promoting our act, we’re in a competition—people decide every night in Vegas whether to see us or guys on skateboards wearing featureless face masks and Beatles wigs. We compete for the attention of the ticket buyers. But it’s different from sports. No one is fucking us up. There isn’t anyone who tries to guess our dreams and plans and then fucks them up on purpose. I take that back—there’s one magician in Vegas who I think has gone out of his or her way (I put that “her” in to throw you off the scent, but the fact that there are very few women in the stupid magic boy’s club makes my attempt not very successful) just to fuck Penn & Teller up. This gal or guy wouldn’t sign a deal at one of the hotels we worked at before the Rio, until we were fired from that hotel. S(he) wouldn’t let us work there when he/she wasn’t. (S)he did that only a couple times that we know of, and it didn’t really bug us. There are other places for us to work. Sports are somebody fucking you up all the time. One team has a plan to run down a field with a football and the other team has a plan to fuck them up. Everyone has a plan until they get hit. I don’t mind working against my own incompetence, random chance and the whole universe, but I hate there being a guy or gal who’s trying to fuck me up. I don’t like games. Trying to get your chess pieces around the board, and the other guy takes them away. Even the game Trouble bums my shit, but my children like it and sometimes I cheat so I don’t fuck them up (I tell myself that’s why I lose).

  Couple my lack of interest in sports with my lack of drug or alcohol use, and my lack of masculinity is ridiculous. We were doing Penn & Teller’s Sin City Spectacular, an hour-long show with a big song-and-dance number every week, and we were wicked overworked. I had been diagnosed with a cholesteatoma in my left ear, which is one of the reasons I’m deaf as a post. They said it was “benign,” but that if they didn’t get it out, it would grow into my brain and kill me. I have a different definition of “benign.” They had to take my ear off and drill into my skull. I couldn’t take that much time off from shooting the TV show without getting something out of it. Teller suggested that we do a trick with a signed penny. Teller would make it vanish and then when the doctor opened up my skull and saw my brain, he’d find the penny—ta-da! We’d video the whole thing and we’d get a great bit out of my required surgery. The surgeon was very Hollywood and had no trouble with all the cameras as long as the crew scrubbed up and wore scrubs and masks
. The penny had to be put into an autoclave and Teller had to learn the sleight of hand with surgical gloves on.

  The big problem was that I had to be conscious to do the bit. This is an operation they do under general anesthetic, but I would be the first to do it conscious, just so I could sign the penny, watch it vanish and then say, “That’s my penny!” when it came out of my brain. Funny, right? When it got to the day, I told the anesthesiologist that because of my long hair, my age, my size, my job and the number of times I say “fuck,” he was going to be tempted to give me a lot of drugs to calm me down and cut down the pain (I wasn’t going all the way unconscious, but I wasn’t going full straight-edge either). At the end of the operation, as I came to, he told me, “I gave you enough Valium to make a ninety-eight-pound sixteen-year-old mall girl a little tipsy and almost lost you—wow, you are a cheap date.” It was really hard being able to hear and feel them drilling into my head. Teller was trying to get me to do my lines into the camera, and I was crying and saying, “Please help me, Teller. It hurts. Get me out of here. Please help me. Help me!” Teller was in my face, yelling, saying, “Stop crying! Focus! Just do the fucking line! Look at me and say, “That’s my penny” with a smile. C’mon, do it. Do it now. C’mon, Penn, focus. Do it!”

  After they got the video, Teller said, “Okay, knock him out!” and they put me under and I was gone for the rest of the operation. Humans don’t really remember pain, but I remember the screaming and I remember them drilling into my head. It’s the loudest sound a mammal can hear. I know the decibel scale is logarithmic so you have to pick your numbers carefully. I know that 19 decibels is twice as loud as 18. A jet taking off in the sixties or Black Sabbath playing in the seventies is about 120 decibels. I’m saying when they drilled into my head it was like a gazillionmotherbuttfuckinggoogol decibels. I don’t remember it, but I was told after that when the electric drill pierced my skull I yelled, “Ramones!”

  Teller left the operating room and took off his mask, gloves, hood and bunny suit. One of the other writers came over and said, “Man, you were so cruel to Penn. He was really suffering and you were screaming in his face. Man, there was no compassion.” Teller said, “That was nothing but compassion. He went in for that operation conscious so we could do our bit. When he comes to, crying in pain, do you want to be the one to tell him that we didn’t get what we needed, so he did it without drugs all for nothing? Is that your job? Because I’m afraid it would be my job. Penn did his part, so we sure as fuck better do our parts.”

  As it turned out we all did our parts perfectly . . . except for the concept. The concept sucked. The editors cut it together and it was so fucking intense, no one could watch it. It looked like just what it was: a man in a huge amount of pain having a penny appear inside his skull. Teller did the magic; it was competent. I did the lines; they were clear. My acting was passable, but the whole thing was unwatchable. We had to fight with the network even to show a small amount of it, and then we had to show it on a TV on the stage with me leaning in and narrating to show I was okay. It didn’t show I was okay; it showed I was Charlie-Manson-bug-fucking-nutty. It didn’t look like the health channel; it looked like a snuff film. My mom saw the broadcast and couldn’t stop crying about her little boy in pain. That’s comedy.

  I have no manly love of recreational drugs or sports. I like to put my hair up in a Judy Jetson ponytail on top of my head (I’m aware that a real sixteen-year-old mall girl wouldn’t have heard of Judy Jetson, but we’re talking heart not memory), talk on the phone in a bath full of scented bath oils, get manicures and write obsessively in my diary. I don’t write “Dear diary” to start every entry, but I do often write, “I got up.” I don’t watch sports; I keep a diary. I’m not a man’s man or a woman’s man.

  The image would have been more perfectly mall girl if I’d said “bubble bath” instead of scented bath oils. But I don’t like bubbles in my tub. They’re distracting. I didn’t used to like bath oils either, until I got bathtub syphilis. In 1979, Teller and I were part of a show called the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society that we ran for three years in Frisco. The AVCS, or Asparagus, as it was shortened to, was kind of like Penn & Teller with a third guy, named Wier Chrisemer, who did some verbal comedy bits with me, a monologue about the history of music, and played classical music in odd and comical arrangements. Teller wore all-black dance clothes, I wore white cutoff shorts and a T-shirt, and Wier wore a three-piece suit. He split and we kept the suit idea. Some of the bits from Asparagus are still part of the P&T repertoire. I was twenty-four years old, and although it was a small theater, it was still a show that I had written, and I was making my living, and a good living, just doing shows. I was making less money than I made street performing, but still more money than anyone I knew. This was before I met Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but I made more than they did at the time—I made coin early. During this period, I took baths a lot. I took baths all the time. There were days when I was in the bathtub more than eight hours a day. I started out reading and talking on the phone in the bathtub, then I added eating in the bathtub, and finally I would work with Teller in the bathtub. It was just me in the bathtub, and he’d sit in the bathroom with me. We were writing Mrs. Lonsberry’s Séance of Horror that Teller would co-star in, along with a really, really old woman (about ten years younger than I am now), and I would direct. Teller would pull a chair and a notebook into the bathroom, and we would talk while I lay in the tub.

  I’ve talked to Adam Carolla about my bath obsession. Adam knows that I don’t fit in a bathtub, not because he’s seen me in a bathtub but because he’s a carpenter, and has a trained eye for how things fit together. I now have a stupid big bathtub in our home, but in the past, and in hotels on the road still, I use a regular bathtub. They’re all kind of sitz baths for me, but I love the hot water on my ass and back. I don’t know why I spent hours and hours in the bathtub during 1979, but I liked it and Teller indulged me. We wrote a failed play while I soaked.

  Penn & Teller have always greeted people after the show, and one night in 1979 a woman came up to me and asked if she could talk to me privately. Hell yes! When the rest of the people left, we went over to a side of the theater and she started with, “I’m a nurse.” This was getting good. Then it got bad, “I’m a nurse. Can I see that rash on your arm?” Sure. I did the show with short sleeves and I showed her this weird rash that I had all the time. “It doesn’t hurt,” I said confidently. She said, “It’s secondary syphilis. It’s all I could think about during your show. Go see a doctor soon.” It didn’t seem like the right time to hit on her.

  I went backstage and everyone figured I’d be meeting her after I got out of wardrobe. “Nope, she wanted to tell me I have syphilis.” No one but me was surprised.

  I made a doctor’s appointment. I walked in, rolled up my sleeves and said, “Someone last night saw this rash—”

  “Secondary syphilis.”

  “No, I don’t think it is.”

  He started into his doctor speech about nice girls and boys having syphilis and he was sure that my sex partners all had sex only with me but there were toilet seats and so on, so let’s just get me a shot and be done with it. I explained that, yes, I did have a few sex partners, but I used condoms and I was a blood donor.

  “Well, they sure didn’t let you give blood with secondary syphilis sores on your arm.”

  “I didn’t have them then, but—”

  We argued a bit, and I got him to agree to a blood test before treating me. He called back a couple days later and told me I didn’t have syphilis. He had no idea what I had; I had to come back to his office. He examined me again and said it sure looked like syphilis, but the blood test was negative. He said, “Okay, we have to talk hygiene.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you keep clean?”

  “Fuck yeah, I spend four to eight hours a day in the bathtub.” I was proud.

  “What? What do you do in there?”

  “Everything, read, typ
e, talk on the phone, have meetings, sleep, eat. . . .”

  “You also ruin your skin and give yourself syphilis sores.”

  “I gave myself syphilis in the bathtub? I have bathtub syphilis?”

  “Yes. Stop taking baths. Pay on the way out.”

  “I can’t stop taking baths. I find them . . . comforting. It’s the way I live.”

  “Stop it.”

  “How about two hours a day?” I was negotiating.

  “How about a couple baths a week, less than an hour, and use bath oil, something to stop it from ruining your skin.”

  I cut down to a couple hours a day with bath oil and my bathtub syphilis went away. I still take baths and read, but I try not to do more than two hours a day. Even without the sores on my arm, baths disgust Adam Carolla. He’s a man.

  The bathtub syphilis doctor thought I was an idiot. He’s not the only doctor with that professional opinion. Teller and I did our first big network TV special for NBC called Don’t Try This at Home. It wasn’t a bad show, I drove an eighteen-wheeler over Teller’s chest and that looked okay, and some of the other tricks were fine. Our craziest trick involved us producing over three-quarters of a million bees out of nowhere. We thought it was really funny to parody Siegfried & Roy producing tigers, by producing many, many more dangerous animals. Not huge wild majestic dangerous animals, but rather tiny domesticated stinging dangerous animals. The idea really made us laugh. We looked into how to do the trick and talked to a few entomologists. We were looking for animals that looked just like bees, but didn’t sting. There had to be close-ups, and nothing looked enough like bees at close range. We knew from county fairs and my love of beekeeping that people do “bee beards” and move comfortably among them. If they’re not protecting the hive and they’re not in danger, the little stinging sisters stay cool. We would just be in the cage made of very fine mosquito netting with the real bees. We went to our doctors and got a lot of allergy tests, but more than ten stings for anyone and all bets are off. The camera people would be in full protective beekeeping fashion and there would be triple air locks to protect our live audience. Teller and I would be in the regular gray suits and we would just do it. We rehearsed without bees and did a few very scary practices in a room full of bees. It was scary, but we could do it. The way one dies from bee stings is anaphylactic shock, so we had EpiPens on necklaces and we were told to look for symptoms in each other. We hired EMTs and there was an ambulance standing by. A nurse gave us some speed before we started, because that was supposed to help. It sure made our timing more like the Ramones doing a Starbucks ad.