God, No! (22 page)

I couldn’t stop laughing. I was cheering while my fellow patrons were jacking off. I loved Jamie’s perfect delivery. It was surreal and inspiring, like Bob Dylan. My head couldn’t really figure what it meant, but my heart kept singing it. For weeks I was saying to everyone, “And now I’m Japanese, so fuck off!” It still inspires me. I still think it all the time and say it once in a while.

It wasn’t too long after seeing
New Wave Hookers
that I saw Jamie on the street. Penn & Teller had just opened Off-Broadway, and when I saw Jamie, I realized if our show was really successful our theater could smell of Clorox. I went over and said, “You’re Jamie Gillis, I’m such a big fan.” I stuck my hand out. I didn’t have the balls to say his line to him. I did not say “And now I’m Japanese, so fuck off!” Who is enough of an asshole to walk over to De Niro and say “Are you talking to me?” Who could have yelled “Stella” at Brando? I just shook Jamie’s hand and said I was a huge fan. I said I loved him.

Jamie smiled. It seemed like he recognized me, and then he called me by name; he called me Penn. He had seen our show. He said, “You know, for every one hundred guys who recognize me, one really hot woman will come up to me. I don’t care at all about the guys, but it’s great to be recognized by a hot woman . . .” Then he paused, looked me in the eyes, and said, “I put you in the hot woman category.” Wow. I think it might be the best compliment I’ve ever gotten.

Jamie and I became friends. I was always thrilled to be around him. I will miss him. The world was better with Jamie in it.

And now I’m Japanese, so fuck off!

“Turning Japanese”

—The Vapors

Penn’s Bacon and a Kiss Airlines

D
oes any American like the TSA? Somebody must think that someone else thinks it keeps somebody safer, and that that imagined safety is worth the loss of freedom and dignity—but so far, I haven’t met that person.

I want someone other than me to run the experiment of trying to get on an American airplane with the New Hampshire state slogan “Live Free or Die” written on a T-shirt. That specific statism might get you a full pat-down. That slogan in context is even heavier. It was a toast mailed by an ailing General John Stark to an anniversary reunion of the Battle of Bennington: “Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.” Fuck yeah! Also try Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” for your comfy travel wear. See how a real patriot would be treated nowadays. Patrick or John’s slogan on a T-shirt will at least get your ball sack fondled by rubber gloves in a bad way. I used to believe it was theoretically impossible to get my ball sack fondled in a bad way, but a TSA worker in Hotlanta, Georgia, changed my mind on that.

The Penn & Teller Show
started touring in 1975 with just Penn & Teller in a white Datsun 210 station wagon with a sign on the side that read
ATLANTA CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION—
SAMPLE TRANSPORT UNIT
in an official typeface. Our car was never broken into. I would drive, Teller would navigate. And we would talk. During those endless conversations we thought up all the crazy shit that would become our career. Our whole show was in that car. We’d share Motel 6 rooms at night, and drive again the next day to the next show, and talk some more about crazy shit we might could get away with onstage. By 2001,
The Penn & Teller Show
had grown to require an eighteen-wheeler and driver. David Copperfield has four eighteen-wheelers for his show. Three of his trucks have a huge picture of Mr. Kotkin’s magical eyes and magic voluptuous eyebrows and
THE MAGIC OF DAVID COPPERFIELD
written in a very magical typeface on both magical sides. Our dirty eighteen-wheeler says
ROAD SHOWS
on the side in a generic typeface. It looks like “Road Shows” is a brand of soup. We could have gotten it repainted with some disease-control logo, but we’re too cheap. We bought it used from some bus and truck touring company, and it was already painted. It says the word “show,” and we do at least claim that.

Typing “eighteen-wheeler” makes me feel really butch. It’s so purely American. In England they call trucks “fully articulated lorries,” which is another reason we kicked their asses in the Revolutionary War. When Teller and I did a show for Prince Charles, we got in a line to meet the big-eared cheese after the show. Some royal handler gave us instructions about how we were to greet the prince. I explained to His Majesty’s official officious butt boy that I myself was an American, and I would greet Chuck exactly like I greet anyone else. I would be polite, but that was all he was getting out of this freedom fighter—real Americans don’t kiss royal ass. I was much more excited about meeting Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie anyway; those are asses I’ll gladly kiss. Chuck was really nice, though. He said, “Oh, you’re the fellow who runs over the other chap with the fully articulated lorry.” He had seen me running over Teller with a trick truck in the truck trick on our first NBC TV special, and part of being English royalty is using “chap” and “fully articulated lorry” in one sentence to polite but classless Americans.

David Copperfield travels with four motor coaches and thirty-one
people. In 2002, in addition to one fully articulated lorry, we had no buses and eight people, including the two of us, all flying from show to show. Our crew is made up of freedom fighters, and when airport security ramped up, there were altercations at every airport on every travel day. It seemed to be a different member of our crew every time, although Stewart, our tattooed, hippie, redneck, biker light man, did go off a bit quicker and more often than the rest of us. I was the last to crack, but I’d watched Stewart flip enough that I knew how to go crazy about the loss of our freedoms. You learn shit like that when you hire patriots.

I cracked at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, flying back from a corporate date with K. C. and the Sunshine Band. The woman TSA-hole asked me to turn down the top of my jeans so she could check the seam, and that’s not the way, a-huh, a-huh, I like it—uh-uh, uh-uh. I said, “Fuck it,” and undid my pants and dropped them. I learned at Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey the Greatest Show on Earth Clown College that when in doubt, try a pants-drop. I was wearing underwear because we had another show that night and I like to have my suit slide smoothly over my . . . wait a minute, I don’t have to explain to you why I was wearing fucking underwear—who the fuck are you? See, I get in a pissy mood thinking about the TSA. Anyway, I was wearing underwear, clean underwear, and not a tight shrink-wrapped banana hammock, but dignified boxers. Yes, I was showing her disrespect by dropping my pants, but I was wearing shorts—“little Houdini” was not escaping. Still, she got on the talkie and called the real po po while a couple of her fellow workers took me to a holding area. She said that I had flashed her and I would be arrested for indecent exposure.

I said, “Listen, baby, if I’d shown you my cock, you would have known it.”

Surprisingly, this well-reasoned, classy argument didn’t sway her. I thought about leaving my pants down, in passive limp resistance and also as exhibit A of my cock not showing, but I pulled them up so I wouldn’t have to be penguin-walked to the corner. The real police officer was there quickly. I guess he didn’t want to miss my cock
hanging out, but by the time he got there our crew was in full militia mode. They had circled the wagons around their meat puppet. The TSA guys said I couldn’t use my cell phone while waiting for the police, so I threw it to Stewart and told him to call my buddy Bob Corn-Revere from my speed dial list. Bob is a way heavy First Amendment attorney. Bob has argued in front of the Supreme Court for your right to say “fuck” wherever you want. I told Nate, our Director of Covert Activities, to call the ACLU in NYC and get Nadine Strossen, a friend of mine and at that time president of the “All Criminals Love Us,” on his cell phone. I don’t remember why I was so sure that my cock in boxer shorts at ATL airport security was a First Amendment issue, but it was clear to me at the time.

Maybe it’s that I have the words “Respect, Freedom, Peace” tattooed on the side of my cock, which expands to “Congress shall make no law
respect
ing an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the
freedom
of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people
peace
ably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” when I think about Fredrick Douglass banging Susan B. Anthony like a Liberty Bell.

By the time the peace officer arrived on the scene, I was ready to insist that the police officer talk to “my attorneys.” Yup, I was going to make a local Georgia police officer talk to Robert Corn-Revere and Nadine Strossen, and they were ready to defend me and/or my boxer-shorted cock. I was so fucking ready.

“I’m your worst nightmare. I have two of the top freedom-of-speech people in the world on the phone. I have some time off coming up. I have money. I have friends with money. I have access to the media, and freedom fighting is a hobby for me. So, c’mon, arrest me and we’ll have fun.”

“I’m not going to arrest you, Penn, the TSA woman overreacted. Let’s get you to your plane.”

“I’m going to fight this all the way.”

At this point, the TSA-hole came over and started complaining to the police officer. He told her to shut up.

I continued: “I’m going to fight this. You’ve got trouble coming. I’ve got the president of the ACLU on the phone here, and—”

“It doesn’t matter, I’m not going to take you anywhere but to your plane.”

“But she had no right—”

“I don’t care, I’m not arresting you.”

I insisted on talking to my lawyers. “You can’t make them arrest you just so you can say they have no right to arrest you,” Bob explained patiently to his asshole buddy.

I argued with him: “But they had no right to detain me.”

“And they’re not detaining you,” he explained as if talking to a four-year-old.

I was furious.

The police officer took me directly to my gate and put me on the plane before anyone else, and made sure I was comfortable. He offered to get me a drink. I was treated like Prince Charles. I was still mad and told him, “I want her name and badge number.”

“Have a nice flight.”

I kept arguing with Bob on my cell phone. Because of his supreme rhetorical skills, he was finally able to convince me that I couldn’t force a police officer to arrest me and that dropping my pants was not going to get me my day in the Supreme Court to fight the pig power structure.

I’m still mad. I hate everything about the TSA. When Shakespeare has Hamlet mulling aloud whether to off himself or not, one of the things in the “not to be” category is “the insolence of office.” The Bard was a genius for being able to write that as a good reason for suicide before someone in a blue uniform with a big condescending smile told him not to put his shoes in a gray bin. Shoes go directly on the belt, Ham.

Writer, producer, freedom fighter, director, and actor (he was Chainsaw in
Summer School
) Dean Cameron created Securityedition.com. It’s a website that sells little playing-card-sized metal copies of the Bill of Rights, with the Fourth Amendment (search and seizure) highlighted. Once you’ve bought a copy, you’re turned automatically into a freedom-fighting performance artist. The Security Edition Bill
of Rights sets off the metal detector and you say to the guard, “Oh, here—take my rights.” It doesn’t accomplish anything. It slows you down and slows down all the innocent people around you. It’s a petulant way of reminding yourself and everyone around you that y’all are giving up freedom for the illusion of safety. The Penn & Teller show sells the Security Edition Bill of Rights at our theater in Vegas. We’d like to find a way to buy back all the ones the TSA confiscates and resell them. That would be a little government stimulus package for Vegas’s premier libertarian atheist magic duo.

Contrary to what you may have heard about my waving my boxer-clad cock at a TSA employee, I really got no beef with TSA employees. But I’ve heard more people bitch about TSA employees than the system itself. They complain that the workers are just stupid, minimum-wage incompetents. I stick up for the stupid, minimum-wage incompetents doing their jobs at the TSA. They’re just hardworking men and women trying to make a living, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever smile at the fucks or keep my pants on.

We now have a security class in this country, workers who do security theater, whom the privileged hire and then treat with disrespect. The privileged blame the workers and not the system. The people in charge hire desperate people at a low rate with low training so people can be inconvenienced enough to believe someone is doing something. Even the self-aggrandizing assholes who run the fucking Hollywood studios want to feel important. They put in security. They want to pretend some bullshit studio would be on al-Qaeda’s celebrity A-list of targets. Al-Qaeda doesn’t give a fuck about Hollywood. Al-Qaeda doesn’t follow American pecking-order rules. They are terrorists; they don’t follow any fucking rules. Fuck, they don’t even follow that “always use a ‘u’ after a ‘q’” rule in their goddamn name. I got their true labiovelar stop hanging. Fuq them in the neq.

To be dramatic, Hollywood hires some stupid minimum-wage incompetent to look at the ID of everyone who’s driving on a studio lot to pitch. Anyone who could do an improvised explosive device could do comedy improvisation well enough to get a pitch meeting in Hollywood.

They wouldn’t need to sneak on. I’ve seen our manager, whom we call Spicoli, get on the lot with just his health-club photo ID. There is no hyperbole there. Our manager Peter Golden, who is a sweet enough talker to keep a show called
Bullshit!
on the air for eight years, was also able to talk his way past security on a Hollywood lot and drove his black Porsche past the guard without a fucking driver’s license.

Profiling is wrong. You have someone look at someone’s face and judge them by that. It’s not fair. Profiling is for assholes, so my idea is to make the assholes do it. Let the bad guys profile. Eliminate airport security. Let anyone walk on a plane with anything they want. Let people bring guns on a plane, let them bring knives, let them bring mace. Let the pilot’s doors be fairly secure. You might not even need that; the people on the third plane on 9/11 took out the hijackers.