God, No! (29 page)

All of a sudden there was a sound. Maybe it was the house settling, maybe it was my imagination, or maybe it was Mary, waking up to take a Penn-hating piss in the middle of the night. Maybe that sound was her, about to see Penn blow-drying his man’s cock with her woman’s blow dryer in her bathroom in the middle of the fucking night. The thought startled me.

I dropped my cock.

The tippy tip of the pee hole slipped out from between my highly skilled Broadway-sleight-of-hand-artist fingertips.

My cock fell into the blow-dryer.

Blow-dryer nozzles (at least this one, at least back then; I have not touched one since, I can’t even look at them) have a recess and then they have a grate and then they have the white-hot heating element. I could try to brag that my limp cock was long enough to flop onto that grating, but it’s not much of a brag; it’s a couple inches, and I’d been stretching it out. The head of my cock hit the white-hot grating.

My cock stuck.

My dick burned onto the grating.

I had burning metal grating attached to the head of my penis, and I couldn’t yell. If I yelled, then Mary would wake up, run into the bathroom, and catch me fucking her blow-dryer in the middle of the night. I don’t know what I was scared of. What’s worse than having one’s cock stuck to a burning grate in the middle of the night in a two-bedroom apartment in L.A.? But I was scared silent.

I pulled on the blow-dryer and my cock just stretched out. The blow dryer and my cock were attached by seared cock flesh.

Finally I ripped the burning blow-dryer off my burning cock. Now I could smell it. I could smell burning cock in a blow-dryer. It smells a lot like hamburger, but not happy hamburger. Very sad hamburger. My cock was in shock. I was nauseated but still scared of Mary. I turned off the blow-dryer. I didn’t want to look at my cock. I just stood there. I set the blow-dryer down on the counter. The blow-dryer giveth, the blow-dryer taketh away. I was no longer dry. I was now covered with flop sweat. There wasn’t a part of me that wasn’t moist. I don’t know how long I stood there, but I finally looked at the head of my cock. It was like a Wendy’s charbroiled hamburger with that painted-on, appetizing grid. It wasn’t appetizing. I didn’t know what to do. Boy Scouts hadn’t prepared me for this. Finally I carefully put my underwear on and tried to pretend it didn’t happen—even though I could still smell the cockburger. I opened the window to air the bathroom out like a guilty junior-high-school cigarette smoker.

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

M
arty 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 accompaniment. 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: