After every show, Teller and I meet the audience. We stand in the lobby and talk to anyone who wants to talk to us about anything. We are happy to sign autographs, but that’s not why we’re out there. It’s really just habit. When we started out, at fairs, renaissance festivals, and little shit hole theaters, there was either no backstage or the backstage was so unpleasant it was better to be out with the audience. No one wanted our autographs, but some people wanted to talk to us, and we’d chat.
We continued to meet the audience Off-Broadway, and then, when it was time to go to Broadway, some thought we would stop hanging out, but we didn’t. We don’t really know how to sit backstage after a show. We relax and come down by talking to the folks who just watched our show.
We still play places that are small enough that we can meet everyone who would want to talk to us in an hour or so, and what the fuck else have we got to do? Since it’s over a thousand people, and we’ve been controversial now and again on TV, we now have security guards near us, and they’re ready to protect us from anyone who would want to hurt us, but what they really do is tell people where the restrooms are.
Meeting our audiences, or at least the members of the audience who would like to meet us, makes us different from other entertainers. We aren’t scared of our audiences. We’ve learned that the crowds that other entertainers might hate—the quiet crowds—include many people who are loving the show. I love quiet crowds now; I don’t see them as lacking enthusiasm, I see them as paying attention.
We’ve learned that a joke that didn’t get a loud laugh might be someone’s favorite line. I’ve learned that even when you’re the first clumsy motherfucker thrown off Dancing with the Stars, you might still have connected in an honest way with some people in that huge faceless TV audience. Teller usually has a few spoken lines in every show, but people like to consider him silent. They like to play it that way. We don’t have to pretend that Teller never talks. It’s just a show and we know it and they know it. After the show Teller talks to anyone who might want to talk to him. An audience member will chat with Teller for a few minutes, but when that audience member gets back home, he’ll explain to his friends that Teller never talks. We’re all in the show together.
I’ve been known to go out to eat with people I meet after the show, and I have lifelong friends whom I first met in conversation after the show.
One magical night after the show, the reason I got into show business paid off. An attractive woman waited around until everyone else was gone and told me she’d seen an advance DVD of the first few shows of the first season of Bullshit! at a Skeptics Society meeting. She was very complimentary and said she’d been talking about our show with the Amazing Randi and Richard Dawkins. Randi is my mentor, and Dawkins is an idol of mine whom, at the time, I’d never met. She chatted me up a little more and invited me out for coffee.
It’s coming up on ten years later and now I’m that fan-girl’s husband, and we have two wonderful children together. I’m not afraid of stalkers; I married one.
One night after the show a man in his thirties came over and asked me for an autograph. As I signed his copy of my novel, Sock, he told me that he had been an Orthodox Jew, and now he was an atheist and he wanted to thank me for helping him make that change. He said that listening to my radio show had had a very big effect on him. He was considerate and didn’t want to monopolize my time when others were waiting for me, so he didn’t say much more, just took his autograph and left.
When the crowd had cleared out, he was hovering. He was waiting like guys who want me to do a quick video ID for their podcast, women who want me to sign a breast or two, and weasels who want to ask me to do a show or a charity event that our manager turned down.
This ex-Orthodox ex-Jew was waiting for me where my future wife had stood to ask me out. He was polite and nervous as he told his story. I’m not going to write his name. As you read on, you’ll understand why he wouldn’t want it published. You wouldn’t believe his name anyway; it’s a joke Jewish name and you’d think I made it up, so I will make it up. I’ll call him Atheist Boy, or AB for short.
AB was a freshly born atheist. His family were all still Orthodox. He had a lucrative job at a big retail company and many of the people he worked with, as well as his bosses, were Orthodox Jews.
I hadn’t given him the doubts in his religion, nor had I given him any theology, but somehow, listening to my radio show had given him some sort of inspiration to say he was an atheist. I have no idea how I’d had this kind of effect on him. I’m from Goyfield, Massachusetts. We had two students in our whole high school class who took the Jewish days off from school. The father of one of those children owned the Howard Johnson where I washed dishes (I also washed dishes at the Franklin County Public Hospital, as well as Famous Bill’s Restaurant—I got around), and I’d had some contact with him, but just as a rich guy, not as a person. My cohost on my radio show was Michael Goudeau, and he’s a coon-ass from Louisiana. We were about as culturally non-Jewish as we could be. I’ve been told that the definition of goyishe kop (non-Jew thinking) is buying a boat. Goudeau and I, together, are a big old leaky cigarette boat. We both knew our Lenny Bruce and the Yiddish of the comedy business, but we sure weren’t anything for an ex-Orthodox Jew to identify with.
I thanked AB and started to walk away, but he had more to say. He had spent his whole life kosher, he said. He’d never eaten pork, or bacon, or shellfish. No milk and meat together. Never. He had flown out to Vegas on business and was taking some extra time to see our show and to think about his theology. On the plane they had offered a lousy microwaved cheeseburger but he couldn’t bring himself to eat it. He couldn’t do it. Here he paused. I’ve gotten laid after my shows. I met my wife after a show. I know about forced awkward preintimacy.
(Before this tale gets all heavy and touching and shit, I would like to give you the best pickup line anyone ever used on me after a show. Yes, my wife praising Bullshit! and dropping “Randi” and “Dawkins” was great and it worked, but, with all love and respect to my wife, another woman creamed her on the immediate sexual pickup front. Remember, this is the Penn & Teller Show, and I’m Penn. I say “My name is Penn Jillette and this is my partner Teller” as the first and last line of every show. And behind me while I’m in the lobby after the show, there are big pictures of me with my name in huge block letters right over my head. After one show I was out in the lobby talking and signing autographs, and a woman hung back and waited for people to clear out. When they were gone, she walked over, cocked her head at a questioning angle, and said very clearly and directly, “Fuck me if I’m wrong, but is your name Debbie?”)
All the sexual pickups I’ve heard were much less intimate and vulnerable than what AB was about to say. He quietly asked me if he could eat his first non-kosher food with me. He wanted me to join him for a bacon cheeseburger. He said it would mean a lot to him. That’s a lot harder to say than “fuck me.” I was so moved. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t know how to describe the feeling. I was certainly honored. I certainly felt unworthy. But it was more than that. I invited him backstage and said, “Yeah, c’mon back, meet the guys, and we’ll watch you eat.”
I walked him back and left him in the Monkey Room with Jonesy, the monster jazz piano player in our show, while I changed my clothes. By the time I got back to AB, Teller was in the Monkey Room, along with a friend of ours from the MIT Media Lab who had come backstage after seeing the show. Zeke was also there. Zeke is one of the guys who sets up all the magic for us. There are places in the show where our lives are in Zeke’s hands. He’s the youngest guy on our stage crew, but he’s been around for a while now. I brought Zeke to the P & T crew. Zeke had been adopted when he was in high school by a distant relative of his who is a friend of mine. Zeke was living with this relative in Branson and not doing well there as a punk atheist. No one does well in Branson, it’s a shit hole. When his guardian would come visit me in Vegas, I’d talk atheism with the boy, and finally my friend said, “You’re helping turn him into an atheist and making Branson hell for him, so let him move in with you.” Zeke had just graduated from high school, so he moved into the Slammer and lived with me. I didn’t take care of him at all, just gave him a room and let him eat my food. He played video games and watched TV and my friends thought it was sexy to have a good-looking young boy around the house eating Top Ramen in his underwear (how the Top Ramen got into his underwear, you don’t want to know). He finally started working with the Penn & Teller show sweeping floors at the shop, and now he’s worked his way up to a serious magic guy. I like Zeke. I recapped AB’s story for everyone in the Monkey Room. I lightened it up a little bit, since it was still a bit too intense and honest for me to really deal with.
When I finished, I said, “Okay, AB, have at it,” and offered him my dinner, salmon and spinach, which turned out to be pretty much kosher. I figured we must have something that wasn’t and pointed him to our sandwich and fruit plate.
It was turkey sandwiches, cheese, and pineapple and banana. AB was disappointed. Yeah, technically it wasn’t really kosher, because the turkeys probably hadn’t been slaughtered with the “correct” procedure, but it also wasn’t obscene. He’d tasted versions of all of this stuff. This wasn’t the real forbidden-sin food. If he was going to lose his virginity, he wanted to really get fucked.
“So, we’re looking for bacon, right?” I asked.
“Yup.”
“So, Jonesy, shall we just call room service? I mean, they have good bacon and eggs. How long will that take?”
The Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, has great bacon and eggs, and their room service is swift, but we didn’t want to wait around even that long. We wanted to watch virgin AB get fucked by the swine now.
The steakhouse at the Rio was open all night, and the steakhouse had it all. We decided we’d take him out. Zeke is a punk and Zeke speaks his mind. “Listen, motherfucker,” he told AB, “if I go along, you’re going to eat all the fucking shit and I’m going to watch you do it. If we go, and you like pussy out on us or something, I’ll kick your fucking ass and shove the bacon down your throat and up your Jew ass. Got it?”
AB agreed, and Penn, Teller, Jonesy, Zeke, our MIT buddy, and AB headed to the All-American Bar and Grille. We were laughing and joking, but it was a heavy event. AB was trembling with nervousness. He said later that a lot of his excitement and nervousness was being out with Penn & Teller, but that didn’t enter into it. This was a change in his life. This was some sort of improvised atheist baptism.
Before I tell you the rest of AB’s story, I need to tell you about another big atheist baptism I hosted. A few years earlier, Joe Rogan of Fear Factor and Doug Stanhope of The Aristocrats had told me about their favorite performance artist. It was a whack job who went by the name Extreme Elvis. Extreme Elvis is a fat Elvis impersonator with a very small cock. We all know he has a cashew dick, because he performs naked onstage and will often piss on the audience. He has the Elvis sideburns, and the Elvis hair, and a big fat belly, and a little dick, and he sings wonderfully. Most Elvis impersonators fall down on the voice. Elvis could sing his ass off and Extreme Elvis can sing for real. Extreme Elvis doesn’t do many shows, because people don’t book a naked needle-dick fat guy who pisses in public, and if they do, the police often enter into the situation and stop the show. He can’t really do a full show unless he’s playing at a private party, and what kind of asshole is going to pay a fat, badly hung, naked, pissing Elvis impersonator to come into his private home?
I booked Extreme Elvis for a party at my private home. I set up a huge stage, sound system, and lights in my courtyard and invited about a hundred and fifty people, about 135 percent of whom showed up. I booked friends to play all day as opening acts, and Goudeau was there making Elvis deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
The party started at about noon, and Extreme Elvis hit the stage around two o’clock the next morning. His show is wonderful. “Every generation gets the Elvis they deserve,” he explained, and he gave us that. It was very intense. People who were afraid of naked fat guys and urine were on the second-story catwalk, and the real boys were down front. Extreme Elvis was funny, challenging, inspired, beautiful, and just amazing. We got so much more than we deserved.
Extreme Elvis and I had planned that after his first set, he would take a break before his second set, right before sunrise. I would turn off all the power at the Slammer—not just all the lights, but all the power. No electricity. I have a rather large lap pool, and we were going to put his band in the pool, acoustic guitars and bongos held by musicians floating on rafts while his backup singers were treading water.
The electric set had been confrontational, the theater of cruelty. He’d scared people and made them uncomfortable, and everyone expected the second set to be heavier, like he was going to shit on everyone or something. It was heavier, but in a very different way. We had tiki lamps and candles around the pool. There was moonlight. The guitarist strummed softly from the air mattress floating in the pool and Extreme Elvis, naked, sang “Love Me Tender” as he entered the pool like an apparition. Once the whole band was in the pool, I joined them. Elvis weighs more than me, but with the help of buoyancy, I went under between his legs and got him on my shoulders. By candle and tiki light he sang the most gentle and beautiful songs from on top of my shoulders. Soon most everyone took off their clothes and joined us in the water.
He did “Suspicious Minds” and all my musician friends did the backup singing. The pool was filled with naked people and a big fat Elvis singing on my shoulders. When I write that Elvis went to “Kumbaya,” you’re thinking I mean that figuratively, but no, we were all singing “Kumbaya” and holding hands naked in the pool in a hot Vegas dawn.
It may be important at this point to remind my dear readers that I’ve never had a sip of alcohol or any recreational drug in my life. My Slammer parties have included a South American man nailing his cock to a board, tying that board to a rope, and using that rope to pull a wagon containing a topless woman across my band room floor (which is carpeted, and I swear, I told him it was carpeted and that this would create more friction before he got there; it was a language problem, not a lack of compassion and foresight on my part). We also had nude cornstarch wrestling, where I wrestled my little-person (they prefer that to “dwarf”; I don’t get it, but I don’t get African-Americans preferring that to “black,” and it’s not my decision) Mexican buddy Arturo. His arms weren’t long enough to hold his head out of the cornstarch, so our wrestling turned into me saving his life—well, saving his life after being the one to almost drown him in gunk. After my children were born, the Slammer parties featured Nemo, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and Cinderella instead of cock nailing, nude cornstarch wrestling, and Extreme Elvis, but the same amount of alcohol and recreational drugs was present and that amount is always none.
Holding hands and singing “Kumbaya” with fat, naked, badly hung Extreme Elvis sitting on my shoulders meant a lot to a lot of people. Several people have since told me that when they took off all their clothes and walked into that pool as the sun came up in Vegas and sang “Suspicious Minds,” they understood what atheism really was. It was an atheist baptism. Everyone seemed to be changed by it. As I type it, I’m aware that it seems like a crazy person is writing this, but with all the naked-fat-guy-pissing psycho energy of the night, it was mostly just a celebration of living a free and loving life. I guess you had to be there.
As the sun came up, I sat in the hot tub with Extreme Elvis and the very well-hung and hairy porn star Ron Jeremy. Ron Jeremy said it was the best party he’d ever been to, and Ron’s been to some parties. I have a picture of me naked, with Extreme Elvis on one side and Ron Jeremy on the other. It could be used in a Trojan condom ad, with the caption “We Fit All Men.”
Now back to AB’s slightly different atheist baptism. This one was also improvised. We took him into the All-American Bar and Grille and he sat down in the Christ position for the Last Supper. This was his first supper, his atheist communion.
AB didn’t order. Teller and I ordered for him. We don’t know much about kosher, but we faked it pretty well:
Shrimp cocktail
Crab legs
Clam chowder
Oysters
Pork loin
Barbecue ribs
and a
Bacon cheeseburger, medium rare, with extra cheese and extra extra bacon.
Many people have pointed out since that there was no way for us to know that AB didn’t have a shellfish allergy. We might have had to deal with anaphylactic shock at our communion. Instead of a born-again atheist, we might have had a dead Jew, and I might be writing this book from the High Desert State Prison, but if your grandmother had had tubes, she might have been a Jewish radio.
The server asked us who was eating what, and we pointed to AB and said he was eating it all, we would just pick.
The pork and bacon cheeseburger took a while, but the chowder and shellfish were out right away. There was a moment when AB just sat there and looked at the food. It was going to be an important moment and he wanted to take a minute and really decide what he was going to do. Teller grabbed the back of AB’s head, grabbed a shrimp, and just stuck it in AB’s mouth. What’s the use of being an atheist if you still have to stand on ceremony? AB chewed the shrimp and kind of shook his head. It was a big moment.
I don’t know who died and made Jonesy a Talmudic scholar, but Jonesy said that eating the shrimp really didn’t count, that it wasn’t the moment, because AB hadn’t chosen to eat the traif—he had been forced by Teller. Jonesy knows how things look in the eyes of Yahweh. We all agreed that Jonesy was right, and AB considered for a moment, then opened up a crab leg and ate it. That was his defiance of god. If the religious can be silly enough to think that eating the right food makes you religious, we can play along for a meal and pretend that eating the wrong food will make you rational.
He ate the crab leg, and our table erupted into cheers. We sounded like we belonged in a Vegas sports bar. AB wasn’t satisfied with the shellfish. He said none of this was really a new taste. There are kosher knockoffs of shellfish. He’d had Krab and fake shrimp. He’d had chowders that had the vibe of clam without the presence of an actual bivalve. It wasn’t dirty-filthy-anal-sex-with-two-nuns-on-Easter-Sunday sin.
Teller, Zeke, Jonesy, our MIT friend, and I dug into the shrimp, crab, and chowder. It wasn’t an antireligious thing for us; we’re entertainers, and when there’s food around, we eat.
The pork loin and ribs came and that was no big deal either. He’d had bovine versions. We were all just waiting for the atheist communion wafer, the pure symbol of free thought: the bacon cheeseburger. The All-American Bar and Grille at the Rio makes a fine one. They didn’t know how important this one was, but it was the last thing they brought. It was made with loving care.
There it was, on a plate with some fries. A big fat ground-beef patty, medium-rare and juicy, just dripping goodness, with a few slices of cheddar melted on it, and strips, a lot of strips, of bacon, the candy of meat, draped over the top.
You could hear the inspirational music swell. It was the monolith in 2001, the unholy grail, the covenant to not talk to god. We had symbolism up the ass. On that plate with the bacon cheeseburger were Mark Twain, George Carlin, Einstein, Ingersoll, and Butterfly McQueen. Frank Zappa, Martin Mull, Randy Newman, Richard Feynman, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins. It was dripping like a hot shiksa. It was the Clash screaming, “You must not act the way you were brought up.” It was absolutely free—or at least Teller and I could put it on our hotel tab.
AB looked at all of us. Made eye contact with each of us. Zeke said lovingly, “Do it, motherfucker.” AB grinned and picked up the burger. He held it in front of his face with the juice dripping and took a deep whiff. He sucked that good bacon freedom into his lungs and then took a bite.
His eyes widened.
“Goddamn, that’s good! Wow!” You can see why those whack jobs keep control over food. It’s powerful. It’s life. AB was transformed. The next day he would go to a fancy barbershop and get a real shave with a real straight razor. I didn’t know it, but that’s another thing some Jews can’t do: they can’t have a razor touch the skin of their face. AB’s life changed; it started way before the cheeseburger and it will continue, but I was so proud to be with him for that first bite. It was a celebration. It was one nation under a motherfucking groove.
AB couldn’t get over how good bacon was. I tried to imagine tasting bacon for the first time. I can remember my mom putting bacon on the plate with my pancakes. You wouldn’t really put the pure Massachusetts (fuck Vermont) maple syrup directly on the bacon, but hey, if a little happened to flow over from the pancakes to the bacon, there was nothing you could do about it, right? I remembered the smell of our kitchen as a child and my mom draining the bacon on a double layer of paper towels. It’s a beautiful thing.
AB and I became friends. I’m invited to his divorce party. His children have played with my children. He made sure it was not a high Jewish holiday and his sons wore baseball caps, the headgear of choice for the waffling Jew. Every time AB visits me, he brings me a big package of fancy bacon and some nice artisanal cheeses. He’s a good man.
Last time I was in New York City, I got in a day before I had to work. AB invited me to go to Traif. It’s a restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on the edge of the Hasidic community. It’s the perfect restaurant for AB to take me to. The menu is really good food, and it’s mostly traif. It’s bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with blue cheese. It’s pulled-pork sandwiches and bacon doughnuts. The food is great and the food is sacrilegious. My buddy SweetiePie, with the facial hair of the leather daddy in the Village People and from Michigan, was my date. SweetiePie got his nickname when he was our theater manager in Hollywood way back before Off-Broadway. His name was Michael and I asked him if he preferred “Mike” or “Michael.” He said “Anything is fine,” and I said, “In that case, I shall call you SweetiePie,” and it stuck. I think he has a different story about how he got his name, but neither of us is lying. SweetiePie is from as non-Jewish a background as Goudeau and me.
It seemed like such a nutty event that I tweeted it, and because of that, some ex-Hasid Jews showed up. So it was AB, SweetiePie, an African-American model skeptic computer programmer whom AB had brought, a Russian woman who looked like she’d been downloaded from a porn site, a woman documentary filmmaker who was doing a movie on ex-Hasids, and three ex-Hasids. All of the ex-Hasids were men. There certainly are women who no longer believe, but it’s even harder for them to get out. They can’t fucking drive, for Christ’s sake, and maybe “for Christ’s sake” is the wrong ejaculation to use there.
So, there we were, nine of us, all brought together to celebrate the flouting of religious dietary laws and have some bacon doughnuts.
The three ex-Hasidic men were in three different stages of breaking away. The one nearest to me was just a guy, a little rockabilly and out of fashion, but still just a guy. He had sideburns, not quite as bushy or big as Extreme Elvis’s, but sideburns, very gentile facial hair. He had no hat and hair like an early Jerry Lee Lewis. He moved like and had the aggression of Lenny Bruce, and his face was not dissimilar to Lenny’s in his prime. He wore jeans and a shirt. He was in his twenties but talked like Jackie Mason. The sentence structure, accent, and inflections were not American, but he had been born in Brooklyn. He was as American as me, but seemed like a foreigner who’d watched a lot of Happy Days episodes to learn how to act. I will call him Sauly. Like a much more Jewish Pauly Shore. Sauly was loud, clumsy, and very lovable.
I’m moving up in level of Jewishness: the second man I will call Moishe. He was a big man, not my size but close. He was wearing a hat that could have been Justin Timberlake’s but could also have been Hasidic; you’d have to see the rest of the outfit. But the rest of his outfit wouldn’t have told you enough. It wasn’t all black, like he was supposed to wear, but wasn’t a Hawaiian shirt either. He had payot, the Jewish sideburn curls, but they were getting shorter. He had come to Vegas a few months earlier and told me he was really ready to leave Judaism. He wanted me to cut his long curly sideburns, the way I had fed AB a bacon cheeseburger. The hair growing in his sideburn region had been down to his stomach, but lately he had been trimming it back as he felt less Jewish. He still wanted me to do the final cutting, but he was already back to being able to hide his payot behind his ears. Moishe was still deeper in the Hasidic world than Sauly. Moishe talked like Jackie Mason if Jackie had never wanted to be on TV. He was obviously from another country. He’d also been born in Brooklyn.
The third ex-Hasid was hard-core. He was full-on guy-working-in-an-NYC-electronics-store. He was a small man, all dressed in black, with a hat, long payot, and a beard. He spoke English very well, but with a heavy accent, such an accent that the phrase “such an accent” would start at a middle C and rise up to about a B-flat by the last word. He looked and sounded like a cartoon of a New York Jewish immigrant. His name had no American equivalent. It wasn’t a name; it was a word. You know how gentile “Penn Fraser Jillette” sounds? Well, imagine the Jewish form of that. Not really a name, just sounds designed to be ethnic. I’ll call him Schmoozleschnu. Schmoozleschnu had been born in Brooklyn, NYC, USA, in 1985. He didn’t learn English until 2006, and it was his third language. He was raised speaking Yiddish, and he added Hebrew probably because it was a little less Jewish. His family didn’t have a TV, listen to the radio, or see any movies. He was from another world, and he was a twenty-minute cab ride from the MTV corporate offices in Times Square.
The first nonreligious book he read—not the first book in English, but the first nonreligious book he ever read—was The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. He had his mind blown by the bacon cheeseburger of comedy, George Carlin, when Schmoozleschnu first watched TV.
Mr. Pie and I were about to learn a lot of stuff we never knew and would have a lot of trouble believing.
I guess some of this is common knowledge, or it should be. You know the Pennsylvania Dutch talk nutty, right? We know that there is an enormous Latino population that speaks Spanish and has some different customs than mall Americans. The Amish and the Gypsies have their own style and language, kinda sorta. If you’ve ever been to Dorchester, Boston, or seen Gone Baby Gone or The Departed, or been in the Deep South, you know there are still some wild accents in our homogenized country. If you’ve heard me when I’m not on TV and I’m thinking about my mom and dad, I talk a bit like a Pepperidge Farm salesman. We all know about the diverse cultures of the United States of America. I mean, Christ on Italian beef, have you ever talked to someone from the real Chicago? It’ll put you off your feed.
I knew all that, but I didn’t know there were people born in the USA who didn’t speak any English. We’re a nation of immigrants, and immigrants want to assimilate, but not the Hasids. It’s a very successful cult. It’s a subculture that has nothing to do with the rest of American culture. While they were full-blown Hasids, these guys had never heard of Madonna or the Beatles. They had never heard of Elvis. They had never heard of Elvis. They had never fucking heard of Elvis Aaron Presley, the good old boy with the Jewish mother. Moishe used the term “Looney Tunes” to describe the people he used to live with. I asked him how he knew about Looney Tunes. He said he knew them from retailing children’s underwear with those cartoons on them. His father had also shown him some Mickey Mouse cartoons on a sixteen-millimeter projector on the wall of their home, and now his father felt that was why Moishe was going crazy and leaving the fold.
Pie and I sat chowing down on bacon-wrapped shellfish while we found out that religious authority figures fucking little boys is not just a Catholic thing. Our new friends all had firsthand experiences. They all had been married to strangers while in their teens. Even in this tightly knit community, the people they were marrying were often strangers. Strangers they would fuck to produce a lot of children. The fucking-through-a-hole-in-the-sheet thing is a myth, but they really do fuck only at night in the dark, and there is no pussy-eating. You can’t get crazier than not allowing pussy-eating. Husbands can’t even look at their wives’ cunts, and this is a community without television. They are more lenient about blow jobs—some sages allow it, some don’t—but no matter what they do sexually, marrying a stranger in the twenty-first century is a little weird.
Somehow in the mishmash of finally allowing American culture to flood over them, they had stumbled on me and my radio show’s podcasts. There are only a few dozen of these ex-Hasids and they all know each other, so if one of them finds something it moves through the expats pretty fast. Somehow by the weird random path of life, I was in the middle of this group of heroes.
I asked Schmoozleschnu how he was led down the road to atheism. How did he end up eating traif at Traif with me? It’s the same one-word answer that you get to so many varied questions: pussy. He didn’t know anything about science, but he knew about strip clubs. He would go to strip clubs but had never heard of Madonna. It just doesn’t seem right. He said that most of the Hasids go to strip clubs and hookers. It seems like at strip clubs, American culture would wash over you, but I guess if you’re in a hat and funny clothes you still stay separate enough for god. Schmoozleschnu was getting a lap dance from a dancer and he asked her what religion she was. He asked her that because . . . well, I don’t know, I guess because he was a crazy motherfucker. She said, “Atheist.” Why don’t I ever get “dancers” like that? It seems all the dancers I see have big old hateful crosses hanging between their big brand-spankin’-new lovable tits, but Schmoozleschnu got lucky. “Getting lucky” in this case doesn’t mean getting laid, but rather having your entire philosophic underpinnings destroyed. He had never believed it really possible to be an atheist. All he had heard about us, in Yiddish I suppose, was that we were miserable monsters. And here was a miserable monster getting his circumcised dick hard. When I have a hard-on I want to talk evolution, and so did Schmoozleschnu. He asked her if she believed in evolution, and of course she did. He said he would disprove it, while she was rubbing her perfectly evolved ass over the burlap, or whatever, of his black trousers.
Schmoozleschnu thought he had a killer argument: which was more complicated, a tomato or a pair of eyeglasses? A tomato, of course. And yet we believe that eyeglasses are designed and a tomato is not? (Read that sentence making your voice go way up, like a high school student in the 1950s playing Shylock.) Our busty dancing Charles Darwin pointed out that a tomato and eyeglasses were different and then laid on the origin of the species for Schmoozleschnu in a loud club. Maybe she used some visual aids and pulled aside her G-string as she explained how we got from primordial ooze to poontang in a billion years. She covered geology and disputed the young earth and Noah’s ark, and he left with a happy ending and a better understanding about how happy endings had come into existence.
Pussy in a strip club led Schmoozleschnu to the big D’s and H’s—Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris—and then to supper with me and SweetiePie in Brooklyn. Sauly was totally American; Moishe was on his way but still able to pass for religious around his family; and Schmoozleschnu was still looking full Yama Yama Jew. I like to think that the term “Yama Yama Jew” is poetic enough that I don’t have to explain, but I will. I went to Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey the Greatest Show on Earth Clown College in Florida. I was the last picked and the youngest the year I went. I took classes in trapeze, wire walking, and prop building. It was a very extensive program, six days a week, and on the seventh day I had remedial makeup. I wasn’t good. I learned to do a double backflip on the trampoline and to walk across a tight-wire. I learned that I really, really sucked at physical comedy. I came into college as a great juggler, and I left as a great juggler, but I never got to be even a passable clown. That’s right, I failed as a fucking clown.
We were taught in makeup class, and in makeup makeup class, that you should never put any red or black makeup on your upper lip—the whole exaggerated mouth is painted on the lower lip and chin. If you put any mouthlike makeup above your mouth, it obscures your facial expressions instead of magnifying them, and when you open your mouth it’s just a slightly bigger hole in the middle of a red blotch. If the makeup is only painted below the upper lip, then all your expressions are exaggerated, and on people other than me it’s funny. Clown makeup that’s put on both the upper and lower lip gives a look that professional clowns call a “busted asshole.” Once you’ve heard the term “busted asshole” for that kind of mouth makeup, well, it’ll add some Human Centipede images to your nightmare idea of bad clowns.
The other big indicator of a sucky clown is a Yama Yama suit. A real clown has a costume that in some way signals a specific character. The clothes also have to give the performer the ability to move, tumble, juggle, run, and fall down. The costume should amplify body movement like the makeup amplifies facial expressions. Yama Yama suits are those one-piece zip-up-the-front baggy suits with bright colors, like Zippy the Pinhead wears. Yama Yama suits obscure body movement like a busted asshole obscures facial expressions. Now that you know, you’ll spot lots of Yama Yama suits and busted assholes on bad clowns.
I was once talking to another clown college alumnus about getting a good deal on a video recorder at Forty-seventh Street Photo in New York City. He said, “Is that the place with the Yama Yama Jews?” It’s the perfect term.
Schmoozleschnu was full Yama Yama because that was his job. Because his English was so good, and because he could work on Friday nights and all day Saturday, he was in showbiz. He was a professional Yama Yama Jew. If you’re watching an NYC show that has a Hasidic Jew in the background, that extra is probably my new friend Schmoozleschnu. He’s also a TV and movie consultant on all kinds of wacky Jewish sects. He makes sure they get it right, and they can talk to him in English and on Saturdays.
The last time I asked anyone if they were Jewish was many years ago at MIT. I don’t remember why, but I asked a genius geek who was showing us around the Media Lab, the same genius geek who joined us for AB’s atheist communion, if he was Jewish. He responded, “No, I’m an atheist.” His dad, as a young child, had fought and escaped from the Nazis, but that didn’t make his family Jewish. He didn’t see it as a racial or cultural question but a theological question. He didn’t care what Hitler would have considered him; he was an atheist. He was no more a Jew than I was a Christian. That answer was important to me. It was that moment when I understood George Clinton suggesting one nation under a motherfucking groove. It was an inspiration.
I don’t understand atheists who claim to also be Jewish. I’ve wanted to do a Bullshit! episode on cultural Jews and tribalism, but there’s no way Showtime would consider letting us do that. They’re afraid that cultural Jews would be better at letter-writing than friends of Motherfucking Teresa, and they’re probably right about that. I hear hard-core atheists claim that they are Jewish because their moms were Jewish. That’s not a genetic rule, that’s a religious rule, and if you’re not religious, you don’t follow religious rules. There were rules in the South for what makes someone “colored,” how many drops of Negro blood it took. There is no scientific taxonomy for different races; there are no genetic markers. It’s very hard for me to tell what religion my mother-in-law is; I guess she’d call herself spiritual. I believe my wife’s grandmother, whom I adore, might call herself atheist. My wife was certainly raised atheist, and yet there are some people who would think our children should be considered Jewish because someone in the maternal lineage said that. Nope. They are atheist and their culture is Vegas—and even that’s too much tribalism for me. Family matters. I love my mom and dad, and my sister and nephews and children. I identify with them. But I don’t see how being identified with people you’ve never met because of “race” is anything but racism, pure and simple. Being proud of yourself, your beliefs, your taste, your accomplishments, and your immediate family and friends seems sensible and right. Being proud of some imaginary group you were born into seems insane and wrong. It’s collectivism at its worst, and collectivism at its worst is racism. I went back to Newfoundland to see where my grandfather grew up, but I’m not a Newfoundland-American, I’m Penn Jillette, son of Sam and Valda, husband of Emily, father of Moxie and Zolten. Penn Jillette, an asshole who didn’t even do well in Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey the Greatest Show on Earth Clown College.
I do think cultures should be studied and preserved. I think it’s important that the great ideas of the Jewish people are preserved, but I don’t see why they have to be preserved by people who consider themselves Jews. Spike Lee could do Schindler’s List and Clint Eastwood can do Bird. I don’t think that complexion or lineage should determine what groups you belong to. I have more in common with Richard Feynman, George Clinton, Sun Ra, and Tiny Tim than I do white Christians. I am an atheist whack job; that’s my culture.
Schmoozleschnu was a professional Jewish expert, and his not considering himself Jewish is a big step toward utopia, world peace, and one nation under a motherfucking groove.
At Traif that night, Pie and I heard amazing stories about life as a Hasid. All the men would ritually bathe naked together every morning. They were all taught it’s okay to steal from a gentile. They had an education that covered the minutiae of prayer and very little mathematics or history. Our new friends were sure part of an insane cult, but none of them had left it completely yet, and I don’t blame them. The ideas of the Hasids are scientifically and morally wrong; the fashion, food, and lifestyle are way stupid; but the community and family make me envious.
When I lived in Greenfield, Massachusetts, with my mom and dad, with my sister and her family a couple miles away, I was in a town where most everyone had known me since my birth. I was around people every day who knew me and cared for me—and didn’t agree with me on anything. I watched Tiny Tim and Lawrence Welk on TV with my mom and dad. Dad hated Tiny, I hated Lawrence, and we loved each other.
Now I live in Las Vegas. We have a big fence and gates around our house. I don’t know the name of anyone who lives on our street. My children have four aunts who are still alive and have never seen all of them in one room at one time. They have a grandfather, and a step-grandmother, and a grandmother, all of whom they love and are loved by, and they see them a few times a year, and never all together. They have a great-grandmother, who is great, and they see her a couple times a year. Day to day, my children are part of a very small family. Technology like Skype allows them to talk to their extended family, but as wonderful as that is, it’s not living near them.
My wife and I disagree about art and poker, but other than that, I’m rarely in a room with someone who loves me and disagrees with me. It’s something I miss in my life. Technology has given us a wonderful world, but it has also spread us out. We have babysitters instead of aunts. Dying more than thirty miles from where you were born is a pretty new thing in human history. There are some emotional family bumps on this road to the future.
The Hasidic Jews have problems, lots of problems, lots of weird crazy shit to fuck people up and make them waste their lives, but they do have family and community in spades.
I know how much I miss my mom, dad, and sister. I know how much I missed them when they were alive and I talked to them every day on the phone—I was still thousands of miles away.
I can’t imagine how difficult it is for these ex-Jews. They are working to love science, and to love the truth, and to be honest, but it’s costing them dearly. Their marriages were arranged, but they still have a great deal of affection for their wives. They love their children. They love their siblings, and they have plenty of them—that’s the way the Hasids keep a growing population. They don’t have a lot of people converting to their fucking psychosis. They love their moms and dads and uncles and aunts and the entire safe community that they’re giving up.
They are giving all that up for the truth. They are heroes, they are astronauts. And I was sitting with them and they were talking about my radio show as we ate food together. Food that everyone they loved for their whole lives thought was evil food.
Schmoozleschnu said that after the stripper taught him science and he read Dawkins and listened to George Carlin and then my radio show (why the fuck am I in that list?), he knew there was no god. He had the moment when there was no doubt in his mind that there was no god. There’s another way to say that: he had reached the moment when there was nothing but doubt in his mind. The moment when he couldn’t accept nonsense on faith.
When he had lost his faith and seen the light of reason peeking through, he asked himself one question: “Who will take care of me?”
Pie and I almost cried when he said that. I haven’t believed in god for so long that I don’t remember ever feeling that god was watching out for me. My family watched out for me. My mom and dad took care of me, and now my wife and friends take care of me. I look in my son’s four-year-old eyes, and I don’t feel alone. He knows something in his heart that can keep me going. But Schmoozleschnu lost god, and all his family and friends were staying behind with his imaginary friend. A silly dream goes away and takes with it your whole real life. He can listen to my radio show, and he can have supper with me, but I’m not going to take care of him. I have my own family and friends.
The restaurant check came and I threw down my AmEx and they didn’t take AmEx, so I went for my Visa card. Moishe and Schmoozleschnu, with their hats and payot, grabbed the check away from me: “No, no, we’ve got it.” Sauly pointed out it was the only time anyone would ever see two Hasids fighting with a goy to pay the check. That’s sure what it looked like, but there were no Hasids or goyim at that table; that table was becoming one nation under a motherfucking groove.
We said good-bye, and Moishe drove Pie, the filmmaker, and me back to midtown Manhattan. He drove us through the Hasid community where he’d lived his whole life. The community he loved and was trying to leave. He said that if I walked down these streets in the daytime I would be considered as foreign as if I were in a town two hundred clicks out of Beijing. Moishe put a Hasidic singer on the car CD player, and even the scale and the mode of the pop music was foreign to us. Moishe translated that the singer was singing about the joy of the end of the world. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Moishe had talked to his father about becoming an atheist. Moishe felt his dad loved him but was still secretly hoping Moishe would end up in jail or something, some deep trouble, to vindicate the faith of his father. Moishe said his dad had asked him if he was happier without religion. If he was happier without his family and community. If he was happier as an atheist.
Moishe had explained to his father that what made him happy didn’t matter; what mattered was the truth.
That may be the definition of a hero.
—George Clinton
Postscript: Since our dinner, Schmoozleschnu has come completely out of the closet. He is doing a lot of consulting work and even writing scripts about the Hasids. He’s now proud of his journey and would like me to give his real name, Luzer Twersky—yup, it’s pronounced “loser.” Maybe we all need to take care of him.