Supreme Court Justice Ron Jeremy

I live in a nutty house. We call it the Slammer. It looks like a prison. It’s very industrial, lots of concrete and chain link, but it’s not called the Slammer because it looks like a correctional facility or because my dad was a jail guard. It’s called the Slammer after the groovy quarantine facility at USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, at Fort Detrick in Maryland. USAMRIID’s stated purpose is “to conduct basic and applied research on biological threats resulting in medical solutions to protect the warfighter.” Cool!

Around the time I was moving from New York City to Las Vegas (when you’re doing Off-Broadway and Broadway in New York City, and you tell your peers that you’re moving your show to Vegas, it’s a little like being a New York City fine artist and telling everyone in SoHo that from now on your media will be fluorescent paints on black velvet and your subjects will be exclusively Elvis Presley and Jesus Christ sweating and crying, respectively and vice versa), we did a Penn & Teller run at the Capitol Theatre in Washington, DC. In that show I had a broken-bottle juggling routine that was about thirty seconds of juggling broken liquor bottles and fourteen minutes of monologue that rambled a bit, like this book. During that monologue I talked about how the audience didn’t have the proper sympathy for me. They didn’t have enough empathy to fear my getting hurt juggling the impossibly difficult, jagged glass bottles. I told them, “Even if I were to dip these bottles in fresh Ebola Zaire virus, cut myself, come down with hemorrhagic fever onstage, and have my eyeballs pop, most of you would turn to the person next to you and say, ‘I hope Teller doesn’t catch it, he’s kinda cute.’”

The big cheese from USAMRIID was at the gig that night, and my hemorrhagic fever reference suggested to him that I might be interested in a tour of his facility. He allowed me to invite our crew to join us for the tour, and most of them did. It’s still the most P & T crew members who have ever shown up for a field trip. When we were all invited to see U2, I could get only my manager and my wife to come along. With the USAMRIID tour, our guys had found what they were looking for.

The tour was amazing. I wanted to sign up to do some “guinea pigging,” which is being used as a test subject to see how people react to catching a certain virus. It would be a way for me to help people without having to do any work. I could sit in a room, read, and have blood drawn every few hours. They wouldn’t let me do it.

We learned a lot on the tour and saw a lot. I looked through the thick glass of the negative-air-pressured room at the woman who works with airborne, fatal, incurable diseases all day long. We flirted, as best we could, through the glass. I found her intact airtight positive-pressure suit so sexy. It was the kind of suit Dustin Hoffman wears in Outbreak. That movie was bullshit, of course, but I would have loved to watch it with the cats and kitties from USAMRIID. It would be like watching Silence of the Lambs with Jeffrey Dahmer. You got to hand it to Dustin Hoffman; you have to be a pretty serious actor to look like Dustin and wear that stupid hat with a magnifying glass over your nose. The USAMRIID woman in the serious infectious disease room filled out the crucial bunny suit very nicely, and I found her job so sexy. This is a woman with some serious balls. So sexy. She’s not going to worry about that little cold sore on your lip before she kisses you. I never got to talk to her, though; it took her too long to get through the showers, so she couldn’t greet tour guests.

Right after I watched Ms. Ebola in her room, our host showed us “the Slammer.” It was a room that nothing went out of; every molecule of air was treated. If Ms. Groovy Diseases had ripped her suit on a broken infected monkey tibia, she’d have been rushed into this room for extreme quarantine and kept there until she died. I had been working on Broadway and doing TV for a while, and I thought that my Fortress of Solitude should be extreme quarantine, a place where I could stay until I died. As I began to plan my house, I decided to call it the Slammer, and the name stuck.

I built most of the Slammer before I had even met my wife or thought about having children. It’s like it was designed by a twelve-year-old boy with a lot of money and no legal guardian. There’s a fire pole coming down from my office to the courtyard. There are secret rooms behind bookcases (so much for secret, but there are others too). There was a sex dungeon off the bedroom that has since been turned into a nursery (the wonderful story of my life). My office has a urinal and a sink (I still don’t know why you need both), there’s a band room with rock and roll and jazz instruments set up all the time, and there’s a big home theater. All this, and it looks like an industrial complex with real human skeletons hanging here and there. When it was being built, the only real grown-up in my life was my business manager, and he worried about the Slammer’s resale value. “No one is going to want to spend money to buy Penn Jillette’s house. You’re not Elvis. It’s not Graceland. So you’re killing your resale value by making it this crazy. Put in marble floors or tile or something expensive to misdirect from the fire pole.”

While I was ignoring my business manager’s expensive advice, my senior adviser, LOD, whom I don’t pay at all, was in Vegas visiting. Lawrence O’Donnell Jr. was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s senior adviser, a big-cheese writer on The West Wing, and now host of The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on Fox News Channel (just kidding, it’s on MSNBC). We’ve been friends forever, and I go to him for advice.

I was telling LOD about some sort of Halloween fetish ball that I’d just been to. Someone had taken pictures of me with some very attractive women who were not dressed for climbing Everest. I don’t do drugs, and I don’t drink, but I still enjoyed this shindig. I asked LOD if I should be worried about the pictures showing up in the future.

LOD went into a flattering speech about how he personally thought that I would make a pretty good Supreme Court justice. The Constitution said nothing about needing a law degree or even being smart. LOD thought I’d do a good job and look cool in the robes. “But,” he said, “it isn’t going to happen. No one is going to offer you a position on the Supreme Court, so you don’t need to worry about the pictures showing up at the confirmation hearings. You’re a fucking juggler! Who cares? It’s like your house, the so-called Slammer; you’re never going to be able to sell it anyway. But you don’t need to sell it, so don’t worry about resale value. Accept who you are and do whatever you want.”

I found that when I stopped lying to myself and stopped planning for futures that weren’t going to happen, I got happier. It was easy. I like that my door to the Supreme Court was slammed in my face. I liked realizing that it would be okay to shave my eyebrows and replace them with calligraphy tattoos of “fuck” over the right eye and “you” over the left eye.

I was taken with these thoughts, and I was preaching this new freedom. My girlfriend at the time was quite taken with the idea as well. She was an actress, and she found it liberating to think that she didn’t have to worry at all about whether she showed her tits in movies or not. Who cared? She wasn’t going to be on the Supreme Court. (She still hasn’t shown her tits in a movie; she married some guy and got knocked up, and I still see her pop up grieving on police shows, but I’ve never seen her tits on TV. I don’t know if she still thinks about it, since like a few ex-girlfriends, she doesn’t talk to me much anymore.)

Besides convincing this woman she was never going to be on the Supreme Court, and giving her a party with a cigarette-smoking monkey in a diaper that she could laugh at (in some ways I was a pretty good boyfriend), I also introduced her to Ron Jeremy (make your own call as to whether that introduction is “good boyfriend” or “bad boyfriend”).

Ron Jeremy is not a porn star, he is the porn star. He will show his big dick to anyone. He’s not all that attractive and never was all that attractive. He’s older than you by a lot and he still gets paid to fuck. If that’s not the American dream, I’m a self-fellating blue-nosed gopher. I have gone out in public with Debbie Harry, Jay Leno, Madonna, and Johnny Depp. None of them gets the same attention or is as recognized as Ron Jeremy. It’s amazing; guys will knock over naked porn women just to get near Ron. He’s a superstar.

I introduced my girlfriend to Ron Jeremy, and a few weeks later they got together with some other people for lunch. I wasn’t there. Ron was discussing some decisions he was making. I can’t even make up an example of what those might be. My girlfriend decided it was the perfect time to share the new LOD wisdom with Ron and the gang. “Don’t worry about it, Ron. You’re not going to be nominated for the Supreme Court; these choices will not be revisited in your confirmation hearings.”

She said Ron froze. He didn’t know what to say. He was heartbroken and angry. “What? You can’t know that. You can’t say I have no chance of being on the Supreme Court.”

She hung tough. “Yes, I can. We all can.”

“No, I could be on the Supreme Court.”

“You’ve made over a thousand pornographic movies. You blew yourself on camera for money—repeatedly,” she reminded him.

“But you can’t say that I wouldn’t be on the Supreme Court. You can’t say that for sure.”

He is right. We can’t say that for sure. We really can’t.

I read something Thelonious Monk wrote for his band members, rules they should follow about his music and art in general. One of them was, “The genius is the one who is most like himself.”

LOD’s advice was a cheap shortcut. It’s easier to be yourself once you decide you have no chance of being on the Supreme Court. The genius way to be yourself is to accept that you might be on the Supreme Court and still star in movies where you blow yourself. That’s the real genius.

It’s very, very unlikely that we’ll have Supreme Court Justice Ron Jeremy. Extremely unlikely. But not impossible.

And if we do . . . oh man, we’ll all be geniuses.

“You Sexy Thing”

—Hot Chocolate