Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! (11 page)

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, type, 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.

We did the bit. We started in an empty cage, and Teller produced one bee bare-handed. It looked great. Then he produced about a dozen from a tube and then it escalated. As usual, I didn’t do much besides talk and Teller just kept producing bees and dropping them on me. Teller got stung a couple times, because he was paying attention to the bees and dropping them on me. I lost count after my twenty-fifth sting, because as I did the bit and moved my arms and talked, bees would get trapped in my sleeves, or collar, feel threatened and sting the shit out of me. There was the sickening sweet smell of fear pheromones and bee shit and I was being stung every several seconds. One bee got trapped in my mouth, and if you watch the YouTube video, you can see it happen on a close-up and watch me flick the stinger with my tongue and spit it out. Everyone thought I was a real tough guy and not a sixteen-year-old mall girl at all, but the truth is, if I fucked up or screamed or stopped, I would have to do it again, and I was too much of a coward for that.

We finished the bit and stripped naked in the cage with the live audience watching, but the TV audience was watching the much more attractive commercials. Stripped naked with bees all around us, we moved into an airlock where the bees were vacuumed off us by our prop guys. When there were no bees left on us, we went into another air lock and then out into the theater proper. Not one bee escaped into the audience. I stood naked in front of the audience (thank you, Allen Ginsberg) while the nurse and entomologist picked stingers out of me, put on salve, and checked my pupils and vital signs. I was a-okay. We got dressed and went on to the next trick.

Naked isn’t a big deal for us. I believe if you haven’t been naked onstage, you’re not really in showbiz. It’s what we do. When we were doing our
Bullshit!
show
,
we would hire people to be naked on the set. We were doing a science show on cable and to do that we needed obscenity and nudity to make it worth paying extra for. We would hire nude models. It pissed me off how many of the models got to the set and then were uncomfortable being nude. They would wear robes and get all shy. It would be like I was supposed to seduce them into taking their clothes off. In my personal life, I hate seduction. Why would I want to talk someone into being naked with me if they didn’t really want to? But in my professional life, it’s just people not doing their jobs. These aren’t people I wanted to see naked. I didn’t care at all. It was their job to be naked. If they didn’t want to be naked, they should have a different job. It’s like you hire a plumber and she comes in and says, “I hate getting my hands wet.” Well, then don’t put “plumber” in the side of your Econoline! If you want to keep your clothes on and have any dignity at all, don’t be in showbiz.

In my last book, people seemed to like the story of me dropping my cock in a blow dryer, so it seems that my stupidity plus my genitals is my ticket to the
New York Times
bestseller list. So here we go again. After shooting the bee bit, we did a bunch more tricks for the audience that day and then went into production meetings and planned for the next day of shooting on our special. I was bee-stung and exhausted and worried about how the show was going. I also knew something was wrong between my legs, but didn’t want to look at it, talk about it or even think about it.

I went home late that night, with an early-morning call the next day. At the time, I was dating a beautiful New York City model. She was so sweet and caring and just gorgeous with her figuratively bee-stung lips. I was exhausted, and when we were finally alone in my apartment, she was in the bathroom, naked, washing her face and brushing her teeth, and I was standing in the doorway to the bathroom watching her and digging her. She was telling me the show was going to be great and I had done a good job. I was barely awake. As I watched her and listened to her, I took off my shirt and dropped my pants, but as I went to take my boxers off, something was very wrong. Oh, so very wrong. The skin of my scrotum was attached to my boxers and my boxers had blood all over the front of them. When I peeled off my boxers, the skin of my scrotum came with them, and I was standing there with bloody balls. I was horrified, but when I looked back to my girlfriend, she was more horrified. “What the fuck?” she asked. All the kindness was gone.

“I never told you. I have an exoskeleton, so to get bigger, I have to molt. Your ass looks great.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m calling 911.”

“It really doesn’t hurt. It’s disgusting and it burns a little, but it’s not bad. It’s like a bad sunburn on my balls.”

“Your balls are bleeding. You have a bloody sack. We’re going to the hospital.”

“I’m too tired. I have to work in the morning. I’m going to bed.”

“You can’t do this. This is disgusting.”

“Okay, so don’t blow me. Goodnight.”

I woke up the next morning in sheets that could be displayed and confuse an entire Jewish neighborhood. I could peel all the skin of my scrotum off in one very thin sheet. Just like a sunburn, if you went on the tanning bed in a completely opaque body suit with your balls cut out and hanging (is that sexy? I think so). My girlfriend wisely insisted that I call my doctor. I had become friendly with my doctor, “Hey man, my ball sack is bleeding. It started last night.”

“Cool. I want to see it.”

“It’ll cost you a quarter.”

“No, seriously, come to my office.”

“I can’t man, I have to be on set. We’re shooting our TV show.”

“Nope, you have to come in. I’ll call the board of health and shut down the whole shoot if you don’t. Jump in a town car and get over here, I’ll get you back on set ASAP.”

“Okay.”

I went to his office, pulled down my pants, and showed him my bloody sack. He got really serious, a nutty kind of serious. “We have to talk.”

“Okay.”

“Listen, the lie is over as of today.”

“What?”

“We’ll get you help.”

“Yes, for my bloody balls.”

“No, for your drug addiction. It’s not secret anymore.”

“What?”

“This is an allergic reaction to shooting up street drugs. Let me see the tracks on your arms.”

“I don’t have tracks, because I’m not doing drugs.” I rolled up my sleeves. Luckily I didn’t have bathtub syphilis at this point.

“Where are you shooting up?”

“I’m not shooting up.”

“I know you do the whole no drugs and alcohol pose, but that’s over. You’re a junkie. Admit it and let’s get you help.”

We went on like this for a while. I finally got him open to the possibility that it could be something else, “An allergy? Did you eat anything unusual?”

“Cheeseburger and pizza.”

“No shellfish?”

“Nope.”

“Nothing unusual happened yesterday at all?”

“Nope, just shooting the TV show, tired, overworked—lots of pressure—could it be pressure?”

“No. Just shooting TV?”

“Yup.”

“When are you doing the bee thing we checked you for? How is that going?”

“We shot it yesterday.”

Long pause. Then another long pause. Then another long pause. Then eyes rolling. He asked, “Did you get stung?”

“Yeah, some.”

“How many times?”

“Lots. Like more than twenty-five times.”

“You were shot up over twenty-five times with dirty little hypodermic needles full of poison and shit and you didn’t mention that?”

“Oh, is that it? But I didn’t get stung in the balls.”

“It’s an allergic reaction, you idiot. It’s not right on the area. It’s systemic. Fuck, you are stupid. If you’d have said that on the phone, you’d be on the set working now and not wasting my time.”

“That could do it? What do I do?”

“Yes, that did do it. I don’t give a fuck what you do—put some cream on it and toughen up. Oh, and the skin will probably peel off the tops of your feet too. Man, you’re stupid. Get out of my office.”

Once my girlfriend knew that it wasn’t life threatening and, more important, wasn’t going to spread to her girly parts, she thought it was hysterical. She was running around the set telling everyone, “You know how Penn’s balls usually look pretty good and tight? Well, now they look like Ernest Borgnine’s balls and they’re bloody—show them, Penn.” And I did. It’s the least I could do after freaking her out the night before. But how did she know about Ernest’s balls? She was a model.