Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! (14 page)

Without the best and the brightest forcing us into an immoral, undeclared and unconstitutional war, Teller might have gone right into magic and now there would be a Teller Theater in Vegas, and I’d be in prison where I belong. Teller killed time to avoid killing people, and had time to meet me; it looks like I was the one who got him into professional magic, but the truth is that Uncle Sam just delayed the inevitable and I wound up with the best performing partner in the world.

I was with Teller on his first free school day in autumn since he had been five years old. We were driving and eating doughnuts, far away from our homes, on a Monday at eleven a.m. in September. Every year before that he would have been in class, either teaching or studenting. I was an old pro at playing hooky. I hadn’t gone to school much of my junior year, I missed almost all of my senior year, and I’d been out for a couple years living on the streets, but still, the air smells sweeter and time stands still any day you’re in the world and everyone else is working or in school.

Teller and I drove together from the East Coast to Minnesota to do our Renaissance Festival shows. We were together twenty-four hours a day. We ate together and shared Motel 6 rooms together. If one of us got laid, the other had to walk around the parking lot to give some privacy. And this was before iPhones. In the car I played Teller Lou Reed and the Shaggs and he played me Bach and Bernard Herrmann, and we talked. It was some of the best times of our lives. All that would become the Penn & Teller style we talked about in that car. We talked mostly about lying to people for a living while being honest. To be able to lie for art, and tell the truth for morality. It was heavy talk. It was pretentious. There was no humility; we were young so we had to try for the best show in the world. We were going to do something brand-new in magic and in entertainment. There were no hope or desire to be famous or rich—we weren’t that crazy—but we were going to do some stuff onstage that we loved. We weren’t going to be greasy guys in tuxes with birds torturing women in front of Mylar to bad small-dick rip-off Motown music. We were going to speak our hearts while doing tricks. Some of the specific ideas talked about on those drives weren’t realized until thirty-five years later, and we’re still working on others. The results of those theoretical conversations can be found in all the Penn & Teller shows. Our career is just an appendix to those conversations.

When we got to Minnesota, we didn’t do an act together. We each did our separate shows and then would meet back in the employee area in the hay behind the trees to reset our props, count our money and roll our quarters. My show was a very long crowd gathering. I would explain to a few passersby that I was going to do “absolutely nothing” and when I signaled them, they were going to scream, yell and applaud. When other strangers heard this and ran over to see what was happening, the original “crowd” could all turn and laugh at them for rushing over to see nothing. We’d do it again and again until there were a couple hundred people watching me do nothing. It got funny. With my audience in place, I would juggle balls, while commenting in a disparaging way about the routine, explaining, in different ways, that I bothered to do all this practicing, so they could at least bother to watch it. I moved from balls to very big and really sharp knives (I was a juggler, not a magician—I didn’t fake much). First I would juggle the knives with an apple. I would eat the apple while juggling and spit all over myself (slightly less of a hackneyed trick at that time, and much more interesting when juggling knives along with the apple). I went to all knives, and then got a “volunteer” from the audience, put an opaque bag over her head, stood behind her, and juggled the knives around her. I’d return her to the crowd and then put the same hood over my head and juggle the knives blindfolded. That was the big finish and then I would do my money pitch. I said I’d do a magic trick and change the executioner’s hood into a change purse, snap my fingers and claim it was done. I then said to prove I had been successful, I would need money from all of them. I then did a list of reasons they should give me money and excuses that I would not accept. There was lots of talk about my size, and my aggression, so it was mostly threats. The money speech was the longest (and most important) part of my act. I had forgotten it, but just this week, I mentioned to Teller I was writing this, and he performed my whole speech from memory. It’s his favorite thing I’ve ever written.

After all this loud, insane, aggression, I ended my show with a very quiet “thank you” and then moved into the crowd to collect my pay. The ball and knife juggling were part of the Penn & Teller show even into the first Broadway show, but the crowd and money gathering fell away. Resetting my props meant dumping money out of my blindfold/bag and grabbing a new apple. Teller had all this niggling magic shit to do, so I just watched him. I don’t want to give the impression of starving artists here, but we were working hard for showbiz. I always have to add “for showbiz,” because no one in showbiz works as hard as anyone with a real job.

Springsteen does a three-hour concert with people cheering for him, while people work at a desk for eight hours just taking shit from assholes. We were doing eight shows a day, and that’s a ten-hour day with a lot of time to talk and roll quarters and it was only weekends. Even when we were “working,” we were getting paid for doing what we would have done for free. We were doing what we had to do. If writing or going into showbiz is a choice, you shouldn’t choose it. Morally and politically I’m a capitalist, but money was not my motivation for getting into showbiz. I didn’t really think I had a chance of making my living in showbiz, and when that started to happen, I was shocked. I still can’t believe it.

I have a commie friend, a good friend, a famous friend, a political friend, who when he admitted to me privately, after he’d admitted on TV publicly, that he was a socialist explained to me the real reason. He believed that big salaries paid to hard workers were just society wasting money. “Hardworking assholes like Bill Gates are going to work no matter what you pay them. They like to work. Look at you, you’re not anything compared with Bill Gates and yet you’d do your little shows even if you were being paid 1/100th of what you get paid. You’d do the same quality show and work just as hard for a subsistence wage. It’s bullshit that money is the motivator for people who really work hard. Hardworking people have a mental illness that helps all of us, and we should exploit that. They don’t really work for the money, so let’s give them a lot less. Take that money and give it to the lazy fucks like me who don’t really want to work. Then take the rest of the money and use it to motivate the people in the middle, who do need incentive.” It’s the best argument for socialism I’ve ever heard. I would do our show for next to nothing.

In Minnesota, Teller and I were trying to get better, and how much money we made was a good measure of how well our shows had gone. Somewhere we have the booklet in which we kept track of every penny we made. If you’re with the IRS, that booklet might be hard for us to find. There we were in leather tops, tights and dance belts resetting our shows and counting our money. I was sitting across from Teller, both of us sitting on the ground, while Teller reset all his magic tricks. After a few weeks working, Teller asked me to take a look at his brilliant “Needles” routine. He wanted my eye and some pointers on how to make the trick better. How he could be a little more deceptive. I said, “Sure, but it’s already deceiving me, so you’ll have to tell me how it’s done before I can help you conceal how it’s done.” Teller was stunned. I had sat and watched him set up all his tricks and I still didn’t know how they were done? I never paid any attention. I didn’t care. I liked the way it looked onstage, and I wasn’t interested in the mechanics.

I think it was that moment. The moment that Teller realized he had found someone who really deeply didn’t care about how the tricks were done was the moment that he decided to work on a magic show with me. We did the Minnesota Renaissance Festival a few years, added Texas, Maryland, Canada, California, and North Carolina, and during the drives back and forth to New Jersey, we wrote bits and shows and talked over the theories that we’re still carrying out. Nothing is more fun than taking one’s work seriously, and we always have.

I did very well street performing and it was mostly a cash-only enterprise. I did a show that was shorter than fifteen minutes and most of that was crowd gathering and collection. Not a lot of juggling in my juggling show. I didn’t study anyone else who was street performing, and with the exception of the Renaissance festivals, I performed mostly where it was illegal. Most street performers get people to give them money because they look like they need it. People gave me money because I looked like I deserved it. Offstage I’m a slob. I’ve never dressed well. I sit around in gym shorts and a work shirt. I don’t look in mirrors. I don’t shave or get dressed unless I have a show. I have to be paid to brush my hair. “Who’s looking at you?” my mom would ask when I made any comment about the clothes she chose for me to wear. But when I was street performing, I always dressed very nicely and made sure that everything I wore looked expensive. I didn’t play poverty. I tried to work places where people were upscale.

Teller and I were partners, and while we were getting our stage show together we needed to make money, and I always hit the streets. Teller had put his Renaissance act together but there weren’t always festivals, so I dragged him back to my old way of making money. Teller and I staked out the area of Philadelphia where we wanted to do our street shows. Before we did any shows, we sniffed around. We went to all the local merchants and spent money and talked to them. We went to them, bought their shit, and said we were going to be doing street shows, and if we hurt their traffic flow at all, could they please let us know right away. We wanted to help their business.

We found out the area we’d chosen didn’t have other performers because there were a bunch of young men around who considered themselves a gang and made it impossible to work there. Maybe they were a gang. I don’t know how gangs work, but these were young men with a median age of about fourteen. I guess they were scary, but we didn’t think they really hurt people. Maybe they did really hurt people. I didn’t know and I don’t know. We did know that other people who had tried street performing had their props and money stolen and blamed these guys, and we knew they disrupted acts. Teller and I decided to try something bold with them. I decided to gamble about a grand to see what would happen if I tried trusting them. I had one of the first really fancy digital watches. I loved it. It would be worth nothing now, but then it was almost a grand. In our age of iSleek it would be just clunky and ugly, but back then I thought it was really sexy and groovy.

I arrived to do my first street show in that area. I had my juggling balls and my wooden log with my big juggling knives stuck into it. I had a suitcase with my blindfold, apples for juggling, and my bank bags for money and quarter rolls and hundred-dollar paper bill-bands. While I was juggling balls at the beginning of my show, all that other stuff was easy to swipe and run away with. One of the “gang” guys was watching me closely as I set up. I said to him, “I’m going to do a show here in a little bit.” He nodded. He had seen other street performers come and go on his turf. Maybe he was the one who forced them out.

I said to him, “I have trouble juggling with this watch on, and I’m afraid to leave it in my suitcase. I’m afraid someone might steal it. It’s a wicked expensive watch.” I took the watch off. “Would you hold on to it while I do my show so it’ll be safe?” I threw the watch to him. It was a gamble, but it felt right. The story is better if you see this guy as the main potential thief, but I have no evidence of that. He was just a tough-looking child with a different complexion than mine. He caught the watch and said, “No problem.”

I did that whole first show without ever looking back once to see if my props were okay. I never checked on my watch. I gathered a crowd of a couple hundred people and juggled my ass off and blew my voice out. I used to put Chloraseptic in a Coke can and use it to stop my throat from hurting so much. I had no vocal training, I just yelled. The voice I have now is not just my age; it’s a lot of stupid screaming. Some people have told me very kindly that I have a sexy voice. It’s just damage. I guess damage is sexy. Bob Dylan has the blood of the lamb in his voice; I have the blood of screaming for hundreds of people in my voice. It was a really good show. Teller might be right—that street show might be the best thing I’ve done in my life. My crowd gathering was ripped off and is now part of many, many street shows. I asked a guy doing it on the street where he got it, and he said it went back hundreds of years. Some of the lines in my money collection are also used as standards. I’m pretty proud of all that. It was a good show.

After I had gotten the last penny from the crowd, I turned around and there was my newest friend still guarding my watch. He was beaming. He liked my show and he liked holding my watch for me. I asked him if he wanted to help me out and he said yes. His name was Jose, and I threw him the whole moneybag. I asked Jose to separate the bills out, sort them, and count them. At the end of every night, Jose would reach into my moneybag and take a handful of the unsorted money from the last show and that was his pay for helping and protecting me. Some nights he got a twenty-dollar bill in the handful, maybe one or two nights two twenties, and some nights just ones and quarters. He never complained and neither did I. I would arrive at my corner, Jose would run over, take my watch, take my suitcase, set things up, and I would do shows. At the end of every collection, I would throw all the money to Jose and he kept everything safe. He cleaned and organized my props and bought apples for me and made sure I had a fresh one for every show. He said he was part of a gang, and he told me one night about a fight that he got in and I let him “hide” at our house out of the city for a few days. I never knew anything about it. I never asked him about his “gang.” We talked about juggling and how much money we’d made. Maybe he just wanted to see my house. I know he didn’t steal my watch, but maybe he lied about other stuff. I knew Jose for a couple of years. He was a good friend.