Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! (16 page)

John Belushi had that one chance to nail that
Star Trek
sketch and he had to make sure everyone got it. Lance had thousands of shows to get that bird out right and every single night it got a little better. The magic was not in hiding the birds in his jacket. The magic was in doing it over and over again.

I can go out onstage and just try breathing in a different place to see if a line is smoother. I’m living my thousand years of Groundhog Day. That’s a rare thing in life, where you have something you want to say from your heart and you get to say it over and over again and get it better. Get it right. There are conversations with my wife I would like to have a thousand times so she understood me perfectly. These audiences get to hear me say for their first time something I’ve said a thousand times. I should be able to get them to feel what I want. There is the art. The art is Groundhog Day.

Listening to: “Like a Rolling Stone”—Bob Dylan (a live performance from last year of a song written in 1965 and performed thousands of times since)

SICK DAYS

HOW MUCH WOULD YOU SPEND,
right now, cash money, for five photographs of me getting a blow job? There are a lot of sex pictures in my collection, but only five of them are clearly me. It’s my fifty-year-old, 6'7'', 300-pound body standing there with an attractive, red-headed woman, a good friend of mine, and she has my proportionate-but-no-more penis in her mouth. I’m enjoying myself. She’s enjoying herself. She’s wearing a blindfold, so one of my personal sextortionists billboarded it as “Hardcore S&M.” At the time the pictures were taken, both of us were single, and so was the person taking the picture. I don’t remember her birthday, but she was just under thirty. There might have been a twenty-year age difference, but I’m so wicked old that she was still double the legal age in some farm states. Someone who used to work for me sold a laptop without wiping it really clean. Someone else got hold of it and went to a lawyer who specializes in extortion. That asshole lawyer got in touch with my groovy lawyer, who specializes, at least with me, on death threats against me for being an atheist. The asshole wondered whether I might be interested in keeping these pictures from going public. This is known as extortion. Or blackmail. The only unusual thing about it is that it was happening to me.

How can blackmail happen to me? What’s to blackmail me on? I wrote a bestselling book that included a chapter on my visit to a gay bathhouse, possibly with “Patient Zero” and trying to have gay sex. In the same book I wrote about group sex and having a fat Elvis impersonator piss on me in public. I’ve written about dropping my cock in a blow dryer and fucking a famous model underwater. I once had a CNN cameraman shoot my poisoned bleeding balls. There are pictures and stories of me wrestling naked with a little person, a man, both of us naked, in wet cornstarch. To use incorrect terms, there are pictures of me butt-naked wrestling a butt-assed-naked dwarf. We got rough, he was choking and he almost died. I came close to being the perp in naked homosexual dwarf murder. Isn’t that a little kinky? Even in the twenty-first century, that’s a little kinky, right? I’ve been to the Fetish and Fantasy Halloween Ball dressed as a leather daddy. I did a show called
Penn & Teller: Bullshit!
—available on iTunes, YouTube, and Netflix—where I’ve been naked and surrounded by naked people and have talked about and cheered for all kinds of sex. I also used every obscenity you’ve ever heard and I may have been the first to say “cunt pickle” publicly. I did a movie called
The Aristocrats
that was banned by a whole chain of theaters just for the graphic verbal descriptions of perverse sex acts. You can go to YouTube right now and watch me dance naked in Zero-G on the Vomit Comet with my cock flapping around. I have a United States patent on a female masturbation device that I demonstrated with nude models for
Playboy
. Bill Maher listed a bunch of “perversions” on his show and I said, seriously and honestly, “I’ve done all those.” Howard Stern talked to me about my sex dungeon in my home being used as a nursery when our children were young. I’ve attended the Adult Video Awards and felt Nina Hartley’s and Carrie Fisher’s breasts almost at the same time in public. At that same convention, I slipped behind a curtain with a porn star for an embarrassingly short time. I dropped my pants at a TSA checkpoint and was detained for indecent exposure. I’ve never done a drug in my life, never had sex with anyone who is underage (since I was underage myself), never committed an act of bestiality (mostly because I just don’t like animals), never coerced anyone into sex and I have no secrets from my wife. She sees every picture and she knows every woman who walks by in Starbucks who I find attractive and that’s most of them. I don’t lie to her. Unless there’s a surprise party coming up (that might include wrestling a naked dwarf), we have no secrets. How can blackmail scare me? But it made me sick for weeks. It fucked up my life.

What was your number for the five pictures of me getting my cock sucked? The extortionists started at “six figures.” When bad douche bags are stealing money, and they say “six figures,” that doesn’t mean $1,000.29. They don’t put the decimal point in. Their jive-ass six figures start at $100,000.00. Let me tell you right now, if you’ll pay six figures even with the decimal point for a picture of me getting a blow job, my wife and I are happy to oblige and you can run the camera yourself. Hell, you’re welcome to join in. My wife and I sometimes have sex just for fun, sometimes for no figures, and not for procreation and not to sell on the Internet.

When the sleazy extortionist lawyer got in touch with my super-expensive honest lawyer and laid out the threat, I had the odd feeling of being innocent and guilty at the same time. I knew I had done nothing wrong. If there were something I would feel guilty about, I wouldn’t do it. I believe very much in privacy, but I don’t keep much private. I get interviewed and I answer questions that others just say “no comment” to. I try to be a little cagey about what I think of Criss Angel, but people see right through me on that, and I don’t even try to be cagey about sex. I should be blackmail-proof, but when my lawyer called and explained that someone had my private pictures and were threatening to make them public, I almost threw up. Later, I did throw up. I got real, no kidding, sick. I ended up in the hospital and I’m sure stress was part of it. I don’t want to make comparisons with other sex crimes that are much more serious, but it is true that something that one gives up happily and for free can feel awful when it’s taken without permission. I felt awful.

I asked Teller, “Who the fuck would want pictures of a fifty-year-old fat guy getting his cock sucked?” He answered, “Apparently you do, and that’s the mystery.” Teller always has the right answer. As funny as that is, it’s also true. It was his way of saying “no one,” but why the fuck did I have those pictures on my computer? Why the fuck did I want those pictures? What was I thinking? I understand why I have thousands of pictures of women (and a few men) that I took or had sent to me, I love naked pictures, but why pictures of me? I don’t even look in mirrors. I don’t brush my hair. I hate photo sessions. Why was I posing with my cock out? Well, I was thinking it was no big deal. We were playing around, there were three of us, one had a camera and the pictures were hot to us. They weren’t hot compared with SpankWire and Hamster or any of those professional porno sites, but they were hot to us because they were us. They wouldn’t mean shit to you. I’m not a sex symbol. I’m not attractive, but the wonderful thing about humans is that we can find people who find us sexy, and I’ve been very lucky. We had a really fun evening and took a few pictures so we could remember it and maybe rub a few more out to those same memories. It was efficiency as much as anything. It saved energy. We did it for the planet. I think others do this too. My politics and theology are certainly weirder than my sex life. I think I’m pretty much in the American sex pocket. I’m not a big deal. I’m not blackmail material.

If I were a piece of ass, like Tom Cruise, or I was anti-ass like Rick Santorum, it seems a lot of people would want to see these pictures, and you could probably get six figures without the decimal point, but Penn Jillette? Who cares? No one cares, and I was still vomiting.

If I were the person I’d like to be, I would have told my lawyer to throw the letter away. No answer is the answer that was deserved, or I should have told my lawyer to just quote Shakespeare: “There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats: For I am arm’d so strong in honesty That they pass me by as the idle wind, Which I respect not.” That’s the person I’d like to be. The person I am threw up.

There was a sickening fear. Maybe it’s the sickening fear I feel every night when Teller points a gun that can’t hurt me at my face. A blackmail letter is scary. Was it possible there were pictures I didn’t know about? When the first e-mail came in, they didn’t say they had all my pictures. I thought they might have someone else’s pictures. I don’t know of anyone else’s pictures, but what if there were some? What difference does that make? It’s the same fat guy. The same cock. I’m used to my cock. I’ve accepted my cock. I’ve used my cock. What’s the difference who took the fucking picture? But I wasn’t strong enough. I threw up and I chattered in fear to my lawyer while her clock was running.

My lawyer and manager met with the extortionist lawyer. I didn’t want to feel like prey—I’d rather feel like the predator—so I engaged the lawyer who helped out David Letterman with his blackmail case. You may remember, Dave was embarrassed and the bad guy was incarcerated. Dave won. My new big-cheese blackmail lawyer told my manager and my regular super-lawyer to push hard when they met with the asshole lawyer. They were told to say pretty much what I said in the first paragraph of this article: Penn lives his sex life in public already, we know he fucks and fucks hard and has pictures of it all—now shock us. You better have him fucking a dog or a young boy. My guy is a fucking bad-ass. Shock us. Make us sick.

This is a goofy situation. It’s like the thief inviting my manager and lawyer to his house to see the Ferrari he stole from me. As soon as he shows my pictures, he’s admitting to a crime. It’s bugnutty. The dickwad led with a picture of me and Liberace. Sadly, both of us fully clothed and not even kissing. He followed that with a picture of Gilbert Gottfried and me with a stripper on my lap. I think the stripper had claimed that she was Dolly Parton’s cousin and fronted that claim with a couple of similarities. My manager said, “That picture hung in our office for sixteen years.” Then my manager was shown the pictures of me getting a blow job from a woman in a comfortable blindfold and the extortionist pointed out that that woman was married (she was married five years
after
the pictures were taken, but why quibble) and she had a job she might worry about losing. Wouldn’t it be more embarrassing to have a homeless woman blowing me? He then showed them some video of my wife fucking and having sex, and yes, my wife knew the camera was running. I was running the camera and I told her that the red light was on. It would embarrass my wife in front of her mom and dad, but even if it was on SpankWire, her mom and dad would at least fast forward through the good parts. So what?

The lawyer tried to argue that this was pretty shocking for someone who was on
The Celebrity Apprentice
.
What?
Do we believe that Donald Trump doesn’t get blow jobs from his wife? She might
need
a blindfold. Aubrey O’Day was on
The Celebrity Apprentice
and so was Miss Universe, and I found both of them naked on the Web the night I got back to my room after meeting them. People want to see them naked more than they want to see me, and they want to see me more than Donald Trump—I mean, I hope they do. So what?

So then the piss-ant lawyer got stupider. He showed my lawyer and manager some financial reports. Oops. This changes the crime. This would get the FBI agents hard enough to blow each other on camera. Then he made it clear he had my whole hard drive, which would help me figure out who his secret “client” was. It also meant that he had my files from Teller that show me how some Penn & Teller magic tricks are done. Some of our tricks are so complex, and Teller does most of the work on them, that sometimes I’ll perform my part in a trick for years not knowing how the whole thing is done. At magic conventions, I have explained our magic tricks wrong—I just didn’t know. But Teller has sent me diagrams. These are trade secrets—oops. Now the FBI is hard enough to cum in their pants without blindfolds on.

The fuckhead extortionist lawyer, from Hollywood, then told an implausible story of how his client got this information: the client had bought the laptop from a Craigslist ad the year before, and saw some files on it. He waited a few months to look at the files (a few months to see what the fifty gigs were? Not likely), saw it belonged to me and took another couple months (until the premiere of
The Celebrity Apprentice
) to engage a scumbag and extort me. Oh, and the lawyer said his client bought this alleged laptop in Las Vegas, Nevada—oooooooops. That’s not California. Now it’s interstate; now the FBI can fuck him hard every way they want. The FBI really loves to hate-fuck extortionists and they take pictures.

Most people who go to the FBI have already made blackmail payments and are scared to death of the blackmailer. I had paid nothing (let’s not count the thousands to the good lawyers), and I wasn’t really very worried about the stuff coming out. There was nothing even close to illegal. I knew the women in the pictures wouldn’t be happy with these out there, but I own the copyright and where would they go? Who would post them? I didn’t fuck movie stars or politicians. I fucked businesswomen and scientists. I fuck citizens. I find real people sexier than showbiz people, and that’s fortunate for me, because movie stars seem to have no desire to fuck me.

TMZ won’t pay for any sex pictures. The sites that put up sex tapes of Paris Hilton and Kim Kevorkian (is that right?) aren’t going to put up stills of my wife having sex. Who cares? Blackmail is just stock options; they are worth nothing unless I happen to believe they’re worth something. They are worth my fear and shame. I’m not without fear and shame, but I’m not overflowing with it either. I don’t have six figures worth of fear and shame.

Before I called in the FBI, my lawyers said, “You want to think about this, because you’ll be turning your whole hard drive over to the FBI. They will have everything. You’re the victim, they’re not looking to bust you, but they might see letters to your pot dealer or offshore accounts or something like that.” I don’t have anything like that. I don’t even drink, and I don’t understand hiding money. “Also, what about your wife?” I told her about all this and she said, “So what, let them put it all up. I wish they had pictures of me younger, but I look okay. Fuck them.” Some people have asked why this woman is the woman who became my wife. Have we answered that? She is perfect and so much stronger than me. If this was going to be a scandal, I supposed it could hurt Teller’s career too. I talked to him about it, but he just laughed at me. The whole thing tickled Teller pink. Anyone wondering why he’s my business and artistic partner for life?