Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! (17 page)

So I turned the case over to the FBI and they got all FBI about it. They started wiring people and setting up installment payments with FBI money and handcuffs and shit. My lawyer said, “I don’t think you want to play cops and robbers.” And I said, “What the fuck are you talking about? I absolutely want to play cops and robbers—I want to be wired by Sam Waterston.” But I didn’t get to do anything. All the e-mails were written by the FBI and sent by my lawyers. All the meetings were done by lawyers. My lawyer made phone calls while she was wired. She wrote leading questions in e-mail like, “If Penn doesn’t pay, what will you do with these pictures?” And the scumbag answered all the questions by the extortion handbook. Oh, that six figure price? What the scumbag lawyer thought five pictures of Penn Jillette getting a blow job were worth? Do you have a figure in your head? Get ready. His figure was $900,000.00 cash money. Give me a list of people to whom you’d pay that much money for five blow job pictures. I’m not on it, right? If I am on it, give my manager a call—you’ll get the deal of your life.

What would happen if I didn’t pay? Would the headline in
The New York Times
be: “Old Fat SubStar Gets a Blow Job from More Attractive Woman with Blindfold—His Career Is Over!” I guess that could happen. If I had just been the human being that Shakespeare wanted me to be and sent the
Julius Caesar
quote, most likely the pictures and the story would never come out. The article you’re reading now is all you would have ever heard of it if I had done nothing. When this book comes out, I might get disgusted and set up “Penn’s Blackmail Page” and put the pictures up myself and be twelve feet tall and bulletproof for the rest of my life. Fuck blackmail.

My children were five and six years old at the time. If they had been fifteen and sixteen, this would be a whole different issue. They could be embarrassed in school, but I still can’t imagine giving those scumbags even six figures of dimes. It would just be some gossip with the MILFs and the teachers and it wouldn’t filter down to my children. By the time they’ll care, my blow job will have blown over. They have much more to be embarrassed about by me. Look at my haircut, for Christ’s sake—who wants to be dropped off at school by an elderly hippie magician dad?

As it turned out, after all the phone recording and cat and mouse, the FBI just showed up at the scumbag lawyer’s office (in his home, what a fucking loser) and said that they were conducting an investigation into stolen material and they were watching him. The lawyer said he didn’t know that and he was dropping his client right away. He wasn’t going to even call him. A few weeks later, I got the laptop FedEx’ed back to me, and the whole thing was over. Maybe the fuckwad kept a copy in case I do end up running for mayor, but after the FBI said it was stolen, he might just want to not have any blow job pictures of me anywhere around him. My legal fees were five figures, and that sure seems a stupid amount to pay for nothing, but they did a good job. So, some asshole cost me tens of thousands of dollars because I had some pictures of myself getting a blow job. If you want to hear the sound of Teller’s voice, listen carefully; you can probably hear him laughing from where you are now.

All this waving my cock around makes it sound like I didn’t care at all, but the truth is I did care. No matter how much I try to pretend I don’t care about this, I do care. I can write here about everything I’ve done, but I don’t like someone else threatening to tell people. My whole system shut down. I got physically sick. I cried. I cried to my wife. I left my office to get hugs from her. I didn’t feel sexy. I did nothing wrong. Nothing. I wasn’t even in danger. I suppose if it had all come out in the worst way possible on a slow news day, it could have hurt ticket sales at the Rio’s Penn & Teller Theater, or hurt book sales, or TV deals, but it was just as likely to help those, right? There’s no such thing as bad press. I think Lee Harvey Oswald said that. So, I was an innocent man who was not in danger, and I was attacked by an impotent dick, and I got sick. It’s amazing. Even being right can’t make me as strong as I’d like to be. I’m no Julius Caesar.

I don’t have the self-control to say, “I’m in the right and I’m out of danger—fuck them.” I could tell someone else to do that, but I can’t tell myself. And that makes me feel weak. Everything conflates—I had an ear operation, I was on
The Celebrity Apprentice
, we were putting a new trick in the show—and everything just ran together. I didn’t know what I was feeling. I couldn’t tell if I was depressed about the blow jobs, Clay Aiken, or an ear infection and those are way, way different things, you know, except for the last two.

I didn’t want the FBI to put the asshole in jail. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life dealing with the fact that someone was in jail because of me. I just wanted them to stop bugging me and they did. I knew when I took those pictures that anything on your computer can go public, and I found out what that feels like. I’m stronger now. If there’s any advice I can pass along from this experience, it would be that if someone tries to blackmail you, go right to the FBI. They’re smart, they’re tough, and they’re fun to talk to. You know when your mom told you to go to the police if you were in trouble? She was right.

I was flying to Burbank just before this book went to press. Porn superstar Ron Jeremy was on my flight. I got close to him and tried to change my voice a little, which is stupid, I always sound like me, and I said, “Hey, show me your dick.” I thought it was the kind of thing a stranger would say to Ron and the kind of thing I wish strangers would say to me. He looked up, saw it was me, smiled, and we chatted a bit.

Before I got to asking him who he’d been fucking lately, Ron said, “Hey, this porno press agent asked me for your number a while ago. He wanted to get in touch with you. He told me why. I thought it was bullshit, so I didn’t give him your number.” (Do you love that Ron has my number?)

“Good thinking.”

“Yeah, he said it was some pre-emptive thing. He said he had pictures or videos or something that you might not want out there. Like sex shit. I told him that you didn’t give a fuck, as long as your dick looked big enough, right? You don’t fucking care. Right?”

“Right.”

“Hey, you want the asshole’s name? I have his name, I can give it to you. He’s a bottom-feeder.” A guy who got famous blowing himself has met some bottom-feeders. I got the name from him and we did a Web search, and that name shows up with the name of a dirtbag lawyer who was able to get my number through my lawyer. Ron’s analysis of the situation was perfect, instantaneous, and completely free. So, let me change my advice some: If you’re ever blackmailed, either go right to the FBI, or ask Ron Jeremy what to do.

Similar weird bad shit has happened to me once before. In one other instance I’ve been totally innocent and was ripped apart with guilt. I had a radio show and I made some jokes about Mother Teresa. They weren’t good-natured jokes. Not at all. They were mean-spirited. I said that Paris Hilton was too moral to play Mother Teresa and that Mother Teresa’s “kink” was suffering. Previously when I talked about Mother Teresa on
Bullshit
, I called her “Motherfucking Teresa” but this was CBS so I couldn’t. I didn’t know anything about it, but some local DJs (I don’t even know how many or where), commented on my show and offered money to have me killed and said they’d pay more if I suffered. I didn’t even know about it until my boss called up right before my show and said, “We want you to know we take death threats very seriously.” I said, “Good thinking, but why are you telling me this?” He said, “Oh shit, you didn’t know.” He explained and I went directly on the air and did a radio show. It’s shocking, but the DJ worked for the same company I worked for. We had the same boss. The next day the DJ and his crew were fired.

I didn’t want him fired, I just wanted him to shut up. My daughter was a year old at the time, and I didn’t want headlines saying, “DJ fired for offering money to kill Penn Jillette.” I didn’t want “Kill Penn Jillette” to be the first thing that popped up on a Google search when you typed “Penn J—” This time I didn’t call in the FBI. I just wanted it to go away. My father-in-law called me and asked me what the fuck I was doing getting death threats when I was supposed to be caring for his daughter and granddaughter. He was right. I had armed guards at our house around the clock and Rio security walked me from the Penn & Teller Theater to my unmarked Penn & Teller car after every show. What the fuck? We managed to keep it pretty quiet and none of the death threats (and there were a few like this) hit the national media, and we finally got rid of the guards, but we still have a pretty good security system at our home. If this gives you ideas, I believe the guy’s withdrawn his offer. And he’s flat fucking broke anyway, so don’t bother.

But this story gets weirder. The DJ who was fired sued me for getting him fired. Here’s the position I was in. It seems like I had a right to ask to have him fired, since he threatened on the air to have someone kill me, but I didn’t. Right after my show, I called the big cheese and asked him
not
to fire the guy. I thought if they kept him on payroll, they could keep him under control. Tell him he was no longer allowed even to say “pen” or “Gillette” again, let alone my name. I thought if they fired him, they would have nothing to hold over his head. My strategy was to keep him working and shut him the fuck up. The DJ found out about my phone call, but not the content and claimed that I had called to have him fired and sued me for that. He also thought that I’d have more money than CBS Radio. I sure wish I had the money that people who want to attack me think I have.

I ended up having sixteen hours of depositions where an elderly Christian lawyer asked me questions about Mother Teresa and how much money I had. I was supposed to follow rules and never help him at all, but after he asked me if I was familiar with Dave Carlin’s “ten words you shouldn’t say on TV” or something that far off, I finally said, “You mean GEORGE CARLIN’S SEVEN WORDS YOU CAN’T SAY ON TV?” My lawyer said that was wrong—I should have made him work for it. Jesus Christ. He also didn’t believe that I’d never heard his client’s comments about me and that I didn’t want his client to be fired. Everyone in the office heard the MP3 of the DJ threatening me, but I didn’t want to. And I didn’t want my wife to hear it. Would you want to hear someone offering money to have you killed?

I had nothing at risk. I was completely innocent. CBS was paying all the legal fees and they were signed to pay any damages. I was facing nothing at all. But I was in the system with people attacking me and I felt sick and depressed. There’s a line by Sly Stone in “Family Affair”: “You can’t cry ’cause you’ll look broke down, but you’re crying anyway, ’cause you’re all broke down.” That’s how I feel at these times.

In both of these cases, I had no reason to be worried. But the system is set up to make a person feel danger. It’s impossible to feel safe and innocent, at least for me. I’ve heard that really bad people thrive in this situation, but I don’t. I way don’t. I’m happier when I’m completely separate from the United States Justice System. I don’t want to sue anyone. I don’t want to be a victim or a perp. I just want to stay away.

I was talking to my senior adviser, Lawrence O’Donnell Jr. LOD and I were talking on the phone about how safe and innocent I was and how shitty I felt. This is what came to me. This is the self-help portion of the book.

I think you just have to take sick days. I always tell people when they’re going through a romantic breakup that “It’s just the flu—give it a week to ten days and you’ll be better. There will be some diarrhea and vomiting, but you’ll be fine. Just accept that you’re going to be sick and get through it. Don’t fight it. Don’t try to be happy and well. Go with the sickness—just get through it.”

I guess that’s what to do with blackmail and death threats too. Just take some sick days. Throw up, bundle up, drink plenty of liquids, take an analgesic for relief of pain and fever, and wait for time to pass. You’ll be fine. That’s my advice.

Now, wanna see some pictures of me getting my cock sucked? I’ll make you a deal.

Listening to: “Family Affair”
—
Sly and the Family Stone

What would this picture be worth to you?

 

APRIL FOOLS’ DAY

OUR MOVIE,
Penn & Teller Get Killed
, is about two guys, named Penn and Teller, played by Penn Jillette and Teller, who play practical jokes all the time and—this isn’t more of a spoiler than the fucking title—those practical jokes end up killing Penn & Teller, and depending on how you read the ambiguous ending, maybe those jokes end up killing everyone in the world. Our movie was not the first movie starring people using their own names as characters who die in the movie. The Monkees’ movie,
Head
, stars Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones and Mike Nesmith playing characters of the same names and they all die at the end (also not a spoiler, the end is shown at the beginning).

Penn & Teller Get Killed
was directed by one of the greatest directors of all time, Arthur Penn, and he made exactly the movie we wanted. The movie we wanted was not the exact movie the audience wanted, and now it’s called a “cult film.” I’m pretty proud of it. I’m happy we did something that nutty for our movie. Nutty made me proud and ended our movie career.

The movie would have been better art if it had been popular. I’m fascinated by the difference between characters and real people in entertainment. I’ve spent most of my life playing a character that has my real name and many of my real-life personality traits. I try to make that character as close to my real self as possible, but that’s still quite a distance. The Penn who lives with his family doesn’t always feel like doing those tricks onstage every night in Vegas at nine p.m. But the Penn who works at the Rio wants to put his suit on and walk onstage every night at the same time, in the same mood, and perform those same miracles. The real me, the I, always feels like being onstage when the other Penn is supposed to be, but if I were totally myself, I might not leave my children to drive into the theater and put a suit on. Once we’re onstage, doing those tricks, we’re pretty much the same guy.

I try not to say anything in character that I wouldn’t say myself. People ask me if I believe everything I said on
Penn & Teller: Bullshit!
and I did and I still do believe almost all of it. There has been some information that’s changed my mind on a few things, and I’m also a different person now, so some of my opinions have changed a little, but when I said it, I meant it.

I’ve done a few TV dramas where I played myself and then it gets tricky. I did a detective show called
Numb3rs
and I was playing myself. Someone else wrote the script, but I was pretty much myself. The Penn in
Numb3rs
was proud of having known Richard Feynman, and the real Penn is even prouder.

I know the audience makes very sophisticated separations between fantasy and reality, but some reactions still confuse me. Lawrence Konner, one of my friends, was a writer on
The Sopranos
. He gave me a call once and asked my permission to write a scene in which one of the women on the show, Adriana La Cerva, confesses to having sucked my cock in a men’s room in Atlantic City. He was inspired to write that after an evening he and I spent hanging out in Vegas—you know what I mean. I was flattered. Even more flattered when a morning DJ told me that Mick Jagger had called Steve McQueen to ask if it was okay for Mick to sing about someone sucking Steve’s cock in the song “Starfucker” (it’s copyrighted as “Star Star”). Steve said yes to Mick and I said yes to Larry. Steve and I are that same kind of guy. After it was shot, Lawrence called me to apologize. I guess in his script she blew me in the men’s room, but they changed it on set to her blowing me in the women’s room. I don’t know why that made a difference on the set, and I don’t know why Larry felt he had to apologize. I have no idea what that means. I guess the Penn of
The Sopranos
cares where he’s blown. The real Penn would be happy to go into the bus station transsexual bathroom for any blow job.

When that episode of
The Sopranos
came out, I had people call me and say, “I loved your appearance on The Sopranos.” I got more reaction to that than the many TV shows I’ve gotten into makeup for. I’m at my best when I don’t show up. A character on
30 Rock
talked about what outfit she’d wear to watch porno in Vegas with me. For the real Penn, you can watch porno with me without any outfit at all. People called up and congratulated me for being on
30 Rock
. After
The Sopranos
blow job line, I was most shocked by the people who said, “You know, that actress, Drea de Matteo, must really dig you, or she wouldn’t have said that.” What? It was my buddy Lawrence who thought about sucking my cock; Ms. de Matteo had no more desire to suck my cock than James Spader desired to fuck Maggie Gyllenhaal in
Secretary
. Okay, that’s a bad example, but I was surprised how many people thought that I was somehow on
The Sopranos
.

Weirder than getting my imaginary cock sucked on that show were the two Penn & Teller appearances on
The Simpsons
. It seems everyone wanted to know what that was like. What? It was like being in a recording studio in Vegas wearing headphones and reading a piece of paper on a music stand. We didn’t go to Springfield. Homer didn’t want to suck my cartoon dick in the cartoon women’s room of the cartoon nuclear plant.

The
X-Files
called us in to do a script with them in the nineties. We went to L.A. for a meeting with the big cheeses on the show. They were considering having us play Penn & Teller, who discover that some bullshit wasn’t bullshit. We were to play the skeptics who were proven wrong. Morally, the show is fiction and so anything is okay. My favorite movie is
Dawn of the Dead
and my twelfth favorite movie is the remake of
Dawn of the Dead
and there’s nothing wrong with doing a fictional movie about zombies even when there aren’t real zombies. That’s okay. It was okay for us to play Penn & Teller and get killed even though we weren’t killed. It was okay to have some Mafia girlfriend talk about sucking my cock. But something rubbed us the wrong way about playing skeptics who are proved wrong in
The X-Files.
It didn’t feel right.

We were discussing this with the cheeses at
The X-Files
and they were being pretty snotty about it. They thought we should get off our fucking high horse and just do their big fancy TV show. They were right and they probably would have convinced us, but then one of them said something crazy. One of them said something like it was impossible to have drama without the supernatural. What? I brought up
Psycho
and all Sherlock Holmes and then they made a bigger mistake. They said something to Teller like “I see why you don’t talk much. Penn is so argumentative, you can’t get a sane word in.” Oh dear. When you say in real life that Teller doesn’t talk because I’m too aggressive and he’s dominated by me . . . well, things don’t go well. Don’t assume anything that Teller does isn’t his own choice.

Teller spoke. Oh my glory, did Teller speak. Teller explained that he was quiet during this meeting not to stay in character or because I bullied him into silence, but rather because he couldn’t figure out a way to suffer fools as well as I had. He then made a very strong case for realistic drama, quoting Aristotle and Shakespeare and using phrases such as “hacks like you.” It didn’t go well. They did the show without us and got a couple of other guys to transform from make-believe skeptics to make-believe believers. The guys who did the bit are friends of ours and it was a good break for them. It would have been good for us too, but we queered that deal. I think it’s okay to do anything in fiction, but it’s not okay to say that Teller is being quiet because I overpower him. That’ll get you a new asshole ripped. Of course, their show did fine without us. It was our loss, not theirs. Sha La La La, man.

We were not the first to kill our fictional selves in a movie, but I really wanted to be the first to be the bad guy under my own name in a fictional show. I can’t think of another example of that except maybe Donald Trump on
The Celebrity Apprentice
, but I’m not sure he sees himself as the villain. I wanted to be a fictional real bad guy named Penn Jillette. I asked the
CSI
guys if they’d let me play Penn Jillette on their show and turn out to be a murderer. I thought me in an orange jump suit with a prison ID number and the name “Jillette” on it at the end of the show would be great. But Teller and I pissed off the
CSI
guys too. I don’t think there was even a story to how we pissed them off; they just plain didn’t like us. We were told by our manager that they hated us. We don’t know what we said or did. I guess we were just ourselves, sometimes that’s all it takes.

When I was on
Numb3rs
playing myself, I asked if the fictional Penn could be friends with the lead guy, Charlie Eppes, played by the groovy David Krumholtz. I asked if I could be some sort of recurring character. I wouldn’t start out as the bad Penn Jillette. I would start out as the good Penn Jillette, who was getting to be friendly with Charlie Eppes. I’d be a guy he went to for a few shows. That would be the arc of my character. And then after Charlie and the audience got used to me, there would be a case where some perp was killing showwomen or magicians or something sexy like that. Charlie would come to me to help me solve the crime, and then he’d realize that I was the bad guy and he’d lock me up as “Penn Jillette.”

I’ve heard that people who play the bad guys in re-creations of real crimes on TV get turned in as “most wanted,” but with my own name, I thought it would be even nuttier. I guess they kind of did that to me on
The
Celebrity Apprentice
, but I wanted to try it with a real script and plot and not just after-the-fact editing. I think going to TV prison would be way more fun than the boardroom. The writers/producers seemed to like the idea, but the show ended before we got to do it. Or maybe they were just being nice over lunch and weren’t even considering. I never know what’s really going on in showbiz. I still wonder what we did to piss off
CSI
.

I’ve heard hard-core drinkers don’t go out on New Year’s Eve because it’s for amateurs. I feel that way about practical jokes. Teller and I do not play practical jokes. Hardly ever. We played a real-life practical joke on an agent in Atlantic City and it didn’t go well. We were too good. Way too good. It really didn’t go well. I’m going to tell you a slightly watered down version, because I’m ashamed of the real story.

Our opening act for one run in Atlantic City was Robert Wuhl doing stand-up and telling wonderful showbiz stories. The three of us decided to play a practical joke on a booking agent who we shared. We’ve done most of what there is to do in Atlantic City. We wanted to see what would happen if an agent had to break up a serious fight between Robert and Penn & Teller. We rehearsed with Robert, and he did a great job. We planned some special effects and rehearsed those too. With a bunch of people, including the agents, standing around backstage in the green room after the show, I started by making a small negative comment about a joke in Robert’s show. He came back defensively. I came back more offensively. We escalated to screaming at each other. That led to some pushing and shoving. Teller had a pot of coffee that looked like it was boiling hot (dry ice), and he threw it at Robert and there was a lot of blood-curdling screaming, swearing and stage combat. It was wicked heavy. We convinced everyone it was real, including a few security guys who weren’t in on it (though a couple were), and it really made people feel scared and awful. It was worse than what I’m writing here. No one was physically hurt, but it went on much too long and there was real panic. It was awful. The guy we did it for never believed it was fake and never forgave us. I’m on his side.

So our new rule on practical jokes is we don’t do them. The one exception is if we can be sure that the “victim” enjoys the joke more than we do. I don’t mean being a good sport and laughing along with us; I mean really thrilled and honored.

We’ve done one great practical joke in that vein. We did a thing called “LabScam” in the fall of 1989. That year will be important later. rob pike, super-genius, and his super-genius buddies at Bell Labs wanted to play a practical joke on their boss, Arno Penzias. Arno is a Nobel Prize smart guy, and they wanted to really blow his mind. They wanted to do a magic trick that would make him think that technology had really progressed even faster than possible. That’s hard to do at Bell Labs. This is the place where the motherfucking transistor was invented. These guys wrote the book on UNIX. These are some serious cats and kitties. These are the cats and kitties who invented the future we’re living in.

Another major player on our “LabScam” team was Dennis Ritchie. He was one of the most important people in computer science, and he was such a great man. He died last year and is deeply missed. On the day of “LabScam,” we taught him to do some tricks with a thumb tip and he performed those tricks for the rest of his life. I have used Dennis’s description of “LabScam” from the Web as the backbone of this story. He wrote up the story well, and he did a lot of the work that made it possible for me to have a Web to find it on. Yeah, he’s that important to computers.

The night before the scam, Dennis sent an e-mail to Arno Penzias, vice president of Bell Labs, their big boss:

Subject: voice stuff

I think rob is almost ready to invite you to look at his latest effort, which is (pretty much) voice recognition. He’s able to show surprisingly good results from a fundamentally simple-minded scheme; it’s worth seeing. Besides, he appears to have spent the long weekend putting some pizzazz into his demo; he claims it is like Eliza (esp. the “Doctor” program) for the multimedia age.