Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! (22 page)

Happy Easter.

May all your chocolate rabbits be solid.

Listening to: “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo”—Patti Smith

HITCH AND TOMMY

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS AND TOMMY ARDOLINO
were my friends. I loved them both, but I should have been closer to both of them. Time doesn’t just steal the future, it steals the past.

When Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie have written about something or someone, it’s best for Penn Jillette to just stay away. Let geniuses write about love and truth and honor, and I’ll stick to stories about dropping my cock in a blow-dryer. If you want to know what a brave and wonderful man Hitch was, go with Marty and Sally, they’re playing on Hitch’s level.

I’ve read
God Is Not Great
twice and I will go back to it again and again. I find tremendous comfort in that book. Shortly after I read it, I went into the hospital. I was sick enough to be in the hospital, but only because I’m a pussy. I felt well enough to pull the IV out of my arm every night, go to the Penn & Teller Theater at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, do our show, then go back to the hospital and be put on morphine. Hospital staff told me I couldn’t leave the hospital, but Nevada law says they couldn’t keep me there, so I left to do the show. Nevada law also says they have to let me back in, so I commuted to and from the hospital. Someday I will be too sick to do the show, and then the show won’t go on, but as long as I can pull the IVs out, I might as well do the show. What else have I got to do? If you can do a Vegas show, you’re not really knock knock knockin’ on heaven’s door, but for someone who has suffered as little as I have, I felt pretty sick. Some would turn to the Bible for solace when watching the IV drip, but I reread
God Is Not Great
and it gave me the rage to live. Hitch’s insistence on the real world makes the real world better.

I loved the too few and too brief times I spent with Hitch in person. I treasure my many e-mails from him, often signed “Insha’Allah.” I started my book
God, No!
by writing about Hitch being so much smarter than me, even when he was drinking. I used the term “shit-faced” to joke about his drinking and my amazement at his intellectual ability despite the cocktails. Even though Hitch was dying, he used some of his too precious time to read my book and sent me a kind e-mail saying he would have liked my book more if I hadn’t insulted him on the first page. I was wrong to write about his drinking. What I thought was friendly ribbing was insult. So I called my editor at home in the middle of the night and begged her to let me rewrite the first two pages. She let me and I made it a little better. I sent the less insulting version to Hitch. He forgave me, but that was kind of my last real exchange with him. He was dying, he took time to read my book, and I insulted him. Fuck.

Hitch liked to drink and I’ve never had a drink in my life. Hitch was never “shit-faced.” He was more lucid and clearheaded than anyone I have ever met. I know nothing about drinking. When Hitch thought of drinking, he thought about Winston Churchill; when I thought about drinking, I thought about my fourteen-year-old school friends throwing up on my shoes. I thought about those same children wrapping their parents’ cars around telephone poles and dying young and not even leaving beautiful corpses. To Hitch, drinking meant being a grown-up. To me drinking meant never getting to be an adult and never getting out of Greenfield, Massachusetts. I never saw a grown-up who I respected drink until I was a grown-up. Maybe until I met Hitch.

Hitch was in town when we had a pretty fine rough cut of
The Aristocrats
and I invited him over to my house to see it with a few other friends. It was the only time Hitch ever visited my home. He arrived, I think in a cab, with a bottle of liquor in his hand. I could go to the Web and search what he drank, and write in “Johnnie Walker” and some color, but I don’t really remember, and it really doesn’t matter. I just know it was a bottle of alcohol.

I greeted him on the porch and I saw the bottle in his hand. I looked at the bottle, smiled apologetically and said, “I really don’t like having alcohol in my house.” Hitch looked at the bottle and looked at me, and said, with a sneer, “Well, I guess I should respect your religious beliefs.” I was arguing, on my front porch, with the greatest debater in the world.

“It’s not religious, Hitch, you know that.”

“It most certainly is, and you expect me to respect that.”

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t mind his lit cigarette—people smoked in the Slammer all the time—but I liked that there had never been alcohol in my home. I had invited Hitch to be a guest in my home, and he had a bottle in his hand. We stood facing each other, one of the most brilliant minds of our time and me.

“I really don’t want you to come into my house with that bottle.”

“Are you going to stop me? Will you physically stop me from coming into your home?”

When I wrote what he said in quotation marks and read it on my computer screen, it had a swagger. It’s like something from an action movie, but please try to reread it as a simple question. A question asked without any attitude at all. Just a request for information. If it were Hitch puffing out his chest and pretending to be an action hero, he’d be an asshole, but he wasn’t. It was a simple request for information. I’m the asshole. There was never going to be an exchange between Hitch and Penn where Hitch doesn’t win. It was asked as a simple question.

It’s hard, in emotional or comedic situations, to simply ask a question the way Hitch asked if I was going to physically stop him from entering my house with a bottle in his hand. Hitch just wanted to know what I was going to do.

I looked at him, looked at the bottle, looked at my home and I thought about it. I answered as honestly as I could. There’s no other way I could be around Hitch. Lying was a waste of time. He was too smart. I answered him honestly, “I don’t know.”

We looked at each other there on my porch. I couldn’t elaborate much, “I really don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t want liquor in my house and I love you. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know.”

I sure wasn’t going to hit him or wrestle him, but would I stand in front of the door to bar him, or would I just open the door for him and welcome my friend into my home with bottle in hand? Hitch looked me in the eye for a long time. Nothing macho was going on. We weren’t two primates working for dominance. Just two men standing silently on my porch in the desert night. I’m always yapping and Hitch was always saying something important, but on that porch we just looked at each other. Finally, without any attitude, he set the bottle down on my porch. Not on a table, or a sill, just outside in the middle of the deck, right in the walkway. He didn’t smile or hug me. He said, “Let’s watch your movie” and walked toward the door. We never found out what I would have done.

He seemed to enjoy the movie. He laughed loudly and said very kind and smart things about it after. As I walked him out, he grabbed his bottle off the porch floor, said good-bye, and got into his cab.

The New York Times
pulled back their front page to put Hitch’s obituary on it. The
Times
sent out an alert that I got on my phone, breaking news—Hitch was dead. I’m old enough that my friends die, but it’s not often I find out from the paper of record. I was walking out of some theater show in Vegas (yes, we
do
have theater in Vegas, thank you very much) with my wife. She had gone to the restroom and I was alone in the parking lot, so I turned on my phone to look at my messages, and Christopher Hitchens was dead. Just like that. You can read any obituary you want of Hitch, and it’ll talk about his genius, his bravery, his courage. He did not go quietly into that dark night. Geniuses wrote about his genius even on his deathbed. Listen, cancer, if you’re picking a fight with Hitchens, you might win, but he’ll get in his licks. Everything Hitch did, including dying, was inspiring. I was lucky he came to my home with a bottle in his hand.

Tommy Ardolino, my friend, the wonderful drummer for NRBQ (New Rhythm and Blues Quartet), also got an obit in
The New York Times
. They didn’t stop the presses, but they recorded the great rocker’s death a few days after he was gone. I found out about Tommy by a tweet of condolence from someone who knows I love him. Tommy didn’t die a brave and strong death. Death didn’t get beat up by Tommy. Tommy didn’t humiliate death. Death owned Tommy’s ass way before it took him.

Tommy liked to listen to records. I like to listen to records. Some of my closest friendships with people were made in playing records for each other. I talk a lot, but I think I can tell you more about myself by sitting you down and playing the records that mean the most to me. I have bunches of goofy records that no one has heard. Really rare stuff. I have a nutty and wonderful record collection. It’s hard to find rarity of any kind anymore. You can find anything on the big World Wide InnerTube. My whole collection is out there somewhere, sitting on hundreds of goofy websites. The music is there, but you won’t find it. Someone has to lead you to it. Tommy led us to a lot.

Tommy spent a lot of time in record stores and finding used records wherever they could be found. He picked through Salvation Army stores, and yard sales. There was a category of record that mystified him for a while. Turned out, he was finding song poem records, before anyone I knew knew what they were. Tommy led me to song poems.

Song sharks put advertisements in the back of cheesy magazines looking for songwriters. “Put your poems to music.” The unknown poet would read the ad, send in a poem, and no matter what the poem was, the song shark wrote back that the fish had talent. For a bunch of monthly payments, the naïve poet would have his or her songs put to music, performed, recorded on a record and then, the scam made the fish believe, the new songwriting team could start the journey to getting the songs on the Billboard charts. The song sharks never really tried to sell the songs. Their money was made from the poet’s investment. They got several hundred dollars (plus financing fees from the payment plans) to bang out a quick musical chart for whatever poem was sent in. They’d get a bunch of jaded musicians to do one take on each song and record dozens in one afternoon. They would make an album’s worth of these song poems, record them, press enough for everyone whose poem was recorded, and send them off to the marks. For a few hundred dollars, you got your poem set to music and you had a professional recording of it. You also had some hopes and dreams. In some people’s minds, you were also a fool. It’s like that with hopes and dreams.

Some of the vinyl never made it back to the lyricists. Song sharks pressed too many, or they bounced from the address, or maybe they miscounted or got a bulk rate, I don’t know, but these song-poem records were dumped into used record bins for a nickel apiece or something. Who would buy these mysterious unknown records? Tommy Ardolino. I have Tommy’s collection in my home now. There are a lot of them to wade through and Tommy waded with glee. Most of the songs are about Jesus or a president, but some of them have a purity you’re never going to get out of any other kind of music. The collision of the naïve and the cynical at the speed of CERN. Musicians who don’t care at all performing hack music around words that are nothing but passion. Here is the poem that was turned into Tommy’s favorite song poem. I urge you to take a moment and find it on the Web and hear the music. Hear the singer struggle with the meter and the rhyme that doesn’t rhyme without the writer’s exact dialect (“route” and “foot”). This would never be a real song, but why not? If music is communication of the heart, this sure is that. All that’s wrong with these lyrics is the juggling. The magic is perfect.