God, No! (5 page)

I thanked AB and started to walk away, but he had more to say. He had spent his whole life kosher, he said. He’d never eaten pork, or bacon, or shellfish. No milk and meat together. Never. He had flown out to Vegas on business and was taking some extra time to see our show and to think about his theology. On the plane they had offered a lousy microwaved cheeseburger but he couldn’t bring himself to eat it. He couldn’t do it. Here he paused. I’ve gotten laid after my shows. I met my wife after a show. I know about forced awkward preintimacy.

(Before this tale gets all heavy and touching and shit, I would like to give you the best pickup line anyone ever used on me after a show. Yes, my wife praising
Bullshit!
and dropping “Randi” and “Dawkins” was great and it worked, but, with all love and respect to my wife, another woman creamed her on the immediate sexual pickup front. Remember, this is the Penn & Teller Show, and I’m Penn. I say “My name is Penn Jillette and this is my partner Teller” as the first and last line of every show. And behind me while I’m in the lobby after the show, there are big pictures of me with my name in huge block letters right over my head. After one show I was out in the lobby talking and signing autographs, and a woman hung back and waited for people to clear out. When they were gone, she walked over, cocked her head at a questioning angle, and said very clearly and directly, “Fuck me if I’m wrong, but is your name Debbie?”)

All the sexual pickups I’ve heard were much less intimate and vulnerable than what AB was about to say. He quietly asked me if he could eat his first non-kosher food with me. He wanted me to join him for a bacon cheeseburger. He said it would mean a lot to him. That’s a lot harder to say than “fuck me.” I was so moved. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t know how to describe the feeling. I was certainly honored. I certainly felt unworthy. But it was more than that. I invited him backstage and said, “Yeah, c’mon back, meet the guys, and we’ll watch you eat.”

I walked him back and left him in the Monkey Room with Jonesy, the monster jazz piano player in our show, while I changed my clothes. By the time I got back to AB, Teller was in the Monkey Room,
along with a friend of ours from the MIT Media Lab who had come backstage after seeing the show. Zeke was also there. Zeke is one of the guys who sets up all the magic for us. There are places in the show where our lives are in Zeke’s hands. He’s the youngest guy on our stage crew, but he’s been around for a while now. I brought Zeke to the P & T crew. Zeke had been adopted when he was in high school by a distant relative of his who is a friend of mine. Zeke was living with this relative in Branson and not doing well there as a punk atheist. No one does well in Branson, it’s a shit hole. When his guardian would come visit me in Vegas, I’d talk atheism with the boy, and finally my friend said, “You’re helping turn him into an atheist and making Branson hell for him, so let him move in with you.” Zeke had just graduated from high school, so he moved into the Slammer and lived with me. I didn’t take care of him at all, just gave him a room and let him eat my food. He played video games and watched TV and my friends thought it was sexy to have a good-looking young boy around the house eating Top Ramen in his underwear (how the Top Ramen got into his underwear, you don’t want to know). He finally started working with the Penn & Teller show sweeping floors at the shop, and now he’s worked his way up to a serious magic guy. I like Zeke. I recapped AB’s story for everyone in the Monkey Room. I lightened it up a little bit, since it was still a bit too intense and honest for me to really deal with.

When I finished, I said, “Okay, AB, have at it,” and offered him my dinner, salmon and spinach, which turned out to be pretty much kosher. I figured we must have something that wasn’t and pointed him to our sandwich and fruit plate.

It was turkey sandwiches, cheese, and pineapple and banana. AB was disappointed. Yeah, technically it wasn’t really kosher, because the turkeys probably hadn’t been slaughtered with the “correct” procedure, but it also wasn’t obscene. He’d tasted versions of all of this stuff. This wasn’t the real forbidden-sin food. If he was going to lose his virginity, he wanted to really get fucked.

“So, we’re looking for bacon, right?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“So, Jonesy, shall we just call room service? I mean, they have good bacon and eggs. How long will that take?”

The Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, has great bacon and eggs, and their room service is swift, but we didn’t want to wait around even that long. We wanted to watch virgin AB get fucked by the swine
now
.

The steakhouse at the Rio was open all night, and the steakhouse had it all. We decided we’d take him out. Zeke is a punk and Zeke speaks his mind. “Listen, motherfucker,” he told AB, “if I go along, you’re going to eat all the fucking shit and I’m going to watch you do it. If we go, and you like pussy out on us or something, I’ll kick your fucking ass and shove the bacon down your throat and up your Jew ass. Got it?”

AB agreed, and Penn, Teller, Jonesy, Zeke, our MIT buddy, and AB headed to the All-American Bar and Grille. We were laughing and joking, but it was a heavy event. AB was trembling with nervousness. He said later that a lot of his excitement and nervousness was being out with Penn & Teller, but that didn’t enter into it. This was a change in his life. This was some sort of improvised atheist baptism.

Before I tell you the rest of AB’s story, I need to tell you about another big atheist baptism I hosted. A few years earlier, Joe Rogan of
Fear Factor
and Doug Stanhope of
The Aristocrats
had told me about their favorite performance artist. It was a whack job who went by the name Extreme Elvis. Extreme Elvis is a fat Elvis impersonator with a very small cock. We all know he has a cashew dick, because he performs naked onstage and will often piss on the audience. He has the Elvis sideburns, and the Elvis hair, and a big fat belly, and a little dick, and he sings wonderfully. Most Elvis impersonators fall down on the voice. Elvis could sing his ass off and Extreme Elvis can sing for real. Extreme Elvis doesn’t do many shows, because people don’t book a naked needle-dick fat guy who pisses in public, and if they do, the police often enter into the situation and stop the show. He can’t really do a full show unless he’s playing at a private party, and what kind of asshole is going to pay a fat, badly hung, naked, pissing Elvis impersonator to come into his private home?

I booked Extreme Elvis for a party at my private home. I set up a huge stage, sound system, and lights in my courtyard and invited about a hundred and fifty people, about 135 percent of whom showed up. I booked friends to play all day as opening acts, and Goudeau was there making Elvis deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

The party started at about noon, and Extreme Elvis hit the stage around two o’clock the next morning. His show is wonderful. “Every generation gets the Elvis they deserve,” he explained, and he gave us that. It was very intense. People who were afraid of naked fat guys and urine were on the second-story catwalk, and the real boys were down front. Extreme Elvis was funny, challenging, inspired, beautiful, and just amazing. We got so much more than we deserved.

Extreme Elvis and I had planned that after his first set, he would take a break before his second set, right before sunrise. I would turn off all the power at the Slammer—not just all the lights, but all the power. No electricity. I have a rather large lap pool, and we were going to put his band in the pool, acoustic guitars and bongos held by musicians floating on rafts while his backup singers were treading water.

The electric set had been confrontational, the theater of cruelty. He’d scared people and made them uncomfortable, and everyone expected the second set to be heavier, like he was going to shit on everyone or something. It
was
heavier, but in a very different way. We had tiki lamps and candles around the pool. There was moonlight. The guitarist strummed softly from the air mattress floating in the pool and Extreme Elvis, naked, sang “Love Me Tender” as he entered the pool like an apparition. Once the whole band was in the pool, I joined them. Elvis weighs more than me, but with the help of buoyancy, I went under between his legs and got him on my shoulders. By candle and tiki light he sang the most gentle and beautiful songs from on top of my shoulders. Soon most everyone took off their clothes and joined us in the water.

He did “Suspicious Minds” and all my musician friends did the backup singing. The pool was filled with naked people and a big fat Elvis singing on my shoulders. When I write that Elvis went to “Kumbaya,”
you’re thinking I mean that figuratively, but no, we were all singing “Kumbaya” and holding hands naked in the pool in a hot Vegas dawn.

It may be important at this point to remind my dear readers that I’ve never had a sip of alcohol or any recreational drug in my life. My Slammer parties have included a South American man nailing his cock to a board, tying that board to a rope, and using that rope to pull a wagon containing a topless woman across my band room floor (which is carpeted, and I swear, I told him it was carpeted and that this would create more friction before he got there; it was a language problem, not a lack of compassion and foresight on my part). We also had nude cornstarch wrestling, where I wrestled my little-person (they prefer that to “dwarf”; I don’t get it, but I don’t get African-Americans preferring that to “black,” and it’s not my decision) Mexican buddy Arturo. His arms weren’t long enough to hold his head out of the cornstarch, so our wrestling turned into me saving his life—well, saving his life after being the one to almost drown him in gunk. After my children were born, the Slammer parties featured Nemo, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and Cinderella instead of cock nailing, nude cornstarch wrestling, and Extreme Elvis, but the same amount of alcohol and recreational drugs was present and that amount is always none.

Holding hands and singing “Kumbaya” with fat, naked, badly hung Extreme Elvis sitting on my shoulders meant a lot to a lot of people. Several people have since told me that when they took off all their clothes and walked into that pool as the sun came up in Vegas and sang “Suspicious Minds,” they understood what atheism really was. It was an atheist baptism. Everyone seemed to be changed by it. As I type it, I’m aware that it seems like a crazy person is writing this, but with all the naked-fat-guy-pissing psycho energy of the night, it was mostly just a celebration of living a free and loving life. I guess you had to be there.

As the sun came up, I sat in the hot tub with Extreme Elvis and the very well-hung and hairy porn star Ron Jeremy. Ron Jeremy said it was the best party he’d ever been to, and Ron’s been to some parties. I have a picture of me naked, with Extreme Elvis on one side and Ron Jeremy on
the other. It could be used in a Trojan condom ad, with the caption “We Fit All Men.”

Now back to AB’s slightly different atheist baptism. This one was also improvised. We took him into the All-American Bar and Grille and he sat down in the Christ position for the Last Supper. This was his first supper, his atheist communion.

AB didn’t order. Teller and I ordered for him. We don’t know much about kosher, but we faked it pretty well:

Shrimp cocktail

Crab legs

Clam chowder

Oysters

Pork loin

Barbecue ribs

and a

Bacon cheeseburger, medium rare, with extra cheese and extra
extra
bacon.

Many people have pointed out since that there was no way for us to know that AB didn’t have a shellfish allergy. We might have had to deal with anaphylactic shock at our communion. Instead of a born-again atheist, we might have had a dead Jew, and I might be writing this book from the High Desert State Prison, but if your grandmother had had tubes, she might have been a Jewish radio.

The server asked us who was eating what, and we pointed to AB and said he was eating it all, we would just pick.

The pork and bacon cheeseburger took a while, but the chowder and shellfish were out right away. There was a moment when AB just sat there and looked at the food. It was going to be an important moment and he wanted to take a minute and really decide what he was going to do. Teller grabbed the back of AB’s head, grabbed a shrimp, and just
stuck it in AB’s mouth. What’s the use of being an atheist if you still have to stand on ceremony? AB chewed the shrimp and kind of shook his head. It was a big moment.

I don’t know who died and made Jonesy a Talmudic scholar, but Jonesy said that eating the shrimp really didn’t count, that it wasn’t the moment, because AB hadn’t chosen to eat the
traif
—he had been forced by Teller. Jonesy knows how things look in the eyes of Yahweh. We all agreed that Jonesy was right, and AB considered for a moment, then opened up a crab leg and ate it. That was his defiance of god. If the religious can be silly enough to think that eating the right food makes you religious, we can play along for a meal and pretend that eating the wrong food will make you rational.

He ate the crab leg, and our table erupted into cheers. We sounded like we belonged in a Vegas sports bar. AB wasn’t satisfied with the shellfish. He said none of this was really a new taste. There are kosher knockoffs of shellfish. He’d had Krab and fake shrimp. He’d had chowders that had the vibe of clam without the presence of an actual bivalve. It wasn’t dirty-filthy-anal-sex-with-two-nuns-on-Easter-Sunday sin.

Teller, Zeke, Jonesy, our MIT friend, and I dug into the shrimp, crab, and chowder. It wasn’t an antireligious thing for us; we’re entertainers, and when there’s food around, we eat.

The pork loin and ribs came and that was no big deal either. He’d had bovine versions. We were all just waiting for the atheist communion wafer, the pure symbol of free thought: the bacon cheeseburger. The All-American Bar and Grille at the Rio makes a fine one. They didn’t know how important this one was, but it was the last thing they brought. It was made with loving care.

There it was, on a plate with some fries. A big fat ground-beef patty, medium-rare and juicy, just dripping goodness, with a few slices of cheddar melted on it, and strips, a lot of strips, of bacon, the candy of meat, draped over the top.