Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! (23 page)

Then she looked and saw him through the window glass

Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?

Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?

He said he was late ’cause he’d run over a woman’s foot

This was the beginning of his search for another route

He had been accusing her of holding him back

He went out to meet that woman, he’d thought he was on the right track

As time went on she thought that things were going along good

But he said things were bad between them as they stood

His other woman had called the house several times on the phone

But June came along, he slipped into the house, got his clothes and was gone

Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?

Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?

Then one year and five months later

Her life could not be any greater

He called on Thanksgiving night

Said he was coming home to get things right

Brush always seems to burn out, but big wood keeps burnin’ on

That’s why he turned around and came back home

Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?

Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?

I judge people by how they react when I play them Tommy’s favorite song poems. Everyone laughs, but I judge them by the quality of their laughter. Maybe it’s all in my head. My analysis is probably just an extension of how I already feel about the potential new friend. The laughter is a place to project my unconscious thoughts, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I can hear differences. I want the laughter to be pure. Laughter about all human hearts and not at some dipshit buying his dreams in the back of the
National Enquirer
. I laugh, not because the songs are stupid, but because the songs are too true. Lady Gaga is protected by skill. She’s good and good makes her bulletproof. The people who write song poems don’t have any armor at all. They are running around naked wearing antlers and we all have fully automatic weapons with laser sites. There is something about a cynical person singing sloppy truth that makes me need to hug my children. That might make you laugh, but if you laugh the wrong way, I may not want to play you any more of my records.

Tommy’s death was a tragedy, but he had a kind of charmed life. Tommy’s working-class mom and dad got him a drum set as a child and he banged to his swinging records all the time. His favorite band in the world was NRBQ (he shared that with Bonnie Raitt, Elvis Costello, Paul McCartney and a bunch of other wicked famous music people). He wrote a letter to NRBQ’s keyboard player, Terry Adams, and somehow, with parental consent, at fifteen years old, Terry let Tommy come on the road with the NRBQ. When their real drummer left before the encore one night, Tommy was there. He had never played drums with live musicians before. His first loose, swinging, snare explosion in front of anyone was in back of NRBQ. It was a couple years later that he was a full-time member of the Q. With Joey Spampinato on bass, Ardolino/Spampinato became NRBQ’s “Ravioli Rhythm Section.” Tommy bagged groceries for one day, but other than that, Tommy never had a real job. Never did a second real day’s work in his too short life. Tommy was two months older than me.

Tommy and NRBQ went along together for over thirty years. Tommy held his left drumstick between his index and fuck-you fingers. It was neither a jazz grip nor a rock grip. It was Tommy’s grip. It gave a fierce snap to the snare. Play me beat 2 and 4 from any one measure of an NRBQ record, and I’ll recognize Tommy’s snare pop right away. Tommy played so hard and so often (NRBQ did over two hundred live dates every year), that he developed calluses on the inside of his fingers just a bit smaller than half Ping-Pong balls. It looked really creepy. Tommy couldn’t put those two fingers together. He was forced by his altered biology to always be flashing a peace sign. Mohawk punks do body modifications in piercing parlors. Tommy did his body mod banging rhythm and blues.

Tommy played drums and he played records for people. He had long, unfashionable curly hair (look who’s talking) and he was too fat for rock and roll (look who’s talking). He had a smile that kept people guessing. I talked to Tommy a lot, and we loved each other, but we didn’t really connect on a verbal level. I never knew what he was talking about. When I talked, he smiled and loved me, but never gave a really appropriate response. I’d compliment his performance and Tommy would meow like a cat and rub against me. Or he’d puff up his cheeks and make weird sounds like he was a little man trapped in a box. The last time I saw him he said, “Penn, what’s going to happen to us?” over and over. When he sent me some song poem records, he had written on the box, “What’s going to happen to us?” I think it was one of those simple questions and Tommy was waiting for an answer.

The answer was we’re all going to die. We’re all going to be gone and leave behind nothing but memories and love, and Tommy left a lot of that. Tommy didn’t fight like Hitch against death. He begged death to come to him.

First, throat cancer came to Terry, the Thelonious Monk/Jerry Lee Lewis/Chico Marx keyboard player of NRBQ. It looked like Terry might not survive, and the dying of their leader was enough to break up NRBQ. They all stopped working while Terry fought cancer. Big Al (I’m bigger than Big Al. I know Big Dave and I’m bigger than he; I met Big Mike, and I’m bigger than he; if I didn’t have a stupid name, I would have “Big” in front of it) had been replaced in NRBQ when he started getting songs recorded by Nashville cats. I think Joey, the bass player, started working as a house painter. Tommy got right to work on dying. He’d lost his band. His parents were dead. His wife divorced him. He lived in his parents’ house in Springfield, Massachusetts (right down Route 91 from my hometown), until the house went into foreclosure. A loving friend of the band bought the house at auction and allowed Tommy to stay there. He stayed there. He did nothing but stay there. He bought food for his cats and alcohol for himself. He was offered gigs with lots of bands, real bands, good bands, but he didn’t take them. He stopped taking care of himself. Maybe he’d never taken care of himself; maybe others always had. He ate only what friendly neighbors brought to him. They’d bring a big plate of pasta to last him awhile, he’d eat it all at once, and then eat nothing. When there was a big power outage in western Mass he sat in the cold dark until Terry, having beaten cancer and started another NRBQ, thought of Tommy and sent someone to check on him. Tommy went from the couch to the hospital. He was treated for all his neglect, liver problems and diabetes for a couple months, but it was all palliative. Tommy died.

Hitch fought for life and Tommy seduced death. Hitch owned every room he walked into. Tommy wasn’t much noticed without a trap set and a band around him. I loved them both and they’re both dead.

I have friends, older than I, who are concerned about their legacies. They are thinking about how they will be remembered. They are making sure their notebooks are in order for posterity. These are friends who have brought a lot of influence and joy to a lot of people. Now they want to make sure they keep doing that after they’re dead. It seems nutty to me.

I’m slowly reading
Arguably
by Hitchens. It’s the last book he published during his lifetime, but unless I die wicked soon, it won’t be the last Hitch book I read. I’m playing a lot of NRBQ, listening to Tommy bang those drums. I’m thinking about how much joy they both brought me and how much they changed my life. I’ll be dead soon too. I don’t know whether it’ll be a few dozen years, a few hundred years, or thousands of years, but Hitch and Tommy will eventually be forgotten. All legacy is temporary. Nothing matters. In several generations even our bequeathed DNA will be diluted to a general human blend. None of our individual traits will be recognizable.

There is no way to cheat. Everyone and everything will be completely forgotten. That’s true, but I’m a nutty optimist and I can’t just leave it there. I have to add that maybe the singularity will happen and there will be a forever for at least some intents and purposes. I just got to laughing. I’m worried that something I’ve written here could be proven wrong and shortsighted in a hundred years. As I write about there being no legacy and Hitch and Tommy being forgotten, I’m worried about how these words will look in the future, long after I’m dead. I’m such an asshole. That’s my point.

During a debate with some rabbi, Hitch was asked, “Do you believe in free will?” Hitch responded, “I believe we have no choice.” I don’t know how much Hitch was referencing Isaac Bashevis Singer in that quotation, and that answer is also written by Vonnegut, sung in a very high pitch by Rush, and it all builds on Sartre, though Jean-Paul wasn’t the first. A while ago, I could have fired an e-mail off to Hitch and got that quotation’s provenance, but now Hitch is dead. Hitch and Tommy will be forgotten, but it doesn’t feel that way. Their lives feel like they mattered. Nothing but the feeling of mattering matters. That feeling is life. I can no longer get wisdom directly from Hitch. Tommy can no longer play records. The future where they are forgotten doesn’t exist, and yet in our hearts’ imagined futures they are remembered forever.

Listening to: “Immortal for a While”—NRBQ

Tommy and me.

 

MY FIRST FATHER’S DAY CARD

I WILL NEVER EXPERIENCE SENDING AND RECEIVING
a Father’s Day card on the same day. I don’t get to feel the chain of life that allows me to look up and look down at the same time. I’ll never have a day where I talk to both my father and my son. That makes me cry every time I think about it, and I think about it all the time. I cry a lot. The difference between joyous crying and sad crying is only for the young. With my parents dead and my children alive, I can never tell why I’m crying. The sadness of my parents’ death is the joy of my children’s lives. Those feelings are the same. That’s life, motherfucker. I’m old enough to know that I’ll never again really know why I’m crying.

My mom and dad never met our children. They never met my wife. Mom and Dad were dead before my children were born and before I met my wife. Worse, my parents knew exactly what they were missing, even though I didn’t. They watched me piss away the shared joy of my future family. My parents knew they would never meet my children. We all knew I’d have children. They knew I’d meet someone to love and share my life with. My parents knew exactly what they were missing and they missed it. It was a hole in their hearts that’s now a hole in my heart. Mom and Dad knew that I wanted to be successful professionally first and that was going to take more time then we would have together. They saw plenty of the fame. My mom and dad were at both of Penn & Teller’s Broadway openings. They made the paperboy watch me on
SNL
. They were extras in the movie that Teller and I wrote and starred in. It’s the Mexican restaurant scene and my dad is right behind me. I can’t see him and he can’t see me, but we’re fiddling with our silverware in exactly the same way. Nature or nurture? Many times they mentioned gently to me that they would like to meet their grandchildren before they died, but I wanted time to go on the fucking Letterman show. What the fuck was wrong with me? My excuse now is that I hadn’t met the mother of their grandchildren. That’s more than an excuse; that’s my real reason. I wasn’t willing to settle for someone less than Emily. I wanted perfect. I wasn’t looking for a wife. I was looking for Emily and she found me. Mom and Dad would have loved our family, their family, with a pure love as hot as the sun, or one of those other suns a zillion light years away that’s way hotter than our little pussy sun. My parents could love. Fuck, could they love.

I’m fifty-seven years old. My parents have been dead twelve years. Emily and I have been married eight years. My daughter, Moxie, is coming up on her seventh birthday and my son, Zolten, is knocking on six. This is my first marriage and these are my only children. I started late. Way late, almost Letterman late. When Moxie is my age, I’ll be 107 years old and I’m sure we all really will have flying cars, world peace, and a cooler song for twelve-year-old boys than “Stairway to Heaven.” I don’t know if Mox and Zz will have things to do before they let me meet my grandchildren, or if they’ll even have children. I don’t know jackshit. That’s another reason I cry. Another reason to be joyful and sad.

It’s not natural to have one’s children this late in life. My body wanted to reproduce when I was fifteen. My body really, really wanted to reproduce when I was fifteen. I loved fooling my body into thinking I was reproducing with girlfriends at fifteen. It took a lot of civilization, socialization, willpower, and some emulsion polymerization technology for me not to reproduce at fifteen. When I was fifty, it took much more technology for us to get started reproducing. Moxie was a test tube baby. My wife, Emily, was thirty-nine when Moxie was born. The ticking clock was deafening, and even though trying naturally was a blast, we turned to science for Moxie. After that kick start, we conceived our son Zolten naturally. Naturally is cheaper and way more fun than IVF. But with IVF we did get to sing the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” together while I used a real hypodermic needle to give Emily her hormone shots (we both felt exactly “like Jesus’ son”). It was kind of fun to see her moods change crazy fast. I’d shoot her up and she’d start crying and we’d have a good laugh together at how much our feelings are just chemicals.

We were going through IVF about the time I was on
The West Wing
. One of the actors on there (I won’t say which one, because I’m not sure he ever made his IVF public) called the sample room at the IVF clinic “The Masturbatorium.” I love that term and wanted to give him credit without outing his children. The masturbatorium is a little room at the clinic where you go in to whack out the baby-batter to give to the nurse so they can make the baby in the test tube. Oh dear, I just called the embryo “the baby.” That’s not a big deal, right? No one is going to argue over when an embryo becomes a baby. Emily had to go into stirrups while they got invasive on her ass or right near her ass; I just had to jack off. She did her part fine, and I fucked up jacking off.

I walked into the masturbatorium and there were three posters on the wall to help me get off. They were swimsuit pictures of three women—Pamela Anderson, Elle Macpherson, and Gena Lee Nolin—all of whom I had made cry in public at one time or another. I was supposed to whack off to women I had pissed off. I needed to jack to women who hated me. Some get turned on thinking about hatefucks but that never worked for me. Says a lot about the taste of our Middle Eastern fertility doctor. Pamela Anderson: made her cry over animal rights and a joke I made to her face on TV. Elle Macpherson: made fun of her hair care products and her husband’s dickey (not dick, dickey, the fake turtleneck thing, I’m guessing his dick was fine) on live radio. And I professionally trash talked Gena until she cracked on
Fear Factor
. They’re all good people, and they all forgave me (maybe not Elle), but I still didn’t want to whack to them. The masturbatorium had videos too, but they were way too vanilla for a Boston cream pie guy like me. The DVDs were the swimsuit edition TV special, not like latex enema nurses in bondage. The idea that there were real nurses right behind the wall to where I was jacking should have been hot, but it wasn’t. I don’t know why. Maybe because we were dealing with making children, which is so much less sexy than fooling my body into thinking I was making children. Emily suggested at the desk that maybe we could send in a couple hookers, and I just got embarrassed. On libertarianism, atheism and transgressive humor my wife is the hard-core one in the family. I couldn’t jack off in front of pictures of women I’d made cry and if that makes me less of a man, so be it. We finally got our “sample” at home working together and then Emily drove to the doctor’s like she was trying to get hot pizza home to her future family.

For Zolten, we just fucked. That’s why he gets $35,000 more in his trust fund.

Lots of people are having children later in life. Everyone is living longer, and now that we have electric lights there’s other stuff to do at night. A lot of older parents worry about being older parents. I hear people say, “I don’t want to be too old to play baseball with my son.” They worry that their kids will be embarrassed by their parents’ age. I worry about that less, because I grew up with older parents. My parents were the best parents in the world, and they were old. They were older for their generation than I am for mine. My mom was forty-five years old when I was born. My dad was a couple years younger. My only sibling, my sister, was twenty-three years old when I was born. Now that I think about it, I might not have been planned. After Jack Nicholson and Bobby Darin found out that their sisters were really their moms, I thought I might have a similar surprise coming, but I’ve seen pre-Photoshop pictures of my mom in the maternity ward and my sister gave me her Girl Scout’s honor. There were no deathbed confessions from anyone.

When my mom got pregnant, she went to the doctor. She was freaking out. She said she was too old to have another baby. She said she wouldn’t live to see her baby go to kindergarten. The doctor told her that there were lots of older moms. This was 1954 and he went to his files. See? Here’s a mom who was thirty-two . . . and here’s one who was thirty . . . and . . . he didn’t find anyone over forty. Mom was very freaked. Bud Trillin at
The New Yorker
did a big profile on Penn & Teller while we were Off-Broadway and it also showed up in a book of his. He did a lot research and went to Philly to talk to Teller’s parents and teachers and went all the way to Greenfield to interview my parents. My mom was very straightforward with Bud. Bud is good, but my mom also didn’t know another way to be. She confessed that she was very worried about birth defects. She worried that I might be born with Down syndrome, for which there were no tests at the time. I don’t know if she would have gotten the tests if they were available, my mom may have believed that love starts at conception. I never asked her directly. She said to Bud that she heard that babies born to old mothers were either retarded or geniuses. (“Retarded” being the only word people used at the time to describe mental disabilities.) She then paused for one of those Dean Martin comedy pauses that go forever, shrugged, paused and thought some more and then said, “I guess he’s a genius.” She got Bud to laughing, but . . . I don’t think it was as much of a joke as Bud thought. My mom knew I wasn’t a genius, but I think she had decided that besides being worthy of her complete unconditional love just for being born, I might have also been okay. I could make her laugh. I could make her laugh harder than anyone in the world had ever made her laugh. You tell me, am I crying now with sadness or joy?

I grew up with parents who were just a few years younger than Moxie and Zolten’s dad will be. My dad didn’t play much baseball with me, but age had nothing to do with it. I was on the A&W Little League team. The other children said A&W stood for Ass Wipes, ignoring the ampersand and making me crazy. With P&T the ampersand matters. You can say P&T stands for “Pisshead & Twat” but don’t you dare say it stands for Pecker Tards, that’ll just piss me off. I was thrown off the Ass Wipes for not understanding why we were supposed to think that our arbitrary team was the best (the same reason I was thrown off
The Celebrity Apprentice
—jocks like Trump never change). Before I was thrown off the Ass Wipes, the best Little League team that ever existed, my mom and dad came to every game. My dad would sit in the stands, saying proudly to the other dads, “See that big boy out in the outfield daydreaming—that’s my boy, he doesn’t care about the game.” My whole family is missing the sports gene and the military gene. During a war (they’re all the same), my dad was a security guard and then a jail guard. I hope I didn’t screw up the Jillette family genes by marrying a great golfer with a Navy dad. If I did, I can teach them to juggle and be medics.

The other children in grade school did ask why I spent so much time with my grandparents, and I guess that embarrassed me a little, but there was never any trauma. I just told them they were my mom and dad and they were wicked old. My parents were always proud of me and I was proud of them. It seemed that my mom and dad didn’t have any problems other than mine. They loved me and they loved each other. I never heard them raise their voices except in jest or in an emergency, to one another or to me. As a very young child, I ran into the street and my mom screamed “Penn!” like Roger Daltrey screams “yeah!” in “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” I never ran into the street again. I guess we also yelled as a joke, but not when we meant it. When the Jillettes mean it, the Jillettes pout.

Way back in the nineties, we did a TV show in Britain called
The Unpleasant World of
Penn & Teller
. We did a lot of bits from our American show and also did most of our TV bits from
Letterman
and
SNL
. We had amazing guest hosts, like Stephen Fry and John Cleese. Stephen and John are both just a little bit smaller than me, but we’re all big guys. It was the first time I met John, and during lighting and just hanging out backstage, John was chatting with me: “Penn, when you’re angry, do you yell?”

“Nope. Never.”

“Me neither. Did your family yell?”

“Nope, never. I can’t recall my parents ever yelling at one another except when they were kidding.”

“My family never did either. We sulk.”

“Yes, we are pouters.”

“And yet we’ve both discovered there’s nothing funnier than a big guy yelling.”

I guess that’s true. For eight years on
Penn & Teller: Bullshit!
I screamed “Fuck you, asshole!” at the fucking top of my fucking lungs. In our live show, I yell several times, but not at home. I was taught if you’re yelling, you’re joking. That hasn’t served me that well. I’ve had people like Lou Ferrigno scream right in my face because he couldn’t understand something, and it’s so hard for me to believe he was really serious. It seemed like he was going to turn green and do a cartoon show.

There must be older parents who scream at one another and at their children, but it did seem like my parents’ wisdom and measured actions were related somewhat to their age. Older parents are wonderful until they croak. They both died when I was forty-five. I was with my mom and dad for about half of their lives, and vice versa. I will have to live to a hundred for Mox, Zz and I to share half our lives.

I hope I’ve learned something from being alive this long that will make me a better dad. I know I will be an embarrassment. I’m an embarrassment to everyone who loves and/or works with me. Moxie and Zolten have already been asked if I’m their grandfather, but that’ll be the least of their embarrassments. They’ll also have a dad with a stupid beard and hair down his back talking atheism at the PTA meeting and calling an almost-saint Motherfucking Teresa on TV. If they say the name of their dad’s TV show in school, they’ll be punished. They have a dad who lost on
Dancing with the Stars
to Adam Carolla and lost on
The Celebrity Apprentice
to Clay Aiken. They may hang their heads in shame.