God, No! (4 page)

I don’t believe Montecore the tiger was trying to help Roy. I believe Montecore was trying to bite Roy’s fucking head off. Roy protected Montecore after the “accident.” Roy still cares for Montecore. I don’t believe the praying helped Roy at all. I believe it was a team of medical professionals working their asses off that kept Roy’s head on. But I didn’t say any of that that night.

A couple of days after the accident, I went to the Forum Shops at Caesars. There’s a Versace store there. I had never been in it. I went in and I spent a few thousand dollars (yup, a few
thousand
dollars) on a pair of tight leather pants. Really tight, like I was wearing a codpiece. I put on a flashy shirt and ran a brush through my hair. I tried to walk in my leather pants, not like a farmer, but like a star.

“Mind Is the Magic”

—Michael Jackson

What’s the G on the Joint?

W
hat’s the G on the joint?” is carny slang for “How do you do the scam?” “G” probably stands for “gaff,” and the gaff is the secret of the trick. I’ve heard some guys say “affis/gaffis” but that’s too affected even for me.

Teller and I spent an afternoon in a hotel room at a magic convention arguing with David Blaine about the use of the word “trick.” He hates the word. Just hates it. He thinks it takes the magic out of magic. We love the word. Just love it. We think it takes the magic out of magic. He thinks that a trick is supposed to be something mystical, which I guess I agree with; everything mystical is just a trick.

It’s always astonished me how any magician can be spiritual. There are hippie magicians who do drum circles in the woods and then do a card force and a false shuffle and think they’re expressing something real. “Imagine a universe so limitless and yet so all-connected that you chose the three of clubs!” There are even “gospel magicians” who’ll do a cheesy “cake in the hat” trick and tie it to the resurrection of zombie Christ: “And god so loved the world that he gave his only son our lord and savior to die for our sins and give us this chocolate cupcake out of your baseball hat!” It seems like depicting the most important event in
one’s philosophy with a $19.95 trick from a joke shop cheapens it a bit. Again, I guess I agree completely.

I think “trick” is a noble human word. It’s something you learn. It’s something you teach a monkey to do. That all seems good to me. I’m proud to do tricks. I’m proud of using gaffs. After a few hours of arguing with David and his posse we walked together to the elevator. There’s a thing with pro magicians: we don’t ask each other how the tricks are done. Some of it is politeness, not putting a person in a position where they have to say “I won’t tell you,” and some of it is a big swinging dick—if you don’t ask them, they don’t know you don’t know. Real classy old-timers would say, “You really baffled me with that trick, maybe you’ll let me in on it someday.”

I’ve never said that. Fuck you and your stupid trick, I don’t care.

On the walk to the elevator David took Teller and me aside, separately, and confided in us that the hunger thing he did in England was “real.” When he was doing the starving trick in that Plexi box by the Tower Bridge in London in 2003 for forty-four days, he claimed he was really hungry for a long time. I’m not a cynic, I’m a skeptic—I try to question information but not motives. But when it comes to David Blaine, I question motives.

Before David took me aside, and I saw him take Teller aside, it never crossed my mind to ask if David had been really starving in the box. I took it like I take most tricks, for the ideas, and I found these particular ideas repulsive.

In the bullet trick in our show, Teller and I point real guns in each other’s real faces and pull the real trigger. It’s a horrific image, but at the end, we’re fine. That’s the beauty of the trick—we’re okay at the end. Lots of people get guns fired into their faces, but they’re not okay after. In the fantasy of theater, we conquer the pain, suffering, and death.

When Paul McCartney went to see David Blaine starving in the box over the Thames, Sir Paul called him “this stupid cunt.” David wasn’t getting fatter in the box. Fatter without food could be a good trick. Blaine was hungry in the box, and being hungry when one doesn’t eat isn’t a good trick. It isn’t a trick at all. There are people all over the world
doing this hunger trick against their will, so who cares about the cunt in the box? In 1981 Bobby Sands starved himself to death in prison in an attempt to get the English government to treat IRA members in jail as political prisoners. Bobby Sands got emaciated and died for a cause he believed in. David Blaine got publicity with mocking children throwing food at him and getting called a cunt by the cute Beatle. Getting called a cunt by the Sir Beatle is the only part I thought was pretty boss.

David was getting fed water while he was cunting in the box, and the water could have had glucose in it, I suppose. If Teller and I were doing it, we wouldn’t have been happy with a little sugar water; we would have been sneaking in steak dinners and Twinkies and getting fat. I don’t know how my getting fat is a good trick, I do it all the time, but getting fat while starving would at least be unexpected. It would be wish fulfillment for starving people.

I was so busy thinking about what a shitty trick it was that I didn’t think much about the gaff. The instant that David took me aside, put a hand on my shoulder, made eye contact, and told me and then Teller, with utmost sincerity, that he’d really been starving himself, I knew there was a G on the joint. Why talk to both me and Teller if you’re not going to lie to us? But it doesn’t matter. If you ask whether he “did it for real or not,” you’re missing the point.

David Blaine and Criss Angel did an odd thing. They became famous as magicians and then claimed to be doing things for real. Criss did a lot of sit-ups and then stuck fishhooks in his tits and wanted people to know he was really doing it. “You know, the steamroller thing and the card tricks were lies, but the fishhooks in my tits, why would I lie about that?”

I started out as a juggler, and jugglers do things for real. There are some juggling tricks that are gaffed, but no juggler I know is comfortable using them. Jugglers like to tell the truth. I do things in the Penn & Teller show that are for real and I do stuff where I’m lying my ass off, and the audience knows the difference. I want them to be able to tell the difference. I like the audience to know when I’m telling the truth and when I’m lying. But David and Criss went into this area that wasn’t
juggling and wasn’t magic. Some of their stuff was the kind of thing that morning DJs used to do (“I’ll do four days on the air with no sleep and
no disco
!”), and before DJs, flagpole sitters. David Blaine even did one gag that was exactly flagpole sitting. The only idea of these stunts is desperation.

Before David did his “buried alive” gag in NYC, his people called Teller and me and asked if we could help with the trick. We were taking a break around that time and some of our crew guys went to NYC to help build a box for David Blaine to lie in and shit all over himself. Our crew assumed they’d be sneaking him out of the box, but David wanted to really stay in the box doing nothing and living in his own stink. This is how he got to be a star. If doing nothing for over a week is the mark of a superstar, my brother-in-law should be Elvis Gaga. The hard part of David’s stunt was keeping the press far enough away from him when he got out of the box that they wouldn’t gag from his smell. Being marinated in your own buried personal Porta Potty for a week is not sexy.

David is a magician who did card tricks and camera tricks, and now he wants his stunts to be taken as real. But “real” doesn’t mean anything in this context. Even if there’s no G on the joint, even if he “really does it,” he’s still not really doing it. It’s still showbiz and not science. “Do you think David Blaine really held his breath that long on
Oprah
?” I don’t care. I don’t want the question asked.

A magic trick has to be good enough as a magic trick that when you know there’s a G on it, it’s still interesting. It still needs to mean something. I love people who have passion and obsession. I love that there are crazy sons of bitches who want to do free diving and go as long as they can without air just to see if they can do it. I love that pure obsession. But I don’t care about dilettantes on
Oprah
. Once there are lights all over, and hype and hoopla, it’s no longer science to me. It’s no longer humanity.

When David pops up in the silver wetsuit with the queen of daytime TV looking amazed, it is by definition a trick. It’s a stunt—and to ask if
he really did it is to not understand that art is supposed to be different from reality. And that’s the cool part about art.

These are all artistic differences, not moral differences. David is a very good person. I like him. We’re not close, but I consider him a friend. The next time I see David, I wonder if he’ll walk me to the elevator, put his hands on my shoulders, look me in the eye, and say, “I really wasn’t breathing, bro.”

That’ll prove it.

“Too Many People”

—Paul McCartney

A
fter every show, Teller and I meet the audience. We stand in the lobby and talk to anyone who wants to talk to us about anything. We are happy to sign autographs, but that’s not why we’re out there. It’s really just habit. When we started out, at fairs, renaissance festivals, and little shit hole theaters, there was either no backstage or the backstage was so unpleasant it was better to be out with the audience. No one wanted our autographs, but some people wanted to talk to us, and we’d chat.

We continued to meet the audience Off-Broadway, and then, when it was time to go to Broadway, some thought we would stop hanging out, but we didn’t. We don’t really know how to sit backstage after a show. We relax and come down by talking to the folks who just watched our show.

We still play places that are small enough that we can meet everyone who would want to talk to us in an hour or so, and what the fuck else have we got to do? Since it’s over a thousand people, and we’ve been controversial now and again on TV, we now have security guards near us, and they’re ready to protect us from anyone who would want to hurt us, but what they really do is tell people where the restrooms are.

Meeting our audiences, or at least the members of the audience who would like to meet us, makes us different from other entertainers. We aren’t scared of our audiences. We’ve learned that the crowds that other entertainers might hate—the quiet crowds—include many people who are loving the show. I love quiet crowds now; I don’t see them as lacking enthusiasm, I see them as paying attention.

We’ve learned that a joke that didn’t get a loud laugh might be someone’s favorite line. I’ve learned that even when you’re the first clumsy motherfucker thrown off
Dancing with the Stars,
you might still have connected in an honest way with some people in that huge faceless TV audience. Teller usually has a few spoken lines in every show, but people like to consider him silent. They like to play it that way. We don’t have to pretend that Teller never talks. It’s just a show and we know it and they know it. After the show Teller talks to anyone who might want to talk to him. An audience member will chat with Teller for a few minutes, but when that audience member gets back home, he’ll explain to his friends that Teller never talks. We’re all in the show together.

I’ve been known to go out to eat with people I meet after the show, and I have lifelong friends whom I first met in conversation after the show.

One magical night after the show, the reason I got into show business paid off. An attractive woman waited around until everyone else was gone and told me she’d seen an advance DVD of the first few shows of the first season of
Bullshit!
at a Skeptics Society meeting. She was very complimentary and said she’d been talking about our show with the Amazing Randi and Richard Dawkins. Randi is my mentor, and Dawkins is an idol of mine whom, at the time, I’d never met. She chatted me up a little more and invited me out for coffee.

It’s coming up on ten years later and now I’m that fan-girl’s husband, and we have two wonderful children together. I’m not afraid of stalkers; I married one.

One night after the show a man in his thirties came over and asked me for an autograph. As I signed his copy of my novel,
Sock,
he told me that he had been an Orthodox Jew, and now he was an atheist and he
wanted to thank me for helping him make that change. He said that listening to my radio show had had a very big effect on him. He was considerate and didn’t want to monopolize my time when others were waiting for me, so he didn’t say much more, just took his autograph and left.

When the crowd had cleared out, he was hovering. He was waiting like guys who want me to do a quick video ID for their podcast, women who want me to sign a breast or two, and weasels who want to ask me to do a show or a charity event that our manager turned down.

This ex-Orthodox ex-Jew was waiting for me where my future wife had stood to ask me out. He was polite and nervous as he told his story. I’m not going to write his name. As you read on, you’ll understand why he wouldn’t want it published. You wouldn’t believe his name anyway; it’s a joke Jewish name and you’d think I made it up, so I will make it up. I’ll call him Atheist Boy, or AB for short.

AB was a freshly born atheist. His family were all still Orthodox. He had a lucrative job at a big retail company and many of the people he worked with, as well as his bosses, were Orthodox Jews.

I hadn’t given him the doubts in his religion, nor had I given him any theology, but somehow, listening to my radio show had given him some sort of inspiration to say he was an atheist. I have no idea how I’d had this kind of effect on him. I’m from Goyfield, Massachusetts. We had two students in our whole high school class who took the Jewish days off from school. The father of one of those children owned the Howard Johnson where I washed dishes (I also washed dishes at the Franklin County Public Hospital, as well as Famous Bill’s Restaurant—I got around), and I’d had some contact with him, but just as a rich guy, not as a person. My cohost on my radio show was Michael Goudeau, and he’s a coon-ass from Louisiana. We were about as culturally non-Jewish as we could be. I’ve been told that the definition of
goyishe kop
(non-Jew thinking) is buying a boat. Goudeau and I, together, are a big old leaky cigarette boat. We both knew our Lenny Bruce and the Yiddish of the comedy business, but we sure weren’t anything for an ex-Orthodox Jew to identify with.