God, No! (6 page)

You could hear the inspirational music swell. It was the monolith in
2001,
the unholy grail, the covenant to
not
talk to god. We had symbolism up the ass. On that plate with the bacon cheeseburger
were Mark Twain, George Carlin, Einstein, Ingersoll, and Butterfly McQueen. Frank Zappa, Martin Mull, Randy Newman, Richard Feynman, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins. It was dripping like a hot shiksa. It was the Clash screaming, “You must not act the way you were brought up.” It was absolutely free—or at least Teller and I could put it on our hotel tab.

AB looked at all of us. Made eye contact with each of us. Zeke said lovingly, “Do it, motherfucker.” AB grinned and picked up the burger. He held it in front of his face with the juice dripping and took a deep whiff. He sucked that good bacon freedom into his lungs and then took a bite.

His eyes widened.

“Goddamn, that’s good! Wow!” You can see why those whack jobs keep control over food. It’s powerful. It’s life. AB was transformed. The next day he would go to a fancy barbershop and get a real shave with a real straight razor. I didn’t know it, but that’s another thing some Jews can’t do: they can’t have a razor touch the skin of their face. AB’s life changed; it started way before the cheeseburger and it will continue, but I was so proud to be with him for that first bite. It was a celebration. It was one nation under a motherfucking groove.

AB couldn’t get over how good bacon was. I tried to imagine tasting bacon for the first time. I can remember my mom putting bacon on the plate with my pancakes. You wouldn’t really put the pure Massachusetts (fuck Vermont) maple syrup directly on the bacon, but hey, if a little happened to flow over from the pancakes to the bacon, there was nothing you could do about it, right? I remembered the smell of our kitchen as a child and my mom draining the bacon on a double layer of paper towels. It’s a beautiful thing.

AB and I became friends. I’m invited to his divorce party. His children have played with my children. He made sure it was not a high Jewish holiday and his sons wore baseball caps, the headgear of choice for the waffling Jew. Every time AB visits me, he brings me a big package of fancy bacon and some nice artisanal cheeses. He’s a good man.

•   •   •

Last time I was in New York City, I got in a day before I had to work. AB invited me to go to Traif. It’s a restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on the edge of the Hasidic community. It’s the perfect restaurant for AB to take me to. The menu is really good food, and it’s mostly
traif.
It’s bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with blue cheese. It’s pulled-pork sandwiches and bacon doughnuts. The food is great and the food is sacrilegious. My buddy SweetiePie, with the facial hair of the leather daddy in the Village People and from Michigan, was my date. SweetiePie got his nickname when he was our theater manager in Hollywood way back before Off-Broadway. His name was Michael and I asked him if he preferred “Mike” or “Michael.” He said “Anything is fine,” and I said, “In that case, I shall call you SweetiePie,” and it stuck. I think he has a different story about how he got his name, but neither of us is lying. SweetiePie is from as non-Jewish a background as Goudeau and me.

It seemed like such a nutty event that I tweeted it, and because of that, some ex-Hasid Jews showed up. So it was AB, SweetiePie, an African-American model skeptic computer programmer whom AB had brought, a Russian woman who looked like she’d been downloaded from a porn site, a woman documentary filmmaker who was doing a movie on ex-Hasids, and three ex-Hasids. All of the ex-Hasids were men. There certainly are women who no longer believe, but it’s even harder for them to get out. They can’t fucking drive, for Christ’s sake, and maybe “for Christ’s sake” is the wrong ejaculation to use there.

So, there we were, nine of us, all brought together to celebrate the flouting of religious dietary laws and have some bacon doughnuts.

The three ex-Hasidic men were in three different stages of breaking away. The one nearest to me was just a guy, a little rockabilly and out of fashion, but still just a guy. He had sideburns, not quite as bushy or big as Extreme Elvis’s, but sideburns, very gentile facial hair. He had no hat and hair like an early Jerry Lee Lewis. He moved like and had the aggression of Lenny Bruce, and his face was not dissimilar to Lenny’s in his prime. He wore jeans and a shirt. He was in his twenties but talked
like Jackie Mason. The sentence structure, accent, and inflections were not American, but he had been born in Brooklyn. He was as American as me, but seemed like a foreigner who’d watched a lot of
Happy Days
episodes to learn how to act. I will call him Sauly. Like a much more Jewish Pauly Shore. Sauly was loud, clumsy, and very lovable.

I’m moving up in level of Jewishness: the second man I will call Moishe. He was a big man, not my size but close. He was wearing a hat that could have been Justin Timberlake’s but could also have been Hasidic; you’d have to see the rest of the outfit. But the rest of his outfit wouldn’t have told you enough. It wasn’t all black, like he was supposed to wear, but wasn’t a Hawaiian shirt either. He had
payot,
the Jewish sideburn curls, but they were getting shorter. He had come to Vegas a few months earlier and told me he was really ready to leave Judaism. He wanted me to cut his long curly sideburns, the way I had fed AB a bacon cheeseburger. The hair growing in his sideburn region had been down to his stomach, but lately he had been trimming it back as he felt less Jewish. He still wanted me to do the final cutting, but he was already back to being able to hide his
payot
behind his ears. Moishe was still deeper in the Hasidic world than Sauly. Moishe talked like Jackie Mason if Jackie had never wanted to be on TV. He was obviously from another country. He’d also been born in Brooklyn.

The third ex-Hasid was hard-core. He was full-on guy-working-in-an-NYC-electronics-store. He was a small man, all dressed in black, with a hat, long
payot,
and a beard. He spoke English very well, but with a heavy accent, such an accent that the phrase “such an accent” would start at a middle C and rise up to about a B-flat by the last word. He looked and sounded like a cartoon of a New York Jewish immigrant. His name had no American equivalent. It wasn’t a name; it was a word. You know how gentile “Penn Fraser Jillette” sounds? Well, imagine the Jewish form of that. Not really a name, just sounds designed to be ethnic. I’ll call him Schmoozleschnu. Schmoozleschnu had been born in Brooklyn, NYC, USA, in 1985. He didn’t learn English until 2006, and it was his third language. He was raised speaking Yiddish, and he added
Hebrew probably because it was a little less Jewish. His family didn’t have a TV, listen to the radio, or see any movies. He was from another world, and he was a twenty-minute cab ride from the MTV corporate offices in Times Square.

The first nonreligious book he read—not the first book in English, but the first nonreligious book he ever read—was
The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins. He had his mind blown by the bacon cheeseburger of comedy, George Carlin, when Schmoozleschnu first watched TV.

Mr. Pie and I were about to learn a lot of stuff we never knew and would have a lot of trouble believing.

I guess some of this is common knowledge, or it should be. You know the Pennsylvania Dutch talk nutty, right? We know that there is an enormous Latino population that speaks Spanish and has some different customs than mall Americans. The Amish and the Gypsies have their own style and language, kinda sorta. If you’ve ever been to Dorchester, Boston, or seen
Gone Baby Gone
or
The Departed,
or been in the Deep South, you know there are still some wild accents in our homogenized country. If you’ve heard me when I’m not on TV and I’m thinking about my mom and dad, I talk a bit like a Pepperidge Farm salesman. We all know about the diverse cultures of the United States of America. I mean, Christ on Italian beef, have you ever talked to someone from the real Chicago? It’ll put you off your feed.

I knew all that, but I didn’t know there were people born in the USA who didn’t speak any English. We’re a nation of immigrants, and immigrants want to assimilate, but not the Hasids. It’s a very successful cult. It’s a subculture that has nothing to do with the rest of American culture. While they were full-blown Hasids, these guys had never heard of Madonna or the Beatles. They had never heard of Elvis.
They had never heard of Elvis.
They had never fucking heard of Elvis Aaron Presley, the good old boy with the Jewish mother. Moishe used the term “Looney Tunes” to describe the people he used to live with. I asked him how he knew about Looney Tunes. He said he knew them from retailing children’s underwear with those cartoons on them. His father had also
shown him some Mickey Mouse cartoons on a sixteen-millimeter projector on the wall of their home, and now his father felt that was why Moishe was going crazy and leaving the fold.

Pie and I sat chowing down on bacon-wrapped shellfish while we found out that religious authority figures fucking little boys is not just a Catholic thing. Our new friends all had firsthand experiences. They all had been married to strangers while in their teens. Even in this tightly knit community, the people they were marrying were often strangers. Strangers they would fuck to produce a lot of children. The fucking-through-a-hole-in-the-sheet thing is a myth, but they really do fuck only at night in the dark, and there is no pussy-eating. You can’t get crazier than not allowing pussy-eating. Husbands can’t even look at their wives’ cunts, and this is a community without television. They are more lenient about blow jobs—some sages allow it, some don’t—but no matter what they do sexually, marrying a stranger in the twenty-first century is a little weird.

Somehow in the mishmash of finally allowing American culture to flood over them, they had stumbled on me and my radio show’s podcasts. There are only a few dozen of these ex-Hasids and they all know each other, so if one of them finds something it moves through the expats pretty fast. Somehow by the weird random path of life, I was in the middle of this group of heroes.

I asked Schmoozleschnu how he was led down the road to atheism. How did he end up eating
traif
at Traif with me? It’s the same one-word answer that you get to so many varied questions: pussy. He didn’t know anything about science, but he knew about strip clubs. He would go to strip clubs but had never heard of Madonna. It just doesn’t seem right. He said that most of the Hasids go to strip clubs and hookers. It seems like at strip clubs, American culture would wash over you, but I guess if you’re in a hat and funny clothes you still stay separate enough for god. Schmoozleschnu was getting a lap dance from a dancer and he asked her what religion she was. He asked her that because . . . well, I don’t know, I guess because he was a crazy motherfucker. She said, “Atheist.” Why don’t I ever get “dancers” like that? It seems all the dancers I see
have big old hateful crosses hanging between their big brand-spankin’-new lovable tits, but Schmoozleschnu got lucky. “Getting lucky” in this case doesn’t mean getting laid, but rather having your entire philosophic underpinnings destroyed. He had never believed it really possible to be an atheist. All he had heard about us, in Yiddish I suppose, was that we were miserable monsters. And here was a miserable monster getting his circumcised dick hard. When I have a hard-on I want to talk evolution, and so did Schmoozleschnu. He asked her if she believed in evolution, and of course she did. He said he would disprove it, while she was rubbing her perfectly evolved ass over the burlap, or whatever, of his black trousers.

Schmoozleschnu thought he had a killer argument: which was more complicated, a tomato or a pair of eyeglasses? A tomato, of course. And yet we believe that eyeglasses are designed and a tomato is not? (Read that sentence making your voice go way up, like a high school student in the 1950s playing Shylock.) Our busty dancing Charles Darwin pointed out that a tomato and eyeglasses were different and then laid on the origin of the species for Schmoozleschnu in a loud club. Maybe she used some visual aids and pulled aside her G-string as she explained how we got from primordial ooze to poontang in a billion years. She covered geology and disputed the young earth and Noah’s ark, and he left with a happy ending and a better understanding about how happy endings had come into existence.

Pussy in a strip club led Schmoozleschnu to the big D’s and H’s—Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris—and then to supper with me and SweetiePie in Brooklyn. Sauly was totally American; Moishe was on his way but still able to pass for religious around his family; and Schmoozleschnu was still looking full Yama Yama Jew. I like to think that the term “Yama Yama Jew” is poetic enough that I don’t have to explain, but I will. I went to Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey the Greatest Show on Earth Clown College in Florida. I was the last picked and the youngest the year I went. I took classes in trapeze, wire walking, and prop building. It was a very extensive program, six days a week, and on the seventh day I had remedial makeup. I wasn’t good. I
learned to do a double backflip on the trampoline and to walk across a tight-wire. I learned that I really, really sucked at physical comedy. I came into college as a great juggler, and I left as a great juggler, but I never got to be even a passable clown. That’s right, I failed as a fucking clown.

We were taught in makeup class, and in
makeup
makeup class, that you should never put any red or black makeup on your upper lip—the whole exaggerated mouth is painted on the lower lip and chin. If you put any mouthlike makeup above your mouth, it obscures your facial expressions instead of magnifying them, and when you open your mouth it’s just a slightly bigger hole in the middle of a red blotch. If the makeup is only painted below the upper lip, then all your expressions are exaggerated, and on people other than me it’s funny. Clown makeup that’s put on both the upper and lower lip gives a look that professional clowns call a “busted asshole.” Once you’ve heard the term “busted asshole” for that kind of mouth makeup, well, it’ll add some
Human Centipede
images to your nightmare idea of bad clowns.