Authors: Penn Jillette
That fine lady was the only one I heard about starting down the road to atheism because of seeing my video in church. Everyone else is still praying for me, in front of computer screens and in churches all over. Part of one of the sermons built around my video includes everyone bowing their heads and praying for Penn Jillette. I have whole congregations praying for me by name. Who else has that attention who isn’t on a milk carton?
So we’re running a pretty good experiment. If praying does any good, it should do some good for me. People are sincerely praying for me. They’re praying for me to find Christ. Is there a time frame on this? How long do I have to go Christless in Gaza before we know for sure that their praying has failed?
I haven’t found Christ. I’m not even looking for him. I don’t need or want salvation. I have no hope of eternal life, but I do have hope that hundreds of millions of pebbles of doubt will grow into boulders, and eventually religion will go away and people will celebrate and cherish and protect the precious life we have here now. I’ll keep preaching that
everywhere I can, stand on the mountain until all souls can see it, until we all agree or until all those prayers do work on me and I change my mind. And then I’ll proselytize about that too.
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”
—Bob Dylan
You Are the Model?
P
enn & Teller are the guys who wear gray suits. The articles always say we wear matching gray business suits, but we’ve never worn matching gray business suits. The Beatles sometimes wore matching suits. The Monkees were more likely to wear clothes that were very similar but had little variations based on the different styles and personalities of Micky, Davy, Peter, and Mike. The Monkees might have worn shirts that were the same color and the same fabric, but they’d all have different collars, sleeves, cuts, and buttons. When I was a child, I thought that was so, so cool. So Teller and I wear suits that are the same color and fabric but have different cuts and linings, and we wear different shirts; sometimes I go double-breasted and Teller wears single-breasted. Some seasons the differences are subtler, but our suits never match completely.
We can’t buy suits off the rack because we’re different sizes, and they aren’t just suits anyway—they’re costumes, so we have them designed. Penn and Teller are only different sizes because of me. Most people think that Teller is little and I’m big. That’s not true. Teller is normal size and I’m the different size. I’m really, really big. I’m stupidly big. I’m a fucking giant. I’m Sasquatch. I think I was too big to even be drafted
into the army. At least that was going to be my argument if they hadn’t abolished the draft before I turned eighteen. I’m just shy of six feet seven inches tall (if we ever go metric, I’m two meters, which is a very cool height) and my weight varies, but I try to stay twenty pounds south of three hundred. Teller is almost five feet ten. He’s a normal-sized man. To give you an idea of how stupid my size is, Teller is about the same size as Art Garfunkel. Teller & Garfunkel are two regular guys; Simon & Penn are waving to each other from about the same standard deviation on opposite sides of the bell curve.
Besides our suits being very different sizes, they’re all a bit tricked out. Our jacket pockets never have flaps and they’re a little bigger than they should be, so it’s easy to grab hidden shit and palm it. We do a lot of costume changes in the Penn & Teller show, but the audience never knows it. I have one jacket that has a breast pocket that connects through the lining to the side pocket, allowing me to place something securely in the upper pocket and then steal it from the lower pocket. I have a jacket with a big pocket on the back that Teller can sneak an American flag into. We sometimes change jackets backstage as a quick way to make sure we have the right props properly hidden in the correct pockets.
It was French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin who got the idea for magicians to wear a top hat and tails—the same Robert-Houdin in whose honor Erik Weisz changed his name to Houdini. Before Robert-Houdin came along, magicians dressed like wizards or Asians (there was little difference between the two way back then). They wore conical hats and long flowing robes. The idea Robert-Houdin had was that if magicians dressed just like their audiences, the tricks would be more amazing. Magicians have been knocking off his idea for almost two hundred years without understanding it. Some magicians today still dress like they’re working for audiences in nineteenth-century France. If they were working for audiences in nineteenth-century France, they wouldn’t have to throw a pigeon into their tails to impress the crowd, they could just turn on a flashlight and be a god. Most magicians today dress like desperate rock stars from the mideighties. I don’t understand that at all. Wouldn’t they be less embarrassed in conical hats?
We understood Robert-Houdin’s wardrobe idea and figured that just about every man, at some time or another, dresses in a gray suit. Maybe it’s to go to work, or maybe it’s as a defendant, but it’s a common look. We thought it was a better idea for us than top hats and tails or baggy shirts and a wind machine. Teller and I are creepy enough; we might as well dress normal.
Our “normal” is professionally designed. One year in the nineties we were changing designers. We were going from Canali to Zegna or something.
GQ
magazine thought it would be funny to do a fashion layout on the new gray suit look for Penn & Teller. The joke was that anyone would give a fuck that our suits were changing slightly.
GQ
knows how to do fashion shoots. They set up a beautiful rooftop in Manhattan with a view of Central Park. They hired stylists for our watches and serious hair and makeup. All the cheeses from the magazine and the designer were there. It was a big fucking deal.
It was spring in NYC, and I walked from my apartment right off Times Square to the
GQ
office building. I was wearing gym shorts (with underwear; I knew I was going to be changing my clothes. I’m not modest, but I try to be polite) and a T-shirt. I don’t remember what T-shirt I wore, but you can bet it was one I got for free from a radio station. Picture gym shorts with a T-shirt that says “WROK Rocks the Rockin’ Rock out of Rock in the Rock City.” Picture it with a pizza stain on it, even though they were catering lunch.
I don’t ever brush my hair unless I’m working. It’s hair that’s unfashionably long. Just stupid old-man hippie hair. Recently, a woman at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino sent out a message that her granddaughter was getting chemotherapy and was going to lose her hair. The Rio sent out a note asking employees with long hair to donate to Locks of Love. This group claims to make hair fungible. The little granddaughter wouldn’t get my exact hair, but there would be more hair in the system, so she could get some. They cut off ten inches, and my hair is still unfashionably long. My mom tried, during much of the time our lives overlapped, to get me to cut my hair. She started when I was in junior high school, saying, “You look like a girl,” and ended right
before her death, saying, “You’re forty-five years old. On a young man that hair was fine, but on an old man, it’s really unattractive.” She never gave up, but I hung tough and made sure my mom was never happy with my hair from the time I was twelve years old. For our live shows, I have microphones in my glasses. It puts the mics at just the right spot; the sound is great and it doesn’t change as I move my head. It was my idea. Carl Sagan came to our show, asked me about my mics, and then started doing it; how great is that? I have battery packs on my back, and they’re connected through my ponytail (Carl just had his wires hanging down his collar). It’s part of mic-ing me up before the P & T show for our stage manager to work the cables through my hair, and that means she’s the one who braids it, not me. When I do TV, they have hair and makeup and someone professional brushes it. I don’t ever do anything with my hair. I don’t even ever shave except before a show, and then only about once a week. It’s not a sexy stubble like Hugh Laurie’s. I have a very light beard, so it’s more like some random hairs sticking out of my face here and there. I’m a fucking pig. My mother used to say I had a light beard because I was part Native American. I think it’s because I have no genitals.
I showed up that day to the
GQ
offices, a little sweaty from walking, hair tangled and loose on my shoulders, in a T-shirt and dirty gym shorts. Probably exactly the way Christina Ricci shows up every day to the movie set, but very different raw material.
I went up into the office building and met the execs and the photographer and his assistants. The photo assistants were drop-dead gorgeous women; they often are. The photographer was intense in studied black casual clothing. All the magazine big cheeses were there. The metonymic term “suits” was really right for these guys. They were executive “suits” at a suit designer company. These are guys who can tie their ties better than you can jerk off. Everyone but me looked great.
Teller had a later call time than I had, so he wasn’t around. They took me out on the roof and showed me the view. The photo assistants had our new gray jackets draped over their shoulders, and they were posing in the spots where we’d be standing later while the photographer took
test shots to make sure the lighting and composition would be perfect for us. It might have been a joke, but it would also be a layout in
GQ,
and it was going to be perfect.
Everyone was embarrassed as they told me their makeup guy was running a bit late, but there was a whole catered spread, and if that wasn’t enough, they had a gofer who could run and get me any other food I wanted. They said I should make myself comfortable, that the makeup artist would arrive presently. Our “dressing room” was a beautiful boardroom. This was
GQ
in New York City; there were no fuckups there, except me.
I didn’t mind waiting. They had a few newspapers for us, so I sat down, put my feet up, and started reading the
Times.
They knew I drank caffeine-free cola, so someone brought me over a glass of that with ice.
I was on my second glass when the makeup artist arrived. He was a small, handsome, slightly effeminate man. He was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt too, but his shorts were a skintight designer take on bicycle shorts that were in fashion that year. His T-shirt was Italian and made of hummingbird-testicle flesh or something. His sunglasses cost more than his rent, and his hair and skin were perfect. He was foreign. He was Italian or something. He was swarthy. His package and makeup kit were both large and professional. He made it clear, in every way he could, that he was homosexual.
He didn’t apologize for being late, even after every suit gave him the stink eye. This makeup artist was a makeup
artist.
They were lucky to have him.
One of the big cheeses asked him to get started, but an artist doesn’t rush. He casually walked outside to see what it was like on the set, so that the makeup would be perfect for the shot, the way the light caught the skin. He wanted to judge how much wind there was in order to gauge his hair-care products and how much balm to put on the lips.
He sauntered back in and picked up a small piece of smoked salmon from the catered tray. No one else had dared mess it up. He ate, shrugged, and looked for somewhere he could lay out his brushes and towels.
He didn’t ask where he should set up—he took over the room. This was his moment. He owned that boardroom. He commandeered the end of the dark, heavy hardwood conference table nearest the window and laid down a fresh towel. He began opening little careful latches on little careful drawers and laying out brushes.
At this moment Teller arrived. He had outdone me in the pig department. He was dressed like me, but he’d added black socks. He thought he could save some time getting dressed in the suit if he wore his black dress socks with his sneakers and shorts instead of white socks. His gym shorts were bright orange. His T-shirt was white and from JCPenney. He walked into the room, introduced himself to the suits, shook hands with the photographer, grabbed a big handful of the expensive catered food that the makeup artist had started with, shoved it in his mouth, went to the other side of the room, picked up a newspaper, and started reading, while chewing in that annoying way he does where his eyebrows move too much (we’ve been working together a very long time).
The makeup artist didn’t even see Teller, and although he had set up right where I was sitting, he hadn’t once looked at me. He was laying out brushes, palettes, differently shaped sponges, and cotton. I had put down my paper and was just watching him set up, watching him move. He knew exactly what he was doing, and I liked watching that. He was clearly great at what he did. The executives were uncomfortable with his unapologetic tardiness and slow, careful movements, and they may have projected impatience onto my observations, but I was just watching him set up.
When he was all ready, and not a fucking instant earlier, he looked up, turned in the general direction of the suits, and in his very sexy European Union accent said, “Okay, where is the model?” Please read his sentence in an accent. It doesn’t matter what accent you use, but make sure it’s a very heavy accent. So you can just barely understand yourself.
His whole story was in his looks and his movements, and in that sentence. This was an important gig for him career-wise (although not important enough to be on time), and more than important, it was a
sexy gig for him. He was a gay man about to do a
GQ
fashion shoot. I’ve done some magazine and TV shoots where I know there are going to be sexy female models with us and I get very excited about going to work (although not excited enough to shave, brush my hair, and put on a clean shirt). I used to run the scenarios through my mind: this was the day I’d fall in love with another model, or, better yet, I’d bang her in the stairwell. As I sat in the
GQ
building, I imagined our makeup artist getting ready for work that day, thinking he’d be around very beautiful men. He was a very beautiful man, and, well, you never can tell, can you?