Authors: Penn Jillette
I went into a hotel room with a girlfriend. I told her I was very sorry, but I had a little bit of writing that I had to do before I could take her out to dinner. I said it would take about an hour.
I said, “You can turn on the TV; my iPod has music on it and there are headphones right there. If you want to go out, my car keys are right there and there’s a Starbucks in the lobby. I have a couple books there if you want to read and there’s a magazine or two . . .”
She said, “I’m fine, I’ll just sit here.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I’ll sit and think.”
She’s still one of my best friends and an inspiration.
ONE ATHEIST’S FOURTH SUGGESTION
Put aside some time to rest and think. (If you’re religious, that might be the Sabbath; if you’re a Vegas magician,
that’ll be the day with the lowest grosses.)
Learning to Fly, Strip, and Vomit on a 727
S
ince I was a child, I’ve wanted to be weightless. I really wanted to go to space, but part of going to space was being weightless. Just to hold something up in front of me and have it stay right there is the real magic. It’s out of this world. I have professionally battled gravity. My start in showbiz was as a juggler. Jugglers fight gravity. “Sudden gust of gravity” is the standard (meaning they’ve forgotten who they stole it from) line that hack jugglers use as they bend over looking like they’re chasing a duck after they’ve dropped a prop. The reason there aren’t any superstar jugglers is because no matter how good you get, at some point you’re onstage looking like you’re chasing a duck.
Elvis never looked like he was chasing a duck. Hendrix never looked like he was chasing a duck. John Lennon never looked like he was chasing a duck. I’ve often looked like I was chasing a duck.
Now that I’m older and weigh 280 pounds, gravity is a less sporting and more real enemy. As you know, I’m six feet seven inches tall, and I still remember Leslie Fiedler writing in
Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self
that “gravity is not kind to those who grow too large.” I would be healthier (and more lucrative) if I were built like Tom Cruise.
A good theory in science is one that we’re damn sure is true: the
Earth goes around the sun. Evolution is how we got here. No one I know seriously doubts those. But no one has the full skinny on gravity.
The only way you can feel weightless for more than a couple of roller-coaster seconds is by getting far enough away from Earth or riding the Vomit Comet. The Vomit Comet is how NASA trains astronauts and rich people thrill important clients. They take a big old airplane and they go up and down really fast. While you’re going up, you weigh 1.8 times your weight, and while you’re going down, you weigh around 0.
Up until recently, the FAA had given NASA a monopoly on losing all your pounds of ugly fat (along with muscle, bone, and everything else). Astronauts got to ride it, some scientists got to ride it, and that’s about it. Ron Howard made some back-room deal (it
must
have included sexual favors) to be able to shoot
Apollo 13
on the NASA Vomit Comet and they talked about it a bit, but it was soon quieted down. You’re not really supposed to use a government-funded program to make movies. I’m glad Tom, Bill, and Kevin got to fly, but if everyone really thought about it, why can’t we all ride?
More and more people are getting a chance to be weightless. A couple free-market nuts at NASA decided they loved zero G and it was time to get off the socialist tit, buy their own Vomit Comet, and start selling rides on it. Everything the Vomit Comet does is within the specs of planes, and why can’t at least rich people get to do what Ron and Tom got to do? That was the idea.
When they first got this harebrained scheme, before it had been approved by the FAA or whoever, I heard about it. It seems that when anyone gets a harebrained scheme, I’m CC’d on the memo. I love nuts, I’m for nuts, I am nuts. They all get in touch with me. I told them I thought it was a great idea (and you know how much that means), and I wrote them e-mail, gave them tickets to our show, and went to dinner with them a couple times.
Several years ago, while they were still working on getting approval to fly civilians, they figured out how I could go up in their Vomit Comet: they’d make me an employee of their company, Zero G. I’d go up in one of the flights they were conducting to train their pilots how to best hit
zero G. My six years of grueling cheerleading had paid off: I was going to be weightless.
It was not without price. I had to get up early. We’d been working hard on a TV show and I needed a rest, but I got up early in Vegas and caught the 8:10 to Burbank. Getting up wasn’t hard. I was as excited as a little kid and didn’t sleep anyway. I decided to have a Cinnabon (“You pig!”) for breakfast because I thought it might taste nice coming back up. It
is
called the Vomit Comet. I slept the whole flight to Burbank and went from Burbank to Van Nuys by car. At the airport I ran into another Zero G “employee,” Billy Gibbons (yup, from ZZ Top). Billy’s also a guy who cheerleads for nuts. Look at us, for Christ’s sake. The Zero G boys had run into Billy at an airport somewhere and had invited him along too.
On board would be two pilots, the four guys who were working on starting the company, a flight doctor, a nurse, and two paramedics. One of the NASA guys brought his girlfriend (another “employee”), a platinum blonde with way-big aftermarket breasts. I’ve always wanted to fuck in zero G, and the aftermarket-breasted girlfriend of someone else was my first choice. I tried to make a case that these were extraordinary circumstances and her boyfriend, who was busy doing airplane stuff, would be fine with us fucking for science, but she didn’t go for it. She thought I was trying to ask her out for another time. I wasn’t trying to ask her out; I didn’t want to date her, I wanted to fuck someone in zero G, and she was a better choice than the officious medical people and Billy. Mary Roach, the great writer, also did a Zero G flight and tried to bring her husband up to fuck her. I wish we had been on the same flight. I could have tried dressing up like her husband. When the busty blonde said no, I winked at Billy, but he was also a no-go.
Billy was big as life, with his big old Warner Bros. cartoon hillbilly beard, an African hat, a $250,000 Gibson starburst guitar, a six-pack of beer, and a specially made amp that had been built inside a can of peanuts. He looked great. Billy is thin. Shaved, he would weigh about a hundred pounds. He was beaming all over. I’ve known Billy about twenty-five years, and although we don’t see each other much, he feels
like a friend—not enough of a friend to have sex with me in zero G, but a good friend all the same. We were ready to go.
We walked out on the runway, and there was the mystical plane that would battle gravity for us. It was a beat-up 727 cargo plane that read
MEXICARGO
on the side. Oh, my word. I’m not one to engage a lot in ethnic humor, but I did have to have some fun talking to Billy about our lives riding on “beans and Bondo.” Man, it looked jury-rigged and fly-by-night. But we were ready.
I was intent on exploring the science behind
Barbarella.
I asked one of the owner guys to run a little video camera for me—I wanted to get some video comparing Hanoi Jane’s strip in zero G, which of course had been faked by having her lie on glass, with a
real
strip in zero G by me. I was going to go weightless and strip naked. The blonde really wanted to join me, and I thought it would help the science, but her boyfriend said he thought her stripping would hurt Zero G’s credibility with the FAA. Big guys stripping in space is serious research.
Anyway, inside, the plane was mostly a lot of big open space. At the back were three rows of old coach seats with oxygen bottles just lying on them, a cooler tied down with ropes, a box of Ziplocs that would be used for our vomit, and a big mat on the floor. An astronaut guy did a little flight attendant speech, except we all really listened. This wasn’t some food server in the sky; this was a real former NASA guy. “We have lost cabin pressure a few times,” he told us, “so we might have to use the oxygen.” In the event we needed the oxygen, it wasn’t going to drop down and turn on—we would have to find it and turn on the oxygen from the bottle. Of course, if we did lose cabin pressure we’d be heading down to thicker air so fast we wouldn’t have time for the oxygen before we were safe (or dead), but our guy was having fun scaring us. The Vomit Comet, for all the weirdness, is safe. It’s doing safe stuff. It’s as safe as any big plane, and that’s safer than hanging out on your front steps. It just doesn’t seem safe, and for creeps like us, that adds to the fun.
Now here is how weightlessness works: this huge plane does parabolas. It goes pretty close to straight up for thirty seconds, and then it turns around and heads straight for the ocean. You know that
feeling you get at the top of a roller coaster before the big drop, that feeling where your stomach goes to your throat? On a coaster it’ll last a second or so. Well, this plane becomes a huge roller coaster, and instead of a second you get thirty seconds. Thirty seconds of that feeling. The roller coaster example doesn’t tell you anything. Thirty seconds of Vomit Comet weightlessness is not sixty times a half second of Six Flags weightlessness. It’s a different thing. Imagine an hourlong orgasm. You can’t—and that’s my point.
Another way to look at how it works is that we’re falling straight down and the plane, and everyone else, and even the air, is staying around us in the same relative position. It’s not easy for the pilots. They’re flying straight down at the water, and they’re trying to keep the plane heading perfectly straight down, and then they pull out, and back up you go, and when you go back up, you go to 1.8 G. I would go from weightless to 504 pounds in a few seconds. We would go from 0 G to 1.8 G and we were going to do it over thirty times! We would be weightless for at least fifteen minutes altogether. That would be longer than Alan Shepard on his first flight.
I would also weigh 504 pounds for 15 minutes. It wasn’t the zero G that would make us vomit, it was the 1.8 G. At the end of each zero G segment we’d hear the call “Thirty seconds!” and have to quickly sit down and get our heads straight up, perpendicular to the floor. It would be better if we didn’t talk or laugh or look around, but just sit. That was our best chance of not getting sick. And we would have no idea where we were. The plane has only one small window in the middle of the open space. It’s recessed and hard to look through. We wouldn’t be able to sync our eyes with what our bodies were feeling. Like a roller coaster in the dark with no wind. Everything would be moving with us. We would just feel it in our bodies.
It’s very weird to be in an airplane unable to see out any windows. I mean, when you sit on the aisle, you may not think you’re seeing out the windows, but it’s so odd when you really can’t. We took off and then had to fly out over the ocean, and it took a while with all the noise regulations over Southern California. Finally, it was time. We’d do “two
Martians, two lunars, and then go to zero.” That meant we’d have two thirty-second legs at one-third gravity, two at one-sixth gravity, and then the real deal. In between each one, we’d get heavy. They told us we might want to stay in our seats for the first few until we got used to it. Billy and I were told to start slow; if we felt sick, we should come back to the seats and strap in, and they’d be there to help us. As we began the first leg—the first “Martian”—the NASA guy used his arm to illustrate the orientation of the plane, so we could understand a little of what we were feeling. We were told to be careful, but the real boys were walking around, even during the going-up times. His arm sloped up and I felt heavy. I mean I was really pushed into my seat, and then . . . his hand . . . as I stared at his arm curving, I felt lighter.
I was lighter. The pros started dancing and jumping. I had to shake my head. They were moving in slow motion. I had seen this motion in movies, but I had never actually
witnessed
it. They’re both stocky men, but now they were jumping huge distances, doing backflips together and landing on their feet. I felt my arms; they were so light. And then we got heavy. I could feel the skin of my face pull down, and it was hard to lift my arms. That lasted thirty seconds, and then we started another Martian.
Billy couldn’t wait; he was up out of his seat, jumping and giving a Texas “Woooo!” I was a little more cautious; I unbuckled and lifted myself from my seat. I was a gymnast. I could hold my whole weight with my arms with no strain. Man oh man. “Thirty seconds!” came the call, and we got heavy. I was back in my seat, looking straight up, trying not to get sick. But I was doing fine. Okay, on lunar, I would rock.
The angle of Bob’s arm told us it was coming, and we were lunar. Weighing forty-seven pounds, I jumped into the big empty space with the mat on the floor, very cautiously. I went right to the ceiling (not far for me). I’ve always wanted to walk on my hands, and there I was, like the greatest circus star you’ve ever seen, running along on my palms. Billy was dancing some weird ZZ Top/Texan nut dance. The busty girlfriend was doing cartwheels and flips. The medical people were just getting up out of their seats. “Thirty seconds!” we were warned, and
I hurried to the edge of the plane and sat on the floor with my head straight up, really feeling the weight this time.
My second lunar was great. My handstand was better, and I tried a flip. I fell over, but it felt great. I was so strong. The body that I’ve been stuck in for decades became new. I was stronger. Looking at the others was amazing. It really was slow motion. I had never even seen what I was seeing, let alone felt it! Amazing. I stood on one hand. I spun and flew. “Thirty seconds!” And I rushed to the wall, and felt the oppressive weight come back almost double. Time to pay the piper.
Now it was straight up and down. The heavy was really heavy, but soon we were going to be weightless. I sat straight and quiet and waited. It was a long thirty seconds of gravity oppression, and then, the tilt of the arm—and freedom, complete freedom. I pushed off and, still seated, floated in the air. Billy came flying at me and I caught him. There was no up or down; I was upside-down and I had military NASA ass over my head. I grabbed the girlfriend and tossed her lightly to Billy. When she got to Billy they both went off together. Someone grabbed me and spun me around.