Authors: Penn Jillette
I built most of the Slammer before I had even met my wife or thought about having children. It’s like it was designed by a twelve-year-old boy with a lot of money and no legal guardian. There’s a fire pole coming down from my office to the courtyard. There are secret rooms behind bookcases (so much for secret, but there are others too). There was a sex dungeon off the bedroom that has since been turned into a nursery (the wonderful story of my life). My office has a urinal and a sink (I still don’t know why you need both), there’s a band room with rock and roll and jazz instruments set up all the time, and there’s a big home theater. All this, and it looks like an industrial complex with real human skeletons hanging here and there. When it was being built, the only real grown-up in my life was my business manager, and he worried about the Slammer’s resale value. “No one is going to want to spend money to buy Penn Jillette’s house. You’re not Elvis. It’s not Graceland. So you’re killing your resale value by making it this crazy. Put in marble floors or tile or something expensive to misdirect from the fire pole.”
While I was ignoring my business manager’s expensive advice, my senior adviser, LOD, whom I don’t pay at all, was in Vegas visiting. Lawrence O’Donnell Jr. was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s senior adviser, a big-cheese writer on
The West Wing,
and now host of
The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell
on Fox News Channel (just kidding, it’s on MSNBC). We’ve been friends forever, and I go to him for advice.
I was telling LOD about some sort of Halloween fetish ball that I’d just been to. Someone had taken pictures of me with some very attractive women who were not dressed for climbing Everest. I don’t do drugs, and I don’t drink, but I still enjoyed this shindig. I asked LOD if I should be worried about the pictures showing up in the future.
LOD went into a flattering speech about how he personally thought that I would make a pretty good Supreme Court justice. The Constitution said nothing about needing a law degree or even being smart. LOD thought I’d do a good job and look cool in the robes. “But,” he said, “it isn’t going to happen. No one is going to offer you a position on the Supreme Court, so you don’t need to worry about the pictures showing up at the confirmation hearings. You’re a fucking juggler! Who cares? It’s like your house, the so-called Slammer; you’re never going to be able to sell it anyway. But you don’t need to sell it, so don’t worry about resale value. Accept who you are and do whatever you want.”
I found that when I stopped lying to myself and stopped planning for futures that weren’t going to happen, I got happier. It was easy. I like that my door to the Supreme Court was slammed in my face. I liked realizing that it would be okay to shave my eyebrows and replace them with calligraphy tattoos of “fuck” over the right eye and “you” over the left eye.
I was taken with these thoughts, and I was preaching this new freedom. My girlfriend at the time was quite taken with the idea as well. She was an actress, and she found it liberating to think that she didn’t have to worry at all about whether she showed her tits in movies or not. Who cared? She wasn’t going to be on the Supreme Court. (She still hasn’t shown her tits in a movie; she married some guy and got knocked up, and I still see her pop up grieving on police shows, but I’ve never seen her tits on TV. I don’t know if she still thinks about it, since like a few ex-girlfriends, she doesn’t talk to me much anymore.)
Besides convincing this woman she was never going to be on the Supreme Court, and giving her a party with a cigarette-smoking monkey in a diaper that she could laugh at (in some ways I was a pretty good boyfriend), I also introduced her to Ron Jeremy (make your
own call as to whether that introduction is “good boyfriend” or “bad boyfriend”).
Ron Jeremy is not a porn star, he is
the
porn star. He will show his big dick to anyone. He’s not all that attractive and never was all that attractive. He’s older than you by a lot and he still gets paid to fuck. If that’s not the American dream, I’m a self-fellating blue-nosed gopher. I have gone out in public with Debbie Harry, Jay Leno, Madonna, and Johnny Depp. None of them gets the same attention or is as recognized as Ron Jeremy. It’s amazing; guys will knock over naked porn women just to get near Ron. He’s a superstar.
I introduced my girlfriend to Ron Jeremy, and a few weeks later they got together with some other people for lunch. I wasn’t there. Ron was discussing some decisions he was making. I can’t even make up an example of what those might be. My girlfriend decided it was the perfect time to share the new LOD wisdom with Ron and the gang. “Don’t worry about it, Ron. You’re not going to be nominated for the Supreme Court; these choices will not be revisited in your confirmation hearings.”
She said Ron froze. He didn’t know what to say. He was heartbroken and angry. “What? You can’t know that. You can’t say I have no chance of being on the Supreme Court.”
She hung tough. “Yes, I can. We all can.”
“No, I could be on the Supreme Court.”
“You’ve made over a thousand pornographic movies. You blew yourself on camera for money—repeatedly,” she reminded him.
“But you can’t say that I wouldn’t be on the Supreme Court. You can’t say that for sure.”
He is right. We can’t say that for sure. We really can’t.
I read something Thelonious Monk wrote for his band members, rules they should follow about his music and art in general. One of them was, “The genius is the one who is most like himself.”
LOD’s advice was a cheap shortcut. It’s easier to be yourself once you decide you have no chance of being on the Supreme Court. The genius way to be yourself is to accept that you might be on the Supreme
Court and still star in movies where you blow yourself. That’s the real genius.
It’s very, very unlikely that we’ll have Supreme Court Justice Ron Jeremy. Extremely unlikely. But not impossible.
And if we do . . . oh man, we’ll all be geniuses.
“You Sexy Thing”
—Hot Chocolate
I Also Couldn’t Get Laid in a Women’s Prison with a Fistful of Pardons
I
spent several hours one Sunday evening in 1981 in the Club Baths, a gay bathhouse in San Francisco. I’m nervous and uncomfortable writing the story of that night, not because I had gay sex in public, and not because I couldn’t have gay sex in public. It was a wonderful night full of many emotions and a lot of laughing, and I was embarrassed then, but I’m not ashamed now. I’m cautious because of all the sadness that must be associated with that time and place. I don’t remember the exact date of my visit, but it was a Sunday in 1981. Any Sunday in 1981 was a bad time to have enjoyed a gay bathhouse. In June of 1980, flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas was diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma. He would continue flying cheaply around the world, having lots of unprotected gay sex. He did much of his fucking in bathhouses. The legend and myth is that he was “patient zero” (from a misunderstanding of a CDC paper that dubbed him “patient O” for “Out of California”). Dugas had a zillion sex partners, and would even tell some of them after sex that he had “the gay cancer” and maybe now they would get it too. Gaëtan went to the Club Baths in San Francisco in 1981. I don’t know the dates he was there and I don’t know the date I was there, but there
were a lot of people fixing to die whenever I had my little night of gay exploration.
I’m going to change some of the names of the main characters in this story. My girlfriend at this time was Tracy. I’m still friends with her, and she’s still just as wonderful, and she’s happy for me to use her name. But I’m going to call my “breeder friend” “Bernard” because I’ve fallen out of touch with him, and I don’t want to connect again to get his okay. I don’t feel like talking to him about twenty years of not talking. Most of the sex at the Club Baths was anonymous and most of the other people in this story are anonymous. I’m going to call my “gay friend,” the star of this story, “Charles,” because I don’t want to hunt down his family and get permission to tell a cute funny story about their dead son.
Charles died of AIDS in the late eighties. I’m sure many of those anonymous people I spent the evening with are also dead. See? It’s not a good backdrop for a sweet little story. We all have lost many wonderful, loving, talented people to AIDS. We all know the heartbreak. Please don’t confuse the lighthearted moments of this story as a lack of grief. I still grieve for friends I’ve lost to AIDS, but you have my word that Charles would laugh his well-fucked ass off at my putting this story in a book.
From 1979 to 1981 Teller and I were doing a three-man show called
The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society
at the Phoenix Theatre on Broadway in San Francisco. The third member was a guy named Wier Chrisemer. He played xylophone and pipe organ, did funny monologues, and believed in god. He finally got his fill of working with a couple of heathens, but we did 965 shows together in that theater in North Beach. We were down the street from the Condor Club, where Carol Doda, the most famous topless dancer in the sixties, was still shaking her beautiful early aftermarket “twin 44s.” We were across the street from the Mabuhay Gardens, where Teller and I would see the Dead Kennedys, Flipper, Black Flag, and a great band called Eye Protection.
The audience at the Phoenix Theatre outnumbered the performers by only 140. There wasn’t a very large staff—a couple box office people, a manager, and Charles, the bartender. It was San Francisco and it was
theater, so most everyone working with us was gay. Three years is a long time for a little theater show, and we all got to know each other pretty well. There was no stage door to the theater, and I’d walk in the front and greet Charles every night. If I was early enough, we’d chat for a while as he was preparing the bar for preshow.
Charles was just talking:
*
“You know, Penn, you don’t know how hard it is to be a gay man living in a straight world.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? This is San Francisco. I’m a straight man living in a fucking gay world.”
“No, seriously, you don’t have to go to restaurants and see two gay men making out, but I have to see breeders making out all the time.”
“And that bothers you? Really?”
“How would you feel if men were making out all around you when you went out to dinner?”
“I’d feel fucking great. Why would that bother me? Men do make out on Castro and that doesn’t bother me at all. Not one bit. I’m telling you, really, I wouldn’t mind men fucking each other in the ass while I had dinner. I like people having sex.”
“No, you wouldn’t be comfortable. You just wouldn’t. I don’t see you hanging out at Club Baths.”
“I would. Sure I would. I mean . . . sure. Fuck, I’d love to go. When are you going next? I’ll go with you.”
“You can’t go to Club Baths.”
“Why not?” This might be a civil rights issue.
“Straight guys don’t go.”
“How will they know I’m straight?”
Charles laughed. He laughed a lot. He kept laughing.
I didn’t really know what he meant. Even after my night at the Club Baths, even after all these years, I still don’t really know what he meant. He certainly demonstrated what he meant, but I still don’t understand it. Was I born this way? Conditioned this way? Did I make a choice? I don’t know. But Charles had thrown down the nicely decorated, fabulous gauntlet. Now I had something to prove. “They can’t stop me from going. How will they know I’m straight?”
Charles laughed. “You’re not going to go to Club Baths with me.”
“Sure I am.”
“You have to be a member.”
“Bullshit. I mean, the initiation can’t be much different from what people go there for anyway, right? I’ll become a member.”
“The membership is to make it a private club to get around certain laws. You know, people have sex right there, right in the club. Dirty nasty gay sex.”
“I’ve heard about Club Baths. I know y’all go, and I’ve always wondered about it. I want to go.”
“It’s really hard-core. A breeder like you couldn’t handle it.”
“Fuck you.”
“Really, you have to pay a membership fee.”
“It can’t be too much, right?”
“It’s like sixty bucks.”
“I’ll pay.”
“And you have to give your name. You’ll be in some government databases.”
“Hey, if they’re coming for you, they can come for me. I’m King fucking Christian the Tenth of Denmark.” (There wasn’t Snopes.com back then; I didn’t know that the story of the king of Denmark wearing a yellow Star of David on his arm to defy the Nazis was jive.) I asked him again when he was going to the club.
“I’ll probably go this Sunday night.”
“Fuck it, I’m going with you!”
“Yeah, sure.”
That night, I did the show and then went home to my girlfriend Tracy. She had moved from back east to San Fran with me. She was a hot little bucket of fuck—way smart and way cool. I told her I was going to Club Baths with Charles. She posed the obvious question: “Is this your way of telling me something? Are you gay? You can’t be gay. You’re not gay. You love tits too much.”
“Many gay men love tits. And everyone in the world loves your perfect tits, but no, I don’t think I’m gay. I never thought about it much, but I’ve always wondered about Club Baths. I’ve heard about it, I’ve read about it. I want to see it. I want to experience it. And I want to prove to Charles that I’m not a fucking pussy.”
“Getting fucked by a guy doesn’t prove you’re not a pussy.”
“It sure does. Oh, it certainly does. In a court of fucking law.”
“So, are you going to fuck? Are you going to blow a guy? Are you going to get blown? What do I do while you’re gone? I can’t go.”
“Sit home and watch TV, I guess. Or go out with your friends. I don’t know. Go blow a guy.”
“Are you going to?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never gotten turned on by a guy before, but this is supposed to be amazing sex. Really hard-core. These are people who know what they’re doing, this is real fucking sex. If my cock gets hard there, I’ll fuck something.”
“That’s the plan?”
“I guess. I don’t know. I have no idea what will happen.”