Authors: Penn Jillette
On April 19, 1974, I saw him in a half-full little theater in New Jersey. This was so early in his career he couldn’t even sell five hundred seats. Not even in Jersey. He did a perfect show. He had no less energy than when I saw him sold out at Madison Square Garden. So maybe that’s a little harder than the rest of us would work for so few people. He’s just like us, but he works a little harder. He’s just like us, but a little better than us.
I saw the
Born to Run
show at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis on September 21, 1975. He was so much one of us that he didn’t even
stay onstage. Teller and I were in the front row and he ran into the audience and laid across our laps while someone else from the audience held his guitar. It was a great show. It made us dance around. Everyone in the audience was in his band. He was our Boss.
I saw one of his first stadium shows in Philly a couple years later, but with Springsteen, you stop bragging about the shows you saw after
Born to Run.
He lost me at
The River.
I liked some of the fraternity rockers on that album, and I bought
Nebraska
and
Born in the USA,
but when he was deep into his John Fogerty singing style and getting “Friends” to come up and dance with him onstage, well, I was too much of a rock snob for that. I loved him for appealing to everyone, but eventually, when he really did appeal to everyone, I started to lose interest.
But I didn’t really turn on him. I never really trashed him. I didn’t make fun of my friends who still loved him. I didn’t argue. In my heart I knew he was still us at our best. I’d see the occasional video: “Brilliant Disguise (Makes Me Look Like Fred Flintstone)” and the walking-through-Philadelphia one. Okay, so I did make a little bit of fun of him. It’s fun to kick people when they’re up, but I never hated him. I never felt like he “sold out.” No one can really sell out until they play here in Vegas.
Springsteen does play Vegas, and I still don’t feel like he’s sold out at all. It’s always a great show. I saw him at Madison Square Garden a bunch of years ago. I hadn’t seen him for a long while, and Max Weinberg invited me to go, and I figured what the hell? I went casually; I didn’t really care. I’m embarrassed by that. It’s a really jaded, stupid way to go to a concert. It’s not fair to not care; it’s not right. The tickets were really hard to get, and there are so many people who so want to be there; why would a person like me, who didn’t care, take up space on that special night? But I went. And I sure didn’t stay jaded for long. Damn, he was just as good as he ever was, and that’s about as good as anyone gets.
It’s hard to remember how good he is because he’s so one of us. He’s only special in being so good at not being special. He’s not antisocial, outlaw rock and roll; he’s good-guy rock and roll. He’s everything that’s
good about all of us, rocking. As he sang, I screamed along with every lyric. I danced. I cried about friends and family whom I had lost. I cried about lost love. I was hopeful for future love. I danced for the whole show. I was crying and dancing. I agreed with every word he sang. I was really one with all those people at Madison Square Garden, and that’s really amazing because I am a real creep. I have many deep political, social, moral, ethical, and stylistic differences with the people who were around me at the Springsteen concert. But Springsteen makes those differences unimportant. We were all born to run in the USA. We were all dancing in the dark. And we all wanted Rosalita to jump a little lighter. He can make me feel just like everyone else and like it.
And if Springsteen ever gets sick the night of his Vegas show and can’t go on, well, we can all go onstage together and fill in for him.
Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this:
that you are dreadfully like other people.
—James Russell Lowell, 1819–1891
“Seaside Bar Song”
—Bruce Springsteen
“Things Like This Don’t Happen to Normal People”: The Greatest Story Ever Told
O
nce upon a time, we moved from a very unsuccessful show in a tiny theater in L.A. to a very successful show Off-Broadway in NYC, and then to Broadway in NYC. We went from using our answering machine and handing out fliers ourselves to
People, Rolling Stone, The New York Times,
Letterman, and Stern. It happened pretty fast, and we didn’t plan any of it.
One of the standard questions a Broadway performer gets asked is, “Is starring on Broadway a dream come true?” I never knew how to answer that question. I love doing our show, and Broadway is a fine place to do it, but it wasn’t a dream. I don’t know how people can dream of a venue. We know a magician in Vegas who always talks about how he dreamed of having a show in Vegas. It’s the “a show” part that blows my mind. How do you dream of being in “a show”? All that matters is exactly
what
show. I didn’t want to be on Broadway, I wanted to be doing that there show with Teller.
If you’d talked to Houdini, Sinatra, or Elvis, they would have all told you they should have been more famous. If you talk to Madonna, McCartney, or Stern, they’ll tell you they should be more famous. And
if you talk to Jay-Z or Gaga, they’ll tell you they’re going to be more famous. It’s that dissatisfaction that drives them.
Teller and I are satisfied, and we were satisfied way before Broadway. The other Broadway press question we fucked up was “You went from struggling performers to huge overnight success—what was that like?” I disagreed with the question. We had huge success compared to what we expected or (and I suppose this is implied in the question) what we deserved, but we’re not even the most famous magicians ever, not even the most famous magicians of our time, not even the most famous magicians to have performed on Broadway. We were the most famous magicians on Broadway for those specific years, but that’s one of those “coldest Wednesday, June 17, in Greenfield, Massachusetts” weather records. We didn’t really struggle. My dad was a jail guard and Teller’s dad was a commercial artist. They struggled a lot more than we did. Teller and I spent a lot of time sharing a car and sharing rooms at many Motel 6s, but my dad had to put on a clip-on tie and work in a county jail filled with criminals. He loved his family enough to hate every minute of his work and never mention that to me until years after his retirement, and then only in passing. Teller and I were making more money than our dads ever had while doing the exact show we wanted to do. Our goal was to play for a couple hundred people at a time and make a living. We hit that goal fast. And then we passed it and it still shocks us. I didn’t dream about being on Broadway; I dreamed of making a living doing exactly what I wanted, and you can cum during that fucking dream.
When Richard Frankel—the producer who put us Off-Broadway and on Broadway, and made us more successful than we ever imagined—first called me and told me he was a producer, I said, “A producer is a guy at a pay phone with a handful of quarters.” We’d had lots of people bring us into theaters with plans for long successful runs, and it had never happened. The poor bastards would work their asses off and maybe break even and make a little jingle, but we’d never made anyone rich, so we’d never made ourselves rich.
Richard wanted to take us Off-Broadway, and we said sure. The
contract we drew up (Teller and I did all the negotiations and contracts ourselves) was based on our expectations for another minimally successful engagement. It included a lot of stuff about getting minimum pay in advance and plane tickets home—and we made it very clear that we wouldn’t help unload the truck, either.
At the time we traveled to NYC, I was living in L.A. with a dancer working as a bartender in a topless bar. For the purposes of this story, I’ll call her Heather. That isn’t her name, and she’s not a dancer or a bartender now, and I’ve dated and lived with a few dancers and bartenders at topless bars, so no one knows who I’m writing about, and that’s good, because she hates me more than life itself.
Heather and I didn’t really plan on her going with me to NYC. We thought it would be just another gig, like Minnesota or Texas—do a few weeks of shows, break even, get our minimum, get some more confused reviews, and head home. Richard Frankel told us that NYC was a whole different thing, but people told us that about Texas. We’d been around the block and stopped off a few times.
Heather stayed in L.A., and I went to NYC. I guess things were okay with us when we left—I don’t really remember—but we started growing apart as soon as I left. She was working as a bartender and I was talking about Stern and Letterman and
Saturday Night Live.
She thought it would stop the success from going to my head if she didn’t act excited about any of that. I’m not sure that was her best move. As soon as I realized I was making it there and thus able to make it anywhere, I invited her to live with me in NYC, but she was dragging her feet. She still didn’t believe my success. It was just her big stupid boyfriend and his creepy little business partner doing their stupid show. She came out to visit a couple of times, but things just got more and more awkward. She’d ride the subway and be freaked out at the pictures of me everywhere. This wasn’t what she’d signed up for.
She called me from Southern California and broke up with me. I was sick of her and didn’t care about her and was treating her shitty until the instant she broke up with me, and then, like most assholes, I was in love, and when I say I was in love, you best believe I was in love, L-U-V!
I begged her to get back together with me. I sent her gifts, called her nonstop, left her countless messages. No soap radio. She was moving on. I don’t really know for sure what it was that made her want to split, but I think the answer is me.
I was sure that if I could just talk to her in person, I could win her back. Heather agreed to see me if I flew out, but said it wouldn’t make a difference—she was done with me. I told Teller and our producers that I was going to fly to Los Angeles on a red-eye Sunday night and be back for the next show, on Wednesday. It was stupid, but I thought I was Benjamin in
The Graduate.
Heather had moved in with the person she knew who hated me the most, a lesbian friend of hers whom I’ll call Mary. I’d barely met this Mary, but she hated me. Heather had rented Mary’s guest room and could invite whomever she wanted, but Mary let her know she was against me and my desperate dickhead visit.
I arrived at the college-student-like full-of-hate apartment in the afternoon. Heather wouldn’t change her schedule for me, so I had to wait until she got home. But Mary was there, and it would have been more pleasant if she’d just spit on me and kicked me. She insisted on sitting in the living room and scowling at me. I was so uncomfortable and afraid of her. Mary seemed capable of exploding my spleen just with rays of loathing.
When Heather got home, we went into her sparse little bedroom so we could talk alone. We sat on the single futon and had the very sad, sweet, hopeless, rote breakup talk. We talked until very late, and then Heather wanted to go to sleep. Although I could afford a hotel room at this point in my career, I hadn’t booked one, and instead of renting a car I’d taken a cab from the airport. I guess I thought pathetic was going to be irresistible. Heather said I could sleep with her on her single futon, but we wouldn’t have sex. I shouldn’t touch her. Six feet seven inches tall, 275 pounds, in a single futon with her . . . just sleeping.
I couldn’t sleep. I just lay there, uncomfortable, brokenhearted, on East Coast time, exhausted, not touching the woman whom I had convinced myself I loved, while she snored. Often when I can’t sleep I
take a bath and fall asleep in the bathtub. So I got up and tiptoed down the hall to the bathroom. I didn’t want to wake Mary up.
This piece-of-shit apartment full of hate and sadness didn’t have a tub, so I settled for a nice hot shower. I took a shower until the hot water started to run warm. I got out of the shower to find that there were no towels anywhere in the bathroom! I was cold, and wet, and there were no towels.
I poked my head into the hallway. There were two doors across the hall. One door might contain towels. The other door definitely contained Mary. I didn’t know which was which. How much would a lesbian who hated me want a naked me to sneak open the door to her bedroom just to peek in? I got down on my hands and knees and looked under the bottom crack of the two doors to see which was her room and which might contain towels. I couldn’t tell.
I went back from the hall into the bathroom, shivering. Then I saw Mary’s blow-dryer. I hadn’t ever used a blow-dryer (look at me, for Christ’s sake), but I knew enough to know that blow-dryers blow warm air. Gambling that the noise of the blow-dryer would be enough like white noise to not wake up Mary, I turned it on. I turned all the switches on full. I pointed the warm air onto my body. It was the only comfort I’d experienced since Heather’s breakup call.
The air made my chest feel warm and comfy. I bent over and blew desert breeze on my feet and between my toes. There was no banging on the door. The sound of the blow-dryer was constant; if I hadn’t woken anyone by now, I wasn’t going to. With nothing else to do in the middle of the night, I thought might as well get really dry. I dried my armpits. They were perfectly dry. The back of my neck. My back. My arms. So warm and dry.
I was the Louis Pasteur of hygiene. Fuck towels. From now on, after every bath and shower, I was going to use a blow-dryer. It was nothing like those bullshit gas station men’s-room hand dryers; this blow-dryer could go where it needed to get the drying job done. I brought the blow-dryer around to my ass. It was time to dry my asshole. I spread my cheeks a little and man, that little winker was clean and dry. I picked up
my cock and balls and did my perineum. I vowed that from then on, my taint would be as dry as the Mojave.
At this point, the blow-dryer had been on full for a very long time. I had been going over every square inch of my huge fucking body with this thing, and it was very very warmed up. Time to dry my balls. I stretched out all the little folds of my ball sack and brought the loving evaporation to my balls. Only one part of my body left. I was so embarrassed—before now, the bottom side of my cock had never been dry, not really. How disgusting is that? A little bit of shower water, missed by even the thirstiest towel, could fester there between the bottom of the cock and the sack. How could I have lived with that for all my filthy towel years? I’m telling you, that cocksucking cock was going to be dry, dry, dry. I was pure hygiene. I took the tippy tips of my fingers and held the tippy tip of my pee hole. I stretched my cock out and shot the blow-dryer straight up, the white-hot, burning blow-dryer pointing straight up as I held my cock by the very tippy tip of the pee hole. Blow, big man, blow!