experiencing part of a time when they did not exist. This is a fairly new thing. I have home movies my brother-in- law and my nephew ripped to computer video that I can watch of myself learning to juggle at age twelve. The sixties and seventies are pretty well documented, and lots of people alive today weren’t alive then. My high school girlfriend, Anne, who is some sort of genius scientist now, thinks any theory about the modern world changing human nature is bullshit. Anne points out that what humans do is adapt. It’s what we’re best at. We got good at going faster than the speed of sound and being able to talk to people all over the world at once. That doesn’t fuck with our attention spans. None of that changes our humanity.
But I wonder what all this time travel does to our sadness. I know we’ve adapted, but how is sadness affected? Just one hundred years ago, the old lady down the street was always and eternally the old lady down the street. You could hear stories about her as a young person, and you could read things she wrote as a young person, and maybe even see a drawing or photograph of her as a younger person, but these were little glimpses. Soon we’ll have hi-def 3-D images of our grandmothers sexting.
Davy Jones died in February 2012. We have a lot of pictures of him at age twenty. We have video and shows of him at twenty and now he’s dead at sixty-six and it’s all laid out there. Mortality is rammed down our throats through our eyes and ears. Paul Newman is the most attractive human being I have ever seen in person. I saw him live and realized the camera was not kind to him. The camera made him uglier. The camera makes David Letterman look better. Off-camera, in person, Julia Roberts is wonderful, but looks a bit like a tapeworm. That’s a lot of mouth to see up close. We don’t have the technology yet to capture the beauty of Paul Newman. But we do have enough technology to watch him get old. Paul never got ugly and that helps my heart, but he got old. Pretty doesn’t always hang in there, Mr. Gibson. Things you’ve felt can show in your face sometimes. Movies can show us aging at its prettiest, and that’s Paul Newman, but it’s still sad. It’s still a bit melancholy to watch
“I sure did.”
Piers Morgan was trying to scare me with death. Fuck death. He can’t scare me with death. I got death hanging. Death is November 9, 1909—death is nothing. I’m not afraid of nothing. But time passing is something different. I’m terrified of time passing. I tremble at the thought of my little girl growing up. I can’t face my son growing stronger than me and helping me up the stairs. I quake at the prospect of looking at my adult children’s faces with eyesight worse than I have now.
Motherfucker.
Piers, you have no chance of scaring me with death, because all the fear possible is contained in life. The awful truth of how sweet life can be is enough to crack me every second. That black-and-white picture of my mom, alive, and bursting with her future in her little wool hat and matching mittens—that, Piers, is what scares the shit out of me, and your TV religion can’t protect any of us from that. I’m not afraid of a hot lead enema followed by some serious ass-to-mouth with Satan—give it your worst. I’m afraid of a life that is so full of joy and love that every second just bursts by and is gone. It’s a gorgeous, detailed, 3-D, surround sound, no-flutter-in-the-bass mural done by 10 billion artists, and it’s whipping by the car window at the speed of sound, and I’ll never come back to it. I can take pictures of it, but in the time I hold those pictures up, I’ll have missed another billion images and experiences.
You want to scare me, Piers, try that. But no one claims god can change that. God might promise everlasting life, and the possibility of seeing my loved ones again, but he can’t promise that this life that I’m living right now won’t go by. I want every time I touch my son’s hand to never end, and I want to experience the next time I touch his hand after not touching his hand for a while.
I want the impossible. But I’ll settle for what we have. Everything in the world has to be enough. Everything in the world is enough. I’m rejoicing that what scares me and breaks my heart is the beauty of what I have right now.
Are you afraid of death?
November 9, 1909.
I’m making my mom’s birthday a holiday. I’m afraid of a life stuck in time, but so what? I’m not afraid of death.
I DEFY THE JAILS OF THE WORLD TO HOLD MY SON
WHEN THE FUTURE LOOKS BACK ON American entertainers of the twentieth century, it’s all going to come down to Houdini or Elvis. A friend of mine who teaches some bullshit rock-and-roll course at UNLV was asked by a student, one who was “studying” rock and roll, who George Harrison was. A teacher at our child’s preschool had never heard of Johnny Carson. There’s your legacy—but ask anyone in America to name a magician, and they’ll name Houdini as often as anyone who’s working today. A few years ago, my buddy Eddie Gorodetsky looked at the figures and predicted that by the year 2053 every man, woman and transgendered child in the USA would be in Vegas impersonating Elvis.
I think Houdini will win. To disappear by “pulling a Houdini” is already a phrase in dictionaries. Houdini was born in Budapest, claimed to be from Appleton, Wisconsin, and stood in front of a nation of immigrants at the sharp turn into the twentieth century and screamed, “I defy the jails of the world to hold me!” My buddy Larry “Ratso” Sloman wrote that Houdini was “America’s First Superhero.”
Let’s forget about Houdini for a second and concentrate on my buddy Ratso. The births of my children were wonderful events, but even that joy has been eclipsed by becoming an adult who has a buddy called Ratso. My cell phone rings, the name “Ratso” pops up, and the voice of pure NYC says, “Hey, Penn. It’s Rats.” What more could a man accomplish in life than getting that phone call? Well, I’ll tell you: Kinky Friedman is a two-Ratso man. When Kinky gets a call from Ratso, he has to ask which one. Hard to beat that, but my caller ID flashes “Kinky” when he calls, so maybe we’re even.
Most people go through a Houdini phase. They read a bio in junior high school and get caught up in the escape artist and magician. Even David Copperfield has admitted that Houdini had a great press agent.
I read Kenneth Silverman’s book
Since my childhood Houdini phase—watching the old Tony Curtis movie on TV and reading encyclopedia entries—I had felt a kinship to Houdini. He worked in magic, I worked in magic. He hated fake psychics, I hated fake psychics. We were both momma’s boys. I lied to myself that Houdini was an atheist not a Jew and that we had the same goals in showbiz. But while I was reading Silverman’s book, I was disabused of that kinship. Being a magician and skeptic didn’t matter to Houdini; he was first and foremost a superstar. After that time, when interviewers would ask me about Houdini, I stopped giving an opinion of my own. I would answer, “If you want to know about Houdini, don’t talk to us or Copperfield, talk to Bob Dylan. Dylan knows what it’s like to sum up a generation’s dreams and goals. I don’t.”
By the end of the eighties, Teller and I were far more successful than we had ever expected to be. The Penn & Teller pop-and-pop business plan was to eke out a couple of livings doing shows that we loved. We accomplished that within a few months of working together, and we were pretty satisfied. We kept working, just because we loved working, but every larger accomplishment just amazed us. We figured when we started that a couple hundred creeps a night might want to see our weird-ass shit, and we were off by an order of magnitude. A
