IT’S A PAIN IN MY ASS THAT KEVIN POLLAK IS FUNNY. It makes him fun to have supper with, and he was good in The Aristocrats telling dirty jokes, but it fucks up my dream. My dream is to have Kevin Pollak play Houdini. Hey, Martin Luther King got his dream—what the fuck am I, chopped liver? Kevin looks like Houdini. Kevin sounds like Houdini (Kevin always sounds really lo-fi recorded on an Edison cylinder). In the world I want to live in, Kevin is playing Houdini in a movie that isn’t campy like Tony Curtis’s, or jive-ass like that Broadway musical with Hugh Jackman playing Houdini is going to be. I love Hugh Jackman. He’s been to our show, and he was fiercely nice and talented when he came backstage. He was more talented backstage than I am onstage. Hugh can sing and dance and everything, and his family is sweet and kind and he’s wicked good-looking. So, why the fuck is he playing Houdini? Houdini didn’t sing, dance, and he wasn’t fucking good-looking. This is why Kevin is perfect. Ugly-ass Kevin would be better than piece-of-ass Hugh. Also, Hugh is Australian, and Houdini was so American he was born in Budapest and pretended to be from Appleton, Wisconsin. Did Hugh ever claim to be from Wisconsin? Not that I know of, but what the fuck do I know. I don’t stalk Hugh’s hot sexy ass. Kevin could claim to be from Wisconsin, and not Frisco or whatever bullshit city he’s from. And if Hugh Jackman were from the USA, like Kevin is from the USA, I bet the assholes in his school would have called him “Huge Jack- off.” Assholes do that. Assholes make fun of your name even if it doesn’t mean anything. I sure would have called him “Huge Jack-off,” and I bet Kevin would have too, because Kevin’s funny and Kevin can be an asshole, and you can bet your huge jackman that Houdini was an asshole. Hugh Jackman is a great singer and dancer, and Houdini didn’t fucking sing and dance in his show. Hugh is going to play Houdini, and The New York Times will write another great blow job on him, because he sings, dances, and eats pussy, and that shocks the Times. I can stop Kevin from singing and dancing… I’m way bigger than he is. I can’t stop Hugh Jackman from dancing and singing because he has big Wolverine claws. Houdini didn’t have big Wolverine claws. Kevin doesn’t have big Wolverine claws, so why the fuck isn’t Kevin playing Houdini? There’s an intensity to Kevin that he disguises in his stupid stand-up act. If Kevin weren’t funny, we would be more likely to see that focus, playing Houdini. Kevin would be a great Houdini. A non-dancing, non-singing, not funny, not jack-off Houdini. Kevin’s name doesn’t sound like “jack-off,” but don’t bring up Polish jokes or short jokes with the little fellow, whose name sounds a lot like “Pollock.” I bet assholes called him “Pollock” and I bet Hugh Jackman never called Kevin “Pollock,” because Hugh is a gentleman. Houdini was a pure little fireplug of intensity. Who knows, maybe Houdini did the first Shatner that every other two-bit piece of shit comic rips off. How would I know? I think Kevin would be great as Houdini, so let’s have him star in a serous movie about Houdini, okay? You know, there hasn’t been a good Houdini movie. Harvey Keitel sure was good as Houdini (and I bet assholes made fun of the name “Harvey,” don’t you think? It’s kind of a goofy name) in that shitty movie about fairies. But that doesn’t count because the movie was shitty. Was Harvey better than Kevin, the Pollock, would be? I don’t know, but Harvey didn’t ask me to write jackshit for his book like Kevin asked me to write something for his book and Harvey was in The Piano and that sure blew. I wonder if Kevin would be naked in his Houdini movie like Harvey was in The Piano. Houdini stripped during his escapes, so naked wouldn’t be completely gratuitous, but I love gratuitous nudity anyway. I’d like to see Kevin’s cock playing Houdini’s cock. But I’d probably rather see Huge Jack- off’s cock, for lots of obvious reasons. Anyway, Houdini died at fifty-two, and Kevin is fifty-five now, so tick tock tick tock, people, let’s get this movie fucking made. Kevin will be great. Let’s all work together and make Penn’s dream come true and let Kevin play Houdini! Is that too much to ask? I mean, that and a cure for AIDS with the patent in my name, and an eleven-inch dick like Huge Jack-off—I bet that’s why he got the part.
Listening to: “Edison Machine Rehearsal” (1914)—Harry Houdini THANKSGIVING —IF YOU WON’T PUT YOUR DICK IN IT, I’M NOT GOING TO EAT IT
THE TITLE IS PERFECT. Why put legs on a snake and paint it? I should leave it at that, but I’ll tell the story.
I was fairly young when I bought my first house, with showbiz money. I made the money doing street performance, Renaissance festivals, and small theater. Penn & Teller were completely unknown, but we were able to make good solid livings doing shows in the mid-seventies. We never planned on being famous, so as far as we were concerned, this was going to be it. Teller lived in Hollywood and I lived with my girlfriend in Orange County. My girlfriend worked in a topless bar, and we had enough money to buy her parents’ house when they retired. We took over the house she had spent some of her childhood in. I had a nice suburban, cul-de-sac house in Cali that I owned with the woman who inspired me to drop my cock in a blow-dryer.
Teller and I had just done a production of a show that we wrote together called Mrs. Lonsberry’s Seance of Horror. Teller starred and I directed. It wasn’t good. We were two young men who hadn’t experienced the death of a loved one, writing about the death of loved ones as an excuse to do magic tricks. We should have written a play about driving around the country eating doughnuts—that was something we had experienced. I’m such a bad director. I hate telling people what to do and I don’t have any vision. I haven’t directed anything since.
Because of producing and financing that play, we’d lost all our money and didn’t have any work, though we still had places to live. There was a few months’ lag between booking the gigs and doing them. I went crazy. I wasn’t mentally ill. I wasn’t a danger to others or myself. Maybe you could say I went eccentric. I stopped wearing clothes. I played croquet by myself in the backyard for hours, naked, with my stereo speakers in the window playing Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music over and over. That record is just feedback, and one track is a closed loop so the same few seconds repeat over and over until the power goes out. Andy Warhol wrote the liner notes to Metal Machine Music, but he never listened to it. It’s difficult listening. It can make a crazy fellow crazier. I was obsessed with topiary, and we had a big hedge. I let it grow and tried to use a mirror and hedge clippers to do a self-portrait of myself naked, in bush, in the backyard with loud feedback playing and croquet set up for one. I have since found out that many of the “topiaries,” especially the ones at Disney, have wire frames underneath and aren’t bush all the way down. It bothers me even more than the Legoland Lego structures having frames underneath them. If you’re creating something of bush or Legos, use bush or Legos. (I also don’t like the Lego sets that tell my children what the set is supposed to build. That’s not creating, that’s following directions, and they ask me to help and I fuck it up.) Finding out that there were wire frames under the topiary was harder on me than finding out there was no god. Fuck those wire topiaries. My naked backyard topiary was a failure, but it was bush all the way down.
Penn & Teller were just a pop-and-pop shop at this point. We called ourselves Buggs & Rudy Discount Corporation. Our operation is still called that. Buggs and Rudy were the imaginary business guys who handled Penn & Teller. I answered the phone as “Buggs,” and silent Rudy did all the contracts and the graphics. I read one cheesy business book that suggested that while negotiating it was helpful to know something the other party didn’t know. I took that to heart on a drive to Tijuana, where I bought a donkey hat. It was a straw cowboy hat with straw donkey ears sticking out, and a straw donkey tail down the back. I had painted my office fluorescent orange and green. I figured no one I was negotiating with by phone would know I was naked, save for a donkey hat, in a fluorescent orange and green room. I could drive a hard bargain.
Yup, I went a little bugnutty. I was naked in that hat all the time, playing crazy music, and thinking. I would just sit and think. I didn’t really talk to anyone. I had a really nice stereo and I played it loud all the time, not just Metal Machine Music, but Sun Ra and Tiny Tim. I was afraid the neighborhood suburban teenagers in our cul-de-sac would steal my stereo (but not my music), so one of the few times I put clothes on, I put on a pair of gym shorts, my donkey hat and flip-flops and told the local teenagers stories about “Nam.” It worked. They stayed away from the house. I don’t know if it was the lies about combat, the donkey hat or the gym shorts, but my stereo was safe.
The silent, loud, naked, brooding phase was coming to an end. Teller and I had to get back on the road and do shows. I can pull it together to be normal enough to do a Penn & Teller show, but that’s as far as I go. My girlfriend could now convince me to put on jeans and a shirt, so we decided to have a Thanksgiving celebration at our house.
We invited a creepy elderly sideshow sword swallower, a lighting designer, Teller, a guy who had just quit dealing angel dust in Fresno and was hanging out with us to help him stay clean, and a geologist. It’s always
