Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

important to have a geologist around so that if you end up in space, there’s someone to die first. At least that’s what happens on Star Trek.

I love Thanksgiving. I just love it. My mom would make this great tuna dip and we’d eat it with Bugles. We had cranberry sauce from the can that I could squeeze through my teeth, celery with cream cheese spread on it, turkey, gravy, stuffing that was really just wet bread and goodness and none of that raisin, mushroom, or chestnut hippie shit, and lots of pie. It had no religious overtones for us; we didn’t say grace. And no one in our family watched football, so after the Macy’s parade, the TV was turned off. It was a pretty great day. We had little pilgrim name tags that I’d made as a young child and my mom still used them to show where we’d sit, even though we’d been sitting in the same places my whole life. My childhood Thanksgivings were Norman Rockwell. Norman Rockwell’s stuffing didn’t have fucking cornbread and chestnuts in it.

We didn’t really have to invite the former angel dust dealer from Fresno to Thanksgiving because he was living with us. We took a liking to him, and he was living with us, until he went to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, my own alma mater. My girlfriend was the only one in the household who worked, and she was going to do the cooking for our Thanksgiving. Right before I went into my naked donkey-hat phase, I had told her that since she was working and I wasn’t, she could just name a kind of food that she liked and I would take a continuing education course in cooking at the community college, and cook her supper every night at two a.m. when she got off work. She suggested Chinese food. Others in the cooking class seemed to be there to meet people and get laid, but I was there to learn. I took a lot of notes, paid attention, bought a wok and every night after work, we had a home-cooked Chinese meal for two. I made my own fucking dumplings from scratch. The teacher said I was the best student she’d ever had. After three weeks, my girlfriend said, very politely, “I love all your Chinese cooking, but some night could we have something else?” I never cooked again. She was cooking the Thanksgiving turkey. If she needed me, I’d be working on my topiary.

As part of his transition from drug dealer to clown, our friend decided to get a big laugh on Thanksgiving morning. I don’t know what got into his head, but he listened to my girlfriend complain about what time she had to get up to start the turkey and then set his alarm for ten minutes earlier. As she groggily walked to the kitchen, she heard a slapping sound and his voice saying in a Spanish accent, “C’mon, baby, you can take all of me.” She tentatively walked into the kitchen to see our housemate, with his boxers around his ankles, slapping the turkey and fucking it. I didn’t see the event, and it wasn’t clear from the story how simulated the sex with the turkey was. At Clown College they teach us to commit completely, but he hadn’t been to Clown College yet, so I don’t know whether there was an actual erect penis in our turkey, or just a limp one bouncing against it, but it was enough to make her scream. She thought it was real, then thought it was a joke, and then settled on it was real and now being passed off as a joke. He had to wait for me to wake up before he got his full laugh. I couldn’t stop laughing, and I still can’t see a turkey without hearing “C’mon, baby, you can take all of me” in a Spanish accent.

As we sat around our beautiful Thanksgiving dinner table in Orange County, I told the other guests what had happened as we ate the turkey. I spooned the non-hippie stuffing onto my plate and bragged how our friend’s dick had been in that cavity. The lighting designer seemed a little put off, so I asked her, not completely rhetorically, “Why would I eat something that he wouldn’t put his dick in?”

Since there was no good answer, we all enjoyed our turkey and stuffing, and then it was time for dessert. Our geologist hadn’t been killed by giant falling rocks in space, so he proudly displayed a flourless chocolate cake that he’d been working on for a few days. It was perfect and beautiful. I had one question, “Did you put your cock in it?”

“No.” He laughed a lot.

“Then I’m not eating it.”

“Me neither,” a few people chimed in.

He laughed more and then realized we weren’t kidding. Well, we were kidding, but we weren’t bluffing. He begged us, “C’mon, man, I worked really hard on this, and I want you to enjoy it.”

“Not if you won’t put your dick in it.” I can be like that. Or rather, I’m always like that—she questioned me once, and I never cooked Chinese food again.

There was a long hesitation, and the geologist proved himself. He pulled the flourless chocolate cake over to his place at the table. He stood up, unbuckled his pants, and dragged his cock all over the cake, while saying, “C’mon, baby, you can take all of me” in a Spanish accent. Thanksgiving is a holiday I can get into.

The cake was way good.

Eventually that girlfriend left me. It kind of tells you everything about me: naked in a donkey hat, talking as much as Teller does onstage, my girlfriend stayed with me, but when I started putting clothes on and chatting, she left me and took my donkey hat. She took the house, the car and the donkey hat and all I miss is the donkey hat. A lot of friends have promised they would find me another donkey hat, and they have all failed. One friend even went to Tijuana insisting she would find me a donkey hat, but no soap. Another friend made one. It was lovely, but it wasn’t the right hat. If you know what I’m talking about and can find a real donkey hat for me—get in touch—for a perfect donkey hat that fits, I’ll pay you a hundred dollars cash money (I can drive a hard bargain even as I sit here in jeans wearing a sandwich hat). I haven’t felt right since I lost my donkey hat.

I don’t know what got into my head, but I still need that donkey hat. “I don’t know what got into my head, but…” When guys are sitting around telling stories, or as the carnies say, “cutting up jackpots,” those are the words I want to hear. It seems like all great stories have that phrase in them. I was on Miami Vice in the eighties because there was no other time to be on it. While we were shooting in NYC and Miami, I was also shooting a feature film with Judge Reinhold and doing eight shows a week Off-Broadway. I went almost three weeks without ever sleeping more than two hours at a time and most of that in limos and mobile homes. It’s as hard as you can work without having a job. The hardest work in showbiz is easier than any other job you can have in the world except the job of driving those big billboards on a trailer up and down the Vegas Strip. That job looks easy and fun, but doesn’t pay as well as showbiz. All that being said, you spend three weeks with Don Johnson and see how much you want to be alive.

One of the security guys on Miami Vice was a former professional wrestler. While I was half asleep waiting for someone to apologize to Don so we could get back to shooting, my security guard buddy would tell me wrestling stories. This was years ago and I was sleep-deprived, but the way I remember one of his stories, he was having Thanksgiving with a bunch of professional wrestlers and he didn’t know what got into his head, but he bet Captain Lou Albano five hundred bucks that he couldn’t get the turkey out of the oven and throw it out the window without the other wrestlers stopping him. It turned their Thanksgiving into a bunch of guys screaming and laughing covered with really bad grease burns and the turkey thrown out a closed window—broken glass and dirty turkey.

I love my life now, but sometimes I’d sure like to be naked with my donkey hat listening to feedback and clipping a hedge to look like me. Maybe that’s when I’m at my best.

Listening to: “Metal Machine Music”—Lou Reed

^{Showing off, kind of, during a B&E at a house in the swamps of Jersey where I didn’t know anyone. We kinda broke in. Let’s say it was around Thanksgiving time and let’s say that I was kidding about the B&E.}

THE MAGICIAN STANDS LAZILY HALF NAKED BEFORE THE WORLD

IN MY LAST BOOK, I WROTE ABOUT my friends and fellow Vegas magicians Siegfried & Roy. In describing the purity and honesty of their showbiz glitz, I tried to quote Lenny Bruce as saying, “The purpose of art is to stand naked onstage.” I’ve been quoting that wisdom since I was a child. I was a small-time New England Christian teetering toward atheism, and becoming obsessed with the idea of people telling the truth onstage. I was listening to Lenny Bruce and anything else that represented New York City and real art to me. That quote kind of summed up what I was looking for. The problem was that when I checked the Lenny quote for my book, I couldn’t find any evidence that Lenny Bruce had said it. I Googled, I listened to all my Lenny recordings, reread the books and I couldn’t find the quote anywhere, not by Lenny, nor by anyone else.

So I wrote that I couldn’t find the quote and then took credit for the line myself. It was just a joke—I knew it