Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

wasn’t mine; that’s too important an idea for me to get on my own. No one who read the book before its release could place the original quote. The book made the New York Times bestseller list for a bunch of weeks, people must have read it, but no one told me where that quote was really from. I said, “The purpose of art is to stand naked onstage,” during my book signings and readings, and no one corrected me during the Q&As. I have more than 1.7 million “followers” on Twitter and they love to bust me on anything, but none of them called me an idiot for not knowing who put that idea in my young brain where it would stay, without the correct attribution, for over forty years. No one seemed to know that quote.

I did a lot of traveling to hawk my book. I was up in Frisco (they love it up there when you call it that, it makes it seem like you’re a native) doing interviews and book signings. I had time for lunch before my flight home, and Scotty and Katrine, a couple of juggler friends, took me to a restaurant in North Beach. I was delighted to walk down Broadway, where just up from Carol Doda’s Condor Club—which has an official government plaque citing it as the first “topless” and “bottomless” strip club—there is a small Afghan restaurant (what’s their special of the day, IED and heroin?), which used to be the Phoenix Theater. Back when the Mabuhay Gardens had Jello Biafra and the other Dead Kennedys making music important again on the stage, Teller and I were across the street in our old performance group, the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society, trying to punk out magic. We did 965 shows over three years, closing on Halloween in 1981. We’ve done tens of thousands of shows since then, and our old theater has become a little restaurant now, but it made my heart go pitter-pat.

As I strolled with my San Francisco friends from my former theater to the restaurant, we walked past the Beat Museum in North Beach, nestled among the strip clubs. A storefront museum and gift shop dedicated to what San Francisco writer Herb Caen called “the beatniks.” They had lots of Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg and all the others. I had recently read the scroll version of On the Road, and I pointed out to everyone that Lowell, Massachusetts, where Kerouac was from, is just a short patch of holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any nightmare senseless American road, kissing his left front tire fraught with eminent peril and wild wild, mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything, to Greenfield, Massachusetts, where I was born.

The beatnik store had lots of old sexy Evergreen magazines. I think I saw one issue when I was a child, and it was and still is perfection to me—black and white naked beat women having sex, smoking cigarettes, or reading in New York City apartments, dirty stories, and real literature and culture. The first one I picked up in the Beat store felt just like the one I saw as a child and got my heart and cock going. It had a woman on the cover. I swear I’d still give it all up for an advertisement for Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s first album, Freak Out! I wanted to live in the spirit of that magazine, and instead I’m featured on Vegas.com. Oh well. They had paperback translations of On the Road in all different languages. They even had Kerouac’s jacket. For a Beat fan, beatnik, peacenik, old hippie capitalist guy like me, this is the only museum that matters. Who needs dinosaur bones?

When I picked up Evergreen and thumbed through it to see the model in the flat lighting on her apartment, with slightly crooked teeth, fat bohemian hair on her head and curly wild hippie untrimmed pubic hair, standing there smoking with books all around her and breasts she was much too comfortable with the hang of, I could feel a sexual flush in my face. You can’t get that flush at fifty-six years old; you can get that flush only as a teenager. But these magazines made me time travel. I love naked pictures. There is no one I wouldn’t rather see naked (and I’ve been tested—Ernest Borgnine? Yes!). There on the wall of the museum was a big black-and-white picture of the young poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso standing side by side, naked, their hands cupped over their genitals. I’m one of those guys who reads all the little description cards at museums, and this one explained…

ALLEN GINSBERG AND GREGORY CORSO, 1961

There are many photographs and stories of Allen Ginsberg getting naked in public. Some of the stories are legendary—being heckled by an audience member while onstage at a poetry reading, Ginsberg would proceed to take off his clothes. “The poet stands naked before the world!” he would say, challenging the heckler. “Are you willing to stand naked before the world?”

Allen would sometimes show up at a party and after a certain amount of time step into the restroom, pile all his clothes in a neat pile and step back in to the party completely naked. Legend has it he did this to John Lennon once at a party in New York. John quietly left telling a friend, “I don’t want anyone pulling out a camera and taking a picture of me and a naked Allen Ginsberg.”

There was my quote. When I was young, I was sucking up everything I could about all these beautiful mysterious people. To my fourteen-year-old goyishe kop, Lenny Bruce and Allen Ginsberg were the same. To my fifty-six-year-old epikoros kop, Lenny Bruce and Allen Ginsberg are still more alike than they are different. They were both poets. “The poet stands naked before the world!” is way better than “The purpose of art is to stand naked onstage.” I’m not Lenny or Allen.

Let’s look at how I weakened the quote. I start with “The purpose of art.” The word “purpose” is an ugly word in there. Ginsberg doesn’t need “purpose,” standing naked is not to be a task: it’s a state of being. Of course, I would think, “purpose.” I was trying to make art, Ginsberg was art. And I end with “onstage.” I was trying to be on a stage, Ginsberg was just being.

I thought about my failures as a poet for a while and then called Scotty, Katrine and the curator who was showing us around over to the naked picture. I told them how important this quote was and is to me. I talked about how much better it was than I had remembered. I asked Katrine if she had a camera on her cell phone. I started stripping off my clothes.

I didn’t think I deserved to be the same as the poets. I don’t deserve to stand symbolically beside them naked before the world. I was too lazy to take my shoes off, I didn’t want to crawl around looking for my clothes, and I didn’t want to get dressed after the picture was taken. I left my shoes on, I dropped my baggy jeans in a rumpled pile over my shoes. I pulled my boxer-briefs down to my knees, at prostate exam level. I unbuttoned my workshirt to show my fat stomach, but I didn’t take it off and throw it. I glanced over at Allen and Gregory’s picture, and I tried to match their hands on my penis and testicles.

I wanted to stand naked with the poets in the public museum, but I didn’t want to have to lace up my shoes again. So I just pulled down my jeans and underwear and unbuttoned my workshirt. I also felt that to stand completely naked would be to call myself a poet, and I just couldn’t do that. If Allen and Gregory had been there, and stripped, I couldn’t have put myself in the same category. I aimed for poet and hit Vegas headliner. Billy West, the greatest voice guy in the world (he’s Futurama, Ren & Stimpy and the best M&M—red), once said there was just one showbiz and we were all in it. Teller says art is anything we do after the chores are done. I agree with them both very much. I believe that Ron Jeremy has the same job as Picasso and Bach. I know that the mall Santa is the same as Bob Dylan and Katharine Hepburn. I know all that and I believe all that. But still, magician has to be a damn sight lower than a poet. We’re above ventriloquists, but not near poets. Imagine if someone said, “A magician stands naked before the world.” The answer wouldn’t be, “Isn’t that brilliant” but rather, “Isn’t that illegal?”

I am one of two magicians who has stood naked, if not before the world, then at least before a paying crowd in a casino showroom in Las Vegas. The other magician is not Houdini, who always had chains in front of his junk and always wore a swimsuit. The other magician is Teller. In the history of Vegas, Teller and I are the disappointing first male full frontal nudes onstage. Yup, Vegas has male strippers—Chippendales, and Thunder from Down Under (which always struck me as an unpleasant name, bringing to mind ripping loud farts instead of sexy ripped Australians). Vegas has had a bunch of shows full of gorgeous, hunky, hung, ripped, sexy men, and yet, the first guys to stand totally naked onstage there were two middle-aged magicians. If that doesn’t prove to you that there’s no god, I don’t know what would. Teller and I ended every show for a few runs at Bally’s (the same stage Sinatra and Dino played on, and Dino and Tom Jones were still doing runs there while we were) stripping completely naked. The joke was simple—magicians are always accused of having something up their sleeves, and we wanted to prove we didn’t. We would take our shirts off, and then our T-shirts, and then with a few jokes to shoes and socks, and finally down to just boxer shorts. It was a drag, because I wear my microphones in my glasses and the battery packs go in a pouch on my T-shirt, so I had to take all that off and go to a hand mic.

Teller would get a couple volunteers from the audience, usually an older woman and a young guy, and we’d bring them onstage to examine us. A pair of crew guys would bring out a thin band of translucent plastic and we’d