Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

to show a small amount of it, and then we had to show it on a TV on the stage with me leaning in and narrating to show I was okay. It didn’t show I was okay; it showed I was Charlie-Manson-bug-fucking-nutty. It didn’t look like the health channel; it looked like a snuff film. My mom saw the broadcast and couldn’t stop crying about her little boy in pain. That’s comedy.

I have no manly love of recreational drugs or sports. I like to put my hair up in a Judy Jetson ponytail on top of my head (I’m aware that a real sixteen-year-old mall girl wouldn’t have heard of Judy Jetson, but we’re talking heart not memory), talk on the phone in a bath full of scented bath oils, get manicures and write obsessively in my diary. I don’t write “Dear diary” to start every entry, but I do often write, “I got up.” I don’t watch sports; I keep a diary. I’m not a man’s man or a woman’s man.

The image would have been more perfectly mall girl if I’d said “bubble bath” instead of scented bath oils. But I don’t like bubbles in my tub. They’re distracting. I didn’t used to like bath oils either, until I got bathtub syphilis. In 1979, Teller and I were part of a show called the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society that we ran for three years in Frisco. The AVCS, or Asparagus, as it was shortened to, was kind of like Penn & Teller with a third guy, named Wier Chrisemer, who did some verbal comedy bits with me, a monologue about the history of music, and played classical music in odd and comical arrangements. Teller wore all-black dance clothes, I wore white cutoff shorts and a T-shirt, and Wier wore a three-piece suit. He split and we kept the suit idea. Some of the bits from Asparagus are still part of the P&T repertoire. I was twenty-four years old, and although it was a small theater, it was still a show that I had written, and I was making my living, and a good living, just doing shows. I was making less money than I made street performing, but still more money than anyone I knew. This was before I met Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but I made more than they did at the time—I made coin early. During this period, I took baths a lot. I took baths all the time. There were days when I was in the bathtub more than eight hours a day. I started out reading and talking on the phone in the bathtub, then I added eating in the bathtub, and finally I would work with Teller in the bathtub. It was just me in the bathtub, and he’d sit in the bathroom with me. We were writing Mrs. Lonsberry’s Seance of Horror that Teller would co-star in, along with a really, really old woman (about ten years younger than I am now), and I would direct. Teller would pull a chair and a notebook into the bathroom, and we would talk while I lay in the tub.

I’ve talked to Adam Carolla about my bath obsession. Adam knows that I don’t fit in a bathtub, not because he’s seen me in a bathtub but because he’s a carpenter, and has a trained eye for how things fit together. I now have a stupid big bathtub in our home, but in the past, and in hotels on the road still, I use a regular bathtub. They’re all kind of sitz baths for me, but I love the hot water on my ass and back. I don’t know why I spent hours and hours in the bathtub during 1979, but I liked it and Teller indulged me. We wrote a failed play while I soaked.

Penn & Teller have always greeted people after the show, and one night in 1979 a woman came up to me and asked if she could talk to me privately. Hell yes! When the rest of the people left, we went over to a side of the theater and she started with, “I’m a nurse.” This was getting good. Then it got bad, “I’m a nurse. Can I see that rash on your arm?” Sure. I did the show with short sleeves and I showed her this weird rash that I had all the time. “It doesn’t hurt,” I said confidently. She said, “It’s secondary syphilis. It’s all I could think about during your show. Go see a doctor soon.” It didn’t seem like the right time to hit on her.

I went backstage and everyone figured I’d be meeting her after I got out of wardrobe. “Nope, she wanted to tell me I have syphilis.” No one but me was surprised.

I made a doctor’s appointment. I walked in, rolled up my sleeves and said, “Someone last night saw this rash—”

“Secondary syphilis.”

“No, I don’t think it is.”

He started into his doctor speech about nice girls and boys having syphilis and he was sure that my sex partners all had sex only with me but there were toilet seats and so on, so let’s just get me a shot and be done with it. I explained that, yes, I did have a few sex partners, but I used condoms and I was a blood donor.

“Well, they sure didn’t let you give blood with secondary syphilis sores on your arm.”

“I didn’t have them then, but—”

We argued a bit, and I got him to agree to a blood test before treating me. He called back a couple days later and told me I didn’t have syphilis. He had no idea what I had; I had to come back to his office. He examined me again and said it sure looked like syphilis, but the blood test was negative. He said, “Okay, we have to talk hygiene.”

“Okay.”

“Do you keep clean?”

“Fuck yeah, I spend four to eight hours a day in the bathtub.” I was proud.

“What? What do you do in there?”

“Everything, read, type, talk on the phone, have meetings, sleep, eat.…”

“You also ruin your skin and give yourself syphilis sores.”

“I gave myself syphilis in the bathtub? I have bathtub syphilis?”

“Yes. Stop taking baths. Pay on the way out.”

“I can’t stop taking baths. I find them… comforting. It’s the way I live.”

“Stop it.”

“How about two hours a day?” I was negotiating.

“How about a couple baths a week, less than an hour, and use bath oil, something to stop it from ruining your skin.”

I cut down to a couple hours a day with bath oil and my bathtub syphilis went away. I still take baths and read, but I try not to do more than two hours a day. Even without the sores on my arm, baths disgust Adam Carolla. He’s a man.

The bathtub syphilis doctor thought I was an idiot. He’s not the only doctor with that professional opinion. Teller and I did our first big network TV special for NBC called Don’t Try This at Home. It wasn’t a bad show, I drove an eighteen-wheeler over Teller’s chest and that looked okay, and some of the other tricks were fine. Our craziest trick involved us producing over three-quarters of a million bees out of nowhere. We thought it was really funny to parody Siegfried & Roy producing tigers, by producing many, many more dangerous animals. Not huge wild majestic dangerous animals, but rather tiny domesticated stinging dangerous animals. The idea really made us laugh. We looked into how to do the trick and talked to a few entomologists. We were looking for animals that looked just like bees, but didn’t sting. There had to be close-ups, and nothing looked enough like bees at close range. We knew from county fairs and my love of beekeeping that people do “bee beards” and move comfortably among them. If they’re not protecting the hive and they’re not in danger, the little stinging sisters stay cool. We would just be in the cage made of very fine mosquito netting with the real bees. We went to our doctors and got a lot of allergy tests, but more than ten stings for anyone and all bets are off. The camera people would be in full protective beekeeping fashion and there would be triple air locks to protect our live audience. Teller and I would be in the regular gray suits and we would just do it. We rehearsed without bees and did a few very scary practices in a room full of bees. It was scary, but we could do it. The way one dies from bee stings is anaphylactic shock, so we had EpiPens on necklaces and we were told to look for symptoms in each other. We hired EMTs and there was an ambulance standing by. A nurse gave us some speed before we started, because that was supposed to help. It sure made our timing more like the Ramones doing a Starbucks ad.

We did the bit. We started in an empty cage, and Teller produced one bee bare-handed. It looked great. Then he produced about a dozen from a tube and then it escalated. As usual, I didn’t do much besides talk and Teller just kept producing bees and dropping them on me. Teller got stung a couple times, because he was paying attention to the bees and dropping them on me. I lost count after my twenty-fifth sting, because as I did the bit and moved my arms and talked, bees would get trapped in my sleeves, or collar, feel threatened and sting the shit out of me. There was the sickening sweet smell of fear pheromones and bee shit and I was being stung every several seconds. One bee got trapped in my mouth, and if you watch the YouTube video, you can see it happen on a close-up and watch me flick the stinger with my tongue and spit it out. Everyone thought I was a real tough guy and not a sixteen-year-old mall girl at all, but the truth is, if I fucked up or screamed or stopped, I would have to do it again, and I was too much of a coward for that.

We finished the bit and stripped naked in the cage with the live audience watching, but the TV audience was watching the much more attractive commercials. Stripped naked with bees all around us, we moved into an airlock