trying.
I took a break from living on the streets to go to Clown College and then went to New York and practiced juggling a lot. I lived in an apartment with a girlfriend and Michael Moschen, MacArthur Genius juggler and my next-door neighbor from when we were children. He doesn’t like me saying this, but I taught Mike to juggle. Put that in your genius dance belt and pose. We lived together in the city, ate peanut butter and jelly, and practiced our juggling eight hours a day, six days a week. We just juggled. I knew Teller by then. He’d drive into the city from New Jersey and take me out to a real restaurant. I began to associate Teller with food.
During those great meals, we had a lot of long talks about art. Teller’s idea was that magic was essentially an intellectual art form. It was a hard case to make with the magic that was popular then. Teller contended that magic could have built-in irony and the collision of the visceral and the intellect at breakneck speed. All I want out of art and life is for my guts and my brains to collide. It’s the feeling of being on a roller coaster, my guts knowing I’m going to die and my brain explaining that if they killed too many people, the insurance rates would be too high. That’s magic. The audience knows that Teller cutting the shadow of that rose won’t make the real petals fall, but they do fall, motherfucker, they do fall.
One of the fucking clowns in my class in Florida, Jeff Siegel, still a good friend, started booking acts for the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. His idea was to bring in people who had a lot of experience street performing, and figured it was easier to put those people in tights than to teach a guy already in tights to be funny. I was hired to do my juggling street show with wooden balls and striped tights. I threw in a few “ye oldes” and we were done.
With a full stomach, I started to listen and I got excited about Teller’s ideas. When Jeff called a year later about the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, I asked him if I could bring a magician along. Jeff drove a hard bargain: I would have to take a big cut in my pay that Jeff could pay Teller. I said okay. I owed Teller some suppers.
Teller had been preoccupied with magic since he was a child. He put himself through Amherst College by doing magic shows at frat parties (and the diamond miners in Zimbabwe think they got it tough). When we first met, I watched Teller in a New Jersey library basement performing for about thirty people. He wasn’t doing “Shadows” then, but I watched him silently pluck one hundred needles out of an apple and swallow them with an audience member this close to him. He swallowed some thread and after that audience member gave him a full mouth examination with a dentist’s mirror and flashlight, Teller brought the shimmering needles back up all threaded. It was creepy, beautiful, classy, amazing, and all silent. It’s a trick he still does today.
I called up Teller and told him I had a magician gig for him. I asked him if he wanted to put together a street show and do it with me in Minnesota. We could get a car and drive out there together.
“When?”
“It starts in August.”
“Perfect!”
“And it goes through October.”
“Oh, I have to be back to teaching by then.”
I said, “Okay, I thought you were a magician, not a schoolteacher,” and I hung up. It probably wasn’t really that precise a conversation, but that’s the way it’s become over the years of telling it.
He called back a few hours later and said he’d take a leave of absence from teaching and do the gig. This was a really hard decision for Teller. He had just gotten tenure, and he was a great teacher. I can’t imagine a better teacher. While I was still in high school, I went to visit him and sat in on one of his high school Latin classes. He was getting New Jersey public school students excited about Latin. Beat that.
It was a conspiracy between the Viet Cong and the American military industrial complex that made Teller a teacher. He was the right age for Apocalypse Then. In the draft lottery he was number 3. Penn & Teller are very different from each other, but neither of us would do well in the military. “Bombs bursting in air, man, not my thing,” as Tony Bennett allegedly said. I was too tall to go in and too young to be drafted, but Teller with his number 3 was on his way to Saigon, shit. He got a school deferment to go to college and then a teaching deferment. My aboriginal American name for Teller is “Terrier-with-a-Slipper.” All our pluses are our minuses and Teller does not give up. His tenacity is infuriating, and I’ve built a very good life on it. He doesn’t give up. Was it hard for a guy with a classics degree to get a teaching job in a public school in the late sixties? Sure enough. Would you have bet against Teller doing it? You would have lost.
Without the best and the brightest forcing us into an immoral, undeclared and unconstitutional war, Teller might have gone right into magic and now there would be a Teller Theater in Vegas, and I’d be in prison where I belong. Teller killed time to avoid killing people, and had time to meet me; it looks like I was the one who got him into professional magic, but the truth is that Uncle Sam just delayed the inevitable and I wound up with the best performing partner in the world.
I was with Teller on his first free school day in autumn since he had been five years old. We were driving and eating doughnuts, far away from our homes, on a Monday at eleven a.m. in September. Every year before that he would have been in class, either teaching or studenting. I was an old pro at playing hooky. I hadn’t gone to school much of my junior year, I missed almost all of my senior year, and I’d been out for a couple years living on the streets, but still, the air smells sweeter and time stands still any day you’re in the world and everyone else is working or in school.
Teller and I drove together from the East Coast to Minnesota to do our Renaissance Festival shows. We were together twenty-four hours a day. We ate together and shared Motel 6 rooms together. If one of us got laid, the other had to walk around the parking lot to give some privacy. And this was before iPhones. In the car I played Teller Lou Reed and the Shaggs and he played me Bach and Bernard Herrmann, and we talked. It was some of the best times of our lives. All that would become the Penn & Teller style we talked about in that car. We talked mostly about lying to people for a living while being honest. To be able to lie for art, and tell the truth for morality. It was heavy talk. It was pretentious. There was no humility; we were young so we had to try for the best show in the world. We were going to do something brand-new in magic and in entertainment. There were no hope or desire to be famous or rich—we weren’t that crazy—but we were going to do some stuff onstage that we loved. We weren’t going to be greasy guys in tuxes with birds torturing women in front of Mylar to bad small-dick rip-off Motown music. We were going to speak our hearts while doing tricks. Some of the specific ideas talked about on those drives weren’t realized until thirty-five years later, and we’re still working on others. The results of those theoretical conversations can be found in all the Penn & Teller shows. Our career is just an appendix to those conversations.
When we got to Minnesota, we didn’t do an act together. We each did our separate shows and then would meet back in the employee area in the hay behind the trees to reset our props, count our money and roll our quarters. My show was a very long crowd gathering. I would explain to a few passersby that I was going to do “absolutely nothing” and when I signaled them, they were going to scream, yell and applaud. When other strangers heard this and ran over to see what was happening, the original “crowd” could all turn and laugh at them for rushing over to see nothing. We’d do it again and again until there were a couple hundred people watching me do nothing. It got funny. With my audience in place, I would juggle balls, while commenting in a disparaging way about the routine, explaining, in different ways, that I bothered to do all this practicing, so they could at least bother to watch it. I moved from balls to very big and really sharp knives (I was a juggler, not a magician—I didn’t fake much). First I would juggle the knives with an apple. I would eat the apple while juggling and spit all over myself (slightly less of a hackneyed trick at that time, and much more interesting when juggling knives along with the apple). I went to all knives, and then got a “volunteer” from the audience, put an opaque bag over her head, stood behind her, and juggled the knives around her. I’d return her to the crowd and then put the same hood over my head and juggle the knives blindfolded. That was the big finish and then I would do my money pitch. I said I’d do a magic trick and change the executioner’s hood into a change purse, snap my fingers and claim it was done. I then said to prove I had been successful, I would need money from all of them. I then did a list of reasons they should give me money and excuses that I would not accept. There was lots of talk about my size, and my aggression, so it was mostly threats. The money speech was the longest (and most important) part of my act. I had forgotten it, but just this week, I mentioned to Teller I was writing this, and he performed my whole speech from memory. It’s his favorite thing I’ve ever written.
After all this loud, insane, aggression, I ended my show with a very quiet “thank you” and then moved into the crowd to collect my pay. The ball and knife juggling were part of the Penn & Teller show even into the first Broadway show, but the crowd and money gathering fell away. Resetting my props meant dumping money out of my blindfold/bag and grabbing a new apple. Teller had all this niggling magic shit to do, so I just watched him. I
