Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

I’m fifty-seven years old. My parents have been dead twelve years. Emily and I have been married eight years. My daughter, Moxie, is coming up on her seventh birthday and my son, Zolten, is knocking on six. This is my first marriage and these are my only children. I started late. Way late, almost Letterman late. When Moxie is my age, I’ll be 107 years old and I’m sure we all really will have flying cars, world peace, and a cooler song for twelve- year-old boys than “Stairway to Heaven.” I don’t know if Mox and Zz will have things to do before they let me meet my grandchildren, or if they’ll even have children. I don’t know jackshit. That’s another reason I cry. Another reason to be joyful and sad.

It’s not natural to have one’s children this late in life. My body wanted to reproduce when I was fifteen. My body really, really wanted to reproduce when I was fifteen. I loved fooling my body into thinking I was reproducing with girlfriends at fifteen. It took a lot of civilization, socialization, willpower, and some emulsion polymerization technology for me not to reproduce at fifteen. When I was fifty, it took much more technology for us to get started reproducing. Moxie was a test tube baby. My wife, Emily, was thirty-nine when Moxie was born. The ticking clock was deafening, and even though trying naturally was a blast, we turned to science for Moxie. After that kick start, we conceived our son Zolten naturally. Naturally is cheaper and way more fun than IVF. But with IVF we did get to sing the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” together while I used a real hypodermic needle to give Emily her hormone shots (we both felt exactly “like Jesus’ son”). It was kind of fun to see her moods change crazy fast. I’d shoot her up and she’d start crying and we’d have a good laugh together at how much our feelings are just chemicals.

We were going through IVF about the time I was on The West Wing. One of the actors on there (I won’t say which one, because I’m not sure he ever made his IVF public) called the sample room at the IVF clinic “The Masturbatorium.” I love that term and wanted to give him credit without outing his children. The masturbatorium is a little room at the clinic where you go in to whack out the baby-batter to give to the nurse so they can make the baby in the test tube. Oh dear, I just called the embryo “the baby.” That’s not a big deal, right? No one is going to argue over when an embryo becomes a baby. Emily had to go into stirrups while they got invasive on her ass or right near her ass; I just had to jack off. She did her part fine, and I fucked up jacking off.

I walked into the masturbatorium and there were three posters on the wall to help me get off. They were swimsuit pictures of three women—Pamela Anderson, Elle Macpherson, and Gena Lee Nolin—all of whom I had made cry in public at one time or another. I was supposed to whack off to women I had pissed off. I needed to jack to women who hated me. Some get turned on thinking about hatefucks but that never worked for me. Says a lot about the taste of our Middle Eastern fertility doctor. Pamela Anderson: made her cry over animal rights and a joke I made to her face on TV. Elle Macpherson: made fun of her hair care products and her husband’s dickey (not dick, dickey, the fake turtleneck thing, I’m guessing his dick was fine) on live radio. And I professionally trash talked Gena until she cracked on Fear Factor. They’re all good people, and they all forgave me (maybe not Elle), but I still didn’t want to whack to them. The masturbatorium had videos too, but they were way too vanilla for a Boston cream pie guy like me. The DVDs were the swimsuit edition TV special, not like latex enema nurses in bondage. The idea that there were real nurses right behind the wall to where I was jacking should have been hot, but it wasn’t. I don’t know why. Maybe because we were dealing with making children, which is so much less sexy than fooling my body into thinking I was making children. Emily suggested at the desk that maybe we could send in a couple hookers, and I just got embarrassed. On libertarianism, atheism and transgressive humor my wife is the hard-core one in the family. I couldn’t jack off in front of pictures of women I’d made cry and if that makes me less of a man, so be it. We finally got our “sample” at home working together and then Emily drove to the doctor’s like she was trying to get hot pizza home to her future family.

For Zolten, we just fucked. That’s why he gets $35,000 more in his trust fund.

Lots of people are having children later in life. Everyone is living longer, and now that we have electric lights there’s other stuff to do at night. A lot of older parents worry about being older parents. I hear people say, “I don’t want to be too old to play baseball with my son.” They worry that their kids will be embarrassed by their parents’ age. I worry about that less, because I grew up with older parents. My parents were the best parents in the world, and they were old. They were older for their generation than I am for mine. My mom was forty-five years old when I was born. My dad was a couple years younger. My only sibling, my sister, was twenty-three years old when I was born. Now that I think about it, I might not have been planned. After Jack Nicholson and Bobby Darin found out that their sisters were really their moms, I thought I might have a similar surprise coming, but I’ve seen pre-Photoshop pictures of my mom in the maternity ward and my sister gave me her Girl Scout’s honor. There were no deathbed confessions from anyone.

When my mom got pregnant, she went to the doctor. She was freaking out. She said she was too old to have another baby. She said she wouldn’t live to see her baby go to kindergarten. The doctor told her that there were lots of older moms. This was 1954 and he went to his files. See? Here’s a mom who was thirty-two… and here’s one who was thirty… and… he didn’t find anyone over forty. Mom was very freaked. Bud Trillin at The New Yorker did a big profile on Penn & Teller while we were Off-Broadway and it also showed up in a book of his. He did a lot research and went to Philly to talk to Teller’s parents and teachers and went all the way to Greenfield to interview my parents. My mom was very straightforward with Bud. Bud is good, but my mom also didn’t know another way to be. She confessed that she was very worried about birth defects. She worried that I might be born with Down syndrome, for which there were no tests at the time. I don’t know if she would have gotten the tests if they were available, my mom may have believed that love starts at conception. I never asked her directly. She said to Bud that she heard that babies born to old mothers were either retarded or geniuses. (“Retarded” being the only word people used at the time to describe mental disabilities.) She then paused for one of those Dean Martin comedy pauses that go forever, shrugged, paused and thought some more and then said, “I guess he’s a genius.” She got Bud to laughing, but… I don’t think it was as much of a joke as Bud thought. My mom knew I wasn’t a genius, but I think she had decided that besides being worthy of her complete unconditional love just for being born, I might have also been okay. I could make her laugh. I could make her laugh harder than anyone in the world had ever made her laugh. You tell me, am I crying now with sadness or joy?

I grew up with parents who were just a few years younger than Moxie and Zolten’s dad will be. My dad didn’t play much baseball with me, but age had nothing to do with it. I was on the A&W Little League team. The other children said A&W stood for Ass Wipes, ignoring the ampersand and making me crazy. With P&T the ampersand matters. You can say P&T stands for “Pisshead & Twat” but don’t you dare say it stands for Pecker Tards, that’ll just piss me off. I was thrown off the Ass Wipes for not understanding why we were supposed to think that our arbitrary team was the best (the same reason I was thrown off The Celebrity Apprentice—jocks like Trump never change). Before I was thrown off the Ass Wipes, the best Little League team that ever existed, my mom and dad came to every game. My dad would sit in the stands, saying proudly to the other dads, “See that big boy out in the outfield daydreaming—that’s my boy, he doesn’t care about the game.” My whole family is missing the sports gene and the military gene. During a war (they’re all the same), my dad was a security guard and then a jail guard. I hope I didn’t screw up the Jillette family genes by marrying a great golfer with a Navy dad. If I did, I can teach them to juggle and be medics.

The other children in grade school did ask why I spent so much time with my grandparents, and I guess that embarrassed me a little, but there was never any trauma. I just told them they were my mom and dad and they were wicked old. My parents were always proud of me and I was proud of them. It seemed that my mom and dad didn’t have any problems other than mine. They loved me and they loved each other. I never heard them raise their voices except in jest or in an emergency, to one another or to me. As a very young child, I ran into the street and my mom screamed “Penn!” like Roger Daltrey screams “yeah!” in “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” I never ran into the street again. I guess we also yelled as a joke, but not when we meant it. When the Jillettes mean it, the Jillettes pout.

Way back in the nineties, we did a TV show in Britain called The Unpleasant World of Penn & Teller. We did a lot of bits from our American show and also did most of our TV bits from Letterman and SNL. We had amazing guest hosts, like Stephen Fry and John Cleese. Stephen and John are both just a little bit smaller than me, but we’re all big guys. It was the first time I met John, and during lighting and just hanging out backstage, John was chatting with me: “Penn, when you’re angry, do you yell?”

“Nope. Never.”

“Me neither. Did your family yell?”

“Nope, never. I can’t recall my parents ever yelling at one another except when they were kidding.”