Free God, No! by Penn Jillette Page B

beautiful and satisfying, it’s much harder to find the ugly truth.
    The big secret of magic is we are willing to work harder to accomplish something stupid than you can imagine. We’ll practice things for years that you wouldn’t consider investing an hour in. You can imagine spending half your life under a bridge learning to play sax like Sonny Rollins, but you can’t imagine spending five minutes learning to drop a palmed cell phone into a little pocket behind a cardboard cutout of Criss Angel while hanging a cross around its neck and talking a mile a minute without the slightest pause. I had to practice that a lot. A lot more than you can imagine. I had to practice it a lot more than you think it’s worth. Our big secret is that it’s worth more to us to do our tricks than you can even imagine. Our deep secret is simply misplaced priorities.
    Shitty Valentino and Fox TV had to pretend magicians were mad atthem for exposing secrets. It was pretty embarrassing and desperate. I remember a TV crew following Lance Burton and me to dinner, trying to get us to say we were pissed at the Masked Magician. We didn’t care. We gave them nothing. They got a few amateur magicians, starving to be on TV, to act pissed off, but professionals didn’t care. Valentino was a two-bit dove magician in Laughlin, Nevada, and he became the Masked Magician and thought he was a big star.
    At the strip club that night, Valentino was surrounded by women whose job it was to be sitting around whoever sat down with money. He’s one of these really creepy guys who goes to a strip club and acts like he’s on a date. He was talking to the women instead of having them rub their asses against his cock. That’s really creepy. Sex isn’t creepy, loneliness is creepy. Valentino thought some of the women recognized me, and he beckoned me over to his hired table full of hired women. “Hey, Penn, I was just telling these beautiful ladies that I was the Masked Magician and they don’t believe me.” Has any non-dipshit man ever used the word “ladies” not followed by the word “room”? But he wasn’t done. “Would you tell these fine ladies that that’s me, that I’m the star, I am the Masked Magician?”
    I stood in front of Valentino and his “ladies” (even typing that makes my skin crawl) and started listing names: “David Letterman, Deborah Harry, Picasso, Mick Jagger, Madonna, Ke$ha, Bill Clinton, Mark Twain, Tom Jones, Fergie, Salvador Dalí, Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley, Ayn Rand, Che Guevara, Ringo Starr, Janet Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Bette Midler, Cher . . .” I went on and on, yelling over the music. After about twenty names from politics, science, and the arts, I asked, “What do all these people have in common?”
    Valentino and his “ladies” shrugged their shoulders, jiggling their bountiful jelutongs. I gave them time to think, and then I yelled, “We know who they are because they didn’t put fucking bags over their heads when they worked.” I paused for another moment and then looked all the women in the eyes, ignoring Valentino, as I said, “I have no idea who this asshole is.”
    Aftermarket tits fill me with joy when they’re cartoony and obvious.I love them when they look like someone stapled some skin over a Tupperware set. I only find them depressing when women get them to “fix” something. There are medical problems that have to really be fixed, of course, but I’m not talking about that kind of “fixed.” I’m talking when they’re not happy with their tits because they’re “too small” or “too saggy.” I’m not saying it’s wrong to do it, but it’s depressing to me when women use surgery to try to be “normal.” I like when surgery is used as a celebration of nutty desire. I like surgery when it’s a “fuck you” to god. When the tits are sticking out like Hummer headlights on a Big Wheel tricycle. I like them to be a celebration of choice over nature.
    I don’t have any tattoos.