Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! by Penn Jillette
Authors: Penn Jillette
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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
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
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