Sock Read online

  s o c k

  s o c k

  Penn Jillette

  A L S O BY P E N N J I L L E T T E ( w i t h T e l l r e )

  Penn & Teller’s How to Play with Your Food

  Penn & Teller’s How to Play in Traffic

  Penn & Teller’s Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends

  ST. MARTIN’S GRIFFIN NEW YORK

  SOCK. Copyright © 2004 by Penn Jillette. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Book design by Jonathan Bennett

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jillette, Penn.

  Sock / Penn Jillette.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-32805-2

  EAN 978-0312-32805-4

  1. Women—Crimes against—Fiction. 2. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 3. Murder victims—Fiction. 4. Police divers—Fiction. 5. Gay men—Fiction. 6. Toys—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3610.I45S63 2004

  813'.54—dc22

  2004040965

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4

  s o c k

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sewn Under a Bad Sign

  Bad monkey wammerjammer. Sewn in a crossfire hurricane of needles and pins. An imaginary friend’s howlings in the driving rain of the washing machine. Don’t you wanna live with me?

  Look at my eyes. Look at them. I told you to look at my eyes! Look at my eyes! These aren’t giggly, jokey eyes to make babies giggle. My button eyes are like a shark’s eyes. Buttons from a sharkskin suit. My eyes have been fiddled with by a husder. Nervously tapped by a bad man. My eyes are worn right in the center from the tapping of a diamond pinky ring. It was his gambler’s tell. When the owner of that expensive but cheap suit was lying, he’d click click click click his flawed diamond against the buttons of his suit jacket. And he was lying all the time. Click click click click click. Those buttons are my eyes! They were always my eyes. They saw everything from the coat of a wheeler-dealer: Mr. Ferris, the big wheel down at the carny. Doctor, my eyes have seen the pain of a lying diamond. Black eyes. No emotion. Predator. Predator sock monkey. Bad monkey.

  Look at my skin. It wasn’t born from a clean, new sock. No way. This is a sock that has been used. Look at my mouth. My mouth sheathed a real heel. A man’s heel. It rammed against the end of a steel-toed boot. That makes a monkey tough. Very tough. There’s human blood in my mouth. Blister blood. And foot sweat. I taste foot sweat all the time. Lumberjack foot sweat. I’m worn. I’ve been around. My mouth has walked forty-seven miles of barbed wire. Bad monkey.

  And the toe of that sock skin. You know where that is. You know what that toe became, don’t you? You have your little baby names for it, but you know what it really is. Yup, it’s that toe that kicked me in the you-know-where. My very fiber is a kick in the behind. That’s what I am. I am a kick in the behind. Bad. That’s me. Kick it. Kick the bad monkey in the behind. Kick it.

  Kick it. Turn it up. Louder, louder. The Little Fool never played Mr. Rogers pap in the Little Fool’s bedroom. This ain’t no nursery, this is our room, brothers and sisters, and we kick out the jams. We play the radio. We play it loud. Kick it. Going faster miles an hour. The Top 40, the FM college station. Janey said when she was just five years old, Little Fool never once gave it away. The Little Fool taking it. It’s all pumping in. But do you like American music best? Mon-key?—Records. Eight tracks. Cassettes. CDs. MP3s.—The Little Fool always listens and I always remember. Everything. He left the music on in the room. He didn’t turn the music off, ever. Even when he wasn’t there. Even when he slept. And he left the refrigerator door open. Bad monkey. Bad rocking monkey.

  Bad to the nylons stuffing my innards. I’m not stuffed with old pjs. There’s no reassuring baby smell deep in me. No way. And I’m not stuffed with sensible, modest pantyhose that got, oh, pshaw, a run. No! I’m stuffed with nylons. Nylon stockings. Modern petroleum, chemical, artificial nylons that were held on with black lace garter belts around the legs of a woman. A woman. A woman with legs up to there. Not a lady. Not a child. A woman. That’s what my stuffing is. My stuffing smells like cheap perfume. Cheap perfume that was put on those shapely upper thighs. That’s not where you put perfume. Bad monkey.

  Lumberjack sock stuffed with a woman’s nylons. Yeah, the old lady washed them. She washed me all. I was created clean, but that smell is deep. Deep. Deep. It’s a smell of the soul, and my soul is a lumberjack’s sole. I’ve been worn. My soul has walked miles of barbed wire to smell the nylons of my innards.

  Hustler eyes, lumberjack skin, the heart of a woman’s legs, and a grandmother’s spoiling love. I got it all, baby. I got it all, my little baby boy. Drool on me. Grab me. Carry me. Rip me apart. I’m a bad monkey.

  The Little Fool calls me “Dickie.” That’s my name.

  “Why do you call him ‘Dickie’?” the parents ask.

  “Because he’s dickie colored,” the Little Fool answers.

  They laugh. They laugh at how cute the Little Fool is.

  But he’s lying. He learned how to lie from my button eyes. He calls me “Dickie” because it’s the baddest word he knows. And I’m the baddest wammerjammer monkey he will ever love.

  He will rip me apart with his love. And he will grow big. He will be very big. And he will never forget me.

  And I’ll love him forever like a bad monkey. Like a very bad monkey.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Lying About Lumberjacks

  Yeah, sure, I’m built from a lumberjack sock. Did you believe that? For a minute. I mean, how old do you think the Little Fool is? Huh? Do you think I’m talking about another time, another reality full of lumberjacks and typing monkeys? Is that what you think? Gimme some truth! I don’t even know what a lumberjack really does. Do people even use that word anymore? Do you ever use that word? Lumberjack. You idiot. The Little Fool believed it was a lumberjack sock when he got just a little too old to carry me around. When we stopped sleeping together. He learned the word “lumberjack” in some story meant to appease him. “Daddy, story?” His Daddy read him stories about lumberjacks.

  What stories about lumberjacks do you read a child? I’m not talking English sketch comedy with lumberjacks cross-dressing. I’m talking about the packages of gay porn. The flannel parting to show a ripped six-pack stomach and a big shaft of heaven below. I guess flannel used to be a child’s thing. A baby blanket thing. Comfort thing. Not any more. Smells like Seattle flannel.

  Lumberjacks aren’t tough any more. Lumberjacks are for gays. I use the word “gay,” but you all know what everyone means. They went to all the trouble to lose all the bad words and make people say “gay” instead. They had the muscle, the flannel- and leather-covered muscle, to get us to do that. They had the New York Times and CNN muscle. But “gay” became the same word the bad words are. That’s the way it works. “Avenue of the Americas” means “Sixth

  Avenue” because that’s where it is. There are no magic words. Even the Little Fool knew that very early.

  “Lumberjack” is for gays and babies. The Little Fool was forgiven. He was little. It was a story from his Dad. The Little Fool loved his Dad. The Little Fool loved me. He loved lumberjacks. And if he still does love a lumberjack now and again? What’s it to you? What are you looking at? The Little Fool grew up big. He grew up big enough to laugh at lumberjacks. And he’s enough of a man to know there’s something very sexy about lumberjacks. There just is. Imagine if I were made from a fireman’s sock. Try that on for size. Too sexy for a bad monkey. Way too sexy.

  So,
who is really tough nowadays, huh? Bikers? Don’t make me laugh; I’ll stretch out my heel mouth. What do bikers do, anyway? Diversify? Bikers have diversified. They don’t just ride. They deal drugs. I said, Goddamn the pusher man. Bikers deal drugs like the other gangs now. Maybe bikers always did that. But now they also own trucking companies. But what did bikers do when Marlon Brando pretended he rode with them? What were they doing in that movie? Get your motor running, head out on the highway, and then what? Huh? I mean, you’d get up in the morning and you’d ride, and then what? Just ride around and irritate people? Loud pipes save lives. We all know what bikers look like, but what activities do they pursue? What is the verb? The verb “to bike”?

  How about firemen? Are they tough? Yeah, they’re tough. They die saving people. Firemen go into burning buildings and save children and cute little kittens. If the TV cameras are on, maybe the firemen will save a sibling sock monkey. Save a little sock monkey for the crying little newly homeless child on the street. Burning down the bad monkey house.

  I guess gays have adopted most of what’s tough. Good. Maybe they’ll do better with it than the straight tough guys did. It’s fun to stay at the YMCA. What do I care? I’m a monkey.

  No one is tougher than the Little Fool. No one. And he remembers hugging me. He remembers his tears falling on my soft, cloth back. But he doesn’t remember much. He doesn’t know how he became what he is. All he remembers are images. He might not even really remember that. He remembers his Dad laughing that the Little Fool didn’t have any hair and said “Ock-u-baby” when he wanted to be rocked, and he always wanted to be rocked. He remembers what they remembered. He remembers what they told him they remembered. He remembers love. Baby loves loving—he’s got what it takes and he knows how to use it.

  But I remember what he was thinking. And I’m a bad monkey. I am whatever you say I am. I remember the harmless family myths.

  Mom and Dad loved the Little Fool into the toughest guy you ever met. You can’t get that tough without love. Not “tough love.” Gentle, pure love. Pure love makes tough. Unconditional love from Mommy, just like it’s supposed to be. And unconditional love from Daddy. Daddy who didn’t get the memo that his love was supposed to be different. Unconditional love from both Mommy and Daddy, that’ll make you tough. That’ll make you twelve feet tall and bulletproof. That’s what that’ll do. It’ll make a little fool spit nails and never say his parents’ first names. Never even think the first names. It’ll make a fool tough enough to say “Mom” and “Dad” when the fool is forty. Unconditional love. Those who get it are not to be trifled with. They can love a bad monkey. Bad monkey.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Swimming in Sewage

  Mom-and-Dad love made the Little Fool tough. What tough guy stuff does he do? No flannel. No leather. He swims in raw sewage. New York City police dive team. Ain’t I tough enough, in love enough?

  More than 188,000,000 gallons of raw sewage a day are discharged into the Hudson and East rivers of New York City. Swimming is limited by the Department of Health to beaches monitored regularly for fecal contamination. That’s a phrase, huh? It’s like “blind, bloodsucking worms,” and we have those, too. But what about the other places? The places that aren’t monitored? What about those places? There are things that have to be done in that water, people who have to go in. The NYC police divers go in. Advanced diving equipment—those cool high-pressure masks, wireless radio devices, and dry suits might minimize exposure, sure, but it’s not police dive-style. It’s standard scuba masks and wet suits for them. The divers report ingesting small quantities of polluted water while swimming at the surface or while using mouthpieces that have dangled in the water before use. Visibility is about two inches. If you were wearing novelty big-nose-and-moustache, “Eagle Beak” glasses (and we know what they used to be called and what they still really are called) from the joke shop, you wouldn’t be able to see the end of your plastic nose. Or even if you were wearing the other novelty glasses with another body part instead of the nose. A plastic, dirty part going over your nose. You couldn’t see the head of it, could you? It’s longer than two inches. On tough guys the subject of the plastic sculpture is longer than two inches. Visibility two inches. The Little Fool feels his way through the water feeling for dead bodies. That was his job. To swim in this town you must be tough tough tough tough tough.

  Scuba diving in sewage-contaminated water is associated with gastrointestinal illness. The Little Fool never feels quite right. He doesn’t talk about it, but the Little Fool is always a little queasy. “Queasy” isn’t a tough-guy word, is it? Queasy is a tough-guy feeling. The Little Fool is the team’s only member who doesn’t drink. He doesn’t drink alcohol at all. All the others drink hard liquor. He watches the adult beverages make his co-workers make that face they learned from black-and-white movies. And he imagines those little doses of poison going into the gastrointestinal tract and killing what’s living there. Killing the microscopic critters. Way down inside.

  Some of the microscopic critters can thrive and become macroscopic. Way macroscopic. Stare in its alien face, macroscopic boy. The critters can do that. They can grow in you. Think about that the next time you’re eating sushi. The Little Fool fantasizes, watching his partners drink poison, that maybe they’re killing the critters. But he knows they’re not. He knows if these things can live in the river, these things can live in some Southern Comfort. The parasites just get rowdy. They can party on grain alcohol. They don’t care. They’re not driving. The divers are the designated drivers. Beep beep beepbeep, yeah!

  Parasites are a frequent cause of illness, and the major health hazard arises from ingesting sewage-contaminated water, even with a hard liquor chaser and a good, NYC tap-water back. Yeah, amoebic dysentery. Another overlap with tough and gay. The Little Fool is not gay, but he could be. He has the stomach for it. You don’t need any special stomach for gay sex; a six-pack of stomach muscles helps, but it’s not needed. But it takes a tough guy to handle the heterosexual homophobia. Yeah, the Little Fool even has the stomach for that. He’s tough enough. All your sickness, throw it at me. I’ll shrug it off.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Mushy Stuff

  Even with alien things living in his gut, the Little Fool is sexy. He’s big. We don’t like to believe it’s that simple, but big is sexy. It’s genetically sexy. That’s why little, tiny movie-star tough guys don’t like being on TV. Even on plasma screens, the movie star is too small. Stars are too small on TV. Put me on a wall in a mall. Tough guys with a gun and fake kung fu, praying mantis style, against Stuntmen with squibs to pop and mattresses to break the falls. Those Hollywood tough guys are all 5’5” on all their good days. Let’s put them on an apple box. Can we find shorter models to lean helplessly on the star? Short girls can run and bouncy-bounce, too, can’t they? The movie-star tough guys like to be on that big screen. Then they’re bigger than the real tough guys. The movie-star tough guys are bigger and they have the big, skidillion-watts-of-power sound of celery breaking when the movie-star tough guys hit the guy with a craggy face. Man, that bad guy is huge. That huge, monster, dumb, bad guy is probably six foot. Little movie, big bad guy. Here we are now. Entertain us.

  The Little Fool really is big. He grew big. He’s way big. He’s 6′ 6″. He’s basketball big, and he’s football wide, and he’s American fat. He’s not really fat, not for America, but he has a belly. Not a bad belly. The wet suit girdles in most of it. The wet suit gives him that William Shatner build. Better than the William Shatner build, because the Little Fool is real-world big. And real-world big works on the women. You don’t go around saying that. You don’t really admit it. Yeah, he has nice eyes. He has all his hair. Not receding at all. No comb-over, toupee, or drugs that make him go soft when he needs to be hard to impress. He has hair and nice eyes. Pretty. Pretty big. And he has the job. It’s a good job for a man who likes to sleep with women. It’s a sexy job. He’s a man in a uniform who isn’t a cop. Nothing is better for f
ully lubricating the women. I’m a bad monkey. I’m a bad wammerjammer sock monkey, so I can say what you can’t. I can say that maybe not all, but a bunch of women want to have sex with a police officer. I’m wrong: they don’t want to have sex with a police officer; they want to be raped by a pig. You don’t like me saying that, you sexy little thing? Well, come knock the nylons out of me. I don’t care. I’m a monkey. I’m a bad monkey. With his head all full of stuffin’.

  And while you’re beating me and throwing me around, maybe a policeman would come in to stop you from ruining the Little Fool’s harmless toy. “What are you doing, lady, are you crazy? I guess I’d better handcuff you. I should try to slap some sense into you. You know, for a crazy lady, you’re pretty sexy.” My vision in blue.

  There are women who are full-out leathersniffers. They know what they want and they know how to use it. And then there are some women who really don’t want it. They can see a pair of handcuffs without thinking dirty thoughts. Those women exist. At least, in theory. There are women who really don’t get turned on by cops. Most women are in the middle. They don’t bring it up, they don’t even think about it much, but a part of them, a part below the waist, wants to be used by a man in a uniform. But another part of them, a less interesting part of them, knows that cops are high school losers. Those women know there’s something creepy about a guy who enforces other people’s rules. Maybe if cops were paid more they wouldn’t be that creepy. Teachers aren’t paid much, and they’re creepy without being sexy at all. But a police diver … with that badge and rubber boots.

  Women smell that the Little Fool is big, and then they find out about his job. They know he has a uniform. He works for the police department; he must have a uniform, right? He never arrests anyone or gives out a parking ticket. He doesn’t racially profile or bust perpetrators of victimless crimes. He’s part of the dive team. He doesn’t really even have to dive anymore. He’s part of the team and he has stories. He has real stories. He has stories like this one I’m telling right now. His stories have diving in them and always will. You can’t think of anything lame a police diver does. He gets paid more. He helps people. He risks his life. He’s like a fireman. A police diver is brave. He’s strong. He’s skilled. He’s tough. He’s big. That’s sexy. He swims in raw sewage. But women don’t think about that last part. All he has to do is chew with his mouth closed and not say “Am I hurting you?” during sex, and he does fine with the women. It’s a good job that way. Vision in blue.