Neil Patrick Harris, Page 3

  If you’re entirely through with magic and would rather focus on acting, go HERE.

  * * *

  1Not a real show, but dammit, it should have been.

  And now a word from your friend …

  PENN JILLETTE

  Sorry, girls—it’s my fault. I’m the one who ruined your hetero dreams. I’m the one who turned Neil Patrick Harris into a gay.

  I’ve heard many women, including my wife (and my wife is a woman; I’m not the gay one in this particular story), curse the fact that you are gay gay gay. You’re the perfect man for them, you know, except for that gay thing. “Why? Why? Why?” they all scream (not in unison), looking upward and shaking their fists. “Why?” Well, the answer is me, Penn Jillette. I turned you, the sexy, gentle, smart, charming, understanding, talented Neil Patrick Harris, gay as a three-dollar bill. Sorry.

  It was sometime late last century. I had this movie night thing in New York City every Friday night (now we have it in Vegas every Tuesday night) where a bunch of people, mostly show folk (but we had a police officer and a dentist who joined us), sat around the Times Square Howard Johnson’s, hung out a bit, then went to watch a midnight movie. There was a lot of talking before, during, and after. It was like the Algonquin Round Table without the wit. We’d say stuff to one another like “Fuck you,” and then go to a movie and say things like “Fuck you” to the screen, and then afterward, say “Fuck you” again and leave. It was always a fun night.

  In this century you’re a big fancy-ass who’s president of the big fancy-ass gay Magic Castle, but back then you were Doogie, a normal child who loved magic as a hobby and made millions of dollars on television. You wanted to meet me because I was a big fancy-ass magician on gay Broadway and you’d heard about me. We never let minors into our movie night for obvious reasons, but I knew you were way famous. So your parents, undoubtedly hoping you wouldn’t wish them into the cornfield, brought you to join us one Friday night. (I don’t know what year this was or how old you were at the time. If you want information, you need to go to a different chapter—that’s part of your book’s big gay gimmick.)

  You attended a few movie nights. Then you and I finally decided to hang out on a non-movie night … parentless. I didn’t have children back then, and I knew nothing about boys. I hadn’t been around a boy since I was a boy, but we went to my apartment to hang out. It was awkward. Yeah, you were smart enough to memorize child doctor words on TV, but I still had a boy in my apartment and that was creepy. My apartment was an NYC bachelor pad. I had all the things women love a single man to have: tons of porn, Three Stooges DVDs, and a DDD silicone breast implant that I would caress, hold, and squeeze while I was relaxing, if you know what I mean. I didn’t really know what to say to a boy. I just knew this evening could lead to jail for something. I had a boy in my apartment and I was a big gay Broadway star so the next stop was incarceration.

  At first things went well. You picked up the breast implant and carried it around my loft. You said it felt great. You were right. But then you started looking at the porn DVDs. There you were, a child, in my apartment without your parents, holding a silicone implant, and perusing my porn. I realized I was this close to being sent to prison and getting my name on a permanent watch list. All I needed was a hot tub and some champagne with bubbles that would tickle your little nose.

  I panicked. I’m not a prison kind of guy. I led you away from Busty Enema Nurses III, without even stopping at the Stooges, and took you right to my music CD shelf. I figured that would be safe. I started talking to you about Sondheim’s Assassins (a show you would star in fifteen years later, way after I made you gay). I told you it was my favorite musical and one of my favorite Broadway shows. I raved about the show and its brilliant, touching, surprising ideas. I had an attractive young boy in my apartment in NYC and we were talking Broadway musicals. Oh dear.

  And then … I played some of the Assassins CD for you.

  Some say gay is a choice. Well, that night I made that gay choice for you. Why oh why oh why didn’t I reach for the Stooges?

  Sorry, girls.

  * * *

  If you’re feeling magical now that Penn Jillette is your friend, go HERE.

  If you’re feeling horny now that Penn Jillette has made you gay, go HERE.

  If you’re feeling musical theatery now that Penn Jillette has played Sondheim for you, go HERE.

  From early in life you are drawn to guys in a tingly kind of way. In elementary school you have a crush (if one could call it that) on the trumpet player in the middle school band. You watch him too much, and when he drinks at the water fountain you go to drink directly after, hoping to taste him in the water.

  Paging Dr. Freud.

  But for most of your life the prefix that for you most aptly goes before “sexual” is neither hetero- nor homo-, but a-. You are not a very sexual person. When puberty strikes, and the time comes for every patriotic American male to do his duty and start wanking up a storm, you can barely sustain a drizzle. You do hump your pillows a bit, but the chafing and relatively low thread count don’t do much for your sexual confidence.

  As childhood gives way to adolescence you are interested in girls, but in a confused, quasi-perfunctory way. It’s what’s expected of you. Boys in high school date girls, and so you do too, but it’s awkward. As it happens two of your teenage girlfriends are both quite prudish, so you sit on the couch or lie on the bed and make out for hours until finally, glacially, your hand creeps upstairs to cop a feel of training-brassiered boob, and they recoil and say, “What are you doing?!?” or “I’m not a slut!” And you backpedal and stammer something stupid like “No, no, I thought you … had an itch there.” But you never wind up with a girlfriend who’s viscerally excited by your advances or into your touch, and the fact that you don’t is probably not a coincidence.

  So why bother? In the back of your mind, are you worried that everyone suspects you’re gay and no one’s saying anything? Are you succumbing to unspoken social pressure? Or are you just gayanoid? Hard to say; hard to know; hard to talk about. But in 1986 you open up to your mom during a late-night conversation.

  “Mom,” you say, “I’m afraid I’m gay.”

  She tells you that a lot of kids your age have those feelings, that they may not be permanent, and that even if you are gay it doesn’t make any difference in terms of how much she and your dad love you. All of which is true. But moms are moms, and later in life she will tell you that deep down she always had a strong suspicion.1 After all, she was a teenager once. She knows what it’s like to have crushes. And she sees that even though you date some really nice girls through your high school years, it’s the cute new boy in your class or on set who really gets under your skin and thrills you and spurs your imagination and prompts you to rush home and ask her with badly feigned composure, “Did he happen to call?” Mom knows the deal, even if you don’t. Or won’t.

  Some would say you were in a closet. Some would say you didn’t even know you were in a house. The “truth” about a person’s sexual preference is often revealed through a long journey of tiny steps, and acceptance is one of the last ones. It’s an individual story for every person. There are unique personal prejudices in everyone, created by our families, our social circles, and mostly by ourselves. It’s tough to confront those things that you are afraid of in yourself. In your case it will take time. Time, and experience. Looking around and witnessing others living their lives. Interacting with free spirits more comfortable with themselves than you are.

  But you will get there.

  * * *

  To get famous, go HERE.

  To get laid, go HERE.

  * * *

  1“You almost had to have a board slapped against your head not to know he was interested in men, not women.” –Your mother, January 21, 2014

  “And now I, Neil the Magnificent, shall attempt the most amazing trick ever conceived in the history of prestidigitation!”

  You are Neil Patrick
Harris, the world’s greatest magician. You have dedicated your life to mastering the art of illusion, casting aside all other professional ambitions. You do not act. You do not host awards shows. You do not appear in online mini-musicals written and directed by Joss Whedon. You are entirely devoted to magic, 24/7/365. 24/7/366 in leap years.

  And now, on a Las Vegas stage, you prepare to debut your greatest trick yet, an escape that would put Houdini to shame. As the capacity crowd watches, you are handcuffed, straitjacketed, and blindfolded. You are then taped down to a chair. The chair is taped down to a larger chair. The larger chair is in turn Krazy-Glued to a sofa. A giant straitjacket is placed around the sofa. The straitjacketed sofa, with you somewhere inside it, is placed inside a vacuum-sealed airless steel trunk filled with venomous snakes, which is then hoisted fifty feet in the air over a giant tank filled with sulfuric acid, suspended only by a single burning rope.

  You wait inside, milking the suspense. You know the crowd is absolutely sure you are about to die, and you chuckle at their terror, knowing full well the simple, unguessable secret that will allow you to miraculously appear in your freshly steamed tuxedo in a seat in the front of the balcony ten seconds from now.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, you hear a woman’s voice.

  “Enjoying yourself, Neil?”

  This is not part of the trick.

  “What the …”

  “Befuddled, are you? I’m not surprised,” says the unseen woman. “I wouldn’t expect you to recognize my voice after so many years have passed. Perhaps this will jog your memory.”

  She lets loose with a pitiful, anguished wail. It sounds like a five-year-old waking up from a nightmare. It’s unbearable.

  “Ring a bell, Neil?”

  “No … who are you?!?”

  “Who am I? Oh, just a woman who was once a little girl. A naïve, trusting little girl who lived in Ruidoso, New Mexico, in 1984 and watched a certain young magician seem to chop off her big sister’s finger at a birthday party.”

  The memory you have repressed for thirty years comes flooding back. Your first professional gig … the one and only time you left a crowd unsatisfied … the children, weeping in horror at what they thought you’d just done to a child’s hand.

  “You!” you scream in horror.

  “Yes … me. I was that traumatized little sister. You took my innocence, Neil. From that day on I’ve had an uncontrollable fear of losing my fingers. I constantly wear gloves and keep my hands in my pockets. As a result I’m unable to do things normal people do, like type, play Chopin’s Études, or give people the finger. I live the life of a recluse. And ever since that moment, I swore one day I would get revenge. It’s taken me thirty years, but now I’ve done it. I’ve infiltrated your latest, ‘greatest’ trick. You’re about to be a lot more than Neil Patrick Embarrassed. You’re about to be Neil Patrick Dead.”

  Your discovery of the hidden speaker attached to your blindfold is simultaneous with the rush of pain from the dozen venomous snakes gnawing on your extremities. You scream, but the sound is muffled by the straitjacket, and the loud snap of a rope breaking.

  “Don’t worry, Neil. You’re sure to make quite a ‘splash!’ ” cackles the demon voice, just as you land in the sulfuric acid.

  When they drain the tank an hour later all they find are two wisdom teeth.

  THE END

  You are a thirteen-year-old boy at a summer theater camp in Las Cruces, New Mexico. You are starting a class in cold-reading auditions, and your teacher is renowned playwright Mark Medoff.

  From the beginning he takes a shine to you. The entire conceit of the class is that when auditioning you need to be good immediately, without any preparation, and this is one of your strengths: you’ve always had a knack for picking things up and figuring them out quickly, or at least figuring out how to appear to have picked them up quickly. And Mark notices this. His two daughters also attend the camp, and it doesn’t hurt your standing that you make them laugh a lot.

  Well, it turns out Mark is in the process of adapting an acclaimed novel as a screenplay. The novel is Joseph Olshan’s Clara’s Heart, about the relationship between a Jamaican housekeeper and a family in Baltimore. One of the main characters is the family’s young son, David. When acting camp is over, Mark mentions this to your parents, and says he thinks you might be a good choice for the role. Your parents think he’s just blowing smoke, but they ask him to “send us the script.” (In the years to come, you will realize your parents instinctively struck upon exactly the right thing to say.) Sure enough, within a week Warner Friggin’ Bros. sends a major-motion-picture script to your dad’s law office. After picking their mouths up from the floor, your parents proceed to relate to you all the exciting, unlikely events of this paragraph.

  You and your mom drive back down to Las Cruces to meet with Mark, who works with you on a few scenes. Then you go to the AV room at NMSU and shoot them into a video camera. Mark and his daughter read the offstage parts. You do a few takes, head home, and then boom, the tape is off to Hollywood. The whole thing feels disconnected from reality.

  But the unreality of the audition is nothing compared to that of being told by Mark soon afterward that you—young, pasty-faced, rural New Mexican, gentile-but-bar-mitzvah-aged-anyway you—are going to star in a major motion picture. Your mom and dad are excited and overwhelmed. You feel like a fish out of water; a deer in the headlights; even, in your wildest moments, like a fish in the headlights.

  And so you and your parents are flown out (because when you’re in a movie they pay for your airfare! Like, round trip!!!) to Maryland for six weeks, with a teacher from Ruidoso in tow to be your tutor.1 The first half of the shoot takes place in a small Chesapeake fishing town called St. Michaels; the last three weeks are in Baltimore.

  You are awed. Moderately awed. You’re struck by how artful and procedural and mechanical everything is. Dolly tracks, for example. They’re actual tracks, like a train, that lock together to support a camera along with massive rigging. They’re like some futuristic mini-version of the transcontinental railroad. Who thought of them? How were they built? How do they work? Oh, that’s how they work?!? Amazing!

  The crew is intense. The silence during production is silent. This is serious business, not the Ruidoso Little Theater. But you take to it pretty fast. Granted, unlike everyone else on set you have to go straight from shooting fifteen takes of a scene to learning chemistry or geometry in your trailer, and that’s a bit tough.2 But you feel no swell of insecurity, no sinking “I don’t belong here” sensation. You enjoy and intuitively understand the process: the line memorization, the rehearsals, the blocking, the discussions of camera angles, the whole thing. It’s new, and it’s different, and it’s exciting, but it’s not something you can’t handle. You belong here.

  And it’s a stroke of luck for your emotional well-being that the movie’s star, Whoopi Goldberg, is the first genuine superstar you ever meet, because she provides a great example of the right way to be famous. She’s incredibly gracious and professional, and she treats you like a regular person, a peer. She shows you how to hit the t-marks at your feet, how to adjust your body to “find the camera,” and dozens of other tricks of the trade. Best of all, she always has a mischievous twinkle in her eye. You love her for that.

  The entire month and a half feels like an out-of-body experience, the professional equivalent of first love. You are filled with enchantment. There’s a small restaurant you can get to only by boat where you order soft-shell crabs and they deliver them in a giant shovel and just dump them on your paper-covered table. Bibs tied and mallets raised, you all whack your steamy dinner into delicious submission. Nothing could be fresher than this. Nothing could make you feel more alive than this.

  But like first love, it ends. And you go back to high school. And you learn chemistry the normal way, at a desk, with other ninth graders. And you wait for a maddeningly long time while the director and editor and the other craftspeople involved in t
he mysterious process known as “post” do their work and put the individual jigsaw pieces you helped construct into one coherent puzzle. Almost a year later you finally have the bizarre, ungraspable experience of sitting in a theater and, for the first time in your life—and who knows if it will also be the last one—watching a giant-sized celluloid two-dimensional version of a person who, it cannot be denied, is you. It’s tough to watch yourself performing, mainly because of how you look physically. There’s a scene where you’re in a Speedo, and the image sears itself in your mind, becoming for many years your pudgy, gangly mental avatar of how you look to the outside world.

  There is one final mini–shit sandwich awaiting you at the end of Clara’s Heart: the reviews. The teenage years are a time of experimentation, but a thirteen-year-old’s first tentative foray into, say, lacrosse or French-kissing are not generally praised or panned on newspapers and television. That’s not true for your big-screen debut, and while many reviewers like your work and the movie in general, others do not, including the most prominent film critic of all, Roger Ebert:

  Meanwhile, Clara the maid labors away to bring warmth and understanding into the life of David, the young boy. But even here the movie has problems, having miscast Neil Patrick Harris in the role. Harris … is unable to project much more than an overwhelming sense of neediness.

  Well, that kind of sucks.

  It’s a decidedly strange thing to spend so many months doing all these wonderful, innocent, magical things and then, almost a year later, to see the end result be reduced into little more than an indifferent statement by a film critic. All that work distilled into a “thumbs sideways.” It’s hard for a kid to wrap his brain around that.