Big Mouth Strikes Again

As John Mayer ambles over to his marijuana vaporizer -- a small wooden device that emits a UFO-like blue glow in his darkened Pittsburgh hotel room -- he shares a passing thought: "I bought myself a Playgirl once," he says, taking a robust, smokeless hit of weed from a plastic tube.

"I just loved the feeling that there was a porno you really, really weren't supposed to have," Mayer adds. He laughs as he sprawls his six-foot-three body onto a couch, his brown eyes unfocused. It's around midnight, less than twenty-four hours before the first show of his co-headlining tour with Sheryl Crow, and he's dressed like an NBA player on a day off, in a hoodie and long shorts that precisely match his limited-edition Nikes. "If there's some shit I'm not supposed to have that's on the top rack, with the black bar over the bag, I want to know what's in there. I don't care what it is -- furniture, spider monkeys." He adds that thanks to his one-time perusal of nude-dude centerfolds, he's sure that he's not gay. "Which is different than might not be gay," he says. "Not to say I wouldn't enjoy the energy of watching a guy and a girl have sex. I think I'd vomit out of pure arousal. Have you ever seen a guy and girl have sex in person?"

John Mayer can't stop talking. He knows it, too -- he even wrote a song about the problem, "My Stupid Mouth," from his first album. "I'm a liability to my art," Mayer says over brunch in New York at a Mexican restaurant, four days before that night in Pittsburgh. "I'm at a point right now where the more I talk, the more I'm going to say something in the next twelve months that's going to damage my career." (It turns out he does keep quiet about one thing: A week after our last conversation, Us Weekly reports that Mayer has just begun dating Jessica Simpson, whom he met at Clive Davis' Grammy party last year. "John is an incredibly talented artist," Simpson told the magazine, in a non-denial.) Though his baby face is as unlined as his shiny-new white Stussy T-shirt, Mayer, 28, is groggy after a night of barhopping -- during which he jumped onstage and indulged in his new hobby of stand-up comedy.

Here is one of John Mayer's jokes: "Everyone thinks Brad Pitt has it great because he married Angelina Jolie. I think he has it terrible, because when Angelina Jolie is giving you a blow job, what do you tip your head back and think of to help you finish? You have nothing left -- just Jesus on a polar bear in the middle of the snow, saying, 'You greedy motherfucker, I've got nothing for you.'"

And another: "I'm not worried about how small my penis is -- I'm worried about how dark it is. I have a Dominican penis. My penis hit six home runs last year; my penis wears shoes without socks." Performing in June at the Comedy Cellar in New York, Mayer did a David Chappelle-esque routine that imagined white people being allowed to use the n word -- a blogger reported, out of context, that Mayer had used the offending word, and a brief media furor ensued.