Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (3 page)

One year later, I lost my uncle Manny to a double heart attack.

Apparently, he had two different heart attacks—one brought on by his business, the other just by pressure in general. His wife, my aunt Millie, loved him more than anything, but she was young and a bit of a hottie—and with that comes complexity. Yes, I just typed that my late aunt was a “hottie.” I’d like to believe she’d have smiled at that one.

Manny was found after his double heart attack on the couch in the living room; he was later diagnosed as having had a front and back heart attack (to use clinical-speak). As for my aunt Millie, may she rest in peace and God bless her—as we say before we dish someone—she was known to have complained to him constantly about the state of their lives, before, during, and I’m guessing
after
the heart attacks. She meant well though. I’m still close to her daughter, my cousin Sandra. Life can certainly be complex. This is true for most people if you get to live long enough. I feel for anyone reading this who presently knows of no sadness or stress—you may be in for a shock. Jesus, I hope I’m not the one to break it to you with this book.

You look at someone as amazing as Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest minds of our time, and as I write pieces of my family’s history I think about what he’s been through. Just imagine, he’s never had the privilege of saying what drunken guys say to each other in bars all the time: “I wouldn’t kick
her
out of bed.” Because he couldn’t. Has this book been pulled out of the display windows in airports yet?

Getting back to my family, the death toll kept rising. A couple years after we lost Manny, even more tragically, Manny and Millie’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Bonnie, succumbed to cancer.

Then, six years later, when I was fifteen, my dad’s youngest brother, thirty-seven-year-old Sammy, died of a heart attack while playing tennis. I guess if you were to pick which one of all these heart attacks you’d want to have, you’d choose the one during tennis. At least you’re all in white, teed up for the great U.S. Open in heaven. God was just watching Sammy play tennis that day, trying to keep score, and said to himself, “Thirty–love-to-have-him-up-here-in-heaven.” It was what it was. Sucked.

Just for clarification, when I mention God watching Sammy play tennis, I’m using poetic license, not referring to the Carlin-esque version of an almighty being with a long white beard, pulling numbers out of a hat, deciding who shall live and who shall die. That’s far from my view of religion. I’m more of a spiritual believer. It doesn’t make sense that an all-powerful wise old man would just make a decision on a whim and take my handsome thirty-seven-year-old uncle from this earth.

It does make sense, however, that an all-powerful old
woman
would make that happen. I don’t know why we never picture God as an old woman. That’s right, I’m suggesting that my innocent, handsome uncle was playing tennis and an old lady with a white beard looked down upon him and said with a Betty White–ish cackle, “Look at that young piece of tail prance around on that tennis court; I think I’ll add him to my collection.” And in an instant he was gone.

I don’t believe that either, of course. I don’t see God as a man or a woman but as a giant transgender Jabba the Hutt creature with striped faux fur. Maybe God looks like Rick Ross.

It was this demented pseudocreative mind of mine and my father’s that helped us deal with losing my uncles at such young ages. All these men were my childhood heroes. Sammy especially. He wanted to go into show business. He could sing, he was handsome, and he was the baby of five brothers and a sister, so he believed he could do anything. He also had the first PhotoGray transitional lenses I’d ever seen. He was the coolest.

He and my aunt Barbara lived on the Main Line in Philly. She was also cool, equally talented, and she still is. She’s alive and is still “the shit”—in the nicest possible definition of that term. She and my uncle Sammy loved their upper-class hippie ways. Just looking at photos of them back in the day makes me want to put on a double-breasted suit and tinted glasses and smoke hemp.

After Sammy died, Barbara married Lee, whom on occasion she has smoked pot with for over forty years. I don’t know if that’s totally true, but they assured me they wouldn’t sue me if I printed that. I’m also very close with Barbara’s daughter, my first cousin Allison. She’s one of my dearest friends and has always, since her father’s death, wanted to get the most out of life. I want to go on record that I’m not
saying
she’s a smoker of the weed. I’m typing it.

Pot doesn’t really agree with me, but it always did with many of my relatives and friends. Rodney Dangerfield swore by it. And on it.

Here I go bouncing back and forth again. Sometimes there’s been a thin line between my blood family and my comedy family. I started to feel related to comedians as I got older—it’s like we share some sort of comedic DNA—but before that it was all about my uncles.

My uncle Joe, the one who
didn’t
die young, was cool too. He lived longer than my dad’s three other brothers, but he did lose one testicle due to cancer. And in retrospect, due to divorce. She metaphorically got one of his balls in the settlement. I also got divorced once, but I was fortunate, I had a good lawyer—got to keep both of my balls. Thank you, Universe.

Still, my balls have been the source of many lifelong issues. You’d think that the problems men have, when they stray or act out of sexual impulsivity, are caused by their dawg-like quality of following the divining rod that is their penis. But no, it is my belief that the root of the problem lies at the root of the penis—the balls. They fill with fluid, which must find a way to leave the body and enter the atmosphere.

Fundamentalists would say it’s for procreation, but the physical act of the expulsion of the male fluids usually doesn’t involve another human being. I have a doctor who says ejaculating once a day can improve cardiovascular health. But so does walking up stairs. I do both. I ejaculate as I walk up stairs. That can be dangerous if on the way back down you slip on your own semen and tumble to your death. That definitely isn’t something you want to hear on the news after the coroner’s report.

But severe leakage can also
save
your life, if you are kidnapped and they are able to find you by the long trail of leakage you leave from, say, your backyard to the kidnapper’s hideout.

Sorry, that was cheesy to bring up. As are my testicles right now, because, truth be known, I am still typing this on my laptop, and when you have a computer on your lap, the fan in it has no ventilation; it’s smothered by your crotch. If I had the choice, that’s the way I’d like to leave this world, smothered by your crotch. And I don’t even know you. My crotch is so smothered right now that I have decided to name my testicles—the Smothers Brothers. Okay, I will not.

When I set out to write this book, I was concerned I would fill it with too many dick jokes. That is no longer my concern. I can now note that it is full of testicle anecdotes. That’s the only indication that I am a more mature man now than I used to be. Penis references become outweighed by testicle references. Gravity creates maturity.

Anyway, back to my uncle Joe and his balls. I loved him a lot. My aunt got only half his balls, not half his heart. The last days I got to spend with him, he was lying in hospice and watching Tiger Woods win the U.S. Open in 2008. He was so happy to watch Tiger’s comeback. That’s what my whole family of that generation was based on—an unrelenting work ethic and comebacks.

According to people I’ve talked to who have interviewed me, I’ve had many comebacks myself. I prefer to call them do-overs. Or redefinings. Or I say what a lot of people with long careers that change over time say about themselves when asked, “Where have you been?”: “I never left.”

I suppose I got that . . . whatever you want to call it—survival instinct, elasticity?—from my elders. Some of them are still around. Besides my interesting and incredibly strong brick house of a loving mother, Dolly—whom I’ll talk more about in the next chapter—I am also fortunate to have still living my aunt Thelma, who is also my godmother. I always called her “Aunt Temi.”

She’s very sweet and always wore beautiful glasses. Then she had Lasik. I miss those glasses. Hers were the kind you want your aunt to have—the ones that appear to be upside down, made of platinum and glass that is not from this world but rather from the mesmerizing prisms of Planet Krypton.

Her husband, my uncle Jonah, whom I also love immensely, has giant glasses himself that frame his face with a statement for all: “I’m ready for welding.” I saw him once without his glasses and it scared me. It was like seeing Peter Parker without his Spider-Man suit. Although Peter Parker didn’t look any more macho
in
his Spider-Man suit. By the way, I wore one of those Spider-Man suits on TV once and it really accentuates the peanut.

My dad—whom you’ll meet in the next chapter—had a similar head-accoutrements situation. He was also blinged out in huge glasses and had a large nose (yes, I got a direct hit of that gene) and a strange, Zorro-like pencil-thin mustache that started just under his nose and ended abruptly above the top of his two wafer-thin lips. I never saw my dad without the mustache, but I did also see him once without his glasses.

I was about sixteen, and when I walked into my parents’ bedroom (not something you ever want to do) my dad turned over and his glasses were off. I could have sworn his nose and mustache had been erased. He looked like one of those aliens from
Mars Attacks!,
without the glass helmet to protect his sensitive nonfeatures. I even recall a quick glance to his nightstand, where I thought I saw the entire set of facial features lying there as one unit—glasses, nose, mustache, even eyebrows attached.