Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (4 page)

At that instant I was fearful my own father was the actual Mr. Potato Head. The first thing that went through my mind was “And he didn’t make a penny off all that merchandising.”

Ironically, years later, it was my dear friend Don Rickles who said that line. He’s kind of a father to me now that my dad’s been gone for several years—and Don
is
the actual voice of Mr. Potato Head in the
Toy Story
movies. All right, that last line was not so much ironic as just name-dropper-y at a time when I had nowhere else to go with this story. Point is, my dad’s face was diminished without his huge glasses resting on his gigantic nose, and I was scared to see him without his headgear at two in the morning.

The only other time I was thrown like that was when I walked in on my mom one day and she was dressed as Gimli from
The Lord of the Rings
.

Deep apologies to my mom; of course that never happened. She never wore a helmet. Once, in a television stand-up appearance on HBO, I mentioned that my mother used to wear a Viking helmet and culottes. That didn’t make her happy. So as I mention it here, in this book that will be in print, I’d like to apologize to my mother for saying she used to wear a Viking helmet and culottes. I might have also mentioned “tit plates” at one time on some show, and for that I apologize to my mother as well.

And so this book has begun. Tales of tit plates, tales of comedy, tales of loss, tales of tail . . . that are not spoken of. Okay, for those of who you are waiting for me to talk dirt or tell out-of-school stories, I’m planning to, once I clean my emotional plate, in like seventy or eighty more pages . . . Wait, I can’t do that, there are people’s lives at stake here, and sharing personal secrets about them serves no purpose. Except for this one time when I met this girl . . . No, I’m not going to do it. And anyway, she was a “woman.” Least that’s what I told the judge. And she was in big-girl pants and everything.

For now, dear reader, I hope you are curling up in bed with someone you enjoy reading with—because you’ve been together so long there’s just nothing more to say to each other—and if this book is working for you on any level—occasionally one of you is laughing out loud, so the person next to you may actually speak to you and say, “What are you laughing at?” And you may say, “Well, it’s in reference to Bob’s penis when the light hits it just right.”

And with that, I am now going to roll up my sleeves as well as my pant legs, put an ice pack on my lap, and move on. Now may be a good time to get a beverage.

Chapter 2

DEATH AND COMEDY ARE CLOSELY RELATED

It sucks when funny people die. It sucks when unfunny people die too, but not as much. As you now know, many of my relatives died young. Many of them were funny. But none was as funny as my dad, who passed away in 2006. Of all my childhood heroes, biggest of all was my father. Well, there was this other guy, a UPS driver who picked me up after school one day and took me to the cornfield. No, that didn’t happen. He was a FedEx guy. Reset.

My dad, Ben, was a huge influence on my doing what I do: hitting on young women . . . last deflection, I promise, what I meant to say was . . . working in comedy. The only young woman my dad ever hit on was my mother, whom he started dating when she was sixteen. He was seven years older than her. And ironically seven inches taller than her. On his back. (Don’t worry, I have it all figured out: when I give my mom a copy of this book, I will just white out a ton of shit.)

My dad taught me nothing means more than the primary relationships in our lives. The love of a great woman and children. Hopefully your own, not the neighbor’s. And then what matters almost as much is the love of good friends. Just make sure you bring in enough income to buy all their love.

Like me, my dad dealt with death and all the hardships in life through humor. Sick and weird humor. We would be standing next to an ice machine and hear a cycle of ice drop with a loud thud, and he would say, “There’s your grandmother.” As though her corpse wanted to say hello by dropping its two hundred pounds within earshot. Not always funny, but always some kind of metaphysical release from the pain.

I think of him now and it all makes sense. He was such a good father and such a great man. I still don’t understand the mustache though. He would darken it with an eyebrow pencil for that perverted Zorro look. But instead of leaving Zs, he just left weird shit in your room. One night when I was seventeen, I drove home late and he had put an eggplant under my sheets, propped up on the pillow with a towel wrapped around it like Yentl in a babushka, with a note next to it that said, “Bob, I waited up for you.”

He could have been a stand-up, if he wasn’t a child of the Great Depression who had to raise his five siblings by going into the supermarket meat business. He was truly a survivor. His work ethic stayed with me my whole life. He drove himself hard for fifty years—worked his way up from a butcher in a supermarket to become a VP of meat. That’s right, a vice president of meat. I don’t know who the president of meat was at the time, but I do know my dad was under a lot of pressure from work. Meat weighed heavily on his mind. His meat pulled him down.

No, that’s not a setup for a joke. But when I was about six, my world was pulled down when my dad had a massive heart attack himself. He used to smoke six packs of cigarettes a day. Didn’t even open them, just put a box of Camels in his mouth and torched ’em. It was like
Mad Men
except it wasn’t about the world of advertising. It was all about . . . wait for it . . . meat.

He really did smoke six packs of Camels a day, from the moment he got up till the moment he put the lights out. Crazy. Next to the surgeon general’s warning on cigarettes they should’ve added his picture. It would’ve been the actual size of his head. He had a very small head. His head was about the size of the surgeon general’s warning on the side of a box of cigarettes, to be specific.

He had a second heart attack six months later that damn near killed him. He was in a hospital in Norfolk, Virginia, and I remember that my mom, Dolly, claimed she
had
to become his nurse because she didn’t like the care he was being given. But years later he informed me that my mom had decided to take over the nursing duties because his actual nurse had “fallen in love with” him while sponge-bathing him back to health.

He spoke of it proudly, telling me his nurse had said, “You can’t die, I am in love with you,” and describing to me in detail how she had tried to bathe him back to life. Ech. He was good at grossing me out. Great news was, he didn’t die, and my mom had the nurse removed from the case.

The nurse’s story had an unhappy ending. As I recall, she was fired from the hospital entirely, but who knows—my entire family history is a blur when told by the surviving elders. It’s frustrating; just when someone is ready to tell you their life history, their mind starts to go, and the facts become diffused. I’m glad I’m starting this book now.

The thing about my dad is, as much of an influence as he was on me, I didn’t really get to know him as a person until I was about sixteen. I guess he was shy. Processing it now, I realize he didn’t relate well to young kids. I think he was very relieved when I finally got old enough to understand a good dick joke. I had two older sisters, so once my father had a son [
angelic musical fanfare played here
] he figured he could just talk to me like I was already the beer-drinkin’ buddy he’d been waiting for his entire life. Again, I was sixteen.

Some of my favorite times were earlier when I was almost a teenager and he would take me on road trips from Norfolk (where we lived from when I was maybe four, or seven; I don’t know the year because my mother changes it each time we discuss it) to Richmond, Virginia, to visit “the stores”—the other branches of his employer, the way-bankrupt-and-gone Food Fair Stores, a company that was run by some Mr. Potter–like individuals. My dad wasn’t Willy Loman. He was a good and noble man. More like George Bailey, one of Jimmy Stewart’s best characters. George Bailey was a fictional man who believed in justice and kindness. And he, like my dad, believed that a man should be paid fairly for his efforts. Which meant he got fucked.

So I was about eleven or twelve when he drove me to Richmond. First, we checked out “the stores” and then we checked out the competition, which was A&P or Stop & Shop. One time he told me Stop & Shop was going to merge with A&P and be called Stop & Pee. I don’t know what to tell you except that he was my dad. And he was a great dad and a great man. And I loved him. Creepy jokes and all.

So on this one trip we were at a store and we went to the back to check out his rival’s meat case. Dad looked closely at all their self-service meat, all individually wrapped in plastic. My uncle Jonah claimed at my dad’s funeral that it was my father, Ben Saget, who helped bring to the American supermarket the whole concept of “self-service” meats—of not having to go to the butcher anymore and get your steaks wrapped in paper. I know that can’t be true, but I do believe my dad was heavily motivated to make self-service meats the thing of the future.

As he led me up and down the meat case, he’d try to impress upon me how amazing it was that all these meats just sat in the case, fresh, prewrapped, and preweighed with a sticker that told you everything you needed to know about your purchase. I’m telling you this story because I did something that day that I feel bad about still. As my dad strolled past the case checking out his rival’s wares, I poked a hole with my finger through every package I could, on a mission to ruin all their self-service meat so that customers would be outraged by the perishing, unsuccessfully Cryovac-ed raw product decomposing in front of them.

We got into my dad’s car and were about to drive off when I proudly exclaimed to him what I’d done. “Dad, I poked a hole in every one of those packages of meat. No one will want to buy their meat and they’ll have to go back to Food Fair, where there are no holes poked in their packages.”

I’ll never forget how upset my dad was: “Why did you do that? You shouldn’t have done that, son. I have to go back in there and straighten this out.” That was the moral compass of my dad. Probably not the best business move to go back into that store, find the meat manager, and confront him with what his numbskull son had just done to his entire display. But he did it anyway.

I was confused. I had thought I’d been helping him. He got back in the car fifteen minutes later and wasn’t mad at me, just told me never to do it again. He said every man was entitled to be in business and it was wrong to sabotage others just because they’re your competition. And then he let it go, and we continued our father-son day trip.

He took me to the deli he’d been talking about the whole time on our two-hour drive to Richmond. We both ordered a particular sandwich there that single-handedly set me on a path of bad deli food I am still trying to eradicate from my diet. The sandwich was called [
timpani drum roll
] “the Sailor Sandwich.” I was eleven or twelve when I ate it, but I finally passed it just last month.

I’m proud to say, having been a deli clerk myself and a past member of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters’ union (I’ve been on a leave of absence since college), that I understand the value of the girth of a good hunk of meat—not to mention the metaphoric penis humor that springs from it. Okay, you may want to sit down or go online for this . . . the Sailor Sandwich consisted of rye bread with melted Swiss and of course fatty pastrami (redundant), sauerkraut, and a huge Hebrew National knockwurst grilled and split as its centerpiece.

How, you ask, could my dad have possibly had two heart attacks several years earlier, eaten that crazy food, and lived until eighty-nine years old? Answer: luck, meds, he didn’t want to die, and he loved a good piece of flounder. He was one of the first people on Coumadin, a blood thinner that’s commonly used now. In those years they didn’t have Lipitor, which is what I now take daily—okay, hourly. (If you’re reading this book, I assume you have high cholesterol or will shortly, I’m flinching as I type this; and I’m relatively sure I know what I’m talking about.) Doctors have told me for years that once you turn forty you should take Lipitor. I’m not trying to get free Lipitor (or the generic) by mentioning it here. I just want to keep
you
alive.

That’s one of the things I love about myself—I actually want to keep people alive. As long as they can stay alive. I mean, life’s a window of time we’re given; why not open it and stay inside it as long as we can, right?

Sorry I typed the word
right
with a question mark at the end of it. I look forward to the day when people have dropped
right
and
really
from our vernacular. But damn, I’ve used it a lot in this book. Whatever. Oh, and can we drop the
whatever
too? And while we’re at it, can we get rid of “That’s what
I’m
talkin’ about!” Oh wait, no, let’s not get rid of that—that’s the name of my last comedy special. Slid that in so quietly, right? Damn.

Well, it’s all just words anyway. Personally, words and names don’t really hurt me. Because my father passed on to me the last name of Saget, I would say as a kid I was pretty much set up in the area of name-calling. Saget came from a Russian Jewish name that kept changing, probably because my ancestors kept running from persecution and name changes were all a person could do to hide their identity back then. Now we have nose jobs, Botox, and caramel-apple-headed orange-hued face-lifts. But back in the day, there were no plastic surgeons, so a name change and a wig were about all you could do to hide from the enemy.

I heard Ivan the Terrible was a victim of a bad plastic surgeon. When the bandages came off, the doctor looked at him and said, “Ivan, you look terrible.” Wikipedia has this to say about Ivan the Terrible: “Intelligent and devout, yet given to rages and prone to episodic outbreaks of mental illness.” Sounds like pretty much everyone in show business, nixing the devout part.