Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (6 page)
My bubbe was well aware she did not excel at languages. But the sound of her name brought all the grandchildren joy. It wasn’t just from hearing the funny sound of the word
bubbe.
Her husband was dying of liver cancer. Don’t think he dealt too well with trying to run a tailor shop and having five sons and a daughter. And yes, those same five sons and daughter were my father and his siblings—and the boys, who, unbeknownst to themselves, continually were becoming inducted into the Heart Attack Club.
One nice story I recall about my bubbe: She was visiting my parents and me when I was fourteen. At that time we were living in the San Fernando Valley, as my dad had just transferred to California from Virginia. It was the only way he could keep his job with the food company. He had a lot of pride in his work, and my bubbe, his mother, was prideful too. Never wanted anyone to see her at night after all her “gear” came off. Before she went to bed she took off her girdle, removed her two hearing aids, put up her small amount of hair in an industrial-strength net, and dropped her teeth in a glass of Efferdent.
I played tricks on her relentlessly. I was an asshole. I didn’t have any friends, so I chose my grandmother to be the object of all my hazing. She’d have to go to the bathroom and I wouldn’t let her go. She’d yell, “Bobby, I have to take off my girdle, let me go! I’m gonna make it in my pants!” And I’d laugh and say, “But, Bubbe, I love you so much, I’ll miss you, please don’t leave me!” I am ashamed to say I was a teenage dickweed. No different from the idiot boys who tweet me now and say dumb shit just to mess with people. It ended well—she never soiled herself and we always laughed about my behavior over the dinner table: “Listen to what Bobby did to me today . . .” Each day she visited had become a comedic adventure.
Anyway, there’s a payoff to this particular story. On February 9, 1971, at six
A
.
M
., my whole family was jolted awake by an earthquake. It was a huge quake and didn’t seem like it was going to stop. I ran into my bubbe’s room and her bed was literally moving back and forth. The closets were swinging open and closed. She sat up, furious with me, and yelled, “Bobby, stop shaking my bed!” It was a bad-silent-film moment where I was trying to explain what was happening as she was grabbing her hearing aids. I left her and staggered to my parents’ room. I remember them getting dressed and then taking me in their arms, bringing me under one of the doorway arches made of drywall and a brittle wood frame, to kiss me good-bye in case the world was ending.
It was the famous Sylmar quake we’d experienced. Looking out the windows you could see the sidewalk rolling like gentle ocean waves. It lasted about a minute and at the time, I recall, they measured it as having a magnitude of 7.1. Since then, history, and I guess the devices they measure quakes with, reassessed it as a 6.6. Like everything else in life, with time it got marked down. Shoulda sold it when it got to 6.8. I used to have a joke that came from that experience. I had a nightmare I was getting a vasectomy and there was an earthquake during the surgery. The doctor came in to tell me the bad news: “Sorry, Bob, it was a 7.1 but now it’s a 6.4.” I’d always look all proud at the setup. “That’s right, it was a 7.1.”
Losing my bubbe was tough for me. Tough for all of us: my cousins, my aunt, my sisters, my parents. She was in a convalescent home in Philadelphia and I would sit at her bedside singing love songs I’d written for her. She rallied and seemed to recover from the severe stroke she’d had, but by the time I played a third original song for her, she knew that it was time to go.
In sci-fi horror movies we often discover, right as the world is about to be wiped out, that something as simple as fire or water can destroy the invaders from another galaxy. For my poor bubbe, fire and water would have been a reprieve. There is nothing more dangerous for a person on the razor’s edge of life than the shrill falsetto tones of a sixteen-year-old boy belting out love songs before his voice has changed.
She was one of the greatest women of my life. And I don’t think my singing had anything to do with her demise. Others have not been so lucky. I was playing “You Are My Sunshine” once in my backyard and on the lyric “You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you,” a squirrel had a heart attack in midair and plummeted to its death. Nature doesn’t lie.
This chapter is about two women who meant the world to me. No, it is not about a three-way with two waitresses—that story comes later. In fact, I have to make it up. Look, there’s no easy way to segue into this; what I’m about to describe is some painful stuff. Life’s interesting. Sometimes it just sucks. Sometimes your heart gets broken. My heart’s been broken several times, and not that long ago. It may be broken again by the time this book goes to paperback, and again for the audiobook.
I’m not telling you anything that’s not the obvious. We all go through pain and heartache. It’s part of the journey. Just when we think we’re on the upswing and have achieved some kind of breakthrough or closure, something else hits. It’s like the family I once heard about who left California because they were scared of earthquakes and moved to Colorado, where a massive boulder fell on their house. That sonofabitch coyote.
Our destiny is not usually what we expect it to be. I’ve known lots of people who’ve tried to plan exactly how things would turn out for them, and then when life didn’t go according to plan, they ended up in denial. They just couldn’t accept that their end point was different than what they’d envisioned. Acceptance of endings has been pretty difficult for me too. It’s painful for me right now just to end this paragraph.
There’s a great quote about the difficulty of “endings” that comes directly from movie star and occasional hero Tom Cruise. He said, “Nothing ends nicely, that’s why it ends.” That’s true of a relationship for sure, but the quote could also apply to the end of a life. That’s right, I’m using a Tom Cruise quote to introduce my personal stories of loss.
You always have to be careful to choose the
right
Tom Cruise quote. If you’re looking at your father in a coffin and up comes your uncle, Ralph Kramden–style, yelling into the casket, “
SHOW ME THE MONEY, BABY!!!”
I’d say that’s not the appropriate quote for the moment. Maybe that’s where the expression
cry uncle
came from.
I looked up the roots of the expression
cry uncle
and it involves being tickled by a friend to the point of begging for help—from your uncle. It also refers back to ancient Roman days when young boys would yell out in Latin, “
Patrue mi patruissime,”
which, translated, means, “Please tell your uncle to take his finger out of my butthole.” I’m not sure if that’s the exact translation, but wherever it came from, it too did not end well.
So the Cruise quote was, “Nothing ends nicely . . .” Sometimes a person’s life does in fact end relatively nicely—compared to how it could’ve ended. Especially if there’s suffering involved. And for people you care deeply about, the less suffering they have to go through, the better.
Having lost quite a few people over the years, I know that when someone dies or is dying, you just want to ease their pain, even end it if you can. That’s why euthanasia can be simpler than divorce. Oh wait, I didn’t type that. But wait, you read it, so I must have. Silly me. Or maybe if you read like I do, you just skimmed, and so it didn’t register and I’m safe.
I’ve been talking a lot with my friends lately about death and divorce. I’ve been obsessed with these subjects for years actually. Sometimes it seems like death, the finality of it, is easier to go through than a breakup. I wouldn’t imagine most people share that opinion, yet I’ve found when I bring it up among friends they understand exactly what I’m talking about. Or seem to, until they storm out of the dinner party crying.
It’s not an easy subject, death. It’s up there with politics and religion, in that it tends to lead to some pretty heated discussion. If, say, you are dating someone, and you have plans to possibly have sex with them, do not bring up death. Unless the person you’re dating is an undertaker, in which case you just found your way in.
Inevitably, going back through our lives and remembering people we’ve lost makes us think of our own mortality. When I was a teenager, having a different uncle die every couple years, I never pictured myself making it past my fifties. Then, losing my two sisters so young, I felt even more like a sword of Damocles was hanging over my head. When was it going to be my turn?
I don’t feel that way anymore. Maybe I shouldn’t jinx it by putting that in print. But these days I see myself in the future and I try to envision a kind, horny old man walking around making people laugh whenever I can. In front of the camera, behind the camera, inserting the camera into myself, then having surgery to have it removed . . . Strange to imagine one’s own death. When I imagine it now, I see it as a sort of dramatic spontaneous combustion. Like I’ll just be walking down the street and from the sheer overamped energy I’ve gone through my entire life with, I’ll blow up. Just disintegrate. But cleanly. I won’t want anyone walking by me covered by my remains of the day.
All of this death talk is leading toward the subject of this chapter, which is my two sisters, who were taken from us too soon. I feel a bit narcissistic discussing my personal losses, knowing so many people reading this have suffered their own. But this is my book, so here goes.
I lost two of the most important women in my life. They were my two older sisters. Andi (short for Andrea) died at age thirty-four of a brain aneurysm. And then years later, Gay lost her life at the age of forty-seven to the disease scleroderma. In the years since, I’ve been very active as a board member of the Scleroderma Research Foundation, trying to raise money to fund the research to help find a cure for this rare disease.
I feel badly I haven’t done as much in the name of my sister Andi to fund brain aneurysm research. And I’ve only done a few benefits for the American Heart Association, even though heart disease is a cause I should pay closer attention to, since all of my uncles and my dad had heart attacks. It’s just part of who I am that I try to raise money for people who are suffering. And having a benefit seems the easiest way to make money quickly if you’re part of a non-profit charity not funded by the NIH. My phone died recently and I held a benefit for it. Sure is quiet in here.
I loved my sisters, Andi and Gay, very much. They were six and ten years older than me, respectively. They were both schoolteachers. Really good ones. Which means they were underpaid and loved to impart as much wisdom and goodness as they could to their students. I still meet people today who tell me how much Andi and Gay changed their lives.
Honestly I don’t know how my parents did it. They lost four children in total—twins before I was born and then my sisters. My mom tells me, “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of them.” She’s not speaking only of grief and sadness either. That’s one of the things I love most about my mom. She speaks of her deceased children the way brave mothers and fathers I’ve met throughout my life often speak of children they have lost, no matter what the circumstance. They learn, as much as they can, not to dwell on the sadness and instead remember the good times and focus on them.
When tragedy strikes, it’s more important than ever to look for anything that can bring humor and joy to every moment. When my sister Gay was in the hospital, we joked about how bad the food was—two slices of bologna on white bread with mayo. So I broke hospital rules and went to Jerry’s Deli and got her chicken matzo ball soup and a turkey sandwich. In her sick state she could barely eat it, but it was definitely better food. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have snuck in that stuffed cabbage. Even she laughed when her gas got so bad that one of her farts knocked a Dixie cup off her dinner tray. Some people say it was coincidence but I believe it was a force bigger than any of us in that room—cabbage gas.
Not only that, but she died so long ago, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, the Jerry’s Deli across the street where I got the chicken soup is now closed. It’s one thing to take my sister from me, but, Lord God, why did you have to close a deli that made a decent Reuben and had good potato salad?
Comic relief truly comes at the strangest moments. I had so many laughs with my father during his hospice time. Laughter through tears hits more senses than most human experience. When you’re laughing and crying simultaneously, the tears often run down your cheeks and roll into your open mouth. It’s shocking how salty tears are when you’re not used to tasting them. And if you
are
used to tasting tears, well, that’s a compelling fetish you have, my friend. And one that requires real skill—to be able to cry on cue, then tilt your head back so you can drink your teardrops . . . or do you just get off on making someone else cry and then licking their tears? That’s just creepy.
What’s creepier is there exists out there in the world a certain percentage of people reading this who can relate—and also get off on licking tears. I don’t want to know them. Creepy weird tear lickers. Yet, I am not here to judge.