Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian Read Free Page B

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