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  Speaking of sex, I'm sure that's why my father used to scream so much. I know he wasn't getting any from my mother. I figured that out when he took me to see Barbarella, starring Jane Fonda. I was about fifteen and my mother was visiting her father in Florida. So my father said, "Let's go to the movies." This was great, because I really didn't get a lot of chances to pal around with him alone. Now, my dad's pretty knowledgeable, but I don't think he knew it was going to be a dirty movie.

  Imagine you're fifteen and your hormones are going crazy and Jane Fonda comes on a big screen with those two plastic see-through things over her breasts. And right next to you is your dad.

  We were both pretty embarrassed. We left the theater and never spoke about it.

  I just knew he wasn't getting it at home. So, over the years, whenever my mother called up on my show, I made it a point to ask her about their sexual practices. One time she was acting so crabby that I told her she needed to get laid. After we hung up, Gary stormed into the studio.

  "I can't believe you told your mother she needed to get laid," Baba Booey marveled.

  "She does," I affirmed. "But she wants to be celibate."

  I called my mother back.

  "You want to say you're sorry?" my mother asked.

  "Admit you want to be celibate," I said.

  "How can I be celibate? I'm a married woman," she said.

  "So you're saying you're not celibate? You have a love life?" I asked.

  "Yes," my mother said.

  "Oh, I'm going to throw up," I said.

  "I hate to tell you this, Howard; it's a shock-a-roo, right?" she laughed.

  "You mean you like the pants monster of love? I just can't accept that. You and my dad doing it. If you do do it, it's gotta be once a month, tops. Just tell me how often you do it," I pleaded.

  "It's none of your business," my mother maintained.

  "Please, Ma, I got to know. You let that animal touch you? He bangs you? I can't believe it."

  "That's your father you're talking about," she reminded me.

  "Oh, man, I'm in shock. He touches your cans? Hey, did you know Robin likes anal sex? She's a three-input woman. Would you ever do that, Ma?"

  "Do what? What's this three inputs?" she asked.

  "Either you have two places to put it or three, Mom. Are you a three-input woman with Dad?" How many guys have the balls to ask their mom if she takes it up the ass?

  "Please, Howard," she said.

  "What about that stuff Chip did to Madonna? When he guzzled water and relieved himself." I was referring to the exclusive story that Chip from Enuff Z'Nuff told us about urinating during a sex session with Madonna. "Does that excite you? Can you fathom that?

  Imagine if Dad did that to you. Dad, do me a favor, do that and videotape it. That'll be the greatest videotape that ever was. Does that excite you in some bizarre way, Ma?"

  "I'm not talking," my mother said.

  "I've seen Dad naked. Is the reason you don't like to have sex with him much because it hurts you?" I asked.

  My father, unlike me, is hung like a moose. I'm sure my mother was frightened by his huge hose.

  "Hurts what?" she said.

  "Does it hurt?"

  "It was wonderful talking to you." My mother was ready to bail.

  "I love you, Mommy," I said dutifully.

  "I love you, too," she said.

  "You don't get up on all fours, do you?"

  "Good-bye," my mom said and hung up.

  MY SISTER

 

  Ellen - Daddy's Favorite.

  My sister, Ellen, is the complete opposite of me. She's four years older but she's very

  quiet. We had a perfect relationship. I would

  beg for and suck in all the attention in the house and she could live her life unnoticed.

  She was the type who could just curl up with a book and be in heaven. I remember once, right after she got her license, she and I drove out to the beach. She lay down on the blanket, cracked open her book, and didn't move for hours. Me, I was going out of my friggin' mind. She wouldn't talk to me. She wouldn't move.

  But we used to get along. Except when it came to watching TV. Another one of my mother's idiotic theories was that her two children should watch television together. As I said, my sister is four years older than me, and at ten years of age, she wanted to watch love movies. At six years of age, all I wanted to watch was Yogi Bear cartoons. To me that was the ultimate in entertainment. So my mother devised a plan that every other day the other person got to pick out what we'd watch.

  But my sister was shrewd. One day when it was her turn to pick

  there was a Yogi Bear cartoon I was dying to watch. So she said that she'd let me watch it that day if I let her watch what she wanted for a year. So I said, "Okay." I'm a little kid, I have no idea what a year is. A couple of days went by and she was watching everything she wanted to watch and, finally, I said, "When's my turn to pick the show?" My sister then told me I couldn't pick for a year. So we went to my mother to arbitrate.

  "What was the deal you made?" she asked me.

  "Ellen can pick the shows for a year," I said.

  "That's it," my mother said. "A deal's a deal."

  I learned pretty early that life sucked.

  The best time I ever had with Ellen, though, was when I saw her dancing naked in her room when she was nine. She was developing those trademark Stern woman breasts. But other than that, I didn't catch many glimpses of her. Our household wasn't exactly a nudist colony. Although my father once said, "There's too much modesty in this house," and he walked out of the bathroom stark naked. My mother said, "BEN! BEN!" and my sister covered her eyes. And when I was about nine, I saw my mother naked. That was pretty frightening. Back then, women didn't know about the grooming thing. At first, I thought she was wearing panties. Mohair panties.

 

  Visiting my sister (center) in college while wearing my serial-killer glasses. I was thirteen.

  LITTLE BIG MAN

  All right, so I've got a small penis. It's so embarrassing. I would give anything for even another inch. I don't get it either, because my father is so well hung. He might be four inches, just hanging around. The trouble is, he never gets to do anything with it. My mother knew I had a small penis, but she ignored it whenever she'd take my rectal temperature. But one of the most humiliating memories of my childhood was when my father had to check me for a hernia and he

  actually touched me down there. I threw him out of the room, I was so embarrassed.

  Having a small penis has haunted me throughout my life. Whenever I'm with a bunch of guys, like going to Atlantic City to gamble or stuff, and we have to make a stop on the way to urinate, I always make a beeline for the stalls. I can't do it at a urinal. God forbid someone should see my puny pecker. I barely clear the zipper. If all the stalls are filled and I have to use a urinal, I press up so close to it that it's like I'm humping the porcelain.

  My biggest fear about the draft and going into the army was that my dad told me when you go to the bathroom in the army there are no walls or anything between urinals and toilets. So everybody sees everything. I was going to run off to Canada just for that reason.

  MY STRANGE CHILDHOOD

  Is it any wonder that I had a strange childhood living in this nuclear family? Let me give you a few examples. My mother thought that playing with dolls was an excellent outlet for creativity. But even she didn't want me to be ostracized by all my friends, so she decided to get me marionettes. By the time I was seven years old, I had become an accomplished puppeteer. My father built me a little stage and I would regularly put on shows for my friends and neighbors. In fact, I got so good at it that an old-age home asked me to do a production of Fiddler on the Roof using my marionettes.

  The old people loved it and wouldn't stop complimenting me after the show. They just loved the singing. They were so out of it they didn't realize the voices weren't mine -- it was an actual recording from t
he Broadway show.

  At the end of the night, I was handed an envelope with ten bucks inside! What a windfall! Getting paid good money for something you enjoyed was definitely a trip.

  So I started entertaining my friends with puppet shows in the basement. One thing led to another and before I knew it, I was doing dirty marionette shows. I had a nice girl puppet and a sailor marionette and I would have the sailor fuck the shit out of the girl. Then the pirate puppet would come in, knock the sailor out, and grab his girl and bang her all over the place. My friends went wild.

  The shows got more and more perverse when I got a horse puppet.

  I had the horse fucking all the other puppets and it got pretty out of control. Plus, I kept a running commentary the entire time. My friends loved it. Once I started doing the dirty puppet shows, I really lost interest in regular puppeteering, and pretty soon, all the puppets were wrapped up and put in storage. I had ruined a beautiful, innocent part of my life.

 

  Demonstrating my technique to my cousin Paul.

 

  The X-rated ventriloquist preparing for his next pornographic puppet show.

  Then my mother tried to get me interested in piano lessons, but that also ended on a sour note. I took a few lessons from a local piano teacher who begged my mother to make me quit. "I'm just taking money from you. I feel guilty," he said. A few weeks later, this nice man went home and killed himself.

  My mother didn't give up. She decided I should volunteer at the local cerebral palsy center in my spare time. This lasted four hours. It was an experience that separated the men from the boys. I was definitely a boy.

  A boy veal. Thanks to my overprotective mother, I was the target of every bully in the neighborhood. A fat neighborhood kid named Johnny, who used to blow his nose into his Italian ices, then eat them with a wooden spoon, used to beat me up so regularly that my parents made me go to judo school to learn to defend myself. On the day of my first lesson I took a brush and scrubbed my feet down before I went. I knew in judo you had to take your socks and shoes off. I always hated to take baths or showers. I would go for days without washing until my mother would smell me and go "You stink!" and march me in for a bath. So I went to judo with my scrubbed feet, I took off my shoes and socks, and the Korean instructor looked down at my toenails and he freaked out.

  "These are weapons!" he screamed. "You've got to cut these, you're going to kill somebody." Then, I looked around the room and saw all these young, athletic, Nordic Nazi types jumping over garbage pails and doing somersaults. There was no way I could do that. It was easier letting Johnny beat me up.

  Is it any wonder that I wound up doing drugs? I smoked a lot of pot when I was in high school. But it wasn't fun because it made me so friggin' paranoid. All my friends would come over and we'd go out to my garage and smoke grass. I used to get Mexican. I'd go over to my friend's house and cop from his older brother. His older brother was in college and he was a big, fat, white Jewish guy who'd be lying naked on his bed liked a beached whale wearing a sombrero while reading Penthouse and playing with himself. This guy had the smallest penis I'd ever seen, even smaller than mine. We had to buy our marijuana from this fat naked guy. It was a disgusting experience.

  I would smoke dope and cigarettes up in my bedroom, blowing smoke out the window, while my parents were downstairs thinking I was doing my homework.

  One time, my mother staged a sneak attack. She crashed through the door as I was flinging a cigarette out the window.

  "Howard. I smell smoke in here."

  "What? I don't smell anything."

  "No. I see smoke. I see clouds of smoke in this room," she insisted.

  "I don't see any clouds of smoke," I lied through my teeth. "There's no smoke in here."

  The room was filled with smoke. My mother stormed out. I was victorious. She never brought it up again and to this day she denies that I ever did drugs.

  Being in the middle of this dysfunctional family I was able to come up with a great strategy for coping. Basically, I whined and whined and wore everybody down until I got what I wanted. My sister would always be amazed at my ability to do this. We'd be upstairs and we'd be talking about something that our parents wouldn't give us and I'd turn to her and say, "Watch me. I'm going downstairs and I'm getting it." I would march downstairs and ask for whatever it was they didn't want me to have and then I'd start whining and I'd wear and wear on them and then I'd start crying and I wouldn't give it up. I'd keep going and going and going and finally they'd cave in. My father always told my mother that I would have been one of the greatest trial lawyers who ever lived, the way I just wear people down. It was like Chinese water torture and great practice for the interviewing technique I use today.

  MY SECOND DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY

  There is nothing bad that I can say about my wife, Alison, except for the stupid little arguments that we have.

  She'll argue with me about really stupid stuff. I'm always on a diet, so I eat like a total of five things: tuna fish, baked potatoes, fruits (bananas and apples), Paul Newman salad dressing, and oat bran cereal.

  We are always out of this shit, and I go crazy. How fucking hard is it to keep a few baking potatoes in the house? I know what you're saying: "Hey, Howard, why the fuck don't you go do your own food shopping?"

  But that's just it. Alison doesn't have to food shop, either. We send out for food. They ship it out to the house. All she has to do is make

  a phone call and remember that her man likes baked potatoes.

  "Hold it," Alison says, "I do remember. But you have to tell me when you're running out of something."

  How fucking difficult is it to take a look in the fridge and see I need an apple? I tell her to order apples, anything -- order a crate of oat bran cereal -- but NO, at least once a week we need to have this fight.

  And what a great husband I am. I pay the extra three dollars a box for cereal just so my wife doesn't have to go food shopping.

  Also, twice a year I play in a card game with a bunch of guys. I have a few male friends and once in a rare while I need to get out and bond with the guys.

  My wife says, "You're playing cards again? I have to spend Friday night alone? You don't want to be with me?"

  I explain I need to do this once in a while the way Spock needed to mate on Vulcan once every seven years. We begin to yell and scream and the ridiculousness hits me. Here's a woman who spends every day with her clique of girlfriends gabbing it up, playing tennis, and going for lunches -- and I can't have a card game twice a year without some shit being thrown my way?

  I just threaten to go over to Jessica Hahn's house (if she has a house) and that quiets Alison down. But I know how lucky I am to have found a woman like Alison, who met me when I was a total loser in college with nothing but some big dreams. She's learned to suffer the bizarre personality that was a by-product of being raised like a veal in my parents' household. That's why I tolerate her PMS and her yenta friends and her snoring and her lunches at the country club. And that's why I haven't cheated on her for nineteen years.

  But my in-laws! Don't get me wrong, I love my in-laws. First of all, they're cool enough to let me call them Bob and Norma. I don't have to be a phony and call them Mom and Dad. And they're really nice liberal people. They even smoked pot once with Alison because they wanted to experience what their children were going through. But two minutes with these people is enough to send you to Creedmore Psychiatric Center for observation.

  TAKE MY FATHER-IN-LAW. PLEASE.

  He's almost perfect, but I have just a few criticisms. First of all, he talks in a monotone like HAL from 2001. Then he's got these

  annoying habits like lying on my brand-new-God-knows-how-many-thousand-dollar couch with his bare feet that he walked through the grass on! Plus, he reads all these newspapers and leaves them lying all over the white couch. Then, as if that's not enough, he does the crossword puzzles in ink and leaves the pen on the couch.

  And
he loves to watch movies on video. He's in the house less than ten minutes and he's reprogrammed my VCR and my entire video collection is in disarray. He's got the videos out of the boxes, scattered all around the room. Between the tapes and the newspapers, it looks as if a windstorm hit my house. Then he starts going around trying to make home improvements. The next thing I know he's gluing tennis ball halves on the garage back wall so we know how far to back the cars into the garage.

  But what totally irritates me is the way he leaves the doors in the house open. We have an indoor cat. We found it abandoned and we nursed it back to health. Because we declawed it, we can't let it go outside since there are a lot of raccoons in the neighborhood and they're all rabid. Even my seven-year-old understands that the cat has to stay inside, and we have to make sure all the doors are closed. We have a sliding door, you close it. Simple enough.

  Every time Bob comes over, he leaves the doors open. He refuses to acknowledge that I have my own way of life. He always says, "Why don't you let the animal be an animal and go outside?" So I explain to him once again, it's an indoor cat. And, of course, he leaves the

 

  My future in-laws were great to me even though I had NO radio show!

  door open, the cat gets out, and he tries to blame the kids. Once when he did this I had to spend an entire day of my vacation looking for the cat. I went to the neighbors and asked them if they had seen it. They're from another country, they didn't know what was going on, so they called the cops. They thought I looked kind of seedy. Then the cops caught me on my neighbor's property and I had to go through a whole explanation with them. Finally, I called Jackie, one of the writers on my show, and his wife, Nancy, had a good idea. She told me to go outside with a can opener because that's the sound the cat always hears when it's about to be fed. So I took the can opener and plugged it into a thirty-foot extension cord and I was spending my vacation walking around outside with a can opener going. I felt like a moron, but it worked. The cat started meowing. We were a family again.

  MY MOTHER-IN-LAW? YOU CAN TAKE HER, TOO.

  I love her a lot but there are one or two things about her that bother me. The minute she gets in the house all she wants to do is monopolize my children, which is fine with me. But she reverts to this baby talk not only with my newborn but with my two other kids, who are ten and seven. Then she starts talking to me in this baby talk with her thick Boston accent. My name instantly goes from Daddy to "Doddie."