Private Parts (6 page)

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."

"Hi,
Doddie,"
she says when I come in the room.

"Hi, what?" I say.

"Hi,
Doddie.
Say hi to
Doddie."

First of all, my name is Daddy, not Doddie. And she acts like I don't know my own kids.

Then she's got to examine everything I eat. Now I admit that this is a little more civilized than examining my underpants, but it's still irritating as hell. I don't like people watching me eat. One of the most annoying things in the world that anybody can do is to put his face in my food.

"Let's see what we're eating today," she'll say. What do you mean "we"? She actually picks at my salad bowl with a fork, stirring everything around. I go out of my mind.

"You've got hot with cold, Howard. Hot rice with cold tuna?" Norma says. "I am fascinated by the combinations of food that you put in one bowl."

Great. What that really means is I'm disgusted by what you eat,

you big, ugly, six-foot-five dork. And the fact that my daughter fucks you repulses me. Now I feel as if I'm a fucking zoo animal on exhibit. I felt like pushing her head into the damn food, she was so fascinated by it.

But the worst thing about my in-laws is the incessant questions they ask me. The second they walk into the room they start asking Howard Stern questions. This is my home. I want to relax. I don't want to think about being Howard Stern. But my in-laws don't let me forget it for a second. It's as if I've got two Stuttering Johns there, asking one stupid question after another. I made the mistake of showing them some of the tapes of my television show and that set them off.

"Howie." My father-in-law calls me Howie. God, how I hate that. "When did Kitty Carlisle Hart add the Hart to her name?"

"How would I know, Bob?" I said. I had her on the show as a guest and maybe I said two words to her off-camera.
Boom,
next question. Just like a press conference.

"How much is a person like Kitty Carlisle Hart or Arlene Francis or Dr. Ruth paid when they come on your show?"

I DIDN'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT MY TV AND RADIO CAREER! I would have talked about their life or my kids or tennis or anything else. And quite frankly, WHO GIVES A RAT'S ASS WHEN KITTY CARLISLE CHANGED HER NAME TO KITTY CARLISLE HART!

My in-laws are just like my audience when they call up with these stupid questions. But at least I can hang up on my audience. Here, I was a captive. I couldn't leave. So I started making believe I didn't hear them and I made them repeat the questions two or three times, hoping they'd get annoyed. Like Muhammad Ali doing rope-a-dope, I hoped maybe they'd punch themselves out. But it didn't work.

When Bob rested, Norma piped in with more questions.

"How will they promote your radio show when you go into new markets?" she asked.

I actually started to answer her, but she was already asking the kids what they wanted for breakfast. It was as if she didn't even want to know the answer.

"How do you get guests for the TV show?" she started in again.

"Booker," I grunted. At this point, I was down to one-word answers.

"What do you mean 'booker'?" Bob asked.

"Booker, we have a booker. Frank Smiley," I said.

"And how does he know who to call? Does, say, a Kitty Carlisle Hart call you to be on the show?" Bob asked.

I was so woozy by this time that I was ready to pass out.

But I couldn't even find a couch, because every one was taken. Bob was on one with his crosswords and pens and dirty newspapers all over the place. And one of Alison's brothers was on the other, watching sports on TV. Alison's brothers aren't as bad as her parents with the questions. But they can eat a person out of house and home in a shorter time than it takes Bob to leave the freaking door open so the cat can escape. I've never seen anything eat so much.

Uh-oh. "Entertainment Tonight" was coming on TV. My father-in-law was armed with more questions.

"Howie, Mary Hart, she's very perky. A very up personality. What kind of gal is she?"

"Don't know," I grunted, hoping to put an end to this nonsense. He had fifty more Mary Hart questions. "Do you think they show her legs on purpose on the show? What else does she do all day aside from 'Entertainment Tonight'? "

How the fuck was I supposed to know? I've never met the woman in my life. He kept asking nonsense questions that maybe only her mother would know the answers to. My father-in-law assumes I know everyone in show business, and when I don't, he's very disappointed.

But I have one surefire way of getting back at all of them -- my parents, Alison, her parents, whoever. Whenever I'm with my family and I find myself getting irritated by something, which can usually be measured in nanoseconds, I run into the next room and I write down whatever they said on a little pad I keep there. And the next day, it becomes radio material. I write it in shorthand, too, so they can't understand what I've written if they find it. And after I talk about it on the radio I come home and Alison is all over my case.

"Can't we have a personal life? Does everything we do have to be grist for your stupid radio show? I don't want you to talk about our personal life on the air!" she yells at me.

Honey, if you'd let me out of the house once in a while maybe I'd have something to talk about. Maybe I'd experience other things besides your parents. Maybe at a card game I could have some funny things happen. But I'm locked up like a veal. Welcome to hell.

"Hey, I have an idea. Let me go over to Jessica Hahn's house!

Then
I'll have something else to talk about," I say. That shuts her up but good.

STERN: THE NEXT GENERATION

I'm the only male in a household of five. And I love having three daughters. They're great kids and that's all because of Alison. I've told her that the kids are her responsibility. Believe me, it's better that Alison should raise them. If it was up to me, the kids wouldn't know that people have private parts. I'd teach them that the human body is filthy, and that all men are evil, you can be sure of that.

And just wait until they get old enough to date. Do you think there's a man on this planet good enough for my daughters? I look around at the creeps and mutants out there, the men who jerk off to my show in their cars, and the idea that these idiots are going to invade my life and marry my daughters at some point really frightens me.

Among the things I'm lacking as a parent are those really good hardship stories to tell my kids. Whenever I complained as a kid to my father, he would lay out his heavy Depression-era stories. He'd tell me how he didn't have a pot to piss in and couldn't afford a pair of shoes to go to school in. My grandfather would buy two left shoes from a pushcart vendor -- the only pair of shoes that my father would have for years. My father would also tell me that he didn't have a desk to put his stuff in until he was thirty-five. And my mother! Her mother died when she was nine, so she had to go live on a farm with relatives for a year. She had only one pair of underpants, which she had to wash every night by hand.

Now these are good deprivation stories!

With my kids, I have no good tales of woe. What can I say about my childhood that was adverse?

"When Daddy was young he had to buy pot from a big, fat, smelly Rush Limbaugh look-alike."

"Emily, when I was your age, Daddy had to break into Grandpa's liquor cabinet to steal his apricot brandy so he could get girls drunk enough to fuck them."

"Daddy couldn't score acid in college without writing home for money."

"Daddy had to roll his own joints before he went to see the math tutor."

I have nothing to tell them.

"When I was growing up, I had to share a bathroom with my sister. And I had to walk fifteen feet down the hall to get to it.
"

Horrors!

The only thing I can tell them is that when I was their age we didn't have a housekeeper to clean my room, so they should clean their own rooms.

But I love my family. Alison's a great wife and I have three lovely daughters. A lot of people ask me whether I wish I had a son, but I tell them I don't really care. But they say, Aren't you concerned that the Stern name won't be continued? What, my family tree is so important? What are we, the Rockefellers, the Kennedys, the Munsters? I come from a long line of garbagemen, pants pressers, and butchers. What a loss. The Stern family crest will have to be taken down. So what?

HOWARD STERN'S DEFORMED PSYCHO MONGOLOID BABY!

BABY WITHOUT BRAIN SURVIVES! HAS THE I.Q. OF RADIO TALK SHOW HOST!!!

REAL FATHER IS BLACK...STERN IS PISSED...

ARE YOU THE STERN BABY'S REAL FATHER?

BABY BORN
WITHOUT EARS OR TONGUE

STERN KID GLOWS IN
THE DARK

S
crew
magazine honors the birth of my third child with a
front-page headline. A new Stern is cause for celebration.

My Radio Crew

Back, left to right: Jackie "the Joke Man" Martling, Scott the Engineer, Howard, Billy West, Fred Norris, Robin Quivers, Gary Dell'Abate. Front: Stuttering John Melendez.

Gange, in my back office, keeping the log for my show.

Boy Gary, pretending to work.

Scott the Engineer, on the phone complaining about his hair.

Stuttering John, pretending to read.

Gorilla, another intern, learning all about radio as he demonstrates
microwaving Howard's infamous baked potatoes.