by Howard Stern
"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 cont
inued? 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.
Howard (sex symbol) at the console.
Jackie "the Joke Man," killing time between weekends.
Fred Norris, King of Mars, with stacks of cartridge tapes for playing sound effects and commercials.
Robin, following the top stories, in the world's largest litter box.
A FAN'S-EYE VIEW
This cartoonist's impression of the show was faxed to me on July 1, 1993.
Black and Blue Like Me
Howard in the 'Hood
Remember the book Black Like Me? It was about a reporter who dyed his skin black and traveled throughout the South to experience what it's like to be black. I could have written that book, only I would have called it "Black and Blue Like Me." I grew up the only white man in a black neighborhood in Roosevelt, Long Island, a pawn in my mother's little social experiment in integration.
My mother is a wonderful, well-intentioned woman and I love her dearly, but one thing she was always rotten at was picking neighborhoods to live in. When my father started making a decent living with his recording studio, we could have lived almost anywhere on Long Island. But she had to pick Roosevelt, a little one-square-mile town that anybody with any sense would know was ripe for the realtors to start planting black people in. Overnight, there was an exodus of whites from Roosevelt. The Irish, the Poles, the Jews, the Italians -- they all left. But my mother, the martyr, had to stay.
It was amazing. One day I'd go over to a friend's house to play, and the next day I'd go knock on the door and a big black guy would answer.
"Hey man, who you looking for? We be in this house now." Every day another one of my friends would be gone. Can you imagine how traumatic that is to a kid? But did my mother care? Damn right she didn't! She had her nice middle-class black friends. Meanwhile, I was beginning to get the shit beat out of me every day by the welfare recipients who are moving into my neighborhood.
My mother didn't care; she wanted to build my character. Every part of life was about lesson builders -- even the car pool. We used to have a car pool every day to get to school. My mother, always a conscientious neighbor, would drive my classmates a few days a week. Except for me. She thought I needed air. Air and exercise. So I had to walk to school. And this was some walk; it wasn't just around the block. Every day I'd be walking to school with a heavy book bag and I would hear a car horn toot and there was my mother driving my friends, waving at me as she cruised by.
One day, I was walking to school and a bee stung me in the ankle and my foot began to swell. I was limping like a cripple. All of a sudden, my mother drove by. I saw her and I yelled, "MA!" V-o-o-m. She went right by. That afternoon, I hobbled home and complained to her and she told me I didn't need a ride. It was good for me to stagger home. This was what made the fiber of a person. Her and her fiber.
Anyway, one day there must have been a typhoon or a blizzard because she gave me a ride to school. I was sitting in the front seat of the car and my three remaining school friends were in the backseat and these guys started making fun of blacks. You know, stupid kid stuff. All of a sudden my mother turned to them and said, "Listen, boys, don't make fun of blacks. I'm part black, you know." There was a stone
Hobble-along Howie, age seven.
Is this woman black?
silence. I was sinking into my seat in the front of the car thinking, "I can't believe my mother just told my only friends she's part black."
"Ma, that's not true," I said.
"Oh, yes, it most certainly is, Howard, and you shouldn't be ashamed of it either," she insisted.
My mother had to pick this forum to make her social statement about racism? The car pool?
By the time I hit seventh grade there were only a handful of white kids left in my school. That's when the beatings began to get regular. And lunchtime was the worst. I think I was providing lunch money for half the school. I'd hide my forty cents of lunch money in my sock, and black guys would come, choke me, rip my shoes off my feet, and take my money. One time I was able to sneak onto the line and actually buy lunch, but this guy Ronald came up to me and said, "I didn't get your lunch money. Think you tricked me?" Then he stuck his big black hand into my salad, scooped the whole thing up into his mouth, and swallowed it. It was like Lord of the Flies.
The lunch money thing got so bad that none of the white kids could bring money to school. One of my friends started bringing a bag lunch. The only problem was there was this black kid who would grab my friend's bag, and whatever chocolate snacks he had, like chocolate Ring Dings or Devil Dogs, the black kid would always steal. So my friend had a great idea. He took Ex-Lax, a large chunk, scraped off the word Ex-Lax on it, and wrapped it in tin foil. The next day the kid came along and swiped the chocolate. About two periods later we saw this kid running out of his next class. He was shitting his fucking brains out. "Yeah, revenge," my friend said.
There was no way to fight these guys. First of all, they traveled in six-packs. They all looked about twenty-five years old in the ninth grade. I don't even know if I had sprouted my first pubic hair, but these guys, who'd been left back at least fifteen times, were almost nineteen years old, with full mustaches and goatees. I would go home and say, "Ma, we love black people but I don't think it's possible to live with them. They hate us. I'm not blaming them for hating us, but why do I have to be the one white person who lives with blacks?"
But my pleas fell on deaf ears. My parents were oblivious to my situation.
I wished Charles Manson were my mother. At least he protected his family. Half of the kids in my school were in a gang called the
Five Percenters, kids from Brooklyn who had moved in. They had dietary laws like Muslims, never ate pork, and hated the white man with a vengeance. These guys would choke me and say, "You'll never live to see your fifteenth birthday" -- nice stuff like that.
I was dealing with mutants who would take their penises out in class. Seriously. And what penises they were. These guys had rhinoceros penises. They would pull them out in shop and play with them. Remember when Clarence Thomas was being confirmed for the Supreme Court and he gave that speech about the hearings being a high-tech lynching because they were bringing up old stereotypes about the size of black men's penises? What is it with him? That's the one good stereotype blacks have. They get rapped on every stereotype -- big lips, talk funny, nappy hair. The stereotype that God gave the black man a big penis is the greatest stereo-
My trusted makeup man Ralph working on my transformati
on ...me as Clarence Thomas with a wild Afro...and today.
type in the world. I'd like to walk down the street and have every person in the world think I have a big penis.
I tried to assimilate, but it was impossible. I was too tall to hide. I'd talk black talk but that didn't work. They even started up a black-studies program. The only kids who signed up for black studies were the few white kids left in Roosevelt. We all signed up thinking the blacks would like us better, but it didn't matter. We still got the shit beaten out of us. But I loved that black-studies class. Today, I could tell you nine thousand uses for the peanut, all invented by George Washington Carver.
Aside from my black-history education, there were some rewards for being in a school like that. I was one of the brightest kids in the school. I could have been valedictorian of my class. And I'm a dummy! They shipped all the bright black kids to a fancy school in East Meadow, so all the retards were left. In the ninth grade I was mistakenly thrown into a class for kids who came out of Brooklyn and Harlem who didn't know how to read. I got in this class and we were reading a book called Itsy Bitsy. Itsy Bitsy has got to be on a first-grade level. I was in ninth grade.
The teacher would say, "Howard, now you read out loud. You had to read out loud.
"Itsy Bitsy was a very little boy, and he..." I was reading, right? The other kids were like, "It-sy bit-sy." All of a sudden, I was like the genius in the class.
I had to put up with a lot of shit in this class, because every dredge was in it. Guys would shake you down. They'd go, "I like your pants," and they'd start to pull your pants off. They'd take your fucking pants! I'd be out of my mind. The teachers were oblivious, they didn't want to know about it. I aced this class, as you could imagine. But, of course, every good thing is ruined. I was about three months into it and I was the teacher's pet. I was a
