by Howard Stern
We even tried bondage to add a little spice to our sex life, but that was a disaster, too. One night I tied Alison's ankles and wrists with
my neckties. She was afraid that the kids would come up and disturb us. Alison wasn't a good subject for bondage.
"This is uncomfortable," she started whining. "My circulation's getting cut off. And that voice you put on when you tied me up was weird." How could she not like it? That was my love voice. It sounds like a cross between Dracula and Barry White.
I tried to spank her, but that was even worse.
"Get out of here!" she screamed. I felt so stupid, I had to untie her. She was pissed off that I was doing stuff to her that she didn't want me to do. I had to explain to her that the whole point of tying someone up was so that you could do stuff that you don't normally do. The whole fun of it was being at someone's mercy. She didn't give a shit. We ended up doing the same old things we always did.
The greatest aid to salvaging what was left of our sexual life was the vibrator. The vibrator came into our lives a few years ago when Robin gave us one as a gift. And we needed it. When we first met, Alison would get wet instantly. After a few years of sex it took like an hour rubbing Alison's clitoris before she would get hot for me. I just like to fuck. At my age, I don't really have the time for foreplay. Why can't she be instantly wet and ready to go? When we got the power tool, it was like magic. I could just lie there and not do anything to her and she'd have an orgasm instantly.
And what a vibrator! You strap it onto your hand. It's called the Swedish Massager. I put it on and I looked like RoboStern. I'd lie on my side, kiss Alison a few times, touch her with the vibrator, fuck her, and five minutes later I'd be asleep. Perfect. Life was good.
But as the years rolled by, I found that the amount of time that I had to use the vibrator to get Alison ready was longer and longer. She must have built up quite a callus down there, because it was taking twenty minutes for her to get wet even with the vibrator. She's so desensitized from using it that I'm going to have to go to the next step. I already told Robin. I want a jackhammer for Christmas next year.
But thankfully, I found something that really solves all these sexual problems. Actually, refound something. Masturbation came back into my life a few years after Alison and I were married, and right now it's the greatest single source of sexual satisfaction I have. I jerk off at least five times a week. I actually use masturbation as a medicinal tool because I have to get up at five every morning and
I've found that the only way to get to sleep early is to whack off.
So I've become quite adept. I always use my right hand. I don't need Vaseline or lubrication. I don't use magazines or porno tapes. I just lie in bed and fantasize. I can get myself off in three seconds. I used to have to replay my sexual escapades with my old girlfriends, but now I've got it to the point where I can just fantasize about the latest girl I've had in the studio. I whack off to Jessica Hahn a lot because I know that she's someone who would open every hole. Jessica told me she's only interested in pleasuring a man when she has sex. She even said that she likes to blow a guy and then fall asleep for the entire night with his penis in her mouth, like a pacifier. God, did that story turn me on.
I've come full circle, I'm back to hiding my tissues ... this time from Alison.
But the amazing thing about me is that even in my sex dreams I can't cheat on Alison. I sometimes dream about strippers I've had on the show, and when they're ready to have sex with me, I run out of the room. Somehow, Alison works her way into the dream and I feel guilty and I never get to fuck the girl. I CAN'T EVEN HAVE FUN IN MY DREAMS! That's how sick I am.
Speaking of Alison, you know, I really don't know what her take is on our sex life. And she won't tell me. I've been trying to get her to answer the anal sex question for years now.
So I asked Larry "Ratso" Sloman to interview Alison and find out about her sex life. Here's what she told him:
RATSO: We've all heard Howard's version of your sex life. What's your side of it?
ALISON: My sex life is great. Well, let me put it this way. When we do it, my sex life is great. There're times it's more frequent than others but basically we have a very good sex life.
RATSO: Howard says that he has a very unusual penis. Flaccid, it's like an acorn, but then it grows to incredible lengths. . . .
ALISON: His penis size is fine.
RATSO: Tell me about the time he tried to tie you up and have a little S and M session.
ALISON: Howard exaggerates. Not all of what he says fits reality. In real life, I don't deal with a sex maniac. People are always saying to me, "Oh, my God, you're married to Howard Stern!" It's not like he has me parading around the room discussing my cup size.
RATSO: What about anal sex? Did you or didn't you way back when?
ALISON: I don't know. I really don't remember. Let's forget it.
RATSO: How can you not know if you did it or not?
ALISON: It's the kind of thing where I think I was attempting it once and I wasn't interested. I've never really done it but then he asked me about it! It's not like I did it with everybody but him. Let's just say I think it was attempted and that was it.
RATSO: Would you have anal sex with Howard?
ALISON: I said to him, "Howard, if you're really interested, fine with me." Then he says he's not interested.
RATSO: What about his masturbation habit?
ALISON: Look, he tells me he doesn't masturbate and he tells the audience he does, so I don't know. People have sat with us at the dinner table and said, "I masturbate as much as you," and I'm sitting there dying and Howard's going, "Yeah, yeah," and I'm going, "Oh, my God!" I do walk in the room after I've kissed him goodnight and he's not masturbating. I don't know when he does it because I've never caught him.
RATSO: How can you catch him if he can do if so quick? He says three seconds and he's done.
ALISON: I've never caught him, but then again, who knows? I don't walk back into the bedroom trying to catch him. I assume he's sleeping. But there's nothing on the sheets either.
RATSO: What about the vibrator stories?
ALISON: No comment.
Mein Kampf
"M y Struggle" How I Became the King of Radio
Chapter 5
It's weird, but I always wanted to be in radio. That was all I could think about from the time I was five years old. I used to do these shows up in my room and record them on a beautiful Wollensack tape recorder that my father gave me. In fact, by the time I was nine, I had actually begun to create the format that years later would send me to the top of the world of radio. I'd get together with a few of my friends, much as I do now, start the tape rolling, and I'd dial. While dialing, I'd break into dirty little stories about my friends and I'd do monologues. The idea was to make the best phony phone call. One guy would call a Chinese restaurant and ask for Itchy Balls. The next guy would call the liquor store and ask for white horse in a bottle. Mine were always a little more inventive. Either I was a game show host (usually Gene Rayburn) and I would award old ladies thousands of dollars in prizes or I would call drugstores using a female voice and try to make dates.
"Hello, you got LSD?" I asked in my best nine-year-old female impersonator's voice.
"LSD, yeah, sure we do," the pharmacist said, knowing full well that he was on the phone with an asshole kid.
"And a box of Trojans," I added.
"Oh, sure we do, honey. What size?"
Size? Hmmm. He stumped me because I had no idea what he was talking about. I had never seen a condom. I didn't get it. What does he mean, size?
"Thirty-four," I ad-libbed. I was nine. Thirty-four sounded right.
"What else you want? You want Prince Albert in a can?"
"Yeah," I said.
"How big?" the pharmacist wondered.
"A twelve-foot dick," I said.
"What else do you want in your mouth?" he said.
"Will you give me a lay?" I asked. "I need you
."
"I know you do," he said.
"I want to meet you in a dark alley," I added.
"I know you do," he said.
I hung up, triumphant.
I think the fact that my father exposed me to the world of radio must have had a big subconscious effect on me. Ironically, my father worked as an engineer at WHOM, which later became WKTU and then K-Rock, the same station I work at today. He always used to tell me stories about working with this legendary disc jockey Symphony Sid, whom my father described as a man who would become very agitated at times. Sid was this crazy guy who played a lot of jazz and rhythm-and-blues, and had been busted several times for drugs. His show was a madhouse -- not on the air, but off the air! One time, my father told me, he thought Sid was coming off a high and he started to get violent. He went to smash the control room window when they were about to go back on the air.
So my father jumped up, banged on the glass in his control booth, and screamed, "SYMPHONY SID! BY THE POWERS VESTED IN ME BY THE FCC, I COMMAND YOU TO GET ON THE MICROPHONE IN A SERIOUS MANNER AND CONTINUE THE BROADCAST!" It worked. He settled down and did the rest of the show. Sid did all kinds of wild things. He'd have a lobby full of street people and black gospel singers during his show and he'd be running back and forth during his radio program trying to keep
order in the studio and in the lobby. He just should have put those people on the air.
I always used to love to go to work with my father when I was young. By that time, he was part owner of a recording studio where they used to tape cartoons and commercials. I'd go visit my dad and get to meet Wally Cox, Don Adams, Larry Storch, all the great voices of my favorite cartoon characters. Plus they'd have these great lunches -- big cold-cut buffets. Man, I was in heaven. Even then, I realized that I wanted to entertain people on the radio. My father would drive into Queens and we'd take the subway from there into the city. The driving part of the commute was horrible. We'd always listen to the radio on the way in, and if anything good came
My dad at his recording studio in the fifties.
on, my father would get totally into it. It dawned on me that if you were half a mutant you could probably get on the radio to entertain people and to make them forget about the drudgery of that shitty commute.
I never wanted to be on the radio to be a disc jockey. I never wanted to play records. I just wanted to talk. It's funny because nobody was doing wild talk shows on the radio then. If you were on the radio, you were a disc jockey like Cousin Brucie. But I ignored those guys. They sounded so canned and phony.
It was weird for me to think I was going to be on the radio someday, because I was so shy growing up. It drove my father nuts that I never took an acting course in high school. I never did summer stock. I was too inhibited. I knew I wouldn't wind up onstage somewhere; I always pictured myself in a dark room, talking into a microphone. But no one else could believe that. My father kept telling me, "Howard, you gotta talk. You're not gonna be on the radio if you're quiet. You gotta have diarrhea of the mouth." What a way with words. That Stern charm.
My high school yearbook photo.
I hardly talked at all my whole senior year in high school. I was in a psychology course and the teacher told me she was going to flunk me because I never once opened my mouth the whole term. She warned me that I had better do well on my final or that was it. I had a cousin who'd been under psychiatric care forever. So I sat him down with a microphone and I interviewed him. I asked him one question: "So, you've been seeing a lot of psychiatrists?" He talked nonstop for two hours. I brought my father the tapes, he transferred them to two discs. The teacher listened to them, flipped out, and said it was a classic. She wanted the records and I got an A.
Drama class, same thing. I wouldn't open my mouth. The first day the teacher said, "Each of you will get up and sing 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat.'" He called on me first. I nearly shit in my pants. I couldn't do it. I whispered it. He was furious.
Yet whenever the people at the counseling center asked me, I would say I wanted to be a disc jockey. Even they said, "No way. He doesn't speak, he doesn't have a professional voice." So to make my parents happy, the counselors came up with an occupation I should
train for in college. They decided I should be a speech therapist.
To be a speech therapist you have to be good at science. I have no fucking ability in science. Meanwhile, I'm flunking all my classes.
So they told my parents there was one school that might take me with my moron grades. Elmira was an all-girls school, but they were taking boys for the first time ever. I heard this, I said, "Unbelievable." Five boys and two thousand girls. "Or," they told my parents, "if he ever wants a shot at radio, he could go to Boston University." They had a retard program called Basic Studies, where you took moron classes for two years, and if you proved yourself, you could go into the School of Communications.
That sounded pretty good to me. I knew I could apply myself. I wound up studying hard. I had nothing else to do because no woman would come near me. I graduated magna cum laude with a 3.8 average. And I got my start in radio.
I didn't get up the courage to go down to the college radio station until my sophomore year. The first time I went over there, they immediately gave me an air shift. I tried to cue up a Santana record and I was so nervous my hand was shaking. Finally, I got it playing, I was on the radio, and I was thinking, "This is going out to millions of people" -- but probably three people in the dorms were listening. So the record was playing and I reached up for a pencil, knocked all of them over, bumped the rack that the station kept their carts in, and the cart rack came crashing down onto the turntable -- in the middle of the fucking show. It was a disaster. I was a horrible disc jockey. I hated the fact that you had to be organized. I used to have nightmares about the record running out and not being able to change it in time.
I did everything at the station. I did news, I did interviews. But I really wanted to do comedy. I wanted to put on a crazy, off-the-wall show. I hooked up with three seniors and we put together a comedy show called the King Schmaltz Bagel Hour. We were totally outrageous, especially for 1973. We used to talk about girls' asses, hebes, and blacks. One of the guys did a game show hosted by Father McNern called Name That Sin. The object of the game was to confess a sin that was so bad it would make the bishop blush.
"If you can make the bishop blush, you win a free trip to the Vatican," the announcer said. "If you say the secret sin, you win one hundred dollars. And now for our first contestant."
"Father, I had sex with my girlfriend."
"Nope, he's not blushing."
"I had sex with my girlfriend's dog."
"The bishop does that all the time, that won't make him blush," the announcer said.
This was outrageous then. We broke all format, we had long bits. Most of the other guys were these way-too-cool soft-voiced "progressive"-sounding disc jockeys: "Now here's Pink Floyd on a trip to the dark side of the moon." We were crazy. On that first show, we also played a bit called Godzilla Goes to Harlem. That would be the last bit we'd play on college radio.
It started out like a typical AM broadcast, playing a Grand Funk Railroad song. Then the broadcast was interrupted.
"We bring you a special report from New York City. A strange being has been sighted in the East River." It was Godzilla. After the police put out an all-points bulletin, Godzilla was seen again at 125th Street in Harlem. We went on the spot to Harlem.
"Hey, brothers, look at that big green dude!" one of the King Schmaltz Brothers said in his best black impression. "Hey, what's your name, turkey?"
"Godzilla," the monster roared.
"Godzilla? What you Italians doing in this neighborhood? Hey, you're not Italian."
"I'm the monster Godzilla."
"Hey, brother, take out your wallet. Hear what I'm saying. Up against the wall."
Godzilla roared.
"You gonna give me trouble, I'
ll have to fight it out with you, dude."
There was screaming and roaring and confusion. Finally, Godzilla moaned.
"Man, all he had was a dime. What a waste of time."
Seconds later, the phone rang in the studio. One of the other guys picked it up.
"King Schmaltz, what can we do for you?"
"Three guesses, the first two don't count." I immediately recognized the voice. It was Hank Sennett, the guy who ran the station. He was home with his family but he had a special line that fed the station right into his house.
"Is it Mary?" one of the other guys said.
"No."
"Is it a sturgeon?" someone else guessed.
"Let me give you a hint," Hank said ominously.
"I bet it's Hank," I said.
"You're fired," Hank said.
Fired during our first show! Hey, even I was impressed. That was a record I was never able to surpass. But I had the tape of that first show and I had the direction I wanted to go in. I sent a copy of the show to my father and he sent me back a nine-page letter that basically called me a moron. "You stupid idiot, this is terrible," he wrote. He was always blunt and to the point with me. "What are these sketches? I hear you go, 'uhhh,' which is annoying. Who takes phone calls on the air? They don't talk like that on real radio stations. If you want to be different, don't go into radio. You don't sound like a real disc jockey. You gotta take this seriously. You gotta announce the record and give the temperature and the time."
Here I thought I was doing great innovative stuff and I sat there reading this and thought, "Jeez, maybe my father's right. I'm a fucking asshole. What am I doing?" I was really hurt. I think my whole motivation in life has been to prove to my father that I'm not a douche bag.
Meanwhile, my parents kept busting my chops for me to get formal training. "You want to be a disc jockey, you have to have training!" they'd both repeat like a mantra. But I told them I had it under control. I was totally focused on making it in radio. I used to write letters to Nancy, the first girl I ever dated, and I told her that someday I would be the greatest disc jockey in the world.
