Private Parts (9 page)

"But the Koreans don't understand. They're rude to us. If I steal a fruit they yell at me, and they don't even yell in English."

Hey, they're rude to you? Don't go in the store. Open your own store. Everyone hated the Jews when they came over and lived in the ghettoes. You think the ruling class WASPs were so anxious to help the Jews develop businesses in this country? They couldn't care less if every Jew in America starved. They wouldn't let the Jews in their law firms so the Jews created their own law firms. They said, "Screw you, WASPs." You can do it, too.

MY SECRET OF LIFE

Why doesn't everyone behave? Life is really so simple. Let me tell you the secret of life. You learn it young. The problem is after I give people the secret of life, they say, "Howard, that's not such a big secret." I know how they feel. It's like the end of an Ingmar Bergman movie. He takes you through hell and then at the end, all of a sudden, he says, "The secret of life is strawberries and cream." What the hell is he talking about? I just sat through three hours of boredom to find

out that life is strawberries and cream? That rat bastard, I'd like to take his Swedish ass and throw it out the window. I went through a chess game with Death to find out that life is strawberries and cream?

You want the secret of life? Here it is: You wake up in the morning. You eat a little breakfast, maybe read the newspaper. You attempt to go to school if you're that age. If your teacher tells you to sit in the chair, you sit in the chair. If you don't feel like it, you force yourself, anyway. You get older, the routine doesn't change. You eat breakfast, you go to work, you come home. If you're lucky enough, you're married. If you're not, then maybe you have a boyfriend or girlfriend. You yell at your wife, you make up with your wife. If your testicles feel all right, you bang your wife. You watch a video you rented or maybe you go out to the movies.

Then you go home to your bedroom, you mellow out a little bit. If you're the late Sam Kinison you take a schnapps. Then maybe you get a snack, have some strawberries and cream, and wash it down with a Snapple. Then you snore away for eight hours, you wake up, and you do it all over again. You wait for the weekend, that's your party, the weekend. The secret of life is so simple. That's life. If you have kids, you live with the kids. You don't move out on your wife. You stay with her even if you've banged her nine thousand times and you're sick of it.
You stay with her anyway.
Nobody follows that. They don't realize that's the secret to life. When you've got kids, you raise them.

The secret of life, in one cliché, if I may sum it up for you, is: ENJOY, EVEN IF YOU'RE NOT ENJOYING. Stop looking for a big bang, stop looking for some kind of excitement. And if you can't go along with these rules, you're a misfit. Expect to be beaten by the police. It's like going on a diet. The secret to losing weight is to keep your big fat trap shut.

"But I got to have butter on my potato or I can't eat it." I'll put you in a concentration camp for one week, and you'll eat a potato without butter. It'll taste like ice cream to you.

"The secret to life is so simple," I declared on my show. "The reason I am announcing this secret is that perhaps one of the maniacs who is stealing a radio right now might accidentally tune to me and say, 'Uh-oh, I'm about to get the secret of life.' To him it would be profound."

Then Robin complained that my secret to life was too honest. I

didn't make it appetizing enough for the listeners.

Okay. Let me make it appetizing. If you follow the secret of life as Howard Stern expresses it, guess what will happen to you? You won't be beaten by the police. You won't be in jail. And you won't have to riot. You'll be perfectly happy.

That still wasn't good enough for Robin.

"You gotta say life will be sweet and all the rewards of the world will be yours," she said. "Lie, Howard."

I thought about it for a second.

"You're right, Robin, I should lie. I should tell all the rioters this secret of life. I hope they're tuned in. Here's the secret of life: Jump into a tub, get yourself wet. Put your finger in an electrical socket. That's the secret of life, you retards."

HOLLYWOOD IN THE 'HOOD

MTV got me really pissed off during their coverage of the L.A. riots. What the hell was MTV doing covering the riots anyway? They flew in that baldy Montel Williams and imported a bunch of fifteen-year-old black kids who were sitting there looking angry and pissed off. MTV video jock John Norris got his combat boots on and they got a pretty young white girl host in a short skirt wearing a "No Justice" T-shirt. Who got no justice? The girl in the miniskirt? Montel Williams? I was furious at this knee-jerk superficial attempt by MTV to "solve" social problems.

Then they had Cosby on, making a "statement." Cosby says, "Let's all pray that everyone, from the top of the government down to the people in the street, that we all have good sense." What the hell was he talking about? Why do the people in the government have to pray? What are they praying for, the idiots in the streets? Nobody wanted to say that those dickfaces in the streets had absolutely no agenda, no reason to do any of what they were doing, and they all should have been mowed down right there and then. Then they got that jerk Arsenio Hall. It's pretty sad when they have to go to a failed stand-up comedian to calm people down. Arsenio tried to deliver a message but nobody paid any attention to him. I did hear, though, that he was of invaluable assistance to the National Guard because they used the top of his head as a landing strip for

Pissing everyone off, I played David Duke on my TV show. I pulled off my hood and shared the family photo album.
their supply runs. Listen to this pretentious idiot:

"I'm a graduate of Kent State. I know that story about the National Guard, man. When they come tonight, it's gonna be insane. I don't want nobody getting killed. Imagine what they'll do to my young black brothers and sisters tonight if they're out in the streets. Please know where your children are because if you don't know where they are tonight, you might have to bury them tomorrow. I'm telling you, they killed white kids in Kent State, they will wear us out tonight."

Listen to that fuck face. What is he, a general? He's phonier than a Chinese redhead. What a stupid argument, too. At Kent State, kids were tragically killed when they were taking a moral stance in opposing a stupid war. He's comparing the lowlife scum looting and beating innocent truck drivers to nonviolent antiwar protesters?
Whooo! Whoooo! Whoooo! Whaaaat
a moron.

This politically correct Hollywood crowd should have gotten

together to sing the peace song we wrote for L.A. It went to the tune of that old Billy Joel hit "Just the Way You Are":

DON'T GO RIOTING

Don't go rioting, you African-Americans

Don't yank us whites out of our cars

Rodney is guilty, there is no question

The bastard should be behind bars

We need to know that you will all stay calm

And stay as gentle as Sinbad

Ahhhh -- give us a break from all this violence

It's so inconvenient when you get mad

What will it take for us to wake you up?

We want to have the city calm ...

Put down the guns and drugs and lose the hate

It isn't friggin' Vietnam

Don't go hitting TV reporters Don't break the windows in the stores, mmmm --

Collect your welfare and watch Montel Williams

Instead of starting racial wars

Don't burn your houses, don't smack Koreans

That ain't no way to fix L.A.

Be calm and gentle, be kind to tourists

Or the cops'll blow you all away

A SPECIAL
MESSAGE

What we try to do with humor is show the absurdity of the differences between people, as Lenny Bruce did when he used words like
nigger
and
kike
and
wop
in an attempt to demystify them and rob them of any power they may have. Underneath all the differences, we're all in this together. So it's a drag to get a letter like the one I got from a listener of my show who's in prison.

I'm in prison, been here a few years. I was in a different prison a few years ago and I was working in the machine shop and we had a locked tool cage. Only one inmate was allowed in there and he was locked inside to pass out the tools. This cage is where the radio was, and the tool clerk and myself were the only white guys in the shop. He'd put on Howard in the morning and the black people would complain. A big argument broke out and some black guys threatened him. After work they jumped him with a steel pipe and he was beaten so bad that he died two days later. He got killed for the Howard Stem show. Prison murders are rarely publicized and his wasn't, nor was the circumstance. Just thought I'd share this with you.

P.S. You guys help me laugh through hard jail time.

This is a distressing letter. If I can teach people anything, it's if you're surrounded by black guys who hate me, change the frigging station. Let them listen to whatever they want. This stupid show isn't worth dying for.

My Sex Life
Chapter 4

Short on sex, long on love. That's the story of my sex life.

I've been married to the same woman for over fifteen years. We've been faithful to each other for over twenty years. So, right off the bat, we're not talking about massive numbers here. Plus, I have to admit, I'm not exactly a sexual dynamo. I'm pretty typical. Dr. Kinsey reported that two minutes was the average duration for a man to achieve orgasm while lovemaking, and that's about how long it takes me. Of course, I'm including the time it takes for Alison and me to walk up the stairs and get to the bedroom.

My sexual guru, Grandpa.

I might be a better lover if I could only understand what is going on. Casanova Stern I'm not, but it's not my fault. I never had any sex education growing up. My parents wouldn't even say the word
sex.
I never even heard a peep coming out of their bedroom. When I was thirteen, my father called me into his bedroom and said, "Do you have any questions about sex?"

I got really embarrassed and turned red in the face. I looked at him and suddenly said, "I know more about sex than you do," and I ran out of the room. I think we were both pretty relieved that we didn't have to go any further in the discussion.

My entire sexual education came from my maternal grandfather, who was a fucking wild man. I never knew this growing up, because he was already old and he was presented as the loving grandpa, rather sedate and dignified. My mother, of course, would never say a bad word about her father, and as a result I was very close to him. We looked alike, and I loved this man very much. But my mother's mother died when she was nine and my grandfather raised her like a dog. She only had one pair of underpants. Plus, he had a really nasty temper. He would take my mother and her sister to the movies once a week and would yell and get into knife fights in the middle of the movie.

And from Grandpa, via my cousin Jack, I got this worldly sexual advice:

"I'm gonna give you some advice," my grandfather said. "When a woman locks up on you, punch her in the face as hard as you can and she'll unlock."

No wonder I was such a misfit. I obviously came from a long line of them. I was sort of a late bloomer, too. I was the last kid on the block to masturbate. One of my friends hinted about it to me, so I decided that I'd try it. I was about eleven when I first tried. My parents had left me alone in the house, so I went up to their bedroom and took off my clothes. I lay down on their bed spread-eagled and started playing with myself while watching "Gilligan's Island."

When Bob Denver came on the show, I played Ginger to his Gilligan.

I really had the hots for Ginger and I was waiting for her to appear on the screen, but they kept showing Mrs. Howell III, that old bag. Finally, Ginger came on, and I really started pulling my pud. Mind you, I had no idea what happened during masturbation. After a few minutes, I started feeling warm all over and then I felt something building. "Oh, man, this is it!" I thought to myself. All of a sudden, warm liquid poured out of my penis, all over my legs and my parents' bed. I had urinated all over myself.

I tried masturbating again over Anne Francis, who played Honey West on TV. I thought she was the hottest thing. They had adapted a book from the TV series, and there was one scene where Honey West got captured and tied up against her will.

I got so excited reading it that I reenacted that scene in my bed with my legs spread and my arms out as if I was Honey. I started flailing away at my cock and, before I knew it, I had my first orgasm.

Then, I was over at my friend's house and his older brother came home fresh from fingering a girl, he told us. Some fat cow named Susan. We begged him to let us smell his fingers. We snorted that loving scent for a good half hour. Man, were we idiots! But my flaming heterosexuality could not be denied. I sought refuge in that Honey West book. I'd bring it with me into the bathroom and jerk off to the same passage over and over and over again.

Aside from seeing my mother naked once when she stepped out of the shower (ugh, what a nightmare), I had never seen a naked woman until I was twelve years old. I was walking home from my friend's house in Roosevelt and I passed a corner where I would always find the weirdest things -- like used rubbers and Kotex -- just lying there in the hedges. One day I was walking past the bushes and I found an old, soiled, disgusting, ripped-up nudist magazine.

It was filled with pictures of naked women playing volleyball, naked women taking hikes, naked women cooking with their big fucking hairy crotches, with the fucking hairs running up to their belly buttons. No airbrushing as in
Playboy.
Real women. Real dis-

gusting women. Playing volleyball with their big, fat, dimpled, cel-lulite-ridden asses hanging out. It was so disgusting. I loved it. I wanted to fuck everybody at the volleyball match. Even the ball.