Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian Read Online Free PDF Page A

health.
    He spoke of it proudly, telling me his nurse had said, “You can’t die, I am in love with you,” and describing to me in detail how she had tried to bathe him back to life. Ech. He was good at grossing me out. Great news was, he didn’t die, and my mom had the nurse removed from the case.
    The nurse’s story had an unhappy ending. As I recall, she was fired from the hospital entirely, but who knows—my entire family history is a blur when told by the surviving elders. It’s frustrating; just when someone is ready to tell you their life history, their mind starts to go, and the facts become diffused. I’m glad I’m starting this book now.
    The thing about my dad is, as much of an influence as he was on me, I didn’t really get to know him as a person until I was about sixteen. I guess he was shy. Processing it now, I realize he didn’t relate well to young kids. I think he was very relieved when I finally got old enough to understand a good dick joke. I had two older sisters, so once my father had a son [ angelic musical fanfare played here ] he figured he could just talk to me like I was already the beer-drinkin’ buddy he’d been waiting for his entire life. Again, I was sixteen.
    Some of my favorite times were earlier when I was almost a teenager and he would take me on road trips from Norfolk (where we lived from when I was maybe four, or seven; I don’t know the year because my mother changes it each time we discuss it) to Richmond, Virginia, to visit “the stores”—the other branches of his employer, the way-bankrupt-and-gone Food Fair Stores, a company that was run by some Mr. Potter–like individuals. My dad wasn’t Willy Loman. He was a good and noble man. More like George Bailey, one of Jimmy Stewart’s best characters. George Bailey was a fictional man who believed in justice and kindness. And he, like my dad, believed that a man should be paid fairly for his efforts. Which meant he got fucked.
    So I was about eleven or twelve when he drove me to Richmond. First, we checked out “the stores” and then we checked out the competition, which was A&P or Stop & Shop. One time he told me Stop & Shop was going to merge with A&P and be called Stop & Pee. I don’t know what to tell you except that he was my dad. And he was a great dad and a great man. And I loved him. Creepy jokes and all.
    So on this one trip we were at a store and we went to the back to check out his rival’s meat case. Dad looked closely at all their self-service meat, all individually wrapped in plastic. My uncle Jonah claimed at my dad’s funeral that it was my father, Ben Saget, who helped bring to the American supermarket the whole concept of “self-service” meats—of not having to go to the butcher anymore and get your steaks wrapped in paper. I know that can’t be true, but I do believe my dad was heavily motivated to make self-service meats the thing of the future.
    As he led me up and down the meat case, he’d try to impress upon me how amazing it was that all these meats just sat in the case, fresh, prewrapped, and preweighed with a sticker that told you everything you needed to know about your purchase. I’m telling you this story because I did something that day that I feel bad about still. As my dad strolled past the case checking out his rival’s wares, I poked a hole with my finger through every package I could, on a mission to ruin all their self-service meat so that customers would be outraged by the perishing, unsuccessfully Cryovac-ed raw product decomposing in front of them.
    We got into my dad’s car and were about to drive off when I proudly exclaimed to him what I’d done. “Dad, I poked a hole in every one of those packages of meat. No one will want to buy their meat and they’ll have to go back to Food Fair, where there are no holes poked in their packages.”
    I’ll never forget how upset my dad was: “Why did you do that? You shouldn’t have done that, son. I have to go back in