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

there and straighten this out.” That was the moral compass of my dad. Probably not the best business move to go back into that store, find the meat manager, and confront him with what his numbskull son had just done to his entire display. But he did it anyway.
    I was confused. I had thought I’d been helping him. He got back in the car fifteen minutes later and wasn’t mad at me, just told me never to do it again. He said every man was entitled to be in business and it was wrong to sabotage others just because they’re your competition. And then he let it go, and we continued our father-son day trip.
    He took me to the deli he’d been talking about the whole time on our two-hour drive to Richmond. We both ordered a particular sandwich there that single-handedly set me on a path of bad deli food I am still trying to eradicate from my diet. The sandwich was called [ timpani drum roll ] “the Sailor Sandwich.” I was eleven or twelve when I ate it, but I finally passed it just last month.
    I’m proud to say, having been a deli clerk myself and a past member of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters’ union (I’ve been on a leave of absence since college), that I understand the value of the girth of a good hunk of meat—not to mention the metaphoric penis humor that springs from it. Okay, you may want to sit down or go online for this . . . the Sailor Sandwich consisted of rye bread with melted Swiss and of course fatty pastrami (redundant), sauerkraut, and a huge Hebrew National knockwurst grilled and split as its centerpiece.
    How, you ask, could my dad have possibly had two heart attacks several years earlier, eaten that crazy food, and lived until eighty-nine years old? Answer: luck, meds, he didn’t want to die, and he loved a good piece of flounder. He was one of the first people on Coumadin, a blood thinner that’s commonly used now. In those years they didn’t have Lipitor, which is what I now take daily—okay, hourly. (If you’re reading this book, I assume you have high cholesterol or will shortly, I’m flinching as I type this; and I’m relatively sure I know what I’m talking about.) Doctors have told me for years that once you turn forty you should take Lipitor. I’m not trying to get free Lipitor (or the generic) by mentioning it here. I just want to keep you alive.
    That’s one of the things I love about myself—I actually want to keep people alive. As long as they can stay alive. I mean, life’s a window of time we’re given; why not open it and stay inside it as long as we can, right?
    Sorry I typed the word right with a question mark at the end of it. I look forward to the day when people have dropped right and really from our vernacular. But damn, I’ve used it a lot in this book. Whatever. Oh, and can we drop the whatever too? And while we’re at it, can we get rid of “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Oh wait, no, let’s not get rid of that—that’s the name of my last comedy special. Slid that in so quietly, right? Damn.
    Well, it’s all just words anyway. Personally, words and names don’t really hurt me. Because my father passed on to me the last name of Saget, I would say as a kid I was pretty much set up in the area of name-calling. Saget came from a Russian Jewish name that kept changing, probably because my ancestors kept running from persecution and name changes were all a person could do to hide their identity back then. Now we have nose jobs, Botox, and caramel-apple-headed orange-hued face-lifts. But back in the day, there were no plastic surgeons, so a name change and a wig were about all you could do to hide from the enemy.
    I heard Ivan the Terrible was a victim of a bad plastic surgeon. When the bandages came off, the doctor looked at him and said, “Ivan, you look terrible.” Wikipedia has this to say about Ivan the Terrible: “Intelligent and devout, yet given to rages and prone to episodic outbreaks of mental illness.” Sounds like pretty much everyone