Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (7 page)

I remember when I was in my teens and my family had just gone through my uncles’ deaths, we were sitting around the dinner table feeling emotional. This was also soon after my dad’s heart attack, and my mom had stopped cooking with salt, because the doctor had told him to steer clear of sodium. I remember my sister Andi started to cry at the table and I made a comment to the effect of: “Good thing we’re all crying—our tears dripping onto this dry chicken is the only shot we have to add any taste to it!” Silly, old-school, and not particularly clever, but an icebreaker nonetheless, one that made us all laugh and feel better. The kind of dumb humor I got from my dad, adding levity where there wasn’t any called for. But there was a solace in it.

My sister Gay is not someone who would have cried at the table. She was pretty different from Andi—stoic, but with an underlying strength and intelligence. What she went through health-wise changed the lives of everyone in our family forever. It definitely changed her life, because it took it. For me, it made me angry at first, to see her suffer. When you can’t do anything to help someone you love, you go through all the stages.

Eventually, her illness made me a champion for a disease that strangely enough I had fortuitously become involved with years before she was diagnosed with it. In 1984 I was cold-called by this great lady, Sharon Monsky, the founder of the Scleroderma Research Foundation. She asked me to perform at a benefit with other comedians to help raise money for research. A year earlier, Robin Williams had been the first comedian to ever perform to help the Foundation. I did the benefit a few months later.

At that time, my sister Gay was completely healthy, apart from some asthma that had been with her since childhood—definitely no signs of an autoimmune or vascular disease. But a couple years later, when I performed again at the same benefit, Gay had finally been diagnosed (after many disturbing misdiagnoses) with scleroderma.

Scleroderma is a rare disease that often affects women in the prime of their lives. When I hosted the benefit once more a year later, my sister Gay was actually in the audience and at this point she was deteriorating fast. It was tragic. Then, a year later, at another Foundation event, I announced that Gay had lost her battle with the disease. Since then, I have been involved in every benefit, and in the past ten years I have been a proud member of the SRF, which has raised over thirty million dollars to help fund research supporting those affected by this disease that took my sister.

All right, I know you paid good money to read this book, and now, all of a sudden, I’ve gone to this sorrowful I-lost-my-sisters place, sans humor, with a plug for my cause. Apologies. Shit happens. I think Confucius said that. I believe he also said, “Man who help others with an open heart will be thanked tenfold with much hot pussy.” Again, just wanted to see if you were still reading or just skimming this chapter.

Thanks for bearing with me. Look, they asked if I wanted to write a book and I said, “Sure, I love writing.” Just didn’t know how I would pinch this one out. But I’m glad I did. Everyone should write a book. Or at least a pamphlet. Or a PDF. Or a mimeo. I miss mimeos. There’s so little these days for kids to get high from in school. Oh yeah, except for booze and drugs.

But getting back to my sisters, when Andi was thirty-four she gave me a book on past lives,
Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul
by Jane Roberts and Robert F. Butts. I was immediately drawn in because I misread the title and thought it was about butts. I soon realized it was about something completely different, about reincarnation and how the soul lives on forever. The book set me on a path of discovery that went on for the next ten years. Not more than two weeks after my sister gave me that book, out of nowhere she had a brain aneurysm and passed away. Again, please hold your laughter until the end of the book. It was not a funny time.

I vividly remember getting the call from my mother. I was in Detroit at a club called the Comedy Castle, working for a friend, Mark Ridley, the club owner. You find out who your true friends are when they console you through the hard times. Mark was amazing. And he was a club owner. You can count the number of kind club owners on your penis. That’s not completely true. In my earlier years as a comedian I did become friends with a couple other club owners. However, I can’t print their names here because they are all in prison.

So it was a Saturday night in Detroit and it was a very dark moment. My mom called and said, “Hello, Bob?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Andi, Bob.”

There was a long pause and I said nothing.

“She’s dead, Bob.”

All I recall through the emotion and shock was the gesture of pounding my fist into the air and saying quietly to myself, “You go, Andi—you evolve and go to where you want to go, to be at peace.” She had suffered a lot in her short life. The sweetest, most emotional girl you could ever meet.

Randy Newman wrote a song, “Real Emotional Girl,” that I think describes Andi perfectly. I was in an acting class in my early twenties with my teacher Darryl Hickman, and I sang the song as a monologue/exercise. It’s a real heartbreaker. It goes: “She’s a real emotional girl / She wears her heart on her sleeve / Every little thing you tell her / She’ll believe / She really will . . .”

That was Andi. She was vulnerable, kind, and easily influenced. A bit lost. Like the girl in the song: “She even cries in her sleep / I’ve heard her / Many times before / I never had a girl who loved me / Half as much as this girl loves me / She’s real emotional.”

I will always miss Andi; she is forever in my heart. I wish I could’ve done something to help her live a full life, or even just a better life than she had before we lost her at thirty-four.

With her sudden death came a flood of emotion for our whole family. But we all shared the knowledge that she was no longer in pain. For any parent, the loss of a child is the worst thing you can go through. Although being disemboweled in the town square is a close second. Mel Gibson was never as likable as when they cut his guts out in
Braveheart
.

I’ve always had a fascination with death, being surrounded by so much of it growing up. At that time in my life, I believed it was therapeutic to think about what happens when we die. Some feel our soul goes on to another incarnation and that it keeps growing and learning. I just don’t want to ever go to a place where there are no deli meats. Honestly, I’m not sure what happens when we get out of here, but I do know I’m a lover of human life. I believe that people are basically good and pure at heart. Especially if they’re holding a chicken salad sandwich. How can you not trust someone holding a chicken salad sandwich?

Allow me please to make my earlier point clearer. I believe
most
people are good and pure at heart. I try to see the good in everyone, I really do. Even when I’m on a long, nightmarish plane flight and looking around in horror at my fellow passengers . . . at the couple arguing at the top of their lungs so everyone can hear . . . at the guy next to me whom I made the mistake of saying hello to, which led to a six-hour monologue detailing every aspect of his life, from his ex-wives drama to his bowel obstructions . . . at the lady behind me sneezing violently, not covering her face, just unleashing hot snot into the air, most of it directed all over me . . .

When I’m in that situation, I look at all these people and I try to visualize what’s beautiful about them. I may have to work a little harder, and I may have a tough time pushing out all the negative thoughts about these strangers invading my personal space. I may start to have an existential crisis, but then I breathe and try to imagine what their stories are. I say to myself, Bob, you’re just frustrated being around all these people in this hot, cramped aircraft and it’s making you focus on their worst qualities—but people are still basically good. I know in my soul that people are basically good.

I look across at the young mother and her baby sitting on the other side of me—a baby who could grow up to do something wonderful like find the cure for cancer. What could be more pure and good than a little baby who grows up to find the cure for cancer? I look at the guy with the ex-wife drama and feel better about him—he’s now sleeping peacefully, thanks to a couple Ambien. He’s not so bad, I think.

But then, it happens: The pilot announces, “We’re starting our descent.” And no one puts their seat upright or stops their way-too-loud conversation, and the baby suddenly throws up and some of it hits me. Yet, even then, I keep it together, thinking to myself, these people may not appear to be the best at this moment, but they are basically good people. And we all deserve to get to Ohio. Let’s do this.

And then the man next to me on sleeping pills sharts his pants. Loud and wet.

People are only human. I do treasure life. I want that little upchucking baby to grow up healthy and happy. Maybe he won’t find a cure for cancer, but who knows, maybe he’ll run a big company and earn a lot of money that will at least go toward the good of supporting his family—until he gets caught embezzling and cheating on his wife and is sentenced for white-collar crime. Then again, maybe he’ll turn out like the guy who just sharted his pants. We are all still only human. If you’re not alive, and you are a soul floating around in the ether somewhere, you do not get the privilege of sharting your pants. That’s right, I’m saying it is a privilege to shart your pants. To butt-queef. Because butt-queefing means you are alive. I don’t know, but my guess is when you’re dead, you can’t hear loud sounds like a fart or smell bad scents like poo. Or the cougars or possible hookers who come in groups late at night in swanky hotel restaurants reeking of Febreze. Life is a gift.

Back to this whole philosophical, questioning thing I’ve been jagging on: Are people basically good? What are we here for? What happens after we die? All this questioning is a direct result of the emotional scars of my younger years, particularly the loss of my two sisters. It’s not so much a religious thing. I’d like to believe my sisters are in a better place now. But I do understand why some say there is nothing after this life and when you die you are dead and gone.

I spoke to a friend of mine recently who flat-out told me, “There is no God, Bob. Period. No God, no ghosts, no nothin’.” I know quite a few people who are positive that when you die you just “cut to black,” like Tony Soprano in the last episode of
The Sopranos
. Which sadly brings up memories of James Gandolfini, who also was taken from us much too soon.

But personally, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s more to it than just cutting to black. Maybe this has something to do with the family story I’m going to tell now, a story that might be a little chilling to readers, especially if you’re into numerology or astrology. And who isn’t? Awkward pause. C’mon, the zodiac is in our newspapers every day. Okay, not in the
New York Times
or
Wall Street Journal,
but I can always rely on the
Los Angeles Times
for my Taurus emotional temperature.

Here’s the story . . . Two years before I was born, my mom had given birth to full-term healthy twins. And when I say two years before I was born, I mean two years to the
day:
May 17, 1954. I was born on May 17, 1956. The twins who were born two years earlier were named Robert and Faith. Like I said, they were both born healthy, but the hospital in Philly had recently been infested with dysentery and no one told any of the parents who had given birth that week. I don’t know exactly what happened but as my mother conveys it now, about seven babies died along with the twins. Robert and Faith lived only seven and eight days, respectively.

Then, two years
to the day
that they were born, I was born—is that an astrologer’s wet dream or what? So that seeming coincidence always stuck with me, and because of it I was very receptive when my sister Andi gave me the book about the soul’s journey through different incarnations. It made sense to me at that time, as if it was all some kind of cosmic do-over. Heartbreaking, and yet I was honored my mom and dad had bestowed the name Robert on me.

To this day, I feel blessed to have been named Robert. Why they named my sister Gay, I don’t know. When she was born in 1946,
gay
only meant “happy.” The joke we have all heard is “And it still does, baby!!” But with the last name Saget, my sister had it doubly rough as she got older. People can be cruel, even if they are basically good. The fact that our family’s last name rhymes with
faggot
is obvious and sophomoric, but ironically those are two personality traits necessary to be a bully and a name-caller. Gay was a great teacher, but if a student didn’t like her, they would call her “Gay Faggot,” which is not only hurtful, but even more in present times, once again, redundant.

Both of my sisters were amazing people and I will always miss them. Until I see them again.
If
that’s how it works. But what my family went through—all the tragedy and all the pain, both before and after I was born—is what created and fostered that crucial comedy/survival gene, which revealed itself most markedly in my father and in me. It was this part of my DNA that allowed me to lose two of the most important people in my life and push even harder to pursue a career in making people laugh.