Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (20 page)

He stared me down: “One more time, Bob; you see me again, and I’m taking you in.”

I know some of you may think he should’ve taken me in and I should’ve paid for my offenses. I said a couple Hail Marys—and I’m Jewish; the closest I’d come before was Bloody Marys. But all I felt was gratitude. Two times he let me off. After that I never saw him again. If I ever do see him again, and it’s not under circumstances like speeding on PCH, I’ll ask him if he’d like to go for a drink when he gets off work to thank him for sparing my ass.

And then, as we leave the bar, I’ll tailgate him and follow him to
his
house and . . . make sure
he
gets home safe. No, you know that’s not what I’d do. Maybe I’d just buy him a few shots, drive him back to my place, and let him stay till he was sober. Then we could become best friends and I could invite Dave Coulier over and we would play
Full House
into the wee hours of the morning. And Dave could keep him laughing all night by showing how amazingly he can fart on cue.

I will always be indebted to that officer. I learned my lesson—and I got to get home to my young daughters. Point is, there are some amazing police officers out there and this gentleman gave me just a hand-slap. I could see in his eyes he wanted to do more—like tie me up and spank me.

It just dawned on me that writing that story in this book may not serve my best interests next time I am stopped by a police officer. I’m calling my agents and offering myself up to host as many benefits as the Los Angeles Police Department would like me to do. And if that kind officer happens to be there, I will ask him for the first dance.

That was the end of my reckless drunk-driving period. Definitely the end of it when my kids were at home. Shame on me for my thoughtlessness. Today I am intolerant of drunk drivers. We have all been touched by drunk drivers and the loss of human life due to their recklessness. These days when I see a drunk person weaving down Sunset Boulevard I’ll sometimes call 911. I’ve turned into the safe old-man driver I used to be annoyed at.

Nowadays, if I’m feeling too incompetent to drive, for whatever reason, I just give the wheel up. I mean I literally give the wheel up. I let go of it—and then I play chicken with the drunken white-trash guys in
Dukes of Hazzard
monster trucks. I also enjoy dragging with the small men in black onesie jumpsuits on those motorcycles with the gigantic round rubber tires that go one hundred miles per hour like they’re on the autobahn.

No, just the opposite. Every time I get behind the wheel now I take a deep breath and concentrate. Had a multitasking cell-texting problem for an instant when the iPhone first came out, but it didn’t take long to come to my senses. Siri has become one of my best relationships.

That’s my other road-rage problem with people—texting and driving. People: Stop it. I’ll call 911 on your ass. Citizen’s arrest. Anyone actually ever done that? Not in today’s world, right? Can you imagine that? “Excuse me, sir, I saw you texting and driving—here is my driver’s license that proves I am a citizen. I am hereby taking you into custody, in the form of a citizen’s arrest. Come on, let’s go, pal.” [
Sound effects: gunshot
]

I know how lucky I’ve been. My friend Sam Kinison wasn’t so lucky. After all his renegade years he lost his life, driving sober, when he was hit head-on on Route 95 by a drunk driver. Life can be ironic.

Takes me back to a handwriting expert who told me once on air on
The CBS Morning Program
in 1987 that I was “destined to always make the same mistakes.” She was incorrect. I won’t make that drunk-driving one ever again. I’ve learned to “surrender the keys” if I need to.

I’ll make other mistakes for sure. One of the things I love about getting older is learning from my mistakes. Okay, that’s the
only
thing I love about getting older. Although I do enjoy slightly saggy flappy body parts that sound like light applause when I walk.

Here’s something else I shouldn’t have done . . . It was a long time ago, long before I had any saggy body parts. Little kids play doctor. Some kids play strip club. I was eight years old and living in Norfolk, Virginia, when I did this. A bunch of us kids went into the garage in the house next door to mine. A couple boys and a couple girls. I had a crush on the six-year-old girl who lived there. Again, I was only eight. There were no adults around. Before I tell this story, my advice is, if you are a parent and a bunch of little boys and girls go into the garage, get them outta there and put ’em in the backyard. Nothing good happens in the garage.

Somehow an arrangement had been made—by my next-door neighbor-boy pre-agent type at the time. Again, I was eight years old. The deal was that this young girl next door would show me her private area if I gave her my troll doll.
Troll doll
is not a metaphor, it was one of those little plastic dolls. You know, the ones with the gnomish faces and the hair that sticks straight up. I was eight. Nobody had told me otherwise yet so I thought this was what it looked like down there.

A few kids gathered around, I took out the troll doll, and the neighbor girl took down her pants. And that was that. But somehow it didn’t feel like an even trade-off. I actually got scared because I knew somehow it was not the right thing to do—I knew that girls were supposed to wear clothes. But ever since I can remember, I was always trying to look up their dresses. I was a dirty little bastard. Yes, I have grown exponentially.

So I kind of looked at her but panicked and did some dumb-ass little-boy thing like yelling, “Eww.” She was a determined negotiator, pulled up her pants quickly, and asked for the doll in exchange for showing me her stuff. I was about to hand it over but then I pulled a little douchebag move. I remember feeling disappointed that there wasn’t more to it . . . that was it? I was giving up my troll doll for
that
? It just didn’t feel like a fair trade.

Recalling this whole story now, as an adult, validates what assholes men can be and why women are so pissed. You don’t make a deal and then back out. How shitty a boy I was at eight to do that. To this day I feel bad enough to vent about it. We’d made a deal and I didn’t honor my part in the deal. I wish for her that in her present life, if she has to expose her privates, say, to her husband or to her strip-club-owner boyfriend, that she is treated with respect and appreciation for exposing herself to her man. Or to her woman. Or to the community.

Hers was the first female private area I had ever seen. That I could recall. One that wasn’t my point of view during birth. I barely remember the six-year-old girl, so I pray she has no recollection of it. If she does upon reading this . . . it’s possible none of that happened.

Despite my blasé reaction, I was actually pretty obsessed at that age with girls’ anatomies. I guess I came from a fairly sexually repressed family. Hey, it’s better than coming from an overly sexually advanced family. Great argument. In any case, whenever the words
sexual
and
family
are in the same sentence, a therapist should be on speed-dial.

Unbelievably, it’s been half a century since the troll-doll episode and I’ve spent much of those years working on trying to be a better person. Too many guys have no conscience at all. Our culture nurtures that—it prizes he who makes a lot of money and takes advantage of women. But enough about my travel agent’s profile on me.

Now, for a moment, I’d like to give you a glimpse into yet another foolish thing I wish I hadn’t done back in my struggling-comedian days—1979, when Dave Coulier and I were both living in L.A. As I mentioned earlier, there’s an odd synchronicity to the fact that eight years later he and I would be cast together on
Full House
.

I was twenty-three. Dave was nineteen. We did dumb shit. Dumb shit guys do. Some of it was fun. And some of it we shouldn’t have done. Here’s a harmless but pathetic example . . .

Dave called me from his single apartment in Westwood, at my single apartment in Palms. He was amped up—“Bob, you gotta get over here. There’s a bum jerking off in my alley behind a Dumpster!”

Back then I didn’t have a lot of excitement in my life. I was just doing spots at clubs around L.A. and staying up all night with other comics—so this seemed like an exciting moment in my day. “Dave, are you serious?! I’ll be right there!!”

I jumped in my Oldsmobile Cutlass—gold with a black vinyl top, with a newly installed cassette deck—and raced over to Dave’s apartment. All I recall is double-parking, running into his building, and pounding on his front door. He opened the door and told me with the most depressed look on his face, “He left. You
missed
him.” I recall my total loser reaction as if it were yesterday: “
Fuck!
Are you serious?!? He’s gone? Where was he?”

Dave took me to the window and said, “He was right out there by that Dumpster, jerking off. I must’ve watched him for fifteen minutes.” I was crushed. What a horrible letdown to such a buildup. I asked him, “Wait, you
watched
him for fifteen minutes?”

Did that mean Dave was gay? And did it matter if he was? And was I gay for going over there to watch a bum jerk off? And did it matter if I was? It was a jerking-off-homeless-man-driven gay-panic moment. Nowadays a guy jerking off in an alley is someone’s screen saver. But before the Internet this was the kind of dumb shit we had to do to find our devious entertainment . . . drive across town at sixty miles per hour.

I love Dave like a brother. That’s why I can share a story as pitiful as this with his permission. Dave and I had a good time back then. Not many people in my life have made me laugh as much as him. He’s one of those solid good friends who will do anything to make you laugh . . . pants dropping, hand farts, mooning cars, real farts, ball sac pulled up over his wiener. [
Sound effects: car screech
]

He’s a grown man now, so he had to change his repertoire. He no longer moons people. Unless you’re in a restaurant and you ask him to. Dave is a man with a big heart and huge farts. One of my favorite people and one of the most refreshingly immature relationships in my life.

Some of the other things I shouldn’t have done—I know you will be shocked—involve John Stamos. Such a great friend. And such an amazing human being. I have so many good stories about him. Most of them involve mirrors and the fact that he always has Greek yogurt dripping out of his mouth.

A chapter about Stamos would be filled with stories of many women, many degrees of mullet, many more women, all the way through to his shorter hair with bangs—then more stories of women and bangs and then bangs and women. But that chapter is not going to be in this book.

This one will. True story: John and I once went into a bathroom at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood and stood next to each other at the urinals. There was another dude in there, a young guy who looked probably around eighteen.

So, out of nowhere/on purpose, John and I started to talk in character as Jesse Katsopolis and Danny Tanner. “Hey, Jesse, how’s it going?” “Good, Danny. Having trouble getting Nicky and Alex to go to bed, but what you gonna do?”

The eighteen-year-old kid couldn’t believe it. He peed all over himself. For just that instant, the poor kid thought
Full House
was real.

Another memorable time with John was spent in Las Vegas. Just the two of us. Schwing. He took me to see an Elvis impersonator at the Hilton, in the same showroom Elvis performed in. In tribute I got a little Elvis-style inebriated.

We were going to go to “the clubs” but I was done for the night. Instead, John had to take me back to one of three suites he had booked for the night—he always had backup suites in Vegas. Anyway, that night, he ended up literally taking off my shoes, cutting up my room-service steak, and feeding me so I wouldn’t yack. One of his sisters even stopped by to check on us. Then he put me to bed. He went to bed soon after. Next to me.

When I woke up the following day I realized . . . I had just slept with John Stamos. And it was not the first time. I remember the first heartrending thing he said to me when we woke the next day: “My breath tastes like a piece of shit crawled into my mouth and took a shit.”