Private Parts by Howard Stern Read Free Book Online Page A

me when I was a total loser in college with nothing but some big dreams. She's learned to suffer the bizarre personality that was a by-product of being raised like a veal in my parents' household. That's why I tolerate her PMS and her yenta friends and her snoring and her lunches at the country club. And that's why I haven't cheated on her for nineteen years.
    But my in-laws! Don't get me wrong, I love my in-laws. First of all, they're cool enough to let me call them Bob and Norma. I don't have to be a phony and call them Mom and Dad. And they're really nice liberal people. They even smoked pot once with Alison because they wanted to experience what their children were going through. But two minutes with these people is enough to send you to Creedmore Psychiatric Center for observation.
    TAKE MY FATHER-IN-LAW. PLEASE.
    He's almost perfect, but I have just a few criticisms. First of all, he talks in a monotone like HAL from 2001. Then he's got these
    annoying habits like lying on my brand-new-God-knows-how-many-thousand-dollar couch with his bare feet that he walked through the grass on! Plus, he reads all these newspapers and leaves them lying all over the white couch. Then, as if that's not enough, he does the crossword puzzles in ink and leaves the pen on the couch.
    And he loves to watch movies on video. He's in the house less than ten minutes and he's reprogrammed my VCR and my entire video collection is in disarray. He's got the videos out of the boxes, scattered all around the room. Between the tapes and the newspapers, it looks as if a windstorm hit my house. Then he starts going around trying to make home improvements. The next thing I know he's gluing tennis ball halves on the garage back wall so we know how far to back the cars into the garage.
    But what totally irritates me is the way he leaves the doors in the house open. We have an indoor cat. We found it abandoned and we nursed it back to health. Because we declawed it, we can't let it go outside since there are a lot of raccoons in the neighborhood and they're all rabid. Even my seven-year-old understands that the cat has to stay inside, and we have to make sure all the doors are closed. We have a sliding door, you close it. Simple enough.
    Every time Bob comes over, he leaves the doors open. He refuses to acknowledge that I have my own way of life. He always says, "Why don't you let the animal be an animal and go outside?" So I explain to him once again, it's an indoor cat. And, of course, he leaves the
    
    My future in-laws were great to me even though I had NO radio show!
    door open, the cat gets out, and he tries to blame the kids. Once when he did this I had to spend an entire day of my vacation looking for the cat. I went to the neighbors and asked them if they had seen it. They're from another country, they didn't know what was going on, so they called the cops. They thought I looked kind of seedy. Then the cops caught me on my neighbor's property and I had to go through a whole explanation with them. Finally, I called Jackie, one of the writers on my show, and his wife, Nancy, had a good idea. She told me to go outside with a can opener because that's the sound the cat always hears when it's about to be fed. So I took the can opener and plugged it into a thirty-foot extension cord and I was spending my vacation walking around outside with a can opener going. I felt like a moron, but it worked. The cat started meowing. We were a family again.
    MY MOTHER-IN-LAW? YOU CAN TAKE HER, TOO.
    I love her a lot but there are one or two things about her that bother me. The minute she gets in the house all she wants to do is monopolize my children, which is fine with me. But she reverts to this baby talk not only with my newborn but with my two other kids, who are ten and seven. Then she starts talking to me in this baby talk with her thick Boston accent. My name instantly goes from Daddy to "Doddie."
    "Hi, Doddie," she says when I come in the room.
    "Hi,