Rubber Balls and Liquor by Gilbert Gottfried Read Free Book Online

about me, but you’d be wrong. As it happens, it’s also about this character I once saw in a movie, who seemed to have his shit together. He was a dashing young man, fairly oozing with charm and warmth and good cheer. Me, I’m just fairly oozing. This other character, he had women and money and cars. Me, I just have dick jokes and some loose change and I can sometimes tell the difference between a car and a bus. Together we make an interesting pair.
    Okay, so let’s just say this is the part of the book that’s based on my life. It’s not about my life, but it’s based on it. It’s like that line you sometimes see on movie posters, “Inspired by a true story.” It means a whole bunch of stuff is made up. The way it works is I think back to something that actually happened, in such a way that I’m inspired to stretch the truth, to embellish, to exaggerate. Basically, to lie. Only here my stories are not exactly inspiring, although there may have been some perspiration involved. It’s not quite the same thing, I know, but I thought I’d mention it.
    Here are a couple half-truths and distorted memories from my childhood. I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to figure out which is which. Let’s start with my father, who served in the military in World War II. He was a Nazi officer, it turned out. (Who knew?) He masterminded the Third Reich. (Again, a big surprise to us Gottfrieds, who were led to believe all along he had been working on the First Reich, which of course at the time would have been known as merely the Reich, since there was no reason to line them up and start counting just yet.)
    Actually, let me amend that last misstatement: my father masterminded the Final Solution. That sounds so much better than being the guy behind all those Reichs, but you can’t really blame him; it wasn’t really his fault; he was angry at his accountant at the time.
    Now, I’m afraid I must put these proceedings on pause for a bit to let you in on a curious exchange between me and my editor. When he read the first draft of the manuscript, he scribbled in the margins that these last few paragraphs about Nazis and the Final Solution didn’t really work for him. I couldn’t make sense of his handwriting, so I called and asked him to read it to me, and after he did I couldn’t make sense of his point. I thought, Oh, the Third Reich didn’t really work for you, huh? So sorry to hear that. Perhaps we can go back and try again. Maybe we can get it right this time.
    We went back and forth on this, in phone calls and e-mails, until it was finally agreed that we would let those earlier paragraphs stand as originally written. The kicker came when my editor threw up his hands in exasperation and sent me an e-mail of surrender. I knew he’d thrown up his hands because he told me later he had to type with his elbows.
    (Confession: I know how difficult this can be, typing with your elbows. I’ve tried to do it myself on several occasions—mostly when I was looking for porn on the Internet and my hands weren’t exactly free.)
    He wrote, “Do whatever the fuck you want, Gilbert. You’re the legendary comedian.”
    I sent him back an e-mail, apologizing sincerely for having ruined the Holocaust for him. “Trust me,” I wrote. “It won’t happen again. NEVER AGAIN!”
    When my father wasn’t campaigning for a new world order, he liked to work with tools. He was very handy—which in turn came in handy with respect to his thriving Final Solution business. He had a hardware store, and he knew how to use everything he sold. This must have been a good quality in a hardware store owner, although you’d never have known it to look at his business ledger. (Also, you’d never have guessed he even had a business ledger.) He had drawers and drawers of nails and screws and nuts and bolts, of every conceivable size. He was a