Private Parts by Howard Stern

her legs on purpose on the show? What else does she do all day aside from 'Entertainment Tonight'? "
    How the fuck was I supposed to know? I've never met the woman in my life. He kept asking nonsense questions that maybe only her mother would know the answers to. My father-in-law assumes I know everyone in show business, and when I don't, he's very disappointed.
    But I have one surefire way of getting back at all of them -- my parents, Alison, her parents, whoever. Whenever I'm with my family and I find myself getting irritated by something, which can usually be measured in nanoseconds, I run into the next room and I write down whatever they said on a little pad I keep there. And the next day, it becomes radio material. I write it in shorthand, too, so they can't understand what I've written if they find it. And after I talk about it on the radio I come home and Alison is all over my case.
    "Can't we have a personal life? Does everything we do have to be grist for your stupid radio show? I don't want you to talk about our personal life on the air!" she yells at me.
    Honey, if you'd let me out of the house once in a while maybe I'd have something to talk about. Maybe I'd experience other things besides your parents. Maybe at a card game I could have some funny things happen. But I'm locked up like a veal. Welcome to hell.
    "Hey, I have an idea. Let me go over to Jessica Hahn's house!
    Then I'll have something else to talk about," I say. That shuts her up but good.
    STERN: THE NEXT GENERATION
    I'm the only male in a household of five. And I love having three daughters. They're great kids and that's all because of Alison. I've told her that the kids are her responsibility. Believe me, it's better that Alison should raise them. If it was up to me, the kids wouldn't know that people have private parts. I'd teach them that the human body is filthy, and that all men are evil, you can be sure of that.
    And just wait until they get old enough to date. Do you think there's a man on this planet good enough for my daughters? I look around at the creeps and mutants out there, the men who jerk off to my show in their cars, and the idea that these idiots are going to invade my life and marry my daughters at some point really frightens me.
    Among the things I'm lacking as a parent are those really good hardship stories to tell my kids. Whenever I complained as a kid to my father, he would lay out his heavy Depression-era stories. He'd tell me how he didn't have a pot to piss in and couldn't afford a pair of shoes to go to school in. My grandfather would buy two left shoes from a pushcart vendor -- the only pair of shoes that my father would have for years. My father would also tell me that he didn't have a desk to put his stuff in until he was thirty-five. And my mother! Her mother died when she was nine, so she had to go live on a farm with relatives for a year. She had only one pair of underpants, which she had to wash every night by hand.
    Now these are good deprivation stories!
    With my kids, I have no good tales of woe. What can I say about my childhood that was adverse?
    "When Daddy was young he had to buy pot from a big, fat, smelly Rush Limbaugh look-alike."
    "Emily, when I was your age, Daddy had to break into Grandpa's liquor cabinet to steal his apricot brandy so he could get girls drunk enough to fuck them."
    "Daddy couldn't score acid in college without writing home for money."
    "Daddy had to roll his own joints before he went to see the math tutor."
    I have nothing to tell them.
    "When I was growing up, I had to share a bathroom with my sister. And I had to walk fifteen feet down the hall to get to it. "
    Horrors!
    The only thing I can tell them is that when I was their age we didn't have a housekeeper to clean my room, so they should clean their own rooms.
    But I love my family. Alison's a great wife and I have three lovely daughters. A lot of people ask me whether I wish I had a son, but I tell them I don't really care. But