Rubber Balls and Liquor by Gilbert Gottfried

you needed two people to run a store that was barely a one-man operation was beyond me, but they were partners. And it was a good thing, too, because the police came by one day looking for illegal merchandise. It happened to be a day when my father was out of the store, probably scouring the city for unopened model airplane kits. The police had received a hot tip that my father and uncle were selling party poppers. Remember party poppers? They were little plastic champagne bottles, with a string hanging from the top where the cork was meant to be. You’d pull the string and the thing would “pop” open and spit confetti all over the place. Fun for the entire family and all that.
    Well, the cops told Uncle Seymour that it was against the law to sell this novelty item. (The hot tip, it turned out, was the fact that my father and uncle had thought to display these items in the window—a misguided attempt at marketing, it turned out.) The cops said the poppers were some sort of illegal firearm, and they dragged poor Uncle Seymour from the store in handcuffs. Really. Okay, maybe not really , but this was how Uncle Seymour always told the story. He liked to embellish, probably because he wanted my father to feel bad for being out of the store that day. In any case, Uncle Seymour wound up spending the day in jail. Really. Okay, okay … maybe not really , but he was there for a couple hours, which was more than enough time for him to bend for the soap in just the wrong way.
    Despite his run-ins with the law, my father the drug dealer and illegal firearms merchant was a hard worker. He was almost always at the store when I was growing up. In this way, he was like everyone else. Fathers weren’t around much in those days. They were always working. Not like today, when they’re supposed to be around all the time, starting in the delivery room. This is a disgusting new development, if you ask me. It’s even pretty disgusting if you don’t ask me. Speaking personally, and from the heart, which means you should probably put your ear to my chest if you care to make out what I’m saying, I miss the old days when expectant fathers rolled up their sleeves and paced back and forth in the hospital waiting room, loosening their ties and smoking cigarettes and waiting for their babies to be born so they could get back to work. At least, that’s how I think it used to happen, although it’s possible I might have gotten this from an I Love Lucy episode. (Or was it Dick Van Dyke ? I can’t be sure.)
    To be clear, my father wasn’t in the delivery room when I was born. I don’t think my mother was there, either. She was working at the time.
    We didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up, but that didn’t keep my parents from wanting to indulge us with some of the finer things in life. Money isn’t everything, you know, even when it might appear to be most things.
    (Note to goyim readers: not every Jew who grew up in Brooklyn was rich. And as long as I’m on it, here’s another note: fuck you. That’s all. Whether or not you assumed we were rich, if you’re a goyim , fuck you. But keep reading, and tell your friends to buy the book.)
    Okay, now that I’ve gotten that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, I’ll share another childhood memory. This one is mostly true, and the parts I’ve made up are mostly inconsequential. One summer, my father decided we should all go away on vacation, so he rented a bungalow in Brighton Beach. Now, if you know anything at all about Brooklyn, you’ll know that Brighton Beach is about a five-minute walk from Coney Island, but this was my father’s idea of getting away from it all and making a family memory. (It’s possible he got this idea from Oprah, but she was still in preschool at the time and I don’t think her show had gone national.) We packed up our suitcases and threw everything into our