Private Parts (21 page)

Is it any wonder that I would want to slit my wrists? But it wasn't just memos. Pig Virus was actually monitoring my show. He installed a "dump" bell that worked from a hotline in his office. Whenever he didn't like what I was doing, whether it was what I was saying or a bit that was running over his cherished two-minute time limit, he'd pick up the phone. That would light up a light and ring a bell in the engineer's booth, and the engineer then had to immediately go to a commercial or a jingle with no explanation. Can you imagine if you're listening and all of a sudden a bit is interrupted by a jingle? You'd think these guys were total amateurs. Then to top it off, he sent a memo about this to the engineer and cc'd the whole world:

Subject: Remote "Dump" Procedure

During Howard Stern's airshift,
at all times,
there should be loaded a basic jingle,
and
a record. If the dump bell/button goes off, instantly dump: close all mikes, fire the jingle and record
immediately.
Do not pick up the phone and check, do
not
advise Howard over the talk-back to get out of the bit -- simply DUMP PROGRAMMING and roll the jingle and record.

Pig Virus was single-handedly ruining my show. He took away my ability to talk for any duration, he took away any control over my show with this dump button bullshit. Then, to add insult to injury, he sent around another memo:

Subject: Non-AFTRA talent

A reminder that only currently active AFTRA members may speak on WNBC Radio, and only via prior arrangement with the Program Director. This precludes regular appearances of friends of the family,

engineers, and any others not officially in WNBC's full-time or part-time employ for the express purpose of appearing on our air.

There went the rest of my show. I couldn't call Alison or my mother. I couldn't talk on the air with the engineers or the cleaning lady or the security guards. Pig Virus had issued his edict. I was fucked. My show was like nothing anyone was doing and they were trying to make me sound like everyone else.

Besides all this, Robin told me that Pig Virus tried to undermine our relationship. He called Robin into his office and, out of nowhere, he told her that he didn't have any money to give her because "Howard has taken it all." Luckily, Robin is an intelligent woman who didn't fall for that.

But it was so demeaning to have any contact with him. He got a few of the interns to cut out pictures of happy, smiling families from magazines and paste them into a collage which he hung in the studio to remind me of the target audience of the station. I can imagine how the other jocks were laughing their asses off at me every time they saw this work of art hanging there.

One of the people who was really supportive during those years was comedian David Brenner. Brenner would come in and do the show from time to time. He truly admired my style. "David, these assholes are attempting to squelch all my creativity and train me to be a boring fuck like Imus." We'd have these discussions during commercials and David could tell I was at my wit's end. "Who's in charge of the station?" he said. "Dom Fioravanti." With that, David marched into Fioravanti's office. He was in there for ten minutes yelling at him about how he had a genius at work and they should get off my fucking ass. This was a pretty spectacular gesture and I loved him for it.

As bad as it was to go to work every day, I somehow knew that, eventually, they would all be worn out dealing with me -- just like my parents when I wanted my own way. A drop in the bucket every day -- get away with a bit one day, and then maybe get suspended the next. But in due time, I would get things my way!

Pig Virus just had no clue where I was coming from. Neither did my general manager. One of the worst things they ever did was have me cohost the Easter Seals Telethon. I had been at the station a few months and they decided that I needed a good-guy image, so they arranged for me to do the telethon. I was trying to be a team player

so I went along. I got dressed up in a tux, but this isn't my scene. You can't be funny talking about crippled kids. I didn't know what the fuck to say. I was on for about seven hours and by the end of my slot I was crazed. I was saying stuff like: "I'm gonna be a father in

Early NBC. I was broadcasting from listeners' homes.

Here I even talked with a guy in his home who was bathing in a tub of red Jell-O.

two weeks and I've been going shopping for baby furniture and it's expensive. But what if I should have to go shopping for a wheelchair? Or an artificial limb? That's really expensive."

By the end of the night, I was sitting in a wheelchair, doing my pitch: "I'm about to fall asleep and this wheelchair is pretty comfortable. But at least I can get out of it. So many kids can't."

The whole thing was a total nightmare.

Even the engineers humiliated me at NBC. I'll never forget one engineer. This jerk was so busy filing union grievances that we could never get him to do anything for the show. It was hell. But this guy had plenty of time to walk around the halls of NBC when the ratings came out like he was a fifth-grade teacher giving out grades.

"Let's see how everyone did!" he'd shout. "Howard Stern show, uh-oh." This was our art, the stuff we lived and died for, and some asshole engineer was walking around with a ratings book, evaluating us. It was amazing we survived. That's why Robin and I ballooned up in weight again. Every night on the way home on the subway... oh, I forgot about the subway! Those bastards made us take the subway. They wouldn't even give us a damn car to use. I was begging them to help us out because we were making personal appearances after each show. After a while, when we were getting well known, we had to deny we were those people on the radio. Meanwhile, vodka breath Imus had a twenty-four-hour company-paid limo. Robin said he was the only guy who looked as if he was being limoed to a park bench.

Getting back to the subway, every night on our way home, we'd devise ways to torture management, to keep our sanity. Robin's boss in the news department was this woman Meredith, and all I'd have to say is "How are you gonna do it tonight, Robin?" and she was off.

"I'm gonna hook Meredith up to a wall and take some five-inch spike-heel shoes and invert her nipples with them."

One day we were on the air and I could see that Meredith had fucked with Robin in some way. I started talking to Robin and soon I got her saying that she wanted to do a Bic pen test on Meredith. She wanted to take the Bic pen and put it in a rifle and shoot it through Meredith's head and then use her whole head to write "BIC." We went off the air and we heard these footsteps rushing down the hall and Robin looked at me as if she was about to be fired. The door was thrown open and it was Pig Virus and he looked at Robin and said, "God, I wish I could say that!"

Meanwhile, life struggled on at NBC. I got suspended again for a skit Fred and I did called Das Love Boot. It was a high-concept bit. Doc Mengele was running the Love Boat and he was experimenting on the passengers.

"Sea sickness, Mrs. Cohen? Come down to the infirmary and I will remove your ovaries."

Eartha Kitt was the rotating guest star on that episode and Doc Mengele got to mate her with a black angus bull for his latest genetic experiment.

But basically we were working on one cylinder. Pig Virus would always be butting in, presiding over the content of our show. When Princess Grace died, her body was still warm and Piggy was running in, forbidding us to talk about her.

In fact, the only fun I was having at all professionally was on television. Judy Licht and Doug Johnson were hosting a local talk show called "Good Morning, New York," and they were about to be canceled when I made my first appearance on the show. It was actually supposed to be a joint appearance but Doug informed everybody that Imus couldn't make it because of the snow.

"What kind of snow are we talking about?" I wondered, a sly allusion to Imus's coke habit.

I then proceeded to do a magic trick in which I handcuffed Judy in a most revealing bondage pose and then threw a blanket over her and tried to remove the handcuffs by ESP. Of course, I couldn't, so I just left her on the floor, cuffed. But the best part was yet to come. They mentioned that the show had been canceled and they were going to be off the air soon.

"Hey, if this was my show and they canceled, I'd bust up the set," I said, and I started knocking all the furniture over. The audience went wild. They loved that bit so much that they asked me to come back in three weeks for their last show. That time, I showed up in a hard hat and I backed a huge pickup truck onto the set and with the help of four hard hats, we actually packed up all the furniture and carted it off. The whole time these guys were lugging the furniture away, I was chopping the set to smithereens with an ax.

But the funny thing was, even though the jerks at NBC had emasculated my show, we were still getting ratings. We were really beginning to show some numbers. Then Fioravanti left the station and NBC brought in Randy Bongarten as the new general manager. Randy was my savior.

The NBC radio Softball team, playing before a Mets game at Shea. I hated softball but this was one of those mandatory radio promotions I had to do to prove I was a team player.

Randy was young, hip, and a keen judge of talent. He had to be, he thought I was great. He basically let me do my show and that meant trashing the format, playing a lot fewer records, and re-creating the ambiance I had started in Washington. By now we had added Jackie "the Joke Man" Martling and Al Rosenberg as writers and we hired Gary Dell'Abate as our boy producer. We were ready to roll.

Jackie was a Long Island comic who had sent me a few of his homemade albums. I liked what I heard and I envisioned him as the perfect good-time party guy to hang out in our studio. When I brought him in, he proved to be an exceptional talent and collaborator. While we never hung out together outside the show, we had a magical meeting of the minds when we wrote the radio show. It was the same

magic I felt with Robin and Fred. I knew we belonged together. Throughout my career there have been managers who've tried to get me to abandon these people I work with, but each of them is just as important to the show as I am, and no one will break us up.

A major indication of the change in atmosphere was the way we dealt with Randy. I had bitched on the air about Pig Virus from the start. But now Randy got management off my back and allowed me to go crazy. I began to call his wife, Fran, and she became a semi-regular in our cast of characters. Whenever Randy gave us any kind of trouble at all, I'd call Fran on the air and beg her to give Randy some sex so he'd be in a better mood.

In fact, sex loomed larger and larger as a topic of our show. We even instituted a feature called Sexual Innuendo Wednesday in which we asked women to call in with their stories about sexual harassment, child abuse, or rape. These women would call in and say, "Well, my coach took me down to the locker room ..." and I'd say, "Whoa, slow it down, slow it down. What were you wearing?" All in the interest of public service, of course.

We began our great tradition of Christmas parties around then. Whoever wanted to come had to apply over the phone and had to promise to do something weird to be invited. For a guy, it would be something like belching out Christmas carols. For a girl, getting naked would do just fine. On the day of the party, girls were running around topless, couples were making out in the corner. It was wild.

Anything that came to mind, we tried. One time I had to take a piss during commercials but I was afraid to go because if there are other men in the bathroom, sometimes I get intimidated and it takes me longer to pee. I started talking about that on the air and my engineer told me about his bathroom habits and one thing led to another and he challenged me to a race to see who could take the fastest whiz. We got a wireless mike and our first Bathroom Olympics were born. By the time we were through milking that bit, we had listeners calling in vying for prizes if they could guess the closest time.

The Bathroom Olympics evolved into the Mystery Whiz, in which callers had to guess who was peeing from the sound of the urination alone. This was a bit much, even for Randy, but when he complained, I found out that his wife had ratted me out, so I called Fran on the air and let her have it.

Radio was suddenly fun again. When the infamous Vanessa Williams
Penthouse
lesbo spread came out, I got an advance copy

and I rerouted the NBC Studio tour
into
the studio, then I sold peeks at the pictorial to the tourists for five bucks a shot. We did so well that we decided to hold our own tours. We charged listeners a flat forty bucks to come into the studio, then we socked them for additional money depending on what they wanted to do. If they wanted to read the news, that was another thirty. It was fifteen to intro a record. We even had Gary go down to the NBC commissary and buy some food and resell it for double the price to the tour. We made over six hundred dollars on one tour alone.

Randy also encouraged me to do more television appearances. They booked me on "Donahue," but it was as one of a panel of controversial disc jockeys and the topic was totally lame. Donahue was bitching and moaning about the controversial lyrics of rock and I told him that I had no idea why the hell he had radio personalities there to answer these charges since we didn't write the lyrics, we didn't pick the records to play, and we didn't particularly like playing
any
records.

But my best exposure was when I did the Letterman show. Dave was working in the same building as we were and he was a big fan of my show. He was the first guy, except for that other television genius, Petey Green, to have me on as a guest in my own right, not as one of an assemblage of "wacky disc jockeys." And I killed. I broke all the rules of those late night talk shows. I touched Dave's hair. I talked about the preinterview. I bitched about both my radio management and his show's producers. And they loved it. Suddenly every show wanted me as a guest and not me with nine other djs.