You ever say thank you to your mom?

You ever look at your mother and just thank her for raising you?

I know my mother wasn’t perfect. I know she did things that she probably regrets.

I know that she was maybe a little too stoned, a little drunk too often.

I know that I did things to her that I regret.

So recently, as I was hanging out with my mom on the beach, I told her, “Mom, a lot of the things that I got away with as a kid were unbelievable.”

I went to summer camp one year and got assigned to a bunk with a bunch of kids that I really didn’t care for.

They were a bunch of nerds and all my cool friends got put in one bunk together, so that made me feel even worse.

So what did I do the entire summer?

I teased them. It was one against eight. They were all afraid of me. They could have ganged up on me, but they never did. They could’ve done anything. I played practical jokes on them, I teased the shit out of them, and they never did anything back to me.

They told the counselors about me and I told the counselors to fuck off.

The owner of the camp sat me down in his office one day and I told him to go fuck himself and walked away.

I was 11. I was a little bit of a bastard, but I have to thank my mom for that.

My dad was a complete pussy. I horrified him.

My mother was 5’2″ and weighed nothing more than 100 pounds—this woman taught me how to tell people to fuck off since I was probably eight.

Was that the right thing to do for a mother and a son? Probably not.

We grew up in Scarsdale, New York. It was a prim, proper, Westchester suburb, and I was a trash-talking kid that had no problem telling the teacher to go fuck herself.

Did I ever get called into the principal’s office? Absolutely. What did I tell the principal? Exactly what you think.

I never cared. I never got suspended because I talked my way out of it.

I got some really bad grades. Thanks mom. She hid it from my dad all the time. My dad never understood how these grades came in late in the year when everybody else was getting report cards.

But year after year, my dad would ask, “Did you get your report card?”

“No dad, not until April.”

And he’d believe it, even though he had to know that it was impossible because other kids were getting report cards.

My dad never saw the report card. My mother and I hid it.

I’d come home with that really bad report card. I’m talking like straight-Ds. I was just the worst student because if you have a kid who tells teachers to go fuck themselves, he isn’t exactly going to get good grades.

I would come home with this terrible report card, and my mother would tell me, “Don’t worry, I won’t show your dad.”

“Thanks, mom. I’m going to go play.”

And she’d say, “Okay,” and let me out to play.

With straight-Ds.

My mom just let me do whatever I wanted to do. It’s probably the reason why I can’t play by the rules as an adult.

One day my mother dropped my brother and sister and I off to go see Jaws—dropped us off.  I was 13 at the time, my sister was seven, and my brother was five and a half, and we went to go see Jaws.

My brother is scarred for life from this movie.  You can go swimming with him and just play the music, and he’s out of the ocean and right back at the shore.

That summer, he wouldn’t go into the ocean without screaming his head off.

Ruined for life.

Before I went to summer camp one year, my mother took me to see The Godfather.  The Godfather.  I was seeing R-rated movies when I was 11 years old.

Why would getting good grades in school matter to me when I’m watching The Godfather tell people to go fuck themselves.

So of course, when a teacher told me to do something I didn’t like, I went into Godfather mode and pretended to be the Godfather’s son and told them to go fuck themselves.

This was my childhood.

This was my childhood.  Everything about this childhood has made me exactly who I am right now.

It’s all because of my mother.

It’s definitely cost me some opportunities.

When I was in my 20s, I wanted to be an actor. One day I told my mom that my manager was frustrating me, so she basically told my manager to go fuck herself.  That was after she had sex with one of my customers in my bar.

That’s right.

When I was 23 years old, I was working at a place called Silverbirds and my mother was sleeping over at my house that night, in the city.

So I let her come to my bar the night that I was bartending. That’s where she got into a fight with my manager.

All I wanted to be was a soap opera actor. That’s all I wanted to be. My manager was one of the top managers in New York City. Her clients were some of the biggest people in TV at the time. So I probably would have been a soap opera actor…at least until that night.

My mother decided to tell her that because she was not sending her son out on enough auditions, she could go fuck herself.

Yes, that’s my life.

A lot of you want to know what my life was like, and what makes me who I am.

This is what makes me who I am—my mother.

My father helped out too.

I’ve always looked at him and thought he was the weakest guy I have ever seen in my entire life and I didn’t want to be like him. So thank you, Dad, for being the role model I needed.

With girls, my dad was the worst. I remember he’d look at me and he’d tell me, “Son, I’m going to give you some advice for women.”

Gee, thanks dad. You’re a fucking stud. I really want advice from you.

The only reason why he got a babe like my mom is because she was looking to get the fuck out of her house, and he was this rich New York City boy. Otherwise he would have never gotten her.

So this stud would say to me, “Don’t look at your feet.”

Don’t look at my feet? Okay, dad.

So I wouldn’t look at my feet. But then when girls would drop their books in front of me I wouldn’t know what the fuck to say either. I wouldn’t look at my feet though.

I’d come home and say, “Dad, some girl dropped her books down in front of me today.”

“Well, what did you do?”

“I didn’t look at my feet.”

“Good job, son.”

“Okay, uh, can you give me a clue about what to do next?”

“Talk to her.”

Great fucking advice.

My mother, on the other hand, would talk to me about sex, drugs and everything. My mother’s friends all were a bunch of horn dogs.

I was 17 years old and they were coming on to me in the strangest fucking ways. You know, pressing up against me every chance they got.

I came home stoned and drunk one night from a high school party. (And my mom always knew I was high because she was high and we were speaking the same fucked up pot language.)

One of her friends followed me into the kitchen because she also knew I was high.

Her stiff ass husband was a real white, suburban guy, thinking his wife didn’t fuck around on him. But she had just gone to the kitchen to follow the 17-year-old son of one of your good friends, guy.

I remember turning around with a donut in my mouth, and she’s an inch away from me whispering that she could be my “Mrs. Robinson” if I wanted.

So, I turn around, and say, “Well, that sounds great.”

And she chuckles and tells me that I should go see the movie. So when I finally did see the movie, I realized about three of my mother’s friends had come onto me in the kitchen on a regular basis, and I could have been fucking them upstairs in my room the entire time.

This is how I grew up.

I could have been banging all of them, and if told my mother the next day, she probably would have given me a high five.

She probably would’ve told me, “Make sure to learn as much as you possibly can, son.”

Because that was my mother.

My childhood was strange as can be. Think about it. Think about what I just told you. I was allowed to tell the teacher to go fuck off.

I was rewarded for being a hardass.

So, now, I’m a total hardass all the time, and I get rewarded for it by all of you.

And by being such a hardass, I’m teaching you life’s greatest lessons so you are no longer stuck in your own head.

My mother taught me that, and I’m teaching you all that.

Thank you, mom.