Let him hear it.
My dad was a degenerate gambler.
He was a bookie for the Gambino crime family in New York.
One of the biggest bookies.
And if you were in the Gambino crime family in the '90s,
that was the [bleep] crime family you wanted to be in.
I don't want to brag, but that was like,
the Michael Jordon of crime families.
When I figured out what he did,
and he was a criminal, I wanted that lifestyle.
The Sopranos
Like, this was, like, a cool time to be a criminal.
And then for my 18th birthday
he decides to take me to Atlantic City.
And he gets myself and my friend Ben a room,
and he gets the room next to us
because when you gamble away your family's money,
they give you free rooms in Atlantic City.
And I'll never forget. So, outside, he takes me aside
before we get into the rooms and he goes, "Here's $300.
Have fun, and I want you to get a hooker."
And I go,
"Yes, Papa."
And then I go into the room where my friend Ben is waiting
and I go, "Ben, we're gonna get a hooker."
And he looks at me and goes, "How does one get a hooker?"
And I go, "I don't know!"
And I don't know if you've ever been to Atlantic City,
but everyone looks like a hooker.
Men, women, children.
There's some slot machines
that looked like [bleep] hookers.
And then we were like, "Let's just open
the Yellow Pages, right? It'll probably be in there."
We look under "hooker," nothing.
We look under "prostitute," nothing.
Then we get to "escort,"
and there's a bunch of photos of hookers.
So we call one up,
and the girl, the woman, she answers.
She goes, "Hey, what do you need?"
And we're like, "Do you have hookers?"
And she goes, "Uh, no.
We have escorts, though."
And we go, "Is that the same thing as hookers?"
And she goes, "Yeah."
So...
So, we're like, "Oh, yeah, we'd love one."
And she goes, "Uh, what height?"
And we're like, "Medium."
And she's like, "What about boobs?"
And we're like, "Yeah, we'd love boobs."
She was like, "Okay, we're sending a girl over."
And I hung up the phone.
I'll never forget, at that point I was like, "Oh, [bleep].
We're getting a hooker."
I'm like, "There's gonna be a human being
that's gonna come to the door and be like, '[bleep] me.'"
I guess that's not exactly how it happens,
but that's how I pictured it.
And that's where this story starts to get weird.
So, there's a knock at the door
and my friend's like, "I'll take care of this."
And he opens the door,
and I can only describe this woman as:
picture your mother's friends.
That's it.
It was--she was just shapes.
And my friend closed the door and he comes over, he's like,
"What do we do?
What do we do about this?"
And I was like, "I don't know, man.
I'm freaking out."
Like, my mom's friend Carla is standing out there.
I don't know what to do.
So we're huddling and he's like, I remember he looked at me
and he goes, "I'll take care of this."
And he goes to the door, opens the door,
looks this hooker dead in the eyes
and just goes, "This isn't what we ordered."
Like a pizza!
Like, he was like, "Anchovies?
"Nope.
That's not what we wanted."
And she just looked at him and went,
"Okay, give me two minutes."
And she walked away.
And we were like, "What now? Where does this go?
There's a level two to this game?"
Then there's another knock at the door and we open it,
and this woman was like, compared to the first one,
like a real fox,
but still wasn't attractive at all.
Like, you know when someone's like hot at the DMV,
they're like DMV hot.
It's like, compared to everyone around them
they're just like, yeah, she's attractive.
And she just stepped right in.
She was like, "Hey, guys, what's going on?"
And we were like, "Oh, hey.
And we, like, we had just a bottle of vermouth.
We just, like, gave her, like, a shot of vermouth.
So, she's sipping her vermouth and then she shows us a picture
of her daughter,
and we were like, "Oh, no.
This is too weird now."
So we're like, "We can't do this."
And we have another huddle.
Like, we're just, like, standing there.
And my friend's like, "I can't have sex with her."
I'm like, "I can't either."
And I'm like, "All right, I think I have an idea
how to get us out of this."
And I leave the room,
and you know that, like, I don't know if you guys have fathers,
but there's a moment where you really bond with your dad.
I went over to my dad's room,
I knocked on his door, and I'll never forget it.
He opened the door and he goes, "What is it, son?"
And I go, "Papa...
"Papa.
[sighs]
"I have a problem.
"There's a prostitute in my room,
"and she's DMV hot, and...
I don't want to have sex with her."
And I'll never forget it. He looked me in the eyes.
He goes, "Don't worry. I'll take care of this.
Send her to my room."
And I did!
And I spent the rest of the night
listening to my dad have sex with a prostitute.
And I remember thinking, "I'm gonna be a weird adult."