Daddy-An Absolutely Authentic Fake Memoir

Intro I’ll say it right now. Right up front. THIS BOOK IS A TELL-ALL. Now that may be a turn-off to you—a tell-all!—or it may be a turn-on, who knows? Only you. But I want you to be aware (and beware!) that it’s a tell-all about my father whom you probably know—“know” in the public persona sense, in the Hey, isn’t that whatshisname! sense—unless in the highly unlikely event you live on Mercury and don’t know him from a crater. Okay, I concede, maybe even if you live halfway round the world or in some very remote American backwater with nothing under your feet but grass. Most people are familiar with him as the ubiquitous businessman known as The Rugman. He’s that “real character!” who’s been an item in the papers forever and often. Well, actually he wasn’t on their pages forever. There was a beginning, when he was getting established, before I was old enough to remember and he began advertising in The Daily News and New York Post, and later added bigger guys like The Wall Street Journal and The Worldly Times. His face appeared in all print ads, which he wrote himself and which were way out there. When he started doing TV spots the public couldn’t get enough of him and he developed a sort of cult following. A newer generation, at least a certain segment newer generation, has gotten acquainted with him in his latest incarnation as a syndicated columnist. (More on that soon.) Well, in whatever way most people know my daddy, and however and whichever way you know him, I can tell you this for sure: it is not as his daughter. That honor falls to me. This is a tell-all in the no-holds-barred sense. (You’re saying, But aren’t they all!) I have no desire to keep anything back and I intend to be very objective. This book is not a lightweight or get-even diversion for me. Until a certain point in my life, I was Daddy’s Little Girl. To me he was beyond perfect, but things changed as I grew up. (Don’t go thinking he did anything sexually or otherwise untoward. No, that’s not it. It’s just that when I began to see him for who and what he was, he fell off the proverbial pedestal upon which I had placed him.) You may think it’s kind of tacky for a child to tell all although you’ve already been subjected to Mommie Dearest, A Child Called It, Running With Scissors and, recently, its other half, A Wolf At The Table…to name a few flagrant memoirs. However, as you may have heard, daddy dropped dead unexpectedly, precipitously, and pretty prematurely last week—he was in near perfect health. So, this isn’t as tacky as you think. He’s already out of the way and can’t be hurt, unless of course you believe in an afterlife and spirits and the supernatural and all things eternal or infernal, which I don’t. Anyway, I must add, daddy was pretty dead, morally and otherwise (which you’ll see is very relevant as the story progresses) before he mortally passed, so he’s not entitled to be offended. I’m not saying whether I would or wouldn’t have written the book had he lived. It was in the works, in my head at least. But his death freed—or stirred?—me and right after the funeral, the day after he died (we Jews dispatch our lifeless quickly to the grave because while we might like gefilte fish, we don’t like the stink) I started in earnest to write this story. His story. My story of him.