I’d like to say that this was shocking and foreign to me at the time, but everything he said reinforced subtle messages that had been making me queasy for years. All right? … I did it right on her kerchief. Howard Stern: The closest I came to making love to a black woman was, I masturbated to a picture of Aunt Jemima. Disregarding the racially tense atmosphere - the Rodney King beating had just happened that March - Howard frequently managed to combine his racism and his misogyny into a single joke: (In 1992 he released an hour-long video called Butt Bongo Fiesta that sold more than 200,000 copies and made more than $10 million.) He often invited Playboy bunnies onto his show to endure sniveling inquiries about “lesbian” sex or graphic descriptions of how he’d imagined having sex with them. A recurring motif involved “Butt Bongo,” in which a member of his studio crew would spank a stripper to the beat of a song as Howard salivated in the background. In his four hours on air each morning, he mixed a cocktail of interviews, rape jokes about his competition, fart gags, and riffs off the news. By this point, he had his schtick down pat. Howard was new to Los Angeles that year, conquering a new market after having made a name for himself in New York. I tie you to my radiator and stretch you. It can be like an abusive kind of thing, where you like come in, you rough me up a little bit. I’m going to talk to the producers, ya know. H.S.: Robin knows, Robin just had her face. H.S.: Yeah, does a guy ever get aroused? ‘Cause I know if I did a love, there would be no room on the screen for my boner. Howard Stern: You ever bang a guy during a love-interest scene? Here he is talking with Stacy Galina from Knots Landing around that time: I turned that phrase around in my head endlessly as I removed streaks of Windex with a crumpled wad of newspaper. “I’ll give her the hot beef injection,” Howard would joke about whichever woman he happened to be obsessing over. Listening to Howard Stern on the radio every morning felt like eavesdropping on the uncensored mind of the adolescent boy - a demographic I was desperate to understand. As a teenage girl, few things were more seductive to me than being let in on a world of male secrets. Once the homeowners had left, we’d climb up the ladders and turn on “Howard,” as my dad called him. I liked watching him charm the old ladies who always asked if he was a struggling actor. I liked being with my dad, whom I never got to see during the school year. I didn’t enjoy washing windows, but I didn’t hate it either. On some mornings, before the sun was high, we would load up his ancient maroon Volvo with Windex and drive from Hollywood to Pasadena, where business was booming. I had come from New York, with a pixie cut and a 15-year-old’s inflated sense of sophistication, to visit my dad, who was writing screenplays and doing odd jobs to pay the rent. Los Angeles has millions of picture windows, and I spent the summer of 1991 making them so clean that birds could fly right into them and die.