My grandfather

It's not enough to say my grandfather was a character. My grandfather left characters choking in the dust and in the secondhand smoke from his Trues. Family legend has it that he lied about his age to fight World War II, and that he punctured his condoms to keep his father from stealing them. I believe both legends, and if the latter is true, it didn't work -- my great-grandfather Noel was born when Grandpa Bernie was 17.

My grandfather was a hothead and a fighter. He walked around the Bronx with a two-by-four. At a restaurant he got chopped tomatoes instead of the sliced ones he'd requested, so he waltzed into the kitchen and showed them how it was done. To him every waiter was Johnny, even in the Chinese joints. He and my grandmother loved to smoke and talk after dinner and were always the bane of an impatient kitchen staff ready to close up and get home to their families.

He and my grandmother were in love, by the way. We're not talking the boring kind of love that makes you yawn. We're talking about hot, passionate, searing, lasting. I remember the only fight I ever heard them have. I was five and they'd just moved from New York to their apartment in the San Fernando Valley. My grandmother was pissed off. Woodland Hills was not suiting her. She was bitchy: "Bernie, I'm leaving. I'm going back to New York. I'm taking my checkbook and I'm going."

"Dolly," he roared, "take your checkbook and wipe your ass with it!" I cringed, impressed.

He'd come home from his accountant job, take off his dress shirt, and light up. When my brother and I were around, he'd freak us out by sticking his foot in our faces. He had two toes frozen off in the war. He loved showing it off and deep inside we loved seeing it.

He once came to our house with golf clubs in the trunk. They weren't for sport.

When I was eight, we stood in my grandparents' kitchen, killing time before driving out to LAX. My parents were taking a trip to Hawaii and we were staying with Bernie and Dolly for two weeks. This was an annual thing. It was 1982, the year Hurricane Eva hit. When it happened, we wouldn't believe our luck: More time here without our parents!

But before all that, we stood in my grandparents' kitchen. My grandfather threw himself into a chair and flipped through a magazine. He turned to me and brandished a glossy page: a woman in a leopard-skin bikini standing next to a tiger. "I don't know," he said, "which pussy I like best."

My mother put on her best nasal Bronx mock outrage: "Dah-ddy!" But I got it. I cracked up. And I knew then, as I know now, who I can thank for my sense of humor.