by Adam Carolla
The other time, I was in another station wagon with my friend Teddy. I can’t remember the context, but as usual I was mouthing off. This time I got slapped in the face by his dad, Grandpa Al Lewis from The Munsters. The difference was that Al didn’t apologize or regret it. He was a grumpy old fuck.
I bring up my dad and discipline because of an incident that occurred around this time. My friend James was a soft-spoken half-Asian kid who wasn’t what you’d call a hooligan, but if he was back in God knows whatever country his mom was from he’d definitely be on the losing end of a lot of canings. Anyway it was a Saturday night, I was sleeping over at James’s house, and we decided to head out looking for fun. We knew an older guy, Brett, who worked at the 7-Eleven and probably wouldn’t hassle us if we got up on the roof with a trash bag full of water balloons and chucked them at cars driving down Moorpark Street. The 7-Eleven was tailor-made for this activity because it had a flat roof with a three-foot parapet you could hide behind once you’d thrown your balloon. Plus it had a dumpster in the back that made roof access as easy as climbing onto a rolling dumpster and then dragging your belly and elbows up six feet of rocky stucco. (My favorite gay porn name, by the way—Rocky Stucco.) We were hitting cars with our water balloons, laughing and ducking. The night was going according to plan until we hit a Honda driven by Charles Bronson’s evil twin. He quickly screeched into the 7-Eleven parking lot, and moments later a hatch in the roof opened and we heard Brett say, “Come down the ladder.” We froze and considered jumping off the roof, but then climbed down the ladder into the back of the 7-Eleven to find the most pissed-off guy who’s ever driven a sub-compact. He was angry and short. He had what psychologists call a Neapolitan complex—the kind of rage people have when you bring home that shitty three-flavored ice cream. This guy was aggressive. He said to me, “You’re lucky you’re not eighteen. I’d beat the crap out of you.” I was fourteen at the time and was already pretty big from lifting weights for football. So au contraire, you diminutive fuck, at eighteen I would have kicked your puny ass. But I was fourteen and scared, so I kept my mouth shut while this guy threatened me. He gave me and James a choice: Either we called our dads or he called the cops.
I went first and woke my dad up, which should go without saying. It’s not like I would have called and interrupted a late-night poker game with the fellas. I told him what happened and that there was a maniac threatening me and repeating he wanted my dad to beat me since he couldn’t do it himself. My dad was about as pissed as his temperament allowed and said he was coming to pick me up.
Now it was James’s turn. He called his house and his Spicoliesque brother, Curt, picked up. James said, “Get Dad.” Curt, being half-asleep and still stoned from earlier that night, made some sort of grunt but then passed out, dropping the phone. We tried calling back several times but got a busy signal. It was like something out of a sitcom, and I got stuck with the worst-of-both-worlds scenario. The short man with the shorter fuse decided the deal was off because James’s dad wasn’t coming. He called the cops. In the meantime my dad was on his way so I had the cops and him to contend with. The officers arrived a few minutes later and gave us the scared-straight routine. They said we were guilty of “throwing a missile.” It was that zero-tolerance bullshit where they said that “in the eyes of the law” there was no difference between us throwing water balloons or a bench vise. And by the way, to a fourteen-year-old, when you call it a “missile” you make the idea of throwing one off the roof of a different 7-Eleven next week a lot more intriguing. My pajama-clad dad arrived a few minutes later, put me in the car, and took me home. I don’t think we ever talked about it again. I’d like to think he made a decision that being lectured by the cops and threatened by Danny Bonaduce’s non-redheaded doppelganger was punishment enough, but the sad and simple truth is that disciplining me would have cut into his Kierkegaard reading time.
So that was my dad’s A-frame. I’m sure if there had been something called a D-minus-frame we would have ended up living there instead. But fortunately it would only be a few years before I’d be in high school and a new house.
WHEN I was finishing up the ninth grade, my dad moved to a new house. Some of you will remember it as the place we renovated on my TLC show. By comparison to his last house it was a palace. I would consider it the first normal house I lived in, and for the first time ever all seemed right with the world. It had an actual lawn that wasn’t brown. The kitchen had a double sink, which was amazing to me. Two sinks! I felt like Elly May seeing the cement pond for the first time ever. My dad had gotten remarried to a normal woman named Lynn, and the plan was to start pretending like we were a real family. It was me, Dad, Lynn, my sister (occasionally), and my new older stepsister Hilary.
For the first three years we lived at this house, I slept in the smaller bedroom. (Stepsister Hilary took the semiconverted garage.) My dad and Lynn had the “master” bedroom, which was a spacious nine by nine. For the size of it, my room had a large closet, which brings me to the next story.
At this time, the tenth grade, my friend Chris had a hot girlfriend. One day he said to me that he wanted to bring his girl to my house to make out with her. My dad’s house was a short distance away from North Hollywood High if you wanted to ditch class and go make out. I thought about this for a second and asked, “Do you think her top is going to come off?” Chris said yes. I said, “I’d like to see that.” He said, “You could. Just hide in the closet.” Now, I know it sounds creepy, but this was before the Internet and I was fifteen. So we hatched a plan. I’d go home, hide in my closet, and then at lunchtime Chris and his girl would leave school and come by my place to get to second base. I asked if I could invite anyone else into the closet and he said no. It was worth a shot. My dad and stepmom were at work and I had my lunch pass so I headed home, hopped in the closet, and about five minutes later they came in and started making out. A few moments after that, the sweater came off. And a few more moments after that, my stepmom came banging on the door. “What’s going on in there?” Turns out her car was in the shop, she had called in to work, and had been there the whole time. She asked Chris, “Where’s Adam?” He played dumb. But my stepmom said, “I saw him walk in.” I hung tight in the closet while my stepmom told him this wasn’t his house and to get lost. Eventually everyone cleared out. I had no idea how I was going to get out of the closet without her seeing me. And the clock was ticking: I had to get back to school or I might miss something important like a ceramics final. My scholarship to Brown was hanging in the balance. I sat there paralyzed with fear for about ten minutes and then made my move.
The house was L-shaped and I was in the back, at the top of the L. Chris and his gal pal had left, but my stepmother was still lurking somewhere in the house and presumably looking for me. From my position, I had no way of telling if she was standing outside the door to my room or on the other side of the house. Either way, I couldn’t get to the front of the house without being spotted. I was left with only one alternative. I dashed out of the closet and hopped into the small bathroom connected to my room. Actually it was a half bath, just a sink and a toilet. I cracked the small window, squeezed myself out, and then began scaling the high rickety wooden fence. Naturally my neighbor was standing there and saw me, covered in sweat, climbing into his yard. For some reason at twelve thirty on a Wednesday he was there with a hose casually watering his lawn. I flopped over the top of the fence and rolled on his grass like Belushi on the lawn of the sorority in Animal House. The neighbor matter-of-factly said, “Hi, Adam.” I yelled “Hi, Mr. [Whatever His Name Was]!” as I ran past him, just beating the bell that signaled the beginning of fifth period. As far as North Hollywood High goes, don’t let the word Hollywood confuse you. It was mostly working-class whites and Latinos from the Valley, with a dusting of Jews from the hills and blacks from the buses. And don’t let the word school confuse you, either. There was no schooling going on. The only thing I learned how to do in high school was cover a textbook
with a grocery bag. North Hollywood High was part of the L.A. Unified School District, which had no standards at all. To get held back in the L.A. school system you have to defecate on three teachers and try to kill a fourth.
My first year of high school was one of the worst periods in my life. My grades were horrible, and in the first semester I failed biology. To me the only important class was driver’s ed. I was fifteen and three quarters, hitting sixteen at the end of May, and school got out in June. It was time to get some wheels. I had it all laid out. I’d take driver’s ed the second semester of my tenth-grade year, then over the summer I’d go to Sears, take driver’s training, and hit the road. (For clarity, driver’s ed was the classroom portion; driver’s training was when you got in the car with the barely employable dude sitting in the passenger seat with the second steering wheel.) There were two guys who taught driver’s ed—Mr. Smith and Mr. Jeffries. Mr. Smith was a cool guy with a handlebar mustache who coached the football team and loved me. Think Dandy Don Meredith. Mr. Jeffries was a super-uptight, Brillo-headed asshole who was probably a closeted homo and definitely had anger issues. Guess which one I got? Of course it was Mr. Jeffries. But I wasn’t sweating it. I didn’t need to be in the top of the class, I just needed to pass so I could take driver’s training. On the last week of class, out of the blue, Mr. Jeffries demanded a twenty-page report on passive restraints. Not turning this in would mean automatic failure. He just dropped it on us: It was not part of the regular curriculum. My reading and writing ability meant a twenty-page paper on anything was impossible. I couldn’t write a twenty-pager on big-tit porn, never mind seat belts. But my hope was that I would just not turn it in and squeak by with a D because I had almost perfect attendance.
Nope. Mr. Jeffries failed me. I hope he’s rotting in hell. Seriously, I picture him in an old-school double-steering wheel driver’s training car while Satan is in the driver’s seat hauling ass and laughing maniacally.
I wound up going to a dusty, depressing strip mall in Van Nuys, paying the ninety bucks I managed to scrape together from all the birthday money I got from the regular, step- and grandparents, and doing one of those six-months-of-training-in-four-days-type programs, where you go for a couple of marathon twelve-hour days and then take the test. I managed to pass that and took driver’s training through a private company. I picked the cheapest one in the phone book. It was what you’d think: driving around with a loser in the passenger seat saying, “turn here,” “merge there,” et cetera. Except my instructor looked like the creepy Armenian guy who would be hitting on Kate Hudson at the singles bar when her friend convinced her that a girls’ night out was just what the doctor ordered after Matthew McConaughey left her at the altar. At a certain point he said, “Hold up. Pull in here.” It was a 7-Eleven in a bad part of Hollywood. Ten minutes later, he emerged with a sack of jerky and a Hustler. Except this Hustler was in 3-D. He just sat there in the passenger seat looking at the Hustler with cardboard glasses on. At a certain point he said something along the lines of, “Wow, look at that pussy jump right off the page.” This was back in the day before people would drop a dime on each other. It was a simpler time. Nowadays the car would have been wired with a nanny cam and a tumescence monitor and this guy would have been fired and had to register as a sex offender.
My guidance counselor was named Mr. Tomi.
I had two memorable encounters with him. The first was when I wanted to take a class he thought was too much for me to handle. I wanted to get into it because all of my friends were taking it, but he said, “I would steer away from that one. It’s a pretty tough class.” He thought I’d be in over my head and he was probably right. It was the ego-crushing equivalent of going to a Home Depot, picking up a cordless drill, and having the guy in the orange smock say, “I think that’s a little too much tool for you.”
My other incident with Mr. Tomi happened when I got suspended and the school pulled my “emergency contact card.” There’s no real story to tell surrounding the suspension. I had a pass to go home at lunch and I tried to leave campus without it and the guard stopped me. He said if I left I’d be suspended. But I was hungry so I split anyway, and thus the suspension.
They sent me to Mr. Tomi, and he had to pull the emergency contact card so he could call my folks. This was that card you fill out at the beginning of high school to reach your guardians in the event of an earthquake or compound fracture at football practice. But because I was me, I never brought the thing home. I filled it out myself the Monday morning before class registration. And since I was doing it while I was standing around with my buddies, I decided to get stupid. We treated it like a Mad Lib. Then I faked my dad’s signature and handed it in. Little did I know that two years later I’d get suspended and Mr. Tomi would pull it out to call my dad. He took it out of the file cabinet, looked down at it, took a long pause, stared at me, and said, “Did you fill this out?” I thought he was just talking about my chicken-scratch handwriting and misspellings. I’d forgotten that I’d fucked around when I was filling it out. Where it asked for “mother’s work address,” I wrote “Hollywood and Vine—Call Big Earl,” like she was a prostitute. For her home address, I wrote “Ronald McDonald Halfway House.” When it came to my dad, I wrote that he was employed as a “Secret Agent” and then under phone number, work address, and home address I wrote “Classified.”
In my senior year we were having a pie-eating contest in the quad as part of a lunchtime school spirit event. Because of my parents’ policy on not having anything in the house that didn’t taste like gerbil pellets, when it was announced that we’d be having a pie-eating contest I gladly threw my pan in the ring. Of the three contestants, I was probably the favorite to win. I was a big guy at the time, captain of the football team, and I was hungry for the victory. Literally. I had the pie of the tiger. So they tied everyone’s hands behind their backs, blew a whistle, and the contestants to my left and right buried their faces in the pies. But not me. I just stared at it. The entire school was there screaming, “Eat, Eat, EAT!” They were pissed. I don’t know if there was gambling going on, but they kept yelling at me to eat the pie. So I taunted them a little by just nibbling at the crust. I wouldn’t bury my face in it. I was in the middle, so the guys on either side of me were covered in pie. It was in their hair, their ears, and under their eyelids. At some point they held up a guy’s hand who had a face full of blueberry pie and declared him the winner. I then quietly picked up my unmolested pie and started heading home. There was still twenty minutes left in the lunch period, just enough time to run home with the pie, sit down at the table, get a knife and fork, take out a big jug of milk, and blissfully eat the whole damn thing. Mrs. Tani, the little Asian woman who was also a guidance counselor and was running the event, went ballistic. It was as if there had been some sort of Geneva Convention for pie-eating contests and I had violated it. She demanded, “You throw away that pie!” I replied, “There are kids starving all over the world and you want me to throw away this perfectly good pie?” She said, “You toss it, right now.” I held the pie up over my head and shouted to the crowd, “Mrs. Tani wants me to throw away this perfectly good pie.” The crowd turned on her and started booing. I used this as covering fire to make my escape. As Mrs. Tani reached for the pie tin, I reached for the pie and using my bare hands scooped it up and carried the oozing and crumbling mess home.
A little pie-related tangent connected to my future roommate, “The Weez.” It happened later when we were living together, but I tell this story now to show how nuts I was about free food, especially pie. When a girl would break up with The Weez, he would hit her in the face with a pie, Three Stooges–style. Word got around after that first breakup, and his next girlfriend was aware this was his MO and didn’t want to suffer the embarrassment after she dumped him. The Weez assured her he was unarmed. It was like in a mob movie when the guy holds his jacket open to prove that he’s not bringing a piece into a meeting with the boss. After he was patted down for pie, th
e girl agreed to go on a walk with him down the street. But like Michael Corleone putting the gun behind the toilet, The Weez had preset a pie on the step bumper of my truck, which was parked on the street. When he got to the back of my truck, he grabbed the pie and creamed her.
I’d always get pissed at him for this. I didn’t care about the chick, I just couldn’t stand seeing good pie go to waste. I’d say, “Why don’t you just put some shaving cream on a paper plate? Don’t waste eight dollars’ worth of pie.” He would go to the Four ’N Twenty pie shop and get a nice fresh one instead of the cheap two-day-old pie from the bakery thrift store. It was like an assassin using golden bullets. I’d come home and see that pink box in the fridge and get excited, but The Weez would say, “Don’t touch it. That’s for Melanie.” Here’s how desperate I was. I would get the pie remnants after the assault and eat them. Like those little fish that go flying up after the hippo shits in the river. I would literally scoop the broken pie off the asphalt and consume it, bits of gravel and all. One time I actually ran into the recently humiliated girl’s house with the pie debris I’d snatched up and was eating it as she walked in moments later to clean up, her face covered in cherry filling and tears.
Naturally I went out for the North Hollywood High football team—the Huskies. And I was a gifted athlete. I had a great sense of balance and I was also stronger than every other kid I played with. As a matter of fact, wrestling with Chris got so boring that I would just let him pin me and we would see how long it would take me to throw him off and pin him. Later on when puberty kicked in, the results were very different.
Puberty for boys is essentially steroids. One minute you’re spindly with a voice like a girl, and the next thing you know there’s a vein in your arm and a chip on your shoulder. Your genes decide how much juice you’re going to get from the steroid injection. My problem was my dad was five foot nine and 145 pounds and had calves skinnier than his ankles. Picture the guy Screech would have beat up in high school. So while most of my buddies’ syringes were filled with high-grade bull testosterone, mine was filled with Ensure and tap water.
