by Adam Carolla
One hot day in July I was out on a delivery run in the liquor store’s station wagon up in what we referred to as Hebrew Heights. I was passing The Weez’s cousin Michelle’s house, so I decided to stop in. She was a good friend of mine and I had some time to kill. I knocked on the door and it just swung open. Like the house was haunted. I heard music coming from inside. So I stepped into the entryway and called her name a couple of times. There was no reply. The house was laid out like the letter C with a little grassy area in the middle. As I was walking through I looked out the window into the courtyard area and saw two completely hot and completely naked chicks sunbathing. I knew them from high school. One of them was The Weez’s cousin and the other was Beth, Molly Ringwald’s sister, a girl I’d had a crush on for a while. Unfortunately, from my angle all I could see was that they were naked and not much else. So I crept around to the back of the house to get a better view from the master bedroom. I climbed up on Michelle’s mom’s dresser to get a view from an upper window. Unfortunately, all I saw was half an ass cheek as they walked into the house and slid the door closed behind them. I was cut off: There was no way to the front door and no back door to get to. I was hoping they were going to walk in for a drink and walk back out, but they didn’t. I was trapped like a rat with a boner. So all I could do was hide in the closet. I couldn’t just walk out of there—that would make me seem like a weird perv who broke in as opposed to a lucky perv who happened to catch them at just the right moment. So from the closet I could hear them talking about needing to take a shower. Fortunately not together: That would have blown my mind and I would have passed out in the closet because all the blood would have left my brain and gone to my wang. Beth said she would take the first shower and got in, but I was still trapped in the closet because Michelle was wandering around God knows where and I could have easily run into her. At a certain point I decided to take my chances and make a break for it. I was supposed to be on a fifteen-minute liquor delivery and I’d been gone almost an hour at that point. I slowly crept out of the closet, snuck down the hall, and peeked around a corner and saw that she was still naked in the kitchen, on the phone, with her back turned to me. I had about eighteen feet of carpet to cover, then a hard left to freedom. I went like a blitzing linebacker shooting the B-gap. I was two steps away from being in the clear when she spun around and spotted me. She dropped the phone and started screaming. So I started screaming, too, and pretended like I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I sprinted out of the house, jumped into the car, and sped off. It was all very innocent, but it was such a traumatic experience that to this day I can barely beat off to it.
THERE were several nights back in the day when my only shelter was a blanket and my bed was the beach in Mexico. Being young and dumb in Southern California means frequent trips to Tijuana. Me and my idiot friends went down Mexico way at least a dozen times. And the majority of those trips ended with me crashing on the beach with the blanket and pillow from my own bed and waking up surrounded by dogs that walked sideways. That’s never a good sign.
You all know Tijuana as a family-friendly crime-free zone perfect for church groups and Scout troops or day trips with the kids. But it wasn’t always Legoland South. Are you sitting down? Believe it or not, there was a time when Tijuana and even other parts of Mexico were filled with criminals, corrupt cops, and three-year-olds selling Chiclets on the street. But it’s not like there were any trips to Paris or Florence on a young Adam Carolla’s calendar, so Tijuana was about as exotic a locale as I could get to. Plus those places had art museums, not seedy strip joints like the Unicorn Bar. And that’s what my gang of poor, bored, and fearless seventeen-year-old buddies were looking for. Most people fear Tijuana because it’s lawless. That’s exactly why we wanted to go. The Unicorn Bar was usually our first stop.
The strippers at the Unicorn danced to a live band. That sounds cool, but the band was made up of three guys whose average age was eighty-seven. The drum “kit” was composed of a lone snare drum first used in the Battle of Pueblo, and one of them was playing a trumpet that looked like it had been backed over by a U-Haul. The place was filled with marines from nearby Camp Pendelton who were looking for one last chance at love before they were dropped onto the mean streets of Grenada, perhaps never to return again.
Of course, the legendary debauchery you always hear about in Tijuana is the donkey show. If you don’t know what this is, Google it, preferably while your youngest is on your lap. Let’s just say it ends with a very sore woman and a very happy donkey. One night in ’83 we looked for the donkey show for more than four hours. We talked to everyone we could. I didn’t speak any Spanish but “donkey show” is part of the International Language. By the way, “¿Donde esta la biblioteca?” is the only thing I remember from high school Spanish class. Have you ever found yourself in Mexico wondering where the library was? Sewage-treatment facility would place higher on a list of Mexican tourist destinations. Every time I went there all I looked for were strippers, street tacos, and the donkey show.
I never did any homework in high school and follow-through is not something that’s really in my family history, but when it came time to look for the donkey show I was like Magellan. We walked the entire damn city but never found it. We did find a taco stand that had a jukebox in it and we pissed everyone off by playing Rick Springfield nonstop for an hour. We just kept feeding quarters in, hitting D3, and rocking out to “Jessie’s Girl.” The other thing I remember about that night was the temperature. It was cold. I didn’t have a jacket and it was freezing, so I borrowed my buddy Carl’s bomber jacket. Carl, for some reason, kept spitting on the back of it. So I told him to knock it off. But he did that super-drunk guy-dude-bro thing and said, “It’s my jacket.” Touché, Carl, touché. So I ended the night in a spit-covered jacket, a couple bucks lighter from tacos and “Jessie’s Girl,” and without having seen the donkey show.
We usually went to another place called Margarita’s Village. It’s still there on the corner of Revolution Boulevard. To get in I had to walk down a tight, dark staircase with an impossibly low ceiling and uneven steps. Much like the mythical donkey show, among the many things they don’t have in Mexico are building codes. When you get downstairs at Margarita’s Village the waiters are dressed in crazy outfits—sea captains, old-time prison getups, and French maids. Plus most are on roller skates. They do a thing called “slammers” where they pour tequila and 7-Up into a shot glass, slam it on the table, pour the foaming concoction down your throat, and then put their forearm across your mouth and vigorously shake your head like a paint can. And if you decide this is all too much and you’d just like to sit there and nurse your Corona Extra, your buddy will excuse himself to use the bathroom and tell the waiter to give you a double. The next thing you know, you’ll be assaulted by the world’s worst chiropractor. And if you resist, you’ll not only get shamed by the whole bar but you’ll end up with some serious neck trauma. It’s like being waterboarded with tequila by a rodeo clown.
One time after a hard night at Margarita’s Village I stumbled toward the bathroom. I’d had a little too much tequila and cerveza and needed to throw up-a. I couldn’t make it to the bathroom so I found the next-best place, the icemaker. I just slid open the door and let it fly. I feel bad to this day wondering if some people upstairs got their margaritas chunky-style. Then I stumbled out the back door and passed out in the alley between some boxes. The last thing I saw was a cop standing on the sidewalk up at street level and I had to do that move where you’re so drunk you’re seeing double and have to close one eye to focus. You know you’re fucked-up when two eyes is one too many for you to handle. I was awoken by a nightstick to the ribs. It was the cop. He miraculously didn’t want a bribe and just told me to move on.
This was the kind of crap we got into, if we ever even got there. The trips down to Tijuana were always hairy. One time me and a buddy, whom we all called “Snake,” drove alone to Tijuana in his stepmom’s ’77 Mazda, which was spor
ting four bald tires and no spare. We were halfway there, near San Juan Capistrano, and out went the front driver’s-side tire. This was at ten o’clock at night. Remember, this is pre–cell phones and ATMs, and as luck would have it I’d left my Platinum AAA card in the Countach at home. So we grabbed our pillows and blankets and started walking down the freeway until we got to the nearest off-ramp and began looking for a place to sleep. Eventually we found a grass median near a state beach, spread out our blanket, and went to bed. The next day we hiked to a 76 station and for eight dollars purchased another used tire. It took us a day and a half to get to Tijuana. It should have taken three hours.
Snake, a couple other dudes, and I did another trip to Mexico in another piece-of-shit car. This time it was my sister’s Dodge Dart. This just goes to show how pathetic I was at the time: I didn’t even have a piece of shit of my own. Among the many problems with my sister’s car was a bad radiator. It was overheating the whole way down. The water-temp gauge was pegged in the red the entire trip. I knew it was fucked-up, so every sixth off-ramp I’d have to pull over, put a rag over the radiator cap, undo it, let the steam shoot out, dump more water into it, and start driving again. So it took us eight hours to get three quarters of the way there. I declared at that point, me usually being the voice of reason in my group of stoners and drunks, that we had to go back. They were outraged. We’d spent forty bucks on coolant and oil and eight hours of our lives and they wanted to keep going. I said, “If we make it to Tijuana in this car, we ain’t making it back. So the farther we get from home, the farther we get out of range. We’ve got to turn around right now, and if we’re lucky we’ll get home and maybe find another car.” Everyone was screaming, “Keep going!” I decided as captain of the ship to turn us around. I drove down the off-ramp, made a left off the freeway, went under the overpass, took another left onto the on-ramp of the freeway in the opposite direction, started to accelerate, and POW! As always, I was right. We threw a rod through the engine block. It was a noise I’d never heard before and hope to never hear again. It went straight through a cast-iron engine block. The scene went from everyone screaming at me that I was a pussy and we needed to keep going to stone silence. Fortunately we just coasted to a stop on the side of the freeway. So like my previous trip with Snake, we started walking. Eventually we found a pay phone and called a friend to pick us up. (For those of you under twenty, a pay phone is like a giant cell phone bolted to the side of a glass closet on the street into which you feed old-time round money.) Our friend Tom had a seminormal family, and they drove two cars down so we could finish the trip with one and they could drive back with the other. Take a moment to imagine me calling my mom and asking for that kind of help. She’d still be laughing to this day. My family didn’t have two cars that could make it that far anyway. We ended up packing five big dudes into a two-door Corolla hatchback and continuing the trek.
This Mexico trip took us not only to Tijuana but farther down the Baja peninsula to Ensenada. And like all of our Mexican excursions, this one landed us at a strip club. There’s a big difference between strippers south of the border and the ones stateside. Up here we have weird rules about how if there’s alcohol served they can only be topless, and some cities require six-foot boundaries between the strippers and the fellas. In Mexico for a buck you can get onstage and attempt and often succeed in performing oral on the stripper without a 250-pound bouncer kicking the shit out of you. If there are any consequences to getting aggressive it will be the stripper herself hitting you in the face with her stiletto heel or smashing a bottle on your head. They’re tough down there.
But it doesn’t always end up that way. On that trip to Ensenada there was a drunk surfer dude, not a member of our team, who jumped onstage with the stripper and got completely naked and generally made an ass out of himself. He was spreading his butt cheeks, shouting, and pouring beer down his chest. This lasted about twenty minutes before his buddies coaxed him off the stage. In the U.S. he wouldn’t have lasted ten seconds before a B.A. Baracus look-alike stomped him to death.
The best part of this story is what happened the next day. Me and the gang were on Rosarita Beach when we overheard this group of dudes in front of us. They were heckling one of their friends. “I can’t believe you did that, man. You showed your dick to a roomful of people.” It was the surfer dude from the strip bar. He was brushing off the chop-busting, saying, “Nobody knows me down here. It’s not like anyone will ever hear about it. It’s Mexico, they don’t even speak English.” This was the opportunity of a lifetime. We ran up to the group like a bunch of starstruck teenage girls and said, “Hey, it’s the dude who got naked on stage last night! You were awesome!” His friends nearly died. That’s a moment all guys live for. Your jackass friend thinks he’s going to get off the hook for his jackassery, and a group of strangers appear at precisely the right moment to back up the story and double down on the humiliation.
Baja was a fun place and became a regular destination even up into early adulthood. Once a year me and a medium-sized group of guys I worked construction with would meet at a Denny’s off of Topanga Canyon at five A.M., load up on Grand Slams, and make the pilgrimage to the peninsula. On this particular trip it was three four-wheel-drive pickup trucks and a Chevy Chevette. Each truck was filled with surfboards, motorcycles, sleeping bags, and a bunch of guys who you wouldn’t let house-sit for you if Ted Kaczynski was available. In five short hours I would be drunk in the bed of one of the pickup trucks going down a dirt road lighting M-80s from a cigarette and chucking them at the truck behind me. Once we arrived on a good stretch of beach, it would be time to either get naked and go surfing or put on underpants and go dirt-bike riding. My two most cherished possessions at the time were a bottle of mescal tequila and a huge sombrero I’d purchased in town. At some point one of my drunken buddies said, “Isn’t that your sombrero over there?” I looked over my shoulder and saw my award-winning sombrero sitting flat on the sand twenty-five feet away. I called out its name and started running toward it (think Tom Hanks and the volleyball from Castaway). As I approached it, it exploded. One of the Cambridge alumni I’d been traveling with put an M-200 under it and used a cigarette as a delay. It blew a hole through the top that was black and trumpeted out like when Yosemite Sam would lose his cool. I spent the remainder of the trip wearing the sombrero with pride.
1988—Baja, Mexico. Me and my sombrero.
The following day began with a long morning of duct-taping M-80s to the sides of bottle rockets that would have been too big for a Sparkletts bottle, twisting the fuses together, and firing them into the ocean. Let me do a quick PSA on why fireworks are so dangerous. You start off cautiously by igniting your first firecracker with one of those extend-o lighters, running, and then diving behind a log. Five minutes later the same guy is holding a beer, lighting an M-80 with the Tiparillo dangling from his mouth, and throwing it at the campfire his buddies are sitting around.
After we’d exhausted most of our fireworks supply, my buddy Chris decided to head out on his Honda 250. An hour later we heard screams coming from around the bend. We rushed over to investigate. Chris was helmetless, gloveless, and shirtless on top of the scariest cluster of cacti you’ve ever seen. The cactus that grows wild in Baja makes the stuff you see in the gardening section of Home Depot look like a marshmallow wearing a goose-down bathrobe.
1988—Baja, Mexico. The killer cactus and Chris’s shredded hand.
His entire body was riddled with three-inch needles. We had to use pliers to remove them. At first we tried leather gloves, but the spines sticking out of him would pierce them and stick us. This would have killed any of the guys I later sat with at various writers’ tables. But not Chris. He was simultaneously super- and subhuman. He would later go on to survive having a wine bottle broken over his head at his girlfriend’s house. On another occasion after beating up a guy on the Pacific Coast Highway he survived being run over by a VW bug. Years later paramedics jammed a syringe filled with adren
aline through his rib cage to restart his heart. He still has all his hair and despite never working out looks better than all of us in his underpants. It’s all in the genes. But anyway, there were no hospitals in the vicinity and driving two hours only to end up in a Tijuana emergency room didn’t sound like a plan. (Tijuana Emergency Room does sound like a hell of a drink though—Cuervo Gold and insulin.) So we bandaged him up and got on with our vacation. The only time it even came up after that was whenever he took a shit. His hands were still bandaged so we’d have to play rock, paper, scissors to decide who got the pleasure of wiping his ass.
1988—Baja, Mexico. John should have gone with rock; he lost and had to use paper, toilet paper.
I forgot to tell you what happened to my sister’s car. We pushed the Dart off the freeway and to a side street where hopefully it would get stolen over the weekend. But unfortunately when I returned the following Monday on my motorcycle, it was still there. I found a guy who made Fred Sanford look like the Monopoly man and convinced him to buy the car from me. Imagine what must have been going through my sister’s head. This was not her extra car, it was her car, her only mode of transportation. I borrowed it on a Friday and came back the following Monday without the car but with forty bucks. I handed her the money along with a unique observation: “It’s a good thing I was behind the wheel when that rod let go. You could have been stranded on the wrong side of the tracks.” She rolled her eyes and went back inside the house. We never spoke of the matter again.
One of our usual Tijuana companions was a goofy guy named Rudy. He was a good dude but a bit of a fuck-up and a blackout drunk. He once woke up chained to a hospital bed. We all decided on one of our trips to TJ that we should each buy a bottle of mescal, the kind with the worm in it, and bring it back with us. As if we couldn’t get tequila in North Hollywood. It was me, Snake, Chris, Tom, and Rudy. We’re walking back across the border when Rudy dropped his bottle. It smashed all over the cement sidewalk. He was pissed and was practically in tears. And then Chris did one of the most comedically satisfying things I’ve ever seen. He was laughing his drunk ass off at Rudy and pretending to be him, mocking him. “Der, I’m Rudy, I don’t know how to carry a bottle!” and then SMASH! Chris dropped his bottle, too. He got pissed and started stomping on the glass.
