by Adam Carolla
On our way out we all stood by Rudy’s car and decided who was the least fucked-up, aka the designated driver. Nobody was sober. That was a given. We decided that Rudy was the least drunk. So he got behind the wheel and drove us all back to The Weez’s cousin Michelle’s dorm at San Diego State. We left Rudy at her room, then found our own places to crash in the fetal position and vomit into trash cans. Somewhere in the middle of the night Rudy had an alcohol-induced psychotic episode where he decided that he had to get in the car and go back to Tijuana to, and I quote, “get the rest of the men out.” Somehow enough tequila had turned a nineteen-year-old from the Valley into a grizzled Vietnam vet having a flashback. “We’ve got to get the rest of the men out!” At some point Michelle called me at whichever dorm room I was puking in to tell me that I needed to come and get Rudy. My response was to unplug the phone and pass back out. Rudy proceeded to run up and down the halls of Michelle’s dorm banging on doors and shouting about rescuing comrades in Tijuana. The next day we discovered him in the street asleep under his car. Again, this was the guy we chose to be our designated driver.
Passing out was a big theme in our drunken Mexican shenanigans. Another time that we got to the crossing at San Diego, we decided to play “Border Patrol.” We were running around laughing and shooting each other with fake machine guns. We made it to the other side laughing and out of breath but down a man. Chris was MIA. We waited for what seemed like a long time and then decided to investigate. We headed up the spiral walkway, and halfway across the bridge we spotted Chris sprawled out facedown on the cement. Here’s the difference between men and women. If this were a group of girlfriends, one woman would have said, “Someone call an ambulance, I think Cindi’s hurt.” Not dudes. Snake came over and kicked him. No response. So then he hocked a loogie on him to see if he was faking. Again, no response. So we lifted all two hundred pounds of him, put him over my shoulder, and I carried him to Tom’s small Toyota hatchback. People forget how tiny those old Japanese cars were. We were big dudes and that was a fucking clown car. But we jammed in and started driving back. Chris, who had not so much as batted an eyelid in the past forty-five minutes, suddenly sprang to life. It was like someone hit him with a set of jumper cables. He popped up in his seat and shouted, “Captain, we can’t feed them boys sticky rice.” This was the tagline to an Uncle Ben’s commercial that had been on TV seven years earlier. To this day we have no idea why he said that. Given the amount of alcohol consumption and stupidity happening, it’s a miracle those weren’t his last words. Imagine that on a gravestone.
I lugged him back to the motel in San Diego. We had managed to pool enough money between the five of us to get a room at one of those cheap places, the kind with two single beds that were taller than they were wide. I plopped Chris down on the bed and went to the bathroom to clean up. I was brushing my teeth when I heard a KABOOMP! I came out and Tom was lying on the bed casually watching TV where I had just left Chris. He had just rolled him off onto the floor. And that was where Chris stayed until the next morning. Again, another example of stuff guys will do to their passed-out buddies that chicks never would.
Say what you will about Tijuana and the poor but proud (of what, I don’t know) folks who live there, but if you’re ever tired of being judged—and don’t mind possibly having your head end up in a duffel bag—then Tijuana is the place you should open that fro-yo joint you’ve always been dreaming about.
I was on the verge of high school graduation and it was time to step out on my own. I leapt boldly into my adult life and moved fifteen feet into my dad’s garage. My stepsister Hilary, who had originally been living there, split, so I got to move in. Now when I say garage, I mean garage. It still had the big wooden door, which had been tarred shut, complete with the original rusty hinges. It was windowless stucco and had all the comforts of the hot box they locked Cool Hand Luke in. There was no insulation or ventilation. What little air circulation I got was from a noisy metal fan sitting on the floor. It wasn’t a nice oscillating fan or anything like that. Think of the fan you’d find in a warehouse in India. That’s what I had. It hardly kept me cool and definitely kept me awake. And it became a real liability one day when my buddy Jeff Katz decided it would be hilarious to turn it up to full blast and dump an entire sack of Gold Medal flour into it. My room looked like the inside of Tony Montana’s nose after he buried his face in that pile of coke. The surface of the moon has less powder on it. No matter how much I cleaned, I never got all of it. I was still finding flour and weevils years later.
The only thing that made my sweat lodge worse was the fact that there were pools on three sides. The neighbors to the left, right, and rear all had pools. The entire summer I heard people shouting “Marco … Polo … Fish out of water!” while the only pool I had was the pool of sweat I was sleeping in. The San Fernando Valley isn’t quite Phoenix in August but it gets pretty fucking close, only about five degrees off on those bad summer days. That garage could easily hit triple-digit temps, and it was unbearable. On those nights, around two A.M. I’d hop the fence like a Navy SEAL and take a dip. To me this was perfectly normal and natural; I didn’t give it two thoughts.
While I had the fan blowing all summer, come winter it was time for the space heater. Being that my room was a garage, the ambient temperature outside was the same as inside. At some point in its life span, my space heater’s cord got cut and I jerry-rigged it back together in a very non-OSHA way. But it was good enough. At night as I slept it rested right next to my bed on the rug.
When I say rug, please don’t think Persian or nice wall-to-wall. It was a bad burnt-orange eight-by-eight scrap of carpeting that had been pulled from another part of the house when my dad got some awful blue carpet. It was a sign of the times. Carpet like that today would be thrown out. But not in the Valley in the eighties. That was a commodity with value. It could be wrapped around a pole in your carport so you didn’t scratch your door; you could line the bed of a pickup truck with it or add a touch of class to a custom van. All you needed was some duct tape and a little chutzpah. (Chutzpah is probably a poor word choice. There’s not a Jew in the world who would attempt any of what I just described.)
Not actually being tacked down to a floor, the carpet curled up at the edges. One time during the night, one of those curled ends connected with the space heater’s sliced cord and ignited. I woke up to the smell of the smoke and put out the fire with my orange polyester blanket, the same one I used on the beach in Mexico. It got charred on the end but stayed in use for a long time after that. The carpet, which was now literally burnt orange, remained in the bedroom as well.
It was my senior year and I was ready to graduate, but only if I passed my Spanish final. So I cheated answer for answer from the Asian girl, Cynthia Nagatani—who sat in front of me—got a D, and was able to graduate. I still feel slighted. I checked every single box on my test exactly the same as Cynthia, and I know she didn’t get a D.
While I did technically graduate, I never received a diploma because I owed the book room $19.95 for a textbook called We the People. Their policy was, you don’t get your diploma until we get our money. I didn’t have $20, and I also instinctively knew that where I was headed, nobody would ever ask to see a diploma. That usually doesn’t come up when you’re begging someone for a job digging ditches. So I was like, “Suckers. I just saved a cool twenty bucks.” Through the next couple of chapters as I break down the terrible jobs I had later in life, you tell me if you think I ever had cause to produce my diploma.
For graduation I was given an eerie harbinger of things to come. My uncle Gobbi sent me the card on the opposite page.
I also got a gift from my dad’s cousin and his wife—Vince and Pat Bruno. It was just what every eighteen-year-old wants: a decorative popcorn tin. It had a cardboard divider to assure that the caramel, cheddar, and regular popcorn didn’t comingle. Like a prison yard where they have to keep the Crips away from the Lowriders and the Lowriders away from the Aryan Nation.
Going one flavor at a time, I ate every kernel even after it got stale. By the way, these are the same people who every year on my birthday would give me a card with slots for dimes. I’d get one dime for each year. So the same year they gave me the popcorn tin, I was worth a buck eighty. Thankfully, I didn’t toss the popcorn tin after I devoured its contents, for the following reason: The garage had no plumbing, and I would frequently return from my carpet-cleaning jobs in the wee hours of the morning. If you’re doing the carpets at the Sizzler in Whittier you start after closing, which means you finish somewhere around three A.M. Thus I would often be locked out of the main house. Anyway, if you haven’t done the fecal math yet, let’s just say the popcorn tin served double doo-dee.
When I graduated from high school in 1982, there were no jobs to be found, but that was of no consequence because I was off to Valley Junior College to pick up a few credits and show the coaches how the position of outside linebacker was supposed to be played before I transferred to one of the many “real” colleges that had tried to recruit me. I wasn’t ready to let my lifelong dream of playing football go just yet. No matter how bad things were at home or school, I could always count on football as my beacon of hope on a moonless life. That was all about to change. Unfortunately, football players aren’t known for their heroics in the classroom, so I found myself on a team with eighty guys, mostly composed of the All-Valley players from my league and other parts of the city, vying for a few precious starting positions. They were bigger than me, stronger than me, and faster than me. And this time my hard-boiled-egg-and-bench-press plan wasn’t going to be enough. My back was bad and my chances of starting were worse. After eleven years it was time to stop doing the only thing I ever wanted to do. My next good year wasn’t until the middle of ’94 when I met Jimmy Kimmel. Until then it was more drudgery and misery.
At this time my idea of a dream job was working at a supermarket. I thought it would be a pretty cool job, especially if you could get into one of the unions. Every once in a while I’d hear about a guy who was in the baggers’ union and was making $10.50 an hour and got golden time for nights and weekends. I’d think, “Damn, he got fifteen dollars an hour for four hours! Holy shit, man!” But it wasn’t meant to be.
I took the only job available and began my career in the fast-paced, lucrative world of carpet cleaning. A buddy was working for a guy named Art Fuss who had a carpet-cleaning company and got me the gig.
Carpet cleaning was back breaking, dirty, and miserable. I didn’t shampoo people’s imported rugs in their entry halls, I used a steam cleaner on barbecue joints. Imagine what the carpet at a Tony Roma’s or a Pizza Hut looks like at the point where it meets the tile that leads into the kitchen. It was barely a carpet anymore. It had a thick coating of dropped food mashed into it. And, as I said, we could only work when these establishments were closed. Which meant showing up at eleven P.M. and cleaning till four A.M. I knew it was a shitty job one day when I was looking forward to emptying the steam cleaner’s catch tank. That means you hold a five-gallon bucket under a valve on the side of the machine, twist the valve, and out comes a four-and-a-half-gallon bouillabaisse of grease, barbecue sauce, and roach shit. Then you drag a bucket filled with this putrid soup as it slops on your jeans to the men’s room and dump it down the toilet. I know it sounds disgusting and horrible, but it’s still easier than being bent over scrubbing that steam-cleaning wand on the almost-black carpet in front of the kitchen. (“Carpet wand” is one of those things that sounds way better than it is, like it’s magical.) So I was busting my back pushing around a wand with a guy named Juan. The only perk was the food. Like when we would clean the Hamburger Hamlet in Westwood. Ray would get behind the grill and make his triple-decker burgers while I was up front removing huge wedges of German chocolate cake from their refrigerated glass palace.
(Surreal sidebar: As I write this I’m sitting in the middle of the California desert, shooting a segment for a car show at the Mojave Air and Space Port. It’s 106 degrees out, but I’m in a $460,000 2012 Rolls Royce Phantom Coupe-Villa to get a little air-conditioning. I just flipped on the satellite radio and immediately heard a ten-year-old episode of the Howard Stern show with me and Jimmy laughing at a guy named Mr. Methane continuously farting for forty-five seconds on a chick’s head. At first I didn’t recognize my voice. I just heard a guy ask the farter, “Do you do weddings?” and thought, “That cat is funny … oh, that’s me.”)
We were cleaning the carpet at the Russian Tea Room on the third floor of the Beverly Center and they left us alone with a bar. Bad move. It was me and Chris and a rookie named Dave. He got behind the bar and started pouring full tumblers of whiskey. No lime, no ice cubes, no umbrella. So we ended up shit-faced throwing chairs at each other, spilling sudsy water all over the place. At a certain point I staggered into the kitchen in search of sustenance. What I found was a walk-in refrigerator filled with cream puffs. Delicious cream puffs. I surreptitiously ate as many as possible before the other guys could realize I’d been gone for a while, come looking for me, and find the cream puffs. Chris would tear that walk-in fridge apart. I wiped my face, snuck out, and hoped they were none the wiser.
The following morning I was jarred from my hungover slumber by a call from the boss. Art said, “How’d it go last night?” This was out of character for Art. I sheepishly replied, “Fine, why?” He matter-of-factly asked, “Did you eat anything?” I more sheepishly replied, “Not that I can remember. Why?” Art said, “Because I found a case of cream puffs wedged into the steam cleaner’s solution tank.” (“Solution tank” also sounds way better than it is, like a charity Al Gore and Richard Branson would found to provide potable water in Sub-Saharan Africa.) Evidently Chris had smuggled out a case of cream puffs but, shit-faced from tumblers of whiskey, he’d forgotten to remove it when we dropped the van off.
Even if we hadn’t been desperate for food growing up, we still probably would have gorged as hard as we did when we had those opportunities. When you work crazy-long late-night hours for shit pay, not only are you sleep-deprived but you eat worse, drink more booze, and smoke twice as much. In fact it’s because you’re sleep-deprived. Nature has built a schedule into us. We’re supposed to go to sleep at ten and get up at six, with a full eight hours in between. Each half hour you get away from that schedule, the more fucked-up you feel. Nobody who works the graveyard shift is into organic food, filtered water, and exercise. It’s cigarettes and fast food all night, some booze to knock you down to sleep after your shift, and then more greasy, shitty food when you wake up. With that kind of routine, your body gets traumatized and wants to be soothed. The alarm goes off and you’re on three hours’ sleep so your body says, “Give me a cigarette, some whiskey, and a breakfast burrito, I’m hurting.” I would love to see a long-term study on the dietary habits and substance abuse of people who work the graveyard shift. I bet their life span is seventeen years shorter than it is for people who work regular hours. This did, however, give me a great idea. I’m going to invent an alarm clock that, thirty seconds before it goes off, spits out a puff of bacon-and-coffee scent. That will ease the transition for people as they get up. Your brain would register that waft of fresh-roasted Colombian coffee and Canadian bacon and waking up wouldn’t be as jarring to your body.
We also had to clean the carpets at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. One place was called the Pink Turtle, which sounds like a Kama Sutra position. I was delighted a few years ago when I went back there to eat. It is now Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant Cut. Even more enjoyable was my return to the bigger ballroom at the Beverly Wilshire—the Grand Trianon. I cleaned the carpets there one night in ’83. More than twenty years later I returned as the celebrity auctioneer at a benefit for Bob Saget’s charity. I was dumbstruck and slightly giddy. The last time I was there I was cleaning the carpets with Ray, and this time I was shooting the shit with John Stamos.
But back to Art. He was a dick. He wouldn’t pay us for driving time. The clock wouldn’t start u
ntil we got to the job. So we’d be out for seven hours and only get paid for five. Every now and again we’d park the custom van on the wrong side of the street and get a parking ticket. Art would then take the cost of the ticket out of our already pathetic pay. Actually, we’d end up owing him. The ticket would be thirty bucks and we’d only made twenty-four for the night.
Art got his comeuppance, though. On Ray and Chris’s last night working for him they took Art out, got him drunk, and beat the crap out of him with his own shoe. They also threw his car keys onto the roof of a commercial building, never to be retrieved.
After one of our carpet-cleaning cohorts, a man of color who called himself Everlast, was convicted of murder for shooting a guy in a gay bar, I realized it was time to move on.
Though I was no longer going to work with them, Ray and Chris were still my pals, and we still had plenty of drinking and fucking around to do. One night toward the end of my time in the garage there was a party down in Orange County at the palatial estate of our buddy Umgad’s sister’s boyfriend (now her husband). All the usual suspects were going to be there, including Chris, Ray, and Snake. With those guys on hand this party was sure to be a blowout. The only team ever assembled that was even close to this drunken, testosterone-fueled wrecking crew was when Lee Marvin put together the Dirty Dozen. This party was gonna be trouble. The cops would definitely be called, probably the fire department, and, if there was tequila on hand, the National Guard. In one of my more sensible moments, I said I was going to pass. I called The Weez and told him to gas up his dad’s Bronco. We were going to escape the fallout zone and go camping. While we were safely atop Mount Pinos the following story happened.
