by Adam Carolla
Chris had an on-again-off-again girlfriend named Carrie. I can’t recall if they were on or off at the time, but that didn’t matter to Ray. He thought he should be with Chris’s girl. Secretly Ray and Carrie had been sneaking around behind Chris’s back for months and had grown so brazen that they attempted to hook up at this party that Chris was also at. Ray and Carrie were having a private makeout session. But it didn’t remain private for long. Snake walked in on them. This was trouble. If Snake told Chris about it, we would have an epic battle on our hands. Chris and Ray were huge, aggressive dudes. Not only would they beat the shit out of each other, but the collateral damage would be catastrophic. It would look like Tokyo after Godzilla and King Kong went at it. For clarity, Chris is a fairly mild-mannered guy, but he’s like that scientist who, when angered, turns into the Hulk. Don’t make him angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.
1986—Chris, another friend, Carrie, and Ray at a bar called Midnight Rendezvous.
Snake declared that he was going to tell Chris. Ray knew this would spell almost certain disaster and told him not to. Snake then came up with a novel solution and said, “Let me make out with her and I won’t tell.” Without asking Carrie, Ray agreed. He’d let Snake make out with the girl he had stolen from Chris in order to prevent Chris from finding out and thus starting World War III. I have to assume Carrie played along because she knew Chris and Ray would tear each other to shreds. Then came the negotiating. Snake proposed that he get a minute of makeout time. Ray countered, then Snake made his rebuttal offer, and eventually these two gentleman settled on twenty seconds.
Snake and Carrie began the makeout session while Ray sat there and watched. Ray later conceded that he got a little turned on. But the damage to their friendship had been done. The seed of resentment had been planted, and through the rest of the party it would be watered with booze.
A little background before the next part of the story: Snake was an animal lover. He was also nuts, especially when drunk. Later on, when he had a dog, he would stack cans of dog food in the fireplace of his small condo and shoot them with a .22 rifle, saying he was “hunting” food for it. Snake also had a yellow-and-gray miniature cockatiel named Remus and a cat named Wilshire because he was found on Wilshire Boulevard. One morning Wilshire was found dead under what Ray deemed suspicious alcohol-related circumstances. Snake denied involvement and would deny it to this day.
Unfortunately, on this night, with everything else happening, Ray decided to call Snake a cat killer. Snake became furious and the fight began. I wasn’t there but I heard the tales and saw the scars. Snake wanted to step it up to a death match and kept shouting, “Get two knives!” Luckily it didn’t get to that point. After many punches were thrown and the scuffling on the ground started, Snake bit Ray in the calf, drawing blood. Ray then tossed him off and threw him into a planter, dislocating his shoulder. In the midst of the chaos, Snake revealed to Chris that Ray had been sneaking around with Carrie. It then turned into a three-way battle royale spanning the entire house. Once the guys had let off some steam, beating each other to a pulp, Chris, in a real bros-before-ho’s moment, broke up with Carrie and took Snake to the hospital. The following day when The Weez and I returned from Brokeback Mountain and heard about the carnage, I had the same sad yet satisfying feeling as the handful of people who heeded the governor’s warning and blew out before Katrina blew in.
After I got out of carpet cleaning, I landed a job at Hoffman Travel. The Weez was working there and had a job running airline tickets between offices. This was back when you had to go to a travel agent’s office or an airport to get plane tickets. Not only did I have a desk that faced the wall, blank except for a clock that mocked me as I slowly died of boredom, I also worked with a bunch of angry yentas. I have to say honestly, they broke me down. Middle-aged female travel agent is just about the only thing above publicist on the evil meter. I was constantly bombarded with verbal assaults from one of the twenty-eight shrews there. Here’s an actual exchange that happened.
Shrew: Merv Griffin hasn’t gotten his tickets yet! Where did you put them?!
Me: I don’t know.
Shrew: I put them on your desk. What did you do with them?
Me: I didn’t see them.
Shrew: [dirty look]
A few minutes later, Shrew finds the tickets under the blotter of her desk.
Shrew: Hey, I found Merv Griffin’s tickets.
Other shrews react as if she’s a hero, and the accusatory bitch-out session with me is completely ignored.
THE END.
This scene was played out several times a day for the entire time I worked there. I couldn’t handle it. If I hadn’t been fired, I would have quit.
The story of my being fired from this job centers on a street called Valleyheart. Valleyheart runs parallel to one of the major streets out here, Ventura Boulevard. On a Sunday night I was eating whole-wheat pasta with low-sodium organic tomato sauce at my mom and stepdad’s house. I brought up the fact that I had a bunch of warrants for traffic violations, hoping they would offer to help out with the $525 I owed and thus prevent me from getting arrested. Instead of getting the money I got a tip: “On your way to work tomorrow morning, don’t take Ventura, take Valleyheart. It’s a smaller street and there’s no cops.” I heeded my mom’s advice and took Valleyheart, and the following morning I was arrested. Not a week later. Not three days later. Less than twenty-four hours later. The cop who pulled me over said he normally wasn’t on that street but he’d been patrolling there because someone had been breaking into a nearby school. Not thirteen hours after the conversation with my mom I was arrested, brought into the North Hollywood Police Department, and fired from my job at Hoffman. It was probably for the best. I would have gone on a killing spree if I had to stay there any longer.
I quickly got back to the business of rotting in my garage. This is the worst position a young male can be in. Rudderless. This is what the military is for: guys who are nineteen and have no idea what the future holds. I was like a leaf in the wind, blowing wherever life took me. At one point my mom knew a guy who knew a guy who was a merchant marine and thought he could get me in. That didn’t happen. I actually attended a job seminar and remember looking at pamphlets about becoming an ambulance driver or an underwater welder. Neither happened. I can’t tell you how anxiety provoking that position is. I had no reading or writing skills and a family somewhere between apathetic, impotent, and hostile. I had no map, no compass, and no safety net.
One night my phone rang and my buddy John asked if I wanted to work the next day. He said, “All you have to do is show up in Silverlake and pull ivy off the side of a house and drag it up the hill to a dumpster.” Before I knew it I was digging ditches and doing other shit work on construction sites. The pay stunk, it was always hot, and the job sites were all the same—twelve Mexicans and three racists named Mike. And they only liked those twelve Mexicans because “they’re the good ones.” People hear I was a “carpenter” and think it’s nice, like I was sitting around with Bob Vila putting wainscoting in a Cape Cod manor. No, I was lugging trash in the blazing sun. It was dirty and mind-numbing. It’s the repetition that will kill you. You have to do the same motion over and over and over again for ten hours at a stretch. And if you have a functioning brain like I do, you will go insane.
And you work with assholes. On my first construction job the foreman, Mike, was a Vietnam vet who was strung out on painkillers. He would announce to a group of us in a ditch that he was going to get someone to quit by the end of the day.
Another example of what an ass-wipe he was: On one particular job we were doing something called repointing. Picture a brick facade the size of the big screen in Dallas stadium. You’d have to grind out the mortar an inch deep around every brick and then refill it with new mortar using a tuck trowel, a trowel so thin that it fits between the upper and lower brick so that you can push the mortar in. It’s as monotonous and repetitive as a job can get. I was si
tting on scaffolding twelve feet in the air tucking away the time with one of the only other English-speaking guys sitting next to me when Mike walked by and shouted up, “No talking.”
It was also dangerous. One of my first gigs was at a house in the Hollywood Hills. It was one of those houses where the first floor is on street level but the bedrooms are below, dug into the hill, with a little yard below that. So it had a steep cement staircase outside, in between the house and the place next door, leading to the back door and the yard.
I was working in the kitchen on the first floor. Or, more appropriately, I was working outside of the kitchen on the first floor. I had to cut some stucco outside the kitchen window so John, who’d gotten me the gig, put together some makeshift scaffolding. It was just a pair of two-by-fours sticking out the window with some plywood nailed across it for me to sit on. So my feet were inside the house and the rest of me was outside. Above me was the wall being torn up by my deafening hypoid saw, covering me in stucco dust, and below was ten feet of space ending in the concrete staircase. Unfortunately, John isn’t as good a carpenter as me, and his jerry-rigged scaffolding collapsed. I could easily have wound up with a broken hip, elbow, and wrist and a hypoid saw embedded in my skull. But instinct prevailed, and I threw the saw into the house as the scaffolding gave way. I landed hard on my ass but managed to put one palm out in an attempt to break the fall. I limped away with a badly contused hand and an epic charley horse.
But because of who I was, how I was raised, and where I was at that point in my life, I didn’t say anything about it. I just went home hoping to recover in time for the next day’s work. I was afraid I would get fired if I didn’t show up the following morning. That’s how bad my self-esteem was at the time. And it was reinforced when I got home and told my dad. He gave me a not-caring grunt. This is how immigrants get exploited. They’re desperate for the work and don’t have the means to take care of their injuries so they just put up and shut up.
People ask me all the time, “Why did you do all that shit work? You’re intelligent, you’re capable. Why did you choose to clean carpets and dig ditches?” It was a perfect shitstorm of low self-esteem, an apathetic family, and higher unemployment than even in today’s economy. I saw a news report last year that said we had the highest unemployment since 1983 and I thought, Yep, that’s why I was digging ditches in ’84. So when my preachy pampered lefty friends tell me white people won’t do certain jobs, I say this honky begs to differ. I did tons of dirty, dangerous, low-paying shit work alongside Guatemalans, Mexicans, El Salvadorans, blacks, and whites of all different sizes and shapes. The only thing we had in common was poverty. When you say white people won’t dig ditches or mow lawns, you’re basing that on the educated gay couple with the frosted tips you just finished brunch with. Not me, Chris, and Ray in the early eighties.
THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE
The garage was also the setting for the worst day of my life. Once again I needed a shit job. I knew someone who knew someone who was able to get me a gig painting commercial office buildings. You know the old saying about commercial painting: It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. So I took a job for seven bucks an hour. The day would start at seven A.M. and wrap up at five. Let me say this: Not only is ten hours of painting mind-numbing, but when it’s commercial painting in an office building, it’s a whole new level. Think of an average office in a high-rise building. There’s no baseboard or molding or any detail work to do. It’s just rolling beige paint onto an endless wall.
As if that weren’t enough to make me jump from the roof of the building being painted, my companion for those ten hours was a dude named Andy. He was a Jehovah’s Witness with nine kids, each one named after a different apostle. So the conversation was very Jesus-centric. Andy would invite me to the big Jehovah rally at Dodger Stadium that weekend, and the radio was constantly tuned to the Christian station.
This particular job was painting a lawyer’s office on the thirtieth floor of a high-rise building in Century City. Remember the twin towers where they filmed Die Hard? That’s where I was working. I had an hour commute each way, but in keeping with my pathetic-ness, I had no transportation. So I asked Chris if I could borrow his motorcycle.
I got up at six A.M. and hauled my ass over the hill from North Hollywood to Century City. When I got to the place I saw that it was $18 to park in the underground garage. I didn’t want to blow a third of my paycheck to park, and there was no street parking near the building. So I just locked the bike up next to the cement facade off to the side of the parking structure. It seemed safe enough.
I spent the next ten hours listening to guys sing about how much they loved their Lord and Savior, trying to come up with excuses to miss the rally at Dodger Stadium and covering a wall in Navajo White paint. (Which I think is insulting to the Navajo people. That would be like naming a paint color Wesley Snipes Beige.) I left the building zombified, ready for the long commute home.
But when I got outside, the bike wasn’t there. There was no sign of it.
Thinking Chris was going to kick the shit out of me for getting his bike stolen, I went to the security guard shack. I told him what was up, that my motorcycle had been stolen, and he said, “No, I had it towed.”
Let me say two things. First, this is a total mindfuck. In my life I’ve had four motorcycles towed. When you get back to where you left it and it’s nowhere to be found, your initial impulse is that it’s been stolen. When I’m president, my first act will be to mandate that when something is towed, the tow-truck driver must leave a sticker in the spot telling the owner the vehicle has been taken and the location of the impound lot and a little sack of honey roasted peanuts to ease the pain. Second, and I’m addressing this to the people who have stuff towed, FUUUUUUUUCCCCCKKK YOOOOOOUUUUUU!!!!!! If my car is parked on the steps blocking your front door or on top of your special-needs child, that’s one thing. But all the people who have cars and bikes towed because they were in the wrong place between certain hours should be crucified on that T coming out of the back of a tow truck.
The security guard gave me some bullshit about it being “an internal-combustion engine that contained fuel and could not be parked within the parameters of … blah blah blah.” I protested. How could it be a fire danger sitting next to a concrete facade. He just said, “That’s the rule.” Seething with rage, I asked him where it had gone. His answer was like a punch to the kidneys—Santa Monica. For those unfamiliar with the geography of the L.A. area, Century City is twenty miles south of North Hollywood. Twenty miles south of that is Santa Monica. I was stuck dead center between my home and my means to get home.
I was fucking exhausted after a full day of drudgery, and now faced with this, my spirit was officially broken. I had no friends or family to pick me up and probably couldn’t scrape together the dime to give them a ring from a pay phone anyway. Hell, the one guy I knew who did have a mode of transportation was Chris, and that just got hauled to Santa Monica.
So I started walking with my thumb out in the hopes of hitching a ride back to my dad’s house. I pose this question. Who’s scarier: guys who hitchhike, or guys who pick up hitchhikers?
I was on what is called Little Santa Monica, a street running parallel to Santa Monica Boulevard, at the point where Beverly Hills becomes West Hollywood, when someone pulled over. In keeping with the fact that one more step would put me in Boystown, it was a big gay guy in a white ’72 El Dorado with red leather interior. He didn’t have a gay flag on his car or anything, but between the interior, the location, and this next fact I can safely assume he was gay. It was only a minute or two before he dropped the line on me: “You wanna get high?” This is gay code, a way of straining out the straights. It works like a charm. The plan is, “I’ve got a place just around the block, we’ll park, smoke some weed, one thing will lead to another …” I passed on that, politely explaining how long a day I’d had. Shortly after that, he dropped me off at the entrance of Laurel Canyon abo
ut halfway back to my place—still a long uphill journey to go before even being able to see the Valley. I can now say I understand what it’s like to be a hot chick. I was eighteen and played a little high school ball, so I was attractive to a fella who was attracted to the fellas. If I looked like Danny DeVito, I’m sure I would have ended up hoofing it the entire way.
I stuck my thumb out again, and another car got me to the top of the canyon, at Mulholland Boulevard. Then, luckily, a friend of mine from high school named Stacy happened to drive by, recognized me, and gave me a lift back to my dad’s garage.
I borrowed some cash from my dad and stepmom Lynn, and Chris borrowed his mom’s car to give me a ride to Santa Monica to get the bike. I then had the joy of dealing with the dapper gent behind the counter at the impound lot. I know I teed off on tow-truck drivers in my last book, but the guys who work at the impound lot make tow-truck drivers look like Prince Harry after a bath.
Getting the bike out of impound cost me $70, ironically exactly what I had made that day. At eleven that night I drove back in the cold from Santa Monica, arriving at my garage by midnight. I had left my house at six A.M. that day. I spent eighteen hours of my life on this ordeal and broke even. Five and half hours later, my alarm went off again for another stimulating day of painting with Andy.
