by Adam Carolla
The thing I like about mushrooms is that when you’re on them you’re like a newborn baby. You get to stand outside of our culture and observe it like you’re an alien who just came down and is trying to figure it out. One time when I was nineteen I ’shroomed out and was watching TV, which really is the true measure of a society and what it’s about at that particular time. I saw a commercial for Lee Press-On Nails. My head was abuzz. “So the female of the species sticks long pieces of red plastic to the ends of her fingers to make them look like bloody claws? This makes her more attractive to the male of the species? Why does this world have a multimillion-dollar company that manufactures plastic red things you stick to the end of women’s fingers, and why does that give us a boner?” The next commercial was for a monster truck rally, which really fucked with my head. I was watching giant trucks crushing little cars while the partisan crowd cheered, thinking, We’re all insane. If you had the constant questioning and wonderment that goes on while you’re high on mushrooms in your everyday sober life, you’d go bonkers. Your brain would eat itself. Without mushrooms you just move on and think, I wish this press-on nail commercial would end so I could get back to a very special episode of Blossom.
The other thing that happens with mushrooms is, you’re having the grooviest time in the world one second, and then are freaked out the next. The same time with the Lee Press-On Nails commercial, I had one of those moments. My buddy who was going to Boulder State came back with a pillowcase full of mushrooms thinking he was going to sell them. The problem was that he liked to get high on his own supply. Like when I would eat the candy bars I was supposed to be selling for Pop Warner. So me, him, and The Weez ate them. And it was awesome. Until Ray showed up. He was high on coke. That’s a bad combination. If everyone is doing mushrooms, fine, but you can’t mix in people on other drugs. Ray grabbed The Weez and started tossing him around like a rag doll. I was screaming, “Don’t hurt him, don’t hurt him!” Then the night took an even steeper plummet into Bummerville.
This is the worst thing that can happen to you when you’re on mushrooms. Ray’s coked-up girlfriend, Monica, locked me in the bathroom to confront me. She was superhigh and licking her lips and had that cokey head twitch. “Listen, I know Ray is your best friend and he’s my boyfriend and you’re protective of him but I love him and we need to all get along and why don’t you like me because I need to know that you like me because there’s always this weird energy in the room when we’re together and I know you feel that I’m taking Ray away from you but I’m not and if you could only understand what I’m saying then I think …” I was protesting, “There’s no weird energy, I love everyone.” Meanwhile Ray started banging on the door, shouting, “What’s going on in there?” I shouted back, “Nothing!” and started to leave but she stopped me and said, “We’re not done talking.” It was miserable. I need to invent a windbreaker with a huge mushroom logo sewn on the back that you only wear when you’re tripping so people don’t come up and freak you out.
I don’t want to glorify drugs or use it as an excuse: We did plenty of really stupid shit stone-cold sober. I was with the guys walking out of the Sherman Oaks Galleria after a long day of arcade games and cheap pizza. There was a Mohawk-sporting punk kid, probably seventeen years old, with his Sex Pistol–wannabe buddies tormenting people as they left the mall. He was hanging around the parking structure telling people to fuck off, spitting on cars, and generally being a dick. He hadn’t threatened us, but we decided to be good citizens. So me, Snake, and Chris told him and his guys to get lost. Usually we’re an intimidating team, but this kid wasn’t having it. He pulled out a weapon. It was like nunchucks, but the chain was three feet long and the handles weren’t wooden, they were solid steel. It was like something you’d see in the Thunderdome. He started spinning it over his head and taunting us, “You want some?” Because it was the eighties, I was wearing a leather bomber jacket. I took it off and approached him holding it out like a bullfighter with a cape. As I inched closer and closer to him, with each step the five inches of chrome steel was inching closer and closer to my skull. All of a sudden out of the corner of my eye I saw something blow past me. It was Snake. He tackled the punk on the hood of a car and started beating him. I jumped in and so did Chris, and we all beat the bejesus out of the little shit. He eventually broke free and ran away, but we had managed to get the weapon.
When we got back to the apartment I asked Snake, “How did you tackle that guy without getting hit?” Snake said, “I might have.” He then pulled up his shirt and revealed a chain mark running diagonally the whole length of his back, shoulder to hip. He’d been nailed but hadn’t complained about it.
The point is, like my earlier run-in with the skateboarders at McDonald’s, if you’re a snot-nosed teen and you’re out in public fucking with people, not only should society not punish those who kick your ass, it should award them the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Dicking around at the mall and getting into fights were just some of my pastimes as I continued to wallow. I had no health, dental, or car insurance. I was driving a pickup truck worth $600 that I had bought because my construction supervisor offered to pay an extra buck an hour if I could haul stuff. I knew there had to be something better than this. One evening I was in the garage off the alley behind the apartment wrenching on a 240Z I’d been putting back together a paycheck at a time for the last three years and, as always, listening to the radio. I remember it was a Sunday night because that’s when KLOS would air a show called Rockline where they interviewed famous bands. I also remember it was a Sunday night because that was always the time I felt most depressed and vulnerable. Somehow having a moment to contemplate the miserable, low-paying week that lay ahead was more painful than living it. The band they interviewed that particular Sunday night was Boston. I’d always enjoyed Boston, but I never really listened to their lyrics. Tom Scholz, the lead guitarist, was talking about one of their hits called “Peace of Mind.” In the interview he went on to say that he was working as an engineer at Polaroid, but that his dream was to play rock ’n’ roll. “Peace of Mind” is about following your muse.
I understand about indecision, but I don’t care if I get behind
People living in competition, all I want is to have my peace of mind
It struck a chord with me and made me realize that I had to try to do something creative with my life, although the engineering gig at Polaroid was sounding pretty good at that point. People were telling me to get my contractor’s license and go into business for myself, but I knew that would spell the beginning of the end for me creatively, and since it involved studying and a number-two pencil, I was out. So I sat down and tried to take an honest inventory of my skill set. I came to the conclusion that I was basically good at two things: working with my hands and being funny. I knew the working-with-my-hands part sucked, so I thought maybe I’d pursue the being-funny part. I decided to give myself until I was thirty to make a living doing something creative. The reason I say “something creative”—and not being a star or being a comic on TV—is that I would have been content to just write slogans for a greeting-card company. As long as I was on salary and had health insurance. Being in front of the camera or behind-the-mike millionaire stuff seemed way too lofty a goal at that time.
While I was a long way away from being a celebrity myself, I did know one. When I was twenty, I attended the premiere of Pretty in Pink with The Weez. Molly Ringwald grew up down the street from me in North Hollywood. I never had a thing for Molly, but I was nuts about her sister Beth (whom you may recall from the earlier nude-sunbathing story). Molly and Beth came from a showbiz family. Her father, Bob, was blind but was a great jazz pianist. I had a funny moment with him one day. We were making small talk and I told him that I liked jazz and comedy. He said, “I love jazz and comedy too.” Then, a breath later, “Dixieland and Gallagher.” He’d managed to find the one form of jazz I wasn’t into and a comedian I didn’t think was funny.
The after party of the premiere was at a place called the Palace, which was the club James Woods’s character ran in Against All Odds. We drove my 240Z now with a souped-up engine but no mufflers. The drinks were free and The Weez was my designated driver, so I drank like Betty Ford on a cruise. Somewhere between my thirteenth and seventeenth greyhound I realized The Weez was gone. He met a chick and didn’t bother telling me he was off to try and get laid. The next thing I knew, the place was empty and the house lights were turned on. I staggered toward the front door. It was raining outside, harder than I’d ever remembered in L.A. I pulled my jacket over my head and started to truck up the hill to the bank where the Z was, but when I arrived at the parking lot I could hardly believe my blurry eyes. There were only two cars in the rain-filled parking lot: mine and the car parked next to it, an LAPD cruiser. I stood there in the pouring rain, frozen in my drunken tracks, wondering what to do. It was dark and the cop-car windows were fogged up so I couldn’t tell if there was anyone in it. Imagine a large empty parking lot with your car in the middle of it and an LAPD cruiser parked right alongside it and you’re at least three times the legal limit. I finally decided I’d crawl into my car to get out of the rain but I wouldn’t start it because that’s when I’d get the DUI. I sat alone in my Z, my mind racing: “If I turn this key, is that cop going to turn on his siren? I wonder who The Weez is porking? That Ducky-boy was so gay; I bet that clown will never have a successful sitcom.” Eventually I just held my breath and started the car. I slowly backed out of the parking spot. Between the booze, the rain, and a broken defroster I was literally just feeling my way to the street. I managed to get onto the flooded 101 freeway and inched home. I threw up in the bathtub and was so loaded I didn’t even attempt to beat off. In the state of California it would have been considered rape. I never found out why that cop car was in the parking lot that night, or how hefty the chick The Weez mounted was. All I knew was I had a tub to clean and a hamper to soil.
THE WORST JOB I EVER HAD
In 1986 I got the worst job I ever had, doing earthquake rehab for the county of Los Angeles. A lot of people get freaked out about earthquakes, but I’ve been through a few of them and I know about construction so it doesn’t frighten me as much. You can actually have a little fun after an earthquake. Head out to the Valley and see all the Mexicans camped out on the lawns of their apartment buildings because they’re too nervous to go back in. In Mexico, everything is built of masonry and crumbles during earthquakes. Their buildings are made of cinder block and non-reinforced concrete. Not a lot of two-by-fours and plywood going on down there. Up here we build them better, so they stay up. But some of the older buildings in town needed a little work to get up to code.
I had to do rehab work in some of the worst places I’d ever seen or smelled. Quite possibly the worst was on Wilshire and Normandy. We had to install those square steel plates you’ve seen on the outside of buildings. They’re called shear anchors, and essentially they keep the floors from pancaking in an earthquake. The reason these buildings were so vulnerable is that they’re made of brick. In an earthquake the first thing to collapse on a house is typically the chimney. This building was basically a giant chimney. Think of brick as matzo and plywood and two-by-fours as taffy.
It was a five-story building with forty government-subsidized units, all singles. Not one-bedrooms: one room with a tiny bathroom and a Murphy bed. There’s a certain math you can do with government-subsidized housing. The more money Uncle Sam is kicking in for you to live there, the worse your place smells. If they’re helping a little, your place has a faint, musty gym-sock smell. But if you’re basically living for free, then it smells like a rhino took a shit in there. There should be a law against places that small having wall-to-wall carpeting, because it just absorbs the stink. Plus everyone who lives there is old, so they constantly have the heat cranked. When you open the door to one of those units you’re hit with a wave of old-man funk.
One tenant had a bucket of shit in his apartment. He had literally saved his poop in a pail. And here’s how I know. I was down in the tiny backyard area of the building. It was eight feet deep and ran the width of the building, just enough to string a clothesline. I had my table saw out and was milling wood for baseboards. It was loud and I had my back turned, so I didn’t notice when the other guys from the crew grabbed the shit bucket and put it behind me on the ground. Construction sites have a lot of merry pranksters. They were devious because they camouflaged it with some wood and other scraps so I wouldn’t notice. They then climbed up to the roof and took the bolts for the shear anchors and dropped them down the five stories into the crap bucket. Because of the sound of the table saw, I couldn’t hear the splat of the bolts falling into the dook, but I could smell it. Every three minutes for an hour I’d have to stop milling wood and turn around because I thought someone had shit or farted next to me.
This wasn’t out of the question; there was a lot of gas to go around on the site. One of the guys I worked with was named Frazier. He did two horrible things. First, because he was a New Zealander, he introduced me to Vegemite. This is a horrible, horrible creation. One of these days I’m going to put together a bracket system and have countries and ethnicities go head-to-head to find out which has the worst regional dish. The final four would be Vegemite versus poi in one conference and haggis versus gefilte fish in the other. Vegemite is awful, but the other Frazier incident was worse. In this same brick building where we were doing earthquake rehab, there was a woman named Millie. Millie had lived in the building for seven decades and was turning one hundred years old. So all the residents plus the construction guys who had become part of their village of the damned gathered outside the building to take a group picture for Millie’s birthday. Frazier was standing on one side of Millie with his arm around her and I was on the other. This is what we heard: “Okay. Everyone smile. One … two … ugh, fucking Frazier!” Right as the picture was about to be taken, Frazier let go one of his infamous huge farts, probably sponsored by Vegemite, and everyone cleared out. We were all so used to his gas that we knew instantly it was his brand. It went from “Say cheese” to “Cut cheese” instantly. Poor Millie never got her one-hundredth-birthday picture because of Frazier’s gashole.
One of the creepier units I had to enter was inhabited by the guy who had collected thousands of images of missing kids. He had cut the pictures out of the backs of milk cartons and had them stacked floor to ceiling. Again, no hyperbole. Thousands. He would buy two half-gallon cartons of milk each week and cut out the panels from the backs. It was about fifteen years’ worth of missing kids.
There was another gentleman in the building named Shakey Jake. He was a black guy, about sixty-five years old, 120 pounds wearing nothing but a wife beater, black socks pulled up to his knees, and a huge droopy pair of boxer shorts. Remember in Goodfellas when Pesci’s character goes and wakes up Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Stacks, and he’s in his boxers? Picture that, but with about twenty more years on him. The guys from the crew sent me in to talk to him because I was the only one he’d listen to. Shakey Jake said he was tired of people trying to get into his apartment, tearing out plaster and putting up shear walling. One of the things we had to do to these poor sons of bitches was block out the only window they had. We’d put in rebar and fill it in with concrete blocks. You could see why someone would be pissed. Shakey Jake was fed up and pulled out a double-barrel shotgun. So they called me in as earthquake-rehab worker/hostage negotiator. Jake had the hammer pulled back, ready to blow away anyone who came into his place. Eventually I convinced him to let me into the unit and I sat on the edge of his Murphy bed and we had a heart-to-heart. I said, “You don’t want to hurt anyone.” He said, “I’m tired of all this.” I said, “I’m tired too, Jake.” I convinced him to lower the gun, which he did, but he couldn’t figure out how to put the hammer back. So there was a lingering threat that the shotgun was going to go off at any moment. I told him to at least point it toward the ground. I
had to keep my ears covered just in case. He eventually figured out how to get the hammer back into the safety position, and we were able to proceed to make his miserable apartment even more windowless, dust covered, and bleak.
In order to do a lot of this work, we had to get into the tiny crawlspace under the building with a flashlight and blueprint to find which wall we needed to dig the footing underneath so that we could create a cripple wall. The space was obviously too tight for a shovel. Solution? A coffee can. People constantly talk about their shitty jobs. No matter what you hate about your occupation, it’s still better than getting under a nearly condemned building with dead rats and dead cats to dig a footing with a coffee can. It was like being in a casket if you replaced the silk lining with rusty pipes and raccoon shit. Most people’s idea of a shitty job is when their boss is an asshole and the vending machine is on the fritz. This was torture.
