Not Taco Bell Material

by Adam Carolla

  I ran into a guy I knew from my earthquake-rehab days a few years ago when I went to my kids’ pre-pre-pre-preschool to do some bake-sale auction-type thing. (Because how could they possibly subsist only on the massive amount of money I pay them?) He looked exactly the same. I said, “Your name’s Chipper, right?” He said yes. He knew who I was, but from being on TV and radio, not from back in the day. I said, “We worked earthquake rehab in downtown L.A. together.” He didn’t remember me being there but said, “I remember that job. I did it in between courses in college during the summer.” I said, “You know how I remember who you are? I gave you your first tool bag.” This rang a bell and he said, “Yeah, I still have it.” For those who don’t know, when you work in construction you have a tool belt with some pockets hanging off of it, usually three—left, right, and back—and they’re called bags. Chipper still had the bag I’d given him. Technically it was a single electrician’s pouch, which is slightly different from a carpenter’s pouch. (“Carpenter’s pouch” sounds like a small town in Virginia. “Head on down to Carpenter’s Pouch, stop at the general store, and ask for Zeke.”) And that was also my first bag; someone had given it to me.

  After a little reminiscing he said, “You weren’t friends with Jeff, the racist guy, were you?” I said, “I knew Jeff. He was a nice guy. I didn’t know he was a racist.” I should clarify at this point in the story that Chipper is a black guy. So I asked him why he thought Jeff was a racist, and he said they had a couple of issues on the site and that Jeff had it in for him. Apparently Jeff came right out and even said, “You don’t belong here.” I asked Chipper if he knew Jeff’s backstory. All he knew was that Jeff was a racist and was obsessed with becoming a fireman. So I told him what I knew. Jeff was a big, strapping white dude from Topanga Canyon whose lifelong dream was to fight fires. When he wasn’t on the construction site he took the fire-science classes at the local junior college, volunteered at the Topanga fire station, worked out by lifting fifty-pound hose packs, and was a lifeguard at Topanga Beach. He worked construction for the same reason as me and every other guy on the site. It was kind of a holding place for life—a purgatory job. You weren’t going to get anywhere with it, but it helped you pay the bills until whatever you were waiting for happened. So Jeff had this placeholder job for eight years while preparing to be a fireman. Why? Because of affirmative action. He went in for the fireman job and there was an eight-year waiting list.

  Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. I asked Chipper, “How did you get the job?” He said, “I just showed up, the boss liked me and hired me.” I said “No offense, Chipper, but you didn’t even have bags when you showed up at the site. And when I gave you mine, you threaded a dress belt through it.”

  This was earthquake rehab for the city, a government job, so there was affirmative action. We needed a certain number of black guys, a certain number of chicks, a certain number of Hispanics, et cetera. It was an EEOC thing. They didn’t advertise it as affirmative action, but that’s what it was. This was dangerous. We weren’t installing closets in a condo, this was earthquake rehab. We had to hang off the sides of buildings and cut steel. Yet we ended up with Chipper, the world’s least experienced carpenter, who probably could have lost an arm building an Ikea end table.

  Chipper never knew why Jeff hated him so much: He stood for everything that was in the way of Jeff and his dreams. This was the biggest payday of our lives, nineteen bucks an hour for carpenters, twenty-one if you were a laborer. (Which was completely backward. On a non-government job, in the real world, the carpenters got thirteen an hour and the laborers, guys who just hauled shit, got seven. Don’t get me started on government jobs. This shows you just how fucked-up the government is and why you shouldn’t want to give them any more money than you already do.) Jeff finally got this bump-up and had to work next to a guy who’d never picked up a hammer and only got the gig because of his skin color. He was just as poor and disadvantaged and came from as broken a home as any of the black guys who got a leg up because of affirmative action. That’s the only thing they should consider—socioeconomic status. That’s the ultimate race, poor people. Chipper is now a lawyer and probably doing quite well for himself but spent twenty years plus walking around thinking Jeff was a racist and not knowing he got on the job site because of affirmative action. I don’t know what ever happened to Jeff. I’ve considered tossing a Molotov cocktail into a house in Topanga, hoping he’ll show up.

  I can totally relate to Jeff. When I was nineteen and living in my dad’s garage, I took a stab at getting a gig as a fireman. It was perfect for me: I was in good shape and I liked foosball and chili. So I put in an application. But I never heard back, gave up, and lived the life you’re reading about. That is, until at age twenty-seven, when I got a call completely out of the blue. My application had gone through and they had a date for me to come in and take the written test. Eight years of my life had come and gone before my name popped up on the list. I went in for the exam. I didn’t have a lot of confidence since not only was it an exam, it wasn’t even multiple choice. But this thing had been eight years in the making and I had to give it a shot. As I stood in line to register, I was still amazed at how long the process took. I leaned in to the woman in front of me who was the size and color of a Starbucks mocha and asked, “When did you put in your application?” She said, “Tuesday.”

  This is my beef with affirmative action, not just that it screwed Jeff over or that it screwed me over, it screwed over some poor sucker whose house is burning in L.A. right now. This chick got to the head of the line without any qualifications because of her sex and race. If Barbie’s dream condo caught fire, she’d be hard-pressed to throw Ken over her shoulder, much less an actual person.

  I hope I’ve conveyed just how nuts life on Laurel Canyon was. If not, here’s one last beat. One of my roommates had a job in the industrial part of downtown in a printing factory. He worked the graveyard shift, so often he’d just be coming home as I was waking up. One morning I walked into the kitchen to find him and a white-trash coworker in there smoking crack. They had turned a piece of gas hose into a crack pipe. They offered it to me. I took a drag, then broke with crackhead tradition and went to work. But, pun intended, that was rock bottom. Our flophouse had officially turned into a crackhouse.

  When we moved out, we pulled the couch from its spot in front of the TV set and caught a glimpse of the carpet’s original color. A bright island of blue in a sea of black filth. I was the poor schmuck who had to go back and try to get our cleaning deposit from Jim. He told me that in his twenty-six years of owning buildings, he had never seen anything worse. Yet for some reason he saw fit to ask if we wanted to move across the street into a house that he owned. We did.

  WE knew it was time to move out of the apartment. Apartments are for guys in their late teens and early twenties to vomit, do drugs, fart, fight, and flop in. We needed to grow up and get into a house to vomit, do drugs, fart, fight, and flop in. Our landlord Jim had just the ticket—a ranch-style house directly across the street from our last apartment. It was me, Chris, and John, the guy who had previously broken my construction cherry. John was smart with a volatile temper, an interesting guy who was quite different from most of the meatheads I hung out with, but shared the one universal quality we all had in common: an inability to succeed.

  One of the classier features of this home was the padded toilet seat. It was high-mileage puffy brown vinyl-covered foam and made that weird sigh when you sat down on it, then stuck to your ass when you got up. I’m not a germophobe or anything like that, but it is weird to think about all the ass time this seat had seen before we moved in. This is a horrible invention. What’s the plan? You want to create a toilet seat so comfortable that you can fall asleep while you’re taking a shit? You’re going to show up late for work or end up like Elvis. Isn’t the goal to keep it moving? It’s a toilet, not a Barcalounger. It sucked when you were sitting on it, but it also made the simple act of pissing a chore. B
ecause of how puffy it was, you couldn’t get it past 90 degrees because the foam would butt up against the tank. So you’d have to push on it with your knee and compress it like a Nerf football in a dog’s mouth. But once you removed your knee, the clock was ticking. If you just had three beers, you could make it before the drawbridge dropped. But in the time it took to evacuate a six-pack, the compressed foam would retake its original shape, and the seat would come slamming down like a piss guillotine.

  This says so much about who me and my roommates were. That foam-rubber fomite (Google it) was in the apartment for God knows how long before we moved in. We never bothered to pool the nine bucks for a new seat. It was still there when we moved out.

  It was a shitty little house that had a shitty little garage that had been turned into a shitty little bedroom. This room didn’t have water or a toilet and was powered by a hundred-foot extension cord that ran from the main house. It was very reminiscent of the garage bedroom at my dad’s house. Having been down that road, I opted for an actual bedroom, small as it might have been. My bedroom was a six-by-seven closet that had one of those plastic accordion doors with the little latch. It had that weird flesh-colored fake-wood texture and never really closed. Plus you can’t get in a fight with a roommate or girlfriend and slam it. It was like living in a train compartment.

  1987—North Hollywood rental house. No picture can truly convey how small that dump was.

  John ended up taking the garage. One day he was napping in this “bedroom” in the middle of the day. Ray came over and decided to crank up some tunes in the living room. This was a good eighty feet away from where John was napping. But Ray really pumped up the volume. I even said to him at one point that he should turn it down because John was asleep in the back. Ray just laughed and turned it up even louder. I said to him again that he should turn it down. From behind me I heard, and felt, an explosion of glass. John had awoken from his slumber and hurled a steel-toed combat boot at the large glass sliding door that faced the backyard and garage. It went right through the window. I literally could have been killed.

  I later put a piece of plywood over the window (which you can see in the picture at the beginning of this chapter). I told John he needed to order a new piece of glass for the door. It really needed to be replaced, since the only other way to the backyard and garage was the other sliding door, which didn’t function. First, it had horrible action—you’d need to get a good grip and pull with your full weight and both feet firmly planted for it to even budge. Second, we had a large hanging speaker blocking the door. It was huge. Every time you walked into the house you’d hit your head on the damn thing.

  John’s plan was to take the aluminum door downtown because he knew a glass guy. He could have the pane installed for cheap down there, bring it back, and we would pop the sliding door back in. He said he was going to take the frame downtown, but in the week plus he let it sit in the back of his truck it got stolen, presumably for scrap. That was the last time we ever saw it. The plywood stayed on the opening for the entire time I lived there.

  This is less a tangent and more a life tip. We put that plywood up and there it stayed for eternity. There is a window for fixing windows and everything else in your life. If you don’t take care of it right away, it becomes part of the scenery. Next thing you know, you’ve got a dirt lawn full of washing machines and furniture.

  So Chris and I ended up replacing the glass ourselves. This adds to the debt that John still owes me. Another time I came home and saw that all the dishes in the sink were broken. I stared at them, trying to come up with a theory on how this could have happened. I was thinking maybe they were in the sink when it was full of water and then the water drained so they collapsed and broke under their own weight. I also wondered if maybe someone was changing the bulb above the sink and accidentally stepped on them. What really happened was that John got pissed off that someone had left their dirty dishes in the sink and had smashed them with a hammer. And it wasn’t like there had been recurring fights over leaving dishes in the sink. He just did it, because fuck it, they weren’t his dishes and he didn’t like the way they were staring at him. Among John’s other greatest hits: He threw a softball through the front window (this time a smaller piece of plywood was put in its place). He severed the hundred-foot electrical cord that fed the back room right at the end so it couldn’t be mended. And most disgusting of all, he would keep a glass bottle in the fridge. It formerly contained apple juice but now was occupied by tap water and his removable false tooth. (Which didn’t stop me from taking a hit off it every once in a while.)

  At this time I was continuing to barely make ends meet doing construction jobs. I did a tenant-improvement job at a box factory in Gardena that was thoroughly soul crushing. They made decorative Estée Lauder gift boxes for soap and perfume. While I toiled away I watched the sturdy Guatemalan women working there, knowing they would never receive one of these $280 boxes of bath salts. It’s one thing when you see downtrodden women making coat hangers, but when they’re sweating to create something they’ll never even get as a gift, it’s really sad.

  I needed to shake things up and try to make some more money, or at least take a step toward my plan of acting like a regular person with a regular schedule. It was time to stop using my brawn and start using my brain. So I sold my truck and bought another motorcycle and headed back to Valley College. There I was five years later, about to give it the old junior-college try again. I went to check out the radio station at the school, knowing I had some aptitude for talking. But I was told that I had to take a Voice and Diction class among a bunch of other required curriculum. I just wanted to get in front of a mike and yak, like I do now. But I had to take real classes and I wasn’t a real student. I quickly found myself on academic probation and shortly after that dropped out, sold the bike, bought another truck, and came crawling back to lady construction.

  Believe it or not, at this time I had a long-term girlfriend. It was an unlikely match. When we met I was living in that shitty one-bedroom with The Weez and could barely make rent. Stephanie had a Beverly Hills apartment that her rich dad paid for. He was an attorney named Gordon and the whitest man alive. He wore a gold-nugget watch and had big coiffed silver hair. He had a huge house in Arcadia and couldn’t figure out why his precious daughter was dating a schlub from North Hollywood. It was straight out of an eighties movie. I thought he was going to escort me into his study holding a brandy snifter, pull out a checkbook, and say, “How much for you to never see my daughter again?” Don’t get me wrong, Stephanie wasn’t bitchy or stuck-up or anything, but she was a sorority chick from USC who didn’t have to work.

  I guess I should give you a little flashback on how I got together with her. One of the more important road trips we took in the limo was up to UC Santa Barbara for Halloween. The city used to block off the roads and have a huge bash. There would be drunk people in costumes stumbling up and down the streets. They don’t do it anymore because it got too crazy. But back in my day it was still on, and that was where I needed to be. That particular year I had borrowed an actual sailor outfit from a friend who was in the navy. I must admit I looked good. Halloween is the single man’s holiday. All the chicks are dressed as French maids and Playboy Bunnies and the dudes are dressed as cops. You can just go up to them and pull that “Sorry ma’am, I’m going to have to arrest you for arson. You’re just too damn hot for this party.” With this in mind, I decided to ditch The Weez, whose costume was Guy Who’s Too High on Mushrooms, and start trolling for some chicks.

  I stumbled around Isla Vista carrying a twelve-pack of cheap beer. I was walking down an alley and I heard a band playing. I popped my head up over the fence and saw a large crowd with a hot chick front and center. We made eye contact, I held up my twelve-pack, and gave her a “You want a cold one?” look. She returned a look that said yes.

  As you know from my unicycle story, I have great balance. So I scurried up the back side of a six-foot dog-eared redwood f
ence, which was not easy. I was wearing oversized pointy, patent-leather shoes. I stood atop the upper two-by-four that held the fence together. It was precarious. It was wobbly, the shoes were too big for me, I was holding a twelve-pack, and there was a hot chick watching me the whole time. In fact more than just her: I was right behind the band, six feet up. I jumped down, landed, then did another hop to get my feet under me and almost crashed into the drum kit. It was that move done by a gymnast who hasn’t quite stuck the landing. Fortunately, I stopped myself before crashing into Ringo. It could have been disastrous but it ended up looking cool. Stephanie and I swapped information and some spit, then agreed to meet up in L.A.

  But back to ’86. My complete loserdom at this point was starting to wear her down. I was officially a college dropout and was just starting a gig installing custom closets. (You’ll hear much more on this job later in the chapter.) Then I did something that definitely added to the tension. One of my first cracks at getting on TV was when they brought The Dating Game back in ’86. I decided I’d go try out. I wasn’t actually looking to hook up; I saw it more as a career move than anything. We’ve all seen the footage of Tom Selleck and John Ritter going on that show before they were famous. So I figured lightning might strike three times and I could maybe get a break out of it. With this in mind, I decided not to tell Stephanie.

  The day of the audition came and I sat in a room with twenty-five guys as they went through the rounds. “Bachelor number one, if you could be an ice cream, what flavor would you be?” That kind of crap. Eventually the producers went into the back to convene for a while, then returned and said, “Great job, everyone. We have your information, we’ll be contacting you. I do need a couple of you to stay behind. Bob Johnson, I don’t think I have a home number for you. Larry Smith, need your work number. Adam Carolla, I need your address. So you three stay behind.” As a joke I announced to the whole room, “She’s just being nice. You guys all lost, she’s just keeping us behind because you didn’t make the cut.” A minute later when the producer shut the door she said to me, “You asshole, they did all lose.” I was just cracking wise. I assumed because I was functionally illiterate that I really did screw up something on the application. I’m not much of a liar, so I tend to assume other people aren’t lying either. I made the cut and went home and told Stephanie. She freaked out. I told her it was Hollywood and I was just trying to get ahead. But she wasn’t buying.