Not Taco Bell Material

by Adam Carolla

  We had a hot tub, too, but that was always well kept because it was the ultimate destination when we’d bring home the ladies. We had enough naked hot tub parties that Ralph started referring to the place as Chez Nude. We must have had deaf neighbors, because we would throw long, loud parties. They would go until four A.M. I have to assume there were no kids in the neighborhood, because the sounds Ralph would make with his ladies in that hot tub could have easily gotten us on the Megan’s Law registry. In a hot tub, you have to elevate your voice over the sound of the jets and bubbles, so you end up shouting stuff like “DUDE, YOU DON’T HAVE TO EAT HER PUSSY … JUST LET HER BLOW YOU.” Yet nothing, never even a polite note on the door from the neighbors.

  1993—La Crescenta. Me in the hot tub with a friend and a number of floating venereal diseases.

  We lucked into the house because Ralph was working at a bar called Tequila Creek and the owner of the bar was also the owner of the house. While I was swinging a hammer for $15 an hour before taxes, Ralph was slinging drinks. He’d come home after a five-hour shift with $200 in cash and eight phone numbers. I’d be reading plans, driving a beat-up truck with a bed box, sweating all day, and he made twice as much as me, tax-free and getting digits. I’m going to tell my son, “Look, I’d like you to turn out to be a doctor or a journalist. But if you don’t, move to the beach and become a bartender. Your job will be getting hot chicks drunk while you look over their shoulders at one of the many flat-screens with the big game on in high-def as the next Dave Matthews is jamming onstage.”

  But the guy who owned the house was cool and laid-back, and we basically had an agreement that if we didn’t ask him to repair stuff or install central heat and air, we could throw our Caligula-esque parties. And he even left behind some cool shit like a jukebox and two pool tables—one bumper, one standard. I don’t think much pool got played, but one morning while cleaning up after one of our parties I did find a spent condom in the corner pocket. No heat and no air but a jukebox and two pool tables. A few years ago I had Ralph on my podcast and he humorously noted that we had “all the luxuries but none of the necessities.”

  When I moved in, I didn’t have anything as far as furniture. Well, I did have one piece. It was a large Craftsman rolling tool chest that I used as a dresser.

  Ralph’s room was outfitted with a nice bedroom set that included a dark oak nightstand which contained a .44 automatic, handcuffs, porno mags that Larry Flynt would think crossed the line, and a French tickler or three. I frequently joked with Ralph that if he ever got T-boned by a drunk driver or shot by a jealous boyfriend, I would get to that nightstand before his parents did. And conversely, if I died on his watch he would place a couple Kurt Vonnegut novels and a Tony Robbins cassette on my nightstand so my next of kin wouldn’t know what a lowlife I was. This concept later became the inspiration for a Man Show piece about a service called Rest Assured that would rush a SWAT team to your bachelor pad upon your death to remove the stack of porno tapes, bongs, and S&M devices and replace them with Shakespeare, scented candles, and inspirational posters to create the illusion of a wholesome lifestyle.

  Let’s backtrack for a moment to clarify further why I needed to move from Santa Monica out to La Crescenta. It’s a quick, semi-inspirational story about how I became a boxing instructor and eventually a radio host. I had always been interested in boxing, and more interested in getting out of construction. My friend Robbie went to college with a guy named Bruce who owned a chain of “executive boxing gyms” called Bodies in Motion. (If you saw my movie The Hammer, it was shot at one of his gyms.) One Saturday afternoon I walked into the West L.A. Bodies in Motion, announced Robbie Levine sent me, explained my amateur-boxing background, and then asked, “When do I start?” Bruce told me to buzz off. They only hired champions and ex-pros as instructors. You should all know the only reason I’m sitting in a big house, paying a guy to type my second book right now, is because I said to Bruce, “I may not be a boxing champion, but I do hold one belt and it’s got a hammer hanging from it.” I offered to hang the speed bags that were sitting on the floor in the back and generally spruce up the place, and all I wanted in return was a chance to teach a boxing class. Bruce agreed that if I did some work on the place I could assist one of the regular teachers. Since the gym hours were six A.M. to ten P.M., I would start after closing and often work through the night and into the morning, with the radio as my only companion. One of the programs I most looked forward to was Loveline, at the time hosted by Dr. Drew and Riki Rachtman, long before syndication. If somebody would have tapped me on the shoulder and told me, “Two years from now you’ll be hosting this show, syndicated in more than one hundred markets and making hundreds of thousands of dollars,” I would have punched them and blown them simultaneously. But back to La Crescenta. After a few months of apprenticing in West L.A., Bruce hit me with a proposition. If I built out his new location in Pasadena and only charged him ten bucks an hour, I could start teaching the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday six A.M. classes as well as a Sunday noon class. Here’s the point of this story. He gave me an opportunity to have my own class, and I seized it. And at the time it wasn’t even an “opportunity.” It was “Construct a gym at the hourly rate of a busboy for the privilege of making twenty bucks a class and set the alarm for five A.M. three days a week.” Either way, at ten bucks an hour the commute from Santa Monica to Pasadena would have used more in gas than I was making. So when a room opened up at Chez Nude, it was time to make the move.

  I began work at the Pasadena Bodies in Motion. One of the drawbacks of this gig was that the owner had a macaw, which is like a giant blue-and-yellow parrot.

  As I said in my last book, birds are mean. They’re the only pet that, when they escape, the owners are relieved. You can tell a species is evil by doing this simple math. If my blond lab Molly was the size of a T-Rex, that would just mean more kibble, more work for the gardener in the backyard, and a harder time moving her to my wife’s side of the bed at night. If birds were the size of a T-Rex, the streets would be littered with human remains.

  This horrible thing lived at the gym and would hang out on its perch. Every now and again it would come down and drag its big black claws along the floor and let out a bloodcurdling screech that would scare the shit out of you. The sound of the macaw’s voice is made to travel for miles across the canopy of a rainforest, so when that thing crept up behind you and let one out, you’d jump out of your boxer briefs. I would be in the ring, training students with the punch pads, and this bird would get down off the perch, scratch its way across the floor, and hop up on the apron of the ring. Now, as you know, all boxing rings have ropes, but this one had a sleeve of canvas draped around them that dangled down just enough to give the bird a handle to bite onto and pull itself up to the next rope. It would climb rope by rope until it could walk along the top rope toward the corner pad. The first time this happened, I didn’t think anything of it. Maybe it was coming over to say hi or to pick up a little technique from the master. Until I heard the crunch. I turned to see a beak crushing the face of my expensive digital stopwatch. Then again, when you’re making three hundred bucks a week, Pez dispensers are expensive. I replaced the stopwatch, and the next time I saw the bird hop down off the perch I thought, I’m gonna keep my eye on that damn macaw. I heard the familiar sound of its talons dragging across the linoleum. The next time I looked over, it was on the ring apron. Keep in mind I was in the middle of trying to turn a tax attorney into Earnie Shavers, so I was a little distracted. Before I knew it, I heard another crunch. It was destroying my new stopwatch. This happened to me three times. Three times I was outwitted by this fucking bird. But as the old saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me three times, what the fuck is wrong with me?” After three busted stopwatches, I wised up and started putting out the old ones as decoys. It felt amazing to intellectually triumph over a prehistoric animal with a brain the size of a garbanzo bean. Of all my accomplishments in the
ring, this one was the most satisfying.

  I had another animal-related incident at Bodies in Motion. While I was working there I dated a hot but high-maintenance blonde named Beth. She was a bikini model and her dad was a tool distributor for Black & Decker, so with her I was in hog heaven.

  But Beth had a dog. It was a little white lapdog named Sushi. She loved this dog more than me or anything else in the world and obnoxiously called it “Tushi.” As if Sushi wasn’t nauseating enough. One weekend she went out of town, probably to fuck another guy, and she asked if I would watch Sushi. Like all hot blondes, she got her way and I was stuck minding Sushi for three days. I had to go in for my early-morning class at the gym, so I brought Sushi with me. She was running around yapping while I taught my class. What I didn’t know was that at some point Sushi scampered out and went down the hall to one of the neighboring businesses, I believe it was a travel agent. Someone there picked up Sushi, read her collar tag, and left Beth a message saying that they had found her dog, which was obviously lost. This is where it got absurd; this is the kind of thing that could only happen to me. The person then put the dog back down when they went to answer the phone or something, and it left and came back to the gym. So when I finished my class and saw Sushi sitting by my gym bag, I had no idea what had just gone down. I left Bodies in Motion blissfully unaware, lapdog in hand. Cut to me back at home, receiving an angry call from Beth. “Where’s Tushi? What have you done with Tushi?” I said, “She’s right here.” Beth shouted, “DON’T LIE TO ME!” I was totally confused. I had no idea she got that call and therefore no clue why she thought I was lying. I just kept repeating that Sushi was right here, I was looking at her right now, and I never lost her. Beth just kept calling me a liar. Unlike in Colombian kidnapping situations or reruns of Charlie’s Angels, there’s no way to put a dog on the phone to prove they’re unharmed. I’m still pissed at that travel agent. What kind of maniac calls someone, tells them their dog is lost, and then lets it go?

  1993 - La Crescenta. Me, Beth, and “Tushi” (out of frame, yapping incessantly).

  Beth and Sushi eventually wised up and moved on to a guy with two pieces of kibble to rub together. I ended up with another girl named Cynthia. She was an ex–Minnesota Vikings cheerleader with a crazy sense of humor. I’m giving you a few background details because Cynthia figures prominently in the next and final story of this chapter.

  1994—With Cynthia at a KROQ singles party on a boat to Catalina.

  THE WORST WEEK OF MY LIFE

  The La Crescenta house was the location of the worst week of my life. It was January 17 at 4:31 A.M. Cynthia and I were sound asleep in my freezing, tiny bedroom. Ralph was from Philly, Courtland was from Denver, and Cynthia was from Minnesota, so nobody but me was prepared for what was about to happen—the Northridge Earthquake. The house rolled up and down violently for what felt like a lifetime. Dishes broke and the house creaked like an old wooden ship in a storm. The next thing you know, we were all standing in the kitchen shocked at what had just happened. I, as the lone Californian and with a background in earthquake rehab, explained to everyone it was no big deal. We’d just sweep up the broken plates and get back to our lives. Cynthia said, “What about my apartment? What about my stuff?” I said, “It’s stucco and lath with two-by-four framing and no subterranean parking. You’re in the clear. Maybe the refrigerator rolled away from the wall a couple of feet. You probably won’t be able to tell the difference.” When we got to her apartment in Sherman Oaks, it was cordoned off with red tape. The building was condemned, and the cops wouldn’t let people in even to retrieve their pets. It turned out that her building ran along a stretch of the L.A. River that acted like a conduit for the quake’s fury; all the buildings and businesses along that stretch were red-flagged, including the nearby restaurant she worked at. So she needed to crash with me. And just for good measure, on the way back to my house her twelve-year-old Nissan Sentra blew a head gasket.

  So let me set the stage—her apartment was condemned, her work was condemned, my work was out of commission for the next several weeks, her car didn’t run, and her mom had already purchased a plane ticket to come out from Minnesota. I was living with a woman I barely knew and about to have a woman I didn’t want to know on my sofa. We were both broke, so we had no way to repair her car or get a hotel room for her mother, who had planned to stay with her for a whole week. I know this doesn’t seem like it could get any worse, but it does. A day before her mother was scheduled to arrive, I woke up in the middle of the night with my sheets soaked in sweat. The following day I had lesions on my face and in my mouth and a 102-degree temperature. It’s still a mystery exactly what I had. At the time there was speculation that the earthquake had kicked up some stuff into the air that was causing various ailments. Later Dr. Drew announced it was herpes. But that’s Dr. Drew’s answer for everything. He thinks Abe Lincoln was killed by herpes. No matter what it was, I had no insurance and no money, so all I could do was ride it out. But I’ll never forget the look on Mama’s face when I answered the door in a tattered bathrobe, covered in sweat and festering boils. She took one look, was horrified, and started in on me. I was in no mood after what I’d been through and fired back. We had it out in the doorway before she even set foot in the house. You can only imagine what the next seven days were like. I had officially hit rock bottom.

  But before the year and the lease would be up, I will have met Jimmy Kimmel, convinced him to put me on the radio, and be well on my way to fame and fortune. But before that there was one last apartment.

  THE La Crescenta house we were renting got sold out from under us. Ralph went his way and Courtland and I set sail for Toluca Lake, a nicer part of the Valley on the edge of L.A. next to Burbank. It was a two-bedroom, one of which was a master with its own bathroom and a small balcony. Courtland and I decided that to be fair we’d pay the same rent, but a coin toss would determine who got the master. The winner would occupy it for six months and then we’d swap. It won’t surprise you that I lost the toss. It also won’t surprise you that Courtland never relinquished the master suite. In fairness to him, I never asked for it. I was working in radio now, and around the six-month mark I was starting to get some career traction. At that point I didn’t want to move into a bigger rented bedroom. I wanted a place of my own.

  Until that was possible, I was stuck with Courtland and a friendly but nosy landlord. You know those old people who have nothing to do so they constantly monitor the neighborhood for stuff to complain about? That was her. If you pulled into the wrong parking spot at three A.M. on a Tuesday night, left your car running, and sprinted to your unit to grab a ball cap that was hanging on the front doorknob, when you popped up after your shoulder roll into the subterranean parking you would find her there leaning against your car wanting to know what was going on. I wouldn’t be surprised if she hid in the ivy with opera glasses waiting for shit to happen.

  I’ve never really understood or been one of those guys who make the entire focus of their lives the Red Sox or Kobe Bryant, living or dying on their latest success or failure and allowing it to cause alcoholism and an emotional rift with their sons. Even more inexplicable than that are the people whose attention is solely consumed with the civilians living within rock-chucking distance. Do you not have a television? There are events in the world more pressing than whether my hedge is too high or my music is too loud. Who are these people who’ve made you their life’s work? You’ve become the Moby-Dick to their Captain A-hole. I want these people fined for using the cops as their own personal Republican Guard. You always hear that we don’t have enough cops to patrol the ports or bust gangbangers, yet these assholes feel free to call them because my recycling bins were out on the street for an extra day while I was out of town. What we need is to ship them off to their own high-walled triple-gated community. Ass-wipe Acres. That would be the greatest payback, making them live amongst themselves. It would be like Escape from New York, but with pussies. They’d all be ca
lling the cops on each other then eventually go insane and start calling the cops on themselves.

  I told the story of meeting Jimmy and getting into radio in my last book, so I won’t include it here. If you need a refresher, I suggest you download several hundred copies of the audio book. But let me share with you some more Kimmel tales dating back to our early radio days on the Kevin and Bean morning show for KROQ.

  Jimmy telling me to create a character (which I did, in the form of Mr. Birchum) was a good piece of advice. He also gave me another great piece of advice. At a certain point I thought I could be more present at the studio and a bigger part of the show if I drove the van for the station. I’d always be around and I could make a few bucks while I was at it. Jimmy said no. If I drove the van, then I’d just be the van driver. He was right. But he also told me that I could really become essential to the show if I could cut and edit tape. Back then, to produce a commercial parody or some other comedy bit you had to physically take a razor blade to a piece of audio tape, cut out the chunk you didn’t want, and then Scotch tape the two ends together to make your edit. The device you used to perform this was slightly less complicated than a joint roller. Jimmy thought this was a skill I should possess. I blew it off. What seemed like a week later, everything went digital and I never had to waste my time with that nonsense. Lots of books and movies follow the theme of missed opportunities and ignoring advice and the repercussions of that. Nobody ever touts the virtues of saying “Thanks, but no thanks,” or blowing off homework assignments. But as important as it is to recognize the opportunities when they arise, such as Jimmy telling me to come up with a character to get on the radio, it’s also important to realize when shit’s a waste of time. Let’s face it, life is short, and the more time you devote to your Beta-recorder repair business, the less time you’ll have for your Mr. Birchum.