Not Taco Bell Material

by Adam Carolla

  One of the first times it hit me that Jimmy’s advice was paying off was at the 1994 KROQ Acoustic Christmas, a concert with some of the biggest rock acts of that year. It still takes place every December. The ’94 lineup had, among others, Weezer, Stone Temple Pilots, Seal, and two kinds of Crows—Black and Sheryl. Mr. Birchum was just taking off, but I continued to work as a carpenter and boxing instructor. Even with Birchum’s growing popularity, I was still only making fifty bucks a bit. I was walking backstage past a group of coworkers when someone from the group called me over. To my surprise and delight, one of the people in that group was Henry Winkler. That’s right—one of the producers of MacGyver. One of my KROQ compatriots said, “Henry, this is the guy who does Mr. Birchum.” He said, “You’re Mr. Birchum?” I said I was. He then gave me that super menschy two-handed handshake and said, “Nobody can do what you do. No one can improvise that fast.” It was surreal: Here was the Fonz himself, kissing my ass. It got even weirder later at the same event when I was chatting with Duff from Guns ’N Roses and he mentioned that Axl had recently been talking about me. The Fonz and Axl Rose knew who I was. That was enough; I should have just killed myself right then and there.

  1995—At a KROQ event. The name placards read “Mr. Birchum” and “Jimmy the Sports Guy.”

  When the morning show would wrap up, it was time to get some breakfast. (Remember what I said about fucked-up hours and how you compensate with shitty food?) I did odd construction jobs around the station while I was getting paid per appearance to do Mr. Birchum. One of the things I built, other than a ten-thousand-CD storage rack for Bean, was a wheel, like you’d see on Wheel of Fortune. Except instead of dollar amounts, it had the names of local breakfast joints like Bob’s Big Boy and Denny’s. After the show we’d gather around the wheel, someone would take a spin, and fate would decide where we’d eat. Now what makes this interesting is that there was also a spot for a restaurant we all hated—the Tallyrand. Every couple of times we’d end up on the Tallyrand and get pissed off at whoever had spun the wheel. This is something only guys would do. It was Russian roulette with bad omelets instead of bullets. Where’s the fun if there’s no risk?

  Just because it was radio doesn’t mean I didn’t have a dickhead boss like on my construction sites. Our boss at the time was named Frank Murphy. Frank was super-uptight and would freak out if you put food in his trash, even if it was just a peach pit or a candy wrapper. And God forbid you took his newspaper. He’d literally threaten your life if you slid the sports section out of his USA Today.

  In Frank’s defense, this may not just be his particular personality disorder, it may be a symptom of working at a radio station. The only thing I miss about radio are the bitter notes on the vending machines. “To the person who maintains this machine: On December 9th I inserted in a dollar for a sixty-five-cent Pepsi Free and got no change in return. PLEASE CORRECT!” The time it takes to write and follow up on that note is worth much more than a dollar. And the community kitchen is a nightmare. The next project I do with this publisher is going to be a coffee-table book entitled Radio Station Refrigerators and will contain pictures of all the angry notes left on break-room fridges. Sure, every office has those snarky Post-it notes left on the office fridge by coworkers about not eating each other’s lunch. But the fridge at KROQ brought it to a whole new low. I would often find long, vitriolic manifestos taped to the door of the Frigidaire. “To the person who feels it is their right to take other people’s property: I left half an egg salad sandwich in this refrigerator. I went to enjoy my lunch today only to find that much to my chagrin it had been stolen! If you are going to continue to have reckless disregard for your fellow coworkers I will have no recourse but to take it up with Human Resources.” There’d be thirty-year-old scratched-up Tupperware with two-week-old Chinese food in it covered in angry-Sharpie scrawl: “This belongs to Cheryl, AND ONLY CHERYL, if you are not Cheryl DO NOT TOUCH!” And I’m not exaggerating about half-eaten food being the breaking point. At KROQ I literally saw a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli with a moistened paper towel stuffed into the mouth of it protecting the single ravioli clinging to the bottom. Literally, one goddamn ravioli. These are adults whose average age was forty-one, average education was three years of college, and average salary was $77,000, practically getting into knife fights about food that seagulls wouldn’t pick off a garbage barge.

  There were other characters around the studio like Michael the Maintenance Man, Jimmy’s boxing opponent and the impetus for our fateful meeting. He was an angry brother who thought everyone was a racist, eventually became a Muslim, and got busted selling T-shirts he was supposed to be giving away at KROQ sticker stops. There was also a weird homeless guy who became a regular character on the show named Booger Man. One morning after Jimmy went into great detail about Booger Man’s girth-enhancing penile-fat injections over the air, I walked into Frank’s office to see Jimmy with his back against the wall while Booger Man vigorously strangled him. You’d think with all my boxing training and my love and allegiance for Jimmy I would have thrown a big left hook to the back of Booger Man’s head. But all I could do was stand there and watch. This is how you know everything in this book is true. I stood there like a coward and did nothing. Eventually Jimmy fought him off and Booger Man was fired. Ironically, not for attempting to kill Jimmy: He gave away a cheap mountain bike to a friend instead of caller number thirty-five. Rules are rules. It was a real island of misfit toys.

  One of the perks of the job was that Jimmy and I used to occasionally travel together. We’d do remotes from New York for the MTV Movie Awards, Vegas for station-sponsored singles parties, and so on.

  It was at one of these singles parties when I had the following incident. After a night of boozing it was time to go back to the hotel, take a piss, and get some sleep. I staggered into the lobby and toward the elevators. I was ready to burst. I’d been drinking all night and the line at the event had been too long, so I thought I’d wait until I returned to the room Jimmy and I were sharing. All the guys reading this understand this feeling. Our bladder has a backward-counting clock, like a timer on a bomb. We can hold it for a long time when it’s unarmed, but once you flip that switch, you’re past the point of no return. You start to ache. Eventually after what seemed like a lifetime, the elevator arrived on the lobby floor. By the time I got out on my floor, I was ready to explode. I hustled down the hall to my door and … the key didn’t work. I was locked out. I quickly surveyed the scene and, like on one of the trips to Tijuana in my younger days, I found myself resorting to an ice maker. In my defense, I didn’t piss on a bunch of ice: I just saw a drain and an opportunity.

  I hate hotel key cards. How about a real key? Is that too much to ask? I have a couple of beefs with those magnetic-stripe key cards. First, they don’t have the room number on them. I know you might think this is a safety risk if the card is lost. Let’s just say it fell out of your wallet at an Applebee’s. What are the chances that the guy or girl who found your key card would think, Somebody’s staying in room 824 at the Ramada: Get my ski mask, duct tape, and water-soluble lube? I’d gladly run that nonrisk in order to be able to find my room after I’ve blown into town, run up to splash some water on my face, done ninety minutes onstage followed by a few beers, and then stumbled back to the hotel exhausted and not remembering if I was in room 914 or 419.

  My second beef is that they all need to have the arrows clearly printed on them showing which direction to slide them in. If there are arrows at all, they are impossible to find and are tiny little half-assed pyramids. Are we so lazy that we’ve removed the dick and left just the tip? I spend twenty minutes, probably at the wrong room, sliding the damn thing in backward and being mocked by that little red light on the door handle. The same guys who are in charge of arrow clarity must also work on rental-car dashboards specializing in not letting you figure out which side the gas cap is on.

  My third complaint is that half the time they don’t work. And when you go do
wn to the desk the chick says, “Did you put it in your wallet? Sometimes the magnetic strip on your credit card screws it up. But don’t put it in the same pocket as your cell phone.” Unfortunately I’m one of those maniacs who insists on traveling with his wallet and cell phone. What am I supposed to do, duct tape it to a broomstick and hold it above my head?

  Plus sliding a card to a chick at the hotel bar is way less cool than handing her a key. And finally, is this the future? When I’m formally presented with the key to the city of Santa Monica after stopping another purse snatching, are they gonna hand me a giant foam-core key card?

  Another time Jimmy and I were up in Seattle doing a remote because UCLA had made the Final Four. We were in a shitty motor lodge, one of those places where the lights from the cars pulling into the parking lot shine directly into your room. And when I say “Seattle,” I should be clear: We were twenty-five miles outside of Seattle. This place shared a parking lot with a 7-Eleven and looked like the motel from No Country for Old Men, except with more rain. Jimmy and I had to be up at four fifteen in the morning even though the show didn’t start until six. We were a good hour away from the sports bar we were broadcasting out of, across from the old Kingdome. This sucked especially hard because we had been at a strip club until past two A.M. the night before. By the way, getting loaded at a strip club for a couple hours before you slide into the bed you’re sharing with another dude is not necessarily the best move for straight guys. So the alarm went off after an hour and a half of sleep, and Jimmy got up first to take his shower. We had one of those tubs that didn’t drain right, so at 4:30 I stepped into a shin-deep pool of tepid water and Jimmy’s back hair. After a minute or so Jimmy did that backward knuckle tap on the outside of the hollow-core door and said, “Oh, FYI. I beat off in the shower. So look out for that iceberg.” I didn’t know if he was kidding or if I needed to jump out and vomit. It’s ironic to have to take a rape shower for something that happened in a shower.

  And on the topic of beating off, every year when we made the pilgrimage to New York for the aforementioned MTV Movie Awards, we went armed with needle-nose pliers and a universal remote. Jimmy had figured out that you could use needle-nose pliers to outsmart the sheet-metal shroud that was supposed to prevent you from undoing the coax. Then you could flip-flop the cables and use the universal remote to get the free porn. It was an ingenious plan with only one flaw. We were so cheap we had only one universal remote, so if during your refractory period you changed the channel to the news station and the remote ended up in the other guy’s room, you couldn’t change it back to the Spice channel.

  Quick side note to that Seattle story. Bean now lives there because of that trip. I was walking around with him, breathing the clean air and seeing the green trees, and remember Bean saying, “Wow, this is really amazing.” I didn’t know he would end up moving there. Being from L.A. is like being in an abusive relationship. When you get outside of it, you don’t know what to do. It’s like a battered wife who leaves her man and finally goes on a date, and when the guy goes to stroke her hair, she flinches. She doesn’t know how to handle it; she can’t believe there are gentlemen out there. You go to a place like Seattle and ask, “Where’s all the graffiti? Where are all the gangs?” A couple years ago I was doing a stand-up gig at the Moore Theatre in Seattle and I stopped by to visit him. When I arrived, he was outside and said he was waiting for the wife and kids. I thought, Kids? Bean hates kids. I hadn’t seen him in years, so I thought maybe I missed something. Ten minutes later his wife pulled up with two potbellied pigs and it all made pathetic sense.

  One of our other trips was to Vegas for Kevin Rider’s bachelor party. Technically this may have been later, after I had left this apartment, but it’s travel and it’s Kevin and Bean so fuck it, this is where it should go. We rented an RV and loaded it up with me, Jimmy, Bean, Lightning (the show’s current producer), another couple guys from the station, and five of bachelor Bean’s buddies. It was a tight fit, and the heat was in triple digits, but we decided that it was still time to light some farts. For four straight hours, the entirety of the journey to Vegas, I was holding a lighter up to my asshole and entertaining the troops. Actually, my biggest laugh of the weekend was later at the bachelor party itself. One of Bean’s drunken buddies was lying down on the carpet of the suite we were attempting to destroy. The stripper squatted over his face and poured beer down her chest so that it followed the contour of her body and eventually dropped off the end of her lady-parts into his mouth. She explained this was called the “golden waterfall.” As this was happening, I yelled, “Forget the golden waterfall, give him the mudslide.” It’s disgusting and not really that clever but to this day it is still the hardest I’ve ever made Jimmy laugh.

  At this time I was still dating Cynthia (thank Christ her mom went back to Minnesota), and there’s a funny story that combines her, my gig at KROQ, and my incompetence as a boyfriend. Cynthia’s favorite performer was Tori Amos (I guess I should have seen our impending breakup coming just based on that). One day Tori came by the studio. A fan had sent her some flowers, but Tori left them behind. So I took them home to my girlie. I walked in and said, “Here’s some flowers.” She said, “Oh, my God. That’s so sweet. It’s not even my birthday. Let me put them in some water.” I said, “Hold on. It gets even better. Guess who these flowers were for?” She looked at me with a “Huh?” and I said, “They were for your favorite—Tori Amos. A fan brought them and she left them behind.” Cynthia’s mood changed instantly and she tossed out a “fuck you” as she left the room. This was another lesson in the difference between men and women. If someone gave me a sack of beef jerky that was meant for Mike Ditka, I’d sleep with it under my pillow. I was thinking like a dude, not a chick. I learned that it’s about the effort, not the flowers. Every chick loves getting flowers, but not if they’re free. This must suck for guys who work as florists. When the anniversary hits, they must have to show their wives receipts from a competing floral shop.

  Eventually I would graduate from doing periodic bits for Kevin and Bean. I had a little something called “it,” and Dr. Drew recognized that. But he was currently partnered with a guy named Riki Rachtman. The good news was that Riki wasn’t very good. The better news was that he didn’t know it. He walked out of the pilot for the syndicated TV version of Loveline at the last minute, demanding more money. His demands were not met, and the casting process began. Drew recommended me based on my Mr. Birchum bits.

  When the producers came calling, I was in New York with Jimmy, Kevin, and Bean. We were doing a week of broadcasts from there, leading up to the MTV Video Music Awards. The plan was to head out to Little Italy every night for some real Italian food, then hit the bars. (Because of the time difference, we didn’t have to get up at the crack of fuck to do the morning-show hungover.) It was gonna be a party and KROQ was paying for the whole thing. We had arrived just the day before and were on our way to get some gelato when I got the call. They needed me to fly back for the audition. I’m a poor reader, as you know, so I’d never been much good at the audition process. And when I say “not good,” I mean Mariah Carey–in-high-heels-throwing-out-the-first-pitch not good. This was the second time I’d been to New York in my life, a romantic getaway with Jimmy I’d been planning all year long, and I was being asked to fly back across the country so some producer could flip a coin, nay, a golf ball, and hope it landed on my dimple. I was dying not to go so I asked the producers in all seriousness, “What’s Mark DeCarlo doing? He’d be good, he has a lot of experience in TV, he did Studs. Why not give him a shot?” They said, “Real funny. Now get back here.” With encouragement from Jimmy and the guys I went back the next day (on Tower Air, which doesn’t exist anymore, it was such a cheap, shitty airline), and headed over to Hollywood Center Studios for the audition. It was a blazing-hot bright day at high noon without a cloud in the sky. I went from that into a pitch-black studio with a table and some folding chairs to answer fake phone calls. When I was done
I thought, That actually went pretty well. It was improv, which is my strength. At the end of the audition the producers said, “You’ll be hearing from us.” So I was actually feeling confident. As I strutted out of the studio I went to push the door and it pulled away from me. Someone was entering as I was exiting. As the door opened I got hit right in the eyes with a shaft of sunlight and all I could see was the person’s silhouette. A second later I literally bumped into Mark DeCarlo as he was coming in to audition. I guess the producers took my note. Thankfully, my nervousness about the audition and thus the suggestion of DeCarlo didn’t fuck me. I got the gig and filmed the pilot. I then spent a few uncomfortable months doing Loveline on the radio with Drew and Riki not mentioning that I had done the pilot. Drew and I felt like a wife and the coworker she’s been banging in the copier room chatting with her husband at the company picnic. Awkward.