Not Taco Bell Material

by Adam Carolla

  You’d think that would end the saga, but that’s the thing about people like this: They’re relentless, like the Predator. In fact, I think I just came up with a great movie premise—Israelian vs. Predator. The Predator moves into my old neighborhood and hunts that prick for sport. He called me about some other petty complaint. What makes this particularly dickish is that he called me at nine forty-five on a Saturday night. I had already gone out for the night, so he left a message on my home answering machine. I went out, tied one on, came home, and passed out blissfully unaware that he had called. He called again at nine the next morning, Sunday, and left another message. When I got up I listened to it. In the most put-upon tone he could muster he said, “This is now my second time trying to get hold of you. In the future, I would appreciate it if you would show me the respect of giving me your home number instead of routing me to an answering service.” Can you believe that shit? An answering service!

  After a few years living next to these two I found myself thinking, “I’m not completely behind the Palestinians, but they do make some valid points.”

  I wish I could call them out as the only nut jobs on my new block. But there was another crazy yenta who lived down the street. This was more of the New York rather than Tel Aviv variety of Jew. Think George Costanza’s mother from Seinfeld. She had that bizarre red hair you only find on crazy old women. It falls more into the orange category and is thin enough that you can see their scalp. She looked like Mr. Heat Miser from The Year Without Santa Claus.

  After I got married, we received a lot of gifts in the mail and thus ended up with a garbage bin full of boxes, wrapping, and packing peanuts. Well, inevitably, as the robotic arm lifted the can and dumped it into the truck, a gust of wind kicked up and the peanuts went everywhere. It was packing peanuts as far as the eye can see. It looked as if they were dumped on my street like fire retardant from a C-130. Now, technically this wasn’t my fault: I blame the garbage men for not getting their asses out of the truck and dumping the garbage by hand the way they used to when I was a kid. I also blame the packing-peanut manufacturers of America. But if it was anyone’s responsibility to clean up, it was mine. So I grabbed a broom. But that didn’t work. The peanuts were too light and scattered like pigeons as I tried to sweep.

  As I was doing this, of course Mrs. Heat Miser came walking up the street. She started in on me. “We’ve got quite a mess here. Who’s gonna clean this up? You know they don’t break down. You can’t just sweep them into the garden. They’ll be there forever.”

  At that point I would have traded all of the wedding gifts that packing material protected to not have to deal with it, but I decided to cut my losses. I told her I was going to take care of it, put the broom back, and grabbed a five-gallon bucket. Over the next two hours I picked up every individual goddamn packing peanut by hand. They had blown all down the hill and were littering several hundred yards, caught in planters, underneath cars, and mired in the muck of the gutter running along the curb. Using my thumb and index finger as the world’s worst set of tweezers I extracted every soggy, dirty, sewage-covered peanut on the block.

  The following day, I walked out of my house and instantly ran into the Red Menace. She brought the peanuts up. “They’re all over the place. Come look at my lawn.” Now, I couldn’t deny that some might have gotten away in the wind, but they couldn’t be “all over.” I told her so and she said, and this is verbatim, “It’s like snow. It’s like it snowed on my lawn.” I told her I’d go look. She said she wanted to finish her walk but gave me her address. What I soon realized was that she was not interested in coming down there with me so I could prove her wrong. When I arrived at her lawn I found, literally, one packing peanut.

  This is the thing that drives me nuts: the exaggerating to make spurious points. But in the end it was my fault. I engaged. Just like with the other neighbor and the “flooding” coming from my air conditioner, I should have stopped it early on. The first time she came to the door about the water I should have said, “Shut up and get in your house.” With Mrs. Peanut I should have told her to keep walking and that I hoped she got mauled by a mountain lion. That’s what we need to tell all of these people. That’s my sincere wish. I hope you’re enjoying this book and find it funny and inspiring, but even more than that I want it to be a call to action. I want it to motivate you to tell your shitty neighbor to shut the fuck up and take a hike. We don’t need to protect these people. They’re not California condors. They deserve the worst we can offer.

  So I had a home of my own and I was finally starting to make some real money. The Man Show was in full swing, and Loveline was on the radio and TV. But don’t worry, my family was not going to let me enjoy my success. My mom’s birthday came around, and we all took her out to a Thai restaurant. Somewhere in the middle of dinner she announced to the crowded table, “I got another one of these flyers for cable in the mail. Fourteen ninety-nine. I don’t know.” And then she said, “Can anyone give me one good reason why I should get cable?” One reason. She actually said one. Her son had two shows on cable at the time. The worst part was that the entire table of Carollas could not provide an answer. Someone said, “There’s gardening shows. You like gardening.” Here’s how brainwashed I’d gotten by the Carolla cult—I didn’t even think for a hot second about defending my honor and bringing up my two shows. I actually piled on and said, “They have cooking shows, too.” It didn’t hit me until the drive in to Loveline what had just happened.

  My relationship with Lynette continued to chug along, notwithstanding a few minor hiccups. When you get into a serious relationship and get married, for better or worse you get a new family. You might think from what I’ve shared about my family that this would be a good thing, but there are also some cuckoo birds making their nest in Lynette’s family tree.

  Lynette has a schizophrenic brother who, when medicated, is perfectly stable; you wouldn’t know he had any kind of condition. Minus one factor. His hat. He wears a UCLA ball cap with the two plastic snap-ons undone that looks like it was backed over by a cement truck and then mashed onto his head. I saw the hat get progressively worse over the years until one day I finally said something. Of course I ended up looking like an asshole, but I was just trying to save my brother-in-law the judging stares of strangers.

  One of the longest and worst nights of my life was when Lynette’s mom (who, like my grandmother, was named Helen) went off her meds. She was bipolar. I had just pulled in from an exhausting four-show tape day for Loveline on MTV when Lynette greeted me, upset, saying that her mom was having an episode and was refusing to take her pills. So I had to schlep forty-five minutes on a Friday night out to Canoga Park to try and talk her into the ambulance that had been called to take her to the psych ward before she was forced into it.

  I tried reasoning with her and said, “I’m tired, you’re tired, Lynette’s tired, the ambulance drivers are tired. You need to get into that ambulance or we’ll have to sit here and wait for the cops to show up and force you into the ambulance in handcuffs.” In not so many words, she said, Bring it on.

  Helen was a scrappy seventy-one-years-young fourth-degree black belt. She had 7 percent body fat and went to the gym every day. She was tough. So when the cops showed up, she went into her kata. She was pulling moves like Ralph Macchio on the pier pylon in The Karate Kid. The straight-out-of-a-movie black cop and white partner showed up and started to approach Helen, still in her bathrobe but acting like an extra from Bloodsport. They followed her into her room and I couldn’t see, but could definitely hear, what happened. Down the hall poured the sound of a cartoonish maelstrom: furniture smashing, glass breaking, and Helen screaming, “Why did you do this to me?” at Lynette. She tore the watch off one of the cops and managed to break it, along with what little spirit Lynette had left. She collapsed in a heap of tears.

  This wasn’t Helen’s first episode; she’d had many before this. In fact so many that Jimmy came up with a novel idea on how to deal with it. H
elen was born-again, so we had one of the Man Show writers call her and as Jesus command her to take her meds.

  About five years later, we were sitting in the kitchen preparing for dinner when Lynette called her and she didn’t pick up the phone. Lynette immediately assumed the worst—she was having another incident. I tried to keep everything calm and said, “She’s probably just at the Olive Garden.” Lynette wanted to call Helen’s neighbor, a big guy named Stan, but I kept insisting everything was fine and she didn’t need to bother him. Like most people, she didn’t listen to me and called Stan. While she asked him to go next door and check on her mom, I went for round seven of “Everything’s okay. She probably just went to the gym. Hell, she goes three times a day. You don’t need to bother Stan. Let him eat his dinner.” Less than two minutes later, Stan got back on the phone. This is the end of the conversation I witnessed: “Hey, Stan. You got into the house?” As I was gesturing for Lynette to let him go and get back to his life, I heard, “She’s dead?”

  I’d never been shut down so fast in my life. It was an emotional e-brake 180. Right in the middle of my saying, “She’ll live to a thousand, she’s a tough old broad. She’ll outlive us all,” Lynette found out she’d taken a nap before her workout and died in her sleep.

  Sad, but I know Helen would want me to honor her memory by complaining about inconsequential shit from my road trips with Dr. Drew and Jimmy.

  Drew and I had a horrible manager at this time. I was smart enough to drop his fat ass; Drew is still a client. Drew is the only person in showbiz who has worse self-esteem than me. We used to do a lot of the college circuit, going around to various schools, talking to the kiddies and doing a little Q&A. But it wasn’t luxury travel, and again, our manager sucked. For example, we would do a gig in DeKalb, Illinois, and then take a short flight down to Kansas City. Our manager would arrange for us to get picked up at the airport. But because he was a cheap dimwit, we’d get picked up by some student from the college, one of the kids who worked with the student council who chose Drew and me to come and speak. More often than not, they’d pick us up in something wholly inadequate. Two-door hatchback Toyota Celicas and things like that. Drew and I would have a week’s worth of luggage and have to cram in the back. And half the time it wasn’t even the student’s car, it was his roommate’s. On a campus visit to Northern Iowa, the kid picked us up in his roommate’s two-door shitbox and there was a full basket of dirty laundry in the back. I was in the front with my luggage on my lap (the hatchback was full of other assorted crap) and Drew was in the backseat, getting a lap dance from his luggage and resting his arm on someone’s dirty socks. After the gig, with Drew still smelling like some sophomore’s spent underpants, we went out for pizza with some of the students. This was kind of how it worked—the student group would book us, and after the show we’d have dinner with them. I suspect they never gave a shit about the lecture or question-and-answer session; they just wanted to hang out with a celebrity. We always obliged because we were staying at shitty motels anyway, so what was the rush to get back to the Iowa Econo Lodge.

  The same gent who was toting his roommate’s laundry was our driver again. I remember that it was snowing and the guy wanted to stop at his apartment first so he could change his pants. Seriously. My zero and Drew’s negative-one self-esteem levels allowed us to agree. While we were sitting in the car, which was parked on fraternity row, people kept coming up to us and banging on the window, saying, “Hey, Loveline.” The pathetic punchline to the whole affair was that when the kid came back down he had changed from a pair of black jeans to a pair of blue jeans.

  It got to a breaking point in Kansas City when we almost died because the two ditzy chicks picking us up had a shitty old Pathfinder that was not roadworthy. Plus the driver didn’t know where she was going. As soon as we got in the car, she asked, “Do you guys know where the hotel is?” As if I’d say, “Yes, sure. I could get you there blindfolded. I’ve been to the Kansas City Red Roof Inn many, many times.” How the fuck was I supposed to know? I’ve never been to your godforsaken city before. After calling her boyfriend and getting directions, she agreed to meet us out front at seven to drive us to the venue. She and her girlfriend were twenty minutes late. Apparently they had decided to go out to eat and then do a little shopping. She then couldn’t find the venue. The show started a half hour late.

  To top it all off, we were in Kansas City, so we wanted some good K.C. barbecue. Ribs are one of those things that when you want them, you’ve got to have them, and after a long journey and a long show, we needed some ribs. But since everything got fucked up because they were late and got lost, by the time the show ended everything was closed and we ended up at a place that ranked somewhere between a Waffle House and a Sizzler.

  I’d love to say this has changed, but I did a live stand-up show in Kansas City in 2011 and we were picked up by runners for the promoters. We actually had two cars because one guy I travel with needed to go right to the venue and I needed to go to the hotel. Initially, I was to ride in the car he ended up in, but upon first glance I knew it wouldn’t do. I got lucky and only ended up in a Kia that was filthy and covered in bird shit. Seriously, you could see where the windshield wipers had just moved and coagulated the dirt. The other guy ended up being driven by a kid who was twenty years old in a car that was twenty-seven years old. It was a piece-of-shit Toyota Tercel with no headliner: It was his friend’s car, which was inconvenient because his friend was the only one who knew how to get the broken Best of Eric Clapton cassette—yes, a cassette in 2011—out of the player. This car had covered more miles than the space shuttle. I’m not trying to pull a star trip. I don’t ask for much: You can see my tour rider, and all I ask for is a couple of beers and a cup of coffee before I hit the stage (and usually that gets fucked up, too). But for the love of Christ, before you pick me up at the airport, please remove your roommate’s spent tube socks.

  Another time Drew and I were flying to one of our college gigs out of Cincinnati going to Alabama. Our plane was one of those twenty-five-seat turbo-prop planes. I was already nervous as I boarded the late-afternoon flight, but then the pilot announced that there were electrical storms and that he was going to attempt to fly around them. The next announcement we heard was that the plane was overweight and that either someone needed to volunteer to have their bags removed or they would remove them for us. We must have had a lot of gamblers on the flight who thought about their one-in-twenty-five shot, because no one volunteered. By the way, if the plane is overweight by one rolling backpack and you take that off, all of a sudden at twenty thousand feet dodging thunderclouds you’re cool? That’s the difference maker?

  They went out and removed what I hoped was Dr. Drew’s luggage. To tell you the truth, at the time I was less concerned about losing a piece of luggage and more concerned about losing a wing if we didn’t get out ahead of that storm. Then they shut the hatch and the pilot fired up the engines. Out of the left-side engine came a giant plume of black smoke. The pilot noticed it and shut the engine down.

  Again we waited while he called maintenance. Once the maintenance guy arrived, he fired it up a second time and a bigger plume of black carbon came from the exhaust pipe. At this point I was seriously considering getting off the plane. I was a nervous flyer back then because outside of the aforementioned Hawaii trip I’d never been on an airplane. The Carollas, as you know, were not part of the jet set. So here we were on a tiny, overweight prop plane with smoke coming out of one of the engines and a storm approaching. Needless to say, I wanted off. At this point I was hoping the maintenance guy would red-flag us and spare me the humiliation of raising my hand and announcing I was a pussy. But he did something much worse. He told the pilot to turn it over one more time, for the third time in a row a big puff of black smoke belched out of the engine, and he gave the pilot a thumbs-up and told him he was good to go. I was mortified and didn’t think things could get worse, but they were about to. The woman in the seat in front of me
innocently turned the page on her USA Today to expose the most frightening image I’d ever seen. It was a full-page color ad for The Roberto Clemente Story.

  Roberto Clemente was an all-star Pittsburgh Pirate who died in the seventies in a plane that was probably manufactured long after the one I was sitting in. Let’s review. I’m in a crop duster that’s over-weight with a blown head gasket, we’re flying into a thunderstorm, and I’m staring at a picture of Roberto Clemente. I don’t know how the universe works, but the great magnet in the sky only gives you clues. There’s no magical force that unbuckles your seat belt, lifts you out of your chair, and pushes you out the door. I was freaked. I pictured a bunch of guys sitting on a cloud with harps and wings yelling, “You idiot, what else do we have to do? Get off of this flight already.” And then the song “Chantilly Lace” came over the intercom. (Just kidding. Go to Wikipedia, dummies.) If you’d like to peer into my troubled psyche, this story is all you need to know. I was convinced I was going to die on that plane that day, but I was way too embarrassed and self-conscious to stand up and ask to be let off.

  In 1999 we were scheduled to do a weeklong shoot for an episode of Dawson’s Creek. They taped that show in North Carolina, and we were due on set that Monday. The producers called me and told me there were only two flights leaving L.A. for North Carolina that Sunday, one at eight A.M. and one at two P.M. Ironically, there were only two flights to the birthplace of aviation. They insisted I take the eight A.M. flight because if I missed the later one, I would be liable and would have to charter a private plane to get me there in time for the shoot. I couldn’t see why I had to get up at the crack of fuck on Sunday morning if I didn’t need to do anything until Monday morning. It’s not a twenty-four-hour journey, why should I make it into one? So I ignored their pleas and took the path of champions by sleeping in and booking the afternoon flight. The show was sending a car to pick me up and bring me to the airport. I usually try to cut it close with the car service: I hate when they show up three hours before the flight ringing the doorbell while I’m still in my boxers trying to pack. But I knew the consequences if I missed that flight, so I included plenty of time to get to the airport and had them send the town car at noon. What I had failed to factor in was the fucking L.A. Marathon.