Not Taco Bell Material

by Adam Carolla

  Grandma Helen grew up in Los Angeles before it was even really a city. She would tell me stories about Wilshire Boulevard being nothing but bean fields, and how she used to go and get chickens from a ranch that occupied the plots now housing the Comedy Store and the Whisky A Go Go on the Sunset Strip. When she told me this, my expression had the appearance of interest but inside I was a ball of rage, thinking, “You couldn’t have bought one acre when it cost a dime? It would be worth millions today.”

  She lived with her mother, father, and older brother in Beverly Hills before her father’s paving company went under during the Great Depression and they had to move to one in a long line of San Fernando Valley shitboxes. Years later after her mother had died her brother and father were living together. They literally were best friends. They would go hunting and fishing in the presuburban North Valley. It was a weirdly close relationship. He lived with his father well into his adulthood in that home, up to the point when his father died in his sixties of natural causes. This was not the case with her brother’s death. Within a week of his father’s passing he sat in the home they shared, put a shotgun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. He just couldn’t live without dear old Dad.

  Here’s the telling thing about Grandma. She and my step-grandfather promptly moved into that house without a moment’s hesitation. I asked her once if she ever felt weird about living in the eight-hundred-square-foot home in which her brother blew his brains out. She, with zero emotion, asked, “Why?” I said, “A lot of people would have feelings about that.” She replied, “What for? It’s just a house.” When I told her that according to California real estate law, when someone kills themselves in a home within the past three years the realtor needs to disclose it, she thought I was kidding. My grandmother was a hard-assed, tough woman. Up until the end of her life a few years ago, she had veins filled with ice water and Geritol.

  One offshoot of her beyond-fucked upbringing was that she, without ever using profanity or calling you stupid, worked very hard at making sure your points got undercut and that you walked away from every conversation feeling bad. One of the best examples is when I was doing Loveline all those years ago with Riki Rachtman, formerly of MTV’s Headbangers Ball. I told her that he cut me off a lot: He wasn’t good at the “Yes, and …” part of improv, didn’t listen very well, and was generally not a great partner to work with. She paused and said, “I bet he’d say the same thing about you.” This was based on nothing. She’d never met the man or listened to the show. It wasn’t like Riki was her other grandson from a previous marriage. She had no dog in the fight.

  In 2005 I was visiting her on her birthday. My mother and sister were there, too. My sister brought up that she had seen a picture of me at a supermarket. I was curious and asked for more details. All she could tell me was that it was me and Jimmy “with some cheese.” I had no idea what she was talking about. Did someone hang a head-shot of me at the deli counter? I don’t know what was more confusing; the fact that there was an unauthorized picture of me out there hawking cheese or the fact that my sister didn’t bother to investigate further. I eventually figured out what she saw. Every year Kimmel and I host the Feast of San Gennaro, a big Italian street fair. We were sitting at our desk one day after we had just gotten back from a trip to New York and were talking about how there’s no Little Italy in L.A. We’ve got a Little Armenia, a Koreatown, and a Little Ethiopia, but no Little Italy. By the way, I’d argue that actual Ethiopia is Little Ethiopia. Until you get a building with a third story, you can’t franchise your country into “Littles” in other nations. Anyway, as we were lamenting our lack of Little Italy, Jimmy said, “We don’t even have a feast of San Gennaro. We should start one.” We got the vendors and the permits and have done it every year since. Jimmy and I, but mostly Jimmy, had been running the thing for about five years at the time of this incident, and it had turned into a big deal with lots of vendors, thousands of people, three days of street closures, charity auctions, and sponsors. The feast was, and continues to be, sponsored by Precious Cheese, thus the picture of “me and cheese.” I never spoke about the feast in front of my family. It was just part of the Carolla “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. But since the subject had come up, after a moment of hesitation I decided to tell them about it, how it had expanded over the years, and the charity aspect of it. I was telling Helen that the feast had raised a good amount of money to go toward college scholarships for kids who couldn’t afford it. I was feeling pretty proud. That was my downfall. She had heard thirty seconds of bragging, and like a soldier diving on a self-esteem grenade, immediately yelled that Jon Bon Jovi had raised over a million for victims of Hurricane Katrina. Helen was way out of the Jovi demo; she was ninety-two and had never even visited New Jersey. Yet she was locked and loaded with that piece of information. It’s like those tales you hear where a mom gets superhuman strength to pull a car off her child. Grandma was that way, except her power was shitting on points. And my mom and sister completely backed her up, changing the subject to a guy they had never met.

  The following year, I was visting my mother and brought up the feast. She asked what I was talking about. I said, “You know, that event I was telling you about last year at Grandma’s birthday.” She replied, “I’ve never heard of the Feast of San Gennaro.” Mission accomplished, Grandma.

  Other people would even suffer collateral damage from the Helen discount. One day we were talking and she said, “I went to the supermarket today and you’ll never guess who I spotted—Bill Maher.” I said, “You know, Bill’s a big fan of mine, he loves The Man Show, in fact he’s one of my few celebrity friends.” That was all she needed. She said, “Oh, do you consider him a celebrity?” I was stunned, thinking, You brought him up—if he weren’t a celebrity, you wouldn’t have noticed him at the Gelson’s in the first place.

  Like most things, this trait got passed down through the generations. My mom got the downgrade gene as well. She showed up at my house one afternoon for a visit and had a VHS cassette. In true cheap Carolla tradition, it was one of those tapes that got used over and over and over. Because a new one would cost a nickel, this thing had probably been rerecorded on fifty times, most recently with an episode of Oprah featuring Jon Stewart as the guest. She asked me and Lynette, “Have you heard of Jon Stewart?” First off, I was on the same network as the guy at the time. Ignorant of this fact, she continued, “He’s really funny, he’s on Comedy Central.” Lynette’s jaw dropped. I got suckered in just the way I did with Grandma and Bill Maher, and said that Jon and I were friendly, had been out to dinner together, and even had the same agent. Her enthusiasm escaped like air from a deflating balloon and she said, “Oh … He’s a little hit-and-miss.” Poor Jon Stewart. Purely by association with her son, he was immediately downgraded from America’s greatest comic talent to Pauly Shore.

  I’m continually reminded of this attribute. As I write this, I’m working on The Car Show for the Speed channel. My mom, to her credit, watched an episode. She told me she had seen the show, enjoyed it, and then came the turn. She added, “Even though I’m not interested in cars.” She went out of her way to let me know that she didn’t give a shit about my passion. I own cars that transcend gear-head stuff. You don’t have to know the displacement on an ’84 Nissan ZX in full race trim to be interested in the fact that it looks awesome and was driven to a championship by Paul Newman. In fact, taking an interest in your kids’ hobbies even when they’re not yours is Parenting 101. I don’t give a shit about dinosaurs, but when my son is playing with them I tell the nanny to act interested.

  As I said, my grandmother was named Helen. And that’s what she was called by my mom for her whole life. She was never once called “Mom” by my mom. That is a horrible sign. Growing up, I didn’t really notice it or think it was weird. But then I started hanging around with normal adults and later had my own kids and thought, What the fuck? I didn’t address it with her until later in life after doing some therapy and examining how my
FUBAR family system affected me. I asked my mother, “Didn’t she ever ask you to call her Mom?” She hadn’t. I asked, “Not even when you were in front of company?” She said, “Nope.” At no point did my grandmother say, “Look at this shiny new nickel. I’ll give you one of these every time you call me Mommy. When we’re at home, call me Helen all day long. But when we’re out at a store or a party, you call me Mom and you’ll get a nickel.” That’s the craziest part, not that my mom obviously had a shitty enough relationship with her mom that she called her by her first name, but that my grandmother didn’t give a fuck if people knew it. I have to assume she never addressed it because it would lead to an uncomfortable conversation about why she didn’t deserve to be called Mom in the first place. If one of my kids called me Adam instead of Dad, I would sharpen a mop handle and fall on it.

  My mom was a hippie, but my grandmother was a counterculturalist. Basically, if the Man told her to walk left, she’d run right. She needed to embrace a culture that wasn’t her own. She married a guy from Europe and romanticized their governmental systems. She said she was a communist, though I’m sure she wouldn’t have lasted a minute in a true communist country. She loved anything that wasn’t apple pie and Uncle Sam. I never let my dad off the hook for not going to my football games, but my grandmother lived down the street from the field as well. It was walking distance. I played either every Saturday afternoon or Friday night, depending on the year. But she never attended one game. It wasn’t like she was working while the games were being played. She had a regular nine-to-five job and never worked a minute of overtime. She just didn’t like football. If I had been kicking around a soccer ball with some French kids, she would have been in the stands with a foam finger.

  She also had gay and lesbian friends before it was cool. She marched with them back in the day, and during my childhood I would see old cross-dressing queens floating around her house at parties. She used to hang out with a guy named Harry Hay and his partner John. Harry was essentially the Rosa Parks of the gay-rights movement. And slightly more feminine. If there was a gay Mount Rushmore, he’d be on it. Harry was cross-dressing in the thirties and forties, when not wearing a three-piece suit and fedora to walk to your mailbox meant you were a hobo. And in the same way my grandmother loved communism—i.e., a rebellious teenage fuck-you to society—she was wild about Harry. Probably the most pissed my grandmother ever got at me was the time she was telling me stories about Harry showing up at parties wearing a dress and pearl necklace and telling people to fuck off for staring at him. I said, “He sounds like an asshole.” She was furious and shouted, “What?” I replied, “He just sounds like an antisocial prick to me.” She brought up his queer-pioneer status. I told her I’d done Loveline long enough to know the type. He was like that guy who gets facial piercings and tattoos, then is pissed when he gets rejected for the job at Toys R Us. I’m sure my grandmother was disappointed that I didn’t turn out to be gay. That would have been something for her to brag about. The same way getting a Prius enhances your liberal-progressive street cred, she would have loved to introduce her grandson and his partner, Troy, to all of her friends.

  My grandmother was a sex therapist and was very comfortable talking about the subject. A little too comfortable. Here are four quick stories of conversations a grandmother should never have with her grandson.

  • One afternoon at her house—she was about 80 at the time—she pulled me aside and said, “I’ve been listening to the show, and I noticed you and Dr. Drew say ‘cli-to-ris.’ It’s pronounced ‘cli-to-ris.’ ” I said, “I think you can pronounce it either way.” She disagreed. “My friend Emery Kennerick is a doctor. And Emery pronounces it ‘cli-tor-is.’ ” So I said, “I also have a friend who is a doctor. His name is Doctor Drew.” So we went into the den and found my recently deceased grandfather’s large-print dictionary and looked up clitoris. It said you can pronounce it either way.

  • In her discomfort-be-damned style, my grandmother also tried to get me to go to one of those nudist camps. She was talking it up saying, “They play volleyball. It’s very freeing.” I feel pretty free; I don’t find cargo shorts to be confining and oppressive.

  • When I was nineteen, I was over at her house and out of the blue she asked me if I knew what a rim job was. Someone at her sex-therapy group for veterans had mentioned that he was giving his boyfriend a rim job and she didn’t know what it was. Of course, she thought the dinner table with five people on a Sunday over some goulash was the right time and place to ask.

  • A couple of months after my grandfather died, I was sitting around with Grandma talking about how she was coping. She was doing okay, but told me it was hard. She said, “Everywhere I look I see something that reminds me of him. I look in the closet and I see his trench coat. I look at the bookshelf and I see his books. I look in the medicine cabinet and I see our water-soluble lubricant.” I shit you not. With no sense of irony or embarrassment, she told her grandson the thing that made her wistful for his recently deceased and beloved grandfather was the lube he used to plow her grizzled vagina.

  As you know, she was astoundingly cheap. She took cheap to a poetic level. She was to thriftiness what Hendrix was to the guitar. And her shining moment, her Monterey Pop Festival, if we can continue the Hendrix analogy, was my sister’s wedding. The blessed occasion was held at my grandmother’s house. Nothing says “sacred ceremony” like a one-bedroom in North Hollywood. There was zero pomp and even less circumstance. Grandma was telling me about how Christoph, my soon-to-be brother-in-law, was getting greedy and over the top with the planning. She complained how it went from twenty people to thirty people, then the cold cuts became hot food with chafing dishes, et cetera. She then said, and this is verbatim, “At a certain point he wanted to get rid of the plastic utensils and replace them with real forks, and that’s where I drew the line.” This would not stand. He had gone too far. He was a madman. On his wedding day he wanted to use stainless steel instead of sporks stolen from a KFC. How dare he?

  To bring it all back to houses and launch us into the next chapter, when I bought my next house I told Grandma, “Hey, guess who just bought a five-thousand-square-foot house on a hill?” She brought up the woman who was helping her in her old age—Delia—and said, “Delia doesn’t even have a dining room table. She has to eat on the floor.” It was a wonderful housecooling gift from Grandma Helen.

  AND finally we get to my current home. Five miles away from where I grew up, but a million miles away from my first house.

  When I bought the place in 2003, it was a mess. I had discovered it driving from my Beachwood Canyon house up to Jimmy’s, which was a stone’s throw away. It took me a year and a half to turn it from the rats’ nest it had become to a habitable human dwelling. And despite what may be reported in some of the architectural and design magazines that later published features on my house, I did most of the work myself. I did not “pitch in” or “help out.” It was more than patching plaster and stripping floors. It was a total gut job, like the aforementioned Beachwood house, but on a much grander and more overwhelming scale. And I dug into the minor details, too. I picked out all the vintage hardware, from the period-correct doorknobs and window latches to the stamped-tin ceiling in the kitchen. I stripped the awful white paint that the previous assholes/owners had slopped over the fresco ceiling and the ornate faces carved into the exposed beams.

  People have such a hard time accepting that I’m a comedian and a carpenter. Comedians are usually so worthless around the house that people generally assume I’m a fraud. Well, I’m not. You know who is? Ty Pennington. He may look better with his shirt off than me, but he doesn’t know shit about construction. In 2004 when I was still ass-deep in the renovations of my new house, he came on Loveline to promote Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. I immediately sensed he didn’t know his ass from his elbow when it came to building. I threw some carpentry questions at him and was not impressed. I started off asking what OSB stood for and even mentioned wo
od as a clue. The right answer is “oriented strand board.” His answer? “Obviously saturated board.” He then brought up MDF. I asked him what it stood for—knowing the correct answer was “medium density fiberboard.” Remember, he brought it up, yet still answered, “Multiple fiber density board.” I said, “It’s gonna be a long night.” For the next question, I dumbed it down significantly—standard door height. Any carpenter worth his bags knows that it is six foot eight, eighty inches. Ty’s answer was seven foot six. This is the equivalent of a marine biologist not knowing what a dolphin is. I repeated, “It’s gonna be a long night.” I tried to save him from himself and turned it around: I told him to ask me some questions. His first salvo was asking me to tell the difference between a butt joint and a dovetail joint. This is carpentry 101. He might as well have just asked, “What is wood?” I was very easily able to explain and moved on. His next attempt at stumping the Ace man was to ask the difference between a header, a beam, and a joist. Of course this was answered quickly and without any difficulty. Many uncomfortable minutes later, I prompted him to ask me a blade-related question. He coughed out some confusing nonquestion about metal studs and drills and blade oil. Eventually he just gave up and asked me how many days it took to build the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s nothing personal against Ty. It’s more an indictment against this business. Ty looks like he knows what he’s doing, and that’s all they care about. I don’t mind him playing the role of a carpenter in a movie, but to put the title “master carpenter” in front of his name is like putting “insurance salesman” in front of Jesus’. It’s just wrong.

  Not only did I do the work myself, I powered through some pain to do it. In the summer of 2004 I hung full-length, 110-pound mirrored doors on the upstairs closet. What makes this a real feat is that I had hernia surgery the afternoon before. For about eight years I had a bulge in my lower gut, right above the pubic bone. If I sneezed you could see it expand. But for a lot of that time I didn’t have insurance, so I just let it be. When I eventually showed it to another doctor that was filling in for Drew, he said I needed to be operated on immediately. A day later when I told Drew I was going in for the procedure, he mentioned that he’d had the same surgery a few months prior and did that thing all dicks do, try to make you nervous: “You are going to be knocked on your ass. It’s going to be awful.” I told him I was getting it on Friday and that I’d see him at work Sunday night. He said I wouldn’t be there. He was actually laughing and saying how much pain I was going to be in.