Not Taco Bell Material

by Adam Carolla

  This is something you should know about Drew: He has no bedside manner whatsoever. It’s morbid. I told him about Lynette’s best friend who had just been diagnosed at age thirty-four with cervical cancer and he simply said, “Death sentence.” Unfortunately, in that case he was right. Jennifer was dead within six months.

  Drew actually showed up at my bedside just before I went under and encouraged his friend, the anesthesiologist who was Jamaican, to bust my chops a little bit about how long it was going to take me to recover. He was Drew’s neighbor, so I made a joke about Drew moving down the street because he “didn’t like the direction the neighborhood was headed” and didn’t need “his type.” The Jamaican anesthesiologist (also the nickname of my favorite welterweight) said that his wife wasn’t black. I replied, “That doesn’t balance it out. Drew is a purist. One is too many.” Probably not the best move to make a racist joke about the guy who’s going to be over your unconscious body deciding whether you ever wake up again.

  Drew took delight in the fact that even if I constantly talked about how everyone is a pussy and I was an iron man because I played Pop Warner, this surgery was going to knock me on my ass and humble me. He had the same operation and took seven days to recover and thought I would suffer a similar fate. After my surgery, I went home, drank a couple glasses of wine, went to bed, popped up at six fifteen the following morning, and announced to my wife, “I’m heading to the new house to hang doors.” She gave me the “you’re nuts” grunt and went back to sleep. The point is this; I powered through because I’m a heavyweight and had a project to finish.

  The home was built in the twenties and has a lot of great architectural details from the era, such as the green bathroom with beautiful art deco tile and fixtures. One of the elements of this bathroom was the original toilet. It was jade green and had a tall tank in the back. During escrow, before I even took possession of the house, someone from the city was dispatched to remove the original toilet and install an ugly, standard-issue, low-flow white toilet so it would comply with city code. This toilet would be fine in any apartment in the San Fernando Valley, but it stood out like a sore thumb in the middle of my mint-green, art deco bathroom. It was like hanging a cat-shit ornament on my beautiful green Christmas tree.

  Los Angeles is what I would call ground zero for the anti–Patriot Act people. Yet they are the same ones who fully condone someone from the city coming into your home and enforcing their agenda without your consent. They raise holy hell because they’re afraid George Bush is listening to their phone calls, as if the government gives a shit about you telling your wife when to pick up the kids at soccer practice, but some douche with a Members Only jacket, a clipboard, and a Mike Ditka mustache can come into my home while I’m not there, take a green art deco masterpiece, and install a white Home Depot master–piece of shit? I want a formal apology from all of you dicks.

  And how about the hypocrisy from the city? They enforce this low-flow code and ticket you if you hose down your driveway, but every day on my commute to the morning show, my car would get sprayed by the sprinklers on Wilshire Boulevard. A sprinkler head every three feet was gushing a ten-foot arc of water in both directions. Occasionally this would even happen in the rain. All of this to wet a two-foot patch of grass on the median. I drove through Niagara Falls while listening to a taxpayer-funded radio PSA about water conservation.

  Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know I removed the porcelain pimple and reinstalled my emerald commode.

  Not too long after I moved into the house, James Van Praagh was a guest on Loveline. You may know him as a celebrity psychic, but I like to think of him as Gay Larry Csonka. I’m not saying he is gay, I’m just saying he looks like NFL legend Larry Csonka if he chugged cock.

  After busting his chops, essentially calling him a fraud and delighting myself with the gay Larry Csonka stuff for an hour and a half, the show had one last commercial break. Once we were off the air, James went into psychic mode and started talking about my new house. He seemed to know quite a few details about my new place, even naming specifics like my French doors. (Which I call Freedom Doors, by the way. Fuck those frogs.) It was interesting, a little weird, but not mind-blowing. At least to me. Drew, a supposed man of science, was like a teenage girl and said, “You’re describing his house exactly.” Van Praagh then asked if the new house had a view of an empty plot from my kitchen. This was true. There was an empty lot of overgrown grass and weeds behind my house. Thinking he was going to tell me to add on a deck or some generic bullshit like “This is a very creative space for you,” I told him it was true. He then said, gravely, “There’s someone in that field … more than one guy. They’re watching your house.” I was officially freaked out.

  Remember this was at eleven forty-five at night and he just finished describing my house in detail that he shouldn’t know. (Though the hidden drawer filled with issues of Milkin’ and Poppin’ magazines was probably just a lucky guess.) And Drew was backing him up like one of the brothers in the bow ties behind Louis Farrakhan. Doctorate be damned, Drew was in hook, line, and sinker. Van Praagh then added that the guys watching my house were Hispanic, wearing knit caps, and had tattoos. They looked like gangbangers. So I was sweating a little bit, picturing my wife at home with some members of MS-13 about to commit a home invasion. Thank God I didn’t have the kids yet, I probably would have run out of the studio.

  I sped home after the show and took a drive down the cul-de-sac adjacent to the lot and shined my high beams in. I didn’t see anything. I crept into my house, trying not to disturb a sleeping Lynette, grabbed a Maglite and a steak knife, and headed out into the windy, rainy, moonless, black-as-velvet night looking for the gangstas casing my joint. Again, no hyperbole, the weather looked like something out of a Stephen King movie. I skulked around the lot prepared to die defending my home.

  Nothing.

  The next day I casually talked to Lynette about adding outdoor motion-sensing lighting and putting up a fence on the edge of the property and letting some ivy grow over it. I couldn’t tell her what had happened. I especially couldn’t tell her that I had also purchased a shotgun for protection. She’s a chick and therefore looks at that psychic crap as a hard science. I was nervous and I’m an atheist who doesn’t believe in that nonsense. She would have called movers that day.

  Eventually, after the thirty-fifth time she didn’t lock the front door and I snapped at her, I had to explain. Fortunately, I never had anyone try a forced entry. Which only makes sense, because if you watch the ads for ADT you know that home invaders aren’t Hispanic gangbangers, they’re all white guys who look like Corbin Bernsen.

  Granted, I would have gladly traded my newest in a long series of horrible neighbors for a pair of cholos camped out in my backyard. He’s the old dickwad with whom I had the hedge-related battle I wrote about in my previous book. Long story short, this asshole called the Department of Building and Safety on me multiple times because my hedge was supposedly too high.

  I hated this guy. I still do. I feel the same way about my neighbor as the Palestinians feel about theirs. At one point I declared I hated him so much that if his house went up in flames I would not call the fire department. Screw him. I’m an atheist and he’s an a-hole.

  Two weeks after announcing this to the heavens, I was sitting in my den watching SportsCenter when I heard something in the distance. A loud crackling sound. I got up, walked down the hallway, and I saw what appeared to be his house on fire. It was the one wish God has ever granted me.

  So I was standing there in my sweatpants, dumbfounded. But I made a promise, and I was not going to call. That’s the way I approach life—I’m not gonna fuck with you. I won’t start any trouble, but if you get that ball rolling, it’s on.

  But here’s the twist. This is what I didn’t factor into my I’m-not-gonna-call-the-fire-department plan. My phone rang, and when I picked up, somebody yelled, “Call the fire department!” Some random person came to my gate, buzzed my phon
e, and threw a cosmic curveball at me that I could not have anticipated. What were the chances? I still don’t know what this person was doing at ten thirty at night just walking up and down the street without a cell phone. My plan had come unraveled. I didn’t factor in the potential witnesses to my crime.

  After another moment of internal debate, I picked up the phone. As I stared at it, trying to do the math on his address, a fire truck pulled up. It was great because I didn’t have to break my word and the neighbor who told me to call must have thought I had a lot of juice to get that fire truck out there so quickly.

  But this is about a bigger point. This is the hell we have created as a society. We’ve become beholden to the narcissistic dickheads we surround ourselves with. This guy was such an asshole to me about my hedge—along with a hundred other petty complaints—that I chose to discard normal human empathy and turn a blind eye to the fact that he was possibly about to perish in a blaze. This guy and many of my other neighbors thought only about themselves, sucked up my life and energy with their bullshit, and therefore when it came time for me to give a rat’s ass, I didn’t.

  I held a benefit at the rental property I bought and renovated in Malibu. It was in the afternoon, and a lot of celebrity friends came out to do some stand-up and raise some money to teach kids Shakespeare or some bullshit. And when I say, “I held,” I mean “My wife held and I paid for.” Anyway, the property is deep and has a three-tiered backyard going down a hill. The event was held on the lowest level. Yet the neighbor across the street called the cops to come out at two thirty in the afternoon on a Saturday. There is no way he could have possibly been disturbed by it. John Daly couldn’t hit a ball to his house from where the stage was. And it was Jay Leno up there, not Jay-Z. But we hadn’t cleared it with him in advance, and he had to let us know. That’s what all of this shit is about, not hedges or noise. It’s about daring to do something without asking their permission. If we had gone to him the day before and asked for his blessing, it would have been fine. But we acted like he didn’t exist, so he had to let us know in the most cocksucking way possible that he in fact did. Well, fuck you. We were three-hundred like-minded people trying to enjoy ourselves and raise money for charity. You were one person. You’re outvoted. Go see a matinee or put in some ear buds, asshole.

  Having a big house and kids means you need people around. And those people cause problems. My place is a constant beehive of gardeners, nannies, and maids. I know, quit complaining about my rich-white-guy problems. But the gardener was warned multiple times about leaving the pool gate open. Call me crazy, but I don’t want to come home and find my twins facedown in the pool. There’s no amount of richness or whiteness that can solve that problem.

  And the maid is constantly moving my shit. Twice a week I play hide-and-go-seek with my hats, keys, and corkscrews because nothing ever gets put back in its proper place. That’s the current maid. We had to let the previous one go.

  My friend Oswaldo’s wife (Oswaldo being my sidekick in The Hammer) used to come by once a week to clean the house. She did a decent job of it, that wasn’t why we had to fire her. I would come home and my eyes would start burning. It took me a while to figure out that it wasn’t some cleaning supply she was using, but rather her perfume. She smelled like she didn’t dab it on but rather dumped it on by pulling a chain attached to a bucket like in Flashdance. I asked her very nicely if she could tone it down a little bit, but the following week there it was again. We chalked it up to a language barrier and asked the nanny—Olga, a Guatemalan woman—to tell her in Spanish that I was allergic to her perfume and it was hurting my eyes. She showed up the next week fragrance free. But the week after that she smelled like she had been dropped in a carnival dunk tank of the stuff. (I later found out it was that Liz Taylor perfume White Diamonds when Kimmel bought me a quart of it for Christmas as a literal gag gift.)

  What the fuck is up with perfume and cologne? Why do we need these strong scents? Perfume, cologne, and deodorant are supposed to stop you from being noticeably smelly, not create a smell so strong and blinding that it masks your BO. That Extreme Red Zone High Endurance stuff is not a deodorant, it’s an odorant. It’s not really a smell other than deodorant smell. Isn’t the Tom’s of Maine baby-powder stuff good enough? And the thing where they say perfume “smells different on every woman”? Bullshit. White Diamonds would smell like ass if I put it on Scarlett Johansson or my mom. If you put White Diamonds on Giselle Bundchen, I wouldn’t fuck her. That shit smells terrible.

  My point is this. We eventually had to let Ozzie’s wife go because she couldn’t tone down the perfume to the point where I could enter my home without a hazmat suit. What is that instinct? Isn’t it everyone’s worst fear to have the same embarrassing thing said to them twice? If your friend sat you down and said, “Hey man, as a friend, the last time we had lunch I could really smell your breath. I don’t know if you need to go to the dentist or …” you’d be embarrassed, and then next time you hung out with that person you’d floss five times and funnel a bottle of Listerine. Yet she got the speech from me, the speech from Lynette, and el discurso from Olga but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, throttle back on the perfume.

  I don’t have too many complaints about Olga, with the exception that every couple of weeks I’ll come home to find fifteen other Hispanic nannies and the thirty white kids they’re raising running around my house. She’ll host what I have coined “nan-borees.” I’m trying to get some work done—such as writing this fucking book—and a soccer team’s worth of blond kids are being chased around my house by their south-of-the-border, paid, part-time parents.

  This one involves Olga but isn’t really about her. Not too long ago, my wife was out of town. It was getting close to bedtime for the twins. We were all sitting on the sofa watching the movie Wall-E. After seeing the cockroach in that movie scurry around for a few moments, I turned to her and asked, “That song, ‘La Cucaracha,’ is played on every lunch truck of every construction site I’ve ever worked on. I know it’s about a cockroach, but what are the lyrics?” She gave it some thought, began the Spanish-to-English translation, and came up with this. “It’s about a cockroach that got its legs pulled off and it was buried on a hill with a mouse and a buzzard.” I went crazy. This is the song you play to let us know it’s chow time? A song about an amputee cockroach? Oh, a mouse and a buzzard? Now I’m starving. Maybe it’s one of those Smuckers things where they’re so confident in their product they can remind people of cockroaches. What, you guys don’t have a maggot song? You couldn’t just hit a metal triangle like we do?

  Having a big house, a family, some investments, and people to maintain them means you have a big nut. And having a big nut means taking jobs you don’t want to take.

  One of the gigs I took just for the payday was for Lance snack crackers. They’re those little orange crackers with cheese or peanut butter that you put in your kids’ bag lunch when you don’t like them very much. I was asked to do a series of ads for them. It typically wasn’t the kind of thing I would do, but it was what they call a “non-ID,” meaning that I wouldn’t have to say “I’m Adam Carolla for Lance snack crackers.” Second, it wasn’t for television. It was a bunch of radio spots where I’d do man-on-the-street interviews with people about the product. But most important, they were coughing up a hundred and fifty grand. So I couldn’t turn it down.

  I said great, I’d get the DAT recorder, head down to Venice Beach, and knock out some man-on-the-street stuff. They said no, Lance snack crackers was based in the South and they weren’t available on the West Coast. Therefore I needed to fly out to Florida and then fly up to North Carolina to do the spots. We’d go to a swap meet, a county fair, a mall, a bowling alley, and so on and record. I asked if we were going to say where we were, like, “I’m here at North Carolina’s most famous bowling alley …” and we’d hear pins crashing in the background. They said no, it’d be recorded in a separate room, they just wanted a cross-section of people. Being logical
, I asked why we couldn’t just go to a mall out here and talk to fifty people. What the fuck would be the difference? Just send me a case of snack crackers, I’ll head down to Santa Monica Pier and knock this shit out in two hours. Without sounding too grandiose, there is no one on the planet better than me at that man-on-the-street stuff. I could get them fifteen radio spots at any L.A. tourist attraction in the amount of time it took to have the argument about where to record the goddamn spots. This went back and forth through my agent a couple of times, and eventually they said in so many words, “Hey, asshole, we’re paying you a hundred and fifty grand. Get on the fucking plane.”

  I soon found myself in North Carolina touring the Lance snack cracker factory, because how could I possibly do these spots if I didn’t understand every aspect of how they were manufactured? As if not seeing the two-hundred-thousand-gallon vat of peanut butter would have rendered those ads unusable. One of the low points of the tour was when the plant manager asked, “You’re from Hollywood. Do you know any comedians?” I said yes, as a matter of fact I did, just about all of them. He asked, “Do you know Larry the Cable Guy?” I said no, there was a long awkward silence, followed by the rest of a long awkward factory tour.