by Adam Carolla
The shuttle is the worst twenty dollars you’ll ever save. It adds ninety minutes to whatever a Town Car or cab would have been. You have the unenviable choice between being dropped off last or being dropped off first and having a bunch of losers who can’t afford cab fare and have no friends or loved ones with cars knowing exactly where you live.
Here’s a story from the road that encapsulates all the misery associated with air travel. In the late nineties, when Dr. Drew and I would do the college circuit, often we would leave town for four or five days at a time. One evening before such a trip, during a commercial break from Loveline, I suggested to Drew that we carpool to the airport. No sense in us both paying for expensive long-term parking. I said, “Since you live in Pasadena and I live in Hollywood, how about you pick me up on the way to LAX?” He explained that wasn’t going to work because he had to go to the hospital on the way to the airport and make the rounds. I said, “It’s a seven A.M. flight—what time do you expect to make the rounds?” He said, “About five A.M.” By the way, we were having this conversation at eleven forty-five in the evening. This is why Dr. Drew is currently hard at work on his ninth TV show and your fat ass is sitting around reading this dumb book. Anyway, he suggested me sleeping over at his house that night and then waiting in the car while he made the rounds. I sarcastically asked if he was going to crack the window.
It was at that point I took one of my many retarded stands. As we came out of commercial break, I made the proclamation that I was not going to drive myself to the airport and that if Drew would not pick me up, then a loyal listener would. The only requirements were that you were female and had a road-worthy SUV. A young lady immediately called in to the show and said she had to be at work at six thirty in the morning so she was up at that hour anyway, and it would be an honor to transport me and my luggage to LAX. I said great and put her on hold. I didn’t want to give my address out on the air, but as I was speaking to her on the phone I realized I didn’t want to give out my address off the air, either. So I told her to go up Beachwood Drive, past the market, and I would meet her down at the bottom of the thousand stairs that connected Beachwood Canyon to the street far above it—and that she needed to be there at five thirty sharp. Since it was almost midnight, I told her to get some sleep and I’d see her in a few hours.
I then got back on the air, and before saying good night to the millions of troubled teens I proudly boasted to Drew that I, in fact, would not be paying for parking at LAX. He laughed and said, “Good luck. I’ll see you at the American Airlines terminal about six fifteen.”
Five hours and eight minutes later, my alarm went off. I quickly drank my cup of coffee, pulled on a heavy overcoat since it was drizzling and cold, and grabbed my suitcase with the week’s worth of underpants and socks crammed in it. I walked out of my house and up the street to the mouth of the staircase. I then dragged my heavy suitcase down the steep, dark, wet stairs on my way to rendezvous with the mysterious young lady with the SUV. Using my luggage like a barstool, I sat on the sidewalk under a streetlight with my collar pulled up, wishing it would either stop drizzling or she would arrive. I checked my watch. It read five thirty-seven. I started to become concerned. I thought maybe I should jog down Beachwood, around the bend, to see if she was waiting at the market. But then I thought, Should I drag my luggage with me or should I just leave it unattended? I decided to drag it behind me. She was nowhere to be found. Now I’m beginning to sweat profusely under my many layers of winter gear. I once again picked up my luggage and this time charged up the canyon to see if she was waiting at the next corner. Again nothing. By this time it was approaching six A.M. I worried that something tragic may have happened to this kind-hearted stranger but then quickly decided the cunt had stiffed me.
I ran up the stairs. Again, these are novelty stairs, the kind that trainers send their clients/victims up and down. I threw my luggage into the trunk, jumped into the car, and hauled ass toward the airport. It was now well after six, and the airport is at least a half hour away. I drove there like an old man drives through a farmer’s market, ignoring all laws of man, nature, and God. I screeched around the corner and into the long-term parking lot about six forty-two, grabbed my luggage, and sprinted toward the security line. This was pre-9/11 so I still had a chance.
I’d made it through by about six fifty-three and started scurrying down the endless terrazzo-covered corridor toward the American Airlines gate. When I arrived I was surprised and relieved to see Dr. Drew standing at the check-in counter. I looked to the left and saw our plane was parked right behind him with the gate still hooked up. I was weak from fluid loss but still had enough energy to let forth a celebratory “Hell yeah!” And that’s when I noticed Drew was arguing with the woman. “Sir, the door has been shut. We can’t reopen it.” I found out later their “on-time” schedule is based on when the door shuts, not when the landing gear goes up. And since it was the first flight of the morning, it affected the entire day’s schedule. I started in on the woman. “It’s two minutes to seven, the plane is parked, the jetway is still attached. Why are we standing in front of the plane arguing?” This bitch was clearly not going to let us onto our airplane.
Drew took this opportunity to make a couple of points. One was that his brand-new camel-hair overcoat was still on the plane because he got off to look for me. Two—the gig we were going to was at the University of Florida at a nine-thousand-seat basketball arena. This was easily the biggest show we’d ever done. As I began a third round of shouting/pleading with the unhelpful representative from American Airlines, Drew turned his ire toward me. “You couldn’t have driven yourself to the goddamn airport? You had to get a listener to do it? That jacket cost my wife two grand and this is the first time I’ve worn it. It was a gift.” (Quick side note on gifts: Why does everyone get caught up in the that-coffee-mug-was-a-gift argument? Doesn’t that make it more expendable?) I fired back at Drew, “If we could have just carpooled like human beings, I wouldn’t have had to rely on the listener with the heart of gold and the alarm clock of marzipan.”
As the arguing wore on, I realized the plane and the jetway still had not budged. I pointed out to the bitch in the blue blazer that I could have been on the plane and drunk by now. She repeated for the fourteenth time, “Sir, the door has been closed.” Then the final indignity. I saw a worker walk out of the jetway. The door had been open since we’d been there. At that point, I went into a fugue state. I don’t remember much after that, just that whenever Drew tells the story he says all I kept repeating to her was “Get me the guy from the commercial. Get me the superhelpful guy that makes everything right. The guy who chases weary travelers through the terminal with the attaché case they mistakenly left behind. That guy. Go get that guy.” This argument went on and on while the plane didn’t move and the jetway didn’t move. It’s another one of those letter-of-the-law, spirit-of-the-law arguments. Thank you, dickhead lawyers. The door not opening was no different from the overhead compartment not closing.
Almost every form of transportation has improved over the last forty years. Cars are safer and more comfortable, trains are faster and less expensive, and even buses have improved—not counting the whole segregation thing. Airline travel’s the only mode of transportation we’ve taken a step backward in. The passengers dress like defendants on The People’s Court, the stewardesses have gotten uglier or gay, and a flight from New York to L.A. still takes six hours, exactly the same as it did in 1963 except that now you have to get to the airport two hours earlier for the prison-style pat-down and delousing. And instead of sitting across from guys with ascots, I’m sitting across from an ass named Scott.
THAT’S
ENTERTAINMENT?
I’ve had the good fortune to work in a variety of jobs in Hollywood—radio, television, film, the Internet, gay pornography—you name it. And I’ve always been a fan. So I feel well qualified to tear the mass media a new asshole.
TV AND OTHER MISCELLANY
&nbs
p; I love television. I wasn’t raised on television, I was raised by television. I watched nine hours a day back when there was nothing on. Imagine how much I watch now. As a matter of fact, it kills me to write this book because I’m not watching TV right now. If only someone could make a TV show about me writing a book, that would be awesome.
Network television followed about the same arc American car companies took from the early seventies till now. Back in the seventies when there was no competition like cable, satellite, et cetera, you got such gems as The Brady Bunch, Hawaii Five-O, Dukes of Hazzard—the list goes on and on. Now, I know a lot of you wax nostalgic about those shows, but it’s not because they were good. They were pieces of steaming shit. The reason you like them is because these shows were all on when you still had hair and weren’t in a loveless marriage. But make no mistake, The Brady Bunch sucked. What’s this have to do with cars? Well, before cable hit our televisions and Toyota hit our shores, we had Hart to Hart and the AMC Matador. Two American piles of shit. Now we have Lost and the Z06 Corvette. See what you can do when you’re pushed by competition?
THE BIGGEST LOSER
I’ve never seen The Biggest Loser, but I have seen the commercials because they play the shit out of them around seven P.M. when I am trying to eat. A cavalcade of morbidly obese dudes with D cups, stretch marks, and manhole-sized areolae are herded in front of me and my spaghetti and meatballs. When did it become okay to show man boobs on prime time? I could make a pretty fucking compelling argument as to why it was more offensive and emotionally scarring for my kids than seeing chick boobs. Couldn’t they throw a wife beater on these fat motherfuckers? The guy already has to go to the zoo to be weighed. Do you think five ounces of cotton would make a goddamn difference? I don’t care whether you have a penis or a vagina, either you need a sports bra or you don’t. Of course the chicks wear a top—they’re covering up the one positive side effect of obesity, which is big jugs. So let’s quickly review the retarded society we’ve crafted. If I turn on Survivor and a hot female model is scrambling up a cargo net and a half inch of her ass crack can be seen over her bikini line, it needs to be pixelated by the network. But the lactating male long-haul trucker on The Biggest Loser, whose jugs are bigger than anything Russ Meyer’s ever beat off to, is perfectly fine, according to Standards and Practices? Does anyone else want to kill themselves? I’ll tell you who the biggest loser is: my junk!
M*A*S*H HAIR
I was watching a rerun of M*A*S*H the other day, a show I’ve seen two thousand times. As I was marveling at Alan Alda’s huge, dry mop of seventies hair and B.J. Hunnicut’s pube-fro and walrus mustache, it dawned on me: This show was supposed to be about the Korean War. The Korean War took place from 1950 to 1953. Not only did no one in the military have that hair, no one in society had that hair. Trapper John was rocking a full-blown Jew-fro in what was supposed to be 1950. Back then no guy left the house without a handful of pomade. And the only guys with mustaches in the fifties were either carnival barkers or Latin band leaders, and theirs were dripping with wax. At least on Happy Days they attempted to look like their hair was living in the same decade, until somewhere around season three when Ralph Malph said, “Fuck it, I’m getting a blow dryer,” and that’s when everyone’s hair jumped the shark. I blame Elvis for this. He made 425 movies in nine months, which meant that whether he played an Old West gunslinger or an Egyptian pharaoh, his hair always looked like Dick Clark’s circa 1955. By the way, M*A*S*H aired from 1972 to 1983. The show lasted nearly four times as long as the event it was portraying. The only other time in television history that happened was Roots.
THE VIEW
I know I’m a guy so I’m supposed to hate The View, but I don’t hate The View because I have a dick. I hate The View because I have a brain. The View is going on what feels like its thirty-fifth season. It has numerous Emmy nominations, and even an Emmy win, and it’s a disjointed, scattered piece of shit that’s hosted by some of the least compelling, most untalented people that have graced a television set. If this show consisted of five guys sitting around talking over each other with the occasional hackneyed joke awkwardly shoehorned into the meaningless conversation, it would have been yanked off the air years ago. You see, at ten in the morning all the smart people are at work, and that leaves The View’s audience.
Barbara Walters is about as interesting and funny as that one old teacher you had in junior high. I know everyone treats her like some kind of national treasure, but she’s clearly past her prime. And no one at that show would dare utter a word. It’s about the same relationship Saddam Hussein shared with his coworkers. When she finally decides to hang up her dentures and call it a career, there will be a silent celebration akin to what the guards did after the Wicked Witch got the bucket of water tossed on her. On her last show, the lavaliere mics will be recording a lot of “We’ll miss you, we’ll stay in touch, we don’t know how we’ll carry on without you.” But the internal monologues will skew a little more toward “Have fun on the Greyhound bus to hell, bitch.”
Sherri Shepherd is dumb. She’s read one book and it’s the Bible. She’s not “ha-ha” funny, she’s more “We need a fat chick who’s not funny” funny.
Elisabeth Hasselbeck gets a pass. She’s already being punished on a daily basis. Could you imagine if your lot in life was to be wedged between Barbara Walters and Sherri Shepherd? She’s the lunch meat between a stale piece of sourdough and the dumbest slab of pumpernickel to ever hit the day-old bin at the bakery.
Whoopi Goldberg. What happened to the unstoppable force of comedy that had us doubled over with spun gold such as Burglar, Jumping Jack Flash, and Eddie? An Emmy for The View and an Oscar for Ghost. She deserves those about as much as Elvis deserved his black belt in tae kwon do.
Joy Behar—she’s the funny one. That’s like saying Marwan al-Shehhi was the funniest of the 9/11 hijackers.
CARTOONS
Now I know what you’re thinking: Why would an old fuck like me waste a bunch of time writing about cartoons? Two reasons. One, I was forced to stare at these things every Saturday morning throughout the seventies. This was a by-product of my inability to read and my dad’s inability to throw a goddamn baseball. And two, now that I have young twins and still can’t read, I’m forced to watch cartoons in my forties.
Where to begin? Let’s start with the most prolific, Hanna-Barbera. They’re responsible for such gems as Magilla Gorilla, the Hair Bear Bunch, Jabberjaw, Hong Kong Phooey, and Grape Ape. Now, I know all you haters are going to say, “What about The Flintstones? What about The Jetsons? What about Jonny Quest?” Those shows all sucked, too, they just didn’t suck as hard as a big purple ape that kept repeating the phrase “grape ape” over and over again. These shows blew ass while Hanna-Barbera got rich and we got dumb. Hanna-Barbera didn’t do programming for kids because they loved kids; if they loved kids, they would have created programming that was interesting, entertaining, informative, anything but that fucking purple ape. They did entertainment for kids because they weren’t talented enough to create programming for adults. It’s like those bands for kids. Do you think the guys in the Wiggles were sitting around their dorm room twenty years ago and thought, “Well, we could be the next U2 or Nirvana and bang all the groupies we wanted. Or we could make music for five-year-olds and get some of that sweet, sweet Guatemalan nanny poontang”?
It’s a topic we rarely talk about in our society. We’ve decided that since the children are our future (I disagree, I say it’s the hovercraft), that every single thing done for kids is above reproach. I contend these jack-offs are just preying on the stupidity of children. I’ve read two hundred Peanuts cartoons and never even cracked a fucking smile. Yet Charles Schulz made more dead last year than I made in the last decade. Even the legendary Dr. Seuss wasn’t exactly Ernest Hemingway. He rhymed box and fox, everyone! Big goddamn deal! You don’t think you could have written that when you were high?
Back to being robbed of my childhood. The guys who ch
urned out almost as much shit as Hanna-Barbera were Sid and Marty Krofft. There should be a class-action lawsuit against these two numbnuts. Hey, if you can sue Union Carbide for poisoning well water, why can’t we sue these two assholes for poisoning our brains?
I was on the CBS lot last year and we were walking to the stage where I was shooting my sitcom. Somebody said, “There’s Sid and Marty Krofft’s office!” Then, with a certain amount of pride, one guy said, “Marty’s there, would you like me to introduce you to him?” I said no. He said, “Why not? The guy’s a legend.” I said, “A legendary hack.” The guy stopped walking. He was shocked. He said, “Do you know how many shows Sid and Marty Krofft got on the air?” I said, “I know, I watched them all when I was a kid. Far Out Space Nuts, Land of the Lost, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters—artistically vacant, derivative, hackneyed garbage. Basically a big bowl of Styrofoam packing peanuts that came in a brightly colored box with a shitty prize in it.” He said, “How can you say that? The guy’s a pioneer. He’s eighty-five and still hard at work every day.” I said, “Hard at work doing what? Warming over steaming piles of cat shit like Land of the Lost so that a new generation’s IQ can be collectively lowered while this imbecile hammers another check?” Then he said, “Why are you so angry at Sid and Marty Krofft?” I said, “Because idiots like you are trying to turn these guys into deities. They’re rich, isn’t that enough?” They came around during a time when there was no competition and monopolized Saturday mornings with shows like Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. One of the worst shows, nay one of the worst creative endeavors ever undertaken. And now they want respect? I’ll give you two scenarios. One is they actually thought they were artists and that the shit they were crapping out every Saturday morning was good, which makes them delusional hacks. Or two, as I suspect, they knew they were providing shit, they knew the checks would clear, and they didn’t give a fuck, which would make them evil hacks.