by Adam Carolla
Another time, I was sitting down for dinner with the kids in a diner. Natalia had a grilled cheese and Sonny got a ham sandwich and French fries. At a certain point, I reached over and took a bite of Sonny’s sandwich. (Carbs don’t count if they’re on someone else’s plate.) I knew he wasn’t going to finish it, and I’m not into wasting food, especially food I pay for. He looked up at me and said, “You have a huge mouth in two ways. You take huge bites of stuff and you never stop talking.”
My initials are ALC (Adam Lakers Carolla) but they might as well be ATM. My kids experience, but don’t appreciate, the nonstop stream of money and stuff in their lives. There is zero connection for them between what Daddy does and the things they enjoy.
One night, I was going between jobs. I had done The Soup that night, and had to go straight to the studio to record the podcast. This was around eight, so I called the kids while I was driving to touch base and tell them I loved them. I told Lynette to put Natalia on. She said, “Hi, Daddy,” and, before I could start to do the good night, I love you speech she started putting in a gift order. She wanted a Rapunzel doll. I told her I was just calling to say good night. She followed up, “But you’re working, right?” She was so used to me calling her from the road, which meant I would be bringing back some crap from the airport gift shop. I explained I was still in town, and I had just had a busy day and didn’t have a chance to come home. She kept going. I had to stop her, “You’re not getting anything, I’m here.” When the phone got handed to her it was like she pulled up to the speaker at the Jack In The Box drive-through. She just started firing her order at me.
I think everything I’m talking about here—the zero appreciation from our kids—can be summed up in the story of a New Year’s Eve gig in Reno. The New Year’s Eve of 2011 going into 2012, I had a stand-up show in Nevada two nights in a row.
Since I was going to be working over New Year’s I decided to make it a family trip. Instead of staying at the Nugget, where I was playing, we’d get a suite in an upscale hotel in Tahoe and have a little family time during the day. I used the American Express Platinum Card, so we got stepped up to an even bigger room, one hundred dollars in WAM (that’s Walking Around Money) and we had comps to the buffet. And because it was New Year’s Eve they were pouring glasses of Champagne at the counter. After we checked in and got to the room Lynette said, “You know, I’d like some of that Champagne.” I asked, “Why didn’t you get some?” She brushed it off. Then, a moment later, she said she wanted to go to the store and grab some crackers and junk for the kids, and some Champagne. I told her to grab me some, too. I settled in to watch a little SportsCenter before it was time for me to head out to Sparks to do my show while she hit the store. A little while later, she came back with the kids and the cookies and a mini-bottle of Veuve Clicquot.
I asked her, “Where’d you get that?” She said, “I got it at the store.” I shot back, “You didn’t want to go to the counter and get the freebies?” She replied, “I was at the store.” Against my better instincts, I followed up, “But you paid for it with the hundred-dollar credit from the hotel, right?” Of course, her answer was no. Then, to make matters worse, I asked, “Where was the store?” She said, “Right next to the front desk.” So she got a thirty-three-dollar minibottle of champagne containing three glasses’ worth when she could have gotten two for free, mere feet from where she spent my money instead of the WAM from the hotel.
Whatever. I tried to move on as she poured each of us a glass. Then she sat in a chair to leaf through a magazine and put the glass on the floor. I suggested that probably was not a great plan with two kids walking around. As predicted, three sips in, the glass was knocked over by Sonny. As I watched eleven dollars soaking into the padding of the carpet, I downed my glass, then said I was going to take a nap.
I woke up about half an hour later and said, “Let’s go out to dinner before I have to head to Reno.” We wrangled the kids and, as we were walking out, I saw a full glass sitting on the table. Again, the mini-bottle could only contain three glasses. One was in my belly, one was in the carpet, so this was a third one poured by Lynette for herself. I asked, “What’s up? Are you gonna drink that?” She said yeah and began walking toward the door. I stopped her. “No, drink it now,” I said. Confused, she asked, “What?” I said, “Drink it.” So she took a sip. Not good enough. I said, “No, finish it. We’re not wasting that.” I made her drink the whole goddamn thing.
Cut to the following morning and time for breakfast. They all want room service. This is a nice hotel with a very nice buffet upstairs that, again, is free. So I say no, we have a free buffet, let’s go check it out. I win that battle and we head upstairs to the buffet, which is a horn of plenty: five different kinds of sticky buns, omelet bar, fresh fruit and so on. Of course, in the face of all this food, there is only one move for Natalia. She scans the entire buffet like the Terminator analyzing the room looking for his target. She’s trying to find the one item they don’t have. She does so, and announces that she wants chocolate-chip pancakes. I told her, “You can have eggs any way you want, waffles, sweet rolls . . .” No dice. She wanted chocolate-chip pancakes and that was that. And Lynette backed her play. She found a way to make me pay.
It’s not the money. That was eight bucks or something. It’s the principle. We have this whole spread in front of us that, again, is free and they still want more. There was a Mexican guy in a hat who would make you any kind of omelet you want. Nope. She needed the one thing they didn’t have. There were Belgian waffles, toast, sticky buns, biscuits—every combination of flour, eggs, sugar and butter imaginable, except pancakes. Come to think of it, there might have been pancakes but no chocolate chips. Thus, she needed the chocolate-chip pancakes.
The next day, Natalia wanted chocolate-chip pancakes again. I put my foot down. I wanted to send a message. The terrorists hate us because of what was in that buffet. There were two hundred and thirty-three food options. I wasn’t going to let something that would have been the greatest day of my childhood be so wildly unappreciated. I told her to go find something and eat. She walked in, grabbed a sticky bun and a little melon and was fine. But I got a heaping helping of the stink eye from Lynette.
The whole trip, and my whole point, really came into focus when we were going home. After leaving Tahoe and heading towards the airport in Reno to fly back, we passed a big billboard with my picture advertising the shows. I said “Hey, kids, look. See your old man up there?” They were completely unfazed. It might as well have been a billboard for a local RV dealership. I banged a U-turn and went back for a second lap to see if I could muster a modicum of enthusiasm from the kids. But like so many who have gone to Reno before, I came up snake eyes.
That story might make you think I’m a horrible dad and a greedy asshole ogre. But by the end of this book I also hope to lay out a strong defense for why being a dad in today’s society will drive me insane and possibly to an early grave.
I am reminded of a conversation I once had with Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray. Mark is a great guy and genuinely funny. One Sunday afternoon we were sitting around at Kimmel’s watching football and shooting the shit. In that conversation I asked him where Sugar Ray was playing and he joked about their fall from stardom and that they were now playing “anywhere you can smell funnel cake.” Nothing beats a nice and humble guy. But the thing he said that sums up perfectly how I feel about my current lot in life as a father and husband is this. Mark is also a father of twins and stated perfectly the thing that is constantly on my mind: “Since when did making all the money count for nothing?”
He’s right. Keeping the lights on, paying the mortgage, feeding the kids, going out and earning all day at whatever profession you have is now a zero. That gets you back to even. This is not an indictment of our families; it’s just how our culture has gone. It’s like smoking pot. Back in the 1950s it was considered an activity second only to bestiality in how deplorable it was. Now everyone is firing up everywhere, no pro
blem. You can’t go to the Mac store without getting a contact high. What would have been unimaginable and shameful back in the day is common and accepted.
Divorce lawyers, start your engines. If any part of this book is going to lead to the end of my marriage, it’s what I’m going to say next. But it has to be said: women are no longer holding up their part of the societal bargain. Men were supposed to bring home the bacon and women were supposed to cook it. That just isn’t the case these days.
One morning, I walked in to see Lynette watching a rerun of I Love Lucy. It was an episode in which Ricky was complaining to Lucy about how hard it was being a working man, and Lucy returning the complaint that it is very hard cooking, cleaning and keeping up a house. Then it went into the hackneyed sitcom premise of them switching roles. I feel like that lame-ass idea was part of every sitcom produced before 1990. Lucy had to get out the help-wanted ads and find a job, which she inevitably failed at, but Ricky also learned a valuable lesson by fucking up the eggs and toast that he had to make for his breadwinner wife.
So I’m watching Lynette watch this show about gender roles after having made my own coffee and breakfast, which consisted of dumping some Planters peanuts into a cup. I realized that this premise would never fly today. Men have work-work and housework. It’s demeaning for women to cook and clean. But if a man decided he wasn’t going to go out and earn a living, he’d be considered a deadbeat. My house has a maid, and my kids have a nanny that I pay for. If my wife was the one out working, and I was the one getting mani-pedis and sushi while the maid cleaned and the nanny took the kids to soccer practice, all her friends would say, “Why are you still with that moocher?”
Not an exaggeration, by the way. I came home from a gig at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles, probably the biggest venue I’ve ever played, to find green and blue nail polish on Sonny’s fingers and toes. The androgyny part aside, the thing that really pissed me off was that Lynette had taken herself and the kids for mani-pedis, while I was sweating my ass off onstage with Jay Mohr in front of 1,850 people.
Nowadays, telling your wife “I have to work” gets you a disappointed sigh. This is the worst period in history to be a dad. It used to be that if you worked and provided that was enough. On the weekend, you tossed the ball around with your boy or had a tea party with your little girl, and that was plenty. Now we’re expected to be present for every kindergarten graduation and bowel movement our kid makes, applauding them the entire time, while simultaneously keeping the bank account full. And all the loser dads who have trust funds or wives who bring home all the money make earners like me look like shit.
So I don’t agree with the assertion that I’m an asshole misogynist because I think it would be nice to smell a little pot roast when I come home. Going through a ten-hour day, and then coming home to flip a coin to see who’s going to head down the hill and pick up the Chinese food that then eliminates the money earned in the last hour of that ten-hour day just sucks.
I suspect that this is because the workplace has changed. At the turn of the last century, guys used to go to work in a hole in the ground or out on a farm or in a factory. They’d come home covered in coal dust, except for the salt outline from their sweat stains. That was if they even came home at all. Work was more dangerous back then, and thus was appreciated. So when their ass hit that wooden chair at the dinner table at the end of the day, there was some fucking lasagna waiting.
My problem is that coming home with makeup on and complaining about the satellite delay to The O’Reilly Factor doesn’t garner me much sympathy. I nearly killed myself doing construction before show business, but the fact is that I’m killing myself now, too. It sucks sometimes, and I need my family to know this.
An example of the disconnect between my kids’ lifestyle and how I provide it for them came this year when I was filming my show, Catch a Contractor. For those who haven’t seen the series, the premise is that I go to houses that have been destroyed by shoddy/shady/shitty contractors who show up just long enough to get the people’s money and then leave them in a death trap. Me and my co-host, a talented licensed contractor, Skip, lure the contractor into a sting house, present him with the evidence of his hack work and make him fix it under our supervision. It’s a good premise and unlike many of my prior TV projects is executed very well. But it’s also filmed in the middle of fucking nowhere. The commutes to and from these dumps are many, many hours in Southern California traffic. I then have the pleasure of confronting sociopaths and comforting destroyed families. It’s a real drain. I literally had to break up a fight between two ex-Marines, one being a contractor who screwed over an old service buddy, leaving him with fire-hazard wiring and his ten-month-old daughter crawling around on asbestos-covered floors.
The one that took the cake was in Watts. That’s the section of South Central Los Angeles that was destroyed by riots in 1965, and looks like it still hasn’t recovered. This is not a place you want to be. And the place you least want to be in Watts is crammed in a poorly renovated six-by-eight windowless bathroom with two cameramen, blazing hot lights, stuck between an angry Mexican contractor and an even angrier black homeowner. I’m standing there yelling at a contractor, “Look at this open sewage pipe, these people have been breathing this,” and then realizing I’m breathing it in myself.
The only thing that could make my day worse was knowing where my kids were at that moment. The night before, I checked my schedule, and saw that it was time for the Watts bathroom shoot. I was complaining to Lynette about having to go back there and asked her what her plan was for the day. She told me it was Presidents’ Day so the kids were off school. That meant big plans. “Natalia, her friend Cami, Cami’s mom, Sonny and I are taking a helicopter to Catalina to go zip-lining.” You literally couldn’t be doing something more opposite from what I was doing. Zip-lining in the open air on a Pacific island, versus a bathroom in Watts as spacious as an MRI tube.
I guess I must have been so busy I missed the Evite. I don’t begrudge them enjoying their time; I just want acknowledgment for my part in making it possible for them. I’ve always said when people ask me about career goals that I would like to be successful enough to enjoy the life my wife and kids have.
So my kids will eventually get their wish and Daddy will stop talking, due to the massive coronary I suffer from busting ass to provide for them. With that in mind I’d like to use this book to also lay down some fatherly wisdom they’ll need when hitting those big life events—specifically buying your first car, buying your first house, and hitting puberty—since I won’t be around to dispense it. Think of it as mediocre parenting from beyond the grave. The sections specifically for Sonny and Natalia to read at those milestones will be marked with this graphic.
And you, dear reader, may also see these graphics.
This is to let not just Sonny and Natalia, but all of you, know to strap in and prepare to get hit with some serious pearls and nuggets of truth. The Aceman is about to say something heavy and lay down a great concept that you need to dig.
And . . .
This is to signify my ideas: all the apps, gadgets, products and systems that I’ve come up with to make parenting, or just life in general, better.
I hope that all you readers dig these concepts and inventions because again I’m sure when it comes to Sonny and Natalia all of this wisdom will fall on four deaf ears. I tried to drop some knowledge on Natalia not so long ago and she shot back, “I don’t have to listen to you. I’m not one of your assistants.”
CHAPTER 2
Your Home Is Not Your Castle
THE HOUSE THAT the kids were first brought back to from the hospital was a 1929 Spanish-style home. It was more than a fixer-upper. I did a meticulous, total nut-and-bolt restoration of that place. I painstakingly turned it into a centerfold for Architectural Digest. It was a museum to my cars and monument to my craftsmanship. It even had a name: Vista del Lago. When your house has a name, you know you’ve arrived. But when the twins came a
long, all that shit went out the window. When you have children the idea that a man’s home is his castle no longer applies. Your home just becomes a place to store their crap.
When you have kids, your castle becomes their bouncy castle. In my case, this is literally true. Jimmy Kimmel bought Sonny and Natalia this inflatable castle in 2012. It’s the real deal. At first, I thought he had rented it. No, he bought it.
It’s nice having rich friends who can blow a bunch of money on great gifts for your kids, but it really makes you look like a loser. I’m positive that my kids are secretly planning a Menendez-style killing so that they can live with their rich Uncle Jimmy and get lavished with bouncy castles and audioanimatronic ponies (an actual Kimmel Christmas gift in ’08).
I didn’t have the space for the bouncy castle, and, in order to simultaneously go for the World’s Coolest and World’s Worst Dad title, I moored it to the pool. Before you call child protective services, the fan was off to the side, so they wouldn’t get electrocuted. I’m not a monster.
Technically, you can’t have an orgasm at age six, but when he saw this setup, Sonny was close. They were sliding down that thing for weeks. This kind of luxury would have been unimaginable for a young Adam Carolla. It is not just that my parents were cheap. These kinds of things didn’t even exist back then. Why not? Did we not have fans and burlap in the 1970s? Sonny has spent more time in bouncy houses than I did in my regular house when I was his age. I was out on the streets trying to get away from my family as much as possible. He’s so used to being in bouncy castles that I wouldn’t be surprised if he showed up at his first job interview not wearing shoes and complaining that the carpet didn’t have enough spring to it. It’s going to be an issue later in life, I’m convinced. Sonny is going to off himself at twenty because his pleasure center will be burned out like someone who did too much coke in the 1970s.