by Adam Carolla
It’s simple, just two hooks that clip over the passenger side headrest, attached to a baseball cap. That way, cops coming up from behind think that there’s someone tall in the passenger seat. It’ll have a drape of black velvet coming down the back so you can’t see through that space at the bottom of the headrest. It’ll just look like you’re commuting with Yao Ming. If you get pulled over, it’s not technically illegal and sometimes cops have a sense of humor. Or they’ll pepper spray your ass. But it’s worth a shot, right?
I’m sorry I’m not going to be around to teach you how to drive, Natalia. I would like the challenge. I know saying this in print will further paint me as the misogynist ape that a lot of people think I am, but chicks can’t drive. I don’t let your mother drive when we go out together unless I’m drunk. Which is often.
On my short-lived Speed Channel show, we did a bit where the other hosts and I had to teach models to drive stick shifts in high-performance cars. I ended up with a ditzy actress in a Dodge Viper. This thing has 600 horsepower, 650 foot-pounds of torque and a super-hard clutch. It’s a grizzly bear, the last of the muscle cars. I was in the passenger seat, and I didn’t want to end up crashing through a mall like the Blues Brothers so I knew I had to make sure my lessons got through. The first thing people do when they learn to drive stick is let the clutch out too quickly without giving the car enough gas. So I said to this chick, “Give me a safe word. Something I can say to remind you to put the clutch in.” She said, “Voltaire.” I have no idea where that came from. So I told her “When I say Voltaire, take your left foot and push it to the floor.” Lo and behold, the plan actually worked. Saying “Voltaire” over and over got pretty annoying after a while, but it proved that if I could teach her to drive a manual transmission, I could teach anyone.
Not that I would get the chance if I were alive. I lament that you kids, and kids in general, aren’t ever going to drive manual cars. We were much more engaged behind the wheel when we drove stick. There’s no texting and driving with a manual transmission. You have to focus, but you feel totally in control, too.
This is especially going to be a handicap for boys. Therefore, I am making this deathbed proclamation. Sonny, you must learn to drive stick. Being able to downshift and blow around another driver, to bump start a car, and the simple satisfaction that comes with you jiggling the stick in the right to left to make sure it’s in neutral, are all rites of passage for a young man. It makes me sad to think that you’ll probably have a car that not only doesn’t have a manual transmission, but has back-up cameras and can parallel park itself. I’ve made my wish clear. I hope out of respect for your dearly departed dad you’ll . . . stick to it. (Good stuff, Ace Man.)
I want to reiterate the most important feeling I have about you two and cars: I’m not buying one for either of you. A car is something you have to earn. All of my shit vehicles were detailed in my previous books: trucks with bolted-down bar stools for seats, screwdrivers for keys and vice grips replacing the missing window cranks.
In Carolla style, both of you are going to have to go through a series of shitboxes, like I did, so that you can feel the pride of ownership that comes with a new vehicle. I want you to feel the sting of driving a car with a coat hanger for an antenna and a tampon string holding the tailpipe in place. I want you driving the car I saw recently in Long Beach. It was a seven-year-old Toyota with duct tape holding the rear taillight in place, that was so sun-blasted that the silver had worn off. The light was being held by the white cloth skeleton of the duct tape. It was so sad. That tape had been in place for at least two years. When the duct tape cries uncle, when the tape taps out, you know you’re driving a piece of shit.
What killed me about this particular vehicle was the “Toyota of Long Beach” license-plate frame. You know, the cheap plastic plate frame they put on every vehicle that leaves the lot? It’s a good idea at first, it’s free advertising. But a couple of years down the road, when it’s adjacent to the duct-tape gauze holding the car together does it really scream, “Come on down to our dealership”? If I were Toyota of Long Beach, I’d set up a system so I could size up the buyer of the car before I let them drive off the lot. If the person is wearing flip-flops and a mustard-stained sweatshirt and is trading in a Tercel with partially eaten In-N-Out Burger in the backseat, he’s getting a plate frame for one of my competitors’ dealerships, like “Toyota of Gardena.”
Remember kids, your car becomes you. If you have a disorganized mind, you’ll have a disorganized car. Poking your head into someone’s vehicle tells you everything you need to know about them. It’s like the Hickory Farms sample at the mall. When you get the taste of that summer sausage on the toothpick, you don’t need to eat the whole thing. You know what you’re getting. When you look in someone’s car and they’ve got spent scratch tickets in the passenger seat and a basket of dirty laundry in the backseat, you know exactly who that person is.
That’s why I’m not into hand-me-down cars. I’ve seen the young male driving the totally cherry Lincoln. That just means Nana died. No young dude would pick that car. And that spells disaster for that Continental. Because it was a hand-me-down, that guy is going to drive that shit into the ground, literally. Nana kept that thing in tip-top shape until she kicked off, but once her jackoff grandson gets hold of it, the cloth interior will be pockmarked with cigarette burns, the suspension will be shot from going seventy over speed bumps and doing brodies in the grocery store parking lot at night and it’ll smell like Willie Nelson’s hair.
When you don’t earn it, you don’t care about it. If I bought you each a brand-new fully loaded Mini Cooper when you turned sixteen, that car would be covered with fast-food wrappers on the inside and bird shit on the outside within a month. Meanwhile, the kid who busted his ass working two afterschool jobs slinging the fries that you then drop in your gratis car will be treating his like a Fabergé infant. He’ll attend to that thing in every spare moment he has, and spend every extra dollar he has on maintaining it. This isn’t a dig on you, Natalia or Sonny, this is human nature.
Let me bookend the chapter with a tale about why car ownership is so important to your old man.
Sonny, in 2011, you and I had a nice father-son trip to Orchard Supply Hardware, followed by a little wrenching. We walked around the store for an hour and a half, and Papa loaded up on paint, nuts, bolts and other odds and ends. You were very patient. Then we went back to the shop and wrenched. I gave you a Phillips head screwdriver and you pulled a panel off the door of one of my lightweight Datsun roadsters, all by yourself. It was great.
This was also incredibly symbolic. I hope what I am about to say shames not just my family, but all families. As a culture, we understand that when a young boy wants to play a musical instrument, we get them some drums. Or when a young girl wants to design clothes, we buy them some fabric, needles and thread and let them go to town. I’m sure a young Vera Wang was making little dresses for her Barbies. Well, early and often, I had an inclination for wrenching, but this went ignored. My parents were too busy being depressed faux intellectuals to attempt caring about something as blue collar as cars. Let me ask you this: If a kid showed a penchant for playing the violin and you didn’t encourage that, you’d be considered a monster, right? Well, what about the kid who wants to tinker with cars? It’s the same thing. We’ve just decided as a society that tools are for meatheads and cellos are for smart people. Some of the brightest guys I know are car guys—it takes a mind to understand mechanics. In our society, you could be the big brain from the DC think tank who comes up with the solution to getting us off foreign oil, but not know how to change your own oil. So who’s smarter?
The point is, it was torture having no garage and a lame dad. It was so fucking pathetic and infuriating that we did actually have a garage but instead of it containing a car and tools, it contained my mattress and was my bedroom. I wasn’t going to do that to you, Sonny. But I wasn’t going to foist it on you, either. You can’t force that.
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So as you read this, if you’re leasing a Camry and GPS-ing directions to the nearest Jiffy Lube that’s okay; I gave it a shot. But I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to give you the opportunity to activate that part of your brain and see if you were a born grease monkey, like your old man was and his old man wasn’t.
Ultimately, kids, I hope you work hard, save up your dough, pick the right car for you, and, more important, for your race. Let’s face it, certain ethnicities prefer certain cars. I actually came up with a show idea around this: Racial Supermarket Parking Lot Sweepstakes. Here’s how it works. I put ten different cars in a grocery-store parking lot. Then the lucky contestant stands near the automatic doors. I have an easel with foam core cards that read “Asian,” “Black,” “Mexican,” “White,” “Gay” and so on. I then hit an air horn and the automatic doors slide open, and the contestant has to run around and put the card on the car that best represents the race. He’ll be putting the “Gay” card on the peach-colored Mini Cooper, “Black” on the Escalade with the spinner rims. But the twist is for “Mexican,” you have to run off the lot and put it on a bus.
Sorry if that was a little tangential. I just realized I hadn’t said anything racist in a few pages, and I don’t want you kids to be confused.
CHAPTER 7
What I Learned from My Parents by Not Learning from My Parents
A QUICK SPOILER alert for my parents: If you’re reading this, just skip this chapter; you’ll be offended.
Who the fuck am I kidding? They didn’t read my last three books, why buck the trend?
A few years back, I was in a store with my dad. Coincidentally, I was on the cover of Wired magazine that month. My dad noticed it in the store, picked it up, glanced at it for a second and then, without a word, put it back down. I was mere feet away from him and he never uttered, “When did this come out?” or “Hey, did you see this?” or anything at all. He picked up that magazine, looked at it as if Tony Hawk was on the cover, and moved on.
So if my folks are breaking with tradition, reading this and are offended, well, they rolled the dice. They thought at best I’d be talking shit about them to day laborers on a construction site. They never imagined I’d have millions of listeners to absorb my vitriol about them. I’ve called my dad a pussy and my mom a basket case a hundred and twenty-seven thousand times on the radio and podcasts. Why change now?
Besides, I’m writing this for you, my fellow parents, who still have the chance to improve. My mom and dad’s parenting skills were DOA.
As you know from my previous literary efforts, I was raised like a hamster. My parents just put some wood shavings on the floor and shut the door, and I walked around in a circle until my eighteenth birthday.
They’re not bad people; they’re just not into family. Ironically, family is not in their DNA. My dad had two brothers that I never met. It wasn’t like there was some Italian family feud going back to the old country. He didn’t have a beef with them, as far as I know. It’s just that a bus ticket or a long-distance phone call costs money. His dad had died when he was a teen, so he never had a real relationship with him. And, as I’ve spoken about many times, my mother was raised by her grandparents, due to a situation I’m still not clear on, but involved child protective services. This went on until she was ten and moved back in with her mom, my grandmother. Until then, she thought her mom was just a family friend who stopped by on occasion. Again, I’m not sure of all the details, but I guess at some point, my grandmother just popped out with, “Oh, and by the way, I’m actually your mother.” As a result, my mom for her whole life called my grandmother by her first name, Helen. It was like how Bart Simpson calls his dad Homer. It was never Mom, it was Helen. That should tell you everything you need to know about my parents and how the trickle-down emotional economics worked in my family.
It’s kind of surprising that my parents had kids at all. For all I know, I could have been an accident. I never asked, and I’m never going to. I think that most likely my parents thought they wanted a child, but then realized they didn’t want everything that comes with it. Kind of like how a kid wants a puppy, but doesn’t want to clean up all the pee and poop.
One thing my parents did do was lower the bar on raising kids. If my parents can do it, then anybody can. We’re so narcissistic when it comes to child rearing. Don’t give yourselves too much credit, parents. By the time you finish this sentence twenty thousand kids will have been crapped out. The majority of them are going to turn out fine. A few are going to be abused and end up as addicts, but the rest are going to settle into standard-issue, unnoticed, suburban lives. So to all the potential parents out there, stop getting up in your head. You can do this. If you’re on the fence about having kids, just do it. That indecisiveness means that you’re at least giving it some thought before you actually create a human being, and will therefore give enough of a shit to parent pretty well. It’s the people who don’t consider whether they should have kids who shouldn’t. These folks are the ones for whom a child is just the thing that happens after you blow your wad and move on to fucking another Floridian.
My brilliant plan to keep these morons from reproducing is this: a kid petting zoo. Parents that are fair to middling can drop their kids off all day and, for a few bucks, the couples who aren’t sure if they’re ready to be parents can come in and pet the kids a little (not in a sexual way). They can toss around a couple Nerf balls, pull them around in a little red wagon and, for a quarter, get a scoop of Chex Mix to feed them. The kid gets the attention they’re missing at home, and the couples who were on the fence get a little taste of parenthood.
So, to be honest, I was kind of afraid to have kids because of how lackluster my parenting was. I waited a long time to reproduce because I wasn’t sure I was going to take to children. I didn’t want to ignore my children like I had been ignored. And I wanted to get my career on track. As an entertainer, a career is very difficult to get on said track. It either takes a while or never happens at all. It took me until my early-to-mid-thirties to get to a point where I felt comfortable that I could make a living doing comedy, and that I had career momentum. I also felt that I needed more therapy, so I could try to be a little more normal. So Lynette and I didn’t end up having kids until later in life. And, as such, it took us a long time to conceive the twins.
Our in-vitro fertility-clinic saga has been well documented. I’d like to make an observation about the rise of this in our culture. Almost everybody I know had to go the fertility-clinic route to have their kid. All the guys had to do the thing where they go into the little room and jack off into the cup using the well-worn porn provided by the clinic. It recently occurred to me that there’s now a whole generation of kids who were conceived while their fathers were looking at a woman who isn’t their mom. When they get old enough to ask where they came from, we’re going to have to sit down and tell them in a heartfelt tone, “When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, the daddy pays thirty-five thousand dollars and goes to the bathroom of a place in Encino that used to sell flooring and watches Ron Jeremy do Jenna Jameson in the ass.”
Getting out of my family’s negative cycle and having kids has been rewarding on a number of levels, but also frustrating—not just from the stuff I’ve been talking about in previous chapters, but also because of the context. Knowing how much I enjoy spending time with the twins makes me hate my parents even more. Speaking of context . . .
The Carolla Bunch
Growing up in the ’60s and ’70s with my parents was rough, especially when I’d watch television. That was the era of The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. I’d sit on the floor and watch these shows in which happy families all hashed out their problems and had great bonding moments in a half hour every week. Meanwhile, my sister had run away, and my parents lived in separate rooms, thinking of ways to kill themselves and end the misery. My house was a chaotic, filthy mess, with sofas covered in sheets and people who didn’t talk to each other. The Brad
ys would have Alice the maid (another luxury they had that the Carollas could never have imagined) call everyone down for dinner and the happy kids would run down and sit around the table.
Then we’d have little Bobby Brady in his plaid sweater, staring blankly ahead, playing with his food. Inevitably, someone would ask, “What’s wrong?” This made me irate because not only was no one in my family tuned in enough to notice that I was bummed the fuck out, I didn’t even have the Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes to move around with a fork. This is such a fake scene. That would not happen in real life. As depressed as I was, there was no way I would have pushed away any food and said, “I guess I’m just not hungry.” I would have buried all of my feelings in food. If my parents had two potatoes to rub together, I would have been so fucking fat. If being depressed about something was an appetite killer for me, I would have been dead of starvation by the time I was ten. I would have looked like Tom Hanks in Philadelphia.
And on the subject of Brady Bunch style, take a look at the cast from season one to season five. Has anything ever changed so much in a four-to-five-year period? Between season one in 1969 and season five in 1973, everything went from Lawrence Welk to Welcome Back Kotter. The lapels got wider, the hair got huge and everything went paisley. Robert Reed even jumped a couple years ahead to the disco era and contracted HIV. Modern Family is currently on its sixth season. Check out the first season from 2009, and look at it today. Is Phil Dunphy dressed like he’s in a completely different decade in a completely different country? Nope. Just one more reason for me to love Modern Family, and hate my family for making me watch that garbage.