by Adam Carolla
Anyway, back to the Bradys and their meals. I’d never seen my mom make anything that came out of an oven. I think she was afraid that if she put food in there, it would take up room she needed for her head when she decided to end it all. And my dad didn’t even know what a fucking oven was. If you showed him an oven, he’d try to climb in and drive it. I don’t even know why we had utensils in my house. I think they were just there in case someone gave in to the urge to start stabbing each other.
This is why I get incensed when I see my kids not appreciating food. It is a trigger for me. This year we took a family day trip to the beach, and when it came time for lunch we went with the sub sandwich plan. Lynette went off to get me a turkey sub and whatever the kids wanted, while I grabbed a table at the food court. She came back and we all sat to eat. A couple of bites in, I noticed Sonny was chowing down on a sandwich from Subway while the rest of us had hoagies from another place. I asked what was up. Lynette told me Sonny preferred Subway. It was a turkey sub, just like I was eating, but for some reason Sonny’s had to be from Subway instead of where the rest of us had ordered. It wasn’t like the other restaurant didn’t have what he wanted. In fact, he got an inferior version.
My real resentment is not about Subway. If Sonny wants to eat crap, that’s his loss. It is just that growing up, if I was lucky, I went to one restaurant a year. Meanwhile, my kids go to two restaurants per meal.
Much like entertainment options being too plentiful these days, food options are also way too copious. If you take the kids to the Cheesecake Factory for their birthday, they’ll cross into the following birthday by the time they’re done reading the menu. That thing is as thick as Oprah’s ankles. (By the way, if you want to know why America is fat and our economy is in the shitter, it’s because the only factories still in operation have the words Cheesecake and Old Spaghetti in front of them.)
Split Happens
There should be a class-action lawsuit against the 1970s, brought by all the kids whose parents were divorced during those ten years. Like mine.
Don’t get me wrong. This was a good thing. They were terrible together. They were the opposite of chocolate and peanut butter. But it’s not like there was domestic violence. That would require effort. They chose to beat each other mentally and spiritually with disinterested sighs, disappointed groans and one-thousand-yard stares. It was even worse than physical aggression, they acted like the other was dead and the form walking around our house was a ghost.
So with parents this emotionally disconnected from each other, the divorce was actually a blessing. I have no beef with it. A therapist friend of mine says the only thing worse than divorce is a bad marriage. To all the parents reading this and thinking about divorce, I’d say that in an ideal world, you should try to make it work. But if staying together will cause more damage to your kids than separating, then just rip off the bandage.
But, please, if you decide to split up, consider the timing. There’s a window between when the kids are really young and won’t remember what happened, and after the ninth grade, when they’re going to hate your guts no matter what, when you just have to tough it out. It’s your job as a parent to experience some discomfort for the greater good of your child and your community. Stay together between the ages of four and fourteen. Not just for you and for your kid, but for me and my wallet. Unless you want to give me back the tax money I part with to pay for school counselors and social workers to deal with your mess of a kid.
My issue with my parents’ divorce wasn’t that it happened. It was what they each did after the split. Because it was the ’70s when he got divorced, Jim Carolla turned into a regular Bob Guccione. My dad looked like he sold aluminum siding when he was married, but as soon as their marriage was over (I’d argue it never even started), he was rocking platform shoes, a medallion resting on the chest hair you could see because his shirt was undone to the navel and clear nonprescription glasses. He sported a huge Jew-fro, despite the fact that we’re not remotely Jewish. I think the most atrocious thing I ever saw him in were jeans that laced up in the front and the rear. It was like a swinging seventies starter pistol went off when the papers were signed, and he decided, “Hey, I’m making the scene. I’ve got to get laid now that I’m forty-four.” He went from Rob Petrie to Phil Spector overnight.
Compare that to my mom. She packed on about forty pounds and stopped dyeing her hair. So when the roots grew out, it looked like she was wearing a gray Nazi helmet with a tuft of red in the back. She kept the medium-long hair, about shoulder length, but the first seven inches were gray and the rest was red. It was convenient because, like the rings of a tree telling you its age, this was a clear delineation of when she finally gave up. She died on the inside and, ironically, stopped dyeing on the outside.
I think that it says a lot about the nature of men and women that when they split up my mom made herself as unfuckable as possible, while Jim caught Saturday night fever.
At least their breakup was quick. There were no assets, so Dad took his ass out of the house and set it at my grandparents’. Yes. When my parents split up, my dad had nowhere to crash and ended up at my mom’s parents’ place. What a pathetic cherry on that dysfunctional sundae.
I’ve got a way to make divorce more palatable. This year I had back-to-back live podcasts in Chicago at a cool venue called Park West. In our Q-and-A segment at the top of each show, we had marriage proposals. That got me thinking about the Kiss Cam that they have at Lakers games at the Staples Center and other big venues. It’s mildly amusing to see a couple give each other a smooch on the Jumbotron. But how about this for a plan? Instead of the tired old Kiss Cam, where we get to see you give your wife of twenty-seven years a forced and tepid peck, let’s create the Divorce Cam. How much more compelling would that be? The camera zooms in on a couple just as one of them drops the D bomb. Obviously, one party will have had to arrange this in advance with the ballpark. Unfortunately, the other half of the couple will be taken completely by surprise. Then the cam would pan over to the kids who are crying and confused, while the slimy divorce attorney stands behind them with papers and pen. Statistically, half the people in the stadium are going to get divorced anyway; why not use it to provide a little between-innings entertainment? I’d never miss a Dodgers home game if they did this. I bet in the long run, the Divorce Cam would help keep a few marriages intact. It would keep a lot of guys on the straight and narrow because if the wife pops out with, “Hey, the Giants are in town, you want to go to the game?” hubby would be Johnny on the spot with, “Yeah, sure, but not until after I’m done giving you a foot rub and buying you flowers, sweetie.”
Life Lessons From Mom and Pop Carolla
As far as life lessons my parents laid out the secret to success: Do the exact opposite of what they did. Like my notoriously bad luck betting on the Super Bowl, where my friends find out who I am going for and bet on the other team, when it comes to fathering decisions I think about whatever my dad would do and go with the opposite. You know those What Would Jesus Do bracelets? WWJD? I have a WWJD bracelet, too, but for me it means What Wouldn’t Jim Do? So here are a few of my parenting techniques, thanks to watching the failure of my own mom and dad:
1. DON’T BE CHEAP WITH YOURSELF
I’ve thoroughly chronicled my family’s cheapness over the years: Saturdays spent dumpster diving, decorating a potted rubber plant for Christmas instead of a real tree, having a rolling portable dishwasher. But there’s one thing I’ve never written about that I think is completely symbolic of my family’s cheapness, and it is our relationship to Tupperware.
Let me explain. I’m not saying avoid storage containers in general. I hate waste, so I want you to be able to store leftovers. What I’m talking about is hanging on to the container, ironically, past its expiration date.
This may not resonate with the younger folk reading this. It seems like Tupperware had the market cornered from 1959 until about two years ago. During this period, it was as if no one e
lse could figure out how to extrude plastic and make a bowl-and-lid combo out of it. Now there are hundreds of brands of disposable containers you buy at the grocery store, use once and leave behind at the party if the guacamole isn’t completely eaten. Before this, there were these things called Tupperware parties. Housewives would gather and one of the ladies who had hooked up with the Tupperware Corporation because she was bored now that the kids were off at college would sell them containers. You couldn’t get these precious gems at a store. You had to know someone who knows someone and gather under the cloak of darkness.
It’s not just Tupperware having a monopoly on snap-lid containers that boggles my mind. I’m still trying to figure out why, for eighty years, there was one and only one blimp. Above every stadium or sporting event since the 1930s has flown the Goodyear blimp. That’s all there was. But it seems like somewhere around 2004 we got inundated with new blimps. Now there’s the Met Life blimp, the Budweiser blimp, the Fujitsu blimp . . .
Blimp technology hasn’t changed that much. It’s not like Goodyear had a patent on dirigible technology. Why did it take nearly a century for someone to think, “Hey, you know that blimp that’s getting all the camera time? We should get one, too.” Maybe the Hindenburg got the competitors out of the market. The Goodyear higher-ups must have been thrilled. “If they just keep running this footage every year, we’ll be all set.”
It also occurs to me that a blimp is a weird thing to represent a high-performance tire. Blimps move slower than a donkey and use no tires. If everyone drove a blimp, Goodyear would be out of business. Why’d they go with that? This would be like if Jenny Craig’s mascot was a manatee.
The point is whether its blimps or Tupperware, I don’t know how they fended off the competition for that long. On January first, every year, Bob Tupperware and Roger Goodyear must have gotten up and thought, “I pulled it off. Another year and no one caught on.”
The current cornucopia of containers was not the case when I was a kid, and thus provided ample opportunity for the cheapness of my family to come shining through. My grandmother had one piece of Tupperware, which looked like it had been through three tours in Vietnam. It was so stained, cloudy and scarred that light wouldn’t pass through it. Yet it was treated like the Holy Grail. This was a big-ticket item to the Carollas. It was considered a durable good in our household—on par with an automobile or a washing machine.
This grizzled container was probably as old as me when we reached peak cheapness. I was around twenty-five, and was a struggling starving-artist–bachelor barely staying afloat doing construction. I would go over to my grandparents’ house for Sunday dinner, when my Hungarian step-grandfather would make a giant kettle of goulash. There’d always be plenty left over and I’d get to take some home. On more than one occasion, he would be ladling the stew into the solitary piece of Tupperware in my grandmother’s house and I would hear, from my seat in the other room, her come into the kitchen and hit him with some stern words. “What are you doing? No! Give him the mayonnaise jar.”
My grandmother felt I could not be trusted with the sacred Tupperware. She acted as though it had come over on the Mayflower and been passed down generation to generation. I lived three blocks from them, was their flesh and blood and had no history of theft and yet my grandmother forced my grandfather to take the goulash out of the Tupperware and put it into the Best Foods mayonnaise jar with the rusty, crusty metal lid.
I don’t know what she thought would happen. Did she imagine that as soon as the Tupperware and I got out of the house I’d dive into my mini-pickup truck and head to Mexico to start a new life? I was broke as shit. I was definitely going to come back the next Sunday to refill said Tupperware with more goulash.
This is just one of a million examples of the poverty mentality that permeated my family. I’ve declared that I will never force my kids to endure these feelings. I suggest that you do the same. Because the real message you send when you act like a cheap bastard is not “take care of your stuff.” The message is “This item cost me over a dollar and it is not disposable. Our relationship, however, is.”
We have a billion plastic snap-lid containers in our kitchen, and my kids can do whatever the fuck they want with them. I value my relationship with them more than a food-storage container. I can get a new one of those at the grocery store, I can’t get a new son or daughter at the supermarket. At least, not without ending up in an Amber Alert situation.
Speaking of those containers. Because I’ve got twins, I’m getting everything in the jumbo size now. I go to Costco and come home with a huge vat of mayonnaise and a kiddie pool of peanut butter. And then I get into that argument with the wife when we’re scraping the bottom of the container but it’s still taking up a beer keg worth of room in the fridge. “There’s still enough in there for one sandwich.” “It’s empty.” “You have to scrape the bottom of it.” I hate the space it takes up, but I can’t bring myself to just chuck it out like Lynette would.
So here’s my solution. Why not equip every jumbo-sized container of mustard or barbecue sauce with a little escape pod on the side, like the dock of the International Space Station? Just a small container that holds two ounces on the side, so when you’re done with the five-gallon bucket of Dijonnaise, you can scrape the remnants at the bottom into the little bladder on the side, twist it, snap it off, put a cap on it and put it back in the fridge. That way you’ve got just enough for one more sandwich, and will have reclaimed the space above the crisper. Coming soon to a store near you: The Ace Carolla Condiment Dinghy.
2. EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT INTERESTED, FAKE IT . . .
Both historically and currently, my parents haven’t been able to give a shit about shit I give a shit about.
My father would read a book in his living room every Friday night. Ironically, the light by which he was reading was partly supplied by the lights from the North Hollywood High football stadium where I was playing. He never worked on Friday nights, he just preferred to stay home and read Leo Buscaglia rather than see me play for the North Hollywood High Huskies. He wasn’t interested in football and that was that.
This is a trend that continues today.
Last year, my dad called to say he wanted to come over and see the twins. I told him they were out on one of their many activities; I believe it was seeing the Harlem Globetrotters. I started going into how the kids were constantly jet-setting and doing amazing stuff. As an example, I casually mentioned, “I just did the voice in a big Disney movie, so they were walking the red carpet last night.” I waited a moment for him to ask the name of the movie, and what my part in it was. Never happened. He just moved on. That, or he thought I was lying.
It’s not like Dad hates the stuff that I do. It’s just not on his radar. He’s not the Great Santini, he’s the Great Doesn’t-Give-A-Shiti. For the entire time I have been doing my home-improvement podcast Ace on the House he’s called it Ace on the Roof. And on the very first morning of my radio show after I took over from Howard Stern, I famously gave him a ten-thousand-dollar challenge. There were five questions of Adam Carolla trivia. I told my dad that if he got the first one right, he’d walk away with ten grand. My very own ten grand. It wasn’t money the station had put up, and we didn’t have a sponsor. I had my checkbook next to me as I gave him the questions. I was that confident in his impending failure. With each question, the payday would be cut in half. So if he screwed the pooch on the first one he still had a chance at five thousand, then twenty-five hundred, and so on.
Now, bear in mind, this is my father. His best financial year ever was about forty-seven thousand dollars. He now had a chance to make more in one minute than in two months of the best year of his life, and all he had to do was provide some well-known facts about his own son.
Here was the first question, for ten thousand: “Your son was on a legendary radio station for the past ten years. Name that radio station’s call letters and number.”
As the drum roll rolled, he stammered ou
t an answer. He knew it was K-rock but couldn’t spell it: KROQ. He went with KROC. I decided to be merciful, and see if he could pull out the number, 106.7. He said 950. Jimmy, who was in the studio that day and sitting next to him, noted he didn’t even have the right frequency.
Then, for five thousand, I asked, “I did a television show on a popular cable network that had to do with puppets making phone calls. The name of that show was . . .” After a good minute of his hemming and hawing, I pulled the plug. I told him it was called Crank Yankers and then noted that Jimmy, again sitting nineteen inches from him, was wearing a Crank Yankers T-shirt. I was stunned on the third question when he was able to pull out my Loveline partner’s last name: Pinsky. Now, before you give him too much credit, Dr. Drew had recently given him a referral to a urologist and he needed Drew’s full name when he filled out the forms.
Credit where credit is due, my dad recently came over to see the kids and I had him watch the documentary I made on Paul Newman’s racing career. I was floored when he not only liked it, but said, “If you never do another thing, that will be enough.” I was astonished. I’ve never gotten a reaction from him like that on anything I’ve ever done. It felt like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment. He could have come out of the closet and broken cover as the world’s top gay CIA agent and it would have been more credible to me.
But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. When I showed the same film to my mother, she piped up with, “I’m not interested in the subject matter, but it held my interest.” I loved the documentary King of Kong. I’m not into arcade games but I enjoyed it. That’s the point of a documentary; it’s supposed to capture your interest in something you know nothing about. But that’s about as much of a compliment as she was capable of. She gave me what the great Albert Brooks, when doing my podcast, called “the complisult”: a compliment couched in an insult.