Daddy, Stop Talking!: And Other Things My Kids Want but Won't Be Getting

by Adam Carolla

  It’s also a damn good thing that my friends and I don’t have periods. Given the tea-bagging and other hazing that guys do to each other when they’re adolescents, the potential for disgusting disaster would have been way up had periods been involved. There’s no way that if my friend Ray had a bleeding vagina once a month, he wouldn’t have put it on my face when I was sleeping.

  Anyway, back to you, Sonny. You’re going to have some hormonal shifts, too, just like your sister. Women will never appreciate the power of testosterone. When a boy hits puberty it’s like Jesse Pinkman set up a meth lab in your nut sack. You’ll have the uncontrollable urge to fight and fuck. You’ll make stupid decisions without thinking. And you’ll be angry. It’s weird. There’s a thing in life where up until your early twenties you’re angry, then you mellow out a little bit, but then when you turn fifty-three you get angry again. On both ends of the spectrum, you don’t give a shit and your anger makes you lash out. I call it the Alec Baldwin syndrome.

  And of course this testosterone geyser is going to mean unintended and uncontrollable boners. Sorry, kid, this is just a storm you have to ride out. There’s only a brief window in life where you have control over your junk. As a teen, you have zero control. You can be watching Schindler’s List and get one. But when you’re my age, chances are you’ll be yelling at it to stand at attention. There’s a sweet spot in your late twenties and early thirties when you no longer have to grab and tuck the surprise boner into your waistband to get rid of it because they don’t happen so often. But right now, if you’re reading this anywhere between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five, be prepared that a stiff breeze can give you a stiff dick.

  Your entire body is going to go through some changes and with those body changes, come body issues. You’re going to feel gangly and awkward. We have a national obsession with female body image. There’s all those Dove soap love-your-body-type ads. And as a dad, even I have to admit it is fucked up what our culture foists on girls. I don’t know if it’s okay to masturbate to your kids’ cartoons, but Disney princesses have no waists and giant boobs. The chick from Aladdin is crazy hot. What percentage of young girls watching those movies are gonna look like that? You would literally need your hips shaved off.

  I feel bad for the girls, but what about the fellas? The Disney princes all have cleft chins, no waists and giant arms. There is no way that teenage boys can have that body without going on the juice. Every action figure is cut and has a hairless chest. If a girl aspires to look like a Disney princess or a Barbie doll all she needs to do is not eat. But boys need to get on HGH.

  Women are always supposedly redefining beauty. They’ll put Lena Dunham on the cover of a magazine and say she’s brave and that she’s redefining beauty. Well, for your sake, Sonny, in this book I’m redefining male beauty. Now men with a double chin and a hairy ass are beautiful. I have decreed it.

  Speaking of hairy, with puberty comes hair in new and interesting places. So let’s start at the head and work our way down, shall we?

  Facial hair is a pain in the ass and I suggest you avoid it. If you got my genes you’re not going to be able to grow a decent beard anyway. I have the beard of a black man: short, curly and itchy. I get ingrown hairs and the beard is always patchy.

  Maintaining a beard is just a time suck unless you’re a total dick like guys from the Jersey Shore who have to wake up at four in the morning to work their perfect sideburns. When you spend that much time working on your facial hair, you’re just a narcissist who likes to spend a lot of time looking at yourself in the mirror.

  At least go all or nothing. Either grow a full beard so you don’t have to be bothered or shave every day or two and go clean. I’ve never understood the mustache. If you’re going to spend the time scraping a blade across your face, just finish the job. And it’s more than just the time. Dig this mustache thought.

  Every other patch of hair on your body stinks: your armpits, your balls and your ass if you’re me. Yet we cultivate the one right under our nostrils. Why would you want a stink sponge right under your nose? That would be like sewing your balls to your upper lip.

  Please don’t be that skinny young hipster guy with a beard. Beards are for guys that swing axes or play fiddles. Dan Hagerty or Charlie Daniels should have beards, not guys who punch up Adam Sandler scripts. A beard used to be something you earned. You were a lumberjack, a biker or a Civil War general. You haven’t earned a beard at twenty-three.

  We’re currently in a facial hair free-for-all. We’ve gone through different phases throughout history, but now it’s game on. It used to be that you had the same mustache or beard everyone else had. Now it’s weird neck beards, or the Sharpie pinstripe, or the young guy with mountain-man beard right next to the guy with the waxed handlebar mustache. In the Mad Men era everyone was clean shaven and if they did want a mustache, they had one choice. Like all things for you kids nowadays, there’s too much variety.

  Just as the facial hair guy who loves to look in the mirror, the guy who has a very demanding and meticulous haircut is a narcissist, too. I was getting my hair cut recently, and the guy who was in the chair next to me when I sat down was still there giving instructions long after I was gone. I have no idea how long he was there before I sat down, but I paid the parking meter for thirty minutes and it had seventeen left when I got back behind the wheel. Meanwhile, this dude was still in the chair. He was a Russian guy getting some complicated two-stage fade haircut. Why? Because that’s his one moment. His wife doesn’t listen to him, his daughter hates his guts, his boss is up his ass and he has a job where he uses that tape-gun sealing boxes somewhere. This was his time to shine. This was his “me time.” He’s not in a barber’s chair, he’s on a throne and his lordship will have it his way. He’s exerting his dominion over another person. It’s wielding power. But how satisfying can that actually be?

  Let’s talk for a minute about the back of your hair. When you find a good barber shop (not a penny over twenty dollars, son), and it comes time for them to do the back of your neck they’ll ask if you want it square or round. Just do what your old man does and say, “How did you do it last time? What is it now? Whatever it is, just do that.” This whole conversation is a waste of time. Has anyone ever been passed over for a promotion, not gotten laid or gotten out of a moving violation because of what the back of their head looks like? I don’t know what the back of my hair looks like as I write this book. I’m an adult, I’m married, and I know whatever shape it is in will just grow out anyway. So I don’t give a fuck. My plan is, and yours should be, to spend as little time in that seat as possible. Every ten seconds extra I spend in the Model Cuts getting my thirteen-dollar haircut is ten seconds I could be making money and living my life. My hair is like the Terminator, it’ll be back.

  If you can get the straight razor shave at an upscale place like the Art of Shaving, go for it once in a while. It feels good. That hot lather, straight razor shave is nice, and makes you feel like Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josie Wales or an old-time gangster. You get out of there and want to hit a saloon and a whorehouse. That said, I can’t sleep at night because the short leather strap used to sharpen the razor is called a strop. It looks like a strap and is shaped like a strap but for some reason is called a strop. This really bothers me for reasons that I cannot explain.

  You’re going to start getting hair on your chest, too. Just let it be. It’s not even because the hair is difficult to tend to, it’s that the chicks who are attracted to the guys with shaved chests are the chicks who are attracted to all guys with shaved chests and therefore you’re getting someone who’s not going to stick around. A girl who is attracted to the narcissist who spends that much time manscaping is the kind of girl who you’re going to catch banging your fellow bare-chested buddy.

  And like me, you’ll probably have some hair on your ass. The area where I could have a tramp stamp looks like the Amazon rainforest. I was once paid twenty bucks by your crazy Uncle Ray to shave my ass. I wa
nt to make that clear, he paid me. He was so disgusted at the briar patch on and around my ass that he coughed up what was probably a half day’s pay at the time to see the bramble above my butthole go away.

  Ray also paid our friend Dave one hundred dollars to let us shave him. Dave was a hairy motherfucker. He was somewhere between Vic Tayback and Chewbacca. So you can see why Ray would be tempted to see him bald as a baby mouse. He actually threw a Shave Dave party. I was there. Dave stood in Ray’s apartment complex driveway, Ray hit him with the hose, then we all sprayed him with shaving cream and took turns with the Bic. It was so much fun that Ray actually started roping people from his apartment building into it. There were a couple of older Asian ladies living below him who had just come back from the market. They were literally carrying grocery bags but Ray managed to charm, or bully, them into taking a turn clearing the brush from Dave’s back.

  Now, when it comes to pubes, a nice trim is okay. But you don’t want to be shaved balls guy. Blades have no business that close to your business. But don’t let it overgrow either. You ever see a mailbox with the lawn overgrown around it? It makes the four-by-four post it’s sitting on look much shorter. So you get out there with the Weed Whacker and make that post look like the Washington Monument.

  The good news is no one wants to see your nuts, anyway. No woman has ever said, “He had such a sexy ball sack.” Scrotum is ugly on every man. Brad Pitt’s scrotum looks the same as Dick Cheney’s. You could set up an experiment where very different famous people put their balls through holes in a piece of plywood and no one would be able to tell whose was whose. This could be a fun reality show, Celebrity Ball Sack Challenge. I don’t think anyone could correctly match the celebrity . . . unless we threw Lance Armstrong in the mix.

  Balls are a pain in the balls. They should retract like landing gear. The sack is just this thing that can get in the way and be injured. Plus, it has more funk per square inch than a decomposing horseshoe crab.

  Since I’m on your balls—sorry if that sounded weird—here’s a tip. I’ve found that a light dusting of talc down the boxer briefs will absorb any moisture and smell and give you multiple wearings. Save yourself some electricity and water. That’s the kind of environmental tip you won’t get from Al Gore. Because he free-balls it.

  And on that note, let me suggest you go with boxer briefs. I have come to this conclusion after experiments with both boxers and briefs, and they truly are the best genitalia container.

  I never understood boxers. They’re cool if you’re going down to the lake to swim with the chicks, but not if you’re at home alone and your dick is hanging out of the fly. That opening is like a compressed pita or one of those 1960s vagina-looking plastic change purses that you squeeze to open. My ding-a-ling would always pop out of those. So I’d have to do that two finger move where you grab the fabric and do a little butt dip to pop the dick back in. And briefs just ride up on you. I’ve never been a fan of the tighty-whitey.

  But, recently, when I was looking at the pack of boxer briefs I noticed something. I had to bust out the jewelers’ loupe to figure out the size. The lettering on the box that tells you the size was literally less than an eighth of an inch. I started thinking about it. They use the same Marky Mark–esque model on the cover of all the underwear packages no matter what size. Size 28 to 32 or 48 to 52 has the same chiseled guy with the six-pack abs on the cover. What gives?

  My line of men’s underpants will have a package where the model looks like he wears the underwear contained in the box. On the size 44 to 52, there will be a guy who looks like Michael Moore holding a can of Stroh’s. This would make it a hell of a lot easier to pick out your size. Instead of squinting, you would just say, “Yep, that’s what my fat ass looks like in the mirror.” It’d be a job creator, too. That way it won’t be the same hairless gay guy for every box. We could kick some of the plus-size long-haul truckers and toll-booth operators some extra work.

  A nice bonus would be that my underwear line would motivate people to exercise. If you see a guy looking like John Goodman on the box of underwear you’re about to purchase, you may decide not to hit the Cinnabon on the way out of the mall and go home and do some crunches instead. It’ll be a realistic brand for your belly and butt, I’ll call it Gut ’N’ Stinc. (Say it fast, and you’ll get the joke.)

  Feels Like the First Time

  Like all young men, you’re going to be fully obsessed with losing your virginity. Don’t. It’s going to be awkward, and it’s going to end quickly, so just get it out of the way. But not too soon.

  Men are to virginity what women are to pregnancy. It’s biologically driven to be incredibly important to us and there’s a window that, if you miss it, it’ll fuck you up. In either direction. If you get laid too early and too often it becomes a distraction, it feels too good and it becomes your occupation. I had friends who had the ability to play college football, on scholarship. Instead, they just spent their senior years essentially dropped out of school, because they were getting laid and that was a hell of a lot more fun than going to class or practice. But if you wait too long to do the deed, you’ll feel like a loser, it will destroy your self-esteem and you’ll be chasing it for the rest of your life.

  That’s why in my will I have set aside a trust for you to spend on a whore if you’re still a virgin on your eighteenth birthday.

  But be safe. I don’t think I need to give another lecture on unwanted kids. So get some condoms. And don’t feel awkward about it when you buy them. There’s no stigma to that anymore.

  When he was a young man, Dr. Drew had a father who was a well-known doctor in his town. Therefore, he knew all the pharmacists. So poor little Drew had to drive to Chinatown to get his condoms without his old man finding out from his underground pharmacist network. Like a junkie, he had to head to the dicey part of town under the cloak of darkness to get his latex fix.

  And don’t get all up in your head about condom size. The Magnum condom makers know what they’re doing. It was brilliant marketing, like the guys who named the Smart Car. “Hey what do you drive?” “I drive a Smart Car.” Assholes. The name Magnum is just designed to get guys to buy them. I would like to do a social experiment. I’ll open a fake convenience store and put a super-hot blonde chick behind the counter, and watch what happens when guys go in to buy condoms. It will be great to see how many of them buy the Magnums with Kate Upton behind the counter, versus the usual Indian guy.

  Lamb-skin condoms must send a mixed message to guys who like to fuck sheep. And I wonder what the answer would be if you were to talk to a sheep about whether they would rather become a car-seat cover or a condom? If the sheep answers “condom,” I think we can assume that sheep is gay. Sure you’re sliding into a lady part, but you’re going to have some guy coming inside you.

  And remember, please, that condoms expire. I think condoms should have a smell like milk, so you can tell when they’re no good anymore. Most people are busting out condoms in dimly lit apartments when they’re drunk and horny. They’ll never know if the thing is expired or broken. But if it stank when you tore open the package you’d know it was time to go visit the Kwik-E-Mart again.

  I’d like to introduce a line of condoms that feature the image of a birthmark. That way when you cheat on your wife and your mistress identifies you by the very telling birthmark, you can say to your wife, “She’s clearly lying, I don’t have a birthmark in the shape of Italy on my dick.”

  Now, I know the condom slows you down a little bit, so be cautious about sex going too long. When you’re a teenager, especially after watching a lot of porn, you think that you need to bang away for hours at a time. But after years of listening to Dr. Drew talk to women about their sexual pain, it is pretty clear that they’re not as interested in that as you’d think. The whole “he went all night” thing is a myth. Once you’re in there count it in dog years. Each minute is seven minutes. Here’s a go-to: If you’re reaching for the lube and she’s reaching for an ice pack,
that’s a bad sign.

  And don’t think that you need to get too kinky, either. I know we’ve all gone Fifty Shades of Grey and that there needs to be novelty in the bedroom once in a while, but sex ain’t broken. I see a lot of movies, not porno, but regular movies, where food is incorporated into sex. That whole Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke 9½ Weeks thing. If you’re staring at a twenty-seven-year-old naked Kim Basinger and thinking, “Ehh . . . I’m gonna need some Cool Whip in order to get wood here. I could just take her into the bedroom and have my way with her or I could lay her down on linoleum and cover her in Tabasco and jimmies” that’s a problem. I like food and sex, but I don’t need to combine them. I like football and sex, I like my dog and sex, I like Coen Brothers’ movies and sex, but I try not to combine any of these things. Sex is the one thing that doesn’t need Cool Whip. I don’t need ambrosia salad on my junk. Going to the DMV needs Cool Whip. Not a twenty-seven-year-old nude Kim Basinger.

  A Beat About Beating Off

  I’ll close out this letter with some thoughts on a very important part of life as a man: masturbation. The Jews say you become a man at thirteen. Well, I believe you’re a man the first time you find some porn and have at yourself. It’s something I call the bate-mitzvah.

  I consider myself an expert on this topic. My best days are behind me, but I have so much to teach. Without a guiding hand, literally, you could get the hallowed act all wrong. So let me drop some wisdom about masturbation or, as I call it, jizzdom.

  I was a late bloomer. Most boys discover themselves at thirteen. I didn’t start beating my meat until I was sixteen. I was at a friend’s house. I won’t mention him by name to limit the object of humiliation of this story to just me. He asked me if I had ever done that and I ashamedly admitted I hadn’t. Like the great mentors of history—John the Baptist to Jesus, Merlin to King Arthur or Mickey to Rocky—he opened me up to a whole new world. He pointed to his electric toothbrush and said, “See that? Fire it up and put it on the back of your weenus.” I said, “Huh?” He said, “It feels great. Just go sit on the toilet and do it.” (To clarify, it wasn’t the brush end. And he had a spare attachment. This wasn’t his actual toothbrush.) I did. And thus was simultaneously born my love of masturbation and my hatred of brushing my teeth.