by Adam Carolla
My assistant Matt “the Porcelain Punisher” Fondiler recently got a nice bullshit ticket for not turning his wheels toward the curb when parked on the hill where he lives. Twenty-five dollars. First off, as a car guy, I know that this law is antiquated. The vast majority of cars are now, sadly, automatic. So when it’s in park it’s parked. It ain’t going nowhere. Fifty years ago most cars were stick shifts and if it wasn’t in gear there might be a rolling problem. But with a modern automatic there is no way to leave a car in gear and get the keys out and walk away, so there’s no fucking way the car could roll down the hill. The superbullshit part was that this was on the weekend. For what else do you have city employees working on the weekend? Go ahead and attempt to get the Department of Public Works to come out and turn your power on during a weekend. Fat fucking chance.
The government clearly isn’t interested in catching criminals. They’re interested in collecting cash. Let me give you two examples. My buddy and writing partner Kevin Hench was driving to work via Laurel Canyon Boulevard one day and off to the side he saw a motorcycle cop with a radar gun and a walkie-talkie. This dude was clocking speeders and then radioing up to his cohort on the top of the hill, who was then pulling over the supervillain in the Hyundai Sonata who dared to go over the speed limit trying to get to work on time. That’s how bad it’s gotten; cops don’t even bother to chase anymore. They have a two-man sting operation.
Then, on a recent trip up the 101 Freeway to a vintage race at Laguna Seca, I passed at least seventeen cops. The California Highway Patrol was out in full force. None were chasing down Bonnie and Clyde. They were parked off the side of the freeway in tall grass, lying in wait. Like a lion about to pounce on an unknowing gazelle. I wouldn’t be as pissed if they were out trying to capture drug runners or a guy with a teenage runaway duct-taped in the back of his van and just happened to nab me while I was going ninety. But they were just hiding in the weeds like a sniper. These are the heroes we need more of? This is why my taxes go up? To pay for more guys to attempt raping my wallet instead of catching the guy attempting to rape the chick jogging in the park?
But here’s how I knew there were so many cops hiding and why I never got a ticket. Radar detector. I had one on my dash and it was going off like a fucking pinball machine. I recommend these for everyone. First, there’s the practical reason. These things cost the price of one speeding ticket, probably less if you factor in the 10 percent hassle charge of getting pulled over, showing up for a court date, and shit like that. For the price of one ticket you’ll save yourself from getting ten and you’ll get everywhere you need to go a hell of a lot faster. I think you should be able to rent them when you get the SUV from Hertz. Because, be honest, you do a lot more speeding when you’re not in your own car or on your own turf, right?
Second is the symbolic reason. These cops are sniping us with their radar guns. Well, turnabout is fair play. You’ve got radar. Okay, I’ve got radar too. How do you like it? This is a cold war, motherfuckers, and we didn’t fire the first shot. We used to call cops pigs, but when they look at us they see piggy banks. If you’re going to be pussies so that you can raise money, why don’t you just put on a skirt and sell some fucking cookies like the Girl Scouts?
Because I know the states still need this chickenshit cash cow and would fight my administration’s reducing the police force used to pick our collective pockets, I’m going to require the auto industry to include radar detectors in all new models.
As president, it’s my job to pay attention to the issues that affect all Americans. You always hear politicians and folks in the media say, “This especially impacts the children . . .” or “This is really bad news for the Latino community . . .” Well, traffic is especially bad for rich white guys. You never hear enough about how things are impacting them, or us, since I am not going to pretend that I’m not rich, or white. I’m going to be the Al Sharpton of rich white guys and bring awareness to our cause. Think about it. If you’re making nine bucks an hour, who cares if you’re late? Nowhere you’re driving to can be that important. Those dishes are going to get washed and that hedge is going to get trimmed. Plus you’re out under ten bucks for that time spent in gridlock. When guys like Jimmy Kimmel are stuck in traffic for an hour, that’s millions of dollars lost. Plus rich white guys drive more expensive cars that are capable of higher speeds. All of that horsepower and the money spent to purchase it is being wasted by going slow. But if you spent two hundred bucks on something between a rusted-out Vega and a donkey with three legs, it’s not like it could get far north of ten miles an hour anyway. So who gives a shit if you’re stuck on the 405? It would probably be a relief since you’re driving on retreads anyway. It’s safer for you to stay at eight miles an hour. But for rich whitey it’s a tragedy.
CARS
My administration would also like to require some changes to cars themselves, for safety, efficiency, and just for fun.
First we need to get rid of airbags. I know what you’re thinking. Airbags have saved countless lives! True, but maybe we’ve come to rely on them too much. People would be much more careful behind the wheel if instead of airbags out popped spiked Prussian helmets. Right now if we T-bone a UPS truck we act like we’ll slide back into mama’s womb. You know who doesn’t text while driving—uninsured Mexicans behind the wheels of gardening trucks. They can’t afford the ticket or the accident and they know they don’t have airbags to stop them from going through the windshield. If there was something a little more painful slamming into us when we got into an accident than a pillow softer than a hooker’s bosom, we might pay more attention when we fucking drive.
Or even better, how about a little Russian roulette? Some cars will have airbags, others will have a water balloon full of moose jizz. You’ll never know what your model features until you get in the accident. Let’s see how safe everyone starts driving then.
Next I’m going to remove the mandate that all cars have that glow-in-the-dark trunk release. Since 2000, all cars have been required to have a glow-in-the-dark T-handle that a person can pull to release the trunk latch if they accidentally get locked inside. I don’t know how drunk or clumsy you need to be to lock yourself in a trunk, but if you’ve done this I either want you put down for your own good or I want to party with you. I guess it’s intended for when your estranged drunken dad abducts you and starts heading for the border, so you can grab it and let yourself out. But if you take a close look at it you’ll see why this bothers me.
First off, I can do the fleeing math. I don’t need the help. I’ve got the BTK killer sitting in the driver’s seat, I’m not going to let myself out and sit patiently on the bumper for the police to come. Second, this is one in a long line of mandates that doesn’t make sense in certain vehicles. Take the Lamborghini Aventador—it has the trunk in the front and is only big enough to hold two loaves of bread, yet it would still be mandated that this handle be installed. The Chinese guy from Ocean’s Eleven couldn’t fit in that trunk yet this must still be on there? Dumb.
My Department of Transportation will also mandate that crash-test dummies need to be fatter. I’ve seen all that slow-motion footage of test wrecks. The dummies in those crashes have a far smaller body mass index than most Americans. This could tie in well with my get-rid-of-airbags decree. Most Americans are now coming with their own airbags in the form of triple chins and panises. And now that I think about it, why are crash-test dummies always white? Let’s get some brown ones in there. Especially for the DUI simulations.
Next up for elimination—the miles-until-empty gauge. This seems like a great idea—your car telling you how far you can go on the gas in the tank. Everyone has been waiting for this thing since cars were invented. But it’s so wildly inconsistent that it does far more harm than good. You start your car up in the morning and it says thirty-one miles left. “Okay, I can make it to work and back,” you think. But then as you back down your driveway it drops to nineteen miles. So you think, “Okay, I’ll have t
o fill up on the way home.” Then it stays at nineteen miles for your entire commute but as you pull up to your parking spot it drops to three. Meanwhile you know that the closest gas station is four miles away. Uh-oh. Then as you start up your car at the end of the day, the display shoots back up to eleven, but when you pull out it drops back to zero again and you shit yourself as you hypermile it to the next gas station. Of course you get there with plenty to spare because you can circumnavigate the globe with this thing on zero. Where do you get those extra miles from? Do they get added in for good behavior? Is it a gift from the gas fairy?
What really needs to happen, and what I’m going to mandate as president, is that every gas tank should have a heel in it. Like the heel of a boot. This will be a reservoir containing exactly one gallon of gas. No more, no less. Do with it what you will. Drive home or drive to the Grand Canyon. You know what your car gets gas-mileage-wise. I know you have one gallon once you hit E on the tank. You do the math yourself.
I also strictly forbid the use of all steering-wheel covers. The entire point of a steering wheel is grip. Covering it in fake sheepskin or shag carpeting, as my mom did in the eighties, isn’t going to help you grab the wheel in case of a skid. Plus, they look stupid.
And finally, as far as car names, I’m going to require a little more truth in advertising. No one who lives in Malibu has ever driven a Chevy Malibu, nor has anyone who’s been to the French Riviera driven a Buick Riviera. There has never been a celebrity behind the wheel of a Chevy Celebrity. And if you drive a Ford Esteem you cannot possibly have any for yourself. But it turns out 89 percent of male escorts do drive an Escort.
DUMB-ASS DRIVERS
The major problem with our highways and byways (and by the way, on the “byways,” do we need both? I think just highways will do) is not the cars or the road signs or even the cops. It’s the drivers. Everyone is tuned out, distracted, and apparently not very interested in getting to where they’re going in a timely fashion.
I know profiling is a dirty word nowadays, but it can save your life. It’s the greatest gift we have as humans. There are sea snakes that take on the color of the poisonous ones so the other creatures of the deep will fear them. They’ve taken on the profile of another creature. We need to be able to assess quickly, by appearance, what is a threat and what is not. But there’s too much of a racial element to it these days, and people are scared to admit they do it all the fucking time. Well, when it comes to driving you have to profile too. There are certain tells that make it clear when someone is a shitty, tuned-out driver that you need to get around. I saw a guy in front of me recently who had his gas cap open, with a stuffed animal sticking out of it. I pulled into the next lane and got past him with gusto. Another telltale sign that the person in front of you is going to maintain a full ten miles below the speed limit is when you can’t see their head above the headrest. That means they’re either old, Asian, or are the cholo who drives with his seat fully reclined. Either way, stay away.
You also have to factor in make, model, and year of their vehicle. There is a stretch of the 110 Freeway on my way home from LAX that is a rolling museum of some of the shittiest, least road-worthy cars imaginable. We play a game every time I’m driving this run on the way home from a gig on the road. My driving companions and I try to identify cars that cost less than five hundred dollars. Sadly it’s not a very difficult game. These are not just eyesores, they are a hazard on the road. I was recently stuck in gridlock. When I got to the source I saw that it was a stalled-out, twenty-five-year-old Aerostar minivan with a baker’s dozen of Mexicans inside. It included a primered fender held up with a tampon string. It had stalled out in the left lane and the cops were running a zigzag traffic interference around it so it could be cleared. If you’re driving a piece of shit like that, you have to drive in the right lane so you can easily pull it over in the inevitable event it throws a rod. When you have a car that’s driven the equivalent of a trip to the moon and back and your radiator hose was formerly attached to a lawn sprinkler, you should be fined if you break down. We need to start shaming these traffic jams waiting to happen. That’s a new law in my administration. All drivers of cars that cost less than eight hundred dollars according to the Kelly Blue Book shall be painted with a scarlet S.
Here’s a handy list of warning signs of the worst people on the road. Some are tuned-out menaces, others are just assholes. Be alert, and if you see this on a vehicle close to you, get away now.
STICK FIGURE FAMILY: I hereby decree that you are allowed to accelerate to ramming speed every time you see a minivan with a silhouette of the family and their names on the rear window. We get it, you didn’t pull out. Is that information you really think I’m interested in? I know you’re a parent. You’re driving a Plymouth Voyager with two hundred thousand miles on it; do you imagine I’m behind you thinking, “Who is that gay entrepreneur?” Even worse is the theme family. Oh, you’re into snowboarding? Oh, you’ve got cats? Oh, they’ve all got Mickey ears, they must really love Disney. You know what I love? Driving more than fifty-three miles an hour. How about a stick figure depiction of your family moving the fuck over and letting me get to work on time?
COP AUCTION MOTORCYCLE: One time I was driving home from Loveline. Because I did this drive all the time I knew the traffic patterns. Drew and I were talking to each other on our cell phones as we would often do on our commute home and I said to him, “What’s with all this traffic? It’s never like this.” There was a wall of cars, like a rolling start at a NASCAR race. I looked down the road a little and saw a motorcycle cop. All the L.A. drivers who’ve been traumatized like a battered wife and were scared shitless to pass were slowing down to fifty-two since the cop was going fifty-three. But because of my hypervigilance, I could tell something was off. So I started to thread my way through the crowd. When I got up close on the guy, I saw, as always, that I was right. The first thing I noticed was that he wasn’t wearing cop pants. This was just some douchebag who bought the bike at the cop auction.
This should be illegal. This is impersonating a police officer. He had the black-and-white Moto Guzzi, the two-tone helmet, and a leather jacket. When they auction off these cop bikes they should have to be painted orange like a squirt gun so people don’t get confused and start driving like Grandma when he shows up.
More importantly I want this guy drawn and quartered on the floor of the Staples Center. And I want his soul to go to hell. And if hell has a sauna in the basement that’s where I want this bag of shit to go. These guys know what they’re doing and they need to be destroyed.
A little side note on motorcycle helmets. As president, I’m not going to enforce helmet laws. If you want to spread your brains on the pavement, that’s your prerogative. But for those who are going to wear a helmet, I’m banning the flat black color. I’ve never understood why this is even an option. It’s not just the heat absorption boiling your cranium, but why are you trying to make yourself invisible to girls who are texting while driving?
MOTORCYCLE INTERCOM COUPLE: I understand riding a motorcycle and carving up a canyon, but the guys who turn their motorcycles into Winnebagos are a breed of cat that I can’t get my head around. They’ve got a loaded Gullwing and retractable training wheels and they’ve got their 250-pound old lady in the trailer attached to the back with the helmet intercom system going. There are guys in Hummers that get better gas mileage and have worse surround sound systems. I could not imagine having a bucket on my head with a direct voice line to said bucket on my wife’s head for a six-hour trip to San Francisco. I’d steer into oncoming traffic or jump off and roll over the cliff of the Pacific Coast Highway into the sweet relief of silence on the rocky shore below.
CALVIN: You see a lot of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes on the back of cars and pickup trucks. On the back of one truck he’s dragging a cross, on the next one he’s pissing on the Chevy bow tie. The kid’s got a lot of range. Either way, whether you love God or hate Chevy, how about you keep it to yo
urself and stop using poor Calvin to do your white-trash bidding.
And since we’re beating up on the honkies right now, the guy who tries to turn his average workaday pickup into a monster truck is a special kind of asshole. I call out whitey on this one in particular because white guys go high with their vehicles while Mexicans go low, but white guys are going way too high in my opinion. In general pickup-truck guys tend to be the worst offenders in the “hey, look at me” category. People who drive pickups really want you to know what they’re into, whether it is the Jet Ski in the bed or the gun racks on the back.
ANNOYED HEAD SHAKE: You’ve all had this happen. You’re slowly and cautiously backing out of a driveway but there’s a van or a cube truck parked to one side and you can’t see oncoming traffic. Then as you get farther out you see someone coming, so you hit the brake. They go past you without any incident, but as they pass you get the slow down with the head shake. You know that “what kind of animal would attempt to back out of his driveway during daylight hours?” look. As if to say, “What’s wrong with you? No traffic cones? No motorcycle cop waving traffic through? No guy in an orange vest holding a flashlight? You’re just flying out of your driveway willy-nilly at the breakneck speed of zero miles per hour?!!!”