Not Taco Bell Material

by Adam Carolla

  I grabbed some Easy-Off oven cleaner to try to wipe down the avocado-colored hood of the stove vent. (God, our color palate was so fucked-up in the seventies.) To my shock and dismay, it took the paint off. What kind of product would work perfectly on the inside of what it is supposed to clean but destroy the exterior? Good work, engineers. Well done. The place was a disaster, wax and smoke everywhere and smeared avocado paint on the oven hood. The kitchen window was wide open, and I was trying to fan the place out with a towel.

  Enter Este’s dad. He pulled up in his Ranchero and stopped right in front of the open window. I thought, Holy shit, turned to Chris, and said in a tone like someone in Alien or Jaws, “He’s here.” I thought the guy was going to kill us. Chris panicked and hid. Then, like something out of a movie, Este’s dad stuck his head out of the car window, looked at me, and yelled in his best El Al security voice, “Where is Este?” Thinking they might be the last words I ever uttered on the planet, I stammered out, “Sh … sh … she’s not h-h … here.” Then, against all logic, he said, “Okay,” settled back into his car, and took off. What were the chances he wouldn’t walk in? The fact that this guy drove to his house, saw a sixteen-year-old in his kitchen, and decided not to enter was, as his people would say, a mitzvah. I then found Chris cowering in a broom closet and yelled at him for abandoning me.

  That night I got a call from Este. She said, “Someone wants to speak to you,” and handed the phone to her mom. It was horrible and tense. She simply said, “What went on here?” I had to play dumb. “What are you talking about?” I said. She went insane on me. They had just remodeled the house and they were very particular about the kitchen. She shouted that I needed to replace the entire stove and the curtains, then said, “Put your father on the phone.” Luckily, he was out on an elephant hunt after finishing the Paris-to-Dakar rally. Actually, he was home doing his best to blend into the sofa upholstery.

  After an hour on the phone with her irate mother, I hung up. The next day, Este called and said she was going to her grandmother’s house in a town a little outside of L.A. and that the least I could do was come and keep her company on the ride. I said okay, she came, pulled up my driveway, and honked the horn. I bounded out of the house to find her mom sitting in the passenger seat. Now I was thinking, “Holy hell, I have to drive to Cerritos with this woman who wants to murder me.” Needless to say, it was a very long ride, but I was able to smooth it over and didn’t have to pay for anything. Not that I could have anyway.

  It goes without saying that high school is the time when you start experimenting with alcohol. Everyone loves a good drunk story, so here is my first. I was with a guy named John Tyler. I was sixteen at the time, and he was a couple years older, so the peer pressure had turned to beer pressure. The weekend before, he had gotten some Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve and we were chugging them in his kitchen. But I was unable to keep up. The beers were bubbling in my nose and swelling my stomach. I said, “I don’t mind the alcohol. I can hold my booze like any sixteen-year-old. But it’s the carbonation.” The next weekend our buddy Chet, who worked at the AMPM convenience store around the corner, ripped off one of those big jugs of … hold on, I have to take a minute to think about big jugs … okay, I’m back. He had ripped off one of those big jugs of Boone’s Farm white wine. You know, the big, cheap, glass kind with the handle you put your thumb through. He took it back to Tyler’s place. So John said to me, “This doesn’t have bubbles in it. Start chugging.”

  Imagine taking white wine—sweet, cheap white wine—and filling a tumbler with it and downing it as fast as you can. You can do it with that stuff in a way that you can’t with vodka or beer. It’s almost like Gatorade or apple juice. So I was chugging full sixteen-ounce glasses of white wine. Glug glug glug. “Hit me again,” I said with pride. Glug glug glug glug glug. “No problemo.” It went down very easily. I would soon find out it came up very easily, too.

  We got in the back of a VW station wagon and headed out to a party. John had two sweaters that were exactly the same. They were both V-necks, one red and one blue. I remember this because he gave me the blue one so we could go out to drink in a park, a little pregame before the party. But before we ever got there, I leaned over to John and said, “I think I’m going to … BLAAA​RRGGG​GGHHH!” I yakked all over John and simultaneously ruined his night and two of his sweaters.

  Later on I was able to crawl up my driveway and sleep on the asphalt until the morning. I remember two things from the following day. First, I had bits of gravel in my cheeks from sleeping on the driveway, which was falling apart. (Yes, the Carollas didn’t maintain or repair their driveway. Shocking, I know.) The second thing I remember is that my eyelids were bloodshot from heaving. Not my eyes, my eyelids. I had yakked so powerfully that I had blown out my eyelids. The strain had broken all the blood vessels. It would be like if someone said, “Take a shit as hard as you can for twenty minutes.”

  But now I’m forty-seven and I’m drinking as I write this. That’s the message to the kids—have a little something called grit. Get right back on that drunken horse. I’m not one of those pussies who says, “I learned my lesson.” I absolutely did not learn my lesson. I vomited many more times in my career. I have thrown up because of booze at least forty times since then. Dr. Drew is always sickened by that statistic, and I have to defend my honor by explaining that at least half of those times were at my own hands, or to be more accurate, fingers. I did it to myself to be able to go to sleep. This does not help my argument.

  One of the worst parts of my high school house was not actually due to the structure itself. The new neighborhood was nice, but one of the residents had a wild dog. Literally. They had a dog that was half dingo. His name was Moon and he was so greasy and weird his coat had a bluish tint. This mutt terrorized any moving object on the street—snarling at squirrels, growling at delivery guys, and chasing children on bikes. My dad could barely muster the energy for a conversation, never mind a confrontation, but even he called the neighbors out on this one. By their own admission the dog was half wild, but they refused to chain it up or keep it indoors. They were probably scared of it too.

  One bright sunny day when I was walking home from the park, I looked up to see Moon approaching me. It was tense, think O.K. Corral. I froze in my tracks and considered slowly backing away. But I decided if I stood my ground and asserted my dominance, he would see me as the alpha in the neighborhood and leave me the fuck alone. Someone had to step up and be a hero. And that person was a fifteen-year-old Adam Carolla. I’d had enough. I took a deep breath, got into the linebacker stance, and shouted “Come on!” at him. I then took an aggressive half step in his direction. He backed off a step but then took three forward. This pattern continued until he closed the twelve-foot distance between us. When he got two feet away he lunged at me. I thought I wasn’t going to live to see the eleventh grade. I hadn’t yet even discovered the joy of masturbation. Hours of Swedish Erotica flashed before my eyes. I knew then I had something to live for. He chomped down, but thankfully he only managed to get my pant leg. This caused me to do the Keystone Cop stepping-on-a-banana-peel routine, landing squarely on my back.

  So I struggled free of Moon’s grip and ran back to my house. Inexplicably, Moon just walked away, perhaps to go and floss my Toughskins out of his teeth.

  With tears in my eyes, I grabbed the first sharp object I could find: a sprinkler key. I was going to put this literal son of a bitch down. But my dad, who for some reason had ventured outdoors, was standing on the lawn, stopped me, and convinced me to drop the sprinkler key. It was a very Johnny Cash “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” moment.

  It was while I was living at my dad’s second house that I got into the workforce and started a long string of shitty jobs.

  My first attempt at employment was at the Taco Bell on the corner of Colfax and Magnolia, across from my high school. It was not meant to be: I put in the application and was promptly rejected. Seriously. Rejected from Tac
o Bell. A guy who was probably only three years older than me and barely made it out of high school but had a “manager” pin decided I was just not Taco Bell material. Have you been to a Taco Bell? Are those employees the cream of the crop? I don’t know what I did on that application, but it seems to me that if you didn’t fill it out with your fist clenching a crayon, you’d be in. But not the Ace man.

  You know what it’s like being rejected from Taco Bell? Can your self-esteem get any lower than that moment? “Sorry, buddy. We’ve got retarded and elderly people to hire. Actually, Dennis over there is old and retarded, so you’re definitely out. Bottom line is we just don’t trust you to make Bell Beefers.”

  Looking back, I wonder if I fucked up the application. Because even now I fuck up paperwork. Can we all get on the same page about what goes above and below the line on applications? I’m forty-seven and I’m still writing my address where my name should be. It’s pathetic asking the receptionist for Liquid Paper.

  A couple years later I also applied at Hot Dog on a Stick, because they paid above minimum wage. It was about two and a half bucks at the time, but they paid twice that. But this time I was rejected because of my hot dog on a stick. I had a penis. Hot Dog on a Stick only hires chicks. Where was Gloria Allred when I needed her?

  Still stinging from my Taco Bell rejection, I headed over to the Studio City McDonald’s. It’s still there, on Ventura. Unfortunately, I filled out the application correctly and ended up getting the job. It was 1980, the summer between sophomore and junior year. People think of the eighties as the go-go eighties, the era of yuppies and Wall Street and “Greed is good.” I ushered in the eighties getting $2.22 an hour to work a grill.

  My manager’s name was Ken. He was a fat black guy who took his job very seriously. And at first I did, too. There’s always that moment in a young man’s life when he’s at his first shitty job and thinking, “Oh, yeah, one day I’m going to be managing this McDonald’s.” That’s as big as your dreams can get at the time. Or at least mine. I remember thinking it when I was getting the speech from Ken about how to really work the grill. Ken would point out one of the older guys and say something like, “You see Trent over there on the grill? He’s got six years on that grill. He knows instinctively when the patty needs to be seared. He’s that in tune with the meat. And you know what he’s pulling down? He’s making three sixty-five an hour. Seriously. He’s looking at a used TR-7. He hasn’t pulled the trigger on it yet …” Then I was thinking, “Wow, man. Three years from now, people will be talking about me. When the rookies come in, I’ll be the guy behind the grill shopping for a used TR-7.” The beautiful thing about being a human is that eventually you wake up. For me, it was about two hours into my first shift. I looked at that guy and thought, “Fuck this. I’m taking a piss in the freezer and getting the fuck out of here.”

  As I said, Ken was all business. There was a sign behind the grill that read TIME TO LEAN, TIME TO CLEAN. The other absurd thing was that on my first day, they sat me down to watch a training video. That video started with how to handle a hostage takeover situation. It had a reenactment that showed if violent gunmen were to take over your particular McDonald’s franchise, don’t be a hero. Just do what they say and wait for the police to arrive. Yeah. I’m making less than three bucks an hour. What do they expect, I’m going to hop the counter, shout, “Not on my watch!” and try to take them out with a spork? It’s more likely I’d help them clean out the register and jump into the van with them.

  The other policy Ken took very seriously was the one about no rubber-soled shoes. They didn’t want you wearing Converse hightops or Vans. You needed leather-soled dress shoes. So you’d end up wearing a shit-brown McDonald’s uniform with a paper hat but wing-tip shoes like an old-time gangster. The only pair of dress shoes I had were from my ninth-grade graduation, but this was a year later and my foot had grown a size and a half and they didn’t really fit anymore. But since new shoes were out of the question, I crammed my feet into them. As I mopped the floor I was sliding all over the place because it was wet and greasy and my ill-fitting shoes had no traction.

  I wasn’t allowed to work the register, so I did my time behind the grill. Which is pure misery. You lean over something that feels as hot as the sun for hours, and the sizzling of Grade D meat is your only companion. That is, until a little light goes off when it was time to flip them. A pigeon could do that gig with some birdseed and twenty minutes of training. My downfall was the three-tiered toaster used for the Big Mac’s three buns. I’d always end up toasting the wrong side—the top part with the sesame seeds. If you got a Big Mac where the bun was toasted on the top, that was an Ace Carolla signature burger. I still remember the lingo. “Burger’s up. Wrap please.” “Cheese count on Macs, please?” These terms are forever infused in my memory like the smell of onions has been forever infused into my cuticles.

  The only thing worse than working at McDonald’s is when your friends see you working at McDonald’s. They’d be coming home from the beach, stop in for a burger, and I’d be there in my uniform doing a sweep and a mop decked out in the brown gi. They were having a great time, spending their parents’ money on shakes and fries, and I was miserable. One summer day Ken yelled, “Give me a sweep and a mop of the outdoor dining area.” As if I wasn’t depressed enough while sweeping outside in the hotter-than-shit weather, some ass-wipe kids came by. They were in that sweet spot where they had just hit puberty and thought they could take on the world. You know, that age when you’re oozing with sarcasm and covered in acne, on the verge of a learner’s permit, just felt your first boobie, and are empowered by your other fourteen-year-old jack-off buddies. These rich kids circled the parking lot on their skateboards and started taunting me. “Hey, you missed a spot.” I let it slide. Then the next kid was like, “Hey, say hi to the Hamburglar and Mayor McCheese.” I begrudgingly took it, but was starting to get fed up. They were like Japanese Zeros doing a raid on Pearl Harbor. They kept getting closer and closer and more and more bold with each insult they launched. So I started timing them, and when I saw the ringleader, the tip of the asshole spear, take one foot pump, then another, on his third push forward I sprang into action. I dropped my mop and lunged toward him. Five steps later, I was on top of him. I grabbed the kid and pinned him to the hood of a car. I didn’t hit him; I just said, “Who’s in charge now, bitch?” He started screaming for his life, and his other chickenshit friends took off. It makes you think about what a different time that was. He was being a little shit and he knew he had it coming. Today he would have returned with his dad, threatening to sue me, Ken, and the McDonald’s corporation.

  One of the few perks was that I’d occasionally get some free food. Not because there was some employee freebie program. Every so often the call would go out that someone had to throw away a pile of Filet-O-Fish sandwiches because they sat under the heat lamp for more than two hours. Being me, I could not let this bounty go to waste. I would take the tray of dried-out, overheated filets, walk out to the dumpster, check to see if anyone was looking, and shove as many down my gullet as I possibly could. I knew I was on the clock and I could only be gone as long as it would take to toss them out. I barely even chewed them. There are pelicans who have eaten fish with more elegance and dignity.

  I only lasted about three months. On more than one occasion I seriously contemplated staging an accident and putting my face in the deep fryer in the hope of getting out from behind the grill and onto disability.

  I had this thought about name tags. I had to wear one at McDonald’s. As far as your job and your name placard go, the farther away from your chest the better. If your name is pinned to your vest, that’s a shitty job. If your name is on your desk, that’s better. The best scenario most of you can hope for is to have your name on the door outside your office. That’s good, solid, middle-class, middle-management stuff. If your name is on the directory on the first floor of the building you’re in really good shape: You own the tax-preparation ser
vice or the dental practice. If you have your name on the outside of the building your office is in, that’s great. You not only have your own company, but you have enough departments to warrant your own building. Now, if your name is on a building on the other side of an ocean, you’ve really arrived.

  After my retirement from McDonald’s—by the way, my final press conference announcing I was stepping down was quite moving—I ended up at Flask Liquor on Ventura Boulevard. My job was to deliver booze.

  This job was the second in my long streak (which continues today) of jobs in which I never got a tip. At the same time I was schlepping hooch for Flask, The Weez worked for a place called Valley Stores, also delivering booze. Except he would deliver it a bottle or two at a time, and when he handed off the twelve bucks’ worth of Cutty Sark, the guy would give him an extra five. I delivered liquor by the case to weddings or events at the movie studios. So I’d wheel in the cases on a hand truck and the receptionist or wedding planner would tell me where to put them and that would be that. I probably dropped off $250,000 worth of alcohol and got $0 in tips.