by Adam Carolla
Looking back, I think rather than suffering through the several years of misery you’ll soon read about I should have just bitten the bullet, gotten it on with the gay guy, and made him my sugar daddy. But behindsight is 20/20.
EVENTUALLY my stepmom decided I needed to grow up and move out of my bedroom/garage. It was her idea of tough love, and my dad went along with it. He isn’t big on confrontation. He’s just a piece of driftwood calmly going down the stream of life avoiding the rapids and the whirlpools and forever flowing toward the great storm drain in the sky. Plus they needed a place for his ’79 Buick Regal.
I ended up in a one-bedroom apartment on Laurel Canyon Boulevard in North Hollywood. This was the infamous apartment where I lived with The Weez. After my parole from North Hollywood High in 1982 and The Weez’s time-served release in 1983, we discovered each other. Maybe it was our mutual love of cars or the fact that he always had a bong loaded and ready to go, or maybe it was the VCR and the Taboo II VHS cassette. You have to remember that The Weez had actual possessions—a TV set, stereo, et cetera—so therefore in my mind, he was rich. It was probably all of the above and maybe just a little pixie dust that had us looking for our first apartment together.
Our unit was on the second story and faced the west. It was right off of Laurel Canyon, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the world. Summers in the San Fernando Valley saw many days in triple digits. And unfortunately for us the apartment had no central air, no swamp cooler, not even a window-mounted unit. Even hours after the sun had gone down the stucco on the outside of the building would be hot enough to fry an egg on, thus turning the apartment into a kiln. Yet The Weez would quickly fall asleep on the shared futon in our Easy-Bake bedroom while I paced and panted like a Saint Bernard at Burning Man. The only way I could fall asleep was to stand in the shower, douse myself in cold water, dive onto the futon without drying myself off, and fire up the oscillating fan. When The Weez’s clock radio would go off at six A.M., my pillow would smell like mildew. But I was fresh as a daisy and looking forward to a day of toiling in the sun with illegal aliens.
As I said, The Weez and I shared a futon. Not in a gay way: It was out of desperation. Let me stress how horrible futons are. A futon is the world’s most uncomfortable sofa that folds out into the world’s most uncomfortable bed. I’m convinced the word futon is Japanese for “bear trap.” I happen to know this is a secret ploy to pay us back for Hiroshima.
I have a theory about mattress height and its relationship to a person’s level of success. When you hit the optimal distance between the top of your mattress and your floor, then life is good. Here’s how it works. If your mattress is lying directly on the floor, you’re a loser. If it’s on a box spring that’s on the floor, you’ve added seven inches but you’re probably still working at a car wash. If you add the five inches for a cheap metal frame, you’re in better shape and probably somewhere in the middle class. Conversely, you don’t want the mattress to be too high off the ground. That puts you on a makeshift loft in a bachelor apartment or prison bunk. I became obsessed with this idea one day and went around measuring various mattresses. After exhaustive and costly research, I’ve determined that 30.3 inches is the target we should all strive for. That’s the height of a good pillow-top mattress on a nice box spring and frame.
Our one-bedroom had one bathroom whose upkeep was a notch below a Greyhound bus depot in Beirut. We had a tub that was in constant use. Not for baths, but as a vomitubium. That’s another sign of where you are in life. When you’re vomiting into the tub and sitting on the toilet simultaneously because your bathroom is so small, that’s not just a sign you had a bad night or had some bad clams. That means you’re having a bad life.
The one nice room in the place was the kitchen, and we had a diner booth in there. It was a burgundy Naugahyde diner booth that fit perfectly into the breakfast nook. I built a table to go with it so it looked like a fifties diner. Except instead of drinking milkshakes and listening to Buddy Holly, we were doing tequila shots and listening to Van Halen. We didn’t even have a normal shot glass; we had a jumbo version with two lines on it. The line at the midway mark was labeled HOG. An inch above that was a line that read MAN. I’d usually opt for what I called “the Mog,” halfway between Man and Hog. But back to the booth.
A booth is a magical place filled with good friends, warm pie, and warmer memories. Nothing bad has ever happened in a booth. The booth’s evil cousin is the chamber—the gas chamber, torture chamber, chambering a round, the chamber pot. Nothing good ever happened in a chamber.
A little backstory on our booth. I managed to get through eleven years of organized football without ever damaging my knees. But when I was playing a pickup football game at age twenty-one, while running for a touchdown in the open field, I heard a pop. My right knee was momentarily dislocated. When I hobbled into the apartment that afternoon, I said to The Weez, “I think I blew my knee out.” He said, “That’s bad timing because we have to grab this booth that’s in the back of the Bla Bla Café on Ventura before somebody else takes it. It won’t be there tomorrow morning.” I told him I shouldn’t be moving furniture, to which The Weez responded, “Don’t be a pussy.” This is another difference between men and women. If Janet told Chrissy she hurt her knee blowing Jack, Chrissy would say, “Oh, sweetie. Let me get you an ice pack,” not call her a fag and tell her, “We’re picking up Mr. Furley’s player piano tonight.”
Smash-cut to me pushing a huge diner booth up a flight of stairs with a blown-out knee. The booth was so big that I had to pull the pins on the hinges and remove the front door of the apartment. But even then it wouldn’t quite make it through. This was now midnight, and my knee was throbbing. I told The Weez he was on his own and went to bed. He took it to the alley behind the Jack in the Box and broke it into three pieces with a hammer and reassembled it in the apartment. The next day I was greeted with a shiny red diner booth and a swollen black-and-blue knee. That’s where my self-esteem was at. Six months later, I had my meniscus surgically repaired.
What the fuck is up with the human body? As I write this, I have a torn meniscus in the same knee. This time the weapon of choice was a jump rope. I’ve skipped rope on almost a daily basis for at least the last twenty years. I can do it in my sleep and am so smooth I could do it with a tumbler of Sunny D on my head and not spill a drop. But yet the other night, five minutes into my routine, my meniscus decided it was time to tear again. One meniscus tear from running in a straight line, the other from skipping rope. This is in a life littered with street fights, kickboxing tournaments, catastrophic scaffolding failures, and subsequent falls with nary a complaint from Mr. Meniscus. The only good news is that according to my calculations, the next time my meniscus is due to tear I’ll be in an urn.
Our building was managed by a guy named Al. He was a cryptic, weird perv who lived beneath us. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, a windbreaker, had a ton of pomade in his hair, and constantly carried two things. The first was a beer in a worn-out styrofoam koozie. It had the logo for some beer that they haven’t made since the seventies, and you could see the indentations where his grip had slowly worn it down like the Colorado River shaping the Grand Canyon. I’m constantly amazed by how long dumb people hang on to ten-cent items. But I digress. The second thing Al always carried was a piece. He had a .38 Special on him at all times, and it was loaded. He said it was for security, but I actually felt less safe around him. We found out about this fact in a weird way. We lived directly above him and made a lot of noise, as you’ll read about a few short paragraphs from now. I asked him one day if our constant raucous partying was cutting into his sleep. He said he wore earplugs, but not because of us. Then he asked, “You want to know why?” This is a question that never gets pulled out when the person being asked actually does want to know why. I reluctantly said yes. He lifted his windbreaker, revealed a revolver tucked into his waistband, and said, “In case I have to use this.” What’s the plan? You wear earplugs so if you ha
ve to put a cap in a guy who breaks into your apartment you won’t damage your eardrums, but you wouldn’t be able to hear the guy breaking into your kitchen in the first place? Al slept like he lived at a gun range.
The only thing Al loved more than his gun was his garden hose. It was his prized possession. It was on one of those rolling spools made of cheap PVC plastic tubing. But he treated it like a Fabergé egg. He kept it inside his apartment to protect it. You know, from all those international hose thieves you read about in the paper. He wouldn’t even let me borrow it the one time I asked to hose off my porch. He said he didn’t have one. I could see it behind him in his kitchen through the screen door, but he was trying to do that blocking move where he stood in front of it. “No, I don’t have a hose.” As if I hadn’t lived there for three years and seen him use it a thousand times. I pointed it out and he said, “Oh, that hose.” He then proceeded to tell me he had been entrusted with the care of the hose by the owner so he couldn’t let it out of his sight. But if I wanted to schedule it, he could come up and hose off my porch for me. I love when people get overprotective of their valueless junk. Al acted like I’d asked to take his mother to the Poconos to fuck her over the Labor Day weekend. What did he think was going to happen—I’d throw the hose over my shoulder and make a break for it shouting, “See you, sucker! I’m heading to Mexico to start a new life”?
Al was, as I said, a perv. He would often say about the many ladies we had over, “Why don’t you send one of them down to me?” These were nineteen-year-old junior-college students. Did he think we were going to tell our chick friends, “Hey, go downstairs and suck off our sixty-three-year-old apartment manager who lives with his dog Skipper”?
One evening there was a knock on the door. I opened it to find Al standing there holding a giant cardboard box. He stepped into our living room and announced he’d brought some gifts the guy in unit 5 had left behind when he moved out. He opened the box to reveal a murderer’s row of dildos, vibrators, strap-ons, and butt plugs. They were all out of their shrink-wrap and were what auto dealers would euphemistically describe as “previously owned.” They were used. Al set the box down and headed back to his apartment to rape Skipper. But before he left, he doubled down on the creepitude by telling us he also found a blow-up doll but was keeping that one for himself. Now, I’m not uptight or a germophobe (see previous Tijuana chapter), but even I announced I wasn’t going near that box. These had been in strangers’ orifices. And this was long before Purell. It was the mid-eighties, which might as well have just been called the mid-AIDSies. Fast-forward twenty-four hours. One of our female friends had donned the strap-on and was chasing me around while Ray bashed me in the head with a dildo the size of a six-foot sub.
Our place was a mess. We had two rabbits and a kitten named Max. One of our girlfriends got the kitten from someone outside a supermarket, and somehow we ended up taking care of it. The Weez was the one who brought home the rabbits. He thought it would be fun to get stoned and watch them run around the apartment. And he was right. There is nothing cuter in the world than a kitten wrestling with an overgrown rabbit. Unlike the human residents of the apartment, the rabbits were well fed. They’d eat whole heads of lettuce. They were “dwarf rabbits,” and the guy who sold them to The Weez said they wouldn’t get any bigger. They started out the size of an apple, but within a month they had gotten up to watermelon and had outgrown their cage. So we’d let the rabbits just hop around the apartment shitting pellets all over the place. (One of the benefits of having rabbits as pets is that you can clean up their shit with a pool cue.) As they loped around the place, Max the kitten would pounce on them. He’d be biting their ears and getting lost in their big ball of fur. A lot of this interspecies wrestling would happen in the infield of our slot-car track.
Keep that image in your mind for the next story. We had bounced our rent check. Shocking, I know. So I needed to go down to the bank to deposit some money. On the way there, I saw a guy selling speakers out of a van and of course being the wise financier that I was, bought the speakers instead of depositing the money. A moment about vans. A lot of stuff in the seventies and early eighties happened in vans. They used to be cool back then. You’d customize them. There was a guy in my neighborhood growing up who had RADICAL RICH written on the side of his van in rainbow tape. Now vans fall firmly into my more-harm-than-good category. For every piece of furniture that has been moved with a van there are ten hookers, schoolkids, or CNN camera crews who have been abducted in one. But back to the speakers. I brought them home and immediately said, “We’ve got to test these out.” The Weez hijacked his brother’s CD player, which was brand-new technology at the time, and we put on Van Halen’s “Eruption.” In the midst of Eddie’s screaming guitar solo I thought I felt some vibration that wasn’t coming from the speakers and told, nay, shouted at, The Weez to turn it down. I went to the door. It was the owner of the building, Jim. He was there to confront us about the bounced rent check. He said he could hear the noise blaring from our apartment in his car as he was driving up. Please take a moment to picture yourself as a landlord: You’re driving to your building, you’re a full block away, and you can hear what is to your fifty-plus-year-old mind an ungodly racket blasting from one of your units. You then knock on the door to ask about a bounced rent check and a collection of stoners opens it to reveal a kitten fighting two rabbits in the middle of a slot-car track on a carpet covered in shit pellets and a capsized bong.
We eventually had to get rid of the rabbits, so The Weez killed them. Not with a cleaver—he just thought it would be a good idea to release them into the wild. So he brought them up into the hills where he grew up and set them free. Except that those hills are full of coyotes. You can’t have a cat or even a small dog in that area because a coyote will jump into your yard and eat it. The Weez went past those houses way into the brushy hills and said, “Be free.” I’m sure the rabbits were pounced on by coyotes before he even got to his car. How did he think they were going to survive? They went from a mall pet shop to our living room to the wild. The only way they made it through the first night was if the coyotes thought it was a trap. I like to imagine two coyotes having this conversation. “Check it out. There’s two de-clawed morbidly obese rabbits some stoner Jew just dropped off. Let’s go get ’em. We’ll eat like kings.” Then the other coyote says, “Hang on, Burt, this is way too good to be true. Nobody could be that stupid. Those things have got to be filled with gunpowder.”
One of the classier touches of the apartment was the Centipede arcade game. The Weez’s father had done a transmission job (his dad being one of the eight Jews on the planet who does automotive work) and had received the game as trade. It ended up in our kitchen. Initially The Weez set it up to work for free until I yelled at him that we were losing money on the deal. People would come into our place to nail their girlfriends, smoke our weed, use our phone, and eat what little food we had, so I wanted a couple of quarters in return. Once every six months we’d remember we had $41 in quarters sitting in the machine. And despite the fact that we were practically broke, we decided it was “free money” and thus “party money.” It was immediately spent on a dime bag of weed (paid for in quarters). We’d then take the rest to the Sherman Oaks Galleria, the mall where they filmed Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and ironically wasted the quarters playing arcade games. If we had anything left, we’d walk across the mall to the theater, catch a movie, and end the day with a slice of pizza.
The point is that we were working adults; we weren’t in junior high. We had slot cars and bongs and rabbits and arcade games but no health insurance. We were idiots. To illustrate this point, please enjoy this list of things we did that normal adults don’t do.
• Long before the Seinfeld “master of your domain” episode, The Weez, some of our other bonehead friends, and I had a contest to see who could go the longest without masturbating. The winner was to receive a sweatshirt that read COLD JERKY on it, but it was really more about pride
. The current record was twenty-one days. Unfortunately for The Weez, he thought it was nineteen. So that day he was loaded for bear and ready to have at himself. When I informed him that the record stood at twenty-one, the normally mild-mannered 127-pounder lunged at me, grabbed me by the lapels, pushed me against the wall and yelled, “DON’T FUCK WITH ME!”
• Grabbing the casing above the door leading into the kitchen like a chin-up bar with my fingertips, I attempted to thread my legs through the opening in my arms, got my feet tangled up, and landed directly on my head.
• To protect the innocent, who now have children and careers, I’ll keep this generic. One of the guys I was hanging with at the time brought a sack of bootleg Quaaludes back to the apartment. Another buddy inhaled fourteen of them, washing them down with tequila. This guy had recently nearly OD’d. So the buyer of the ’ludes freaked out, grabbed the bag, and ran for the bathroom to flush them. I jumped in front of the door to block him. So he took the next logical step, ran out to the side yard, and buried them.
• Then there was the time The Weez ignited a fart and I actually lit a cigarette off the flame that shot out of his ass. By the end of this book you’ll hear a few more stories about lighting farts. I wish I didn’t love it as much as I do. Years later when I was telling this story to Dr. Drew, I lit some farts in the studio. Drew is a classy and, dare I say, uptight guy. But he went from disgusted to fascinated to doubled-over laughing. There’s no one on the planet who wouldn’t laugh at that. James Lipton would bust up if The Weez lit a fart at Sir Laurence Olivier’s funeral.