Not Taco Bell Material

by Adam Carolla

  It had a vinyl bench seat and no headrests. If you hit a pothole, you’d whack your head on the window behind you. In a world full of DOT regulations that I usually bitch about, this is one I could have used. If I was rear-ended, my head would have gone through the back window at literally breakneck speed. And it was uninsured. Because of the neighborhood, I knew my truck would be stolen immediately, so I went to the Hollywood Pep Boys, bought a toggle switch, a few feet of wire, and a can of brown spray paint. I went under the truck and cut the wire that went to the fuel pump. Then I hooked up my wires, dragged it to the front of the truck, opened up a hole, popped in the toggle switch, and put it underneath the bench seat. My plan was to be able to hit the toggle and cut off the fuel supply. The beauty of this plan is that the truck would start up but would only run for about a block and a half, as there was no fuel being pumped. For you gearheads out there, the truck was not injected and the few blocks it ran was off of what was left in the float bowl of the carb.

  Here’s why I’m a genius. This system meant the thief would try to steal it, but only get a block away before the truck “died.” He would just assume he had the horrible luck of running out of gas and scamper off to his next victim. And it worked. Three times. All three times my truck got stolen, I walked around and found it within a block or two. Before I’d start looking I’d have to pick a direction. “I wonder if they went north this time.” I’d also have to remember if I hit the toggle a block before I got home to burn some of the fuel in the float bowl, giving the thief even less range.

  Even if they couldn’t steal the truck itself, I still had to worry about the stereo. But I had a MacGyver-esque solution for that, too. It had a brown dashboard, so I took a can of brown spray paint, put a little piece of tape over the digital readout of my Sony stereo, and then spray-painted it. Guys wrapping T-shirts around their hands and punching out windows to steal stereos are not music lovers. They’re just looking for something to trade for a hit of crack. So what’s the junkie gonna do with a stereo that’s been spray-painted? Clean it off meticulously so he can sell it? No, he’s gonna move on to the next car. All three times the truck got stolen, the stereo stayed in the dash. It’s like firing a snot rocket onto your own waffle so you can leave it at the table while you hit the bathroom and return without it being eaten. (By the way, this is a true technique I saw Ray implement with his brother in 1981.)

  I did have to start the truck with a flathead screwdriver after one of those assholes popped out my ignition. I just kept the screwdriver on the seat, and it became my key. And because I used to keep the door unlocked so said junkies wouldn’t bust out my window, I didn’t need to worry about the key to the door. This led to a funny moment. One time I got pulled over by the LAPD. A cop had seen the popped ignition and the screwdriver and thought I stole the truck. Little did he know I was just too poor and pathetic to get it fixed. Joke’s on you, buddy.

  Our place was too small and the neighborhood was too shady. Lindsey and I needed to get the hell out of there. We retreated to my old stomping ground: From our apartment you could see the North Hollywood High football field. It was a one-bed/one-bath with a small loft that gave it a high ceiling and the illusion of space even if there was barely any.

  We were officially living together, but it was far from domestic bliss. In fact, there was even some domestic violence. One time I was out playing softball with the fellas. When I finally returned home, she was pissed off. I was supposed to come back after the game but instead went out and got loaded. She started haranguing me, but I didn’t want to deal with her noise so I went to the bedroom to lie down. As I passed out in my softball uniform, she angrily said, “Get up.” I stood up, and as soon as my still-cleated feet were under me, she punched me square in the face, knocking me back down on the bed. She was a chick, I used to box, and I was drunk so I didn’t really feel it. But I remember having this thought as she stomped out of the room: “Good, I win.” That may seem like an odd thing to have in your head at a moment like that, but the argument was over—and since she had escalated it to that point, now she was the one who needed to say sorry. I’d wake up the next morning to an apology, some French toast, and maybe a blow job.

  It wasn’t all bad. Lindsey was supportive of my goal of getting into show business. I had taken an honest stab at comedy and had hit the ceiling at the Groundlings (the infamous improv training program/troupe that produced Phil Hartman, Pee-wee Herman, and Will Ferrell among others), but she came to me one day with an ad from the Drama-Logue about the formation of a new improv troupe that would become the Acme Theatre. I detailed my time with Acme in my last book, so I won’t include it here. If you need a refresher I suggest you go out and buy several hundred copies—preferably in hardcover.

  While Lindsey was a fan of my improv, I can’t say the same for my grandfather. One night we had him and my grandmother over for dinner at our place. Being a writer, my grandfather said he wasn’t that big a fan of Acme and didn’t appreciate improv in general. Of course, Grandma had to dogpile on this as well. During minute fifteen of their critique of improv and my choice to do it, Lindsey, who’d had a couple glasses of wine, told them to shut up. To me, my grandparents’ complaining was just standard operating procedure, and I didn’t really notice it. To Lindsey it was shocking. This happens often: Outsiders witness my family’s boundless lack of enthusiasm for my efforts, are baffled by it, and occasionally, if they’ve had enough to drink, will tell them to shut the hell up.

  A similar situation happened years later the first time I brought my wife to visit my father’s house. She walked around the place and eventually noticed that while there were many pictures of my family, mostly stepfamily, there were literally no pictures of me. Not as a child, not as an adult, nothing. She was disgusted.

  While I toiled at improv with Acme, hoping it would lead to something, I made ends meet with more construction. I was working for myself, building cabinets, fences, and anything else people wanted me to do for fifteen bucks an hour. (Thank God none of my clients directed gay porn because I probably would have just said, “Eh, fifteen an hour.”) One job, like so many others that had come before it, involved putting in some drywall. Let me just do a quick PSA against drywalling while stoned. It’s already boring work, and the clock really slows down when you’re high. You start at seven A.M. and by 8:15 it feels like you’ve been there all day. It’s the longest day of your life. And you don’t even do the job right. One time I ended up covering the rough electrical—switches, outlets, junction boxes—and the electrician had to poke holes in the drywall with a coat hanger to find all of his work. It was the poor man’s version of a metal detector. That was the last time I got stoned on the job.

  I also took some other truly odd jobs. One of the many low points that come to mind is the time I auditioned for Party Pals. I swung by my friend Paul Rugg’s apartment; he was out of work and also a member of Acme. He said, “I have an audition. Want to come along?” I said, “What’s it for?” He said, “It’s for one of those companies where you dress up like Batman or a Ninja Turtle and make balloon animals at kids’ parties.” I said I’d go but just to watch and make fun of him. Twenty minutes later, we pulled up at a strip mall in Encino to the world headquarters of Party Pals. Sadly, there were about twenty people there, all hoping to beat the odds and have the chance to don the stinky turtle outfit and spend the day getting kicked in the shins by kids for sixty bucks a party. One minute we were all standing around a waiting room, and the next thing I knew some lady with a clipboard said, “Let’s do an improv called ‘the machine.’ ” This is a very basic physical improvisational exercise in which one person starts a repetitive physical movement, like a moving part of a machine, and then the next person connects to that person with their own repetitive moving part. I thought, “This is gonna be good. I can’t wait to see Paul make an ass of himself.” Naturally, the woman with the clipboard looked directly at me and said, “Why don’t you start?” A combination of low self-
esteem, extensive improv training, and adrenaline made me immediately snap into action. I stood there silently in front of nineteen people and made a goofy train locomotion movement with my arms while simultaneously bending and straightening my knees. After doing it for what felt like a lifetime, I looked at her and said, “Should I be making a noise?” She, in her most condescending voice, said, “It’d be nice.” My little plan had backfired. Eventually the rest of the desperate actors were forced into this pathetic dance until it abruptly ended with a thud. One of the more ambitious gals had gotten down on her hands and knees under a folding table, and as she began her mechanical movement, she mashed her head into the sharp steel support rail that ran under the table. And that actress’s name is Jennifer Aniston. Actually, the only thing I remember about her is that she was crying and literally had a dent in her head. Paul went on to become a proud member of the Party Pal family, and I was also offered a position. I declined and went back into the profession of Jesus. The only difference was that I didn’t gouge the elderly. But on my way to carpentry jobs I did enjoy driving by kids’ parties over at Beeman Park to laugh at Paul sweating in his Ninja Turtle costume.

  I also had a short stint as a comedy traffic-school instructor. It may sound like it’s a million miles away from a hit TV show or a syndicated radio program, but if you can do seven hours of comedy in front of a hostile group at a Holiday Inn on a Sunday morning, you can do just about anything.

  But before I could teach a class, I had to go to three rounds of traffic-school training—Saturday and Sunday for eight hours straight, plus a Wednesday and Thursday half-day class. I wanted to kill myself, as would anybody who sat through twenty-four hours of traffic school in four days. I believe I should get credited with that. I should have those hours in the bank so that the next time I get pulled over and have to do traffic school, it just gets deducted from my tally.

  The thing I remember them stressing over and over again in the training was to tell the people I was a professional comedian and not to be scared to embellish my credits a little bit. These violators could have gone to Sears and paid $18.95 for traffic school, but they chose to spend the extra four dollars to come to “Lettuce Amuse You”—seriously, that’s how the name was spelled—and they’re gonna want their money’s worth. I remember thinking, When I show up to the Y in El Segundo at seven forty-five in the morning, I wonder how the story about just winning Star Search or getting off the road with the Rolling Stones is gonna go over? Saying your comedy career is going great to a roomful of traffic-school students is about as believable as telling the guy behind the glass at a pawn shop that you just got a big promotion.

  But if you were forced into traffic school, I was the instructor you wanted. I would let people show up late despite the fact that they were required to fulfill a certain amount of time in the class. People would sometimes walk in an hour or more late and instantly launch into their apologies and excuses. I just said, “It’s fine, sit down.” Once I figured out there were no DMV undercover narcs in the class, I just let people do whatever the hell they wanted. I’d be doing crowd work, asking people questions about themselves and riffing on them. Occasionally we’d go outside for some Frisbee. I wasn’t about to force people to read a pamphlet about passive restraints. I was just in it for a few bucks.

  In 1989 I decided that I needed a change of venue. I told Lindsey to hold down the fort while I headed north to San Francisco. The plan was to get in at a local comedy club and really hone my stand-up act. I quit Acme after just starting it a few months earlier, packed up my truck, and headed for the extra bedroom my high school friend Zeb had in a house he was renting in Oakland. The club I attempted to make my workout room was called Rooster T. Feathers. By name alone, you can tell this was the comedic low point of my life. I was ready to drive off the Golden Gate Bridge, but I couldn’t afford the toll.

  This is a good opportunity to talk about Zeb. I learned two very important lessons from him. He was one of my best friends and the only guy with whom I’d had a creative kinship. Ray, The Weez, Chris, and all the other people I hung around with had no interest in my ideas and observations. They just wanted to know why I wouldn’t shut up. Zeb hasn’t been mentioned previously because his head actually contained a brain. He was a lover, not a fart lighter. He didn’t participate in our criminal enterprises. Zeb was a long, gangly redhead with thick glasses and a cowlick. He was a wildly interesting and creative guy. He wrote a six-hundred-page book on Russian cosmonauts by the time he was fourteen. In high school he started an underground school newspaper that was very successful with the student body. Most people thought he would end up publishing a really cool magazine and personally do all the photojournalism. Starting at age fifteen he worked at the KFC in North Hollywood and was, at $2.22 an hour, able to save up enough for a used VW Bug and a camera. Plus he was also the only kid I knew with a Playboy subscription. This was my idea of having your shit together. Other than that, we were equals in the loser competition. It would have been hard to tell which of us was more destitute and pathetic. But even though he was poor and his dad had abandoned the family, he was able to get a scholarship to UCLA and later transfer to Berkeley. Unfortunately, when he got to Berkeley he found himself a couple credits short of graduating and didn’t manage to finish.

  1989—San Francisco. Me and Zeb in the gayest photo I’ve ever taken.

  Years later after I had some success, my first call was to Zeb. My character, Mr. Birchum, was gaining traction on KROQ, I was signed by William Morris, and things were starting to work out for me. Meanwhile, he was languishing in a rented house in Oakland with a temp job and four roommates. Knowing what a clever guy he was, I told him that he should head back to L.A. and let me introduce him to my new Hollywood connections. No dice. He was trying to mop up the remaining units he needed to graduate Berkeley. Then as Loveline and The Man Show took off, I tried again. This should have been a dream come true for him. His best buddy from high school was living in a house in the hills and had two shows on TV. While I was on Comedy Central, he was still in Oakland bouncing from one shitty job to the next. I said he should come down and write some jokes for The Man Show, but he always gave me some line about a book he was working on and had to finish and said he had to clean his room—literally—before he could even do that. Finally, after a few years of prodding he agreed to come out for a week so that I could set up some meetings. But when he got here all he wanted to do was borrow my second car and chase down some chick he met online who wasn’t interested in him. At the end of the week he returned to the same crappy job and the same crappy house filled with the same crappy roommates.

  Sadly for Zeb, he was on the losing end of a cosmic see-saw. The more success I’d see, the less he saw. Seven years into my struggle to drag him toward success, I had another of our unsatisfying phone calls. After once again bringing up his never-to-be-completed book, something like The Gentlemen’s Guide to Picking Up Brazilian Chicks, he also mentioned losing his temp job and declaring bankruptcy over a $3,300 MasterCard bill. Enough was enough. I said, “Cut the bullshit, you’re never going to finish that book. Just drop it and move on. You’re a thirty-seven-year-old man declaring bankruptcy over a credit-card bill. Your plan isn’t working. Listen to me and let me help you.” His response was, “You think you can get preachy with me just because you were lucky enough to meet Jimmy Kimmel.” And that was it. I thought, Fuck it, I give up. I told him I made my own luck, and that was the last I’ve heard from him. I’ve never spoken to him since.

  And that is lesson one from the book of Zeb. Internalization versus Externalization. He could not internalize how he was standing in his own way and made everything someone else’s problem. I remember him once telling me about a great idea for a domain name but then bitching about a business partner who “screwed him” on the deal. They agreed to split the cost of the domain, $1,200, but she backed out. He got pissed at me when I asked why at age thirty-five he didn’t have $1,200. We came from equally
fucked-up families where success was not considered an option. Yet I managed to break that cycle by changing my mind-set. But for him it was too overwhelming. He just couldn’t get his crap together. His pride got the better of him, he couldn’t accept a helping hand from me, and now he’s doing God knows what.

  The other lesson is that you have to be able to walk away. Six months after we shunned each other, I showed up for our twentieth high school reunion anticipating an uncomfortable public confrontation. Although he was one of the most popular students from the graduating class of 1982, Zeb was conspicuously absent. People, knowing how close we were, kept asking me where Zeb was. I just shrugged my shoulders and said I didn’t know anything. At some point one of the Finnegan twins who used to worship at the altar of Zeb ran up to me and said, “Did you hear the news?” Zeb had gotten a big promotion and couldn’t travel. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. He was ashamed to show his face at the reunion because everyone thought he was going to be Richard Branson and he just turned out to be a Richard.

  Two weeks after my tragic attempt at comedy in the Bay Area I returned to my apartment, tail between my legs. Fortunately my girlfriend, construction job, and improv troupe were all waiting and welcomed me back. At least for a while …

  That year my old buddy Carl was getting married and the wedding was in Hawaii. All the dudes were going: The Weez, Ray, Chris, et cetera. So I told Lindsey it was “just the boys.” She was unhappy but rolled with it. That was until The Weez’s cousin Michelle and one of her friends who were also flying out saw Lindsey and mentioned that the ladies were going, too. That was the straw that broke the stripper’s back.

  I went to Hawaii for the wedding. In a scene that seems unimaginable today, we flew in a big empty plane smoking cigarettes the whole time. The wedding was nice, and at one point The Weez and Chris secretly put LSD in Ray’s drink. It was as nice and mellow as Ray has ever been.