Not Taco Bell Material

by Adam Carolla

  It’s hard to believe that a guy who spent a weekend sharing a bed in a shitty hotel and being marinated in farts would soon purchase a house in the Hollywood Hills. But things quickly heated up with Loveline, and The Man Show would soon follow. I looked at a couple of houses and found a nice one that needed a lot of work and was in my price range. I then accomplished something I never thought imaginable even just a couple of years prior. I was no longer a renter.

  THE end of 1996 began an odd period when I was a both a renter and a homeowner. With Loveline sailing along and me starting to make some real bread, I decided it was time to buy. After looking at two other places, I stumbled across a dilapidated French Normandy–style house in the Hollywood Hills. And when I say Hollywood Hills, I mean this thing was directly underneath the Hollywood sign. If a suicidal actress tossed herself off the H, she would have landed on my hibachi. That said, I don’t think it was glamorous. It was a serious fixer-upper. It had major structural damage. The living-room walls were leaning out on both sides about four inches at the top. This might not sound like a lot to you laymen, but trust me, it’s a ton. It was way out of plumb. The walls were bowing out and the steeple style roof was sinking. Left alone it would have collapsed under its own weight. I had to take out the ceiling and use chains and come-along ratchets to pull the house back together. That wasn’t the only problem. In fact, at a certain point the place was completely gutted. Of course, this was when Jimmy came by and asked innocently if it wouldn’t be easier just to take the thing down to the ground and start from scratch. This was demoralizing. The remod took over a year, so I continued to live in Toluca Lake with Courtland while I renovated.

  The house had an old stone wall around the property that leads to yet another story of a peon trying to ruin my life. When shit like this happens with a private business it’s troubling, but when it’s done to you by the city, it’s that much more egregious because you feel like your tax dollars paid for the bowling pin you’re being violated with. In the process of the renovation of my new bachelor pad, I had to go to the Department of Building and Safety in the city of Van Nuys to pull a permit. My choices were either the Van Nuys office or the downtown L.A. office, which was much farther away. So with my plans in one hand and checkbook in the other, I headed out to get my permit. When you arrive, the first thing you do is pull a number and the second thing you do is wait. Think of a bakery, except replace the smell of cookies with BO, and you’ve got the Department of Building and Safety. Finally it was my turn. The plan check went well, everything was moving along, and I was nearing the point where I got the privilege of writing a big fat check for the honor of having a city-appointed asshole show up at my house and tell me what I could and couldn’t do on my own property when the guy said, “Wait a minute. I see a red X on your plot schematic. That means your house has been designated a historical landmark and you need to go to our downtown office to get okayed.” I said, “The house isn’t a historical landmark. The retaining wall around the property, however, is. Thus the red X on the plot schematic. But since my plans are only to remodel the kitchen, that shouldn’t affect us.” He said, “You’re gonna need to verify that at the downtown office.” I replied, “If you call them, they could verify it over the phone and we could move on with the permit process.” He said, “We don’t do that. I’ll see you when you get back from downtown.”

  I got in my car and headed toward downtown L.A. An hour and a half later I was looking for a place to park and a half hour after that I was in the historical-landmarks office of the downtown building. And forty-five minutes after that I was stepping up to tell my story to a guy behind a counter and fifteen seconds after that he said, “Why did you bother driving all the way out here? Why didn’t the guy just pick up the phone?”

  This, in a nutshell, is what’s gone wrong with our society. That fucker in Van Nuys wouldn’t spend ninety seconds of his time to save three hours of my time. But the story does have a satisfying second chapter. Two years later I had go back to Van Nuys to pull a second permit to add a new roof. When the guy pulled out the schematic, he said, “You’ve got to clear this with downtown.” I said, “Pick up the phone and call them.” He said, “I can’t do that.” That’s when I came at him like a wolverine with Tourette’s. I said, “Bullshit you can’t call him. Now get the fuck back there and call downtown.” He once again resisted. I said, “How about you guys try to be a little bit better at your jobs? How about instead of just hoping everyone goes away, you actually provide the people that pay your goddamn salaries some semblance of service?” He was a younger guy who said, “Wow, my first argument on the job and it’s with the guy from TV.” I said, “Just pick up the phone, call downtown, and let’s put an end to this.” So he finally agreed and walked back to call the other office. Two minutes later he returned and said, “They didn’t pick up the phone, come back first thing in the morning, they should be in the office. I’ll call them then.” I said, “I’m not coming back. I’m gonna write you a check for the amount I owe you. You can call the guy tomorrow morning, and when he verifies it over the phone you can send me the permit in the mail.” He said, “That’s impossible.” I said, “The hell it is. If I lived on the roof of this building I would not come down here tomorrow fucking morning to waste more of my goddamn time. Now I’m gonna write you the check, fill out an envelope with my address on it, and leave.” He made the mistake of yelling over to his cashier, “Can we take a check this way?” She made the mistake of saying, “I guess.” And that was the end of that. I was a total asshole to that guy behind the counter, but my asshole was being used for good. My asshole is looking out for yours. It was one of the best days of my life. This poor schmuck got hit with a tidal wave of righteous indignation.

  One of the nice things about this house was that it had a living room with big cathedral ceilings. Keep that in the back of your head as I tell this next tale.

  One night I had watched that horror movie The Ring. Quick refresher on the premise of the movie, because it affects the story. In The Ring there is a videotape that shows a bunch of disturbing shit. Immediately after you watch the tape, you get a phone call and then die within seven days. So after watching a movie where people die after staring at a screen with a montage of macabre imagery, I went to bed. At three in the morning I woke up startled. There was a booming male voice bellowing from my living room along with flickering lights. I crept down the stairs to investigate. This is where the big cathedral ceiling comes in. Because I used to work out in there, I had mounted the TV high above the entrance to the step-down living room so I could watch it while skipping rope. But it faced away from the stairs I was currently descending. So as I crept up on the room, prepared to have my soul swallowed by a demon, I could only see a flickering light and hear a big voice coming out of the TV. The really creepy part was that I hadn’t left the TV on. It had turned on by itself. With trepidation I walked into the room and I saw on the forty-two-inch screen an old white-haired preacher shouting about Satan and fire and brimstone.

  I had a Gateway TV with one of the stupidest features imaginable. After a power outage, when the electricity was restored the TV turned itself on. Even if it was off when the outage happened. So if you were out of town, made sure to turn your TV off before you left, and there was a power outage, it would start up and be running until you got back from Branson, Missouri. Apparently at some point in the night the power had gone out momentarily, and when it returned, the TV started up and happened to be on the late-night cable preacher yelling in tongues. But just to be sure it wasn’t haunted, I pulled an Elvis and shot my TV. Can’t be too safe.

  I’m not a nervous guy and I don’t believe in ghosts, but I was thoroughly freaked out for that couple of minutes. First, let me say this about ghosts. Why are there a million ghosts in New Orleans but none in North Hollywood? Do ghosts not reside in the Valley? I wouldn’t blame them, by the way. Has no one in North Hollywood ever died and wanted to come back? And why do they want to come bac
k? It’s always this “unfinished business.” I’m pretty sure when you’re dead your business is done. You can clock out. What’s your “unfinished business”? Did you forget to clean out the trunk of the Volvo? Plus ghosts are never scary dudes. They’re always old women in shawls or little girls looking for their dolly. There’s nothing threatening about that. What would be scarier? Which would keep you up at night more—the four-year-old girl in turn-of-the-century knee socks, or a merchant marine who did some wrestling in college, was gayer than shit, and was a top?

  There was a good kebab joint right down the street from my new home. It wasn’t the Zankou Chicken that I ranted about in my last book, but I did have a similar run-in with the delightful Armenian behind the counter. As I’ve said, no culture loves the word no more than Armenians. You know how Eskimos have seven words for snow? Armenians have seven words for no. The place was called Al Wazir, and they made a hell of a falafel sandwich. Cheap, too. It was only $3.99. But that was the problem. I ordered the sandwich, they made it, and then when I opened my wallet to pay, I realized I had no cash. So I apologized to the guy and took out a credit card. “No. Ten-dollar minimum.” I thought about it for a second with the smell of falafel tantalizing me and said, “Just charge me ten bucks.” He said again, “No. It is three ninety-nine. Ten-dollar minimum for credit card.” I said, “Let me be clearer. Just charge me ten dollars for the three-ninety-nine falafel. Do you understand?” “I understand. No. Next!” He put the awful in falafel. The guy turned down more than double the price of the sandwich for the pleasure of telling me no. The impatient woman waiting in line behind me tapped my shoulder and said, “Add some baklava.” She wanted me to pad my order up to the ten-dollar minimum. But as much as I wanted that sandwich I had to take a stand, drop a “No” of my own, and leave.

  You’d assume being a celebrity might help out in a situation like that, but it didn’t. You might think, “Maybe they didn’t recognize you.” That’s probably true, but it doesn’t explain the next story. You may be familiar with the multiplatinum band System of a Down. They are from the L.A. area and used to appear on Loveline regularly. What you may not know about them is that they’re Armenian. One night me, Dr. Drew, and the band, about eight of us in total, went out to a nice Armenian restaurant in Glendale that the guys from the band recommended. They’d been there a bunch of times. When they walked into the restaurant it was like Stan Lee at Comic-Con. They were greeted like they owned the joint. We sat down and John from the band started ordering for the table. The excited and somewhat nervous waiter answered each time with a “Yes sir, right away, sir. An excellent choice.” Until John got to the one item he’d been talking about on the drive In—the mini-chicken-sandwich appetizer. The waiter said, “Sorry. That’s for takeout only.” John said, “Well, bring us two orders and we’ll eat them at the table.” The waiter said, “I can’t do that. That’s a takeout item.” I then chimed in, “So if we ate them in the parking lot, that would be okay?” He repeated one more time that it was a takeout-only item. At this point John raised his voice and said, “Just bring them to the table.” The waiter looked the drummer in the eyes and said, “No.”

  To this day I have no idea why they told the hottest band from their country to fuck off. This is the equivalent of ABBA walking into an Ikea, ordering Swedish meatballs, and being told to hit the bricks.

  While I’m on the topic of swarthy folk who drove me nuts while I lived in this house, let me tell you about my neighbors. (Lynette, fortunately, hadn’t moved in yet and was spared.) You’d think a better neighborhood would buy me a better class of neighbor. Not so much. The neighborhood was beautiful, but the neighbors were shit. Across the street were the friendly but nosy alcoholics who made the grave error of inviting me over for a drink and a tour of their Star Trek room featuring Spock’s lute. And next to them was an elderly couple who would constantly yell up at me and my crew to move our cars so the wife could swing into her garage. This had less to do with our parking and more to do with her driving. She couldn’t enter into the garage because one end of the street had been closed by the city and this bitch couldn’t just pop it into reverse and back in.

  But the worst was the woman next door. She was a sixty-year-old Israeli who was the queen of all coozes. She had an old white wrought-iron fence, which always says “class,” attached to a peach-colored stucco pillar adjacent to my property. At a certain point she insisted that I pay the cost of repainting it. It was so old that where the wrought-iron was bolted to the post it was rusty and the paint was bubbling and decomposing. This created an ooze of rust and paint the consistency and color of bird shit running down the side of the stucco. She insisted this was paint from my house. Needless to say, I did not pay.

  This wasn’t my only run-in with her. One night in December of ’03, my buzzer rang. I was just hanging out in a towel. This was at eight P.M. I answered the door and it was her. She started ranting about “the water. The water is coming from your house.” Somewhere up the street a pipe must have broken, so a stream of water was running down the hill. But it certainly wasn’t coming from my place, and I told her as much. Not surprisingly, this answer was not good enough. As no answer ever was for this cunt. In her best broken English she said, “No, I show you, I show you.” Against my better instincts I fought through my irritation, put on clothes, grabbed a flashlight, and followed her down to the street. She showed me the water running down the curb and asked, “Is not from your water?” Yeah, you caught me. I was lying before. But now that you’ve dragged me out of my home at night to the scene of the crime, I confess. What is that impulse that people like her have? I don’t know whether she thought I didn’t know or that I was lying. I have to hope she thought I was lying, because otherwise she would have to assume I was a complete idiot. Did she think I wouldn’t notice that I had zero water pressure?

  Secure in the knowledge that I was a thousand times smarter than her and not a liar, I said that I didn’t know where it was coming from, but that I assumed it was from up the street and that she needed to call the DWP. She said, “Let me show you what is happening at my house.” I replied that I knew what was going on—water was running down the street from higher up the hill, past my house and down to hers, there was nothing I could do about it, and she needed to call the DWP.

  At seven P.M. the next day I drove home and saw the poor DWP guy outside her house. My heart sank for this son of a bitch. I knew she must have been driving him nuts.

  So as I drove by pulling up to my place, she sprinted toward my car. I’ve never seen her so spry. As I got out, she started grabbing my elbow and ranting about how the DWP guy said the water was coming from my central air unit. That is simply impossible. There’s no plumbing hooked up to an air-conditioning condenser. The only water source was a condensation drip pipe that produces about a tablespoon an hour on the most humid of days. So I called the DWP worker over. I told him it was not coming from my house. She chimed in again about the air conditioner. I could see the praying-for-the-sweet-relief-of-death look in the eyes of the DWP guy. God knows how long he had been there and what she had been putting him through. I walked away and into my house.

  As soon as my ass hit the sofa, the bell rang. I could see through the window that it was the city worker saying he needed to come in and check the AC. I shouted at the door, “You have to check or that cow is making you check?” What I didn’t realize was that she was standing right there with him. I let him in. Twenty minutes later she was knocking at my back door to tell me that he couldn’t find it. No shit.

  She thought she was living next to an evil prima donna. What she didn’t realize is that I’m just a normal guy with some good solid common sense who has zero tolerance for those with zero intelligence.

  The only thing worse than her was the zaftig pussy that sprang from her pussy. She had a son who was one of the worst people I’ve ever met. He was an entitled, overweight junior-college student. The best word I can find to describe him is soft. He was
a doughy asshole who was completely ruined by his horrible mother. Once I ran into him during the construction on the house and he asked what I was going to be doing on Friday. I told him I’d be sandblasting the stucco. He said, “No. That’s bad for me. I have a big test on Monday and I’m going to be studying.” First off, can’t you go to the library? How about you just go in your room and close the door or put on headphones like a normal person? Nope, the plan is to get the neighbor to shut down his entire construction project. Second, I can only imagine what he was studying for. I’m sure his junior-college degree has since gotten him as far as my mom’s Chicano Studies degree. Third, I wasn’t just a neighbor. I was a celebrity. Low-level, but a celebrity nonetheless. I couldn’t imagine a twenty-two-year-old version of myself going next door to Peter Scolari’s house and telling him to shut it down.

  During another phase of the renovation, we had to do some painting. Some overspray apparently had gotten on his piece-of-shit ’84 Honda. You’d need a fucking jeweler’s loupe to find it but he claimed it was there, and his mother claimed she had some paint on her car, too, so in an effort to avoid dealing with them I offered to pay for their cars to be buffed out. He called me on a Saturday at eight o’clock and said, “Hey, man, I got the car detailed today. It was a hundred and twenty dollars. I could really use the money, so if you could drop it off.” I said okay, that I was heading to dinner but I’d put a check in his mailbox on my way out. He said that he needed cash. I told him I didn’t have that amount of cash on me, but that I was going out and I’d hit the ATM and leave it in his mailbox when I got back. At this point I had been more than reasonable. But he insisted that he needed the cash now. I asked, “So you want me to go down the hill, go to the bank, and drive back up to drop off the cash?” Not sensing—or more likely ignoring—my sarcasm, he said that would be good. That’s the sense of entitlement this pudgy bastard had. As example #122 of why I’m not the problem and have no self-esteem, I still went down the hill, got his cash, and dropped it off for him.