Adam Carolla - Not Taco Bell Material

Copyright 2012 by Lotzi, Inc.

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

All photographs courtesy of the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

eISBN: 978-0-307-88889-1

Tan Gent and Touchdown Dance illustrations by Tam Nguyen
Jacket design by Michael Nagin
Jacket photographs: Courtesy of the author
Author photograph: Craig Larsen

v3.1

This book is dedicated to my twinsSonny and Natalia.
But this is the only page of it theyll be allowed to read.

This is a book of stories. My stories. They range from pathetic to infuriating to disgusting to absurd. But something important I want to make clear right at the top is that all of these stories are true. There is not one ounce of hyperbole. Ive not exaggerated or fabricated any of the details. In fact it was probably worse than I remember, but my psyche has dimmed it down for my own protection.

Lets talk houses. As a kid the places I called home were cracked stucco, dirt lawns, and furniture raccoons wouldnt fuck on. But theres another way of looking at homes. They are where you create memories with your family, good and bad, and the pad you launch from when you start your own life. If you want to know where someone is at physically, mentally, financially, and spiritually, look at where theyre living.

So Ive decided to start each chapter by telling you a little bit about the different abodes Ive called home. This book will be a journey from the plethora of dumps I was raised in, through the shithole apartments I rented in my twenties, to the homes I purchased and personally renovated when I found some success.

THE photo on the previous page is of the first of many dumps I grew up in. Technically there were a couple of stops in Philly and New Jersey when I was a baby and a couple months in a rental house in Chatsworth as a toddler, but this is the house I consider my childhood home. The roof was falling off and the porch was falling apart. At some point my grandfather decided to rebuild the front porch. But in the penny-wise, pound-foolish Carolla tradition, he bought used lumber that had been salvaged from a pier fire. The boards were warped, charred, and had termite damage. That porch stayed on the house for fifteen years. It was humiliating living in this place. It was called the barn by the neighborhood kids.

It had one bathroom, no dishwasher, no air-conditioning, one washing machine but no dryer, yet it had two front doors. Two doors right next to each other at ninety degrees. I never thought that was strange until I dug up the picture below some years later. There is symbolism to it. It made no sense and didnt conform to any standards, yet was accepted as if it was completely normal and did not need to be fixed. Just like my family.

1977The barn. Family photo or police lineup? You decide.

My dad is the white guy in the dashiki who looks like the lead singer from Boston. My parents had just gotten divorced and my dad was ready to swing. It was time to put on a medallion and hit the disco. My mom is the one in the back looking like a depressed, lesbian Moe Howard. Next to her, hiding from the world, is my older sister and only sibling, Lauren. Thats me, second from the left, standing next to my step-grandfather, Lazlo Gorog, the one sane person in my clan. More on him later. My grandmother is behind the camera. I could fill the rest of this book with details about the other dead-eyed people in this picture, but I wont. What I want you to notice is that these are the expressions they have when a picture is being taken. Imagine the complete lack of joy being expressed when the camera was put away. Thats what I grew up in.

My mom was a full-blown hippie. Everyone thinks being a hippie is all free love and tambourines. But my mom was the paranoid-bummer version of hippie. There was constant hand-wringing and worry about the atomic bomb and the ozone layer and pollution in the streams and how were oppressing the indigenous peoples. Her message was basically, Good luck enjoying your childhood while other people starve, the planet goes to shit, and we nuke each other. Oh, and its all our fault because were evil greedy white people. Being a depressed hippie is a lose-lose. It would be like if a rice cake had the caloric content of a MoonPie.

My mom hung out with some world-class longhairs. She had a friend named Happy, one named Sunshine, another named Axis, and one guy named Zorback. His name was probably Gerald but he went by Zorback as a fuck-you to the Man. Take that, Nixon! Im not sure if they were dating and I dont want to know. But he was one of those guys that was always hanging around after my folks split up. Zorback drove a customized (using plywood, duct tape, and a jigsaw) microbus. The kind you might find up on blocks in front of a commune. It was essentially a mobile raping unit. The streets in the San Fernando Valley in the early seventies were filled with custom vans, three-wheeled Harley choppers, Army jeeps, Baja bugs, and sand railseverything except normal cars. Picture the bad guys from The Road Warrior, minus the super-homoerotic overtones.

One time when I was eleven, Mom, Zorback, and I piled into the Backmobile to go camping. I was sitting next to the rear window, which was fashioned out of an old screen door. This created a vacuum that sucked all the exhaust into the back of the bus. I thought I just fell asleep, but later I figured out that I had gotten carbon monoxide poisoning. Thank God the adult supervision was baked and decided to stop for munchies and left me in the back. Parents, I know what youre thinking: They just left you alone? But you have to remember it was a different time. If your kid was asleep in the car, you wouldnt wake him up unless you needed him to go into the liquor store and get you a pack of smokes. I woke up, left the bus, and wandered around the grocery store. I grabbed a can of Coke that I wanted them to buy for me, but I kept dropping it. I was so loopy from the carbon monoxide, everything was dark and echoey and I couldnt get my feet under me. I stumbled into the bathroom and thought it would be a good idea to take a nap on the cool tile floor. Eventually an employee came in and told me to move along. To add to my tripped-out confusion, a woman came up to me, handed me a packet of beef jerky, and asked me to open it for her. How often does that happen, some stranger coming up to you in a store and asking you to open a bag of jerky for them? Yet it happens to me when Im eleven and fucked-up on carbon monoxide. I was wrestling with it like an alligator. I dont know if I ever got it open. I staggered out of the place and back to the bus and became more coherent as the minutes wore on. But I was nauseous and had a headache and was fucked-up for the next forty-eight hours. (Eventually Mom and Zorback did figure out I had carbon monoxide poisoning and attempted to remedy it by sitting me next to a campfire and bathing me in secondhand pot smoke.) I know that this has caused me some brain damage. Im convinced if it hadnt happened I would have ended up going to college, then grad school, and eventually creating Facebook. Nice going, Zorback.