Not Taco Bell Material Read online

  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 twins—Sonny and Natalia.

  But this is the only page of it they’ll be allowed to read.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: A Cracked Foundation: Mom’s House

  Chapter 2: Same Shit, Different Place: My Dad’s First House

  Chapter 3: Home Improvement: My Dad’s Second House

  Chapter 4: Finally, People Poorer Than Me: Tijuana

  Chapter 5: A Literal Lateral Move: The Garage

  Chapter 6: Time for This Bird to Spread Its Wings and Flop: The Laurel Canyon Apartment, Pt. 1

  Chapter 7: With Friends Like Ray … : Ray’s Apartment

  Chapter 8: Good-bye, Futon, Hello, Bunk Beds: The Laurel Canyon Apartment, Pt. 2

  Chapter 9: A New Pad with a Padded Seat: The North Hollwood Rental House

  Chapter 10: A Room with a Jew: Joyce Schulman’s Hollwood Hills Home

  Chapter 11: The Santa Monica Redemption: The Fourteenth Street Apartment

  Chapter 12: The Beginning of the Beginning: The La Crescenta House

  Chapter 13: A Farewell to Apartments: Toluca Lake

  Chapter 14: Movin’ on Up: The Beachwood House

  Chapter 15: A Gray Area and the Birthplace of No Self-Esteem: Grandma’s House

  Chapter 16: From the Valley to a Peak: Vista Del Lago

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  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. I’ve 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.

  Let’s talk houses. As a kid the places I called home were cracked stucco, dirt lawns, and furniture raccoons wouldn’t fuck on. But there’s 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 they’re living.

  So I’ve decided to start each chapter by telling you a little bit about the different abodes I’ve 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 didn’t conform to any standards, yet was accepted as if it was completely normal and did not need to be fixed. Just like my family.

  1977—The 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. That’s 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 won’t. 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. That’s 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 we’re 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 it’s all our fault because we’re 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! I’m not sure if they were dating and I don’t 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 rails—everything 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 you’re 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 wouldn’t 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 couldn’t 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, an
d 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 I’m eleven and fucked-up on carbon monoxide. I was wrestling with it like an alligator. I don’t 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. I’m convinced if it hadn’t happened I would have ended up going to college, then grad school, and eventually creating Facebook. Nice going, Zorback.

  Everything in the house was secondhand. If there was such a thing as thirdhand, the Carollas would have jumped on that train. It wasn’t just furniture and retreads on the car. It was intimate items: pillows, blankets, coffee mugs, tampons, maxi pads. My sister’s favorite drinking glass was a graduated cylinder from the turn of the century that looked like it was part of an old-timey chemistry set. We later found out it was a jar for urine specimens.

  Like any decent hippie, my mom shunned material possessions and waste and the consumer society and blah blah blah. Some families have lasagna night and family board-game night. For the Carollas, Thursday night was trash-picking night. Mom, Sis, our neighbors—the Gravitches—and myself would scour the neighborhood in search of stuff we wouldn’t throw away. You’ve heard the old adage that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Unfortunately, I was raised by the second guy. So my idea of a good weekend growing up was to head to the Schwinn shop and do some dumpster diving. If I was lucky, I might find some handlebars that were bent because the previous owner was unlucky and got hit by a truck.

  My family was cheap and poor but they were also honest. Maybe a little too honest. A lot of kids, especially nowadays, are raised with a go-out-and-get-yours or screw-him-before-he-screws-you mentality. My family’s battle cry was “What about the other guy?” All other people, especially if their skin was darker than mine, were to come first. Here’s a little story that predates this house but perfectly illustrates this line of thinking. I was about five years old and living in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I was at the Cherry Hill Mall with my mother and I found a fifty-dollar bill. Not a wallet with a fifty in it, just a loose crumpled-up bill. I used to find a lot of shit when I was a kid, but I just recently realized that was because I was only two feet off the ground. Sadly, my five-year-old twins never find anything on the ground because they’re too busy staring up at the forty-two-inch flat-screen mounted on the wall of their room. Anyway, I showed my mom what I’d picked up and she told me we had to go to the lost and found and report it missing. Even at five years old I was thinking, “Bitch, are you nuts? The guy at the lost and found is just going to pocket it.” I should have grabbed a barstool, climbed up, and slapped some sense into her. When we brought it to the desk, the guy said, “We’ll keep it for two weeks. If no one claims it, it’s yours.”

  I was at my house waiting impatiently for the two weeks to expire like a prison convict scratching lines into his cell wall. You have to remember this was fifty bucks in 1970. At the time, gas was twenty-two cents a gallon. And we were Carollas: I didn’t even know fifty-dollar bills existed. I thought they stopped at ten.

  The bounty was claimed, to my mom’s self-hating white delight, by a heavyset woman of color. To the woman’s credit, she found out I had returned the bill and came to our house to give me a reward. Ten bucks. Then for some reason my mom made me split it with my sister. My fifty dollars cash got whittled down to five dollars and a hug from Nell Carter.

  The perfect storm of poor meets atheist—with an unhealthy dose of “What’s in it for me?”—formed the holy trinity of pathetic Carolla Christmases.

  One of the most memorable holidays was the year my mom cut down a branch from a pine tree and leaned it against our living-room wall. That’s a step down from Charlie Brown.

  Christmas at my grandmother’s house was even worse. She never purchased a tree, opting instead to decorate the potted rubber-tree plant that was in her living room. She just threw a little tinsel on a houseplant and called it a holiday.

  Two of the people in the photo at the beginning of this chapter are my uncle and step-aunt. They were named Gobbi and Bueshi and they were from Hungary. We used to spend Christmas Eve over at their house. This provided the setting for the only Christmas tradition we had—the family grab bag. Imagine this scene: All the grown-ups would bring a gift costing no more than five dollars. The gifts would get wrapped and piled in a corner, everyone would get in a circle and draw numbers, and when their turn came up, they grabbed a random gift.

  One year my dad drew his number, took his turn at the grab bag, and got a gift fit for a king. A shrimp de-veiner. It was a little plastic shrimp on a weird hook thing, used to pull the veins out of shrimp. It could not have cost more than a buck twenty-nine and was definitely purchased at the grocery store on the way to the party. That’s if it was purchased at all. It might have been stolen from an all-you-can-eat seafood joint. What is for sure is that there was zero thought put into it. A moment of contemplation is all it would have taken to realize that no one in my family could afford shrimp. Shrimp were far too expensive and delicious to grace the Carolla dinner table.

  1965—Grandma’s house. Moments before singing the traditional Christmas carol “Oh, Rubber Tree.”

  A fucking shrimp de-veiner. If someone gave that to me today as a gift I would dive across the table and stab them in the neck with it.

  In my family, the cheap jab was always followed by a haymaker of laziness to deliver the knockout blow. Average garden-variety laziness might prevent someone from accomplishing a goal for a couple of months, but in an ironic twist, the Carollas really stepped it up when it came to not stepping up. I’ll give you two examples, both over forty years in the making, and in keeping with the holiday theme, the first one takes place on Thanksgiving. My grandmother’s house had a piano; I know that sounds upscale, but like my grandmother, it was weathered, old, and barely upright. Before I was born some roofing tar dripped onto its arm—think wax drippings from the world’s shittiest candle. And there it stayed until I grew up. We were at my sister’s house six years ago for Turkey Day. My grandfather had died and my grandmother was fading fast, so the piano had made it to her house. I was sitting there eating my stuffing and cranberry sauce when I glanced over at the piano and noticed something. The tar. The goddamn tar was still there. I asked why it hadn’t been removed. Not one member of my family could give me an adequate answer. It wasn’t like they tried solvents and a wood chisel but it was too mighty a foe. Nope. No one had bothered. But I was bothered, so I got up, walked to the kitchen, grabbed a butter knife, and easily popped the tar off. I did in one single motion what my whole family couldn’t—and more importantly didn’t—attempt to pull off in my entire life span leading up to that moment.

  The second incident occurred just last year when I went to visit my mother. I hadn’t been inside the house in quite a while and poked my head into my stepfather’s room, which was also our den. My mom and stepdad sleep in separate rooms—don’t ask. I looked up toward the ceiling and saw something very pathetic and telling. In 1973, my cousin Greg was visiting and we were eating Fruit Rolls (the cheap generic precursor to Fruit Roll-Ups). We were fucking around and decided to see if we could stick a piece of Fruit Roll to the ceiling. This was an old colonial house from the 1880s and for some reason back then they built houses with super high ceilings. Which is ironic since the average height at that time was five foot six. Most ceilings now are down to eight feet while we’re all getting taller. At this rate my grandkids are going to get brain damage from a ceiling fan. But what makes it even nuttier is that the footprint of the room is seven by nine. My stepfather’s room/den was built like a shoe box standing on it
s end.

  Despite this we managed to pull it off, and thirty-nine years later that quarter-sized piece of jelly flypaper was still affixed to the ceiling. My stepfather has been in that room staring at the ceiling as he drifts off to sleep with visions of strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups dancing in his head for forty years. He’s now officially a Carolla.

  Final thought on how lazy my family is: I don’t even have a middle name. There is a blank spot on my birth certificate where a middle name should go. Somewhere in the mid-eighties I was renewing my license and the middle-name spot was blank, mocking me. Thus Adam “Lakers” Carolla was born.

  About six years ago I asked my dad why I don’t have a middle name. He gave the worst answer a father could give his son. He thought about it, scratched the back of his neck and said, “I don’t know.” He followed up with, “Ask your mom.” When I asked my mom, she gave me the worst answer a mother could give her son: “Did you ask your dad?” I’m more offended at the lack of excuse than the lack of a middle name. It wasn’t like, “You were born premature in the back of a cab and we didn’t have time to fill out the paperwork.” Nope, just “Ehh.” And here’s the worst part, my dad’s dad’s name was Giacomo. I could have been Ace Giacomo Carolla. It’s such bullshit.

  You’ll read more, much, much more about my friends Ray and Chris in future chapters, but I thought it was worth pointing out that it was at this stage of my life I met the two guys who would become my best friends and occasionally my worst enemies. I met Ray at Colfax Elementary and Chris while playing Pop Warner football.

  I started on the farm team, then moved up to Gremlins, then two years of Mighty Mites, Pee Wee, Midget, then Bantam. My hippie mom hated that I played Pop Warner. The only thing she liked about it was that it exposed me to people of color so I could learn firsthand how horrible white people are. As I said, race was an issue for my mom. She was a Chicano Studies major at Valley Junior College despite being slightly whiter than Tom Petty. Really, that was an actual major. We didn’t watch a lot of TV when I was a kid but we did see every second of Roots. My mom sat there staring at it with a disgusted look on her face and then every ten seconds she’d look at us and say, “Do you see how bad we are? Do you see what we did?” I was thinking, “I’m twelve. What the fuck did I do?”