Текст книги "Daddy, Stop Talking! And Other Things My Kids Want but Won't Be Getting"

Автор книги: Adam Carolla

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

CHAPTER 6
To Sonny and Natalia, on Buying Your First Car

THIS IS A little note to my offspring, meant to impart some hard-won wisdom on making that most monumental of purchases… your first set of wheels. While cars may not be as important to you as they are to me (though they should be), the lessons I include can be applied to any major purchase our kids will have to make one day. Just swap the car for whatever you value – boat, helicopter, NFL franchise. Hopefully they will have the bread to make the purchase without asking us for help, right?

Dear Sonny and Natalia,

Cars were obviously important to your dear old dad and I want them to be important to you. As you know, I had the wrencher gene as a kid, but it was never nurtured. Your grandfather was useless when it came to cars and your grandmother drove a VW Squareback with the engine in the rear under a piece of plywood. Cars were not nearly as important to them as ignoring each other.

Yes, I grew up without something I clearly loved, cars, and have admittedly overcompensated. When it comes to cars, I am like the guy who never gets laid in high school and then when he loses the zits and the Peter Brady voice crack he bangs everything with a pulse. When you’re deprived of a passion, you get a hankering for it and, if you can, you’ll overcompensate like someone who just got out of prison and walked right into the buffet at the Bellagio.

So I have filled a warehouse with rare and vintage cars, and guess what, you’re not getting any of them! I want you to have that hunger, too. I want you to want cars. More important, I don’t want you to think that you can get something for nothing. I took you guys to a warehouse full of cars once, and I did not like what I saw, not one bit.

The day after Thanksgiving 2014, I brought you to the garage of my old friend Jay Leno. Do you remember walking around his hangar full of more than one hundred and thirty cars? We had to take a golf cart to get around that place it was so big. When we got there, Jay was out in one of his steam-powered cars. He was doing exactly what you’d expect him to be doing, wearing all denim, tooling around in a car from over a century ago that only a millionaire with no kids can afford or have the time to enjoy. He was living up to every stereotypical image you’ve ever seen of him in tabloids. It was like going to a fat guy’s house and finding him on the toilet eating a giant turkey leg. I recall that you kids were pretty bored at first but, eventually, you, Natalia, looked at a car and said, “That’s my car, that’s what I want to drive to school.” It was a Dodge Viper. Among all of Jay’s cars this was your first pick. This is a pretty garish and nutty car and at the time it came out, it had the biggest engine you could get in a sports car. The only reason someone would buy this car is to do donuts on their ex’s lawn while high on prescription pills. It’s all engine and clutch and no backseat. But you had made your taste known.

That’s not the part that concerned me; it was what happened next. As we started walking back to the front passing forty acres of cars, you stopped and decided you wanted a different car. You changed your mind. It was like when someone is at the diner, orders the club sandwich but then looks at the table next to them and sees a Reuben, and calls the waitress back to change their order, annoying both the waitress and your dining companion. Your pick this time? A Ford GT.

This will run you about 300K. But then, another 180 yards down, you changed your mind again. You sent the Reuben back and ordered the surf and turf. You pointed at a McLaren P1.

This is a one-and-a-half-million-dollar car. It’s not the most valuable car in Jay’s collection, some of the older ones are worth far more, but that was the one that had the highest original sticker price. By the time you’re in high school and thinking about cars and reading this, that McLaren will be a cool six mil. That’s my concern. You have expensive taste. And seeing Daddy’s collection, you might have the impression that it’s normal to have a couple of Lambos lying around. It’s not. Just like all other things in your life that you might desire, I want you to earn it. You, too, Sonny. After Natalia pointed to that McLaren, you jumped in and said, “I’ll take one too,” like you were ordering a side of hash browns.

So, now that we’re a little more realistic about cost, let’s think about the future. When you are ready to lay out the cash for your first ride, take a moment to reflect before you sign on the dotted line. Don’t get anything too small or too big. I know you, Natalia, you’ll want the zippy little car. You have that daredevil gene. You’re going to want something cute, fast and sexy, but you’re not going to know how to drive it. I knew a girl in high school who had a Triumph Spitfire, a tiny little convertible. I’m a big guy, and the one time I sat in this car, I realized that I could hang my hand out and touch the ground. It has no airbags, crumple zones or anything to offer as far as safety. It’s a cute car that a cute sixteen-year-old would surely die in if a big guy with a big Ford F-250 with the lift kit stopped short. Not so cute. You’re a rich white girl from the hills, so, statistically, this is how you’re going to die, anyway. You’re not going to get killed in a drive-by, you’re going to be killed in a drive-over, when that Ford F-250 smashes you as you’re texting behind the wheel. Let’s not do anything to stack the deck, shall we? To make sure that you abide by my wishes and stay safe, I have mandated in my will that when I die from exhaustion due to my work schedule your mother implement my safety plan for your first car: a line of tires strung around it like on a tugboat. This is fully legal, and only costs about ten bucks a used tire. Then every six months you go without an accident, we’ll take one off.

Now, you might flip the script. You might want to go with something big. You could be that little chick who wants the giant Suburban as a way of overcompensating. We always talk about guys driving big trucks as a way of making up for a small penis. If that’s true, why is it that I always see little chicks climbing into giant SUVs? I think it’s a power thing. It’s the only time when you are in motion with your head more than five feet from the ground. I also think women like bigger cars so they can carry around all their extra shit.

So, Natalia, you’re either going to have a small car that is too fast for you or a big car that you can’t handle. No matter what happens, I’m sure as you spin your wheels I’ll be spinning in my grave.

Either way, you’ll need insurance. Though when I see insurance company ads, I’m not sure that insurance is even necessary. I mean, according to these ads, the only time you can get into an accident is if you’re having a good time. Crashes only happen if you are having fun with friends, particularly friends of a different race, who are sitting in the backseat. I don’t mean driving drunk kind of fun, just jovial, laughing with your ethnically diverse friends kind of fun. And then, bam. Next thing you know, you get T-boned by an Escalade. I’ve never seen a commercial where someone totals their car if they’re just going eyes forward, hands on the wheel, with a stern look on their face. When I drive I look miserable and I’ve never gotten in an accident. Kids, that’s my tip. Skip the insurance and drive angry. Hands on the wheel at ten and two, and wear a look like Bill Belichick at a press conference, and you’ll never get into a wreck.

Unfortunately, by this time I’m sure there will be a nationwide government mandate on carrying car insurance, so just pick one and get on with your lives. The amount of car insurance commercials currently on television is astounding. I hope it won’t get worse once I’ve departed. You’d think that there was a huge difference between auto insurance companies by how fiercely they compete. But, honestly, they’re all pretty much the same. And yet, they keep coming. More and more commercials for more and more companies, all offering basically the same coverage. It’s like when they say you spend a third of your life sleeping. This is true. What they don’t say is that you’ll spend more than half of your waking hours viewing car insurance commercials.

To the insurance company CEOs reading this here’s my offer: I’ll switch my insurance to the one with the lizard and Lynette’s to the one with Flo, if you’ll agree to never show those ads again. Deal? Hopefully by the time you kids are reading this, we will have invented a chip you can put into the television that knows you already have insurance, and blocks those ads so you can get on with the business of working to pay for it.

While I’m on automotive innovations, let’s talk about car-door openings. Hopefully by the time you’re buying your first car, the auto industry will have figured this out. Why is it that when car doors open they only have two settings? It doesn’t just flap open like the door on your house, it opens to one place and stops, and then it hops to the next place and stops. The first one is just enough to get a little air in and let a little fart out. It’s a crevice just wide enough that maybe DJ Qualls could crawl out of his Denali. The next place car doors stop is where it slams into the door of the Camry next to you in the Best Buy parking lot. That opening is wide enough for the guy from The Blind Side to step out of comfortably holding two bags of groceries. It’s either too open, or not open enough.

Hey, car manufacturers, how about a nice middle ground? A Goldilocks zone, where I can get out comfortably without denting the car next to me? What’s that first opening for? “Hey, I need to let my ferret out to pee?” Not only that, but all the parking spots are getting smaller and all the cars are getting bigger. Plus, our fat asses are getting bigger, too. This is a disaster. Statistics I just made up show that this opening issue is the reason for the 92 percent increase in car-door dings. All I’m saying is let’s treat car doors like a vagina, we don’t want it so tight we can’t slide in, but also not so wide you feel like a tube sock alone in a dryer.

Anyway, on to you, Sonny, and your first wheels. Don’t get anything too cool. A lot of cops are car guys. They were dudes who loved cars and took the cop gig so that they could do burn-outs, and maybe get into a high-speed chase. So, as car guys, cops will be quick to pull over a Lamborghini, just to check it out. You want something nondescript that blends in to get around this. One of my good friends intentionally drives a Volvo station wagon so that he won’t get pulled over. That guy has pretty much circumnavigated the globe while tipsy, and has never once been pulled over because he drives the official vehicle of upper-middle-class soccer moms. So, Sonny boy, take a booze-soaked page from his playbook. (I don’t want to get him in trouble by naming him, so I will keep this alcoholic anonymous.)

Speaking of getting pulled over. Let Pops give you both a couple of tips on getting out of a ticket. Natalia, you’re going to be a good-looking young woman, so you should be fine flirting your way out of a ticket. Sonny, you’ll be in tougher shape. You’ll be a handsome young man, too, but the number of gay male cops who will let you off when you flash your pearly whites is going to be pretty tiny, and any female cops who pull you over will probably be more interested in Natalia, if you know what I mean.

I don’t know if you guys recall, but back in 2014 I actually got pulled over with both of you in the backseat. I had not been pulled over in seven years, thanks to my radar detector keeping me aware of all the spots where the cops hang out at the bottom of hills, waiting to pounce. Plus, I always drove with one eye in the rear-view mirror. Not the safest move, but in Los Angeles you have to drive scared.

On this particular day, we were driving to the ocean. In an attempt to avoid a traffic snarl, I made a last-second decision to hop off one freeway and onto another. I sped up to hit the off ramp and instantly saw a California Highway Patrol cruiser in my rear view. He didn’t have his radar going, so my detector hadn’t gone off. I was just a target of opportunity. My usual cop Spidey-sense let me down. He hit the rollers and pulled me over. I was doing eighty.

By the way, the top speed on the car we were driving was 177 miles per hour. I hadn’t done anything unsafe. The most dangerous thing about the whole scenario was him pulling me over and getting out of his car to walk to my driver’s side window. He was much more likely to get clipped after he got out of his cruiser than any potential accident I could have caused. But anyway. ..

I knew you were both in the backseat and it was a teachable moment. I had my license and registration ready to go before he even got to my window. And I didn’t fight with him. When he said, “I pulled you over because you were going eighty,” I didn’t shoot back, “Come on, it couldn’t have been more than seventy-three.” I just said, “I understand.” When he asked for a reason, I told him the truth, “I was going on one ramp and changed my mind at the last second and just kind of blanked.”

The first thing I knew was that this cop hadn’t been lying in wait with a radar gun. Those guys are ticket-writing machines. They exist to write tickets; that’s their mandate. So if you get hit with one of those quota-meeting assholes, you’re getting a ticket, no matter how you react. I knew I was just low-hanging fruit for this guy, and thus had a chance to sweet talk my way out of it. That’s the lesson, if you start arguing or give a bunch of excuses, cops are going to give you the ticket just to prove the point. If you push back, they’ll make sure you know who’s in charge. Make them not want to give you a ticket. Make them feel bad for doing their job.

It worked. He let me off with a warning, and we then sped well over the limit all the way to the beach. It wasn’t because I was a celebrity; the guy didn’t recognize me. It was because I was a cop-killer with kindness. I hope you will always remember this little nugget of wisdom.

But just in case you have too many brushes with the po-po, here’s another tip. I once got pulled over on Van Nuys Boulevard doing seventy-five in a thirty-five miles per hour zone. Obviously, I knew I was way over the limit, and that there was no wiggle room. I fully expected a ticket. When the cop started asking me all the usual questions, he threw in an extra one I wasn’t expecting: “Where’d you get that hat?” I forgot that I was wearing an LAPD hat that someone had given me. It was just a coincidence. But being quick on my feet, I told him, in my best humble-brag tone, “I do a little charity work for the boys in blue.” I’d probably done one celebrity golf tournament, and was shitfaced the whole time, but I didn’t go into details. He walked to his motorcycle for a minute, then came back and let me off with a warning.

So here’s the tip, a tip of the cap so to speak. Travel with baseball caps for the police department of every municipality in your area. Do what you have to do to get your hands on them. Go to the local precinct, and say you have a sick kid who loves the cops or something, and then put them in a box in your backseat and swap them as you cross county lines.

While we’re on caps, here’s a great idea that I never got around to manufacturing. Take this and run with it, kids. This simple device will help you and all drivers avoid tickets while using the HOV lane.

To be honest, I fly solo in the HOV all the time. You have to in Los Angeles, if you want to get anywhere. What I do is lean the passenger seat back, and pull the shade down on the passenger’s side, like the sun is bothering Granny’s cataracts. I’ll even pretend to be talking to that person: “Grandma, all the kind words you had about my car headliner have been nullified by your hurtful comment about my double chin.”

It’s simple, just two hooks that clip over the passenger side headrest, attached to a baseball cap. That way, cops coming up from behind think that there’s someone tall in the passenger seat. It’ll have a drape of black velvet coming down the back so you can’t see through that space at the bottom of the headrest. It’ll just look like you’re commuting with Yao Ming. If you get pulled over, it’s not technically illegal and sometimes cops have a sense of humor. Or they’ll pepper spray your ass. But it’s worth a shot, right?

I’m sorry I’m not going to be around to teach you how to drive, Natalia. I would like the challenge. I know saying this in print will further paint me as the misogynist ape that a lot of people think I am, but chicks can’t drive. I don’t let your mother drive when we go out together unless I’m drunk. Which is often.

On my short-lived Speed Channel show, we did a bit where the other hosts and I had to teach models to drive stick shifts in high-performance cars. I ended up with a ditzy actress in a Dodge Viper. This thing has 600 horsepower, 650 foot-pounds of torque and a super-hard clutch. It’s a grizzly bear, the last of the muscle cars. I was in the passenger seat, and I didn’t want to end up crashing through a mall like the Blues Brothers so I knew I had to make sure my lessons got through. The first thing people do when they learn to drive stick is let the clutch out too quickly without giving the car enough gas. So I said to this chick, “Give me a safe word. Something I can say to remind you to put the clutch in.” She said, “Voltaire.” I have no idea where that came from. So I told her “When I say Voltaire, take your left foot and push it to the floor.” Lo and behold, the plan actually worked. Saying “Voltaire” over and over got pretty annoying after a while, but it proved that if I could teach her to drive a manual transmission, I could teach anyone.

Not that I would get the chance if I were alive. I lament that you kids, and kids in general, aren’t ever going to drive manual cars. We were much more engaged behind the wheel when we drove stick. There’s no texting and driving with a manual transmission. You have to focus, but you feel totally in control, too.

This is especially going to be a handicap for boys. Therefore, I am making this deathbed proclamation. Sonny, you must learn to drive stick. Being able to downshift and blow around another driver, to bump start a car, and the simple satisfaction that comes with you jiggling the stick in the right to left to make sure it’s in neutral, are all rites of passage for a young man. It makes me sad to think that you’ll probably have a car that not only doesn’t have a manual transmission, but has back-up cameras and can parallel park itself. I’ve made my wish clear. I hope out of respect for your dearly departed dad you’ll… stick to it. (Good stuff, Ace Man.)

I want to reiterate the most important feeling I have about you two and cars: I’m not buying one for either of you. A car is something you have to earn. All of my shit vehicles were detailed in my previous books: trucks with bolted-down bar stools for seats, screwdrivers for keys and vice grips replacing the missing window cranks.

In Carolla style, both of you are going to have to go through a series of shitboxes, like I did, so that you can feel the pride of ownership that comes with a new vehicle. I want you to feel the sting of driving a car with a coat hanger for an antenna and a tampon string holding the tailpipe in place. I want you driving the car I saw recently in Long Beach. It was a seven-year-old Toyota with duct tape holding the rear taillight in place, that was so sun-blasted that the silver had worn off. The light was being held by the white cloth skeleton of the duct tape. It was so sad. That tape had been in place for at least two years. When the duct tape cries uncle, when the tape taps out, you know you’re driving a piece of shit.

What killed me about this particular vehicle was the “Toyota of Long Beach” license-plate frame. You know, the cheap plastic plate frame they put on every vehicle that leaves the lot? It’s a good idea at first, it’s free advertising. But a couple of years down the road, when it’s adjacent to the duct-tape gauze holding the car together does it really scream, “Come on down to our dealership”? If I were Toyota of Long Beach, I’d set up a system so I could size up the buyer of the car before I let them drive off the lot. If the person is wearing flip-flops and a mustard-stained sweatshirt and is trading in a Tercel with partially eaten In-N-Out Burger in the backseat, he’s getting a plate frame for one of my competitors’ dealerships, like “Toyota of Gardena.”

Remember kids, your car becomes you. If you have a disorganized mind, you’ll have a disorganized car. Poking your head into someone’s vehicle tells you everything you need to know about them. It’s like the Hickory Farms sample at the mall. When you get the taste of that summer sausage on the toothpick, you don’t need to eat the whole thing. You know what you’re getting. When you look in someone’s car and they’ve got spent scratch tickets in the passenger seat and a basket of dirty laundry in the backseat, you know exactly who that person is.

That’s why I’m not into hand-me-down cars. I’ve seen the young male driving the totally cherry Lincoln. That just means Nana died. No young dude would pick that car. And that spells disaster for that Continental. Because it was a hand-me-down, that guy is going to drive that shit into the ground, literally. Nana kept that thing in tip-top shape until she kicked off, but once her jackoff grandson gets hold of it, the cloth interior will be pockmarked with cigarette burns, the suspension will be shot from going seventy over speed bumps and doing brodies in the grocery store parking lot at night and it’ll smell like Willie Nelson’s hair.

When you don’t earn it, you don’t care about it. If I bought you each a brand-new fully loaded Mini Cooper when you turned sixteen, that car would be covered with fast-food wrappers on the inside and bird shit on the outside within a month. Meanwhile, the kid who busted his ass working two afterschool jobs slinging the fries that you then drop in your gratis car will be treating his like a Fabergé infant. He’ll attend to that thing in every spare moment he has, and spend every extra dollar he has on maintaining it. This isn’t a dig on you, Natalia or Sonny, this is human nature.

Let me bookend the chapter with a tale about why car ownership is so important to your old man.

Sonny, in 2011, you and I had a nice father-son trip to Orchard Supply Hardware, followed by a little wrenching. We walked around the store for an hour and a half, and Papa loaded up on paint, nuts, bolts and other odds and ends. You were very patient. Then we went back to the shop and wrenched. I gave you a Phillips head screwdriver and you pulled a panel off the door of one of my lightweight Datsun roadsters, all by yourself. It was great.

This was also incredibly symbolic. I hope what I am about to say shames not just my family, but all families. As a culture, we understand that when a young boy wants to play a musical instrument, we get them some drums. Or when a young girl wants to design clothes, we buy them some fabric, needles and thread and let them go to town. I’m sure a young Vera Wang was making little dresses for her Barbies. Well, early and often, I had an inclination for wrenching, but this went ignored. My parents were too busy being depressed faux intellectuals to attempt caring about something as blue collar as cars. Let me ask you this: If a kid showed a penchant for playing the violin and you didn’t encourage that, you’d be considered a monster, right? Well, what about the kid who wants to tinker with cars? It’s the same thing. We’ve just decided as a society that tools are for meatheads and cellos are for smart people. Some of the brightest guys I know are car guys – it takes a mind to understand mechanics. In our society, you could be the big brain from the DC think tank who comes up with the solution to getting us off foreign oil, but not know how to change your own oil. So who’s smarter?

The point is, it was torture having no garage and a lame dad. It was so fucking pathetic and infuriating that we did actually have a garage but instead of it containing a car and tools, it contained my mattress and was my bedroom. I wasn’t going to do that to you, Sonny. But I wasn’t going to foist it on you, either. You can’t force that.

So as you read this, if you’re leasing a Camry and GPS-ing directions to the nearest Jiffy Lube that’s okay; I gave it a shot. But I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to give you the opportunity to activate that part of your brain and see if you were a born grease monkey, like your old man was and his old man wasn’t.

Ultimately, kids, I hope you work hard, save up your dough, pick the right car for you, and, more important, for your race. Let’s face it, certain ethnicities prefer certain cars. I actually came up with a show idea around this: Racial Supermarket Parking Lot Sweepstakes. Here’s how it works. I put ten different cars in a grocery-store parking lot. Then the lucky contestant stands near the automatic doors. I have an easel with foam core cards that read “Asian,” “Black,” “Mexican,” “White,” “Gay” and so on. I then hit an air horn and the automatic doors slide open, and the contestant has to run around and put the card on the car that best represents the race. He’ll be putting the “Gay” card on the peach-colored Mini Cooper, “Black” on the Escalade with the spinner rims. But the twist is for “Mexican,” you have to run off the lot and put it on a bus.

Sorry if that was a little tangential. I just realized I hadn’t said anything racist in a few pages, and I don’t want you kids to be confused.