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

Автор книги: Adam Carolla

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CHAPTER 7
What I Learned from My Parents by Not Learning from My Parents

A QUICK SPOILER alert for my parents: If you’re reading this, just skip this chapter; you’ll be offended.

Who the fuck am I kidding? They didn’t read my last three books, why buck the trend?

A few years back, I was in a store with my dad. Coincidentally, I was on the cover of Wired magazine that month. My dad noticed it in the store, picked it up, glanced at it for a second and then, without a word, put it back down. I was mere feet away from him and he never uttered, “When did this come out?” or “Hey, did you see this?” or anything at all. He picked up that magazine, looked at it as if Tony Hawk was on the cover, and moved on.

So if my folks are breaking with tradition, reading this and are offended, well, they rolled the dice. They thought at best I’d be talking shit about them to day laborers on a construction site. They never imagined I’d have millions of listeners to absorb my vitriol about them. I’ve called my dad a pussy and my mom a basket case a hundred and twenty-seven thousand times on the radio and podcasts. Why change now?

Besides, I’m writing this for you, my fellow parents, who still have the chance to improve. My mom and dad’s parenting skills were DOA.

As you know from my previous literary efforts, I was raised like a hamster. My parents just put some wood shavings on the floor and shut the door, and I walked around in a circle until my eighteenth birthday.

They’re not bad people; they’re just not into family. Ironically, family is not in their DNA. My dad had two brothers that I never met. It wasn’t like there was some Italian family feud going back to the old country. He didn’t have a beef with them, as far as I know. It’s just that a bus ticket or a long-distance phone call costs money. His dad had died when he was a teen, so he never had a real relationship with him. And, as I’ve spoken about many times, my mother was raised by her grandparents, due to a situation I’m still not clear on, but involved child protective services. This went on until she was ten and moved back in with her mom, my grandmother. Until then, she thought her mom was just a family friend who stopped by on occasion. Again, I’m not sure of all the details, but I guess at some point, my grandmother just popped out with, “Oh, and by the way, I’m actually your mother.” As a result, my mom for her whole life called my grandmother by her first name, Helen. It was like how Bart Simpson calls his dad Homer. It was never Mom, it was Helen. That should tell you everything you need to know about my parents and how the trickle-down emotional economics worked in my family.

It’s kind of surprising that my parents had kids at all. For all I know, I could have been an accident. I never asked, and I’m never going to. I think that most likely my parents thought they wanted a child, but then realized they didn’t want everything that comes with it. Kind of like how a kid wants a puppy, but doesn’t want to clean up all the pee and poop.

One thing my parents did do was lower the bar on raising kids. If my parents can do it, then anybody can. We’re so narcissistic when it comes to child rearing. Don’t give yourselves too much credit, parents. By the time you finish this sentence twenty thousand kids will have been crapped out. The majority of them are going to turn out fine. A few are going to be abused and end up as addicts, but the rest are going to settle into standard-issue, unnoticed, suburban lives. So to all the potential parents out there, stop getting up in your head. You can do this. If you’re on the fence about having kids, just do it. That indecisiveness means that you’re at least giving it some thought before you actually create a human being, and will therefore give enough of a shit to parent pretty well. It’s the people who don’t consider whether they should have kids who shouldn’t. These folks are the ones for whom a child is just the thing that happens after you blow your wad and move on to fucking another Floridian.

My brilliant plan to keep these morons from reproducing is this: a kid petting zoo. Parents that are fair to middling can drop their kids off all day and, for a few bucks, the couples who aren’t sure if they’re ready to be parents can come in and pet the kids a little (not in a sexual way). They can toss around a couple Nerf balls, pull them around in a little red wagon and, for a quarter, get a scoop of Chex Mix to feed them. The kid gets the attention they’re missing at home, and the couples who were on the fence get a little taste of parenthood.

So, to be honest, I was kind of afraid to have kids because of how lackluster my parenting was. I waited a long time to reproduce because I wasn’t sure I was going to take to children. I didn’t want to ignore my children like I had been ignored. And I wanted to get my career on track. As an entertainer, a career is very difficult to get on said track. It either takes a while or never happens at all. It took me until my early-to-mid-thirties to get to a point where I felt comfortable that I could make a living doing comedy, and that I had career momentum. I also felt that I needed more therapy, so I could try to be a little more normal. So Lynette and I didn’t end up having kids until later in life. And, as such, it took us a long time to conceive the twins.

Our in-vitro fertility-clinic saga has been well documented. I’d like to make an observation about the rise of this in our culture. Almost everybody I know had to go the fertility-clinic route to have their kid. All the guys had to do the thing where they go into the little room and jack off into the cup using the well-worn porn provided by the clinic. It recently occurred to me that there’s now a whole generation of kids who were conceived while their fathers were looking at a woman who isn’t their mom. When they get old enough to ask where they came from, we’re going to have to sit down and tell them in a heartfelt tone, “When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, the daddy pays thirty-five thousand dollars and goes to the bathroom of a place in Encino that used to sell flooring and watches Ron Jeremy do Jenna Jameson in the ass.”

Getting out of my family’s negative cycle and having kids has been rewarding on a number of levels, but also frustrating – not just from the stuff I’ve been talking about in previous chapters, but also because of the context. Knowing how much I enjoy spending time with the twins makes me hate my parents even more. Speaking of context…

The Carolla Bunch

Growing up in the ’60s and ’70s with my parents was rough, especially when I’d watch television. That was the era of The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. I’d sit on the floor and watch these shows in which happy families all hashed out their problems and had great bonding moments in a half hour every week. Meanwhile, my sister had run away, and my parents lived in separate rooms, thinking of ways to kill themselves and end the misery. My house was a chaotic, filthy mess, with sofas covered in sheets and people who didn’t talk to each other. The Bradys would have Alice the maid (another luxury they had that the Carollas could never have imagined) call everyone down for dinner and the happy kids would run down and sit around the table.

Then we’d have little Bobby Brady in his plaid sweater, staring blankly ahead, playing with his food. Inevitably, someone would ask, “What’s wrong?” This made me irate because not only was no one in my family tuned in enough to notice that I was bummed the fuck out, I didn’t even have the Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes to move around with a fork. This is such a fake scene. That would not happen in real life. As depressed as I was, there was no way I would have pushed away any food and said, “I guess I’m just not hungry.” I would have buried all of my feelings in food. If my parents had two potatoes to rub together, I would have been so fucking fat. If being depressed about something was an appetite killer for me, I would have been dead of starvation by the time I was ten. I would have looked like Tom Hanks in Philadelphia.

And on the subject of Brady Bunch style, take a look at the cast from season one to season five. Has anything ever changed so much in a four-to-five-year period? Between season one in 1969 and season five in 1973, everything went from Lawrence Welk to Welcome Back Kotter. The lapels got wider, the hair got huge and everything went paisley. Robert Reed even jumped a couple years ahead to the disco era and contracted HIV. Modern Family is currently on its sixth season. Check out the first season from 2009, and look at it today. Is Phil Dunphy dressed like he’s in a completely different decade in a completely different country? Nope. Just one more reason for me to love Modern Family, and hate my family for making me watch that garbage.

Anyway, back to the Bradys and their meals. I’d never seen my mom make anything that came out of an oven. I think she was afraid that if she put food in there, it would take up room she needed for her head when she decided to end it all. And my dad didn’t even know what a fucking oven was. If you showed him an oven, he’d try to climb in and drive it. I don’t even know why we had utensils in my house. I think they were just there in case someone gave in to the urge to start stabbing each other.

This is why I get incensed when I see my kids not appreciating food. It is a trigger for me. This year we took a family day trip to the beach, and when it came time for lunch we went with the sub sandwich plan. Lynette went off to get me a turkey sub and whatever the kids wanted, while I grabbed a table at the food court. She came back and we all sat to eat. A couple of bites in, I noticed Sonny was chowing down on a sandwich from Subway while the rest of us had hoagies from another place. I asked what was up. Lynette told me Sonny preferred Subway. It was a turkey sub, just like I was eating, but for some reason Sonny’s had to be from Subway instead of where the rest of us had ordered. It wasn’t like the other restaurant didn’t have what he wanted. In fact, he got an inferior version.

My real resentment is not about Subway. If Sonny wants to eat crap, that’s his loss. It is just that growing up, if I was lucky, I went to one restaurant a year. Meanwhile, my kids go to two restaurants per meal.

Much like entertainment options being too plentiful these days, food options are also way too copious. If you take the kids to the Cheesecake Factory for their birthday, they’ll cross into the following birthday by the time they’re done reading the menu. That thing is as thick as Oprah’s ankles. (By the way, if you want to know why America is fat and our economy is in the shitter, it’s because the only factories still in operation have the words Cheesecake and Old Spaghetti in front of them.)

Split Happens

There should be a class-action lawsuit against the 1970s, brought by all the kids whose parents were divorced during those ten years. Like mine.

Don’t get me wrong. This was a good thing. They were terrible together. They were the opposite of chocolate and peanut butter. But it’s not like there was domestic violence. That would require effort. They chose to beat each other mentally and spiritually with disinterested sighs, disappointed groans and one-thousand-yard stares. It was even worse than physical aggression, they acted like the other was dead and the form walking around our house was a ghost.

So with parents this emotionally disconnected from each other, the divorce was actually a blessing. I have no beef with it. A therapist friend of mine says the only thing worse than divorce is a bad marriage. To all the parents reading this and thinking about divorce, I’d say that in an ideal world, you should try to make it work. But if staying together will cause more damage to your kids than separating, then just rip off the bandage.

But, please, if you decide to split up, consider the timing. There’s a window between when the kids are really young and won’t remember what happened, and after the ninth grade, when they’re going to hate your guts no matter what, when you just have to tough it out. It’s your job as a parent to experience some discomfort for the greater good of your child and your community. Stay together between the ages of four and fourteen. Not just for you and for your kid, but for me and my wallet. Unless you want to give me back the tax money I part with to pay for school counselors and social workers to deal with your mess of a kid.

My issue with my parents’ divorce wasn’t that it happened. It was what they each did after the split. Because it was the ’70s when he got divorced, Jim Carolla turned into a regular Bob Guccione. My dad looked like he sold aluminum siding when he was married, but as soon as their marriage was over (I’d argue it never even started), he was rocking platform shoes, a medallion resting on the chest hair you could see because his shirt was undone to the navel and clear nonprescription glasses. He sported a huge Jew-fro, despite the fact that we’re not remotely Jewish. I think the most atrocious thing I ever saw him in were jeans that laced up in the front and the rear. It was like a swinging seventies starter pistol went off when the papers were signed, and he decided, “Hey, I’m making the scene. I’ve got to get laid now that I’m forty-four.” He went from Rob Petrie to Phil Spector overnight.

Compare that to my mom. She packed on about forty pounds and stopped dyeing her hair. So when the roots grew out, it looked like she was wearing a gray Nazi helmet with a tuft of red in the back. She kept the medium-long hair, about shoulder length, but the first seven inches were gray and the rest was red. It was convenient because, like the rings of a tree telling you its age, this was a clear delineation of when she finally gave up. She died on the inside and, ironically, stopped dyeing on the outside.

I think that it says a lot about the nature of men and women that when they split up my mom made herself as unfuckable as possible, while Jim caught Saturday night fever.

At least their breakup was quick. There were no assets, so Dad took his ass out of the house and set it at my grandparents’. Yes. When my parents split up, my dad had nowhere to crash and ended up at my mom’s parents’ place. What a pathetic cherry on that dysfunctional sundae.

I’ve got a way to make divorce more palatable. This year I had back-to-back live podcasts in Chicago at a cool venue called Park West. In our Q-and-A segment at the top of each show, we had marriage proposals. That got me thinking about the Kiss Cam that they have at Lakers games at the Staples Center and other big venues. It’s mildly amusing to see a couple give each other a smooch on the Jumbotron. But how about this for a plan? Instead of the tired old Kiss Cam, where we get to see you give your wife of twenty-seven years a forced and tepid peck, let’s create the Divorce Cam. How much more compelling would that be? The camera zooms in on a couple just as one of them drops the D bomb. Obviously, one party will have had to arrange this in advance with the ballpark. Unfortunately, the other half of the couple will be taken completely by surprise. Then the cam would pan over to the kids who are crying and confused, while the slimy divorce attorney stands behind them with papers and pen. Statistically, half the people in the stadium are going to get divorced anyway; why not use it to provide a little between-innings entertainment? I’d never miss a Dodgers home game if they did this. I bet in the long run, the Divorce Cam would help keep a few marriages intact. It would keep a lot of guys on the straight and narrow because if the wife pops out with, “Hey, the Giants are in town, you want to go to the game?” hubby would be Johnny on the spot with, “Yeah, sure, but not until after I’m done giving you a foot rub and buying you flowers, sweetie.”

Life Lessons From Mom and Pop Carolla

As far as life lessons my parents laid out the secret to success: Do the exact opposite of what they did. Like my notoriously bad luck betting on the Super Bowl, where my friends find out who I am going for and bet on the other team, when it comes to fathering decisions I think about whatever my dad would do and go with the opposite. You know those What Would Jesus Do bracelets? WWJD? I have a WWJD bracelet, too, but for me it means What Wouldn’t Jim Do? So here are a few of my parenting techniques, thanks to watching the failure of my own mom and dad:

1. DON’T BE CHEAP WITH YOURSELF

I’ve thoroughly chronicled my family’s cheapness over the years: Saturdays spent dumpster diving, decorating a potted rubber plant for Christmas instead of a real tree, having a rolling portable dishwasher. But there’s one thing I’ve never written about that I think is completely symbolic of my family’s cheapness, and it is our relationship to Tupperware.

Let me explain. I’m not saying avoid storage containers in general. I hate waste, so I want you to be able to store leftovers. What I’m talking about is hanging on to the container, ironically, past its expiration date.

This may not resonate with the younger folk reading this. It seems like Tupperware had the market cornered from 1959 until about two years ago. During this period, it was as if no one else could figure out how to extrude plastic and make a bowl-and-lid combo out of it. Now there are hundreds of brands of disposable containers you buy at the grocery store, use once and leave behind at the party if the guacamole isn’t completely eaten. Before this, there were these things called Tupperware parties. Housewives would gather and one of the ladies who had hooked up with the Tupperware Corporation because she was bored now that the kids were off at college would sell them containers. You couldn’t get these precious gems at a store. You had to know someone who knows someone and gather under the cloak of darkness.

It’s not just Tupperware having a monopoly on snap-lid containers that boggles my mind. I’m still trying to figure out why, for eighty years, there was one and only one blimp. Above every stadium or sporting event since the 1930s has flown the Goodyear blimp. That’s all there was. But it seems like somewhere around 2004 we got inundated with new blimps. Now there’s the Met Life blimp, the Budweiser blimp, the Fujitsu blimp…

Blimp technology hasn’t changed that much. It’s not like Goodyear had a patent on dirigible technology. Why did it take nearly a century for someone to think, “Hey, you know that blimp that’s getting all the camera time? We should get one, too.” Maybe the Hindenburg got the competitors out of the market. The Goodyear higher-ups must have been thrilled. “If they just keep running this footage every year, we’ll be all set.”

It also occurs to me that a blimp is a weird thing to represent a high-performance tire. Blimps move slower than a donkey and use no tires. If everyone drove a blimp, Goodyear would be out of business. Why’d they go with that? This would be like if Jenny Craig’s mascot was a manatee.

The point is whether its blimps or Tupperware, I don’t know how they fended off the competition for that long. On January first, every year, Bob Tupperware and Roger Goodyear must have gotten up and thought, “I pulled it off. Another year and no one caught on.”

The current cornucopia of containers was not the case when I was a kid, and thus provided ample opportunity for the cheapness of my family to come shining through. My grandmother had one piece of Tupperware, which looked like it had been through three tours in Vietnam. It was so stained, cloudy and scarred that light wouldn’t pass through it. Yet it was treated like the Holy Grail. This was a big-ticket item to the Carollas. It was considered a durable good in our household – on par with an automobile or a washing machine.

This grizzled container was probably as old as me when we reached peak cheapness. I was around twenty-five, and was a struggling starving-artist – bachelor barely staying afloat doing construction. I would go over to my grandparents’ house for Sunday dinner, when my Hungarian step-grandfather would make a giant kettle of goulash. There’d always be plenty left over and I’d get to take some home. On more than one occasion, he would be ladling the stew into the solitary piece of Tupperware in my grandmother’s house and I would hear, from my seat in the other room, her come into the kitchen and hit him with some stern words. “What are you doing? No! Give him the mayonnaise jar.”

My grandmother felt I could not be trusted with the sacred Tupperware. She acted as though it had come over on the Mayflower and been passed down generation to generation. I lived three blocks from them, was their flesh and blood and had no history of theft and yet my grandmother forced my grandfather to take the goulash out of the Tupperware and put it into the Best Foods mayonnaise jar with the rusty, crusty metal lid.

I don’t know what she thought would happen. Did she imagine that as soon as the Tupperware and I got out of the house I’d dive into my mini-pickup truck and head to Mexico to start a new life? I was broke as shit. I was definitely going to come back the next Sunday to refill said Tupperware with more goulash.

This is just one of a million examples of the poverty mentality that permeated my family. I’ve declared that I will never force my kids to endure these feelings. I suggest that you do the same. Because the real message you send when you act like a cheap bastard is not “take care of your stuff.” The message is “This item cost me over a dollar and it is not disposable. Our relationship, however, is.”

We have a billion plastic snap-lid containers in our kitchen, and my kids can do whatever the fuck they want with them. I value my relationship with them more than a food-storage container. I can get a new one of those at the grocery store, I can’t get a new son or daughter at the supermarket. At least, not without ending up in an Amber Alert situation.

Speaking of those containers. Because I’ve got twins, I’m getting everything in the jumbo size now. I go to Costco and come home with a huge vat of mayonnaise and a kiddie pool of peanut butter. And then I get into that argument with the wife when we’re scraping the bottom of the container but it’s still taking up a beer keg worth of room in the fridge. “There’s still enough in there for one sandwich.” “It’s empty.” “You have to scrape the bottom of it.” I hate the space it takes up, but I can’t bring myself to just chuck it out like Lynette would.

So here’s my solution. Why not equip every jumbo-sized container of mustard or barbecue sauce with a little escape pod on the side, like the dock of the International Space Station? Just a small container that holds two ounces on the side, so when you’re done with the five-gallon bucket of Dijonnaise, you can scrape the remnants at the bottom into the little bladder on the side, twist it, snap it off, put a cap on it and put it back in the fridge. That way you’ve got just enough for one more sandwich, and will have reclaimed the space above the crisper. Coming soon to a store near you: The Ace Carolla Condiment Dinghy.

2. EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT INTERESTED, FAKE IT…

Both historically and currently, my parents haven’t been able to give a shit about shit I give a shit about.

My father would read a book in his living room every Friday night. Ironically, the light by which he was reading was partly supplied by the lights from the North Hollywood High football stadium where I was playing. He never worked on Friday nights, he just preferred to stay home and read Leo Buscaglia rather than see me play for the North Hollywood High Huskies. He wasn’t interested in football and that was that.

This is a trend that continues today.

Last year, my dad called to say he wanted to come over and see the twins. I told him they were out on one of their many activities; I believe it was seeing the Harlem Globetrotters. I started going into how the kids were constantly jet-setting and doing amazing stuff. As an example, I casually mentioned, “I just did the voice in a big Disney movie, so they were walking the red carpet last night.” I waited a moment for him to ask the name of the movie, and what my part in it was. Never happened. He just moved on. That, or he thought I was lying.

It’s not like Dad hates the stuff that I do. It’s just not on his radar. He’s not the Great Santini, he’s the Great Doesn’t-Give-A-Shiti. For the entire time I have been doing my home-improvement podcast Ace on the House he’s called it Ace on the Roof. And on the very first morning of my radio show after I took over from Howard Stern, I famously gave him a ten-thousand-dollar challenge. There were five questions of Adam Carolla trivia. I told my dad that if he got the first one right, he’d walk away with ten grand. My very own ten grand. It wasn’t money the station had put up, and we didn’t have a sponsor. I had my checkbook next to me as I gave him the questions. I was that confident in his impending failure. With each question, the payday would be cut in half. So if he screwed the pooch on the first one he still had a chance at five thousand, then twenty-five hundred, and so on.

Now, bear in mind, this is my father. His best financial year ever was about forty-seven thousand dollars. He now had a chance to make more in one minute than in two months of the best year of his life, and all he had to do was provide some well-known facts about his own son.

Here was the first question, for ten thousand: “Your son was on a legendary radio station for the past ten years. Name that radio station’s call letters and number.”

As the drum roll rolled, he stammered out an answer. He knew it was K-rock but couldn’t spell it: KROQ. He went with KROC. I decided to be merciful, and see if he could pull out the number, 106.7. He said 950. Jimmy, who was in the studio that day and sitting next to him, noted he didn’t even have the right frequency.

Then, for five thousand, I asked, “I did a television show on a popular cable network that had to do with puppets making phone calls. The name of that show was…” After a good minute of his hemming and hawing, I pulled the plug. I told him it was called Crank Yankers and then noted that Jimmy, again sitting nineteen inches from him, was wearing a Crank Yankers T-shirt. I was stunned on the third question when he was able to pull out my Loveline partner’s last name: Pinsky. Now, before you give him too much credit, Dr. Drew had recently given him a referral to a urologist and he needed Drew’s full name when he filled out the forms.

Credit where credit is due, my dad recently came over to see the kids and I had him watch the documentary I made on Paul Newman’s racing career. I was floored when he not only liked it, but said, “If you never do another thing, that will be enough.” I was astonished. I’ve never gotten a reaction from him like that on anything I’ve ever done. It felt like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment. He could have come out of the closet and broken cover as the world’s top gay CIA agent and it would have been more credible to me.

But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. When I showed the same film to my mother, she piped up with, “I’m not interested in the subject matter, but it held my interest.” I loved the documentary King of Kong. I’m not into arcade games but I enjoyed it. That’s the point of a documentary; it’s supposed to capture your interest in something you know nothing about. But that’s about as much of a compliment as she was capable of. She gave me what the great Albert Brooks, when doing my podcast, called “the complisult”: a compliment couched in an insult.

The saddest part is that in my mom’s mind, this was a compliment. But the message conveyed is that the thing I cared enough about to make a documentary about she was not interested in. The thing your son is passionate about is of no interest to you. Maybe I should do my next documentary on her, because I find her lack of interest in my interests very interesting.

Ultimately the lesson is this: whether it’s their finger painting when they’re three or their salesman-of-the-month award when they’re forty-three, you have to put in some telenovela-quality acting to pretend you give a shit. Because you do. Maybe not in your kids’ hobbies or minor accomplishments. No, the thing you give a shit about, or should, is your relationship with them.

3. DON’T BE A BUMMER

My parents were both total downers. My mom was a hippie who, ironically, had friends named Sunshine and Happy, but was a dark cloud and never mustered a smile. There was a constant bad vibe in my house growing up. I was inundated with messages about the indigenous people and how we were oppressing them, how horrible white people were, how it was all going to end in a nuclear holocaust anyway. These were great motivators for getting your kid up and ready for school. “Sure, son, you can go to school but it doesn’t matter. Khrushchev is going to nuke us all anyway.” You probably think I’m joking, unless you grew up in the sixties. Two of the most popular songs at the time were “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” by Peter, Paul and Mary, and “Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire. Here are a couple of lines from the McGuire tune.

 
If the button is pushed, there’s no runnin’ away
There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave
 

This isn’t coming from some unknown singer/songwriter at a coffeehouse. This was a Billboard number-one song the year after I was born. This is what I grew up with. My parents lapped this shit up.

When I was somewhere in single digits my mom read one of those 1970s parenting books about how not to fuck up your kid. She must have fallen asleep before the end. I guess there weren’t enough pictures. When you’re reading one of these books, it’s already too late. The damage is done. Somewhere in the book it told her not to say, “I don’t like you,” but rather, “I don’t like what you do.” So at one point she used that line on me and I fired back instantly with, “I am what I do.” I must have been seven at the time, but I already knew that she was feeding me a bunch of hippie nonsense.