In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy (24 page)

A short time later I had flown from New York back to L.A. to audition for
Loveline
the TV show. I was on the balcony of my apartment on the phone talking to Jimmy, who was still in New York with
Kevin and Bean
. It was midnight.

As we were talking, a Ford F-250 pickup, going fifty down a residential street, without touching the brakes slammed right into the back of my car. It was an explosion of metal and glass. My car went careening into the street and the truck jumped the curb and onto the lawn of my apartment building. The balcony I was standing on was on the first floor, so I was staring down at the whole thing eight feet away from me. My car looked like an accordion. It was totaled. The guy threw his crippled truck into reverse and tried to drag it off the lawn. He was going to get the fuck out of Dodge in his Ford.

The point is that instincts matter. Whether it’s on the job or in a relationship, you should trust your gut. Unless your gut is full of Mountain Dew and Slim Jims, in which case you’re a cretin and should do the exact opposite of whatever your cholesterol-clogged heart is saying.

MOTIVATION
No one came from a lazier, more apathetic family than me. If there was a laziness competition, my folks would take the gold, but it would have to be mailed to them.

So given this upbringing, it’s no surprise that I had to break the cycle and teach myself how to make something of my life. I was like a bear that was raised in captivity and then was ill equipped to go out into the wild. So I started challenging myself. If you’re thinking about something, don’t procrastinate—do it, whatever it is. For me it was the coffee mug. I would be going off to my construction job in the morning and I’d have my coffee mug with me. After I finished it, I would toss it on the floor of the passenger side and it would roll around all day until I got home to my shitty rented apartment. I’d be getting out of the truck and the coffee mug would be out of arm’s reach and I’d stare at it for a second and think, I should bring that in and rinse it out. But then another voice would come into my head and say, “Fuck it, I’ll just get a new one tomorrow morning.” The argument in my head would go on. “But then you’ll have two mugs clinking around on the floor mat and one will get chipped.” “Eh, just put it on the seat and that way they won’t bump together.” It was like a retarded version of those cartoons where an angel and devil would appear on Daffy Duck’s shoulders and argue. After losing twenty minutes of my life wrestling with myself over whether to take the coffee mug in, I decided, “Do it this time. And from now on when you see that coffee mug, you pounce on it. Eventually it won’t even be a thought anymore.” Everything seems overwhelming when you stand back and look at the totality of it. I build a lot of stuff and it would all seem impossible if I didn’t break it down piece by piece, stage by stage.

The best gift you can give yourself is some drive—that thing inside of you that gets you out the door to the gym, job interviews, and dates. The believe-in-yourself adage is grossly overrated. I don’t trust people who believe in themselves. Your job in life is to fool other people into believing in you, not to fool yourself. If you take a look at my Social Security statement from 1980 to 1994, you’ll see that I had no reason to believe in myself.

The bad news is I no longer make what I made in ’03. The good news is if I did I never would have written this stupid book.

So focus more on motivating yourself and moving forward, and less on self-belief.

YOU CAN BE POOR BUT NOT STUPID
Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you have to be stupid. People are constantly wasting money and short-changing themselves on the good things in life because they don’t understand cost versus value. Like the dunces who drive eight miles out of the way to the gas station where unleaded is five cents cheaper. Dummy, the amount of gas it took you to drive your ’85 Aerostar van over there cost more than what you’re supposedly saving. And is your time not worth sixty cents? How low is your self-esteem?

People do this with food constantly. We’ve all heard the semi-annoying five-dollar-foot-long Subway ads. Sounds like a good deal, right? But look at what you’re getting: a pillowcase-full of shredded lettuce, a couple of presliced composite meat products, and some half slices of processed, prepackaged cheese. For a buck more you can go to Giamela’s (a fantastic sandwich place in Burbank, but you could replace it with any good local sub shop from any town in America). For under six bucks you get a six-pound masterpiece of meat, fresh onions, pickles, and tomatoes in good Italian bread. If you’re going with the meatball sandwich at Subway, you’ll get four of them that are the size of a golf ball in some watery Ragú. At a place like Giamela’s, the meatballs are the size of a softball and need to be cut in half to fit in the roll. Then they get covered with a rich, hearty sauce. What’s the better buy? The one from the chain sub shop that leaves you hungry an hour later, or the one that weighs as much as a Duraflame log that is so much you save half and eat it for dinner?

Another thing that falls under this poor-versus-stupid category is the bed. Let me give you a little bed background from the Carollas. I didn’t know until I was into my mid-thirties that you could buy new furniture. I grew up in a house with four people sleeping on four separate beds and zero box springs. We were 0 for 4 in the box-spring department.

My mom had just a mattress on the floor. I always had only a very thin, cotlike mattress with no box spring. That in a room this big (see
this page
). My childhood room is literally a closet now.

Every bed in the Carolla home was a half step up from a prison bunk. My stepdad slept on one of those square late-sixties, early-seventies sofa things that they had in the
Brady Bunch
den. Essentially you would take this long triangular pillow, throw it onto the ground, and it became a bed. It had the bad, scratchy, burnt-orange seventies slipcover and it was on those gold rolling casters.

Eventually I started buying mattresses from the Salvation Army that had been reconditioned, which means some ex-con flipped it over, beat it with a broomstick out in the alley, sprayed it with Lysol, put it in a Hefty bag, and sold it to me.

So given the long, pathetic history of the Carollas and beds, I’m going to give you, the reader, the same advice I plan on giving my kids: Buy a good bed. It’s not like you’re gonna sleep every other week, or only Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. You’re not gonna be on the road with your band half the year. I’ll be conservative and say 350 days a year you’re gonna spend seven to eight hours, eleven to fifteen if you’re a Carolla, in your bed. It’s the most important investment you’ll ever make. You always hear that thing where they say every cigarette takes a minute off your life. Every horrible night’s sleep probably takes four days off your life. You’re stressed out, your back hurts, you don’t feel right, and you’re not productive at work. Please buy a decent bed.

This is the room as it looks today. My bed was shoehorned into the corner, to the right of the door. The water heater and the electric meter were in the closet on the left.

And get yourself a nice bathrobe. Even if you’re not Bill Gates, a couple times a year you’ll go out and drop seventy-five dollars on a decent meal for an anniversary or birthday. Why not spend that same cash on something you’ll use every day? The pleasure of that filet mignon lasts about a half hour. A nice plush bathrobe will last you a couple of years and you’ll wear it morning and night and, if you’re like me, all weekend. Again, delayed gratification and value. I compare it to the baseball mitt. Instead of getting one made of vinyl that you have to replace, get a nice cowhide one for a little bit more and keep it your whole life. With the bathrobe, which makes more sense: spending ninety dollars every decade to have something that feels like you’re wrapped in a warm cloud, or thirty dollars every other year for one that’s shitty, itchy, and paper-thin?

Not to get too deep, but a lot of this is psychology. When you’re poor, you feel beat-down and shamed. You don’t feel like you deserve nice things. But saving a nickel by getting the generic pair of shoes at the grocery store isn’t going to turn you into Richard Branson. So treat yourself well, which will boost your self-esteem and actually help get you into that next tax bracket.

DOES IT MAKE YOU MONEY OR MAKE YOU HAPPY?
Ask yourself that quick, simple question before embarking on or sticking with anything, whether it be a job, a home-improvement project, or a relationship. If it doesn’t fulfill one of those two requirements, then move on and let it go. Now, I agree that money doesn’t necessarily buy happiness, but it sure as shit doesn’t hurt. If whatever you’re doing doesn’t make you happy or at least provide you the money to go to a therapist or a liquor store to take care of that unhappiness, then it’s time to blow that taco stand. Life is too short for anything else.

CHANGE
On that note, I’ll leave you with this last tip, and cue the inspirational music while you’re reading it. This is roughly the speech I gave on my final morning radio show in 2009. Since then I’ve had two TV pilots, a successful podcast, several appearances on Leno,
Dancing with the Stars
, Howard Stern, et cetera, and sold out many live shows across the country. The end of that radio show wasn’t the end of the world. In fact, I would have never written this book if I were still doing my morning show.

Change feels bad at the beginning. “I just got dumped by my girlfriend. This is horrible.” “I’m moving. This is horrible.” “I’m going to a new school. This is horrible.” “I’m starting a new job. This is horrible.” Change always feels scary. Why? Because it’s unknown. And we’re scared of the unknown. That’s what freaks us out. We build our world around the known—this is my wife, these are my kids, this is my house, this is my car, this is my office. When that gets interrupted, it scares the shit out of us. But it’s usually for the best. When you think about the lives where there is no change, they are the most unlived. Like the guy who’s been a postal carrier for sixty-one years and lives in the house he grew up in. That’s the opposite of change. Lots of change makes for a very rich, vivid, and colorful life.

Here’s the problem. A lot of times you don’t get to be the captain of your own change ship—other people make those decisions. When you make the call, it usually feels good. “I want to break up with that guy”; “I have a higher-paying job I’d like to move on to”; “The Bay Area is a much nicer place to live and I’m moving there.” But when someone else decides, then your ass is freaked the fuck out and you don’t know what to do.

But think about all the change that’s happened in your life. Is it ever bad? Change is growth. That’s how you measure growth. It’s the rings in your tree. Sure, it can be bad temporarily: You’re out of a job, you’re out of your apartment, you’re out of your relationship. But six months or a year down the road, you don’t think, “I wish I still had that job,” or “I wish I still lived there,” or “I wish I was still with her.” Anyone who’s past the age of twenty-five has had several significant changes happen in their lives. They’re always met with resistance. But if you have a rearview mirror, you’ll look back and realize you are happier and better for that experience.