In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy (26 page)

And in our effort to give every kid a gender-identity disorder, the first thing we do is put them in the pink-and-blue-striped beanies.

Not pink
or
blue. Pink
and
blue. Are we trying to turn every child into a David Bowie circa
Ziggy Stardust
he-she? And once they go into the nursery, there’s thirty kids spread out. They’re all swaddled up in these Tupperware bins, and one of the ways you can recognize your kid, or at least narrow down the field, is by gender. If they showed me two kids—one with a blue beanie and the other with a pink beanie—next to each other, I’d go, “There are the Carolla twins.” Now when you get hold of them, especially when you have twins, you can’t tell them apart. I still can’t tell them apart. The brainiac who had the idea of a confusing, ambiguous, light-blue-and-light-pink-striped beanie should be shot. Have any other great ideas? How about instead of red for stop and green for go we mix them and have one big brown light? Fucking retard. And is the fifty-fifty version any cheaper than a solid powder-blue or pink beanie? No. It’s probably more expensive. Just buy a thousand pink units and a thousand blue units and stop the gender bending.

Giving birth is tough, but let’s not treat it like it’s anything more than it is. I can’t stand the mommy bloggers, the women who have kids and then decide to go online and write about the dos and don’ts. You know, hard-hitting topics like “Sack Lunch. Friend or Foe?” It’s all the same forty-year-old white chicks. They act as if they’re the first women on the planet to give birth. It’s so narcissistic. Meanwhile the Nicaraguan woman who is actually taking care of their kids has four of her own in high school. Actually three dropped out, but the point is that she crapped out four kids when she was nineteen through twenty-one and they’re all fine. The whole world crapped out kids before these bitches and obviously they were crapped out, too. You’re forty-one and all of a sudden after you have a kid you must write a children’s book and a blog to explain to other people how to do it. You’re telling us stuff we’ve all known for a billion years. It would be as if I discovered beating off at age forty and had to tell all my friends. “Attention fellas, there’s a way to have an orgasm without hiring a prostitute. You grab your cock, and you just pull it. It feels awesome. Are you listening? Why aren’t you writing this down?”

Moving on to the end of life. Aging sucks. Here’s how, as a guy, you know there’s no God: The only parts of a man’s body that keep growing are your balls, your ears, and your nose, the three parts of your body you wish got smaller. Not your biceps and your cock. Those wither away. The shit you wish would grow gets smaller and the stuff you don’t want to grow sags. It’s no picnic for the ladies, either. At least as men get older they get better-looking. The hair gets gray and they get dignified. Dr. Drew gets sexier as he gets older. There’s not one guy who’s said, “Liz Taylor. I wouldn’t have hit that at nineteen, but now that she’s seventy-five I want to nail her. I’ll break that other hip.”

You also know you’re starting to get old when you go into the swimming pool wearing a hat and sunglasses. When you’re young you’re frolicking, doing cannonballs, and playing Marco Polo. The more you wear going into the pool, the older you are. I’m only forty-five and I go into the pool with a shirt, hat, and sunglasses, which means I’m this close to going in with a three-piece suit, spats, a pocket watch, and a monocle.

We insist on making fun of old people in this society. Lots of jokes about Grandpa and his Depends, how slow Grandma drives, et cetera. Considering we all hope to live to a ripe old age, this seems horribly ill conceived. Making fun of a group you pray to one day be part of would be like joining the Klan right before you made the transformation that Robert Downey Jr. did in
Tropic Thunder
. Why would we make fun of something that, God willing, we’re going to become? I suggest we get back to basics—making fun of Polacks and Puerto Ricans.

I love when the news shows people, usually from another country, who just hit their one hundredth birthday. They inevitably ask them the stupid and predictable question about what they did to live so long. The answer is never from eating fruit and exercising every day. They tell you that they get up, have a shot of brandy, smoke a pack of Lucky Strikes, eat a Twinkie wrapped in Canadian bacon, go to work at the asbestos factory where they have a hearty lunch of Styrofoam peanuts, then come home for six tumblers of grain alcohol. By the way, these people probably drank tap water every day of their hundred years, loved peanuts, and never touched a drop of Purell.

Then, after we get the noninformation from the unwrapped mummy on the news, we get to hear the anchors laugh and say, “He’s one hundred years young.” I hate that cliché. Even worse is “He died of a broken heart.” People always say that when a person’s spouse dies and then he dies a couple days later. It’s dumb. Technically, everyone dies of a broken heart. It stops beating. And the other stupid death-related cliché is “You can sleep when you’re dead.” I don’t think that’s been confirmed. You may be able to sleep when you’re dead, but what if you can’t? What if it’s like flying coach when you’re up against the bulkhead and your seat won’t recline? I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not taking any chances. I’m gonna take a nap.

After you die of a broken heart, your poor relatives are going to have to cough up for a funeral. This is another time when dickheads try to extract money from you with guilt. We do from the cradle to the grave. When you have kids, they’ll try talking you into the expensive pre-preschool by saying things like “Don’t you want your kid to have a head start? Don’t you want this for your child?” No, he’s two, he’s eating a Lego and shitting himself right now. I don’t need to spend the equivalent of a down payment on a house so he can play with finger paints. I’ve already regaled you with the tale of my son and the corrective helmet. They play on your guilt. That’s from ages zero to ten. Then at some point you die, and it becomes “I think your uncle Ted would want the Ambassador casket.” Ted’s dead. He’s not part of the conversation. I know you’re trying to guilt me into the velvet-lined coffin with gold trim, but I’m pretty sure his corpse is indifferent to which box it decays in.

Though I do think I could make a lot of money with my idea for a big-and-tall funeral parlor. Everyone is getting bigger nowadays, so I’m sure the coffins and grave plots have had to kick it up a notch, too. Why not a big-and-tall funeral parlor? I’d call it Larger Than Life. I could even sell the funeral suits for the deceased at my big-and-tall men’s shop, Big Sir.

I don’t like to tell people about deaths in my family. It’s not because I’m narcissistic or too wrapped up in my own shit, it’s because it puts people in an uncomfortable position. There’s that weird awkward pause. Then that person feels compelled to offer up some loss in their life, and it’s never a direct comparison. “Oh, my cat just died, so I know what you’re going through.” This is usually followed by the “If there’s anything I can do.…” As if you’re going to take them up on it. “You know, a fresh coat of wax on the car would really take the sting out of Grandpa’s demise.”

I went to a funeral once where the rabbi mispronounced the name of the deceased no fewer than twenty-eight times. There should be a policy where if the person speaking says, “Although I didn’t know Gabe …” you should be able to shout, “Then get the fuck offstage!” The Sandman from
Showtime at the Apollo
should come out and sweep you off. Sit down and let someone who knew Gabe up there. At my funeral I don’t want some guy saying, “I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting Alan Carelli.…” This is one drawback to the Jews doing their funerals the next day. They could use a little extra prep time to get off-prompter.

I want a big turnout at my funeral. Not for me, but for the people I leave behind. I want them to be surrounded by others. I want people around my widow and my many trophy widows. Plus, open pews at a funeral is like a restaurant where there’s only one other couple eating there. It’s sad.

And I want it abundantly clear that I wouldn’t want you to go on working after I die. People say, “That’s what he would have wanted.” No, I want you to drop everything. Clear your calendar. I want a national day, nay, a national week of mourning with flags at half staff across the country. I want the flags on the greens of golf courses at half staff.

And I want wailing and crying. I need a big black woman to throw herself on the casket and say, “Take
me
.” I want the entire cast of
Precious
screaming like banshees and trying to jump into the open grave. I’d never get that kind of emotion out of my own family. It would be like having Marcel Marceau there. And they’re so cheap, they’d probably try to make me bring the champagne to my own wake.

When my grandfather Lazlo died, the Carollas went with the most pathetic postmortem option possible: the Neptune Society. This is the group that cremates your loved one and scatters the ashes in the ocean. Sounds classy, right? Think again. You just call them up, “Hey, Grandpa’s dead,” and they say, “All right, Bert will swing by in about forty-five minutes. He’ll probably drop by Arby’s, get a little dinner first.” In my grandfather’s case, the guy just showed up at four
A.M
. in a station wagon. Not a hearse, a regular station wagon. He filled out a couple of forms and tossed Grandpa in the back of the wagon. I’m surprised he didn’t put the corpse in the passenger seat so he could use the diamond lane on the way to the crematorium. We never saw the body again. I don’t even know if they cremated him. There were no oceanside speeches, no golden urns, no rose petals floating in the bay. That would cost an additional fifty bucks. Just some dude and a fake-wood-paneled station wagon. It cost something like $280. My grandfather’s funeral cost less than my blender.

The only less dignified option would be to leave him out at the curb on trash day. Here in L.A. the black bin is for trash, blue is for recycling, and brown is for dead relatives.

Over the years I have prepared a list of things I want to do before I die:

• Have my hands registered as weapons.
  
• Get kicked out of a casino for winning.
  
• Jump into a body of water with a knife between my teeth.
  
• Have a cape removed onstage.
  
• Have a sports jersey pulled over a nice suit.
  
• Be killed by the person I told to kill me if I started to become a zombie.
  
• Wipe down a gun.
  
• Silently communicate/point to my watch underwater.
  
• Punch out my undercover partner who is about to say something he shouldn’t and blow our cover.
  
• Play bass in an all-black band, be the only white guy, and whisper something onstage to the conga player and then laugh.
  
• Put my hand over the mouth of a beautiful woman to stop her from screaming and alerting the bad guys.
  
• Get shot at and brush it off, saying, “I ain’t got time to bleed.”
  
• Be able to say someone attempted suicide over me: “She threw herself on the train tracks.”
  
• Catch a punch and twist the guy’s hand until he goes down to his knees.
  
• Have a celebrity shorten my name in an interview. “Bobby De Niro says working with Ace was great.”
  
• Be embroiled in a lawsuit that leads to a heroic story: “I broke the leg of a gangbanger robbing a liquor store, and now he’s suing me.”
  
• Stop a crime by throwing something. A guy steals a purse and starts running. I throw a can of corn football-style and knock him out.
  
• Track someone. I dismount my horse, then do that low squat where I pick up a clump of dirt and let it sift through my fingers.
  
• Hawk a championship belt or Super Bowl ring at a pawnshop when I hit rock bottom.
  
• Shout, “Release the hounds!”
  
• Be lost in the Utah desert with a hot chick, then come across an old Indian guy and speak his language.
  
• Pull a fake mustache off someone and shout, “A-ha!”
  
• Have a hot towel on my face at a barbershop with a cigar sticking out.
  
• Dislocate my shoulder to get out of a straitjacket.
  
• Snap Larry King’s suspenders and turn him into a pile of ashes.
  
• Shout “Not on my watch.…”
  
• Direct a movie called
  Awesome
  so that entertainment shows will have to refer to me as
  “Awesome
  director Adam Carolla.” Then follow it up with the sequel
  Hung Like a Rhino
  .
  
• Drive a car off a pier onto a garbage barge.
  
• Be stripped of a crown.
  
• Tell my team to “synchronize watches.”
  
• Dry-shave with a machete.
  
• Pull down a surgical mask and say, “There’s nothing I could do,” or beat someone on the chest and shout, “Live, damn you!”
  
• Box a kangaroo.
  
• Demand unmarked bills.
  
• Drape a suit jacket over handcuffs in the front like John Gotti.
  
• Fend off a Kodiak bear with a torch.
  
• Pop the locks on an attaché case full of money and slide it across a table.
  
• Be tied to a chair with a hot chick.
  
• Have to choose between cutting a red wire and a blue wire.
  
• Fight someone on top of a moving train.
  

My biggest regret is that I hear you fart a couple of times after you die and I won’t be around to enjoy it and, appropriately enough, laugh my ass off.

CONCLUSION

Thank you for purchasing/borrowing/winning this book at the world’s worst charity raffle. No matter how you got it, I appreciate you taking the time to read it. I know that this book covered a lot of ground, from politics to pizza toppings, flying first class to taking ceramics class, homophobia to home improvement. I have many, many more things to say about these and other topics. But that’s for the next book. So until then, thank you and
mahalo
.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not be possible without the dedication, wit, and nimble fingers of Mike Lynch. This project would never have become a reality without his involvement. As a matter of fact he’s typing this right now. And also my agent, James Babydoll Dixon, and my wife, Lynette, who encouraged me to write this book when I was hell-bent on a coffee table book entitled
Dade County Black Prom, 1977–1985
.

I should also thank my literary agent, Dan Strone, my editor, Suzanne O’Neill, and the whole team from Crown for letting a guy who’s never read a book write one.