In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy (23 page)

PARENTING TIPS

FIND OUT IF YOUR KID IS A GOOD DRUNK OR BAD DRUNK
Let’s face it. Your kid’s going to have some relationship with alcohol. You should find out early on if it’s a good one or a bad one. We all remember those friends from back in the day who turned into different people when they got drunk. I had friends who were the nicest, most rational guys in the world when they were sober and turned into belligerent, confrontational date rapists after nine beers. I’ve also had girlfriends who after a few too many Jack and Tabs would go up to my boss at the Christmas party and let him know what I really thought of him.

So it’s important to find out early what kind of drunks your kids are gonna be. On my twins’ sixteenth birthday, I’m going to take them to the park with a twelve-pack of Mickey’s and get to the bottom of it. If, God willing, they just say, “Let’s go to Tommy’s and get chili burgers. You drive, we’re too drunk,” then it’s time to toss them the keys to the liquor cabinet and get the party started. But I’ll know they can’t handle their booze if my son says, “You think you’re hot shit, old man? Come over here and get some,” and my daughter looks at me and says, “Someone’s been working out.”

SHOW YOUR SON YOUR DICK
Before you start calling Child Protective Services, I’m not saying you should sit him down in the living room when he’s fifteen and drop your drawers. Just at some point when he’s old enough to have a fuzzy memory of it, step out of the shower drying your hair with the towel and give him a glimpse. Of course I don’t mean in an aroused state. Maybe get a little blood circulating and just the right amount of baby oil to catch the light. Just once, and then never let him see it again. He’ll think you’re huge. This is an investment in your dick’s future, a 401(cock), if you will. Because down the road he will definitely tell his friends, “My old man’s got a huge honker. I saw it once.” Then word will get around town that you’re packing. You can look forward to some day when he’s in high school and he brings his friends around and they look at you like a god. They’ll be like, “Hey Mr. C,” and give you a high five and a knowing glance. What he won’t figure out until he’s in his thirties is that you are just average but looked huge to his waist-high eyes.

TRAVEL/AUTO

TRAVEL KIT
Get yourself a small bag and stuff it with an extra T-shirt, shorts and towel, and a toiletry kit with the travel-sized toothbrush, deodorant, et cetera, and keep it in your car. That way you’re prepared with a change of clothes and can clean yourself up in case an impromptu hoops game starts up, someone tosses you into the pool, or you wake up in a strange hotel room with a hangover and a floozy.

FIX-A-FLAT
Nothing is more pathetic and a greater sign that you are a loser than the space-saver spare tire on your car. (Unless of course that space-saver spare has a Denver boot on it, in which case you should just take the tire iron and beat yourself to death with it.) No matter where you live, but especially here in L.A. with all the shit littering our roads, you’re eventually going to get a nail in your tire. Get a can of Fix-A-Flat and keep it in your trunk. Just hook it up and spray it in there. Then take your car to a place that can repair the tire. And you won’t have to look like a pussy in front of your lady when you can’t manage to get the lug nuts loose.

SUNGLASSES
First, the multiple-scissors and multiple-nail-clippers rule applies here too. Keep an extra pair of sunglasses in the glove box so that when you leave the first pair in the house you’re not squinting your whole commute. Also, if you ever go to a pool party, barbecue, or any event that starts while the sun is up and ends after the streetlights come on, don’t set your sunglasses down. You’ll miss them on the way out because it’s dark. Put them in your breast pocket or hang them on your shirt—anything but set them down. But for Christ’s sake, don’t put them backward on your neck or on top of the bill of your ball cap. You’re trying to get laid, not win a bass tournament.

BATHROOM/HYGIENE TIPS

PEEING IN THE SINK
I’ve been a proud sink pee–er for over fifteen years now. Why waste water flushing the toilet when there is a perfectly good, crotch-height receptacle with a drain in every bathroom? Pee in the sink and give it a quick spritz of water from the faucet. Many years ago Dr. Drew made the fatal error of telling me that urine was sterile. Since then it’s been game on. Here’s a challenge for you Pee-ya Hatas: You try to shave or brush your teeth while emptying your bladder into your beloved toilet and tell me, how much of it ends up in the potpourri dish?

ZITS
A lot of people squeeze their zits. I have a better technique. Take a hot shower to loosen up the skin and open the pore. Then drop a pin into the pore. You’ll know you hit the right one when it feels like puncturing the skin of a grape. A little resistance at first, and then it will drop in. Then you can pull the skin apart and drain it that way. Finish it off with a dollop of flesh-colored Oxy 10 and you’re ready for your date. That way you don’t squeeze the zit and inflame or irritate your face or ass. (Getting hot, ladies?)

SPACE HEATER FOR THE BATHROOM
The only thing worse than the alarm rousing you out of bed at an ungodly hour is stepping into a frosty-cold bathroom moments later. The bathroom is often the coldest place in the house, and to compound things, you’re either naked or in a towel. You could blast the heat all night while you’re under a comforter and the bathroom would be toasty, but that means you’d be baking in your bed and throwing money out the window. Here’s a cheap and simple solution: space heater. “But Adam,” you ask, “you want me to leave the space heater on all night? Won’t that waste electricity?” No. “But if I turn it on after I wake up it won’t be warm until I’m driving to work.” That’s right, it needs to turn on twenty minutes before you walk in. “But Adam, they don’t make space heaters with timers.” This is why they call me Ace. For six dollars you can purchase a wall-outlet timer, the one you use to turn your Christmas lights on and off. Set it to heat up the bathroom fifteen minutes before you wake up. That way when you step into the room in your bare feet and boxers to brush your teeth in the morning, it’s not like you’re dropping the puck at a Penguins game.

SHAMPOOING
The reality is you should probably shampoo once a week. There have got to be oils and essences that are meant to accumulate in your hair that you’re not supposed to strip away. Think about it. What do you do right after you shampoo? You use conditioner. Why? To put back all the good stuff you just took out. Here’s an even better example. I have never seen a bald bum. Have you? The average fifty-five-year-old CEO is balding. The average fifty-five-year-old bum has a head of hair like Phil Spector. What’s the difference? The CEO has a marble shower with twenty different massaging heads that he uses twice a day. The homeless guy showers once a year at the beach.

ONE LAST BATHROOM TIP
If you get ingrown hairs on your neck or bikini line, use a little Oxy 10 after you shave and they will diminish considerably. P.S.: If you’re getting ingrown hairs on your neck
and
bikini line, please stay at home when I come to your town for the book signing.

LIFE TIPS

ARRIVAL TIME
As a society we heap a lot of praise on those who are punctual and even more on those who are early. “The early bird catches the worm,” “This guy is the first one in the office every day,” et cetera. This next tip is a case for being late.

If we’re meeting at a restaurant or the movies, be on time. But if you’re going to someone’s house, it’s better to be late than early. People are never ready when you show up before the agreed-upon time. If you’re coming over for brunch and you’re twenty minutes early, the person is just going to be stepping out of the shower. If you’re coming to a barbecue that starts at three o’clock, don’t get there at two twenty-eight. The hosts will still be hosing down the patio and setting up tiki torches. Then you’ll have to do that awkward thing where you say, “Pretend I’m not here,” but then annoy them five minutes later looking for the bottle opener. And usually the couple throwing the party is having one of their biggest, stupidest fights of the year. “What kind of idiot doesn’t know the difference between Sunkist and Orangina? You’re a monster. This marriage is over.”

That kind of early is horrific. But this tip is not just for your host’s benefit. It’s for you. Why throw away precious minutes of your life? They add up. Let’s face it: Work begins the second you leave the house. You are on the clock as soon as you walk out the front door.

When I was doing
Loveline
, I was always exactly on time. I was late maybe four times in ten years. I saw no sense in showing up a half hour early to do nothing.
Loveline
was a two-hour show. Take that half hour, multiply it by five days, and it would add up to more than an extra show. Over the course of a month, it’s like doing an extra week of shows. Moreover, if you multiply that half hour of sipping coffee with the flunkies from the station by five days and then multiply that by ten years, I would have lost fifty-four days of my life. God knows how old I’d be by now.

This all may be well and good for barbecues and radio shows. But I know a lot of you are going to draw the line when you hear about my next tardy destination—the airport. There’s a reason why there’s an endless line at the Cinnabon and the Chili’s is filled to the point where people are having to eat standing up: stooges showing up too early for their flights. In order to fully absorb this next tip, first you’re going to have to get over your fear of not flying. Missing your flight is not the end of the world. You’re not on top of the U.S. embassy in Hanoi in 1975. You’re in an international airport. There’s hundreds of flights leaving each day, and I’ll bet you at least twenty of them are going where you’re supposed to be. So if you miss your flight, you can still get to your destination, just a couple of hours later and maybe eighty dollars lighter in the wallet.

Now let’s do the same math I did with
Loveline
. Imagine you show up at the airport an hour earlier than you need to be there. Not an hour before the flight: an hour before the time you need to get through check-in and security. If you do that for three flights, you’ve lost the time it would take to fly from L.A. to Chicago. If you did it two more times, you could fly from L.A. to New York.

HAVE A “FUCK OFF” CHAMBERED AND READY TO GO
You’re going to encounter dicks in your life—it’s inevitable. One time during the first few weeks of my morning radio show, I was in the parking lot of Canter’s Deli on my way to go get some postshow pastrami. Someone walking by recognized me and shouted, “Howard Stern was better.” Without missing a beat I shouted back, “Fuck off.” It caught the guy by surprise. He started explaining that he was “a producer,” but before he could finish the pathetic excuse for his behavior, I hit him with a second round: “Go fuck yourself.” Then I walked into the deli and enjoyed my lunch. Life is too short to deal with dickheads. These people need to be shamed publicly. If you’re uptight about cursing, then having a “Beat it” in the breach is good, too.

FAKING IT
This tip is for the gals. Personally I don’t care if my many, many ladies fake orgasms. Either I gave you a real one or you think enough of me to avoid hurting my feelings. It’s like ass kissing. Genuine or not, it’s a compliment either way. But if you’re with someone who can’t get you over the hump, no pun intended, and you have to fake orgasms, hold back every eighth one. Just say, “Sorry, Oprah had on that woman whose face was ripped off by the monkey. It just wasn’t in me tonight.” The guy will think the rest of them were legit and you’ll never get accused of faking.

TIPPING
The tipping system is all screwed up. The people who really deserve the tips don’t get them. For example, the wife will get the hour (actually fifty minutes) of massage and aromatherapy at Burke Williams for $125 and still have to tip the bitch out. Why isn’t this included? Why do you have to give the masseuse another thirty bucks on top of the $125? What a scam.

And while we’re in the area of massages, let me say this. If you can afford a massage, you don’t need a massage. You know who needs a massage? The guy working on your roof while you’re out getting a massage.

I also don’t like the bullshit where you go out for dinner with a group of more than six people and the restaurant does the “gratuity included” on the bill. Let’s look at the definition of the word
gratuity—
“something given voluntarily or beyond obligation, usually for some service.”
Voluntarily
. If it’s included it isn’t a gratuity, it’s a tariff. They don’t give you the option. Eighteen percent (sometimes 20 percent if they’re real assholes) is built in. What if the service sucks? You’re still forced to give the “gratuity.” In fact, this system makes sure the service sucks, because it’s taken away the financial incentive to bring the food quick and keep the water glasses full.

And shouldn’t the chefs be getting the tips instead of the waitstaff? Why should the cost of the food influence the tip? It all weighs the same. It takes as much time and effort to deliver a Morton’s prime rib as a Denny’s Grand Slam. But that Morton’s waiter is going to get a big fat tip while the Denny’s waitress is going to get screwed by the old cheap fucks who are busting out the abacus to figure out what 14 percent of $6.95 is and then leaving it in lint-covered pennies.

Whether it’s an expensive restaurant waiter or masseuse, the “this is how they make their money” argument is a load of shit. They should be paid by the business. I wish when I was a contractor I could have done the job and then told the homeowner to tip the laborers. “Sorry, I don’t pay them. Eighteen percent would be fair.”

By the end of my carpentry career, I was really skilled. I could read plans, do the layout for framing, tell you the difference between a glulam beam and a Parallam beam, and I was driving a truck with three grand worth of them in the back. But I was making fifteen bucks an hour. Why does the hot twenty-one-year-old waitress who’s banging the rich producer need to average forty dollars an hour? Why does she deserve to make what an optometrist makes and not have to claim it in taxes?

So here’s the tip about the tip. Why not tip the laborers and minimum wagers? Like the Home Depot guy. He’s going to get a hernia or die trying to pull the tankless water heater from the top of the aisle rack. Next time you’re at the Taco Bell, if the kid taking your order is nice, tell him to keep the change. You just got nine tacos and a large Pepsi for $3.89. Give him a five and walk away. He’ll feel great because it’s unexpected, and you’ll feel good too.

TRUST YOUR GUT
Here’s a little story to illustrate my next tip about trusting your instincts.

The year was 1995 and I was teaching more boxing and doing less carpentry, and thus it was time to do what all young men wearing blue collars yearn to do: get out from behind the wheel of my piece-of-shit pickup truck and get behind the wheel of a piece-of-shit car. I probably should have purchased a used Sentra or Tercel, but I was swinging for the fences. I wanted a Toyota Supra. The problem was my twenty-seven hundred dollars could have bought me a Civic with one owner and seventy-two thousand miles, but if I wanted a Supra it was going to have to be five owners, none of them German, and 151,000 miles. Here’s the tip within a tip: Right now you could go on eBay and find a Jaguar from the eighties for fifty-five hundred dollars. But you’d be much better off spending that fifty-five hundred on a Nissan from this century. It’s hard to turn down a Jag, a Mercedes, or a BMW for the same price as a Honda or a Toyota, but after you pay for a valve job and new transmission on that Jag, I think you’ll see things my way.

Now back to our story. I scoured the
PennySaver
outside of the ninety-nine-cent store until I found a Supra for under three thousand dollars. I showed up at the guy’s apartment building to check it out. (Mini-tip within a tip: If you ask a guy to pop the hood and he reaches for a mop handle to hold it up, he’s probably not a loving owner.) Anyway, I was so excited to finally be in a bucket seat instead of a bench seat, I still bought it. I ended up replacing the shocks, tires, brakes, engine, and transmission—essentially every part but the dome light—over the next year. But there was still one component left to fix. The air conditioner. Now to you the air conditioner may just be another knob on your dash, but to me it was very symbolic. It stood for much more than cold air that was being pushed through a vent on a hot day: It meant success and prosperity. I grew up in the oppressively hot San Fernando Valley in houses that had sun-bleached driveways and no garages or carports. This meant whatever pile of shit happened to be in that driveway during any given summer was thirty degrees hotter inside than the 108-degree ambient temperature. And nobody ever had air-conditioning. I kept this sad legacy alive as an adult by living in a string of bad apartment buildings with only street parking and driving beat-up pickup trucks long past their prime. This was the first vehicle I’d ever owned that actually had air-conditioning. It just didn’t work.

Sometimes on a hot summer day I would press that little blue button with the snowflake on it just to see it light up even if the air coming through the window and the vent were the same temperature. At this time in my life I was beginning my radio career, and even though I was only getting paid fifty dollars a bit, there was light at the end of the tunnel. So I decided it was time to conquer this hot-air demon. Even though I was starting to make some money, out of habit I decided to do the job myself. So I bought a rebuilt air-conditioning pump and the component called a receiver dryer. I rolled up my sleeves and got to work in the driveway of my rented La Crescenta home. Some hours later, I finished installing the components and it was time to go to the service station and have it filled with Freon. Now came the moment of truth. I started the car and pushed the blue button with the snowflake on it.

I could feel that air was coming through the vents, but I couldn’t tell if it was getting colder or not. It didn’t feel any different from the air outside but I just figured, ironically, that it would take the air conditioner some time to warm up. Ten minutes later it became apparent that it wasn’t working and that the curse had not yet been broken. I’ll spare you all the details of all the knuckle busting and all the trips back and forth from the parts warehouse, but the summer had come and gone and I’d still not figured out a way to get the air working in my ’85 Supra. In my vain attempt to beat the heat I sadly, and ironically, spent an entire summer lying on a hot driveway underneath a black car on jack stands or standing in a parts warehouse in Van Nuys with nary a swamp cooler to be found.

The good news was the radio career had picked up enough that six months later I decided to break down and let the experts handle it. I brought the car to a place that specialized in air-conditioning repair. I told the guy behind the counter I didn’t care what it took: This car needed air-conditioning, and it needed it now. He told me, “You come back here at five
P.M
. and this baby will be blowing cold arctic air.” I jumped into Jimmy’s car and we went out for a celebratory lunch. Before I knew it, it was four thirty and time to make my way back to the shop. Jimmy dropped me off and headed home. I confidently strolled into the office. The mood was somber. The manager opened with, “I’ve been calling you over and over again.” I said I was out. I asked if the car was ready. He said, “No.” I asked, “Well, how far into it are you?” He said, “We haven’t even started.” I asked, “Why not?” He said, “You took the keys. That’s why I’d been calling.”

This, of course, was pre–cell phone. To be fair, it was not pre–cell phone for normal people, sort of like the Carollas huddled around a black-and-white TV in 1978 was not pre–color TV for normal people. I was crestfallen. Since I didn’t have a way home, I told him I’d have to have someone follow me over the next morning to drop it off. I started out to the parking lot where the car was parked. He chased after me. “Oh, one more thing … while you were gone, somebody backed into it and pushed in the rear right quarter panel.”

It was at this point I starting flirting with the notion of giving up. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be. I decided to soldier forward. I dropped the car off the following morning, and when I returned that afternoon the air was still not working. A part needed to be ordered or something. Either way, eight months, thousands of dollars, and hundreds of man-hours into this endeavor, the air passing through the vents of my Supra was the same temperature as one of Suge Knight’s farts.

Sometime the following week I got the call all parents of cars with no air-conditioning dream of. The manager from the shop said, “It’s working. Come pick it up.” This time it was my father’s turn to give me a ride. My dad and I don’t have a lot in common, so between his lack of knowledge/interest in building, boxing, or radio and my lack of knowledge/interest in jazz trumpet, jazz trumpet, or jazz trumpet, we don’t spend hours on the phone talking each other’s ears off. But one thing we do share is a passion for psychology. I told my father on the journey to pick up my Supra—a journey that was only three miles door-to-door but in actuality spanned hundreds of miles and thousands of tears—that I didn’t think this car was meant to have air-conditioning. It just wasn’t meant to be; I knew it in my gut. I predicted that the car would either be stolen or totaled.