In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy (6 page)

If you manage to get past the lecture about Bach and Prince Leopold without rushing the cockpit praying a sky marshal would put you out of your misery, you might attempt to drift off to a soothing Beethoven sonata only to be jarred awake by a John Philip Sousa march or some Tchaikovsky piece with cannons. Did the airlines research this? Did they hand out a survey to their frequent fliers and realize that while 19 percent of their patrons said they prefer to sleep on the flight, a rousing 81 percent said they wanted a master’s-level education in chamber music? What the fuck is wrong with these people? There’s been two hundred different airlines over the last fifty years, and not one goddamn one of them has a sleeping channel on their prerecorded radio station. Why not a channel with just light classical, crickets, and rain-forest sounds?

You’d think that a way to avoid a lot of these hassles is to cough up for a first-class ticket. Wrong. Flying first class actually makes the process longer. One of the so-called perks of paying a king’s ransom for your ticket is that you get to board first. You pay
more
, yet you have sit there
longer
. Your flight is as long as your ass is in the seat. If you get on the plane last, your flight from New York to L.A. is six hours and five minutes. If you’re the first guy on the plane, your flight is six hours and fifty-five minutes. And there’s no movie showing, there’s no booze flowing, there’s no stewardesses blowing. It’s not like you’re getting a foot massage, a reach-around, and a martini the whole time. The flight attendants are helping the person who paid one tenth the price you paid get his luggage into the overhead bin. As long as you’re on the ground, you ain’t in first class. You’re not getting your Bloody Mary until you’re at thirty thousand feet. People think it’s a champagne fountain up there, but what’s really happening is you’re getting the stink-eye from the economy-class passengers as they shuffle by and whack you in the shin with their luggage.

Here’s what first class should be: Get me when everyone else is on the plane. Send the stewardess out to the bar to say, “Mr. Carolla, we’re ready to leave.” What if this was a bus instead of a plane? There’s nobody who would pay ten times more for a bus ticket if he had to sit there while everyone else was loaded on. Imagine the bus driver says, “Because you paid three hundred dollars, you get to sit on the bus and watch everyone else drag their asses on board before we leave. And by the way, this bus holds two hundred and eighty-three people, so it’s gonna be a while.” You’d say, “Fuck you, I’m going to a bar, come get me when the people who paid thirty dollars are buckled in.”

After you arrive at your destination, the torture continues. The first thing most people do when they get off the plane is head to the bathroom. Big mistake. From an olfactory perspective, you’d be better off heading to a Porta-John at the nearest construction site. The damage done in the airport bathroom is worse than any terrorist action that could happen on the plane. What happens in those bathrooms is the work of an international all-star team of shitters. It’s a combination of bad airplane food meets nervous flyers meets “I’ve been holding this in for six hours” meets “Who cares? No one in my country of origin will ever know about this.” It’s how you treat a rental car: It’s not mine, therefore I don’t give a fuck. People file off the plane, see that bathroom, and think, “Not my home turf. Let the games begin.”

Then it’s time to go home. The airport shuttle, at best, probably saves you twenty bucks over a cab. But the cost to your time, soul, and sense of smell will never be recovered. I was in New York covering the Video Music Awards for KROQ when I got the call to come back and audition for
Loveline
on MTV. I was poor back then, so opted to take the shuttle to my apartment. My shuttle smelled like a burlap sack of BO had been thrown onto a hibachi. Just this whoosh of hot air and foreigner funk. Different parts of the world have different stink. It’s a curry-based diet meeting synthetic-based rayon. They’re all wearing disco shirts, their beards are down to their chests, and they haven’t washed their hair in six months. That shuttle van smelled like I walked into an asshole. There shouldn’t have even been double doors; there should have just been cheeks that opened up. Of course, I’m the first guy in the van and we have to do that thing where you circumnavigate LAX twenty-eight times to fill it. So we’re doing that circle and I’m hanging my head out the window like a dog on a country road. The other four or five couples eventually pile in. Since I was the first guy in, I felt like I was the lead man, like I was at a deli and pulled the first ticket. But no, because there’s a guy whose apartment is between LAX and where I live. So we eventually drop off a couple of people and it gets down to me and one other guy. We head down the 405 and toward the 101 interchange. He lives out in Calabasas, which is fifteen miles north on the 101, and I live in Sherman Oaks, which is two miles south. We’re coming to the fork and I realize if we veer to the left, I’m going to this guy’s house in Calabasas with this smelly motherfucking driver. I literally grabbed the wheel and pulled us to the right.

The shuttle is the worst twenty dollars you’ll ever save. It adds ninety minutes to whatever a Town Car or cab would have been. You have the unenviable choice between being dropped off last or being dropped off first and having a bunch of losers who can’t afford cab fare and have no friends or loved ones with cars knowing exactly where you live.

Here’s a story from the road that encapsulates all the misery associated with air travel. In the late nineties, when Dr. Drew and I would do the college circuit, often we would leave town for four or five days at a time. One evening before such a trip, during a commercial break from
Loveline
, I suggested to Drew that we carpool to the airport. No sense in us both paying for expensive long-term parking. I said, “Since you live in Pasadena and I live in Hollywood, how about you pick me up on the way to LAX?” He explained that wasn’t going to work because he had to go to the hospital on the way to the airport and make the rounds. I said, “It’s a seven
A.M
. flight—what time do you expect to make the rounds?” He said, “About five
A.M.”
By the way, we were having this conversation at eleven forty-five in the evening. This is why Dr. Drew is currently hard at work on his ninth TV show and your fat ass is sitting around reading this dumb book. Anyway, he suggested me sleeping over at his house that night and then waiting in the car while he made the rounds. I sarcastically asked if he was going to crack the window.

It was at that point I took one of my many retarded stands. As we came out of commercial break, I made the proclamation that I was not going to drive myself to the airport and that if Drew would not pick me up, then a loyal listener would. The only requirements were that you were female and had a road-worthy SUV. A young lady immediately called in to the show and said she had to be at work at six thirty in the morning so she was up at that hour anyway, and it would be an honor to transport me and my luggage to LAX. I said great and put her on hold. I didn’t want to give my address out on the air, but as I was speaking to her on the phone I realized I didn’t want to give out my address off the air, either. So I told her to go up Beachwood Drive, past the market, and I would meet her down at the bottom of the thousand stairs that connected Beachwood Canyon to the street far above it—and that she needed to be there at five thirty sharp. Since it was almost midnight, I told her to get some sleep and I’d see her in a few hours.

I then got back on the air, and before saying good night to the millions of troubled teens I proudly boasted to Drew that I, in fact, would not be paying for parking at LAX. He laughed and said, “Good luck. I’ll see you at the American Airlines terminal about six fifteen.”

Five hours and eight minutes later, my alarm went off. I quickly drank my cup of coffee, pulled on a heavy overcoat since it was drizzling and cold, and grabbed my suitcase with the week’s worth of underpants and socks crammed in it. I walked out of my house and up the street to the mouth of the staircase. I then dragged my heavy suitcase down the steep, dark, wet stairs on my way to rendezvous with the mysterious young lady with the SUV. Using my luggage like a barstool, I sat on the sidewalk under a streetlight with my collar pulled up, wishing it would either stop drizzling or she would arrive. I checked my watch. It read five thirty-seven. I started to become concerned. I thought maybe I should jog down Beachwood, around the bend, to see if she was waiting at the market. But then I thought, Should I drag my luggage with me or should I just leave it unattended? I decided to drag it behind me. She was nowhere to be found. Now I’m beginning to sweat profusely under my many layers of winter gear. I once again picked up my luggage and this time charged up the canyon to see if she was waiting at the next corner. Again nothing. By this time it was approaching six
A.M
. I worried that something tragic may have happened to this kind-hearted stranger but then quickly decided the cunt had stiffed me.

I ran up the stairs. Again, these are novelty stairs, the kind that trainers send their clients/victims up and down. I threw my luggage into the trunk, jumped into the car, and hauled ass toward the airport. It was now well after six, and the airport is at least a half hour away. I drove there like an old man drives through a farmer’s market, ignoring all laws of man, nature, and God. I screeched around the corner and into the long-term parking lot about six forty-two, grabbed my luggage, and sprinted toward the security line. This was pre-9/11 so I still had a chance.

I’d made it through by about six fifty-three and started scurrying down the endless terrazzo-covered corridor toward the American Airlines gate. When I arrived I was surprised and relieved to see Dr. Drew standing at the check-in counter. I looked to the left and saw our plane was parked right behind him with the gate still hooked up. I was weak from fluid loss but still had enough energy to let forth a celebratory “Hell yeah!” And that’s when I noticed Drew was arguing with the woman. “Sir, the door has been shut. We can’t reopen it.” I found out later their “on-time” schedule is based on when the door shuts, not when the landing gear goes up. And since it was the first flight of the morning, it affected the entire day’s schedule. I started in on the woman. “It’s two minutes to seven, the plane is parked, the jetway is still attached. Why are we standing in front of the plane arguing?” This bitch was clearly not going to let us onto our airplane.

Drew took this opportunity to make a couple of points. One was that his brand-new camel-hair overcoat was still on the plane because he got off to look for me. Two—the gig we were going to was at the University of Florida at a nine-thousand-seat basketball arena. This was easily the biggest show we’d ever done. As I began a third round of shouting/pleading with the unhelpful representative from American Airlines, Drew turned his ire toward me. “You couldn’t have driven yourself to the goddamn airport? You had to get a listener to do it? That jacket cost my wife two grand and this is the first time I’ve worn it. It was a gift.” (Quick side note on gifts: Why does everyone get caught up in the that-coffee-mug-was-a-gift argument? Doesn’t that make it more expendable?) I fired back at Drew, “If we could have just carpooled like human beings, I wouldn’t have had to rely on the listener with the heart of gold and the alarm clock of marzipan.”

As the arguing wore on, I realized the plane and the jetway still had not budged. I pointed out to the bitch in the blue blazer that I could have been on the plane and drunk by now. She repeated for the fourteenth time, “Sir, the door has been closed.” Then the final indignity. I saw a worker walk out of the jetway. The door had been open since we’d been there. At that point, I went into a fugue state. I don’t remember much after that, just that whenever Drew tells the story he says all I kept repeating to her was “Get me the guy from the commercial. Get me the superhelpful guy that makes everything right. The guy who chases weary travelers through the terminal with the attaché case they mistakenly left behind. That guy. Go get that guy.” This argument went on and on while the plane didn’t move and the jetway didn’t move. It’s another one of those letter-of-the-law, spirit-of-the-law arguments. Thank you, dickhead lawyers. The door not opening was no different from the overhead compartment not closing.

Almost every form of transportation has improved over the last forty years. Cars are safer and more comfortable, trains are faster and less expensive, and even buses have improved—not counting the whole segregation thing. Airline travel’s the only mode of transportation we’ve taken a step backward in. The passengers dress like defendants on
The People’s Court
, the stewardesses have gotten uglier or gay, and a flight from New York to L.A. still takes six hours, exactly the same as it did in 1963 except that now you have to get to the airport two hours earlier for the prison-style pat-down and delousing. And instead of sitting across from guys with ascots, I’m sitting across from an ass named Scott.

THAT’S
ENTERTAINMENT?

I’ve had the good fortune to work in a variety of jobs in Hollywood—radio, television, film, the Internet, gay pornography—you name it. And I’ve always been a fan. So I feel well qualified to tear the mass media a new asshole.

TV AND OTHER MISCELLANY

I love television. I wasn’t raised on television, I was raised
by
television. I watched nine hours a day back when there was nothing on. Imagine how much I watch now. As a matter of fact, it kills me to write this book because I’m not watching TV right now. If only someone could make a TV show about me writing a book, that would be awesome.

Network television followed about the same arc American car companies took from the early seventies till now. Back in the seventies when there was no competition like cable, satellite, et cetera, you got such gems as
The Brady Bunch, Hawaii Five-O, Dukes of
Hazzard
—the list goes on and on. Now, I know a lot of you wax nostalgic about those shows, but it’s not because they were good. They were pieces of steaming shit. The reason you like them is because these shows were all on when you still had hair and weren’t in a loveless marriage. But make no mistake,
The Brady Bunch
sucked. What’s this have to do with cars? Well, before cable hit our televisions and Toyota hit our shores, we had
Hart to Hart
and the AMC Matador. Two American piles of shit. Now we have
Lost
and the Z06 Corvette. See what you can do when you’re pushed by competition?

THE BIGGEST LOSER

I’ve never seen
The Biggest Loser
, but I have seen the commercials because they play the shit out of them around seven
P.M
. when I am trying to eat. A cavalcade of morbidly obese dudes with D cups, stretch marks, and manhole-sized areolae are herded in front of me and my spaghetti and meatballs. When did it become okay to show man boobs on prime time? I could make a pretty fucking compelling argument as to why it was more offensive and emotionally scarring for my kids than seeing chick boobs. Couldn’t they throw a wife beater on these fat motherfuckers? The guy already has to go to the zoo to be weighed. Do you think five ounces of cotton would make a goddamn difference? I don’t care whether you have a penis or a vagina, either you need a sports bra or you don’t. Of course the chicks wear a top—they’re covering up the one positive side effect of obesity, which is big jugs. So let’s quickly review the retarded society we’ve crafted. If I turn on
Survivor
and a hot female model is scrambling up a cargo net and a half inch of her ass crack can be seen over her bikini line, it needs to be pixelated by the network. But the lactating male long-haul trucker on
The Biggest Loser
, whose jugs are bigger than anything Russ Meyer’s ever beat off to, is perfectly fine, according to Standards and Practices? Does anyone else want to kill themselves? I’ll tell you who the biggest loser is: my junk!

M*A*S*H
HAIR

I was watching a rerun of
M*A*S*H
the other day, a show I’ve seen two thousand times. As I was marveling at Alan Alda’s huge, dry mop of seventies hair and B.J. Hunnicut’s pube-fro and walrus mustache, it dawned on me: This show was supposed to be about the Korean War. The Korean War took place from 1950 to 1953. Not only did no one in the military have that hair, no one in society had that hair. Trapper John was rocking a full-blown Jew-fro in what was supposed to be 1950. Back then no guy left the house without a handful of pomade. And the only guys with mustaches in the fifties were either carnival barkers or Latin band leaders, and theirs were dripping with wax. At least on
Happy Days
they attempted to look like their hair was living in the same decade, until somewhere around season three when Ralph Malph said, “Fuck it, I’m getting a blow dryer,” and that’s when everyone’s hair jumped the shark. I blame Elvis for this. He made 425 movies in nine months, which meant that whether he played an Old West gunslinger or an Egyptian pharaoh, his hair always looked like Dick Clark’s circa 1955. By the way,
M*A*S*H
aired from 1972 to 1983. The show lasted nearly four times as long as the event it was portraying. The only other time in television history that happened was
Roots
.

THE VIEW

I know I’m a guy so I’m supposed to hate
The View
, but I don’t hate
The View
because I have a dick. I hate
The View
because I have a brain.
The View
is going on what feels like its thirty-fifth season. It has numerous Emmy nominations, and even an Emmy win, and it’s a disjointed, scattered piece of shit that’s hosted by some of the least compelling, most untalented people that have graced a television set. If this show consisted of five guys sitting around talking over each other with the occasional hackneyed joke awkwardly shoehorned into the meaningless conversation, it would have been yanked off the air years ago. You see, at ten in the morning all the smart people are at work, and that leaves
The View
’s audience.

Barbara Walters is about as interesting and funny as that one old teacher you had in junior high. I know everyone treats her like some kind of national treasure, but she’s clearly past her prime. And no one at that show would dare utter a word. It’s about the same relationship Saddam Hussein shared with his coworkers. When she finally decides to hang up her dentures and call it a career, there will be a silent celebration akin to what the guards did after the Wicked Witch got the bucket of water tossed on her. On her last show, the lavaliere mics will be recording a lot of “We’ll miss you, we’ll stay in touch, we don’t know how we’ll carry on without you.” But the internal monologues will skew a little more toward “Have fun on the Greyhound bus to hell, bitch.”

Sherri Shepherd is dumb. She’s read one book and it’s the Bible. She’s not “ha-ha” funny, she’s more “We need a fat chick who’s not funny” funny.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck gets a pass. She’s already being punished on a daily basis. Could you imagine if your lot in life was to be wedged between Barbara Walters and Sherri Shepherd? She’s the lunch meat between a stale piece of sourdough and the dumbest slab of pumpernickel to ever hit the day-old bin at the bakery.

Whoopi Goldberg. What happened to the unstoppable force of comedy that had us doubled over with spun gold such as
Burglar, Jumping Jack Flash
, and
Eddie?
An Emmy for
The View
and an Oscar for
Ghost
. She deserves those about as much as Elvis deserved his black belt in tae kwon do.

Joy Behar—she’s the funny one. That’s like saying Marwan al-Shehhi was the funniest of the 9/11 hijackers.

CARTOONS

Now I know what you’re thinking: Why would an old fuck like me waste a bunch of time writing about cartoons? Two reasons. One, I was forced to stare at these things every Saturday morning throughout the seventies. This was a by-product of my inability to read and my dad’s inability to throw a goddamn baseball. And two, now that I have young twins and still can’t read, I’m forced to watch cartoons in my forties.

Where to begin? Let’s start with the most prolific, Hanna-Barbera. They’re responsible for such gems as Magilla Gorilla, the Hair Bear Bunch, Jabberjaw, Hong Kong Phooey, and Grape Ape. Now, I know all you haters are going to say, “What about
The Flintstones?
What about
The Jetsons?
What about
Jonny Quest?”
Those shows all sucked, too, they just didn’t suck as hard as a big purple ape that kept repeating the phrase “grape ape” over and over again. These shows blew ass while Hanna-Barbera got rich and we got dumb. Hanna-Barbera didn’t do programming for kids because they loved kids; if they loved kids, they would have created programming that was interesting, entertaining, informative, anything but that fucking purple ape. They did entertainment for kids because they weren’t talented enough to create programming for adults. It’s like those bands for kids. Do you think the guys in the Wiggles were sitting around their dorm room twenty years ago and thought, “Well, we could be the next U2 or Nirvana and bang all the groupies we wanted. Or we could make music for five-year-olds and get some of that sweet, sweet Guatemalan nanny poontang”?

It’s a topic we rarely talk about in our society. We’ve decided that since the children are our future (I disagree, I say it’s the hovercraft), that every single thing done for kids is above reproach. I contend these jack-offs are just preying on the stupidity of children. I’ve read two hundred
Peanuts
cartoons and never even cracked a fucking smile. Yet Charles Schulz made more dead last year than I made in the last decade. Even the legendary Dr. Seuss wasn’t exactly Ernest Hemingway. He rhymed
box
and
fox
, everyone! Big goddamn deal! You don’t think you could have written that when you were high?

Back to being robbed of my childhood. The guys who churned out almost as much shit as Hanna-Barbera were Sid and Marty Krofft. There should be a class-action lawsuit against these two numbnuts. Hey, if you can sue Union Carbide for poisoning well water, why can’t we sue these two assholes for poisoning our brains?

I was on the CBS lot last year and we were walking to the stage where I was shooting my sitcom. Somebody said, “There’s Sid and Marty Krofft’s office!” Then, with a certain amount of pride, one guy said, “Marty’s there, would you like me to introduce you to him?” I said no. He said, “Why not? The guy’s a legend.” I said, “A legendary hack.” The guy stopped walking. He was shocked. He said, “Do you know how many shows Sid and Marty Krofft got on the air?” I said, “I know, I watched them all when I was a kid.
Far Out Space Nuts, Land of the Lost, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters
—artistically vacant, derivative, hackneyed garbage. Basically a big bowl of Styrofoam packing peanuts that came in a brightly colored box with a shitty prize in it.” He said, “How can you say that? The guy’s a pioneer. He’s eighty-five and still hard at work every day.” I said, “Hard at work doing what? Warming over steaming piles of cat shit like
Land of the Lost
so that a new generation’s IQ can be collectively lowered while this imbecile hammers another check?” Then he said, “Why are you so angry at Sid and Marty Krofft?” I said, “Because idiots like you are trying to turn these guys into deities. They’re rich, isn’t that enough?” They came around during a time when there was no competition and monopolized Saturday mornings with shows like
Sigmund and the Sea Monsters
. One of the worst shows, nay one of the worst creative endeavors ever undertaken. And now they want respect? I’ll give you two scenarios. One is they actually thought they were artists and that the shit they were crapping out every Saturday morning was good, which makes them delusional hacks. Or two, as I suspect, they knew they were providing shit, they knew the checks would clear, and they didn’t give a fuck, which would make them evil hacks.

Either way, you watch an episode of
Far Out Space Nuts
and tell me if the label “legend” applies.

SITCOMS

Let it be noted that when the history books are written and future generations want to know why we’re still doing shitty live-audience four-camera sitcoms in 2011, they can blame
Two and a Half Men
. The genre was almost dead. I was like Jamie Lee Curtis in the first
Halloween
, catching my breath on the sofa and thinking, Thank Christ this horrifying ordeal is over. And then from behind the couch popped up Sheen, Cryer, and that kid with the thyroid condition and set the movement back ten years.

I did a sitcom pilot for CBS. It was run by five women who were sort of like friends of your mom when you were in high school. A little bit scary, not particularly funny, and you weren’t exactly sure what they did for a living. But you figured you ought to be nice or you would get in trouble. Indulge me on a quick sexist rant for one minute.

Most of the comedy executives that I’ve dealt with at the network level have been women. Close your eyes and tell me, how many really funny women have you come across in your life? Thank you. I fantasized I’d be talking comedy with a bunch of fat Jews named Murray who knew exactly what I was talking about. The reality is you get your choice between postmenopausal women, gays, and Harvard grads. The network landscape is littered with people who have never made another human being laugh, not counting the time they tried to throw a softball. But don’t worry, they’re experts. Like an expert on great white sharks who’s never left Wichita. I don’t know why it’s an accepted fact in this town that you can be an expert on funny without having a funny bone in your body—and I’m including their funny bones, which I’ll downgrade to mildly amusing bones—but somehow they all get away with it. And if you knew how much money these guys/gals/gays made, you’d never stop vomiting.

CAR COMMERCIALS

I love cars. I hate car commercials. So why would a guy who loves cars hate slow-motion beauty shots of cars cruising down winding roads? Because of the disclaimer: “Closed course, professional driver. Do not attempt.” Do the goddamn lawyers have to get involved with every fucking aspect of our society? They used to just be on the commercials where the guy pulled an e-brake and slid into a parking space in front of a busy café. Now the disclaimer is in every shot of any car driving. I’ve seen them on minivan commercials where the van was going fifty-five in a straight line on an empty highway to Vegas. Hey assholes, if I’m not allowed to attempt to drive the vehicle in a straight line on an empty highway, what the fuck am I buying it for? There was a Subaru commercial a few years ago that showed their competitors’ cars driving around on the front wheels with the rear ones six feet off the ground, illustrating they are front-wheel drive versus Subaru’s all-wheel drive. And then came the disclaimer: “Do not attempt.” How the fuck could you attempt to drive a car with the rear wheels eight feet off the ground? It’s sad that we’ve regressed as a society to the point where we have to put warning labels on shit that’s physically impossible.