farewell to a friend
- The five hour drive to Las Vegas
- The Rat Beach Red and huge pile of nachos from the Redondo Beach Brewing Company
- The double-double animal-style, animal-style fries, and large vanilla shake from In-N-Out Burger (yes, ask for large – they have it)
- The country skillet at the Ocean Diner in Hermosa Beach and the Gordito Breakfast Burrito at the Local Yolk in Manhattan Beach (tie)
- Paying 1/3 of the rent that I paid in NYC (which, for better or worse, is about to change)
All of these things, save for the last one, revolve around destroying myself. The middle three fall into the “food” category, and, honestly, I’ll take Katz’s, Sea Thai and Rosario’s (and a pint of Sweet Action) over each of them. Rent in NYC is much more expensive than in LA, but that’s because it’s worth every, single, m-f’ing, goddamn penny. Really, only the nearness of Las Vegas is my one true love about living in LA, and that’s almost like saying that you love Scranton because it’s close to NYC.
But there’s another thing that I have grown to love while living in LA, something I did not nor cannot experience on the east coast: Adam Carolla’s radio show.
I’d never been a radio guy. When friends in high school first fell in love with Howard Stern, I didn’t get it. Later, when he became more popular, I dug him a little bit, if only for the abundance of porn stars and lesbians on his television show (which I never turned off when it came on E!). But allegiances to talk radio, whether Stern or Mike and the Mad Dog or whomever, I never understood.
But then I moved to LA.
My commute, as I’ve chronicled on here, is joy-eradicating. I know I’ve been harping on this non-stop, but trust me, you still don’t get it. Last Tuesday, I left home at 6:45am and clocked into work at 8:11am (mind you, my commute is 17.3 miles long). Several times, I’ve made plans on a Friday afternoon to hang out with a friend later that night, then after sitting in traffic on the horrendous rush hour commute home, have canceled those plans, preferring instead to sit in my room and sulk. Yesterday morning, as I pulled onto La Cienega from the little turn-out from Aviation, there was a shit-ton of traffic, which was unusual for that time in that specific spot. As I drove along, I saw why – in the middle lane, a car was completely stopped, but didn’t have its hazards or blinkers on. As I drove by, I looked up into the SUV to see a man sitting in the driver’s seat, head cocked back, unconscious. People were beeping, and he may well have been dead. Like, that’s not even a joke – the guy was likely dead. This is the stuff I deal with on my drives to and from work. 34.6 miles per day, at least two hours and twenty minutes in the car. Not good.
It was early on in my days here that I discovered the Adam Carolla Show, which broadcasts on 97.1 FM from 6am to 10am. Prior to the radio show, I was already a fan of Carolla. I remember when “The Man Show” first premiered in what must have been the summer of 1999. I was spending the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college as a busboy in North Wildwood, New Jersey, hanging out with my girlfriend and generally being a retard. We both worked on the weekends, and both our families left us (and the shore) during the week, so we went out every single weeknight. And I remember that I would not go out until 9:30pm on Wednesdays, after that week’s “The Man Show” episode was over.
Just as I am unashamed to admit my love for “The Man Show”, I also am unashamed to say that I became a huge devotee of the Adam Carolla Show. No one – and I mean, no one – loves the combination of boobies, fart jokes and beer quite like I do, so the appeal was immediate and intense. But as I learned over the past several months listening to him, Adam Carolla is much more than that Holy Trinity of Humor – he’s actually quite smart, articulate, and absolutely anti-Mexican, all things I celebrate. A lot.
What’s more, Adam is almost the perfect mix of me and my dad (bear with me). I am funny, like boobies and beer (see above), but have a gigantic, unabiding fear of real, actual, physical work and prefer reading books in the shower, books mostly relating to either serial killers or syndicalism. On the other hand, my dad is funny, presumably likes boobies and used to like beer, and would rather, I don’t know, frame a house or buy nails than read The New Yorker. If I am at one end of the spectrum and my dad is at the other, Adam, with his intellect, lack of formal education, and knowledge of carpentry and boxing and beers and boobies, falls somewhere in the middle. And for this, I love him.
But now, with no warning, his radio show is going off the air. It’s not just Adam – the whole station is going from talk to Top 40. This makes me feel a little better, for two reasons: 1) If it was just Adam getting booted, well, that shit just wouldn’t be right; and 2) At least Tom Leykis, who I strongly dislike and whose life philosophy can be summed up as “Women are dumb c-nts and gold diggers”, is also out of job now. So that’s nice.
But still, the news is devastating. Again, comforts are few and far between for me in Los Angeles (have I mentioned that they don’t even have Bud bombers here???), and Adam was an everyday staple. I don’t want to go into a laundry list of things I thought were funny or things that I’ll miss (I do, believe it or not, have some limits to this hero worship), but quickly: one of the top five funniest things I’ve ever heard in my life occured on Adam’s show, when he and Norm MacDonald were doing a line-by-line deconstructing/retelling of Kenny Roger’s “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town” (line: “And it won’t be long I hear them say until I’m not around”/Norm: “Look, I got, like, three weeks here. Do you think you can wait three weeks before you start whoring it up? I mean, three weeks? C’mon!”). I won’t attempt to recreate it further, but if you can find a clip of this and send it to me, I will be your best friend. I had cried in my car several times before and have since, but this was the first and last time I did so out of laughter and not for reasons related to girls’ high school basketball.
(And if you don’t believe me when I say that bit was hilarious, trust me, it was funny.)
And now it’s all gone. Done. Over. First, it was Indie 103.1 being replaced by a Mexican station, and now Adam’s off the air for Top 40. This about sums up LA: good rock music and funny, intelligent conversation replaced by something Mexican-related and T.I. Great, great city.
I’ll continue to listen to his podcasts, but it won’t be the same. Nothing will quite replicate the joy I felt, even if it was fleeting, as I started up the ol’ Town Car each morning and Adam’s voice boomed through my radio, giving me just enough juice to take on that 90 minute/12mph commute.
Accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu, godspeed, Adam.
(And T and Bald Brian)
