Adam Carolla - Daddy, Stop Talking! - And Other Things My Kids Want but Won't Be Getting

Not that I would get the chance if I were alive. I lament that you kids, and kids in general, aren’t ever going to drive manual cars. We were much more engaged behind the wheel when we drove stick. There’s no texting and driving with a manual transmission. You have to focus, but you feel totally in control, too.

This is especially going to be a handicap for boys. Therefore, I am making this deathbed proclamation. Sonny, you must learn to drive stick. Being able to downshift and blow around another driver, to bump start a car, and the simple satisfaction that comes with you jiggling the stick in the right to left to make sure it’s in neutral, are all rites of passage for a young man. It makes me sad to think that you’ll probably have a car that not only doesn’t have a manual transmission, but has back-up cameras and can parallel park itself. I’ve made my wish clear. I hope out of respect for your dearly departed dad you’ll… stick to it. (Good stuff, Ace Man.)

I want to reiterate the most important feeling I have about you two and cars: I’m not buying one for either of you. A car is something you have to earn. All of my shit vehicles were detailed in my previous books: trucks with bolted-down bar stools for seats, screwdrivers for keys and vice grips replacing the missing window cranks.

In Carolla style, both of you are going to have to go through a series of shitboxes, like I did, so that you can feel the pride of ownership that comes with a new vehicle. I want you to feel the sting of driving a car with a coat hanger for an antenna and a tampon string holding the tailpipe in place. I want you driving the car I saw recently in Long Beach. It was a seven-year-old Toyota with duct tape holding the rear taillight in place, that was so sun-blasted that the silver had worn off. The light was being held by the white cloth skeleton of the duct tape. It was so sad. That tape had been in place for at least two years. When the duct tape cries uncle, when the tape taps out, you know you’re driving a piece of shit.

What killed me about this particular vehicle was the “Toyota of Long Beach” license-plate frame. You know, the cheap plastic plate frame they put on every vehicle that leaves the lot? It’s a good idea at first, it’s free advertising. But a couple of years down the road, when it’s adjacent to the duct-tape gauze holding the car together does it really scream, “Come on down to our dealership”? If I were Toyota of Long Beach, I’d set up a system so I could size up the buyer of the car before I let them drive off the lot. If the person is wearing flip-flops and a mustard-stained sweatshirt and is trading in a Tercel with partially eaten In-N-Out Burger in the backseat, he’s getting a plate frame for one of my competitors’ dealerships, like “Toyota of Gardena.”

Remember kids, your car becomes you. If you have a disorganized mind, you’ll have a disorganized car. Poking your head into someone’s vehicle tells you everything you need to know about them. It’s like the Hickory Farms sample at the mall. When you get the taste of that summer sausage on the toothpick, you don’t need to eat the whole thing. You know what you’re getting. When you look in someone’s car and they’ve got spent scratch tickets in the passenger seat and a basket of dirty laundry in the backseat, you know exactly who that person is.

That’s why I’m not into hand-me-down cars. I’ve seen the young male driving the totally cherry Lincoln. That just means Nana died. No young dude would pick that car. And that spells disaster for that Continental. Because it was a hand-me-down, that guy is going to drive that shit into the ground, literally. Nana kept that thing in tip-top shape until she kicked off, but once her jackoff grandson gets hold of it, the cloth interior will be pockmarked with cigarette burns, the suspension will be shot from going seventy over speed bumps and doing brodies in the grocery store parking lot at night and it’ll smell like Willie Nelson’s hair.

When you don’t earn it, you don’t care about it. If I bought you each a brand-new fully loaded Mini Cooper when you turned sixteen, that car would be covered with fast-food wrappers on the inside and bird shit on the outside within a month. Meanwhile, the kid who busted his ass working two afterschool jobs slinging the fries that you then drop in your gratis car will be treating his like a Fabergé infant. He’ll attend to that thing in every spare moment he has, and spend every extra dollar he has on maintaining it. This isn’t a dig on you, Natalia or Sonny, this is human nature.

Let me bookend the chapter with a tale about why car ownership is so important to your old man.

Sonny, in 2011, you and I had a nice father-son trip to Orchard Supply Hardware, followed by a little wrenching. We walked around the store for an hour and a half, and Papa loaded up on paint, nuts, bolts and other odds and ends. You were very patient. Then we went back to the shop and wrenched. I gave you a Phillips head screwdriver and you pulled a panel off the door of one of my lightweight Datsun roadsters, all by yourself. It was great.

This was also incredibly symbolic. I hope what I am about to say shames not just my family, but all families. As a culture, we understand that when a young boy wants to play a musical instrument, we get them some drums. Or when a young girl wants to design clothes, we buy them some fabric, needles and thread and let them go to town. I’m sure a young Vera Wang was making little dresses for her Barbies. Well, early and often, I had an inclination for wrenching, but this went ignored. My parents were too busy being depressed faux intellectuals to attempt caring about something as blue collar as cars. Let me ask you this: If a kid showed a penchant for playing the violin and you didn’t encourage that, you’d be considered a monster, right? Well, what about the kid who wants to tinker with cars? It’s the same thing. We’ve just decided as a society that tools are for meatheads and cellos are for smart people. Some of the brightest guys I know are car guys — it takes a mind to understand mechanics. In our society, you could be the big brain from the DC think tank who comes up with the solution to getting us off foreign oil, but not know how to change your own oil. So who’s smarter?

The point is, it was torture having no garage and a lame dad. It was so fucking pathetic and infuriating that we did actually have a garage but instead of it containing a car and tools, it contained my mattress and was my bedroom. I wasn’t going to do that to you, Sonny. But I wasn’t going to foist it on you, either. You can’t force that.

So as you read this, if you’re leasing a Camry and GPS-ing directions to the nearest Jiffy Lube that’s okay; I gave it a shot. But I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to give you the opportunity to activate that part of your brain and see if you were a born grease monkey, like your old man was and his old man wasn’t.

Ultimately, kids, I hope you work hard, save up your dough, pick the right car for you, and, more important, for your race. Let’s face it, certain ethnicities prefer certain cars. I actually came up with a show idea around this: Racial Supermarket Parking Lot Sweepstakes . Here’s how it works. I put ten different cars in a grocery-store parking lot. Then the lucky contestant stands near the automatic doors. I have an easel with foam core cards that read “Asian,” “Black,” “Mexican,” “White,” “Gay” and so on. I then hit an air horn and the automatic doors slide open, and the contestant has to run around and put the card on the car that best represents the race. He’ll be putting the “Gay” card on the peach-colored Mini Cooper, “Black” on the Escalade with the spinner rims. But the twist is for “Mexican,” you have to run off the lot and put it on a bus.