In a way, I think I might have been moving a little too fast for my own good in those first few years out of high school. I’d maybe squeezed a little too much living into too short of a time frame. I needed a break. I needed to slow down. I needed to do that great American thing that I hadn’t done yet: I needed to hit the road and go “find myself.”
Man, I hate that term. I really do. I mean, I knew who I was. I knew who I wanted to be. I just wasn’t sure what was going to come next, and I needed to break free of the expectations of everybody else around me before I could get there.
So what’s a guy to do when he’s feeling done with everything in life?
First of all, if you’re me, you go buy a new vehicle. I’d sold the Mustang and traded for some other classic I can’t even remember before I made my decision to up and leave the life I knew. I also knew I needed a really reliable vehicle if I was planning to go drive off on a great adventure. So I traded whatever car I had, and I used the good credit I’d built up as a fireman (before I let anybody know I’d quit) to run right out to one of the big dealerships in town and buy myself a brand-new Jeep Wrangler—the kind with the fold-down top. What better vehicle to go out and see America in, am I right?
What else does a guy in his mid-twenties do when he wants to change everything? When you’re me, you sell everything. Just dump it. I took out an ad in the newspaper and I put some signs up in front of my apartment that said, EVERYTHING MUST GO!
I packed a few T-shirts and jeans and a cheap leather jacket into the Jeep that morning, and then I sat there drinking beer while people came and went from my place. I was absolutely determined to sell everything. People would look at the couch or a table or something and say, “Is this for sale, too?” I’d answer, “Everything’s for sale. And anything that hasn’t sold by five o’clock is going out on the front lawn and you can have it for free.”
That’s exactly what I did, too. At five o’clock that day, I threw the rest of my stuff on the lawn and I drove over to see my dad to say good-bye. I didn’t know where I was going. I figured I’d head west, maybe to California, because that’s just what people do. I had no idea when I’d be back, though, and no idea how I’d pay for anything once I ran out of the $5,000 or so I had in my savings account at that time.
I think that good-bye moment was the only time I’d ever seen my dad cry. He was scared to death. He thought he was losing me. He probably thought I’d lost my mind! Here I’d been this incredibly dedicated, hardworking, successful, clean-cut kid from the moment I left high school, and he just couldn’t understand what in the hell I was doing.
“I’ll be fine, Dad,” I told him. “I just need to do this.”
ON THE ROAD
Me, in the middle of growing up . . . and growing out my hair. COURTESY OF RICHARD RAWLINGS.
I didn’t have any tattoos when I left home. There wasn’t a single hole in my body that I wasn’t born with—except for the bullet hole. My hair was so conservative it was almost military-style short. I barely even recognize me when I look back on those days, and you can be darned sure nobody who’s a fan of Fast N’ Loud would recognize a picture of me at twenty or twenty-two years old if they saw it anywhere outside of this book.
Anyway, I hopped in my brand-new Jeep and took off, determined to see California, excited to see the Pacific Ocean, and thinking that somehow hitting the road for a couple of weeks would make it all come together. I really didn’t think I’d be gone for more than two or three weeks. The purpose of this trip was to figure it all out. What it actually turned into almost instantaneously was me camping out or staying at run-down motels, drinking beers at night, and having fun with whomever I happened to meet along the way. Once I was a few hours west of Fort Worth, I realized that I could basically do whatever the hell I wanted to do.
I was free!
I stopped for gas in Tucson and this backpacker dude—not a dirty, nasty-looking vagrant type, but somebody right about my age who just obviously lived on the road—came up to me and said, “Hey, can I borrow some money?”
“Dude, I’m strapped,” I said. “I’m sorry, man, but I just don’t have it.”
“Well,” he said, “could I get a ride?”
I tried to be nice and get out of it, but then finally I was like, “Sure. Where you going?” He said he was going east. I said I was going west. He said he didn’t care, and he hopped in.
As we were cruising west and talking, it occurred to me that this guy somehow made enough money to live and eat and keep himself pretty happy, all while seeing the country, meeting new people, and moving from place to place. It intrigued me. I wanted to know how he did it. So I made a deal. “You can ride with me, and I’ll buy you hamburgers and beer and what have you,” I said, “but you’ve got to do something for me.”
“What?” he asked.
“You got to teach me how you survive and do all of that with no job!”
He was pretty happy with that deal. So we talked for a bit, and I got a few little lessons from him on how to panhandle for money at the gas stations. A ways up the road, I parked my brand-new Jeep with the dealer tags on it around the back of some gas station, went out in front, and started asking people for money. Much to my surprise, people started giving it to me! An hour went by and I had $60 in my hand.
I’m thinking, Holy s—t! This is insane!
The last guy I asked gave me a $10 bill. I turned around, went right into that gas station’s store, bought beer, beef jerky, and Cheetos, threw it in the Jeep, and we took off. The guy was still pumping his gas! I’m sure he was thinking, What the f—k?
It was so much fun that the backpacker dude and I wound up tooling all over the West Coast for months pulling this same routine, staying at dingy motels and gettin’ loaded. We’d take turns driving so we were safe, but there were times when I’d just be sitting there drinking a beer in the passenger seat, watching America fly by, feeling freer than I’d ever felt in my life. We’d stop at whatever dive bar we could find and try to pick up girls. Sometimes we’d camp out in a public park somewhere.
It was like my personal version of living free like people did in the 1960s, and I had a blast. It was also a little bit like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, if you know what I mean. I did things I’d never imagined doing. We got crazy. And I started to look different, too. I let my hair grow for all those months. My skin got all dark and leathery from the sun and wind and partying. I had my backpacking friend pierce my ear with a straight pin on a park bench one night, and it’s never closed up after all these years. I can still put an earring in that hole if I want to.
At some point we finally made it to Los Angeles. We were cruising down the Sunset Strip, right where the big billboard is near the infamous Chateau Marmont hotel, and I started looking at this gorgeous blonde chick in the car next to mine.
“Hey, how are you doing?” I said, and she answered me. She was hot, man! The sort of California-girls hot you hear about in old Beach Boys songs or something.
I said, “Hey, we should have a drink or something sometime,” and she said, “Sure!” I told her I was new in town, and she said she was on her way to a meeting, but we made plans to meet at this certain bar after she was done. We did all that right there in our cars!
As she drove away, I looked at my trusty passenger and said, “Dude, this is where you get out.”
“Cool,” he said. He shook my hand. He grabbed his duffel out of the backseat, hopped out onto the sidewalk on Sunset Boulevard, and walked away.
It was the last time I ever saw him.
The blonde from the car actually followed through and showed up at the bar. I wound up staying on her couch for a while in L.A., where I completed the demolishing of my formerly clean-cut look by getting my first tattoo—a tribal band high up on my bicep, where it could be hidden under a short-sleeved shirt (in case I ever wanted to get a respectable job again, I figured). I actually wrote a check for that ink to Easy Riders Tattoo on Melrose.
Th
en I decided, Okay. It’s time to go back home.
A photo I keep in my office these days, which shows off my first tattoo. COURTESY OF RICHARD RAWLINGS.
The thing I realized when I was out on the road is that I’d been the one pushing myself too hard from the start. It wasn’t anybody else who was pressuring me into doing all the things I did. It was me. And I liked that pressure. I liked pushing hard to see what I could accomplish. I just hadn’t given myself enough downtime. I didn’t go to college and mess around for four years like a lot of kids. I needed to blow off that steam. I needed to let go and find my own sense of style and everything else. It felt good, I had a blast, and when it was done, it was done.
“See ya!” I said to that blonde chicky and the other friends I’d made in L.A.
I hopped in my Jeep with the dealer plates still on it and headed back toward Texas. We didn’t have cell phones back then, and I’d pretty much neglected to stop by a pay phone in all the months I was on the road, so nobody knew where I was. Not my dad, not Daphne, nobody.
I stopped in Las Vegas on the first night of my drive home and checked into the Imperial Hotel. Vegas seemed like a pretty rad place to be, so I decided to stay for a couple of nights—but only a day or so into it, I realized I was out of money. The check for the tattoo wiped me out. I was flat broke. No backup. No savings. Done.
That’s the first time I called my family.
“Hey, I’m in Vegas and I’m out of money, and I need you to send me some cash to get home,” I said.
My dad was pissed. He was like, “You got yourself in it, you can get yourself out, man!”
I didn’t expect that response from him, but he was right. It took me about a week or so to scrounge up enough to pay for the hotel and to gather enough gas and food money to get back home, but I did it. I wound up at Daphne’s house, where I crashed on her couch. They all looked at me like I was some kind of a street person or something. No one could believe how different I looked, and how different I seemed. That trip was definitely a trip, I’ll tell you that.
Once the journey was over, though, reality hit and hit hard. While I was lying there on my sister’s couch on my very first full day back, some repo man showed up and repossessed my Jeep. I hadn’t made a single payment on it since I’d driven off the lot. Whoops. So not only was I broke, but now I didn’t have a ride, and my credit was shot on top of it all.
My sister and my dad were really worried about me, and I can understand why, but they had no idea how driven I was. I knew at that moment that no matter how down I got, I would never give up. I’d gone through my personal cross-country odyssey. I’d had some crazy, crazy times—many of which I couldn’t remember if I tried to—but now I was ready to get to work. I was ready to take control of my own destiny.
From my experience with the Promo Wipes, combined with my ability to talk people into giving me money on the road, I came to the conclusion that sales was the first thing that I ought to jump into in order to start making some money real quick. I started looking through the paper and came across a job listing from a brand-new company with a brand-new concept. I called ’em up and discovered that this company was looking for a salesperson to go around to all the local bars and restaurants and talk to the owners and managers about us paying them to allow us to hang advertisements over the urinals in their bathrooms.
I was like, “Really?” and the owner was like, “Yeah. We’ve got another team selling all the big ads to the liquor companies and tobacco companies and all that, so it’s up to you to go around and pay the restaurants and bars to allow us to hang those ads.” I guess the liquor and tobacco companies figured they’d have a rapt audience while guys were standing there taking a leak. The concept seemed cool to me from a marketing standpoint. It was kinda genius, actually. I wished I’d thought of it.
“Sign me up!” I said. And so my first sales job was literally selling ads over urinals. It was a little bit embarrassing, and a little bit intimidating, but it allowed me to cut my sales teeth very quickly. I was thrown right into the pits where the only money I’d make were the commissions on the ad space I secured. And I nailed it. All of a sudden I was making some money. It wasn’t great money, but it was money—and the more ads I sold, the more money I made. I liked that concept a lot. I liked being in charge of my own destiny. It felt right.
I said good-bye to Daphne’s couch and went out and got myself another apartment. My credit wasn’t great because of the Jeep repo, but I managed to fill my new place up with brand-new furniture and everything I needed by using store credit. It cost me a lot of money every month, and I racked up a lot of debt in a short amount of time paying insanely high interest rates, but I knew that as long as I kept selling ads, I could always make ends meet.
I guess I developed a penchant for living slightly beyond my means pretty early on. It kept me hungry. It gave me something to chase. It kept me on my toes. I like that feeling of knowing I need to get up every morning and go get it in order to keep living the life I want to live. It keeps a certain fire under your feet, and that’s a good thing.
I was good at my job. There’s hardly a better feeling than knowing you’re good at something, and then going out and nailing it every day. That gave me confidence in every part of my life—especially with women. My edgier look attracted a whole different class of chicks, and walking around feeling like I had enough bank to do whatever I wanted didn’t seem to hurt my chances, either.
I’d been at that sales job for maybe a year when I finally decided to take my confidence to another level: I decided to grab that long-lingering burger-joint lawsuit by the balls.
I was sick and tired of waiting around for my lawyer to get stuff done, and I was sick and tired of waiting for that company to pay me something for what I believed was their role in my getting shot. The whole thing had dragged on for almost three years without a resolution, which is the problem with lawsuits and one reason I am not a big supporter of engaging in any type of legal action unless it’s a last resort. My attorney insisted we had a slam-dunk case, though, and that the only thing the burger joint had been doing was trying to stall and put us off.
Finally, the court put us into mediation, and that’s when I put my salesman’s negotiating skills to work.
The lady from the burger joint’s corporate side walked into the mediation room and I said, “Look, I’m tired of this s—t. Bottom line is you know you are f—ked if this goes to court. Your job is to not pay me, or at the very least to pay me as little as possible. So tell me this: what’s your deductible?”
She looked a little stunned.
“What’s the company’s deductible on their insurance?” I asked.
She told me that it was a hundred grand, which sounded like a large sum of money for me. I’d never had any money like that. I said, “Well, how about you cut off a little bit from that, so you can say you did your job—why don’t we make it like ninety-seven thousand or something like that, and we’ll wrap this up right now. You’re gonna have to pay that anyways, so why not get this over with?”
“Done,” she said, and they wrote me a check.
That was the first time I’d ever had any substantial amount of money in my life. Prior to that, no matter how hard I’d worked, I’d never had more than five or ten grand to my name at one time. It’s kind of crazy that it took a bullet in my shoulder to get me that kind of financial payout. But such is life. Depositing that check made me feel like I’d won the lottery. I thought everything was going to be great from that moment on.
Of course, that’s when I went and did one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.
I had been in the process of building my credit back, and because I’d been making all of my payments on time, my credit score was actually pretty stellar. I was sick and tired of paying all kinds of payments every month, though, so I sat down on the very day the check cleared and did the responsible thing: I paid off all of my debts. I sat at my kitchen table and wrote out $38,000 worth o
f checks for all the furniture and credit cards and everything. It felt so good to be zeroed out and debt-free that I called up my credit card companies and canceled all of my cards right then and there. Boom!
I am never going to carry any debt again! I told myself.
Then I rolled out to the Harley dealership and bought me a brand-new Harley. My first ever brand-new Harley! Cash. Life was good.
By the time I was done paying taxes, that whole $97,000 was gone. I didn’t think anything of it because I was debt-free and feeling good riding around on my new bike. Of course, a few months later, the ad sales started slowing down. The money got tight. I realized I needed a new refrigerator or something and that I didn’t have the cash in the bank to go get it. So I filled out a credit application—and I got turned down. I’d never been denied credit in my life. I’d worked hard. I’d been a firefighter and a cop. I’d always received great treatment from the credit companies. I was like, “What happened?”
Turns out that my credit was always good because I carried a certain amount of debt. Once I closed out all my credit cards, thinking I was being responsible, all that was left on my credit report was the repoed Jeep! It looked like I had no other actively good credit whatsoever, even though I was debt-free. I’d been stupid. I didn’t know how the credit-reporting system worked before I made that bold move of canceling my credit cards, and I screwed myself over by acting rashly.
It would take me a solid five years or so to rebuild my credit after that moment.
Since I didn’t have any credit anymore, and I didn’t have the cash to simply buy the things I wanted or needed to buy, I realized I needed to find a new job that would give me a much bigger upside in sales commissions than the over-the-urinal ad business could provide. I couldn’t find another job quickly enough to get me over the hump, though, and suddenly I was broke. I wound up having to sell my new Harley just to make ends meet, and of course I took a bath on it since any new car or bike depreciates like crazy the minute you drive it off the lot.
Fast N' Loud Page 4
