Fast N' Loud

by Richard Rawlings

  It wouldn’t last long. We’d start spending time together almost immediately after the divorce was finalized. She really is an incredible woman, and I will question why I did what I did probably for the rest of my life. We tried to be friends, and sometimes we’d be more. But I had a feeling we’d always be in each other’s lives no matter what the status of our relationship. That feeling would prove to be right in ways we never could have imagined over the next couple of years.

  On the business side of things, after we got that sizzle reel optioned by Pilgrim, two more years went by. We kept Gas Monkey alive primarily by flipping cars. Most of the money that came in went right back out. I wasn’t pulling a salary for myself, and most months it took everything I had just to keep paying Aaron.

  Pilgrim stayed in touch and seemed enthusiastic about the show’s possibility, but they finally called and said they wanted a new sizzle with a slightly different concept. So we went out and put it together, and the show morphed a little bit more into the car-build show you see today instead of the road-tripping, presto-change-o car show we thought it was going to be. That was a good thing. It forced us to go out and drum up more business that would put Aaron’s true talents to work. We were super happy with the way the sizzle turned out, so we sent it to Pilgrim, and then we waited again. I kept calling them every week looking for updates, looking for some bit of good news to hold on to. And week after week I was told that our show was “still alive!” but that there wasn’t any news to report as of yet.

  Part of me wondered if that was just Hollywood’s nice way of telling me to get lost without actually saying it. Hollywood’s like that. They talk out of both sides of their mouths and try not to burn any bridges, just in case anyone ever becomes successful. They want to be able to come back and be all supportive and ride your coattails if and when it happens. It’s just not as honest a place as Texas, that’s for sure. I’m not disparaging anyone in particular. That’s just the way Hollywood operates.

  Finally, sometime in mid-2010, I decided I’d had enough. The shop was barely holding on, and it just didn’t feel like very much fun to me anymore.

  It wasn’t that I was quitting. I would never, ever quit. I just needed a bit of a breather—and a chance to make some cash to maybe get this thing fired up again.

  Aaron Kaufman, with all of his talents, wound up taking a side job at a regular everyday four-wheeler shop, installing shocks and fog lights on pickup trucks. It killed me to see his skills going to waste like that. So we moved the operation into a smaller garage, one that had an apartment above it where Aaron could live and work and take on custom jobs and the sort of work he loved until I (hopefully) got Gas Monkey back on track.

  In the meantime, I went to work for my ex-wife’s home-health-care company and I tried to make the best of it. Like I said, Sue and I would always be in each other’s lives. I just didn’t realize we’d be working together so soon after we split, or that my own business would come so close to going bust. I was living in a lousy apartment while I threw my business acumen into Sue’s company as if I were building a new company on my own. In some ways, doing that helped me to refocus myself. I helped her company become far more profitable than they’d been up until that point. It was good work. I liked that I was helping Sue become more successful, and I pulled in some good income for myself in the meantime.

  Aaron, alone at Gas Monkey Garage . . . COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.

  At some point a few months into this, Pilgrim Studios called once again and said, “Hey, would you do one more sizzle? I think we got some traction with Discovery.” So I called Aaron and we did a third sizzle reel, which focused even more on the car-building aspect, getting the cars sold, and doing it on a tight timeline to meet the needs of some incredibly demanding customers. Neither me nor Aaron thought anything would come of it. We just did it for the hell of it. It was kinda fun. We’d given it a good shot. We’d had a blast while we tried.

  Putting an end to all of the promotional work was certainly easier. Aaron is definitely more comfortable just doing his thing in the garage. I was working nine A.M. to three P.M. most days, and I very quickly got back to pulling in a six-figure income. I wasn’t on the road anymore. I actually saw more of my ex than I’d seen of her in the last couple years of our marriage.

  I hate to admit this, but I was starting to feel comfortable with the thing I dread most in life: settling. When we didn’t hear back from Pilgrim for months again, I was almost, almost ready to give up my Gas Monkey dream and just say, “F—k it.”

  And that’s when the phone rang.

  PEDAL TO THE METAL!

  At the old garage, at the start of Fast N’ Loud! COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.

  I picked up my phone and it was Craig Piligian, the founder of Pilgrim Studios.

  “Discovery wants the show. They’re buying six episodes,” he told me. “They need to slam this into the schedule, which means we need to start shooting the pilot five days from today or the deal’s off.”

  “Craig,” I said. “There’s nothing to shoot.”

  At that moment we didn’t have any cars in the pipeline that were anywhere near the super-cool interesting stuff Aaron had been building a year or two earlier. We’d really, really dialed it back!

  “Well, it needs to be up and running in five days. Do whatever you need to do.”

  “In five days?”

  “Five days.”

  I didn’t know whether to get excited or to give up. So much time had gone by that a part of me wondered if I should just tell him, “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m not interested anymore.” The five-day time frame didn’t worry me. I knew I was capable of doing anything under any deadline if it came right down to it. I just wasn’t so sure that I wanted to pursue that dream anymore. I was about as defeated in that arena as a guy could get. I’d already dedicated nearly eight years of my life to chasing a dream that kept running away from me again and again and again. I was pretty invested in building my ex’s business now, and I was making good money. I honestly asked myself, Do I really want this anymore?

  I told him I’d need to think about it, which didn’t make him very happy. But then I went off and discussed it with Sue. That’s right, I went to my ex-wife to talk about one of the biggest and potentially life-altering decisions of my life. It’s a pretty strange thing to do for most people, but I knew that she was the only one who fully understood what I’d invested in this, and just how much of a toll the whole endeavor had taken on me.

  “We could bend over backward to do all of this, and all they’re giving us is six episodes,” I said. “We don’t have any control over the edit. I mean, it’s just a full-on shot in the dark.”

  Was it worth putting Aaron through that? Was it worth putting myself through all of that for something that was a longshot? At that point, if the show didn’t take off there was a chance Gas Monkey Garage would just close up for good.

  That’s when my ex said the one thing I needed to hear: after all of the time and energy I’d spent trying to build the Gas Monkey brand and business, she said, “If you don’t do this now, you’ll hate yourself for it.”

  There’s a reason I married that woman.

  She was right.

  “You know what?” I said. “F—k it. You’re right. It’s a chance.”

  It was more than a chance. At the very least, I’d be able to end my Gas Monkey odyssey by saying I actually got a show on the air. How many people can say that? I had to do this. I owed it to myself. I owed it to Aaron. I owed it to the small but powerful Gas Monkey fan base we’d developed around the country in our years on the road—all those people who wore our T-shirts and who came out to support me at the Gumballs and Bullruns. I needed to do it for them. I needed to do it to prove all the haters wrong. Most of all, I needed to do it because it was my dream.

  All of a sudden I got angry at myself for almost giving up! What the hell was I thinking? I’m not a guy who settles. I’m no quitter. I picked
up my phone and called Piligian. “Hell yes!” I said. “I’m in. Get your crew to Dallas and let’s roll. Whoooo!”

  You know what’s kind of amazing? Sometimes things work out in life, and sometimes they work out even better than you plan.

  My old shop was big and cushy and comfortable and could hold all of the equipment Aaron needed to get the job done on just about any vehicle. The new smaller spot we moved into? It was way too small, a little bit dingy, and had nowhere near enough room for everything we needed. We were starting over from scratch and just scraping by. Capturing the drama of how we were going to get this business up and running again with minimal resources made the show more interesting! I could see that from day one. And I could see that it would give us room to grow as the episodes went on. With a little time, we’d be able to move into a bigger and better shop, and that would be fun for the viewers to watch—assuming we made it past the first episodes, of course.

  Once we got this thing rolling, though, I got right back to being the big-dreaming, goal-oriented Richard Rawlings I’d been all along. With a dozen or so crew members around pointing cameras in our faces while we went about our business, I knew where I wanted this show to go, and I knew that I wanted the audience to get invested in growing the business right along with us. It all made sense. We were starting over—not from scratch, but from what we thought might be the absolute end of our business. We really would be building it back up from here. Every job we did we really needed to make money. We’d need to flip some cars for quick cash just to pay for expenses. We’d need to be smart and fast, and all the more dedicated to working at breakneck speed, because the budget would dictate our timelines now as much as, or maybe even more than, any customer we could drum up. We’d need to produce a full hour of television, complete with A stories and B stories (that’s what we call the main story lines and the secondary, smaller story lines), every two weeks. There was no wiggle room. If we didn’t get shows in the can on time, we risked losing our deal. Period.

  I suddenly felt the enormous pressure of knowing that I’d really only have a few episodes to get this right. If the network or the viewers hated it, there would be nothing I could do about it.

  As you can imagine, the five days leading up to the first day of shooting were some of the most intense of my life. I suddenly had to refocus everything I had on what would work—and what wouldn’t work. I didn’t want our show to be filled with all the infighting and nastiness that you’d see on so many other reality shows. I wanted us to focus on the personalities, but also on the cars themselves. Cars have great history. Cars bring up all kinds of nostalgia for people. They’re an important part of our childhoods. They’re an integral part of our daily lives, and a lot of people dream about tooling around in a convertible Mustang or some other cool car at some point in their lives. It’s a common dream. We needed to tap into that.

  With just five days to think about it all, I realized that I needed to make a couple changes. One: I needed to cut my hair. My hair was so long, I’d been wearing it in a ponytail. For years. But I knew that ponytails were perceived as some sort of hippie-rebel type of thing, and that wasn’t really the image I wanted people to see on TV. It was a part of who I am, of course, but it wasn’t all of who I am. How you look makes a powerful impression on an audience.

  The guy who cuts my hair had been encouraging me to snip it off anyway. When he heard that my TV show was finally a go, he insisted it was time. I’d been wearing that ponytail for more than a decade. It was a huge thing for me to cut it off, and it took me a bunch of hours and a whole lot of Miller Lite before I finally relented and said, “Do it!”

  Snip.

  That was it. One swift clip and it was gone. Boom! A whole new me.

  After making such a dramatic change, I decided to leave the rest of me exactly as I was—tattoos, rings, ripped jeans, and all. I needed to be aware of what the audience wanted, the same way somebody might dress extra nice or do their hair a certain way before they go into a job interview. But I also knew that I needed to be me. Authenticity comes across, and I never wanted to seem like anybody other than who I was.

  The even bigger issue I suddenly felt the need to change in those five days, though, was the Gas Monkey logo. We’d been running around with the same basic logo for almost ten years, and it suddenly occurred to me that it just didn’t capture the brand. It was a great car-shop logo. It was rebellious and edgy looking. But I needed to have all of that combined with something much more family friendly.

  I called a designer pal and a couple of friends over and we sat around a big whiteboard and sketched out some ideas. I liked the Gas Monkey name, and those guys got me talking about what it was all about. In addition to being about guys (and gals) who enjoyed cars more than almost anything else in life, I really liked what the monkey represented. A monkey’s a bit of a rascal. He’s curious. He likes to get in there and monkey around with things. He’s into having fun just for the sake of having fun, too. He’s a troublemaker. But he’s also so darned cute that kids find him all sweet and adorable no matter how big of a rascal he may be.

  That was it. The monkey needed to be the whole focus of our logo. The skull and crossbones, swords, any kind of symbols that might elicit something from wartime (the way West Coast Choppers did, which caused a lot of controversy a few years down the line) had to go. My designer sketched out a crazy-looking monkey with his tongue sticking out, and I knew it was perfect. It was just a gut reaction, with no time to ask for anyone else’s opinion other than my own. I ran out and got some big signs made to tack onto the side of the garage. I made new business cards and some bumper stickers, too. And then I rush printed some T-shirts for my employees to wear on air.

  Oh yeah! That was the other thing. We needed a crew! On super-short notice, we hired K.C. to be our paint guy, and Scot McMillan to come in and work as a fabricator to help get this show on the road.

  K.C. was an old high school friend of Aaron’s, and Scot knew Aaron from back then, too. I took his word on it, met these guys quickly, told them what we were doing, and made them an offer to join the crew—knowing that we were only guaranteed six episodes. It basically meant they could be out of a job in a few weeks, or, if all went the way I planned, they could be setting themselves up to make more money than they could possibly make at their current jobs, and gather some fame and notoriety to boot. It was a gamble for sure. A big gamble.

  In K.C.’s case, he had a good job as a service technician for Coca-Cola when we approached him. He had a wife and two kids at home, and he had to make a decision about joining us in something like a twenty-four-hour time frame. It was crazy to even ask a young man to think about making that kind of a choice. Lucky for us, his wife had a great attitude about it. She told him, “Well, if you wind up out of a job after three months and you can’t get your old job back, you’ll find another job. But this sounds like the opportunity of a lifetime. If you pass it up, you’ll always regret it.”

  K.C. took his wife’s advice, and Scot said yes, too, and suddenly we had a crew! I knew we’d need to make some more hires, but we’d have to do them on the fly as the show started taping, because we were down to our last twelve hours before the cameras would be at the garage and the first day’s shoot would be under way.

  Next thing, I went out and hired the best social-media experts I could find. I knew I needed to tap into Facebook and Twitter big-time. I needed to get ahead of any bloggers that might pop up to say disparaging things about me. I needed to make sure the whole world could find Gas Monkey Garage on Google. All of it. And I needed it done fast! I was all pumped up about it as I brought this fantastic girl named Lauren into my Gas Monkey circle. I told her I wanted a million followers as fast as humanly possible, and she talked me down and explained how the number of followers Gas Monkey had wouldn’t be nearly as important as how engaged we are with each follower we have. I guess that one strength I have as an entrepreneur is that I know when to listen to those around me who have m
ore expertise in an area than I do. I listened to Lauren’s advice, and I got a crash course in how to send my own tweets and take better photos with my iPhone so I could be ready to interact with Gas Monkey fans. Luckily, we already had a website up and running where we’d been selling Gas Monkey T-shirts for years. But Lauren and her team helped us get the whole thing revamped and up to speed as quickly as possible.

  Finally, with about twelve hours to go before we started shooting the first show, I sat down with Aaron and said, “Well, what should we build?”

  Of all the cars we’d built and fixed and flipped at Gas Monkey since we started, we knew that the Model A—the classic hot rod of all hot rods—was the one we’d done most often. There’s an estimate I’d once heard that there was one Model A out there for every 1.1 square miles of earth in the United States. That’s how prevalent those cars were back when Henry Ford first ruled the automotive world. They were cheap. They were common. They were easy to fix up and modify. And because they were cheap back when people first bought them, people often abandoned them in a field or left them in a barn somewhere when the engine conked out. There was no sense in fixing them. It was just as easy to go buy a new car. That meant there were Model As all over this country just waiting to be found and brought back to life—or “reincarnated,” as Aaron likes to say.