I hopped on eBay, and much to my surprise, I couldn’t find one. I was shocked. I started to panic. What are we gonna do if I can’t find one? We didn’t have an alternate plan. I’d kept about ten hot rods in storage, so maybe we could come up with something to do with one of those, I thought. But how boring would that be? The whole idea here was to show people that amazing moment of finding a diamond in the rough, a gem of an automobile that was hiding in some remote location just waiting to be uncovered. I loved that feeling. I needed to share that with the audience!
It was early the morning of our first day’s shoot when I finally found a Model A for sale that looked like a perfect car for us to work on. Sure enough, it was in a barn up in Missouri, if my memory serves me right. That meant Aaron and I could hop in my truck and go get it together. A road trip. An adventure with a prize at the end of the journey.
The first-ever episode of the show that would be titled Fast N’ Loud was under way. It was time to let go, to have some fun, and to dedicate myself to cars full-time. I was finally completely embracing the passion that had bitten me way back in my teens.
And guess what? Discovery loved it. Before we finished building our third car for the series, the network ordered six additional episodes. By the time episode number three aired and the ratings came in, they ordered nine more.
All those years of hard work and struggle finally paid off, thanks to you, the Gas Monkey fans who said loud and clear, “Hey! We love what you’re doing! Keep it up! And give us more!”
We’ve been shooting episodes one after the other for nearly three years straight since that first episode got under way, and all told, we’ve only taken about two weeks off in all that time. It’s crazy! I love it. I couldn’t ask for a better job, a better career, a better lot in life. I’m living the dream, and so are the other guys and gals who make up the Gas Monkey family. Every one of them is enjoying the crazy trajectory we’re on, as this show has become bigger than anyone (other than myself) ever dreamed possible.
Gas Monkey is much more than a garage now. It’s a lifestyle. It’s apparel. It’s an expanding universe of awesome businesses that allow Gas Monkey’s Fast N’ Loud fans to get up close and personal with us. I couldn’t be any prouder of what we’ve accomplished, and I couldn’t be any more excited than I am right now to be sharing it all with all of you.
So let me take this opportunity to say, “Thank you.”
You rock!
Thanks so much for coming along on this ride. Go grab yourself a cold one now and sit back for a ride of a different kind as I walk you through some of favorite episodes, show you around the ever-expanding Gas Monkey empire, and share a few tips and insights into how you can become even more of a Gas Monkey yourself than you already are.
As you’ve seen already, the key to making this all come true has been a journey of Blood, Sweat and Beers. Maybe that’s the secret of life right there. What do you think? It sure makes one heck of a fun line on the back of a T-shirt if nothing else. But I really do believe it’s that simple.
Whatever it is you’re seeking to achieve in life, all you’ve really gotta do is picture it in your mind and then, “Get you some of that!” All you’ve gotta do is go do it. Dream it. Plan it. Resolve yourself to it. Put in the hard work. Give it your all. I’m living proof that anything is possible in life. Even landing your own TV show . . .
PART TWO
THE BIG SHOW
Aaron and me in the desert. COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
ASSEMBLING THE CREW
Before we reminisce about some of our favorite episodes, I thought I’d say a few things about the core who’s who here at Gas Monkey Garage.
Putting a crew together to pull off the work we do while simultaneously making good television is not as easy as it looks. All right, I’ll admit, it must not look too easy. We’ve had a lot of turnover in the two years or so since the show started. K.C., Aaron and I are the only original Gas Monkeys who’ve been at the garage since the show began—primarily because a lot of people who think they can do this job can’t handle the intensity of it. It’s a lot of pressure. We shoot continuously, usually six days a week, with a week off in the summer and a few vacation days around Christmas and Thanksgiving. That’s it. And our days aren’t nine-to-five (as much as we try to make them nine-to-five). It often takes long stretches of work late into the night to get the builds done on time, and getting these cars out the door on whatever deadline we’re working toward is the key to Gas Monkey’s success.
From the beginning, Aaron and I determined we were going to build the best cars faster than anybody else has ever built them. And that’s what we’ve been doing, week after week, with the help of our kick-ass crew. Sometimes we get wildly successful results, and sometimes not. I’m not afraid to show all of it—the good, the bad, the ugly, and the disastrously unprofitable. I insisted we needed to show people the real ups and downs of the car business. Nobody can win all the time. Nobody. And if we lose money on a car, we’re gonna tell you.
Anyway, the magic formula I’ve uncovered for putting together a solid crew—whether it’s at Gas Monkey or a print shop or what have you—is that there is no formula. It’s all trial and error. With the enormous pressure we’re under, it’s important that everybody in the garage gets along. Sometimes you just can’t figure that out until you get people in the door and see how they perform when the heat’s on. Or when the heat’s off, as it were.
That first garage space we were in didn’t have any heat—and we started shooting in the middle of winter. It got cold! It didn’t have any running water, either. We had to run up to the building in front of ours to use the bathroom or wash our hands. I had to rent a little office trailer to park in the parking lot just so I could have a spot with a computer and a phone in it. It was nuts. And for the whole first three months of shooting, Aaron, K.C., and Scot were pulling twenty-two-hour days just trying to get the work done on time. No joke, twenty-two hours a day. For the six months after that they pulled like twenty-hour days, and that felt like a frickin’ vacation compared to what we had been doing.
The guys often slept in the paint closet, which was the warmest spot in the shop. We put a couple of cots in there, but they had to sleep in cold-weather sleeping bags to make it through the night. I remember coming in at six o’clock in the morning and seeing K.C. wrapped up like a caterpillar in a cocoon, with the hood around his head and the sleeping bag zipped up so all you could see was his nose and his eyes. Sometimes they’d take naps in K.C.’s truck, too, working in shifts just to keep their momentum up. At one point K.C. told me his truck kept running in the parking lot for twenty hours straight, just so they could hop in and get some heat for a half hour as the day dragged on.
A hard day’s work at the original garage . . . COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
. . . and what it looks like on an average day inside our new spacious digs! PHOTO BY MARK DAGOSTINO.
You put a whining, complaining, half-assed sort of worker into a situation like that, things are gonna get ugly. I definitely felt fortunate that those guys got along during the difficult start to getting Fast N’ Loud off the ground.
The fact is, everybody who stays at this shop is cool. There are times when we get angry or frustrated, and there are certainly some shouting matches. But even in the midst of all the hard work we put into getting cars built and putting a TV show together, I always make sure the crew has a lot of fun, too. The whole staff tends to go grab lunch together five days a week. It’s not uncommon for me to call for a “F—k-it Friday!” where everyone on the whole staff just grabs a few beers or some shots of tequila after lunch and sits around shootin’ the s—t. We get into some really stupid discussions on those Fridays, but you can hear people laughing from all the way out in the front parking lot by the Gas Monkey gift shop. It’s awesome.
That sort of camaraderie just makes it all worth it. It really does. Whether we’re pulling each other around on skateboards beh
ind somebody’s truck, or pushing all the cars out of the way so we can do donuts in the parking lot, the messing around and blowing off steam is a part of who we are. The little sayings that come out on this show—like “If we’re gonna have fun, it better have a motor!”—that stuff’s not contrived. It grew straight outta the fact that we’re all having a good time doing something we love, whether it’s chopping that frame back to get the air suspension just right, finding a pair of old Jaguars for sale on Craigslist, mixing the perfect color for a badass ride, or running the numbers and yelling at me to get my ass in line back in the office. Everyone I’m about to introduce here does his or her job really, really well, and has a whole lot of fun while they do it. That’s part of what being a Gas Monkey is all about.
MEET THE MONKEYS!
Aaron. COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
AARON KAUFMAN
Here’s an undisputable fact: I wouldn’t be where I am without Aaron, and Aaron wouldn’t be here without me.
I hired Aaron to come into the shop and do what he does best because he’s a talented motherf—ker, and I just can’t do what he does. Nobody can do what he does. There are times I just stand back in awe, admiring how differently he sees things and how he puts things together.
I think the reason he has such a following among car enthusiasts is that he’s self-taught, too. He just looks at cars from a different point of view than almost anybody else in the business. And he’s very talented in figuring out a problem. He really is. He can look at something and figure out what’s wrong. Boom! He doesn’t need to open a book and read the instructions. Most of the time he’ll buy something and open it up and talk about how it sucks and how he could’ve done it better. He’s great at that, and that allows him to be more creative and do things to cars that most people wouldn’t even think about.
A lot of his automotive genius doesn’t even transfer to the show. You can see it in the results of how good a car looks, but you don’t necessarily know what it is he did to it to make it look so cool. I mean, he can look at a car and figure out the geometry that’ll make the wheels sit correctly, you know? When we’re dropping something, he’ll know how to get the car down closer to the ground than anybody else would even think possible, and he’ll do it in a way that the car not only looks totally cool but rides great, too.
Aaron knows how good he is, too. He’s very egotistical. He doesn’t see the world except for how he sees it, and he’s never going to take anybody’s opinion or anything on it. Period. It’s his way or no way. So that makes me have to walk very delicately around trying to make a job come in on time, or make money.
Aaron at work on a 1948 Fleetmaster. COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
The other thing that’s remarkable about Aaron is he doesn’t give up. He doesn’t call anybody for help, either. He’ll mess around with something for three days straight trying to get it right, which is fine except for he’s taking up my time and money when he does that. I like to say that Aaron’s been going to the University of Gas Monkey for eleven years. In all the time he’s been working for me, on top of paying him, I’ve been giving him the opportunity to hone his skills. He was good before, believe me. But there’s no other shop on earth that would have let this twenty-year-old kid just tear things apart and figure ’em out on his own. I saw how talented he was, and I wanted to see him keep growing. So before the show started filming, in that entire eight-or nine-year run-up of growing Gas Monkey, I made it a practice to say to him, “Just go figure it out and go do it.” And most of the time, I didn’t put any kind of time frame or constraint on him. I wanted and needed him to learn everything he could, so when the time came to build cars in record time, he’d be ready to tackle whatever got thrown our way.
Aaron’s one hell of a quirky character, though, I’ll tell you that. First of all, he couldn’t care less about money. Everyone who works for Gas Monkey gets opportunities to go make money doing appearances and making endorsement deals nowadays. Aaron doesn’t want to do hardly any of it! He truly just wants to spend his time building the best cars and trucks he can. Hell, if I let him, he’d live in his truck at the garage. We’re talking about a guy who, for long periods of time during the eleven years he’s worked for me, went without any permanent address. There are times when his electricity got shut off and I’d have to pay the fine for him to get it turned back on—not because he couldn’t pay the bill, but because he didn’t feel like walking to the mailbox to pick up his mail. “My mailbox is filled with all kinds of junk that gets sent to me that I don’t want to look at!” he’ll say.
His priorities are just different from most people’s.
During times when he was sleeping in his truck or crashing at the shop, I would ask him: “Where are you gonna shower, Aaron?”
“Oh, I’ll just shower at my girlfriend’s house, or whatever,” he’d answer. It just wasn’t a priority for him to live like a normal human being.
Different. That’s Aaron. The best car guy I know. The anti-establishment guy. Hell, I think the best time of his life was back when we were tooling around the country for months at a time in the Gas Monkey rig. Nowadays, I think he couldn’t care less whether we were on a TV show or not. Truly. He just wants to build great cars. He wants his cars to speak for him, too. If he could avoid doing any and all interviews, I think he would. He wants his work to be his legacy and his craftsmanship to be his reputation. And I suppose that’s what makes him so cool and appealing to the audience. Hell, it seems like every week there’s some chick waiting for hours and hours out in front of the shop, just refusing to leave until Aaron pops his head out and waves at her or something. His fans are a dedicated bunch, I’ll tell you that.
The last thing I’ll say here about Aaron is this: Yes, the beard is real. No, he didn’t have it back when we first met. You want to know why Aaron grew that beard? Let’s just say he got in a little trouble with the law one time. As a sign of rebellion or something, he decided he wasn’t going to shave until his probation was finished. Of course, his probation got extended at one point and seemed to drag on forever, and then lo and behold we got ourselves on a TV show, and now everybody knows Aaron for his beard!
CHRISTIE BRIMBERRY
Aaron’s fans may be dedicated, but let me tell you this: Christie’s fans are passionate. Actually, the better word for some of Christie’s fans might be perverted. We get dozens of requests every week to post pictures of Christie’s feet on our Instagram feed. No joke! They ask for pictures of a lot of other things, too, which cracks us all the f—k up. I realize she’s cute and all tatted up and she’s got big boobs and all that, but come on, people! She’s a mother of six! Tone it down a little!
One thing a lot of people don’t know is that Christie is actually married to the guy who cuts my hair—the very same guy who’s responsible for snipping off my ponytail just before we shot the first episode of the show. She was barely even an acquaintance to me before I hired her.
We were getting ready to shoot the second episode when I went in for a trim, and as I sat in the barber’s chair I started complaining about how exhausting and overwhelming the whole process of the first episode had been. “I can’t keep track of everything. I’m going nuts, man. I need an assistant like there’s no tomorrow. So if you know anybody who’s looking for work, please send ’em my way,” I told him.
He laughed and said, “My wife needs a job.”
He was just joking around, but I said, “Dude. Seriously. I’ll talk to her. I need someone to start helping me out, like, now.”
I swear to you, the moment Christie came walking in, I said, “You’re hired.”
She was like, “We haven’t even talked yet!”
The fact that she gave me some attitude so quickly only reaffirmed my snap decision.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “You’re hired.”
Christie. COURTESY OF RICHARD RAWLINGS.
First of all, I only had to take one look at her to know that the TV cameras
would love her—and I was even more right than I imagined. Hell, Hollywood should come see me about doing all the casting for their big shows from now on. Look what I did! She’s a huge star now, with fans of all ages and both sexes. (Although, it’s just men who write us asking to post pictures of Christie’s feet.) But I could also tell just by the way she walked that this woman was tough. She was in charge. She had practice running a household full of six children, and that’s pretty much what it’s like to try to take care of me. Just ask my sister, Daphne.
Daphne was actually running the accounting over at my ex-wife’s home-health-care company at the time or I would’ve just hired her to work as my assistant. I was pissed that I couldn’t snag her away quick enough—until Christie came walking in. She wound up being a massively positive addition to the Gas Monkey crew.
First and foremost, Christie’s a badass, and it takes a badass to be able to put up with me. She’s also had to do her share of dealing with some of the crazy female fans who refuse to leave the premises in their quest to get to Aaron or me, and let me tell you: you do not want to mess with Christie. She’ll cut a bitch!
She’s smart, she’s quick, she can multitask—she’s truly the ultimate office manager and personal assistant anyone could ask for. She very quickly became not only my personal assistant, but my life coach and my confidante, too. The amount of laughing and joking we do around the office is almost criminal. You know what it is? My professional relationship with Christie reminds me a little bit of the one between Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy, Tina Fey’s and Alec Baldwin’s characters on that TV comedy 30 Rock. If you know that show, then I think you’ll understand what I mean.
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