Once in a while, on my radio program, a caller will kid around about all the money I make and say something like: “Hey, send me some of that.”
And I say: “You wouldn’t take it, would you?”
Usually, that rates a pause on the line. The caller is thinking about something that he or she hasn’t heard before: Well, why wouldn’t I take it? The answer, again, is simple: If you earn it, it’ll mean a lot more than if it’s given to you. Taking stuff makes you weaker. Earning stuff makes you stronger.
That’s Right, Jack!
One of my favorite actors is Jack Nicholson, a true American original. Even if the movie he’s in is a dog, Nicholson finds some way to elevate his role. The guy is creative and daring and outrageous.
So I wasn’t surprised to read in Parade magazine that Nicholson made it on his own. His father abandoned him; he did not find out until he was thirty-seven years old that the woman he knew as his older sister was really his mother. His grandmother had pretended to be his mother. “From age 11,” he told Parade, “I had to make my own money working. It was an advantage, because I always knew that, whatever I did, I’d have to do it on my own.”
Even though I was lucky enough to have two loving parents, I started earning money even earlier than Nicholson. In Levittown there were two big job opportunities for urchins: grass cutting and snow shoveling.
Early on, my father had a manual lawn mower; you pushed it and grass got cut. In the middle of a hot, humid August, this was slave labor, and few adults wanted to do it. So dopey kids did it. In 1960, I got a buck a lawn. Gathering up the clippings was fifty cents extra.
Then my father splurged for a “power mower.” The problem here, as some of you will remember, was getting the damn thing to start. You had to pull a tightly coiled starter rope with a wicked snap. Most kids were too weak to kick the thing into gear. It was maddening. Also, you had to put gas into the mower, and I usually spilled the fuel, making me a potential human torch. Sometimes my father helped me out with the mower, but often he was not around. But once up and running, the power mower was faster and far easier than the push mower; however, there always seemed to be complications with the contraption. Nevertheless, I had about five lawns a week, and the cash kept me in movie and candy money, with a little left over for the Good Humor ice-cream guy.
Shoveling snow was a much better deal. Just a steel shovel and your back muscles. Two friends and I could knock off ten driveways before lunch. A buck a driveway, plus many of the Levittown moms would throw in a mug of hot chocolate and cookies. Perks!
Back then before Al Gore caused global warming (just a jest for you far-left nuts), it snowed in New York consistently for three months. So, from the time I was nine to age sixteen, the snow economy was brilliant for me. I bought my Willie Mays–model MacGregor baseball glove with snow money, and I still use it today!
Snow was a moneymaking occasion—back when it actually snowed.
By the way, try asking most kids to shovel snow today. You’ll get some very interesting facial expressions.
When I was sixteen, when it became legal to do so, I got a so-called real job at a Carvel ice-cream stand. This was primo. Basically, I got paid for eating ice cream and, occasionally, dishing it out. Since the guy who owned the store, Frank N., was rarely around, the inmates definitely ran the asylum. We knew Frank expected a couple of hundred bucks a day from sales, and we delivered for him. But, at the same time, we were not exactly the “customer is always right” type guys.
Here’s what I mean. Every couple of days, one very large woman would drive up to the Carvel stand in her fine white Cadillac. Moments later, a pudgy little kid, most likely her son, would saunter up to the service window to order ice cream. On just about every occasion, the kid would screw up the order and the lady would then alight from her car, laying on the attitude. Sometimes she went ballistic over butterscotch topping; other times there was not enough hot fudge to suit her.
Since we didn’t care, we’d listen to the tirade and generally mock the woman. One time, I asked her nicely (I swear) if, perhaps, a five-year-old might not be the best option for placing the order. She told me to mind my own business.
Okay.
One August night, Bangladesh hot and humid, the zaftig woman drives up, the little kid gets out of the car, and he predictably waddles over with his order. “One hot-fudge sundae with extra hot fudge,” he squeaks, “one chocolate cone with sprinkles.”
Okay.
So the best employee in Carvel history, me, whips up the sundae and then piles the cone high with soft chocolate ice cream. And I mean high. Straight up high, so there was no base upon which the ice cream could rest. The cone was straight as a pencil.
We, the highly trained, ultraprofessional Carvel staff, then watched from inside the store as the little kid slowly walked back toward the white Caddy, both his hands filled to capacity. Almost immediately the cone began to wobble, the ice cream slowly swaying in the humid breeze.
Taking in the scene from behind the wheel, the offending woman’s eyes widened. She realized the calamity that was quickly unfolding before her. She opened the door, but her bulk prevented a swift exit. Then gravity took over. The cone swayed one last time and, almost in slow motion, the dark brown frozen cream fell, landing on the hood of her shiny automobile. Splat! Did I mention the car was white?
The child, distraught and panic-stricken, then dropped the sundae, and all that “extra” hot fudge hit the steamy, sticky pavement, immediately finding a comfortable home.
Appalled, the large lady sprinted to the window demanding a re-fund. I told her she was lucky I didn’t charge her for the parking-lot cleanup (certainly that was bold and fresh). She continued to yell, demanding to see the manager. Since I was that person, an unkind smirk crossed my mouth. Finally, she left in a major snit. Another satisfied customer.
My Carvel experience lasted about two years. I averaged about a buck-forty and twenty laughs an hour. But then it was time to move up in the employment world. Using my swimming prowess, and armed with a water-safety instructor card, I convinced the Town of Babylon on Long Island to kindly pay me two-fifty an hour to teach little kids to swim. How can you hate that?
Quick story. One hot summer day I had finished my morning swim class at the pool and was sauntering around trying to look cool just in case there were some girls my age in the vicinity. The young ladies were not happening, but there were dozens of children splashing around and, just by chance, I looked down into the water. There at the bottom of the pool was a little kid staring up at me. And he wasn’t moving. My instincts kicked in fast: I jumped into the water, which was about eight feet deep, grabbed the kid’s arm, and hauled him up. Upon breaking the water’s surface, the kid began to cry and spit out liquid, lots of liquid. His mother came running over and thanked me profusely. The little boy was shaken but fine. I was proud of myself.
About thirty-three years later, I was signing copies of my book The No Spin Zone at a store on Long Island. A man walked up to the table and said, “Thanks for saving my life.” What? Incredibly, it was the kid. He told me his mom had never forgotten the incident or the name of the teenager who had pulled her son out of the water. And after I had achieved some fame, the mother told her son the pool story. Is that amazing or what?
Teaching swimming was rewarding, and fairly good money at the time for a high school student, but those wages weren’t going to cut it during college. I needed better money to be able to put gas in my car and go out on an occasional date, although that was wishful thinking most of the time. So, after some deliberation, I decided to start a house-painting business. As many teenagers say today: Oh…my…God!
The Color Purple
It was the beginning of summer, 1968, and things were not going well. Vietnam was raging and the economy was soft. Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey were getting ready to slug it out in the presidential contest, but few of us in Levittown cared about that. We were all trying to earn some decent mone
y, and it wasn’t easy.
Some of my friends signed on at the McDonald’s on Old Country Road, but I resisted. The money was terrible, and when those guys finished their shifts, they smelled like French fries. There had to be a better way.
One fine day, a friend’s mother, disgusted that we were hanging around looking like slobs and doing nada, suggested we paint her house. I believe I said something stupid like, “Is Tom Sawyer not available?”
But paint her house we did. And she gave us a hundred dollars each. By Carvel standards that was about sixty-five hours of work. And even though we horsed around a great deal, we finished the project in about three days, about twenty-four hours of labor. My dim mind calculated that we had each made just short of five bucks an hour. Gold mine.
Originally, the houses in Levittown were small and coated with slatelike shingles: in other words, very little wood trim. The dwellings were easy to paint, even for boobs like us. Unfortunately, there was one major downside to developing a lucrative painting franchise: few in Levittown had any money, so homeowners usually painted their houses themselves or ignored the situation until their neighbors threatened to firebomb.
But, with some clever marketing, I was able to secure a few exterior painting jobs. One problem: I really didn’t know what I was doing. Customers would ask me about caulking and scraping and priming, and I would say, “Of course.” In reality, I had no clue.
So I went to see my friend the Bear, a big guy whom I had known since the first grade. The Bear said very little, ate plenty, and would sleep through the winter if you’d let him. That’s why, to this day, he is still called the Bear.
Anyway, the Bear knew a little about painting but was not interested in actually doing it. That’s because he had a great job as a janitor in a grocery store, where he cleaned up incredibly gross stuff for two-fifty an hour. His shift was midnight to eight a.m. I mean, how could you leave that?
I told the Bear in no uncertain terms that he was a moron and that he would make huge money painting homes with me in the daylight hours. Unfortunately, the Bear was a moron on many occasions, and this was one of them.
But I needed the guy. So, finally, I took my appeal to the Bear’s father, Fred. A tightfisted man of German descent, Fred had five other smaller bears at home eating him out of said dwelling. I bluntly told Fred that the Bear was passing up about two hundred bucks a week, off the books.
The next day, armed with a used paintbrush, the Bear showed up at my house.
For the next five summers we painted hundreds of houses and made more than ten thousand dollars each. This was enormous money at the time. We worked hard, but nobody was telling us what to do. We called the shots—it was our business.
In fact, things became so lucrative, we had so much work, that we actually had to hire some of the neighborhood guys in order to complete all the contracts. This is where things got dicey, because most of the neighborhood guys made the Bear look like a brain surgeon.
Trust me, I tried to keep things simple. All the guys had to do was slap paint on shingles and wood trim, making sure the paint did not get on anything else. We never used oil-based paint, because that stuff is like a roadside bomb: at any moment you can die from inhaling it. We used latex paint from Sears. It was smooth, easy to apply, and glowed upon application.
All the neighborhood guys were under strict instructions to put drop cloths underneath wherever they were painting. That way, when some paint did inevitably fall to the ground, it would hit the cloth and not damage anything. Because of the intricacy of this concept, I explained it many times using actual drop cloths in my presentation. Most of the guys got it. One did not.
As I related in my book The O’Reilly Factor for Kids, the culprit was Jeff Cohen. Late one afternoon Cohen was high on a ladder painting away. Then, in one motion, he dropped his paint can. It should have hit his drop cloth but it did not. Because no drop cloth was laid out beneath him.
Instead, Cohen’s white paint splattered all over a very green bush, a nice bush, a bush that sat in front of the house alongside other very nice bushes. This was not good.
Quickly, I threw a drop cloth over the now white bush to hide the catastrophe. After cursing Cohen, I calmly assessed the situation. There was no substance on earth that could remove the paint from the foliage without killing it; that was number one. Second, to buy a new bush would take much of the job money, because we worked cheap. Third, the owner of the house was not an understanding kind of guy, if you know what I mean. If the man found out we had murdered the bush, even accidentally, full payment for the job might have been in jeopardy.
Faced with those facts, I could do only one thing. Late that same night, Cohen and I returned to the house, removed the cloth covering the white bush, and quietly sawed that sucker down. This, of course, left a major hole in the foliage. We then went to some nearby woods, gathered up a little foliage, and brought it back, placing it strategically around the missing bush. Obviously, a desperate and ridiculous patch job.
When we completed the paint job a couple of days later, I walked around the house with Mr. Jenkins (not his real name). The fresh paint looked great, but the man kept staring at the front of the dwelling.
“Something looks different,” the guy said.
“You know, Mr. Jenkins, everybody says that after their house is painted. It’s a natural reaction.”
I had rehearsed that in my mind before saying it.
“Guess so.”
I cashed his check within minutes.
Like my student year abroad, the painting business was a turning point in my life. Create your own opportunities and execute them. Rely on no one else when it comes to improving your situation. As Home Depot says today: “You can do it. We can help.”
And here’s the kicker to this ramble down memory lane: Exactly twenty-seven years after creating a painting business, I created The O’Reilly Factor. Even though I had a job in television at the time, I knew it wasn’t good enough, that I could do better, and I did. (I’ll explain how that all happened later on.)
One final thing in this chapter: like my friend the Bear, most people on this earth are reluctant to take chances, to improve their lives, to escape a stifling situation like my father endured for his entire working life. The big reason that many folks accept the unacceptable and settle for less than they can achieve can be summed up in one word: fear.
FEAR
Fear is your friend if you can control it.
—CUS D’AMATO, FAMED BOXING TRAINER
For my friend Lenny’s seventh birthday, his parents took five of his hooligan friends, including the bold, fresh guy, to see a double feature: Attack of the Crab Monsters and Not of This Earth. These cheapie monster movies were made for about thirty-two dollars by the legendary American International Pictures under the hilarious supervision of a man named Roger Corman, who was known as King of the Bs.
The year was 1957. Leave It to Beaver had just debuted on television, Elvis had a smash hit with “Jailhouse Rock,” and The Bridge on the River Kwai won the Oscar for Best Picture. Attack of the Crab Monsters did not come in second.
I vividly remember that day because it was the first time adults took us kids to see monsters in the cinema (British expression). Before that, we were restricted to mostly Disney stuff, and even though he is eternally young, Peter Pan was getting kind of old.
The birthday boy, Lenny, was a first-rate dolt, totally out of control and dim to boot. Everybody in the neighborhood—and believe me, we are not talking Ph.D. candidates here—understood that Lenny would be lucky to get out of the fifth grade.
But if Lenny’s parents were paying, we were going and, as I remember, the first few minutes of Crab Monsters were a bit spooky. That’s because the actual creatures never appeared on-screen. That exposition came later. In the beginning of the movie, you just heard clicking sounds somewhere off in the dark jungle on a deserted South Pacific island. The sound effects brought to mind very agitated crickets. It was e
erie and menacing.
Then somebody on the island suddenly disappeared. Then, a few minutes later, you heard the voice of the guy who had just vanished calling one of his pals. Then that guy went missing. We kids were spooked.
But not for long. When the crab monsters did finally show up, they looked like Mardi Gras parade floats. Five seven-year-olds hooted and mocked those monsters, even though radiation from bomb tests had made them huge and hungry. Not that we cared, but the movie was actually relevant. In 1954, the United States set off its biggest H-bomb test blast ever, and three real Pacific islands were vaporized.
But we kids weren’t concerned about “no stinkin’ radiation” and paused in our mocking only when one of the crab monsters decapitated a guy and swallowed his head. That was pretty neat and explained how the monsters could talk like people. Somehow, the voice box of the dearly departed kept on working inside the creature so that it could speak and knew what to say! Wow! It took us a few minutes to digest that (sorry), and then we began hooting again.
Attack of the Crab Monsters earned five thumbs down, and after a few coming attractions, the second film began. But this flick was a far different story. Filmed in stark black-and-white, Not of This Earth told the tale of an alien who came to earth and drained humans of blood. Unlike Dracula, however, the guy didn’t drink the blood for nourishment. Carrying a little kit, he hypnotized victims with his strange eyes and then inserted a needle in a vein. The blood flowed into tubes he kept in a suitcase until it was all collected. Gross. Nobody said a word. This was scary stuff.
Wearing dark glasses to hide his weird eyes, the alien guy hunted down a variety of adults and eventually wound up chasing Beverly Garland all over the place. He really wanted Beverly’s blood, and she wasn’t happy about it. Finally, the good guys came to rescue Beverly, but somehow the aliens were not wiped out when the movie ended. In little-kid world, this was not good. Blood-seeking aliens at large could show up again, especially late at night in your dark room!
A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity Page 4
