by Ed Bolian
I was no psych major but I loved the mental aspect of sales. The process was truly exhilarating to me. You ask leading questions, make it easy to say yes, and carefully sculpt a logic that leads to a decision. It is a style of hypnosis. I was very green when I started but the general manager and sales manager of the dealership seemed to notice some promise. They invested a lot of time into teaching me what they had learned in long careers in the car business. Before long the word tracks flowed like honey and whether I liked it or not, I was a salesman. I assumed that before too long I would develop that twinkle in my incisors every time I smiled. They say that psychopaths exist most effectively as lawyers, politicians, or salesman. Seems there is some truth to that notion.
I still loved driving the cars but giving up ownership was challenging. It had been one of my favorite things about myself and while the successes at the dealership were nice, it did not compare to the pride I felt in owning the rental business. When a guy is asked what he does for a living, the answer matters. “I sell Lamborghinis” sounds cool but, “I own and operate an exotic car rental company that I started in college” sounded a lot better to me.
That was by no means the beginning or the end of my issues with pride. Humility and sports cars have a bit of an oil and water relationship. Making the best of it was still sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel. That led to a lot of soul searching. I have always found myself to be good at things that you probably should not be good at. If you tell someone that you are highly adept at getting away with things, bending a questionable truth into an appealing reality, and rationalizing breaking the law; it does not always paint an attractive image. It is not the way I want the world to see me but it remains difficult to escape.
Megan and I had purchased our first house in a northern suburb of Atlanta late in 2010. It was not geographically close to anything that I liked going to but she fell in love with the house and it was an aggressive short sale so I agreed that we could buy it. It was a long way from where we both worked which created some tension in the relationship. For all her amazing qualities, understanding of maps is not Megan’s strong suit. It also only had a two car garage which accommodated the S55 and her Cayenne but did not invite a new exotic addition to the family.
I tried to get her to understand that a small garage was like only having one bedroom. No room for kids. I guess that means we won’t have any. She did not seem to get it and, of course, the house had four bedrooms.
I hate home ownership. I think the polarity of my interests has always made it easy to become irrationally obsessed with certain things very few people even care about while having an apathy towards conventional goals. The grass is always greener but I look back on renting and truly question why people are so obsessed with owning houses. Of course those people who spend all of their spare time and money taking care of their treasured house probably think, “Why does that idiot spend more on his car than we spend on this beautiful and satisfying home we have here?” Touché theoretical opponent.
Despite some financial success and stability I was extremely unhappy. I never intended to consider divorce as an option in my marriage but we had completely different goals and views of what we wanted our life to become. I had grown to vehemently oppose the idea of having children. I missed my cars. I still had the gray S55 but Cannonball was a distant priority. We were struggling to find a church that we could enjoy being a part of. Her parents were not wild about me and I was growing to care less and less about their opinions. It was a fairly dark place below the surface of some finally calm seas.
Over time I took steps to give up the priorities in my life that were keeping me from a happy marriage and it did begin to improve. Megan and I began to tithe diligently to a church we had joined in Alpharetta and helped start a new Sunday School class for newly married couples. She and I were getting along better but the rest of my life still felt pretty empty. I had lived my life up until marriage in a very selfish but effective way - bouncing from goal to accomplished goal. That felt over.
The struggles in marriage had taken a lot out of me. I remember the day that I made the decision that the only thing that mattered to me was honoring my covenant of marriage. That was a much more open ended answer than I was looking for. My wedding vows to Megan were these:
I am not here because I love you
I am not here because you are the most amazing person I have met
I am not here because I want to spend the rest of my life with you.
I am here because I know, beyond the shadow of a doubt,
that God made you for me.
All of those things are also true but it is the recognition of God’s plan for our lives
that gives me confidence and joy to marry you.
So I do promise to love you
From this day forward
Just as Christ loves His Church
For better or worse
In sickness or health
For richer or poorer
Until death do us part.
I knew that the “Just as Christ loves His Church” part would come into play. Ephesians 5:25 commands us to do just that but it is both an impossible standard and something we do not see play out very often. The idea of loving someone truly regardless of what they do for you is hard but I learned a lot through trying. I would stay with Megan and trust that God could make me happy through that act of faithfulness. I knew it meant continuing to sacrifice anything standing in the way of our union. I truly let myself buy into the idea that if I proceeded through life with that priority first, I would find greater peace and happiness than if I were to pursue the selfish goals that had pulled us apart early on in our marriage. I had reached this conclusion after a lot of soul searching, prayer, secular counseling, and Christian counseling with the pastor of the church that we grew up in and who had married us just a few short years prior.
My God is one of endless grace and faithfulness. I was in for a wild ride.
Chapter 7
A Prostitute and a Lamborghini
People ask me a lot about what I want out of my life, how I want to be perceived, what I might want my legacy to be. I want to be known as a devout evangelical Christian, a good family man, and a loyal friend. I believe their questions are different though. To answer the true essence of the questions - I really want to be the most interesting man in the world. At least I want to be the most interesting person that people who know me know.
I don’t care how wealthy I get, how educated, how admired, or how popular I am. All of those metrics are awesome but when I look in hindsight upon how I have made the decisions that made me the happiest, they were generally chasing after ideas that I thought would be interesting to talk about later.
The steps I had taken to stabilize my marriage had confounded some of my efforts to do interesting things but as the top level priority improved it began to feel more acceptable to add back in some things I was missing.
Early in 2011 I met one of the most interesting people whom I have ever known. A flatbed tow truck arrived at the dealership with a non-running Blue Caelum (metallic royal blue) 2004 Gallardo. Every wheel was curbed, the tires were bald, the clutch was fried, and it was pouring oil from everywhere it could find. The door handles were broken off and the interior smelled particularly exotic. The two East Asian guys dropping it off didn’t speak much English. Best we could understand it, we were being asked to put together an estimate of what it would take to get the car back up and running. With quite the laundry list, the rehabilitation came to right at $20,000.
We called the number they left and did not get an answer. We had the car all apart and did not have anyone to pay for it. A man showed up a couple of days later and told us it belonged to his girlfriend’s daughter and that she was very attractive. It was a strange unsolicited comment but he did not present himself as being the most socially conforming type of person. She was in jail at the moment but would be out soon and probably wanted to sell the car. My ears perked up.
The car was too rough to even wholesale. It needed a lot more work than we anticipated she would be able to afford so we parked it out back and waited.
A few days later I met Kimmi.
Kimmi is a prostitute. Political correctness might ask that I say Kimmi is an alleged prostitute but that wouldn’t be fair to the criminal justice system that had already convicted her of the charges three times in various metro Atlanta jurisdictions. While her mother’s boyfriend had insinuated that she was in jail for speeding it was, in fact, a professional appearance. Kimmi had paid $100,000 in cash for the car in Miami about nine months prior to her most recent incarceration. While she was away some of her friends went joyriding fairly destructively in the Gallardo and thus our paths began to cross.
We were correct in assuming Kimmi was not in a position to write us a check for the service so she asked if we would buy the car. There are never many bidders on a car like this. You could not know what else it needed until the first $20,000 was spent fixing the obvious items. The risk made me the one and only suitor. I offered her $30,000. She wanted $60,000 as it sat. We settled on $30,000. I expected more out of a career negotiator.
I paid the service bill and stuck my detailers on it for a week. It had some occasional electrical and mechanical quirks but it was a great car. It also said Lamborghini on it and had cost me less than a new Hyundai.
Kimmi was half black and half Vietnamese as best I could gather. She had blue and blonde hair and usually wore very tight, nylon, animal print, short dresses. She had a lot of tattoos and they were conveniently displayed, even the ones in more private areas. She wore some weird zombie-like light blue contacts with catseye pupils. Kimmi’s most compelling and presumably marketable feature was her backside. She had a reasonably proportioned, albeit augmented, torso but then she had 50” hips. I mean that she could take breaks while hula hooping. It was the kind of thing that you could never stop looking at, with or without it being arousing to you. She was taller sitting in a chair.
The demographic market for her specialty was a far cry from myself but I found her to be a phenomenally interesting person. She wanted a pink Bentley like the one Paris Hilton had on the TV. You can’t buy a Bentley and paint it pink for the $30,000 I owed her for the Gallardo so we decided to see if we could get her financed for the balance.
That meant Kimmi and I got to talk about her credit. I asked her if she had ever gotten a loan for anything and she said, “No.” That would normally be a death blow to a big car loan but if she was financing half of a $60-70k Bentley we thought we had a shot. Beyond that, the conversation was too much fun to stop. She pulled out her social security card which she apparently carried all of the time and she gave me her driver’s license to copy. The address that was on it matched the title for the Gallardo that she had but it was a strange location for a residence. It was off a big road in the center of town so I Googled it. It was an establishment called the Gold Spa. She unashamedly confirmed that was correct.
I asked Kimmi who to list as her employer and she gave me a name of a pornography production company. She seemed to have her hand in a variety of businesses. I asked her how much she made and she said that it was between $10-50k per month, “So why don’t we just say $500,000?” That was on the unbelievable side of the scale for a bank.
“How about this, what did you put on your most recent tax return?”
She shook her head.
“Does that mean it was not very much or you just haven’t gotten around to filing.”
“That.” She said.
We estimated.
When we pulled her credit it was strange. There were no records at all. She had never used her social security number for anything. Not a cell phone, library card, credit card, not even a bank account. That became clear in the next step.
We had no banks that would step up to be the first credit offering to Kimmi. Without a Bentley to apply it to, I told her we would give her a check for the Lambo. We printed it out, signed it, and handed it to her.
“What do I do with this?” She asked.
“You can deposit it or cash it. Do you have a bank account?” Head shakes. “Then just take it to our bank and they will give you cash.” The dots were not connecting.
“Really? Can you guys just give me cash?” She was perplexed.
“No, we don’t keep that much cash around. It is super easy, they are right down the road.” I said. “Have you ever used a check?”
She had not ever seen one.
Kimmi went on her way and I owned a prostitute’s Gallardo. I had a bear of a time getting the second key from her though. I called, texted, emailed, and tried everything to get in touch with her to get it. I wanted the second key and wasn’t wild about someone in her profession maintaining access to the car - not judging.
One day she sends me a text message.
“It’s my birthday tomorrow. Do you still want that key?” she asked. Interesting combination of ideas.
“Yes, please. Would you bring it up here?” I asked.
“Can I get $100 for it?” I shouldn’t have been surprised given her normal income earning strategies.
“Sure. Get it here by 5 PM and I will give you $100.” No response. No show by 5.
The next day just as we were about to close, Kimmi walks in. The best way to describe the dress that she was wearing is that it was a basketball net. More holes than stretchy white fabric. It left even less up to the imagination than her normal wardrobe. There was a woman with a small child at our service counter. She saw Kimmi’s dress, grabbed the child, and literally ran screaming out of the building.
“What are you all dressed up for Kimmi?” I asked. She came over and hugged me. Kimmi was a hugger.
“Itsma birfday!”
“Well you are halfway to that outfit, aren’t you?” I am not sure she got it.
She handed me the key. I paid her the $100. Given her attire I felt like the obvious question was sufficiently appropriate. My curiosity persisted on a zoological level. Utterly fascinating. No pun intended although our local Atlanta, low budget implant installers need to brush up.
“Kimmi, do you have butt implants?” I was at the edge of my seat.
She was proud to answer, “No. I got a fat redistribution. You see, they made me gain thirty pounds, and then they suck it out, and they injected it right here.” She pointed to the injection site. They clearly used a turkey baster.
“Does it feel strange?”
“No. Feels normal.” She seemed quite pleased with it. I was proud to have lived long enough to encounter the recipient of such a pioneering medical procedure.
I haven’t seen Kimmi since then but she does occasionally like and comment on some social media posts of mine. Now that is interesting.
I was very pleased to once again be an exotic car owner and I drove the wheels off of it. As I said, the house that we had purchased only had a two car garage. That meant that there was no place to put the Mercedes. I ended up enjoying the blue Gallardo as the first exotic that I had owned that finally had no strings attached. One consequence of the rental business was a hyper-consciousness about the cost of driving them. It was $5.71 per mile on average to drive a Ferrari 360 or Gallardo including the cost of consumable items, servicing, depreciation, insurance, cost of money, etc. With the financial risk removed from ownership of the Kimmi car, It quickly graduated into daily driver duty. The carefree feeling of a car that looks cool, is fun to drive, and was fresh out of a monster service was excellent.
Working 60-70 hours per week, trying to build up some savings, volunteering a lot at church, and continuing to work on my marriage meant that the Cannonball still occupied a space somewhere between a backburner and the lowest cabinet shelf in the kitchen. As much as I wanted it and while the toilet was still running in the background, there was just no time or money to allocate to it. I also had no idea how much it was going to cost to do. It is challenging to budget for an unknowable expenditure.
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br /> I wasn’t driving the S55 very much and it was coming up on needing a ton of maintenance. It needed a major service, brakes, tires, a suspension/power steering pump, and a bunch of other stuff I knew meant I was further from the record than I wanted to be. Reluctantly, I listed it for sale on Craigslist and it sold quickly. Very quickly in fact. I got a call on the way to the airport from a seriously interested party. I was headed to Las Vegas for a Lamborghini event so I told him I would be back in a few days. He wanted it now. “Well you can meet me at the airport parking lot if you want.” I told him, expecting that to end it.
“That works. See you in 15. Text me the lot and section.”
He got there, agreed to pay me what I wanted, gave me half in cash, and we agreed on the other half when I brought him the title. I had Megan grab the title and pick me up after my return flight into Hartsfield and we went to the buyer’s house to wrap it up.
The Gallardo was my only car and I was quite fine with that, despite the fact I didn’t fit in the car comfortably. My knees frequently hit the wiper stalk and my head was usually against the headliner. Jeremy Clarkson, who is only an inch shorter than I am, said it best. “I can fit in any car that I want to.” I drove it as much as I could, putting over ten thousand miles on it in the next year. We ended up driving Megan’s Cayenne whenever we required more space or comfort.
Chapter 8
Finalizing the Playbook
Time flew by but life still felt mercilessly boring. I lacked energy, had no goals, and had made a lot of materialistic sacrifices for the sake of our marriage. Megan was happy but she was itching hard to have kids. I was not.
I was talking to Chris Staschiak. With increasing entrance fees, Gumball was now out of reach for him as well. It was time to start planning the drive. If we were going to make an attempt at the Cannonball record we needed to stop making excuses and start taking strides toward making something happen. You can always tell what is right outside the fringes of my deliberate consciousness by what I jot down on the backs of and in the margins of paper left lying around on my desk. Within the prior few weeks those spaces were full of shopping lists and budgets for radar detectors, laser jammers, CB radios, police scanners, and everything else we needed based on the last nine years of planning.
