The Wealth of My Mother's Wisdom: The Lessons That Made My Life Rich
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So I didn’t.
During my sophomore year of college, one of my professors told me about NASCAR’s diversity internship program. NASCAR wanted to bring more racial diversity to the sport of racecar driving—from the drivers themselves to corporate executives and employees. I was intrigued and, with the help of my professor, ended up winning a summer internship at NASCAR’s Los Angeles office, in their entertainment department.
It was a great internship—so great that I ended up going back the following two summers. At NASCAR, I learned more about business than I had in my whole life thus far: from how to write a business letter, to how to solicit talent to perform at races, to how to behave when you’re on the phone with the highest muckety-mucks at a record label. I solicited performers like Mariah Carey, Jamie Foxx, and Jennifer Hudson, inviting them to races, to sing the national anthem, or to become a grand marshal.
When I returned to North Carolina after auditioning in Los Angeles that summer of 2005, I felt utterly defeated. I let the bad reviews from the Hollywood casting agents and the discouraging words of my teachers convince me that I wasn’t cut out for entertainment after all. So when NASCAR called and offered me a full-time job at their headquarters in Daytona Beach, I decided to take it. “I’m over acting,” I told myself. “That dream is done.”
Every morning for almost a year, I got up and went to my NASCAR job and told myself that I was happy. And it was an amazing job. I was now running the diversity internship program that I had previously interned for. I was going around the country, speaking with young African American and Hispanic kids about opportunities at NASCAR. I was twenty-two years old and was already a gold medallion member of Delta Airlines. I was sitting in business meetings, watching multimillion-dollar deals go down; learning all about licensing, branding, networking. And it was exciting to be breaking new ground for NASCAR. Often, I was the only black kid in the building, in the meeting, getting the pit tour, and that’s a powerful position to be in.
But outside of work, I was miserable. I was dirt poor, still paying off a mountain of debt from my college education. I lived in a tiny, barely furnished one-bedroom apartment. I couldn’t even afford a TV. (Seriously—I went a whole year with no TV!) With one exception—my college buddy Travis, who was also working with me at NASCAR—all my friends lived far away. Even my girlfriend lived in a different state, and we often went months without seeing each other. I was lonely, broke, and bored.
All I had were books. Instead of going home after work, I would go to the local Barnes & Noble and read. I had rediscovered that love for the written word that my mom had instilled within me. Good to Great, The Celestine Prophecy, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Who Moved My Cheese—these were books that would end up defining my adult years. And of course, The Alchemist.
Almost a year passed this way. Then one day I got a call from Fred. Despite the entertainment industry aspirations Travis and Fred and I had shared in college, now none of us was pursuing our true passion. We’d all listened to the same advice, and gotten “real” jobs after graduating. Travis was in Florida, working with me at NASCAR; Fred was working construction in New York City, a job he hated. But as much as we pretended we’d left all that behind, the truth was that we all missed it terribly—life in the spotlight, throwing fun parties, great social lives. We all knew we weren’t as happy as we’d been in college, but we rarely talked about the fact that we weren’t pursuing our dreams anymore.
On this day, though, Fred surprised me by bringing it up directly. “Hey, man, I know you like NASCAR and all, but what’s up with the hosting and acting?”
I was surprised to hear him mention this. “Yeah, I’m over that,” I said, defensively.
“That’s too bad,” he said. “Because BET is hunting for new talent. They’re doing open casting calls in Atlanta, Houston, L.A., and New York. The New York one is in a few days. You should come audition.”
For a second, my pulse began to race. An image of myself standing in front of a camera flashed through my mind. But I took a breath and played it cool. “Nah, I’m not gonna do any auditions,” I said, slowly. “Look—I have a job, a good job, and a life plan. If I stick it out at this job I could make it to a director, or a vice president. Hell, I could be the president of this company someday. I shouldn’t be playing with acting. I already tried that once, I don’t need to go down that road again.”
“Nah, come on up!” he kept insisting.
When I hung up the phone, I sat there for a long time, thinking. I was tempted to book the next flight to New York. But I remembered all the discouraging words I’d heard when I went out to Los Angeles the previous summer; I remembered all the professors who said that acting was a pipe dream, but a stable job with a 401(k) was a reality. I was listening to the fear, and it was screaming.
And then I picked up the phone again and called my mom.
She heard me out, and then was quiet for a long time. Finally, instead of telling me what to do, she asked me a simple question: “When you wake up every morning, is your heart completely in what you’re doing?”
Her question stopped me cold. “I love what I’m doing,” I began. And then the truth spilled out of me. “But honestly, I feel like I’m missing something. When I see a Will Smith movie I’m still inspired to be like him. I still want that.”
“You’re young, Terrence,” my mom replied. “You have the opportunity now to follow your dreams. It’s important to do it. Do it while you can.”
When we got off the phone, I sat there for a long time. I looked up the price of a plane ticket to New York: $700. My bank account balance was $924. Making this risky trip would completely wipe out my savings, a crazy splurge for someone who couldn’t even afford a TV. And then I thought back to the day that my family moved down to North Carolina, and my mom’s words before we got in the car: When you have a vision, you have to see it through, no matter how far you have to go to get it.
Then I picked up the phone and called Fred. “You know what?” I said when he answered the phone. “I’m coming to New York.”
“Oh, I’ve read this story!” Tiffany exclaimed. “This is how you got the job at 106 and Park, right? You went and auditioned twice and . . .” She started to recite my own story back to me; the girl had read her Wikipedia entries, clearly.
“Yes, but I’ve never told anyone the full details of how it all went down. It’s not on the Internet, trust me. It’s a long story, but it’s a good one.”
The line outside the BET headquarters on that June morning must have been two thousand people long. It stretched all the way around 57th Street, circling the building. Fred dropped me off at the break of dawn, where I met my college friend Lashawn Ray, who was also auditioning. But apparently we were already late, because we were near the back of the line.
We stood in that line for five hours, with nothing to do but grow more and more nervous. I was starving, having only eaten a soggy turkey, bacon, and egg sandwich from the deli on 57th Street and 10th Avenue. My feet were killing me. Before I got on the plane, I had called in sick to NASCAR, lying to my boss that I had some sort of stomach flu. Standing there, feeling worse by the minute, I remembered what my mom liked to say: “If you tell people you’re sick, you’re gonna get sick.”
We kept getting closer to the front of the line. We made it into the building, and went through security, then we were walking through the BET offices. A BET employee handed me a nametag to wear around my neck. I saw Big Tigger, one of my idols, walking down the hall.
“I can’t believe I’m here,” I thought.
And then, finally, we were in the casting room—a big, intimidating studio with photographs of broadcasters on the wall. As I walked in, a casting assistant handed me a single piece of paper with some words on it. This was the script that I was supposed to read:
“Hey, what’s up? I’m [say your name] and it’s an amazing day here in NYC. Up next is the number five video of the day, the new joint from Jay Z, right here on BET.”
I bombed.
After I finished stumbling through the lines, a casting agent ushered me up to the table where they all sat. He smiled and put a red mark on the piece of paper I was holding. And then an assistant took me by the arm and walked me toward a door. “Okay, just go through this door,” she said, nicely. For a minute, I didn’t know where she was taking me. Were they overlooking the way I’d flubbed my lines? Did they like me anyway?
The door opened directly out into the traffic on Tenth Avenue. I’d been ejected. And just like that, my dream was crushed again. I’d never been so depressed in my life.
When Fred picked me up, I showed him the paper with the red mark and shook my head.
“Damn, dog,” he said.
The sun was setting. I’d spent the whole day standing in line at BET, and now there wasn’t even enough time to grab dinner before my flight back to Daytona Beach. “Just take me to the airport,” I said. “I gotta get back to Florida. I can’t afford to get fired.”
As we drove back across the Brooklyn Bridge, I texted my mom a quick message: I didn’t make it.
A few minutes later, my phone chimed with a text message back from my mother. Just don’t give up. If they already cut you once, what’s the worst they’re going to do if you keep on going?
I read this out loud to Fred and laughed. “Well, they could cut me again,” I muttered.
Fred said nothing, sitting behind the wheel. We sat, idling, in New York rush-hour traffic. My day had finally caught up with me: I was exhausted. Before I knew it, I was asleep.
When I woke up, it was dark out. I looked out the passenger window, and was disoriented. It looked like we were in . . . Philadelphia? I glanced at the clock—three hours had passed. We were in Philadelphia.
I looked over at Fred. “What are you doing?”
Fred shrugged. “Your mom is never wrong. We might as well keep going.”
“What do you mean?”
“Auditions in Atlanta are tomorrow morning. Let’s just go.”
“You’re nuts.”
Fred just smiled.
It was nuts. But sitting there in Fred’s green Nissan Maxima, I was suddenly filled with so much energy and support, coming from my mom and from my friends. They believed in me. I wanted to believe in myself as much as they did. I wanted to share my mom’s determination to make my vision a reality.
I looked down at the audition script with the red check mark on it, crumpled on the floor of the car. “Hell. Why not?”
I texted my mom: Think we are going to try to make audition in Atlanta.
A few minutes, a text came back: That’s my Terrence.
But Philadelphia to Atlanta is a twelve-hour drive. It was already eleven o’clock at night. Judging by the crowds in New York City, we needed to be there in Atlanta by six in the morning in order to guarantee a spot in the line. There was no way we were going to make it. But we were unstoppable. En route, I called Jocelynn Jacobs, one of my best friends from college, who had moved to Atlanta. She lived down the road from where the auditions were taking place, at Club 112 on Peachtree Street. I woke her up at two A.M. and asked her to do something I’m not sure I would have done myself. The mission: I needed her to go down to the audition, register in my name, and stand in line until we got there. Maybe she thought I was crazy, but she always had my back: “Of course I’ll do it, but I have to be at work by nine-thirty.” I thanked her a million times and got off the phone.
I started calling everyone I knew in Atlanta. I needed someone to take the second shift when Jocelynn left for work. After I exhausted all of my local options, I realized I had only one person left I could call. I dialed Travis to ask the unthinkable.
He picked up after my second call. He sounded groggy; obviously I had woken him up as well. I got right to it as he tried to make sense of my outlandish request. “Okay, so let me get this straight. You just flew to New York, auditioned, and got cut. And now you’re on your way to Atlanta and you want me to drive up there from Daytona in the middle of the night to swap spots with Jocelynn and wait in line until you arrive?”
Long pause. Reluctantly, I said, “Yep, that pretty much sums it up.”
Another long pause. And then, in typical Trav manner, he said, “Okay, cool. But please note, you owe me for this one. And I’m taking your car. I’ll put gas in it and meet you there.”
I’m not sure what I did in my last life, but I’m damn sure lucky to have my crew.
We drove straight through the night, stopping only for gas and to wash our faces in a public restroom. We ate service station turkey sandwiches and Doritos. While Fred drove, I read the script on that piece of paper over and over, trying to come up with new ways to deliver the lines. By the time we were halfway there, I had them down cold. By seven A.M., I was getting text messages from Jocelynn: “The line is out of control.” I made a quick phone call to my office in Daytona Beach, calling in sick for the second day in a row.
We finally arrived in Atlanta, unshowered and delirious with exhaustion, at around noon. Travis and Jocelynn (who skipped work to wait for us) had already been in line for nine hours. Yes, my friends waited in line for me for nine hours. We walked up and down the audition line, which stretched all the way down Peachtree Street, looking for our friends. There were thousands of people waiting outside—even more than in New York City—but Travis and Jocelynn were nowhere to be seen. Finally, we texted them and discovered that they’d gotten there so early that they had already made it inside the building. Praise be!
Tiffany jumped in. “Wow, I can’t believe your friends actually did that for you. I wish I had people like that in my corner.”
“Like I told you last time—you’re only as good as the team you have behind you. That day, I had an amazing team. I still do.”
In any case, Fred and I stood there for a minute, trying to figure out how to get inside the club to meet them. Just as we were about to duck under a rail, a giant security guard began to shout at the crowd: “Everybody, go home. We’ve already handed out a thousand nametags, and that’s gonna be it. So if you don’t have one, you need to leave. No one gets inside the building unless they already have a nametag.”
Fred and I looked at each other as the disappointed crowd began to dissipate. I couldn’t believe it had come to this. Somewhere inside the building, Travis and Jocelynn were still standing in line for me, but there was no way to get to them. We’d driven all night long, traveling the entire eastern seaboard, just to find out that it was over?
And then I glanced down at my chest and had an epiphany. I hadn’t had time to change since the audition yesterday afternoon. I was still wearing my dirty clothes. I was still holding the crumpled script with the red check on it. And I was still wearing my damn nametag.
Quickly, I walked toward the security guard. I flashed a smile and flashed the nametag—praying that he wouldn’t notice that it was from the New York, not the Atlanta, audition—and said, “Sir, I’m so sorry—I was just inside doing my audition and I left my phone in there. Can I go back in and get it?”
He nodded. “Hurry up.”
And just like that, I was back in the game.
This time, walking in the door to the audition, I had a completely new sense of confidence. Unlike everyone else in that line, I knew what was going to happen when I got in the room. I already had the script: I knew it by heart. I was prepared. I had the motivation of all these good people in my corner, supporting me—my mom, Fred, Travis, Jocelynn. And most important, I had my mom’s words in my head: What’s the worst thing they can do to you? I had no more fear. Once the fear was out of my system, I had nothing left to lose.
This time, I nailed it.
This time, when I finished my reading, t
he guy smiled at me and said, “That was great.” This time, when they sent me to the next door, there was a green check on my script. This time, instead of opening out onto the street, the door opened into another room and another group of casting agents.
I went through three auditions in quick succession, each time getting moved along to the next, delivering the script in front of casting agents and executives and video cameras, until I finally stood in front of BET executive VP Stephen Hill.
After I did my reading, he stood and came over to shake my hand. “Oh my God, you’re really good,” he said. “The best of the tour so far.” He leaned in to read my nametag, and stopped. “Hey, does that say New York City?”
I looked him straight in the eye, remembering that I had nothing left to lose. “Yes, sir,” I said. “I just drove down from New York City, where I was cut from the audition. I haven’t had a shower or a meal in seventy-two hours, and honestly, I have to go to the bathroom as soon as possible. But there’s nothing I want more than an opportunity to work for your company, and if you give me a shot I won’t let you down. If you don’t give it to me now, you’ll see me in Houston. If you don’t give it to me there, you’ll see me in Chicago. And then in L.A. You’re going to see me until you give me the job.”
Hill laughed. “How about that,” he said. Then he shook my hand again as I was ushered out the door. There was no one left to see. The audition process was over.
I left the club not really knowing what had just happened. Had I just been cut again? It sure felt like I had. But this time I didn’t feel like such a failure. I was proud I’d made it to the third round; that was an accomplishment in itself. I’d taken my mom’s words to heart and truly seen this through. If this was it, so be it. At least I could say I’d tried my hardest.
Travis and I drove back to Daytona Beach that night; Fred headed back to New York City. The closer I got to home, the worse I felt. Frustration began to set in as I absorbed the futility of the last two days. How many more times would I have to try and fail? I had already learned my lesson once by going to Los Angeles and failing as an actor, and then I went to New York and failed with BET, and then I went to Atlanta and failed again. This had to be the end of the line. Plus, I was just exhausted.