Your Career Is More Important to You Than Anyone

I went to high school in an area called Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and lived with my father there during high school. Up until ninth grade I had lived in a city called Grosse Pointe, Michigan, which was about an hour’s drive away. Since I had grown up in Grosse Pointe, many of my friends still lived there and I spent many of my weekends there visiting.

One day I received the most amazing telephone call from a friend of mine in Grosse Pointe. A girl who I (and just about every other guy I knew) had been incredibly interested in for a long time had stopped by my buddy’s house with his girlfriend and told him that he should call me because she wanted to go out with me that night. She had recently broken up with her boyfriend of five or six years, who was a freshman at the University of Michigan. She was still in high school, as was I.

“Are you kidding?” I asked my friend.

“No. You need to get over here right now. We’ll all go out. I do not think you understand … No one has ever gone out with this girl except for her ex-boyfriend. I have no idea why she picked you, but you need to get over here right now!”

I could hardly believe my luck. This seemed too good to be true. In fact, it hardly made sense. I did not know the girl very well and had only been listening to stories from other kids that were obsessed with her, for as long as I could remember. My friend handed me the phone and the girl got on the line and said she was thinking that it would be fun if we all hung out, and that I should come over right away.

I jumped in my Yugo and started making the one-hour drive from Bloomfield Hills to Grosse Pointe. I was about halfway there when I noticed that my car was slowing down. Then I heard a loud grinding sort of sound and the engine lost all of its power as I steered the car to the side of the road. When I tried to start the car nothing happened and all I could hear was a clicking. The engine would not turn over.

In a panic I popped the hood and checked the oil. There was no oil in the engine, which is apparently why the engine had seized up. I had completely trashed the car by forgetting to check the oil. The car was rendered useless–with only 23,000 miles on it. I remembered back to when I had first purchased the car and was very proud of it. One time a man approached me as I was pumping gas, and he told me he was from Yugoslavia and used to have the same car when he had lived there.

“This car will not go more than 25,000 miles,” he had said.

The Yugo was stopped dead beneath a freeway bridge and I decided that the best thing I could do was to go to a gas station and call a taxi. It must have taken me close to a half hour to find a gas station. I called home, but nobody was there. The taxi showed up within a few minutes.

I was, of course, upset about the incident with the Yugo since it was my only car, but I was not all that worried, since I had a large van that I used for my asphalt seal-coating business. The van was very nice and I had gotten a great deal on it. It was not something I could drive on a daily basis, though, because after having done several asphalt jobs with the van, I had gotten tar all over the interior. I had to be careful where I sat.

I took a taxi back home and it ended up costing me sixty bucks, which was all the money I had had available for going out that night. I called my friend:

“Where are you?” he asked. “We are all waiting for you!”

I explained to him that I did not have any money, that my car had broken down, but I would be leaving in my van right away. My friend sounded annoyed about having to loan me money to go out, but he simply told me to hurry up. I started driving again and, incredibly, halfway into the drive the van started making strange noises, losing power, and so forth. Within a few minutes the van had broken down, started smoking out of its engine, and literally rolled to a stop directly behind the Yugo, alongside the freeway. It made absolutely no sense.

I was extremely depressed about this whole situation and did not know what to do. I had no money to call a taxi and now I had no way to get to my friend’s house to go out on my dream date. I hiked again to the gas station and told the people there the incredible story about how I had broken down another car, literally right behind the Yugo. They looked at me as if I were insane and clearly did not believe me. They were kind enough to let me use a phone.

I first called my friend in Grosse Pointe. He could not believe me either. He said they were going out without me–and he did not have a car.

“It would kind of be awkward if your first date was her picking you up at a gas station, eh?” my friend said. He was absolutely right. I did not want that. I never got another chance to go out with the girl. Within a week she had another boyfriend.

Next I called a rich friend of mine, who drove out to pick me up. An hour or so later he pulled up in his brand-new BMW convertible, wearing Ray Bans and looking somewhat stoned. He had been smoking pot with some other friends. I sat down in the convertible and the guy suddenly got agitated:

“Jesus Christ!! Look, you got a speck of tar on the leather! THIS IS NOT THE YUGO!!”

I got out of the car and busily tried to clean his prized leather seat. The mark on it was no larger than a fingernail and it came out quickly. As we drove back toward my house, my friend started telling me that he thought it would be fun to go into partnership with me in the asphalt business. Since I literally had no money, and no truck, to me getting a partner seemed like a good idea. I was at a very low point and felt like I needed help to get out of the hole I was in.

The business at the time was quite small and involved me passing around various flyers, giving estimates, and going out and seal-coating people’s driveways, repairing cracks and doing asphalt patches. Apart from the fact that my van had just broken down, the business was going very well and my friend wanted in on it.

For less than a few thousand dollars he bought in to the business and was suddenly a half owner, entitled to half of all the revenue that came into the business (after expenses, of course). I was excited about having a partner, and working with a partner really took a lot of the stress off my back. Now I had someone to talk with about various things that were going on in the business and, most importantly, I had someone with whom to share the workload.

With the money he invested in the business I bought an old camper to do the work in. While buying the camper I was propositioned in a very strange way and the man selling it made some really crude remarks about other matters, which really freaked me out. Driving away after paying for the camper, I felt sexually violated, just because of the things that were said to me during the purchase. After having owned the camper for some time, one day I picked up an old sleeping mattress in the back of it and found several pairs of little girls’ underwear. The event was so bizarre that I had blocked the event out of my mind until just now. Old campers formerly owned by perverts are bad news.

My first day of work with my new partner left us both completely covered in tar. Someone who worked on my partner’s estate had recommended that at the end of each day we clean the tar off our skin using Brillo pads (steel wool) and liquid Lysol. I am not sure why this recommendation was made; however, before we started work that day we made sure to buy plenty of Brillo pads and liquid Lysol. I remember it was a particularly hot day and we both got a ton of tar on ourselves, which baked on with the heat. At the end of the day we found a hose on someone’s property we were not working on and started cleaning ourselves with steel wool and Lysol. It was so painful I can still feel the sensation of the steel wool digging painfully into my skin and the burn of the alcohol from the Lysol.

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