Fast N' Loud Page 3

  I sat at that station and I told them, “When I got done having my car washed at the drive-thru this morning, they asked me if I wanted a litter bag. A litter bag! There aren’t even any knobs in my car that a litter bag can hang from anymore. It’s out of date, you know? It’s like some sort of promotional tool from a bygone era.”

  It really was. Cars were changing. Handing out a little plastic litter bag that would hang from the headlight knob or the cigarette lighter just didn’t cut it. It was useless to me. That got my mind turning.

  “What I could really use is one of your towels,” I told the gal at the car wash.

  “Well, those are really expensive,” she said. “We can’t just give those away.” I asked her how much they paid for ’em, and she told me they were a dollar and a half apiece. These tiny little terry-cloth or shammy towels or whatever they were.

  As I was driving into work, I thought about it: the litter bag has been around since the fifties, and car washes use it to advertise their car-wash name, and the businesses around them pay to have their ads on those bags, too, which must be how the car washes offset their cost. They go to the businesses around them and say, “Hey, I’ll put your restaurant name on there, Luigi,” and all that kind of stuff. Then they give the bag away.

  That’s when it occurred to me: Why can’t you do the same thing with a nice disposable printed towel?

  The other firemen were like, “You’re an idiot. That will never sell. You’re not gonna print on a paper towel and make money doing that! Ha ha!”

  Their skepticism spurred me on like I was a bull at the damned rodeo. I started asking around. I made a bunch of phone calls. I looked into whether it was possible to get a thick disposable towel made up, and how much printing area it would have, and how much they would cost. I really thought it might work. Then I found out there was an international car-wash association that had a giant show every year in Vegas, and I thought, What the hell. I’m gonna try this.

  I printed up some sample towels for very little money, bought a small spot at that trade show, and drove all the way out to Vegas to see if I could sell a few. I’d never been to a trade show before and had no idea what I was in for. All these big companies were there, and everyone had spent a ton of money on all sorts of fancy displays. All I had was a table and a sign that said PROMO WIPES!

  One of my original Promo Wipes car-wash towels. COURTESY OF RICHARD RAWLINGS.

  I knew I needed to do something to draw more attention. It was a real turning point for me. I knew that if I didn’t blow it out and do something over-the-top, I was gonna fail—and there was no way I was going back to the firehouse with my tail between my legs. So I called up one of the local modeling agencies the night before the show opened. I hired a couple of pretty girls to help show off the towels. I also went out and rented a Hummer H1, which was a pretty badass thing to do in the 1990s, and had it logoed up real quick. The morning the trade show started, I drove that Hummer up and down the Strip throwing out business cards, and then I made sure the girls got busy attracting all sorts of attention inside.

  I hoped we’d take in forty or fifty orders just to get things started. I would’ve been really proud of that.

  By the end of the convention, we’d taken in 980 orders. Nine hundred and eighty! From all over the country.

  Suddenly, I had a new business on my hands. A booming business! I also had enough orders that I had some sway. I flew to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and cut a deal with Kimberly-Clark, the paper company. Basically, instead of paying them a certain price per towel, I made them an offer to buy time on their printing machines whether I bought a certain number of towels or not. I knew I had enough orders to use up all that time, so the result was it brought my cost per towel down significantly, which increased my profit in a big way. Boom! Remember now, I didn’t have a college education. I just ran the math, did some numbers, thought about what I wanted and needed, and then made it happen. I can’t imagine what that giant corporation thought of this kid coming in to cut a deal with them, but I wasn’t afraid, and I wasn’t leaving there without making a deal. Sometimes you’ve just gotta grab the bull by the balls, you know?

  From there, I built my way up. I probably risked about $5,000 getting that company off the ground, and $5,000 was just about all the savings I had at that time. I believed in myself and my idea enough to take that risk, and it paid off. I grew that side business into a nice little company, and on top of my firefighting and police and EMT work, I was making a nice living. I started riding a Harley during that time period. I went out and bought a gold-colored 1965 Mustang—a full-on Steve McQueen–style 2+2 fastback. One of the coolest cars I’ve ever owned. Life was good, man!

  Funny thing about life, though. If you’re not careful, sometimes when you’re riding that wave, it can crash on you.

  GUNS & MONEY

  I’ve always had a phobia of driving in the rain. Especially at night, and especially if the night involves any kind of partying or drinking. That’s just stupid, and I try my best to be smart about things. I try not to put myself in harm’s way. I try to think things through as a general rule, but whether it’s rational or not, I think driving in the rain is just asking for an accident.

  The crazy thing about that phobia is that it may well have saved my life one time, in a way I never could have imagined.

  So, it was pouring rain when my closest buddies, Ted and Scott, invited me to go party with them at a big club in Dallas. “No way, guys,” I told ’em. “Have fun.” It didn’t make sense to me that we’d go all the way to Dallas just to grab a few beers and try to meet some girls. We’d have to drive all the way back, and that just seemed like a waste of time. The rain just made it a 100 percent no-go.

  So they went. I stayed home. Later that night, I got a phone call that shook me up really bad. The story went like this: apparently the club wasn’t all that happening that night. So Ted and Scott walked in, had one beer each, turned around, and headed right back to the parking lot. That’s when they saw someone breaking into their car. They’d driven the show car from Scott’s stereo business, which had the shop’s name on the back window and everything. Clearly the thief thought he was in for a big score with all of that expensive stereo equipment in there.

  “Hey! What the f—k do you think you’re doing?” they yelled as they ran over to beat the crap out of the guy. That’s when the thief popped up with a gun in his hand. He pointed it right at them. Scott ducked. The gun went off. Ted got shot in the face. He died right there. One of my closest friends. Just like that. Gone.

  It’s hard not to think about what might have happened if I’d gone with them. I made it a rule to never carry my gun when I was out partying. Having a firearm on you when people are drinking is just a dangerous thing to do. So it damn well could’ve been me that got shot. It shook me up to think about it, but I was nowhere near as shaken as Scott. He was in really bad shape as we buried our friend. I can’t even imagine how it felt to be right there when it happened. There’s such a thing as survivor’s guilt, too—that nagging, terrible question about why he made it but Ted didn’t.

  I hated seeing Scott so torn up. Finally, maybe two or three weeks after the funeral, I talked him into going out: “Hey man, you gotta get out of the house.” I’d talked to him about life’s twists and turns, how s—t happens, how it wasn’t his fault. But what he really needed was to get out of the house, have a few beers, find himself a piece of ass, and get back to living.

  So we went out partying and Scott had a few drinks and loosened up. By the end of the night I was pretty loaded, and Scott was in no shape to drive, so I took a cab home from the bar. It was 1:30, maybe two o’clock in the morning by the time I got back to my house, and by then I’d decided I was hungry. It wasn’t too smart of me, but I decided to jump in my prized gold ’65 Mustang fastback and head to a burger joint down the road. It was only three blocks away. I didn’t expect any trouble with the drive, and I really, really wanted a burger and some f
ries. (Sometimes I wonder if I was singlehandedly trying to define the phrase “young and stupid.”)

  I pulled around into the drive-thru lane and I noticed that the girl at the window was talking to three shady-looking characters. I was off duty and I’d had a few beers, but I still had my cop eyes on. I noticed those guys look back at me before they moved away from the window. I rolled up there, gave the girl my order, and handed her a twenty-dollar bill. She closed the window. I heard a click. She locked it. Right then and there I knew something was going down.

  I looked in my rearview mirror and saw those guys coming up behind me on foot.

  Instinctively I went straight down to where I usually keep my gun beside the seat. My left hand was still on the steering wheel. My window was open. One of the guys reached in to try to grab the keys out of the ignition as I realized my gun wasn’t there. From that bent-down position with no visibility at all I slammed it into first and took off. That’s when I heard the gunshot. I felt my car go crashing over the hedges and the curb. I heard more gunshots: Pop! Pop! Pop! I sat up in the seat so I could see. I tried to turn the wheel as I jammed it into second, and I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t turning. Then I looked over and saw that my left arm was just hanging.

  I’d been shot.

  “F—k!” I shouted.

  I let go of the shifter and drove with my right arm. Then my left arm kind of came back to life and this burning pain seared in a trail from my shoulder down through my triceps to my elbow.

  Tires screeching, I yanked the car into my driveway and ran inside, scaring the hell out of my sleeping roommate.

  “What the f—k?” he yelled as he caught sight of the blood.

  “Motherf—ker! I’ve been shot!” I yelled as I made a mad dash for my guns.

  He picked up the phone and dialed 911, but I’d already decided that I wasn’t gonna wait around while those guys got away.

  “Man, f—k them. Let’s go.”

  I wrapped my shoulder and arm in a T-shirt and I jumped back into my Mustang to go out looking for them, which probably wasn’t the smartest idea. My roommate jumped in with me. It had always been a lousy neighborhood for as long as I could remember. It was so bad, I used to ride my Harley up over the curb going into my yard, kick the front door in, and park in the living room rather than park my bike outside. There was just too much of a chance that somebody’d steal it otherwise.

  Our search was fruitless. By the time we got back to the house the police were there with the whole street blocked off.

  We told them who we were, and the guys from the ambulance started to take care of me. That’s when a cop I knew said, “Man! What happened?”

  “Haven’t you gotten a call from the burger joint yet?” I asked.

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “These dudes blew up with two guns and shot my ass and I nearly wrecked my car, and they haven’t called you?”

  “No, they haven’t reported anything.”

  That’s when I knew, right then and there: I’d been had.

  They insisted on taking me to the hospital, which meant the cops would be left to find the dudes who shot me and to track down what happened at that burger joint on their own. I wouldn’t be allowed to participate in the investigation anyway, but there was no question in my mind that the whole thing was a setup. They were just waiting for the right victim to come along. I had no doubt that their plan was to jack my car. What else they had in mind for me, I have no idea.

  I’m sorry, but there was no way anybody was stealing my Mustang.

  I thought the whole thing through, over and over again, trying to remember every detail of what happened. I was lying in the hospital when my buddy Scott came running in. This was just two or three weeks after we’d buried our close friend Ted, and Scott was a complete wreck.

  “Dude, I’m fine! I’m fine!” I said. I couldn’t help but laugh. Poor Scott thought he’d lost another friend.

  The fact is, I was lucky. Twice in a month, I’d been lucky.

  The doctors told me I’d been shot with a .38, and the cops who investigated found multiple 9mm shells at the scene from the second gun. Through some miracle, the .38 slug didn’t hit any bone. It hit my muscle mass and left a long trail of a scar that’s still visible plain as day today from the point of entry right down to where it ripped through the inside of my arm near my elbow.

  My Mustang didn’t suffer any bullet holes. Just me.

  That bullet could have blown the hell out of my arm. Just a couple of inches over to the right and it might have gone through my back and into my chest, and I’d be dead. But to me, the moral of the story is that if I’d had my gun with me, I wouldn’t be here right now at all. One of those guys might be dead, too, but grabbing my gun would have caused enough hesitation that I would have stayed there one more second, and I am absolutely sure that a second bullet would have come my way. Instead of hitting the gas pedal and peeling out from that bent-over position, I might have sat in place for another second—and that one extra second might have meant the end of me.

  My 1965 Mustang 2+2 fastback. COURTESY OF RICHARD RAWLINGS.

  I tell people that story when they talk about buying a gun to defend themselves, or keeping a gun in their house to protect their family. It’s just something to think about. Sometimes having a gun can get you into more trouble than not. Sometimes it can cost you your life.

  It took a lot of therapy to build the strength back up in my left hand. I also wound up being out of work for a long time, not only because I had to let the wounds heal, but because the department was scared about post-traumatic stress disorder, or that the experience might turn me into a bad cop who’d be out for revenge. I had to go through all kinds of psychological, medical, and physical testing to get back on duty. It took close to ten months.

  In the meantime, everyone I knew kept telling me I should go after the burger joint. They were part of a chain of restaurants, and a corporation could be held accountable for the actions or inactions of their employees, I was told. At the very least, I knew that no one from that restaurant called that shooting in to the police.

  The thing is, I’m not one of those people who’s out to sue everybody. I hate that we’re a country full of idiots filing idiotic lawsuits. So I ignored everybody’s urging. I ignored it until about six months later when my roommate was in another nearby restaurant and he overheard two ladies behind him talking about how they’d been beat up and had their purses stolen inside the women’s restroom at the same burger joint. “Hey, my buddy got shot there!” he said to them, and those women were like, “Oh, there’s so-and-so who had this happen to him, and this happened to so-and-so.” Hearing those stories made me angry.

  I hired a lawyer and we pulled the restaurant’s records and receipts. It turned out that girl at the window didn’t even ring up my order. Which means at the end of the day, I got shot for twenty bucks.

  The lawsuit dragged on and on. The attorney I’d hired said it could be years before I’d see any kind of resolution. I couldn’t see that far into the future at that point in my life. I didn’t have that kind of patience. Getting shot has a way of changing your thinking, too. You get pretty anxious about what you’re doing with your life when you’re confronted with the possibility of your own death.

  A few older guys who I rode Harleys with had been trying to get me to sell them the Promo Wipes business around that time, and I said, “Why not?” I didn’t see myself staying in the towel business my whole life, you know what I mean? So I sold it and made a few bucks. It was right around this same time when I sat down with my fire captain to talk about my future. I got talking to him about pay scales and how I could make mine rise a little faster, and he sat there and showed me how if I stuck it out, I’d be making X amount of dollars in seventeen years, just like he was making.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “No disrespect, sir, but after seventeen years, your pay has only gone up by that much?”

  “
Well, it’s a lot more than you’re making right now,” he told me. “And when you consider the retirement benefits, you’re on track to have quite a payout and retire real young!”

  I thought about the other guys in that department who were basically waiting to retire—the guys who’d been so negative about my dreams and ideas—and all I could think was, Is that what I’m gonna be someday?

  The fire department didn’t offer me any opportunity to get ahead in life except to stay the course and know I’d have X amount of dollars at the end of so many years. It seemed way too finite for me. It felt almost claustrophobic or something. I’d joined the fire department because I wanted to get ahead in life. Suddenly, being in that job felt like the opposite. It felt as if staying would amount to nothing more than settling—and settling was something I never wanted to do in my life. Ever.

  I stood up right at the captain’s desk in that minute and said, “I quit.”

  “What? What do you mean, you quit?” he said. He thought I was just being rash and would change my mind, but I knew right then and there I wouldn’t. My career in public service and safety was over. Life’s too short. I wanted to make something big for myself, and I wanted to do it my own way. I’d started and sold the Promo Wipes business. I was sure I could do it again. It turned out that I was a heck of a salesman, and sales always offers a chance to decide your own fate and paint your own destiny.

  “Nope. I mean it, sir,” I told my captain. “Thank you very much for your time and all your help, but I’m gonna go do something else now.”

  I was barely going on twenty-five at the time, and I’d already had a career path and built a company of my own. I’d already gotten married and divorced, too. I almost forgot to mention that. I’d got involved in one of those tumultuous relationships where we broke up and got back together all the time, until finally it was like, “Are we gonna break up for good or get married?” And we went out and got hitched. It was a big mistake from the start, and I wound up moving out and living in my own apartment again not long before I quit the fire department.