Mike J.: My name is Mike Johnson, and I'm from Chicago, Illinois, originally. Parents were both instructors my dad was a D.I. for the Marine Corps, a drill instructor, and my mom was a schoolteacher for forty years and focused on just teaching kids that were seven years old because that's the point where they're either make or break and lose them or gain them as possible potential students in the future.

Michael S.: So she liked that age?

Mike J.: Yeah, so that's the age that you can be manipulated into loving school or hating it.

Michael S.: Yeah, was it private or public school?

Mike J.: Always public schools which is a struggle because they always want to reset you into different environments, you know, sort of constant change of attitude so that you don't get stuck in one rhythm but if she wanted to stay where she can be more helpful to more students. She's helped ten thousand students in her lifetime, and most of them would come back as adults and say my God you're the teacher that changed my life.

Michael S.: She really was a great teacher.

Mike J.: Yeah, well she had me to deal with. She said man if there’s other kids like this, there’s got to be a need, you know.

Michael S.: (Laugh) Did you have brothers and sisters?

Mike: J: Yeah, I had three sisters, and they were very easily to retain information from books and studies and stuff, and I have a sister that has I guess a double major or a doctrine in English and teaching, so she also went on to do the same career choices as my we grew up in a very poor family when, you know, they were working all the time and they have kids to deal with and payments and stuff. So it was at a time when there was no such thing as an abandonment law. They didn't have problems with children being left in places and basically baby sitted by other things you know, so my parents thought it was totally OK to take me every day to the different museums and zoos and amusement parks in Chicago and leave us there for the day.

Michael S.: Your sister as well?

Mike J.: No, no, they usually went different directions, you know, they had other people that were wanting them to do stuff for them so they would have them stay at their house and maybe watch other siblings or you know do something of the nature but my mom and dad couldn’t afford a whole lot of childcare and there wasn't any babysitters basically to sit us basically, so they’d just drop me off at the museum. They’d say here you go, they’d drop me off at the Field Museum in Chicago, and they’d give me two or three dollars to eat lunch, and I was really young. I was only probably five or six years old, five probably, and they said when the hands on the twelve and the little hands on the six, you be right here. We're going to leave you in the museum overnight.

Michael S.: How long did that go on for?

Mike J.: Oh for years, maybe two or three years. I imagine.

Michael S.: So you must have learned that museum inside and out?

Mike J.: Well you know it's a really amazing thing. I was a small child whatever, about five, six and I think that at the end of it I was about seven and what I would do, I remember, I'd say OK they're going to drop me off right now and sometimes I would run as fast as I could just to see the end of the museum. It just went on and on endlessly, you know, from floor after floor and wing after wing, so I just wanted to see the whole thing so I remember attempting to run as fast as I could and I would run for four hours.

Michael S.: To try and take it all in.

Mike J.: Yeah I had to take it all in. At the same time, I didn't make it. I don't remember even to this day. I don't know how big that museum actually is because I'd get four hours into it and then I'd realize I have to get back because I have to be back by the six, you know, so I would take off and go back the other direction and try to retrace my steps. You know, I remember being in front of big huge giant exhibits. One of my favorite was the giant T.-Rex dinosaurs, you know bones and all the different effects with the different dinosaur exhibits and stuff that they had once were numerous and a couple times I got stuck in the museums. One time at the art museum in Chicago I was in, I was past my time. I'd locked onto Jackson Pollock, and I was standing on the little bench in front of the painting itself. As I was standing on the bench, my mother said she came into the museum, was looking for me because I wasn't there at the allotted time and so the museum was going to close and she had to go find me. And so she was looking up every wing and going every direction. She found me in front of Pollock, and I think I might have been just standing on the bench and just crying looking at the amazing, you know, how that becomes what it is or whatever is a phenomenon to me so I that as I grew up or whatever. I try to understand Pollock's thinking and where he was coming from and all of that, but she says what are you doing and I said, well look at that Mom, that's just amazing. It's the best piece in the whole museum, but it's just basically dripped paint. He just walks around and dripped paint in his driveway and covered canvases that were huge giant pieces of or whatever.

Michael S.: So do you think he had a method to his madness, his paintings?

Mike J.: Well, the thing is they have actual film of him painting, you can see on YouTube how he actually painted and stuff and how the story goes, I try to read a little bit about it, and of course my mother would find different things about him. I even have to this day postcards and things that have his work on it, you know, to kind of refresh me of where it was all coming from, but he would drip paint, at first he would dip a brush and then put it on to the canvas and then that wasn't fast enough to accomplish what he wanted so you started...by throwing it. He'd take the paint out of the can with the paintbrush and throw it at the canvas so that it would get there quicker because dribbling it is kind of a long process. Then eventually he would just put a can opener on it and open it up in several different holes and pour it out of the can on to the canvas because it was faster. But basically he would continue to do it until some point where he was satisfied with it being complete. I know for a fact that one of his things was to cover the entire canvas so that he couldn't see the beginning work and see where he started from and where he ended says that at some point the fourth piece or third piece he accomplished, there were huge pieces the size of a driveway, obviously might be the size of four square cars or some of the size of the canvas. It must take months to dry it, I mean you think of all that poured paint. So anyway, so he stood up in front of his wife or whatever and asked her "is this art?" He didn't ask is this good art, is it something you like, he just asked "is this art?" I don't remember the answer to that and I thought that was kind of interesting that he was unsure of himself even to that point after three of them being sold that it was even art. I think was a joke at first. He just wanted to see what people would step into because they read into the art, different forms and different images that he really didn't put there. He just dribbled the paint, so eventually they say well look at that elephant over there and that sausage whatever it is and he didn't put that in there on purpose, it just shows up because of the patterns, the random quantum patterns.

Michael S.: How many paintings did he do, do you know?

Mike J.: About fifty paintings and forty-nine of them were accepted or purchased by museums which leaves only one painting that's still being traded and sold through private dealers and right now the painting is worth eight-hundred million dollars.

Michael S.: Do you know how he sold his first couple paintings?

Mike J.: I believe he just went to studios and asked if they would sell it for him and they probably denied him. They said no, this thing's huge, who's going to buy that, you know. So I don't know how you accomplished his first one. It must be in some easy to look up form or whatever how he started to sell them. And I remember he sold them for four-thousand dollars, a painting that took months to accomplish and months to dry, I imagine at least two months to dry it. You know under the wrong conditions, you have to be able to have a nice clear day that's either sunny or warm, so it'll dry and then he sold it for four grand. So, you know, I imagine it was just like I'm going to make money off this thing as a joke, and he smoked like a chimney. He loved the chain smoking and all of the stills that shows him painting he's got a cigarette in one hand and painting away so I imagine the money went to buying cigarettes. And different paints and stuff so they can accomplish the next one. You know that is like any artist, he didn't really visualize profit off of these, just visualize all right, I got to do this one more time. I imagine it's an amazing release from his psyche to see it accomplished. You're like all right, that one's done, and then to see it go away must of been kind of exciting too.

Michael S.: Do you think his paintings sold for the millions only after he died?

Mike J.: Yes, yes, it became a period thing. It was the same as impressionism, same as French realism or whatever, he became in the sixties the person that made that random mark. The first one that was recognizable and so I believe it was actually in his lifetime, they came to him and said hey look, you know, this is a pattern and style of art that's like nothing else before, nothing else after, and we recognize it as being valuable, so I think before he passed he was able to say well you know I want big money for it. And they said OK, we'll pay you whatever's value is for real instead of trying to burn him for them.

Michael S.: So that experience in the museum, staring at the Jackson Pollock, that had an influence on you and also the big T-Rex display. And we're going to talk about those influences shortly. That had an influence on you. What are some of other things during those early days in the museum that had an influence on you?

Mike J.: One of my favorite things in life is a silly movie Oliver Twist. He's got Dodger is best friend and they go through England, you know, London obviously, and they do things that are basically risky and wrong. You know they work for a thief basically that shows them how to pick pockets. So I was influenced by their ability to get in and get out of tight small places to run from cops and to go underneath something that an adult couldn't go underneath to get away. It's a part of the museum experience was I'd be out there by myself, walking around to doing things by myself and eventually you run into other kids that are in the museum with the same scenario. I see another kid and he's crying and I say you know did your mom and dad leave. Yeah, you know, so I says why are you scared? Well I'm nervous of this, that, people So eventually we gathered together and it became a thing where every couple days, you would see the same kids and I'd say oh wow you're back and wow you're back to. So we would play tag. The thing to do was tag you're it and then run like hell from the kid and then eventually we're running from the security because they're chasing us around. But I remember holing underneath many an obstruction to keep an adult from going closer to the art and I would crawl underneath the velvet ropes or underneath the cages or fences, whatever they had in front of it. And I would touch the paintings, that was one of my things to go up and, I didn't want to break them but I would just feel the canvases paint. I remember touching Monet's, I remember touching Pollock's, I remember touching the paintings that most people would never even get near, you know, because arrests or whatever. I remember doing that as a child, but I would do a thing where you stand next to a door and when an adult comes out I could just simply step through the door and the door closes behind me and now I'm inside or wherever it was that you're not supposed to be because I was so small they wouldn't even see me. I'm down below their view line. I walk into a room or whatever after they walk outside. I remember at one point going down into the archives of the Chicago Field Museum where they had the actual bones. I started to learn that the bones upstairs were models so that they can be reproduced and if anything was to happen to them whether they be destroyed or damaged or stolen or something, they have the real one downstairs and chilled archives where it's actually climate-controlled and they kept them under secured isolation for years to this day so they can maybe do D.N.A. tests and everything else that they do now and carbon-dating and 13 everything else so they don't lose the bone upstairs to the possible threat of environmental damage, so I found myself in the archives of the museum saying oh my God look at this and you know pulling out a drawer full of tiny little bones that was just fascinating to a kid and I say wow look at all. It's like a jigsaw puzzle you know. It makes one of those things upstairs, wow. So they have many many things down in there archives and some of the art is even archived where they don't let you see the real stuff because of potential terrorist threats to it, you know, it becomes national treasure, so they don't want to lose it. So obviously I started to see that they had a different part of the museum that they don't let the general public see, that was real fascinating to me too, I mean even to this day, I'd love to go to the Smithsonian Institution, I would spend months or maybe a year there just to see all the stuff and then also the try to see their archives so you can see the real stuff, same just like anything else. Whenever you see King Tut's exhibition or the Crown Jewels of England, they're never the real jewels, they're always something that's been duplicated so that it wouldn't be a threat to somebody destroying it or stealing it. And that actually lead me to an interesting story as I learned that they stole the Mona Lisa on time. They took the Mona Lisa off the wall and set it behind a radiator, a security guard did that and when he put that behind the radiator, he then went out and sold to four different criminal entities, he sold an artificial replica of it, you know, he had rolled up canvas. He said look I got the Mona Lisa right here, so four criminals actually their like mob leaders or whatever bought the painting from him four times over and that became one of the biggest scandals in history that was unreported by anybody because they couldn't report that they'd been ripped off by this guy so as I said they probably tried to seek him out and take out his life or something for doing it, but that does kind of interest them that they actually saw the Mona Lisa disappear for a few minutes.

Michael S.: So what happened to the real one?

Mike J.: Well they found it eventually behind the radiator and took it out and put it back on the wall. In fact, it's not missing. But during that time that it was reported and I'm sure it went out on the newsletters and everything that the Mona Lisa's been stolen, that's actually the most recognized piece of art in the world. People see that and they know exactly what it's all about from every culture and every generation just sort of appreciates what the effort is. originally a face of a man or something.

Mike J.: I believe he had gotten commissioned to paint a wife of a famous, I think it was a king or a prince or something, you know he wanted his wife painted, and he looked at the wife and says Oh my God that's hideous, I don't want to paint her. I believe he made a joke out of it, and he painted his face and then imposed her features onto it so that it was feminine You know he obviously was able to determine what makes up a feminine face and a masculine face and I believe he became the first person to do a female impressionism and that was so entertaining that even to this day, people paid millions of dollars and line up just to see it. It's just amazing, and I heard from my roommate that went over and actually viewed the painting that it's on a stairwell so that you're not allowed to just linger in front of it they want people to continually move past it because it's so sought after, people come to the museum just to see the piece so they want them to continually move past and so they have it on a staircase so you have to go by it going up or down the stairs and so you can't just stop in front of that in just admire it or take it in or whatever because people like me would just be stuck there all day and just never move trying to understand it or figure it out. And of course to analyze it isn't today's forensics or whatever. They have a way by taking dimensional photos of it and analyzing it to determine what was painted first and what lines came second and third and stuff like that and the guy that was since in that concepts of trying to dissect it using forensic evidence platforms you know like maybe the density of the paint or what colors went down and stuff like that, he couldn't determine what the first features were. But somehow or another, he turns the painting over and they superimpose something onto it and suddenly it looks just like an actual UFO. Of all this it looks like a potential unidentified flying disk of some kind and I don't know if that's seeking out something that's there that's not really there but anyway wonderful special about what is the Mona Lisa but anyway that is a fascinating painting to me as one of those things that you can see wow what makes this so popular, why is this the number one painting in the world, how can I duplicate that. How can I make one of those because I was fascinated as a child in the museums I wanted to get some bones I wanted skull so I would ask curators you know all those guys that work there and the security and everything, I'd say how do I get one of those bones, and they'd laugh and they'd say that thing cost the museum eight-million dollars, you know, you can't expect to 16 get one of those, son. Anyway, when I was very young my dad was always trying to find some clever ways to keep me occupied and so mischievous as a kid. He would give me a shovel and pick and give me a helmut, and I remember him saying go out in the yard, dinosaurs came from right here, you heard at the museum, and I remember saying yeah they did you know right in the Chicago area they found prehistoric bones or whatever, so he says go find one in the yard, I think there's one out there. Oh yeah yeah a number digging a hole and I was a kid I about six or seven years old at the time I and I started digging this hole and I dug and I dug and hid something...I was down below eye level so I had hauled out a ladder to get down in there and it was a big hole, you know, it was probably about five or six feet long and two or three feet wide, you know I was exploring I was going down. It was difficult to work with because it was hard pan and different elements of stones and stuff and so I had know I started to use my toothbrush and brush away anything without damaging the item, you know, and I excavated this thing that looked like a big eye pocket in a bone, you know, to me it was the same exact thing as I'd seen in the museum. It was a big receded hole inside of a giant white element in and I says Oh my God I think I got something. So I'm out there digging away. My dad used to see the dirt shovel flying out of the hole and he says he's still in in there, he's good to go. But anyway so now I'm excited and I cut as much as I could around it, and I go and I get my pops and I say I think I got something. He says what. l I think I found something. So he comes out there and from standing above it looking into the hole you can see is an outline of what looks like a giant white skull with the eye sockets and teeth and the whole thing. So he says oh my God the kid found something so my parents went to I guess probably some university because my mother is connected and they had somebody come out and some archaeologist come out there and he's going to take a look at this thing, and he went down in the hole with his tools and lights and stuff to see what it's about and he come up and concluded that it's actually a big piece of quartz rock but it's huge. At the same time, it does have what looks like eyes. He's laughing he says man that kind of fooled me at first too. He says this is pretty interesting and he asked my parents, can he pull that out of there and so they came out with teams of people, I remember my mom taking a picture with her 17 old camera that turned things upside down or whatever, she took a shot of all the people above, it they had built an A-frame, a way to hoist it out, you know chains and everything else and you know twenty students show up, they're trying to dig it out of there. So they were practicing to actually excavate a bone as if it was real and when it came out it was huge so it was probably four feet by three feet by two feet big of quartz and they had some elements on it that kind of looked like a bone, so they took it to some school or something, they took it to some library and some school and put it in front of it, and to this day it's got some place in Chicago, I don't know where, but it sits out in front of the library where the kids can sit on it and enjoy it and explore it and stuff but at the same time it looks just like a skull and a part of it was to put my picture and the story with it somehow.

Michael S.: Oh, that's a great story.

Mike J.: That's so funny, my parents were laughing. To this day, my mom looks at that picture I guess and says and I remember you found a bone one time. That's Ok. Whatever, Mom.

Michael S.: Let me ask you this. What kind of lessons did you learn from your mom about making money and what's your earliest memory of making your first dollar on your own.

Mike J.: Ok, so what I did was I found out from my mother thank God she was adept because they thought I was just a slow student school, I was retarded or something, now back in the day they had a names for it, so they wanted to just ex me out of the class or put me to the back of the room or pass me by and because I have to dyslexia, many famous people have it whatever, one of them's, I can't remember the name of the actor.

Michael S.: No, very common, so you could not make grade. You had dyslexia, they didn't know what you had, so they just thought you were dumb.

Mike J.: I think I had a problem with seeing words upside down and backwards, you know, seeing the letter jumble. Tom Cruise is the name I was thinking. Tom Cruise has the same exact affliction and what they do with Tom Cruise is they never make him study a script, he simply method acts, he goes and lives with the person he's going to duplicate and then he method acts his personality and eventually they write the movie around him so that he doesn't have to learn any lines I thought that was fascinating, I said there it is right there again, and so my scenario was I couldn't read that well and I couldn't retain the information correctly and so I was unable to learn by direction let's say of a planned direction of put slot A into slot B. It what to do. Hey look, put that thingamajig in that thingamajig over there, that didn't work either but as soon as you showed me how to do something then I was on it. As soon as they do it themselves then I would record it and I would say I can do that so I got to the point where I can actually do amazing things that would blow people away because they say damn the kid can't tie his shoes but he could do that.

Michael S.: Did your mom recognize you to... 19 hey look my kid's special and he's better than all of the kids here, you'll see some day, but don't jerk him around because he can't read from a book. You know, saying just show him what you want and watch him do it, he'll do better than you. I remember many times you know they'd instruct me by just showing me what to do and then pretty soon I'm in front of the class showing the class exactly what to do and just a matter of minutes and the teachers were impressed with that, they said wow he really does catch on quick if you use his method to teach him. One of the first I believe in the schools of Chicago to understand that there's a potential that you just don't want to just throw them aside and just blow them off because he can't read or write, saying don't do that you know so eventually I excelled. I actually was sent back for the year when I was seven years old I was in second grade twice and my parents were embarrassed. I had to go do it again, and it didn't work the second time. I still wasn't able to read or write. They realized what it was and studied it and found out and then suddenly I caught up to the class and I didn't have to go sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. I went from fifth grade to ninth grade and I got to pass up three grades and I graduated, the third youngest student to ever come out of the school, and I had just turned seventeen when I graduated.

Michael S.: What was your high school called?

Mike J.: It was called Hudson Bay High School. To me, I just wanted to get out of his sooner because schools intimidated me to the point where I was getting anxiety from it. You know saying I got to do this and stand in front of that and I know I'm going to be embarrassed. Even to this day I have a hard time when somebody this or that and I'll misspell a word and it's frustrating thank God for now computers where they have the spelling check. I love that, you know. I do that to text on a phone. I'll text on a phone and I can't get the word right; it won't show up right, it won't correct on my phone my phone so I'll go to my computer real quick and open it up and type it in and it'll show these are examples and what I'm looking for and I can put that into my text messages. It's kind of silly, but it's a lifesaver for folks like myself. That can't deal with the correct spelling of things.

Michael S.: All right, how did you get to Vancouver? You were in Chicago. Did you guys move around because of your dad?

Mike J.: Yeah, well my pops, he's an inventor, he's an artist, he painted art and he wanted to be an inventor and that was his life is kind of you know a little bit foolish, whatever. And my mother just got fed up with it she says, look none of your paintings sold, you painted three thousand paintings. None of them sold and he couldn't get any effort going on that and none of his inventions would work. He'd invented over three thousand different items, so finally he says OK I'll does, it was something to do with the production in the tools and guys sales. Different things to make products. So he would then come home with different new toys, and I remember him pushing a stopwatch one time. He'd hand me a toy, and he'd stop watch. He'd click and then see how long it was before a piece broke or before I lost the piece or before I ate a piece or one of the things would fall apart, or before I would get disinterested. I'd put it down and say this is stupid, this is a ridiculous toy. So anyway so he brought home many a toy that were prototypes that weren't even on the market yet. Then he'd come back to the work I'm sure and then he would have a report back to them and show them where the failings were, so they would then redesign the product so that piece wouldn't fall out or make unsafe or whatever they had to do to keep up with production, so that became an important part in sending home different things to little crazy Michael whatever. You'd figure out a break the thing you know, so I was really good at taking things apart and not being able to put them back together, so he'd kind of take advantage of it. He says, you know, let my kid have it, he'll figure it out in no time at all, so he brought home one time a creepy crawler machine, I don't know if you remember the creepy crawlers.

Michael S.: Yeah, I remember the creepy crawlers.

Mike J.: Yeah, so it had molds and he brought home this thing and they had goop, they poured goop into it and so I was excited about it. I just found that toy just fascinating. You could cook it in a little oven and then just very soon because I had this artistic thing in my head, I would take the molds and I would paint different color goops to different elements of it. I'll give a quick example, is they have a little shrunken head, his lips were sewn together with thread, and I would paint the threads black and I would pour in different mixtures of the goop so that the skin tones were right. You know, come out with pink and purple and you know orange and all these different things mixed together so that the skin tones were like real skin tones and eventually it had little eyes that were shut and make I'd make those blue or black, so that it looked like it'd been beat on and ravished. But by the time I was done it looked like a real shrunken head. I could fool people with my art in the mold making. The process was to put some paint down in there first and then cook it a little bit with some goop. And then the next level, the next level, and pretty soon, they had multi-layers of different colors, so they could be very accurate. I had spiders that had long dark fangs and white hair on top of its black tarantula body, you know. So eventually they became more and more realistic, so I would take those to school and the kids love them. The first one I ever showed them, you know, scaring the girls with a spider or something, and all the kids had to have...Oh God we want that. We want to have one Mike and spent the time, I was very young, I was only seven, and I start to sell them for a nominal cost, I think, a dime. You know, fifteen cents, I think of twenty-five cents was my most expensive one and then eventually I'd turn to my dad, and say hey Dad these things are really great. Can I get more? So he came home with ten more different sets that they had. They had army men, they had cars that you can make. They had rings and things and different Halloween. Each one was a different set of molds with its own oven. So eventually I had ten different sets with a hundred different molds, and I would cook in my room and stuff and eventually had ten different ovens plugged into the same outlet so it was a real risk for fire and stuff. Eventually I was selling so many of them, I had so much production going, that I had to hire kids that were in my class to come home and make them with me. I said, look at, first do this and then this. So I had a production line, a little assembly line in my room and my pops comes in one day and the rooms all full of smoke and I'm sure we're inhaling all the wrong substances. And he says listen 22 this isn't safe, so here let's work in the garage, we're going to open the door. And you know, it's freezing cold in Chicago. And he says we're going to make this thing so that it works right so he went out and purchased...it was actually a grill out of a restaurant. I believe was gas-powered grill that could cook one-hundred forty-four molds at once. It was twelve molds wide twelve molds long, so I could cook one-hundred forty-four of them at one time, and then use a two-by- four to slide them into the water. They'd fall off the girl into the water, and I'd put the next line of them up there, and we'd start the process all over on each roll. So I was cranking them out by the thousands. I actually had like ten-thousand units some time. Now I take them to school, and I was selling them left and right and the kids come back with stories. Oh I scared my sister with this little worm or whatever, but my mom took it away or my dog ate it or...I need another one. And so they'd come back over and over to buy the same product from me. I thought that was great, you know, I had like a built-in resale ability with it, you know. And at some point, I'm ordering through the company and U.P.S. has showed up to my house with twenty cases of this goop. These guys have got, you know, he's got a bill for five- hundred dollars, and I'm giving my mother five-hundred bucks and she's making a check so they can write it out to do the purchase for the materials and things just one crazy and at some point I was selling them left and right to adults and down the road, I was peddling it like a crazy kid. And I went to school one day and I was selling them at school like always and the principal called me into his office and says look we got a problem. And I said what's going on. He says you've taken every child's money for lunch. Yeah at the cafeteria today there is zero money in the boxes because you've taken all the money in my locker was full of quarters. I remember my pockets were full of change, so I couldn't deny it. I says well, I thought that's what we're supposed to do is learn how to make money, and he says well, how's the cafeteria supposed to survive. I said well that's not my problem, you figure that out you know. So he's calling my parents, they were going to throw me out of school. They were going to expel me for three days for it and they were going to discipline me and my parents showed up enraged. You know what I'm saying, my dad wasn't about to have none of that. My kid isn't going to get thrown out of school for doing something that you're teaching them how to do. So they went down there with a different attitude. I exed out of the room while they had a discussion. And I can hear him screaming like 23 hell. My dad's a marine D.I., remind you, you know, SO he was about to put up with nothing. So eventually they had to let me back in the school. They took allowances, a kid to be kicked out for that. I think there was a threat of a lawsuit or something. And they said OK OK, you're back in school, but you can't do this anymore. Don't sell any kids these products or whatever. Which my dad thought was wrong because, you know, you're teach them how to do it. So anyways, so I would take them across the street before school started, and I'd poor them on the ground and have a great time. I still took all the money from the cafeteria. So I'm back in again, and they say hey look, you know. I said well, I'm not doing it at school. I'm across the street. What do you want? So eventually they had to make up what they called the Free Enterprise Day. We're going to let you do this one day a year and all the kids get to build whatever they want and sell whatever they want and what we'll do is we'll have the kids exchange money for script so that way it's not cash at school. Some sort of stipulation that they couldn't trade cash value at school. So we bought scripts and then you could take your scripts and go around the cafeteria or in the gym and all the kids had table set up for whatever product they had. I remembered most of the kids had things you can eat or whatever you know a lot of brownies and cookies and shit like that. And a few of them had things that they had made with different crafts or whatever, and I had my creepy crawlers. And I had now converted them into key chains and I had paper clips. I had pins behind them, so you could use them on your lapel. I figured out different ways of incorporating elements into it, so that it'd hang on and fasten better to whatever adults wanted. So I had tie clips that were spiders and the whole thing and what I did is at the end of the day I had taken every piece of script at the whole entire event, you know, and I had everybody's money in my hand and then I just cashed it all in. I can't remember it was probably thousands of dollars and probably a thousand dollars at least. But I'd taken everybody's script, and my dad was real proud. See the kid came up with a product that everybody wanted to have one. And I believe even the principal ended up with one of the tie clips, so the idea was I outsold everybody and even gained the trust of the school and everything else. So at that point I was kind of satisfied with the whole thing and I didn't sell them at school anymore. I tried to take them down the road. I started peddling them at different businesses, and I found myself at a place that sells bait and tackle and I also sold them to the Ace 24 Hardware. They put boxes of them on their shelves, and I would out put a sample on the box and I put a sign above it that says they're a quarter and they made half or something off every sale. And I took it to the bait shop and tackle shop and the guy wanted thousands of them. He wanted pieces made with grasshoppers with fish hooks in them. He said can you put a fish hook in their son? And I said I sure can.

Michael S.: Now back them did bait and tackle stuff have this rubber type...

Mike J.: No, no, it was the first thing, and he was on it. He was realising he was the first one and so I believe he took it to advertisement everything else. He used it as a concept to sell to other bait and tackle shops. He wasn't a fool. He said I'm going to sell these around the city, you know, and get other people involved because it was a worm that had a hook in the back of it, and it looked because I was into the paint and make it right thing. So they were all the right colors. I'm sure to a fish that's a real item, you know, and at the same time, they're very durable, they're rubber, they can he put under water, salt water whatever you had. So he was onto it. He had ordered thousands of them. I want ten thousand grasshoppers, ten thousand worms and so I would go home and start on the production, I said.

Michael S.: How old are you now?

Mike J.: I was eight at that time. So I went home and said pops I need more molds, I need more goop. This guy wants a big thing of it. shelves because kids were doing things wrong with the little oven. They would put the ovens in the toilet and they'd fry the cells or they'd pour water on it or they did things where they'd put things in there that would cook and you know asphyxiate the kid in the bedroom and ovens and stuff. And they tried to redo the product with plastic molds and a light bulb and that didn't click. They just failed. To this day, Mike, I still have molds and stuff. And they have 1964 on each one of still love or whatever. I have to have them myself. But anyway that's kind of the demise of the whole thing. Eventually I couldn't get the goop. I ordered the goop for the next four or five months and they'd bring it to me and eventually they came to me and said look it's no longer available. I said what, you know, I can't get the goop. So I would try other things in the molds. I would try everything I could think of to try to make my product because I still had a demand for it. So I was pouring glue and I'd pour rubber cement. And I tried different things and try to get it back out of the mold and eventually I had to give up because it seemed like it was just a lost case. I couldn't make it work any more.

Michael S.: Were you ever able to make for the fishing guy?

Mike J.: I did. I made orders for him, I was cranking them out. But I had to go to my dad at the time. He went to work, and he would buy one-hundred molds with the one with the worm on it. You know, as soon and he was able to get on a production line or whatever he probably bribed somebody or did something you had to do to get something to sell us out of the kit, you know, they'd sell you six different molds and an oven. We'll now he's taking the molds right off the production line, one-hundred at a the time for the different elements that I needed. You know the grasshoppers and crickets and worms and whatever it is, spiders, and things that that were now in my production order. So I'd have one hundred worms cooking at one time. All different colors, all different rainbows and everything else is trying to get what this guy wanted. He's coming to me and saying can you make them green, can you make them white? You know, he's on to the concept of different colors work better as different lures or whatever. But anyways so I was doing that and that's when they took him off the shelf and there was a big scare and my dad says that's not my kid he's got a grill. He's got a regular restaurant girl, he's not working with the oven. So that's not a threat. So he says, just be careful and don't burn yourself and you know I was already on to it by the time. They get very hot. You know, the little molds get pretty hot when they're cooking. So, they would hurt kids. You know, they'd drop them on their lap or something or whatever drop them on their brother or whatever so that the kids were hurting themselves out there, and you know I was on to different element. I said we're going to make things out of this.

Michael S.: That's very good. Can you remember what you got to do with the money and what kind of money. What kind of money you were making at eight years old?

Mike J.: My parents mostly took it. We were very poor, I mentioned, you know, so a lot of went away in clothes and school story over and over. We're going to give this back to you, and we'll save this for a college fund or something, but basically they scammed and took my money from me. Every chance they could. And it kept me out of trouble because my favorite things in life were bubble gum and different things.

Michael S.: Yeah, but what a great story. That was a true manufacturing business. What could someone who wants to make money today, what kind of lessons could they take from your very first manufacturing business as an eight-year-old kid? What are some of the benefits of that specific business? Maybe in relationship to low manufacturing costs. To margins, stuff like that.

Mike J.: Well, I think the most important thing is secure the future of it, so you can control whatever elements make up your money. It reminds me of the story of Henry Ford where he was making the first Model A's and stuff with the crate that they sent him. You know they used to send him a crate full of parts. The different bearings and stuff and he would take the crate and that became the model for the car. He actually took the crates that they were sending them in.

Michael S.: Who was sending them, the crates?

Mike J.: The manufacturers that were making the parts that he could make it for.

Michael S.: Oh, so Ford was buying parts when he first started?

Mike J.: When he first started, he bought parts, and they came in this big wooden crate, you know they came in the size of a chassis of a car, and he would use that crate and cut the doors out and make it so that it that's actually the frame of the car was the crate and he never told anybody, you know. He just started to do it and it's really interesting that the other thing he did as he cuts the crate apart he would cut out the doors cut out the trunk and then make all the parts around it so that it makes it into a Model A. But he takes all the parts that he cut out, and he very carefully would cut them into small little boards and then he would charcoal them. He'd burn them and then put them out. And that became the first Kingsford charcoal briquettes. It was actually Kind Ford is the production for that and they would put the charcoal briquettes in the cars that they sold so you could take it for a picnic. That was the first purpose of cars to the country, you know, so they could have a picnic. And they use the little Ford charcoal briquettes that are made out of the crate and they would be driving in the crate itself and they didn't realize it and then later the guys found out that were sending them the parts in the crates, and they says hey look we're going to change the size of the crate unless you pay us money and somehow or another he secured his ability to get them to continue to sell him the crates or he would stop the production. He would stop the buying. You know he said he'd buy it from somebody that was going to give that crate. You know, so that became a big issue at the first Fords or whatever that he couldn't work out that particular detail without being put over the barrel. You know Ford when he first started doing his cars he made four dollars off every car. The profit level was four dollars. Is that amazing or not? Nowadays you make four dollars off a lug nut. I mean come on. You know, every single part of the car is mass money, you know. So the profit margin is so high that the first one is only four dollars and of course made millions. They made four million dollars. If you ask the most important thing I think it's to secure whatever it is that you need so that nobody can hold you over the barrel later. That seems to be a big thing in production for big companies. They'll buy the fuels of rubber plants so that you can't hold the rubber over them later.

Michael S.: You got to be the manufacturer. You got to be the source.

Mike J.: Yes, you have to create, be the source, or you're going to be vulnerable to them increasing whatever it is that makes them richer and you poorer because they got you over a barrel. So I think that's one of the most important things you have to secure whatever elements that are making of your bottom line. That's an important factor most people don't consider, you know. And if it's successful whatever you're doing, someone's going to catch wind of it and realize it and then raise your numbers so that you're going to be at their mercy. Oh, you need water, do you? That's a great example too, they need so much water from Pepsi Cola and Coca-Cola that they actually buy a water source and you know now they make water bottles by Nestle and they sell it to you at the regular rate as a Coke. You ou know this is one of those things where as soon as they see a new source of water, Nestle and Coke are right there first to be the first buyers of it because they need so much of it, you know. Freshwater, in bottles for their sodas.

Michael S.: Let's tie this in. Be the manufacturer, so your inspiration by Jackson Pollock. In the early days in the museum, you started painting as well, correct?

Mike J.: Yes, well I was an artist for years and sculptor and eventually I found it too demanding of my body. Someone would say how much is the cost of the sculpture right here and I'd say everything's determined on the risk to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Michael S.: Let's do the story about the guy who came into your shop and you learned about the demand for this bear or this sculpture. And then how you got into that.

Mike J.: I had a store. It was in Pacific Beach California. It was a store, and it was one of the most fascinating stores on the West coast. People came from miles around from L.A. to New York, and they came in and some of them sought out the store. They said we heard about this place, we want to see it.

Michael S.: What was it called?

Mike J.: It was called the mad mall.

Michael S.: What was the address of it?

Mike J.: It was on Garnet Avenue. It was probably about the fourteenth hundred block. I was right across the street from Henry's. Is it called Henry's, the food place?

Michael S.: Yes, Henry's Market

Mike J.: Yes and then they changed the name of course to the new one now. But I was right there on the corner Fanuel and Garnet Avenue. It was six blocks from the basics block from the bay, six blocks from the beach, because I intended to make it a place where we can have lots of toys and go play at the beach or play the bay in my boats and stuff. So that was the first concept was to have this store. Anyway do you want to hear about how I got started with that store or what?

Michael S.: Let's do the sculpture story, and we'll go back to how you got started.

Mike J.: OK, I had the store, it had amazing products. I had at least ten thousand items hanging from the ceiling alone on piano wires. That was one of my things that made it interesting as you walked in the whole room was free floating items in mid-air and I had thousands of items on the floor and shelves and on the counters and it was just a full store that would make you just eye pop. You know, people came in the store and they do a circle with their eyes and they say wow. And if they didn't do that I got angry at the guys that were working for me. I had ten men working for me at the time, and I'd say hey listen guys, that guy didn't go wow, you know make some more things. And put more interesting things in the ceiling. You know, we had everything you can conceive of hanging upside down from the ceiling like you're in the center of a mirrored image. So one of the things I had on the ceiling that was kind of a challenge to put up there because I had big beams that went across and they were able to hoist with enough different points that it would make it so there wasn't too much stress on any one wire, you know, since I had a baby grand piano hanging upside down from the ceiling, and I sold that about every couple months. Someone would come in and say I have to have that. It was fascinating to me the things that were hanging from the ceiling, sometimes upside down, they were actually sold faster than the things on the ground that were the same exact item so you know and some sort of weird thing where people see that and say wow I really love that thing and they want to get it down to the ground or get it to the home and say you know what, it doesn't hold the same value as it did in the store when I bought it because now it looks different you know. They didn't understand that I was used in the artist's eye and the concept of composition when I painted and did things with art you have to use composition. There's maybe triangulation you know where you have a certain part of the painting goes right here and then it goes to here and then here, I realized as a child that artists manipulated your mind and your eyes because your perspective to get you to draw all around the painting or whatever. The real masters were good at moving your mind around so that they can get what they wanted to achieve. So if you look at great pieces of art they're actually done mathematically and at a distance you realize that you're being pulled around with your eyes mentally. You know psychologically so I did the same thing with my store on a huge scale. I'd say, no, no put it right there and make it like this and the guys would listen to what I said or whatever and they'd put it upside down 32 at an angle or something and for whatever reason it was more aesthetically pleasing. You looked at it and say wow that's amazing. But when it's down on the ground under your level of eye, it doesn't look the same. It's been altered so that was one of the tricks or whatever to the trade was to get people to walk in the room and I can move their mind. I could watch their face their eyes and say they're looking at the right place now they're moving over there. I can see they've gone there and they've covered the whole room mentally before they've even taken one step into the store. It's interesting the different elements that made up the store were fascinating to me. You know how people buy psychologically, you walk around a room, usually counterclockwise and you end up with the cash register's right next to the door and you buy the purchase and most stores are set up the same way. Of course since stores have been made, since you know thousands of years that people have analyzed and figured out the direction to buy is this direction so they actually walk around the room in a certain way and take in the perception a certain way and purchase and buy and then walkout. Those other guys have taken advantage of that. You know, Montgomery Ward's and Sears and everybody else figures that out and says we're going to set it up like this so the cash registers are right here. It's not just a random thing. You never see a Cash register in the back of a store. Obviously they want to catch you right at the point of entry or point of exit. Anyway so there's a lot of study involved with all of it. I learned it by myself just trying to analyze and figure it out. So I had thousands of items in my store and this little American Indian, native from the north, convinced my store and he had a tarp and he set this thing down in the story. He had the long hair and tattoos and things that showed that he was the tribesmen, you know from far in the north. I love anything Native American was fascinating to me and it still is. And so he had this thing and he says hey mister take a look at this. And he unveiled it, you know he had a tarp wrapped around it, he unveiled it. And it was a little wooden bear that was made with a chainsaw and it was about three feet tall and it was fascinating. It had fur and eyes and the whole thing was just amazing piece of accomplished art and somebody came in right then and says wow this is cool, Mike, how much is that? I said wait a minute, I've got a whole store, you see this thing? Out of all ten thousand items, upside down or not. They said yeah that's the coolest thing in here and so they purchased it right on the spot for five hundred dollars from the native and I thought maybe 33 somebody had sent that guy in from around the corner. I thought it was called the show, you know, where the guy came in and says I'll take it, and later they work out the deal between them you know, so they give him his money back or whatever to the native. Just to show that they sell quickly so that way I might be interested in making an order for some, you know. So I thought, ah, the guy was just standing around the corner or whatever. He's a shill, he's a set up, you know. So right then one of my customers came in that I've known for ten years and they says wow that's amazing, how much is it? And before the native could say anything, I says, it's seven-hundred dollars. And they says well I'll take it. And so I increased it by two hundred dollars almost fifty percent and he wanted it, and I looked at the native I says you got any more on the truck. He says no, that was the last one. I was dumbfounded because why would you bring in something to somebody you're going to sell to him and only have one of them.

Michael S.: How old were you?

Mike J.: I was probably twenty-two at that time, you know, twenty- three. So I says you know you got to have more of these things. He says well I got more but they're a thousand miles north where the border of Oregon and California come together and I said let's go get them. So I packed up a truck and up we went. You know, two friendly guys and we went to the north to go obtain these items that this native had made because they're so quickly sold. Anyway, so I found myself finding other ones that were made by non-natives and you get closer and closer up there in the hills, there's lots of guys that make them, you know with the chainsaw they make art. And I would buy every single piece I've seen you know no matter what I'd have to have it. You know because I needed a big demand for the store and I got so focused on it that eventually I gave up the store and just started to chase down the sculptures because they were so fascinating and there's so many variables and it's such a unique item that I was just stuck to sell those. At some point I ended up with a lock that I rented and I would pull them in the truck and they were trapped. I would put a tarp around each one so they wouldn't scratch against each other and I would take them off the truck and they would still have the tarp tied on it, and the people were purchasing there that were waiting for me to give me. They'd give me five-hundred dollars or four-hundred dollars, depending on what I wanted, and they don't even know what the item is. They see that it's a piece of wood with something and a towel wrapped around it and they say I got to have it, so I simply pull them off the truck and sold them faster than they can even look at what it is.

Michael S.: There is nothing like this in San Diego, eight?

Mike J.: No, there's no such piece of wood like that. And people here love wood and they don't have it. There's not wood items that you can obtain anywhere in Santi Loso. Everything's speckled brick and rock. So here's this unique...and it was actually California Redwood. So as I took them off the truck they trusted a knew enough to just grab it up and buy it before there's any increase of rate or someone else might get it. So they were buying wrapped up towels and wrapped up cushions that had items inside of it, so then they'd buy from me for four, five-hundred, six-hundred dollars. And they'd untie it and then wow look at it I got a bear. Wow look I got a eagle, and I remember only one time or one of the persons traded their Native American face for a bear and so I really like yours and that one says I really like yours, so they traded right on the spot. But other than that I can't remember anybody being dissatisfied with whatever they were getting. It was just an amazing accomplishment, to drop on the ground and sell something without even being seen whatever it was for five hundred dollars, it's a lot of money involved, and they were totally happy with it. They'd take their animal whatever it was and walk away and say all right. I got one and then I would driving one day selling, two day's driving. And I had my men on the lot that were there are to receive and have the people ready to go. You know, they'd have them in a line and ready to buy up this item. Eventually I would go to the north, back to the people that were buying them from me, whether they were natives or white people on the side of the road making them up and I had bought out every single piece. There was no more people to buy them from because most of them would get ten thousand dollars in their hand for me buying their pilots from them and they'd leave. They said this is the first opportunity in five years that they get to get out of this town so that...And I'd get there and there'd be nothing left. I said where'd the guy go, the artisan was here. Oh he took off. Somebody had paid him a couple grand or ten thousand dollars. He's out of here. He's wanting to go back to Detroit or Idaho or Nebraska or wherever they’re from. And I'd say damn. So I was buying myself out of my own product. I couldn't find anything to purchase anymore.

Michael S.: Were your margins good? Were you buying at a right price?

Mike J.: Oh yeah, yeah, I'd turn them right over because up in the north, the only way to describe it. The highways and the byways that I was buying off of, maybe two cars a day would pass by. And then I would take it down to my lot where 20,000 cars pass by. So the exposure was so much increased. And I always made it a point never to burn the artists for the numbers. Whatever they told me they wanted for it, I'd give it to them. I didn't even argue or anything else. Whether it was $50 or $100 whatever it was I'd say here you go. And I'd buy every piece so that even the ones that weren't so good were the ones that were only half-finished. I would purchase them also because I wanted to show the artist that I was devoted enough to buy every piece that he was making. So they would make more. They'd sit down with other pieces of wood. They'd say, all right. I've got $5000 in my hand, I want to make more. I can buy new saws. I can buy new wood. I can buy a new truck. Whatever they needed. And they all needed everything. Every one of them always had needs. And I would show up and all right here comes our savior. Here's the guy that's going to buy every piece I got. But anyway, one of the first 30 feet tall. It was this huge giant monster. It was a giant Native face. I was already in love with the first bears and when I got up to the North, he took me to the place where he was making more, he says enormous. It was between 25 and 30 feet tall, and I said oh my god, I have to have that thing. And it wasn't finished, he says oh it's nowhere near done. I said it's done enough. I said that's a fascinating piece and someone will pay a lot of money for it. So we put it on the back of a low-bed semi and had to have a crane lift it up to set it on a semi. And they laid it down, and they put a big tarp over it so they could take it down the freeway. And I only made it to L.A. I went from the north, down the south and drove 200 miles. Made it to L.A. and I was in the truck that has wide load on the top of it. So that I can follow the truck in front of me because the piece stuck out five feet off each end of the trailer you know, so I was taking up almost two lanes. Anyway, so I'm chasing it with the chase truck and it has a big sign above me that says wide load, you know big flags and blinking lights and stuff. Anyway a Rolls Royce pulls in between me and the truck and started honking at the big semi, and you see the guys got his hand out the window and he's saying pull over, pull over. So I thought, oh shoot, a piece of it must have fallen off and hit that Rolls 37 Royce, so I said here we go. We're going to have to pay for damage on this car because something fell off the big rig. Anyway, so we pulled off the side of the freeway. It was freeway ten up there. And the guy pulls us over and the cars are going by 70 miles and hour and the guy jumps out of his Rolls and he goes up to the piece and says oh my god, that's fascinating and all he's looking at is the bottom the log. He's looking at the thousands of lines that are making up the years of the growth. And he's looking at the lines, there's not even a What is it? I says it's a sculpture. Of what? A big Native American face. He says, I have to have it. I have to have it right now. And I'd paid $7000 for it from the guy up in the North, and I says, well you know you don't even know what the thing is or what it's worth. He says I don't care, I have to have it. I says, it's 30 grand. So he says OK I'll take. So he bought it. Sight unseen for $30,000. And I says where's it going to go. He says I live out in Lancaster out in the desert, you know straight out from L.A. So I turn to the driver I says you're paid to get down to San Diego, would you take it to Lancaster, he says I don't care one way or another. So he took it out to Lancaster to this guys estate and there it sits to this day. I don't know where. The guy gave me thirty grand for it. And he gave me a check and I didn't trust it. So I made him drive with me to the bank so he North and tried to buy more. That was the start.

Michael S.: Wow, you must have been excited. Ok so we're going to go back to your lesson. You got to have control. At what point did you run out of product to where you decided to go into your own manufacturing, just like you did with the creepy crawlers?

Mike J.: I was going north to buy pieces with the thirty G.'s and I started on that point to buy from every person I seen. I said this thing’s so amazing that I have to have every one of them. So at some point I would have to drive seven hundred fifty miles just to see the way up to the north, seven-hundred miles. And then there would be the first guy that says what happened to the other thirty guys that were down South. He says, ah they're out of here. It's hard to find the wood, it's hard to obtain the wood to make the piece because it's up in the north and then the markets down in the south and so I learned that right away. I says well obviously you got to drive these things to the south to get exposure, to get the people that don't know what wood is or to be excited about it. And at the same time the wood was hard to obtain in the north, so it was a perplexing situation where eventually I went back to the Native that I bought the thirty-foot piece from and I was buying his ten-foot, fifteen foot whatever he had. I was buying the pieces from him, and he had taken money upfront. One of the mistakes, I guess, but at the same time it was imperative that I had more pieces so I would leave cash on the barrelhead to come back to obtain more pieces. I'd say here is five grand, go ahead and quick, one time a handed him five-thousand dollars upfront for a piece and one of the little Natives from this tribe comes up and he's crying. The little Native kid is crying, he's about six years old, and he says well my mom she sick and sh's got to get medicine. So he hands him the five grand. And the little kids is running away, and I remember seeing money peeling off and a handful of cash, he's actually as he's running, he's losing bills behind him. I asked the Indian, I said why would you do that? You know he says, ah, it comes it goes no big deal. So he had no value to the money. He didn't care. He said ah his mother's sick, let him fix him you know. I says man that's amazing. At first, I was a hundred percent behind whatever he thought. It was just great to me. So I purchased everything that he had and started buying, and I went back up one day and he was gone. He ended up, one of the broken saws he actually had cut a hole in one of the pieces and during the saw stuck it in, there was a bar stuck in with the blade, and he put a little sign in there that says make your own piece, white man.

Michael S.: Really.

Mike J.: Yeah, he was gone. You know, he probably had fifty grand of my money in his pocket, and he's out here, you know. I couldn't blame him. I didn't diss him for it or whatever. I says ah, you know it's the first time he had an opportunity to get out of that town and you know he's rich, and he's got everything he's wanted, everything he can accomplish. You know. Later I ran into him, it was really fascinating, a wonderful story, I ran into him. Anyway, I wanted to bring him and everything that's involved in some...you know, we made up or whatever for the fact that he burned me and he was broke again and he's says would you buy another piece. I said sure whatever you got, you know make it. He had this amazing teepee. He had made this teepee with thirty-foot logs or thirty logs and thirty-foot tall. It's the biggest teepee I've ever seen in my life and biggest teepee most people have ever seen their lives. It was made out of It was thirty-feet across the bottom. It was up in the snow up where he was from. And he says I'm working on this. And he was painting a giant Buffalo outline around the back of it with red tape. And he's covering the whole thing with different paintings, and I said man that's amazing and he says that's my lodge, that's what I live in. And I says no way, so he says come on inside, take a look inside. So it's actually a round door that has stitches that holds it closed. And it's all made out of buffalo hide, the whole thing, it was actually really buffalo hide that he obtained and made this thing up, so I stepped through the hole of the door and the only way to describe it is thirty feet tall, thirty feet across, in the center of it is a giant raging fire made with pallets inside and he has a big tarp that goes across the floor and then up one foot around all the poles. It's up and tied or nailed to the poles all the way around, one foot up. And the outside of the teepee goes all the way to the ground and by doing that or whatever there's a space in between there where air and oxygen comes into the teepee to feed the fire and it all goes up straight to the top of the teepee. It's a big flue, that it goes right out of and it's actually the way that all of them are designed across the Midwest and I says oh man this is amazing. And on the inside of it, I could describe it real quick because he lived there and it's a modern day Native American. He had wall-to-wall carpets, mostly Persian rugs. It was three big fold-out couches that made up of the places where they actually lived and slept on and all the poles that were all the way to the top of the teepee were carved. 41 Every inch of it was sculpted into different images. You know there was wolves and feathers and all sorts of wonderful native things. There was eagles and all this carved into the wall... and in between it was hanging a canvas that he had painted in between each one of the poles all the way around and he had painted parts of the canvas so the whole thing was just art inside and out. And at the same time he had, it was a sunken little kitchen inside of a kitchenette sunken into the ground about a foot, so that you stepped down into it and it had a big cauldron stuck in the ground through a big piece of pipe and it swung around into the fire and it would swing out and there's his wife, and she swings out the cauldron. She says are you hungry, I've got dinner on here. And I said what do you got? And I look in there and there's some posts sticking out of it. It's actually a deer hoof was sticking out of the pot. And she says, I got some venison, some deer, and I said well I got to have that. So we're eating it, you know, we're enjoying this wonderful view and I'm looking up and one of the things that was happening is the fire would lick, you know, as the fire, cooks and licks up into the air, all the images on the teepee would move around. All the carved images so it actually was alive. The whole thing was just like it had flickers and it would make all the faces move and different things would coagulate together. And all the images on the walls would change as you sit there looking at it and then right then he did the chant. He did this "wa-ya-ya." As they gave me shivers. Even right now it gives me shivers to think about what I was looking at . You know the inside of this teepee was so fascinating and to see all the things were so hard to take in and what I did is I said listen man, we got to take this thing to San Diego. I got a lot right on Teepee Drive, it was actually right on Teepee Drive where it comes together with Lahoya Boulevard right there. It's actually across the street from the Promenade. I had rented this huge giant lot. I said we need to move this teepee down to the lot. I says listen I want to do a deal where you can make whatever you want, you can carve and sell whatever you want, I don't want any money for any of it, I'll bring wood to you and at the same time I want to charge people five dollars to see the teepee and I want the gate, you know. I want the money off the teepee see and at the same time you can sell and do whatever you want he says man, it's freezing cold up here. I'd love to be down at the beach. So we moved the entire teepee and the whole entire set-up down to P.B. And by the time we got it set up, there was a line around the block. People had come from the beach and seen it going 42 on and they came across, I have pictures of the line in the beginning of the set up or whatever because I couldn't believe people already lined up. I says it's not going to be ready for hours, they said we don't care, we want to see it. They go the money in hand, they were willing to put the five dollars out, you know. We started bringing people in and they walked in the teepee and they walked out the other side and be fascinated by what they're looking at and all the different images and he's carving away and making pieces and brought down pieces from the north of he already had carved. And he's making a hundred percent profit which is OK for me. And one of the people in line. was a woman standing there with a clipboard in her hand, and I said oh God, here we go. There must be some city ordinance that I'm probably breaking or whatever and she's there to give me tickets or write me up or do something because she looked like an official person. Anyway so she's standing in line so I went up to her before she can pay her five dollars and go into the teepee. I says, ma'am can I help you. And she says no I just want to talk to the artist and I says well I kind of talk for him because he's busy salting and stuff. I don't want him to be interrupted while he's working. Is there anyway that I can talk to you and deal with whatever the situation is because I still thought it was a negative at the time. I thought she's going to give us a ticket or write us up or correct us for whatever we're doing wrong. And she says well I just want to talk to him for just a minute. I'm a promoter and I want to buy some of his art. I want to see if he'll do a deal with me and I said well I don't want to slow him down from that potential opportunity, so I called him over and they went and talked in the back of the teepee for a few minutes by the trucks or whatever, and she comes back out, and he says Oh my God I just swung a deal. And up until then I was probably paying him five hundred dollars a week, you know, so he was making at least five hundred dollars a week or five hundred dollars for a couple days to do is art the first two days we're there. And he says I just swung a deal with that lady. I says what do you mean? He says well she owns the Indian Casino. She has something to do with promoting Indian casinos. And she wants to pay me a thousand dollars a day to go around to the Indian casinos and do grand openings with the same thing. Wow and I says son of a gun, well I don't want to slow you down. I says, there it is. Obviously all your dreams were met. You know his eyes were lit up, he was excited and he's going to get a grand a day. I says you know if you save a grand a day for three 43 years, you're a millionaire. And he laughed and he says, Oh my God, Mike, you fucking made my life. How could I repay you? I says well, if you make a piece every once in a while let me buy it from you just so I can show it at my stores or promotions or whatever. So he went off with her and they ended up carving and doing a show as they went. And they opened up all the casinos the Apollo, the Verona and all the different ones. And he ended up over Hawaii where they're opening up some sort of big thing over in Hawaii. And the Natives fell in love with him the first time they see him. First of all he's tall. He's about six feet tall.

Michael S.: What's his name? 44 thousand times to go chase him down to see what happened and temptations, so he ended up drinking and doing drugs and bad things or whatever, helping him to his health, and he ended up hurting his back and he got to the point where he could work anymore so she discharged him or whatever and broke the contract because he hundred miles to the north and I found him. I ways Laven what's going on man, where you been, what you up to? And I thought because he's broke again another time in his life at least three or four hitting me up for some cash and I gave him some money of course. sitting down and he's carving with a knife an antler. He has an antler from an elk. What he did is he carved it into a perfect proportional letter opener, with the handle being sculpted into a bear's face. And I said oh my God that's fascinating. Look at that piece of art. And it's all antler, so it looks like a bone or it looks like it's all white ivory or whatever, but he's scratching away at it, carving away, and he also had a little Native American face that he made out of the same antler down a little further. And I said oh man that is so cool and right then one of the things with Natives is that they love big giant women that do all the work. Native men just sit around and they do all the cooking, cleaning, chores, and kids. So he had this woman that was his new wife, his new adopted wife whatever, and she was a monster. She was like three hundred pounds of romping stomping orangoutang. Yeah and that kept him in check to the point where he's still alive anyway and he's in a back brace and he sitting in a chair and he can't get up and he's got a beer in his hand and I'm throwing money at him. And he says you can have that if you want and I have a hold of the piece or whatever and I set it on the table, I'm looking at it on the coffee table. And we're talking for a few minutes and he turns to her, she's in the kitchen and she's kind of in a little down or distraught about me being there for some reason. Maybe she thought I was going to bring some negative influence into his life or something but basically she's kind of like negative, being in the kitchen and growling and stuff and he turns to her and he says honey I got to go out. Mike and I are going to go out and talk for a minute. And she 45 says you are not going nowhere and I can hear her yell. And he says no I'm going out woman, I'm going, see you. So he goes and he and before I can make it out of the door, that letter opener will slide across the room and sticks into the frame of the door.

Michael S.: Whoa. She chucked it?

Mike J.: She threw it at him and it missed him. She wanted to hit the wall and wanted to hit the door jam and it did and it stuck right in there and he turns right he comes back into the room and he goes goddammit woman. And he takes the thing and he pulls it out of the wall wall but it had broken the tip. And by breaking the tip off of it in order to keep it proportional, you now have to carve the whole thing over again half an inch shorter. He's pissed as hell. He says dammitt, you broke it. So that was my last connection with them. I left and I room. They went someplace, I don't know where.

Michael S.: So this guy was a true artist, sculpture. 46 a different wife. He had a wife named Laverta. And his name was Lavin, hers was Laverta, and they were standing together and when I first met him he was up on this thirty-foot sculpture carving away. He was standing with each foot on a forklift and they're going back and forth towards the sculpture and then away from it so you can get a perspective right. He's got a seven-foot chain saw in one hand and he's the flailing through the pieces and the sawdust was going for two city blocks. I remember I took pictures of all of it. And two city blocks, the sawdust is landing away. And as he drove back and forth, he turned around and he's yelling at her, woman keep it steady. And he's up there standing on the forklift. And what she's doing is she's driving over the pieces of wood that he had just cut away so the forklift is all over the place. The top of the forklift was going left and right and forward and back and so he's yelling at her to keep it steady but she can't because there's no way to keep it straight. But anyway that's my first impression, my first influence was them being on the forklift, carving away and making his amazing sculpture I end up buying. But then at the very end, that woman, Laverna, his wife, they had their own original tribe. They renamed themselves their own tribe. They were called two feathers and they actually had a tattoo on each one of their faces that was a feather, a couple feathers. But when they put it together when they stood cheek to cheek. It turned into a different seen in my life a couple they had two separate tattoos that when it went together it made something else.

Michael S.: That's cool.

Mike J.: Yeah and I took pictures of all of it you know best I could or whatever. I still got them someplace, and I took pictures of two wanted a child and he didn't want nothing to do with it because he that one of the magics, one of the things about their stuff is that his stuff was getting worse and worse, as I come back to buy another piece. It looked kind of hokey, you know the noses weren't right, the eyes weren't correct. Things were starting to distort on the sculptures and I tried to narrow down what it was and later I found out that she actually had carved them. She was the number one artist. The most fascinating artist I've ever seen in my life. A chain saw sculptor like nothing you've ever seen in your life and she would carve away but he was too proud to let anybody know that she had done it, so he would just add a little bit of stuff to the end of it and put his name on it.

Michael S.: So all those carvings were really done by her.

Mike J.: They were mostly done by her, most of the carvings, and he was carving the big stuff and block it out and then she would come in with her little saws and she'd finish it up and they were fascinating. One of the ones I got to say, picture a native face with a big headdress on it, you know a big giant war bonnet, you know a giant head dress. But when you turn the piece around, on the inside of it was a woman holding a child on the back of this piece. But when you hold it up to the light, you can see through it, it was so thin. And both pieces were carved by a chainsaw by her. The pieces that were so fascinating that you know not only did I take pictures of every one of them and love them but I couldn't even obtain them because by that time they're usually owned by a store and they would go from five grand to fifty grand. The store owns them now you know. They would use them to draw people in to buy crap made in China, you know. They use the big sculptures to stop the tourist buses and stuff to come into the little shops and buy up all the crap or whatever.

Michael S.: So with the people lining up wanting to go into the teepee, how much money did you make doing that?

Mike J.: Before the woman showed up with the clipboard it wasn't a lot. You know, maybe about a grand or two. I was selling the pieces that were made by white folks up north and they were banging off as fast as I could bring them out like always, and then the people were lined up around the block. It was going to be a fortune made. There's no doubt about it in my mind. But she shows up, she was less than ten people into it with her clipboard. So she snatched him away. At that moment he didn't want nothing to do with me because I was only making him five hundred dollars a week which was more than he'd ever make in the north because there's just no avenue to sell his art.

Michael S.: All right, so you became a chainsaw artist. How did you learn how to do it?

Mike J.: I did what he was doing. You know I watched him do it or whatever so like everything in my life, if I see somebody do something, I can do the same thing. I can just watch long enough to say I have the confidence to try it, and I was forty years old by the time that I'd had to start sculpting myself. By the time we got the teepee down there, I was probably about thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old. So I'd never held a chainsaw in my life. And so I wanted to figure out how to do it without hurting myself, so I spent one whole year of my life going to every single artist that I could find. Every single chainsaw, even the guys that trim trees and I'd ask them, hey do you have any scars. And every one of them would say oh yeah I got a cut right here, a hundred and fifty stitches. I got cut right here. Lost my ear, this and that. And so I tried to narrow down what it is that hurt them. So I found myself trying to figure out exactly what would go wrong with each ofthese accidents and I found out and decided not to do the same mistake.

Michael S.: What did you find was the biggest mistake?

Mike J.: Oh so funny because when you buy a brand-new chainsaw, they're very expensive, very dangerous tools and the very first when you open up the owner's manual says you know, welcome for buying a steel chainsaw, thanks very much. And it says the very first thing in this instruction booklet is number one, keep both feet on the ground. And that become the number one reason people got hurt, is they had one or two or other feet off the ground or whatever. They had put one foot up on the work to work on it you know to hold it down steady or they were standing on a ladder, which was a big, big mistake or they would get on a scaffolding or whatever it was that people would take the chainsaws to the trees in their yard, and that would be the biggest mistake is to take both feet off the ground. Some of the rules in the book says, the brochures and says, keep both feet on the ground. Never let anybody watch you do while you're doing this, you know while you're doing chainsaw work. Don't let anybody watch you do this. This is talking about when you buy a skill certain warnings and one of them is, don't let people watch you while your chain-sawing.

Michael S.: Because it's a distraction.

Mike J.: Well the piece of wood might fly out on them. See there's dangers involved. The chain might fly off. You could kill somebody with a chain, you know. So the idea is don't stand there and watch somebody do it that's the number three rule. And so I found it interesting that you know here's these rules and they seem so mundane and so ridiculous, you know like, they're trying to cover their ass or whatever but really it is the number one reason that people get hurt. So then after a year of learning that information I started in on it, and I started sculpting.

Michael S.: Where were you? In San Diego?

Mike J.: No, I took off to the north, so I could be with the wood, and I have to this day the first piece that I ever made. I could show you it's a piece four-feet long by three-feet high by three-feet wide. It's great story, I think you'll love it. I went up to the north and I brought with me everything from the store. I think I needed you know so they had the store going on and another store of course as years later since I had my first original one. So I had another store and I says what am I going to need in the north to survive? I know it's cold so I took five or six pairs of blue jeans off my shelves and I took t-shirts. All my life I would wear a T-shirt until it got dirty and then throw it away. Even in my yard sales today, I still wear a tshirt or a pair of pants and when it gets dirty I just throw it away because most of the time you can't clean embedded dirt or whatever. I'm so filthy all the time. So I took some t-shirts and some jeans and I went to the north and I'm supposed to go to a place in the north where they have a gift shop and the guy, I called him up because I traveled back and forth and I talk to him on one of the ways through. I call him up and says OK, I'm ready to chainsaw. I've been studying for a year to see where the hazards are, now I'm ready to go for it. He says well come on up. We need you to start in the gift shop so that you can stop the tourists, you know, that come into the store. I says OK. Is it free and he says yeah. He says but when you sell a piece I want a little bit. I want like maybe ten percent or something. I said that's fine. He says if I sell a piece for you, I want ten percent. I says what if I sell it myself, he says well then I won't charge you. And I says that's fine. I said that sounds like an agreeable thing that I would do for any of the natives or any of the people that sculpt. So I went up to him and I was driving there and it was so far away, seven hundred miles away. So I was driving and I was getting closer and I'm driving through the redwood forest itself. There's this primeval Redwood groves up there that are there are huge giant trees that are ten feet across or twenty feet across and four hundred feet tall some of them, sixty-five feet around. And sometimes they're growing in a position where they have to make the freeway to go around it. And it's a spot. And they're protected so you can't level the tree to go around it with the road. So the roads are built all around these little groves and you drive through them and of course the freeway eventually bypasses it and you could get off the main freeway and drive through these groves. And I went 51 there and I wanted to go to this shop which is off one of the groves' roads and I'm driving through the grove itself and it's real late at the night, it's twelve o'clock at night. And I have strapped to the top of my camper truck a boat, I wanted to take a canoe with me so I can go do the rivers and have fun. And it was wired down to the truck with two wires to the front of it, little cables that held it to the front of my bumper and as I was driving through the woods at twelve o'clock at night, I look up. It's so dark you can't see stars, there's no moon, there's no light whatsoever because it's blocked off by these wonderful trees, you know the redwood trees. So I'm driving through the heavy woods and I see a bunch of leaves flying flying in front of my truck. They are falling from one side to the other onto the ground. And I thought wow where the hell would all these leaves be coming from at the same time, it's twelve o'clock at night, and there's no wind. So I drive and I ran right through the bunch of leaves and one of them was a bat. It's actually bats that were flying by and one of them hit the wire on my cable and it slapped against my windshield, right in front of my face. And it was shocking to say the least to see a bat, all the sudden right in front of me and right in front of the windshield. So I says holy shit it's a bat. It looks like it might have killed it. But you know I'm only about a half a mile away from where my destination was so I kept going and then I also thought about getting out and having a bunch of bats around me as they're flying through the woods, so I kept going and I come out into a clearing where you have a little township with about two hundred houses all together and their porch lights and stuff are so bright compared to the woods that I could actually see what's going on. So I pull over at the spot that I'm supposed to be in front of the gift shop. I could see it. And then I get out and I'm looking at the bat, you know. It's in stuck to my windshield. I'm poking at it with a stick. I says I think it's dead. It's not alive for sure. So I went into the back of my truck and I slept because I was exhausted after driving many hours and when I woke up there was a person, his name was Joe. They call him Smokey Joe or they call him mountain Joe and he's a big bearded white guy, kind of skinny with a long beard, long hair and he standing there and I wake up and I look out my little window and here's this guy you know scratching his beard and examining the bat on my windshield. So I come out of the back of the truck I say hey what's going on. He says how are you doing my name is Joe, and I said how you doing Joe. And he says what is that on your window. I says it's a bat. He says no 52 way and he says why do you got it right there? And I says because I went through the woods and I hit it with my wire. See the wires a little bloody right there and it slapped onto the windshield. And he says that's cool as shit, and he says can I have it? And I say sure you can have it Joe. So he took it off my windshield and he's stretching the wings and he says whoa I got a bat. He ran off into the woods and so he was to come up later you know later he comes back into my campsite, almost every day he comes to see what I got going on because to the people of the north, you know that was a fascinating thing to see a sculptor, an artist and all that stuff show up in their little town. It's going to make their town, it's going to actually bring tourism and bring some sort of production into their little village where they can recognize that I'm something to covet. I'm somebody to cater to whatever I need, they're going to get it for me so I stay there. You know, they want me to be there. So anyway, so he comes back in in the next day or two, he's looking at my truck and all my stuff as I'm unpacking and getting ready and he sees the jeans behind my seat that are stacked up to the eye level and he says what's that back there, Mike, that blue thing. I says and you know cause it's the folded jeans all you see is the folds. I says them are blue jeans Joe, and he says can I take a look at one of them and so I pull it out and he says those are what Levi's look like when they're brand new because it still had the stickers on it and shit. So I says Joe, you can have one of those. He says no way so anyways, to make my story a little shorter whatever, I made another piece, I sculpted a piece of wood that was rotten on the bottom and it didn't work out so good. I gave up on the sculpture but when I stood back and looked at it, I was trying to make a face. When I looked at it, it looked like Joe, you know, it looked like this guy with the beard stuff so he comes back to visit me and I says Hey Joe, I made this for you and he looks at me and he says no way, can I have it. And I said yeah, and so he takes it. And so about a month into carving at this location, they come to me, and he says, hey Mike my wife invited you to come over and have some dinner. I says Joe I've been here for a month and I don't even know where you live. He says I live in that trailer park over there, you know, there's a little trailer park. He says I live in number 22, come on over we're going to cook some dinner. And I says all right, I'll be nice, trying to see what's going on you know. Usually I'm eating at restaurants every day, so kind of burning out on that. So I go over to see Joe at his campsite number 22 the trailer. And it's one of those trailers that's 53 called a bachelor where's there's only room for one bed in it. And I says wow, talk about minimal living you know, but right then he's got a couple friends over, and they're drinking a beer and he says hey guys, you want to see my bat, so he pulls out the bat out of the trailer and he shows it, and he says look at that, and they're all looking at it, and I look inside the trailer and hanging on the wall is the pair of Levi's. I says Joe, you got the Levi's hanging on, yeah, those are brand new, you guys want to see my Levi's. Check this out. This is what Levi's look like when you buy them brand new, and he pulls it out of the trailer and he shows all the guys his brand new pair of Levi's. I says Joe, you don't wear them? And he says no man they're too cool.

Michael S.: It becomes art.

Mike J.: And so he's showing it to them. You know, he says I just show it to my friends, and they've never seen it, they're all touching it, whoa they're stiff, you know they're really neat. I laugh I thought man that is so funny. So anyways, I turn to the village people, I'm desperate for wood, I'm stuck in my little spot trying to carve, and I turn to those people and says guys I need wood. So every one of the damn towns people, about 20 of them that live there. Go racing out into the woods to bring me back chunks of wood. It was so funny because they line up and each one of them has a piece of wood and maybe it's a log, or maybe it's a big piece of beam.

Michael S.: You pay them for it?

Mike J.: I pay them for it. They all stand in line. I says what do you want for it. They says, I want a dollar. I give them dollar. I says what do you want for that piece, they says I want two dollars. So I give him two bucks, so I get to the end of the line and they are all walking away with their money and stuff and I turn to this guy that's with and kind of helped me out and you know working with the wood and stuff and I says two bucks for a piece of wood? What's that about? And he says that's how much a six pack of beer costs. Of course. It makes sense. They're going to go by beer. And every one of them runs over to the little county store and buys beer.

Michael S.: So how long were you there and how many carvings were you doing there?

Mike J.: What I did was I showed up and the guy with the shop square structure that was 20 feet by 30 feet by 50 feet. And he had shape cloth on it so that I had a place to be out of the elements because it's very hot, you know 100 degrees and so they should be in the shade. So I could work out there, and it's all screen so that the wind can blow through it and I can breathe and everything else. So he made that for me so I would stay of course. And he says here you go you can work right here. And I said thanks. And I started to buy pieces of wood from the natives, the local people. And they're bringing me chunks of wood and stuff. And they bring it on top of the cars. They're so funny, they go out in the woods and come back with a log strapped on the top of their car. I says, that's going to ruin your car. They says I don't care, give me some money. I says here you go you know. So I'm buying up all the pieces I can make, and I made about a hundred pieces inside of a weekend everybody started to accomplish some wonderful pieces. Because I found myself really talented at this thing. I didn't realize that I was going to be good at it and I turned to the guy that owned the shop and he's getting a little jealous because I've already got pieces accomplished, I'm selling him but he's not able to sell them. I'm bringing them in the store but I'm selling them faster than I can make them. I'm selling them before they're even made. Just like I was buying them up there. So he's getting a little jealous. He's a little bit irritated that, you know I'm doing really well and he's been at it for 20-30 years and he's going nowhere. His expertise was to make slabs out of wood. Out of burl and stuff. So slabs out of pieces of wood. But they weren't selling them like his carvings were. And at the same time, he sees my demands for wood or whatever. So I turn to him and I can't remember his name, Dave or whatever, and I turn to him and I say hey can you get me some wood. And he had trucks that were capable of hauling huge pieces of wood because they had cables, you know booms and everything else on it, everything you need to pull up heavy pieces of equipment. So he says all right, I'll get you pieces of wood. So he goes and he comes back with this piece of wood. What they did in this other town, they take these huge giant stumps, and every year they try to burn them to get rid of them. So they pour gas all over the, and start them on fire. They burn them during the rainy season. And then when it gets to the dry season, they have to put them out and then they wait until the next year and burn them again. So he brought 56 me back this piece of charcoal. And inside of it was what's called the crown of a tree. It's actually where the tree connects to the root, and it's the big crown. And he drops that in the middle of the freeway, right on the street. And he says there's your piece of wood. And it's so dirty charcoal that it falls on the street so that it falls off. And I says, my saw my brand-new saws that I spent about five grand to buy all the different saws. I says, I'll ruin my saw with all that damn charcoal on it. And he says do whatever you want, there's your wood. You asked for wood, there it is. What I did is I took a pick axe and I sharpened a pick axe and I started hacking away at the charcoal so I could get down to the wood and so I wacked down to the wood or whatever and it was still in the middle of the street. I couldn't move it. It was too heavy. So I tried to hook a wench to it and try to pull it over but I couldn't do it. So I said I better carve it right there you know, I said I better take off some of the weight. So I started hacking away at this thing, you know my big saws or whatever now that I'm down to green patterns and stuff where the tree comes together with the root is very dense you know cause you have tons of tree pushing down on it and tons of roots pushing up on it so it's very dense woods and it actually picks up little stones in it and stuff you know it grows right into the wood as it grows. Anyways so I'm carving away on this thing and I get it down to some point where it looks kind of hokey but it's actually a donkey and it looks like he's standing in weeds up to his ankles because I didn't know how to do a hoof. And I don't know how to do a face so I put all this mane hanging down in front of his face. So when it's all done it looks like Winnie the Poo. The little.

Michael S.: Yeah, Eeyore.

Mike J.: Eeyore, yeah it looks just like that, but I couldn't carve some of the side of it away it was too much charcoal and stuff so what I did is I carved into the side of it a coin slot like I grew up with as a child, growing up in Chicago, they had the things out in from of grocery stores and you put a quarter and back then you put a dime or a nickel in it. It would rock so as I got into this wood I carved one of those little change boxes so it looks like you could put a coin drop in there and it has a little coin return button on it. You know that type of thing on the side of this piece of wood and the whole thing was starting to get accomplished and look like Ewok with a little change thing on him and I look at the wood and it starts to crack, its cracking apart, millions of little cracks are showing up in the saddle part of it. I'd made a saddle on top real smooth and stuff. And so I'm looking at the cracks and I asked one of the townspeople right there. I said where are all these cracks coming from? He says well Mike that wood hasn't been exposed in ten thousand years you know you're opening it up the first time to oxygen and it's just cracking from the sun and so how do I stop it it's going to ruin the piece and so he says well you can put this varnish on it. This certain kind of thing called logwood oil that it's actually like a hard spar varnish and he says you can put this on it. I says well I guess I'm done with this, so I can finish it. You know I painted it with this varnish, and it made a very wet look to it. It's very slippery, wet dark. You know it looks like a varnished piece of furniture and so as I'm varnishing it or whatever, this woman pulls up in a brand-new Jaguar coming from San Francisco which is five hundred miles to the south, and she's five hundred miles north going through the woods doing her thing. She's parked in the middle of the freeway. She come out of the car. The freeway is two-lane road that goes down into the woods and no cars go down there but maybe two cars a day will go by. So there's no traffic at all so she stops right there. She's dumbfounded by the piece, jumps out of the car, she fascinating. She says would you sell it to me. And so right then the townspeople and the guy that brought me the wood. They're standing there leaning against the post watching me do my varnish on it. And there's probably five of them all together. It's the little local town people. Anyway so they can overhear the conversation. And so I says out loud to her so that they can hear it. I says well what do you give me for it, ma'am. And she says I'll give you 2500 dollars for it right now. And I look over and all the jaws are to the ground. So to me it 58 was on the tenth day that I carved, I carved him in ten hours. And he had varnish on him so he was finished. And I had a potential to sell him for 2500 dollars to the city woman. And I said no ma'am you can't have the piece, I was to take it home to my mother. And she said okay, I understand. This is my first one you know, I don't want to give it up you know. And she says oh that's fine. Foolishly, I didn't get her number. I should've of course got her number and made her another one. But I didn't do that. So she jumps back in her Jaguar and she drives away, and I was satisfied with the value of it. And it's an accomplishment. To me Jackson Pollack where he says yeah it is art even though it wasn't finished. And I look over at the townspeople and they were just totally freaked out. They're freaking out because I didn't take the 2500 dollars. Why didn't you take the 2500 bucks? That thing's a piece of shit. It's got no face on it, it's got no feet. It's just ridiculous. I says well, it has a big value, you know my mother is going to love it. Later I packed it up on the truck and took it north. But I have a picture of me sitting there after two weeks and I held up two fingers to show those two weeks and I had about a hundred pieces around me. That I'd carved up in two weeks you. Each one of them valuable enough to sell to the next tourist that sees it. You know.

Michael S.: Did you sell them all there?

Mike J.: Well what I did was on the second week, I was out there working away. And this guy come down the road and he's driving a huge front loader with a big shovel, giant tires that are bigger than me and he's coming down the freeway, they call it the freeway. Down the road right there and he stops and he slams on the brakes in this thing. And he looks over goes wow and he jumps off. He's looking at all the pieces and stuff. And he says man they're all made out of red wood, and I says yeah and he says do you want some more wood. I says yeah I could sure use some more wood you know since I'm already running short you know. I'm buying it from the townspeople but they're bringing me pieces of junk and wood that's not even redwood, any piece of wood and they're being demanding. So I gave him a few bucks for every piece of wood they gave me. This guy says you need some more wood, I says yeah I could sure use it and he says I'm working on the freeway up here. I'm part of the construction crew I said yeah. He says we got some wood that fell down you want it? I says hell yeah. So he drives up the road and he comes back down with the loader and he's got ten trees on the front of the loader. Ten trees, each one of them about fifty feet big, you know, fifty feet long. He's coming down the freeway of course it takes up all the lanes and I love said oh my God here he comes. Look at this wood you know. I says man there's enough wood to do some serious carving. So he comes over and he says where do you want it and I says over there in the field so he drops it off, ten trees. He says you want some more? I says how many you got? And he says maybe five or six hundred.

Michael S.: Oh my god.

Mike: J: I says are you shitting me. Yeah I got about five or six, we're going to take it to the dump if you don't want it. I says you bring it right here mister. No problem at all. He says all right, this is a lot shorter distance to haul it than the dump. So up the road he goes and this time he comes back, he's got ten more trees on the front of the loader and this time he's got his crew. There's five guys, mostly Mexicans, that were working the crew. You know they all got the same shoes and construction site. So they come back up to see what I'm doing you know so he says hey come on check this out. So he brings all five of the guys up and they jump off the truck and they come on over and now he's dropping the second ten trees in the field and I says to him, I says, do the guys want one of these things and he says yeah you know every one of them is yeah I could give that to my mom you know. I says you guys can have them all so I gave away most of the pieces that I accomplished you know about twenty or thirty pieces right there and that I could part with, besides the ten I wanted to keep for my parents, so they took all the pieces ran off into the woods and the guy came back with six hundred trees and put them all over this field and they were piled up all different precarious sticking out positions. You know there's roots sticking out one way and points of this sticking out the other. So I went out there and went to work on my saws started to lop them into two foot pieces, four foot pieces, three foot pieces, so I could stand them up and start to make things out of them. I was popping them out of the pile because they were too heavy to move around for me. And as I cut them I would make it so that one would come out, another one would come out. And so I got about twenty pieces stacked up so I could start to work on him and right then the native came there my friend Laven, the guy that does all the work and stuff. He shows up and he just happened to be traveling through to go sell some of his pieces that he made up in the north. He's going to go down to the gift shops. And see them to the gift shops because I wasn't buying them no more. I was up there making them instead. So he comes and he's bummed out about me having to be up there, that he ripped me off for the money and stuff. I says don't worry about it. He says look at the pieces that I made the accomplished ones that I had ten of them left over for my parents. He says hey them are pretty good. Who made those? I says I did. He says no way, he says what are you doing with all this and all the ones who are standing up there were just logs they call them a camp. And it was just all these camps are standing. I says I want to carve them 61 up. He says all of them because he looked at the wood. I says yeah I want to carve them all up. He says how many do you think you could do in a day? I says how many do you make in a day? He says I can make eight pieces in one day and I could sell them for at least three hundred fifty bucks for all eight pieces. I says well tomorrow I'll find out how many I can make in one day. He says okay, I'll come on by tomorrow on my way back from the gift shops, and I says okay, so he takes off with his truck and his wife and they go toward the south. So now I'm working furiously. I want to get as many as I can to stand him up to see what I can do. So whacked up about one hundred pieces of wood, split them all up, and then what I would do is I fire up my saw and I walk down one whole length of it. I walk from one log to the next, chopping through it as fast as I can, you know. Just whack, whack, whack and then I come down the other side, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack. And I wanted to keep it simple so I wanted to make them all little bears and raccoons and bunnies and stuff like that you know just the faces on the log, so I started hacking away on them and I worked from in the morning and then the next day I wake up about six o'clock. I wake up the whole damn town with my saws but they're used to the chainsaws up there. They love it. They want me to do whatever I want, so that I'm waking them up at six you know here we go and I fired this up and I worked all day long and by the time it was dark, he shows up, and he says well Mike how many did you make? And I says I don't know, I didn't take a chance to count them I just kept laying them down so I could get to the next one without hitting the last one with the saw. You know I didn't want to bump into the last one with my chainsaw because I was flying around like a maniac, you know, and so they're all laying down in different positions. So he says let's count them up. So he starts standing them up and he's counting them. So one two three four. One hundred and ten. I says one hundred and ten? He says yeah. One hundred and ten. I says man oh man that's a lot of pieces. He says yeah, but they're kind of hokey looking. This bunny's got funny looking ears and the face on this bear isn't done right. You know it looks a little bit like a square face. I says yeah but they're good enough, you know. What I'm going to sell them for. He says well what are you going to sell them for? I said maybe 20, 25 bucks. He says well good luck on that. of them in my truck because that's all that will fit in my little truck. I load 30 of them in there. And I take them to the gift shops. I take 62 them to the first gift shop down the road, five miles away. And I pull into them and I say, I've got some carvings out here and they all want carvings. Because they can either use the carving to sell it or they can use it to sell the China gift crap that they got. So they said oh what do you got. I said come on out and take a look. And they come out to the truck and they said oooh those are kind of rough. I said listen they're twenty dollars each or if you buy ten of them you can have ten of them for I think I told them $190 or some break on the price. I said if you get a dozen of them, I said, I can't remember like 200 bucks for a dozen of them or something. So they said really, so I'll take this one this one and this one. So I take them out of the truck, and the first guy buys two-hundred dollars worth, and I drop off the appropriate number for him. And he says all right. He gave me a check. You mind taking a check? I says yeah I know where you live. He laughs. He says okay so he makes me a check. So I go to the very next gift shop with the ones that I have leftover and I pull in there and I says hey you want to buy some carvings. What do you got? And he comes out and he says man those are kind of rough. I says the guy up the street, he bought a dozen of them. He gave me 200 bucks for a dozen. He says well I want a dozen, and he takes the next bunch. Now I have to go back to my shop and load up a bunch more. So I can take it to the one that's another five miles away. So I basically loaded them all up and sold them all the next day. And I had checks and cash for 2500 bucks. When I'm all done. So then the native shows up. It's dark again, he says well, how many did you sell? I says, I sold them all. He says, what? He says I sold them all. He says, aw, bullshit. So I pulled out the checks and the cash and says there's 2500 bucks I sold them all. He says oh my God, he sees the names on the checks were from all the gift shops. He says man the Drive Through Tree bought 12 and you know the Biggest Tree in the World bought 12. And the Living Tree or whatever bought 12. I says yeah they bought them all. He says my God that's fucking amazing. He says from now on I'm going to call you two saws. I said two saws, what does that mean? And he says well you must have carved them with a saw in each hand to do a hundred of them a day.

Michael S.: I like that like. Two feathers.

Mike J.: So anyways, so then he drives away and I wake up the next day and I walk off into the woods to do something or other, but now I've got 450 trees or so that are still left over in my pile. And I go off into the woods to go enjoy my day because I made so much money the next day, and I'm exhausted, tired, I can't even move. And when I come back into my camp that night, all my trees are gone. All the carvings are gone. Everything is gone from my space except for the big frame that I started with. And I said oh my God, they ripped me off. That's a bunch of shit, you know. So I run around and there's a couple townspeople standing there. There's always someone standing around, you know, nothing to do or whatever. Either chewing on chew or you know drinking a beer or...I said guys what happened to all my stuff? I got ripped off for all my shit. And they says, you'll never believe it man, everybody from town and everybody from the next town, and they all took pieces. I says pieces are the wood. I had all these trees out there, you know 450. Yeah, they chopped it up and took it away. I said what just to steal from me or what. They said no, souvenirs. I said what do you mean souvenirs? They says well, they found out you made like three or four grand in one day, and they all came down to see it, and they all took away a souvenir.

Michael S.: Oh my God.

Mike J.: I says are you kidding me or what. I says son of a gun. They had taken everything that I touched. Pieces that were just lopped off chunks of wood or mistakes or whatever it was that was laying there. They took every damn piece of it. And I says damn now I got to go find more wood, you know. They said sorry man, we didn't know that there'd be a big deal for you. I said well it's not but at the same time I'm worried that I can't get enough wood. So I go off into the woods and I come back the next day about 12 o'clock noon and as I'm driving up to my space, there's like 30 people standing there. Thirty people around my little area right there. And as soon as I get into sight, you know my little truck coming around the corner and I got a bunch of wood on the back of my truck, and they start running toward me. You know like on the Beatles movie where they got all the people running toward you. So I said oh my God, I thought for sure they're going to beat me up or steal my wood or take my blue jeans or something or other. So I turned around and I beat it, I went back into the woods as fast as I could drive. I said oh man I can't even stop there no more. The people are going to do something to me, I don't know what. They're going to rip me off of my money or something, I don't know what. They're going to tear my shirt off or whatever they're going to do. So I drove away to the next town and set up at the next place and says man the last town over there, they went crazy. And by the time I get to the next town, I've already got the reputation. Oh are you Mike. You're the guy that makes five grand a day? I says I don't make five grand a day. Where do they get these numbers?

Michael S.: You're the money man. 65 increases the story in no time at all. The scuttle butt has it where I'm making five grand and I only have to touch a piece of wood and it has value somehow. Now I can't get anything because they're not going to sell me nothing for no two dollars. Everything is all 50 bucks. So I said shoot you know so I left and I went down to San Francisco and I went across the San Francisco bridge toward San Diego again and I stay for a couple of weeks or whatever and I'm trying to recoup and trying to figure out what I'm going to do next. I deliver my pieces to my parents. And so then I went back towards the north and I says I got to get back up in the woods and start to get more wood and stuff. And the funniest thing happened. I went across the Golden Gate bridge and supposedly someone had spotted me going across the Golden Gate bridge with my truck and so the chain of command was all the way up to the north. By the time I got 500 miles north, they're waiting for me. I says what the heck, you know. I pull over and ask somebody, I said hey what's going on. They said well we heard you coming. I says, heard from who? And they says well they seen you coming across the bridge and so already they're down there they start to bug me you know. So there's already people showing up. I says damn. My reputation precedes me wherever I go now. I got to watch myself because who knows what they're actually up to. These people are poor, they got nothing you know.

Michael S.: What do they want from you?

Mike J.: Well first of all they just wanted to be next to it. They just wanted to see the guy that did these carvings and makes 10,000 dollars a day. And by that time it's up to 10 grand. And it's like oh my God. They think I'm like a celebrity. So I got celebrity status. You know they're talking their crap back and forth on the phones. You know one sister talks to another and pretty soon they know I'm on my way up there, so some of them have gifts and other ones want to get something from me. Some of them want to sell me wood. You know, whatever it is. You know the poor people, to give you an idea of when I first got there. I says hey guys, where do you take a shower around here. You know, I'm asking Joe, the first guy that I meet. I says 66 Joe, where do you take a shower? He says we stand in the creek, but you can't do it right now, the creeks too low because it was the middle of summertime it was 90 degrees. He says the creek's too low to get a shower right now, you have to wait.

Michael S.: Take me back, that was a great story about creepy crawlers. Can you think of any other entrepreneurial ways you made money as an adolescent?”

Mike: ‘Cause there’s snow on the ground in Chicago; always snow. I was at a grocery store, I look and some lady come out of the grocery store, she’s pushing her cart full of groceries and she goes off the curb and the cart will not move one inch in the snow. Err, it just stops right there, (chuckles), there’s no way you’re gonna go another inch, lady, you know what I’m sayin’? So, I go out to her, you know being my dad’s boy, or whatever, you know, bein’ a Marine’s kid, I go out there and says, ‘Lady, you want me to help you carry those to the car? She says, ‘Sure, you know, God, I sure appreciate, you know, you’re being here, whatevers.” So I said alright, I got my little boots on, so I could walk through the snow, so I take her groceries, and they’re heavy, I’m real young, I think I was probably about oh maybe eight at the time, and so I start walking her groceries out to her car and I gotta go back and get another bag, she takes one light bag and she walks out there with her fancy shoes on and we get out to the car, she shuts the door, shuts the trunk, and she turns to me and she gives me some money. And I say, ‘what’s that for?’ and she says, ‘oh that’s for helping me out, I sure appreciate it. Here you go.’ (Chuckles) So she gave some money. I was eight years old and she handed me a hundred pieces of candy. You know what I’m saying? It was like, cha- ching. I said, ‘stand back’, you know, so I run back over to the door and the next lady comes out, err, she stops with her cart and I says, ‘lady, can I help you out to the car?’ ‘Sure.’ (Laughs), so I’m out there all day long, taking people to their cars, they’re giving me, some are giving me five dollar bills, you know, so I mean they’re thinking this is really helpful, and some are giving me a dollar, most of them just give me a dollar, two 67 dollars, so anyway, so I’m running back into position as fast as I can and the manager sees me through the door to the store, he sees me outside doing this, or whatever, sees me carrying these groceries out to the car, so he comes out there, he says, ‘hey young man can I talk to you for a minute?’ I said, ‘sure’, you know, he says, ‘I just want to say thank you. I appreciate you doing that because it keeps my courtesy clerks from having to go out to the cars, so you’re actually helping me out by doing that.’ I says, ‘really?’ and he says, ‘yeah, you know, I seen you make a couple of dollars, you’re welcome to keep it.’ And I says, ‘alright! You know, so I said, ‘man, this is it, you know. So, so I go back on standing in my position, you know, ready to help the next one out, or whatever, lo and behold, some bigger kid, punk kids come along and they see me doing my thing and they says, ‘wait a minute, he just put a dollar in his pocket,’ you know, so they’re standing right there, too. “Hey lady, can we help you out?” You know, so (chuckles) I says ‘shit’, you know. I go into the store manager and say, ‘Hey mister, you know I was out here first a few minutes ago. Now you got a bunch of big kids that, are, you know, way bigger than me, that can pound on me. I says, listen I got these other kids out here and they’re taking my spot, you know. And he says, ‘Damn those kids’, you know. So, he runs outside, you know, he’s got a broom in his hand, or something, ‘You kids get out of here,’ you know, so, so he kicks them out, or whatever, so now I have exclusive (inaudible). He says, ‘you stand right there and just do your thing’ and I says, ‘alright thank you, I appreciate it, so you, so now I got exclusive rights to do it, you know, but there’s a big demand. More and ladies are coming out and getting stuck, I can’t keep up with the pace. So I go over to the kids that are scowling at me from off the property right there and I says, ‘listen if you guys want, you can come over, you can help me do the groceries, but I get to get half. Whatever you get, I’m taking half. And they says, ‘Okay, okay.’ So he comes over for a chance to make some money, you know. So, so they come back out, so now I got five kids working for me. And now I’m sitting on top of one of the mailbox dispensers, there’s a big, 68 uh, newspaper dispenser, I’m sitting on top of one of the machines and I’m watching the kids go out to the cars, so I get a little vantage point, I can see if they are making one or two or five or what, and so they come back and I got my hand out, so next. ‘Okay, you’re next, right there. You over there take this next one. So, I’m directing traffic, and it just so happens that I have, in my possession, a derby cap. So, I got my derby cap on, you know, so it sets me apart from everybody else, you and I’m feeling like, when you watch the old movies when they have the guy that’s like a produ, he’s a director or producer?

Michael S.: Yeah.

Mike: Or one of the guys that running the show in the big uh newspaper room or whatever, you know? I got that look. So, I’m my money from you, man? You didn’t give me my money, yet. So, I’m already catching ‘em holding out. I’m eight, you know. So, these kids are ten, so they’re way older than me, but I got control of the situation and I’m running the show here. I think I even made one of ‘em go away. I says, ‘listen, thats the third time you kept money and didn’t give it to me. You gotta leave.’ And he says, ‘you ain’t gonna,” and says, ‘Well you know what, I’ll go get the manager and you’re gonna be outta here, you know.’ So he walked away, whatever. So, I had to actually let one of them go. So, I’m actually firing kids at eight years old.”

Michael S.: Let’s break that down. So, look, that, there’s a lot of business lessons just in that story, right there. Number one, you said, ‘I had control,’ and you got the control by getting an exclusive, by going in with the manager, and saying ‘can I be the only one in control.’

Mike: Yes, get permission. That’s really important to do.

Michael S.: So, you blocked all your competition, right?

Mike: Yes.

Michael S.: And then because of the exclusivity, you could control them.

Mike: Yes, and then also I seen that I wanted to do it, you know I wanted to be greedy and do it all myself, but I also seen there was no way could keep up with the demand. And so I decided instead to go out and share it with the other guys by splitting half and half with them, but I visualized myself, and it’s true that I ended up making way more money by having five guys and getting half, rather than trying to do it all myself and only getting one percent of the customer. That was a big important thing to do. And it also made it so I didn’t have to do the labor. I could still making half of the cash. It was a great move.

Michael S.: We call that in our house, like the Tom Sawyer method. Painting the fence.

Mike: Exactly. Tom Sawyer (inaudible). But at the same time, I’m giving them money. They’re making money. They have an opportunity where before there was none and they’re taking directions from me, which they don’t like, but at the same time, it keeps them working. And I made it fairer, so that one of them didn’t get to do the next one or the next one, they had to take turns.

Michael S.: Alright, give me another story how you used exclusivity to make money in your young adolescence or even as a teenager, or even as a young man.

Mike: Well, I was four years old and my parents want to keep an ear territory, I could go up and down in front of the street right here, in front of a very busy street, you can’t go across the street no matter what, Mike. And you could go up and down the sidewalk right here as all the way to one corner all the way to the other corner on the city block. And so then my mom could stand right there at the bushes and see me down there, that I haven’t stepped in the street, I haven’t gone up to any houses, I’m up and down the sidewalk, and now I’m going back and forth, and doing things, being crazy, doing my usual and they says, we 70 mother found an old wagon in the attic, an old Red Ryder wagon, you’ve heard of ‘em, and uh I had my wagon and she put a bunch of junk in the wagon, so that it makes noise. I think she found some metal things, or whatever, so now as I’m going up and down the sidewalk, every crack that I hit makes a noise because you can hear the wagon coming. Dink, dink, dink, dink, dink. You know hear the rattle as it goes down the street. So when she didn’t hear the noise. If the noise stops, he’s in trouble. (Chuckles) He’s doing something, you know what I’m saying? So, I remember I was playing in some bushes or you know playing with the neighbors, uh hedges or whatever and she heard the wagon stop, so all of a sudden, I hear her over the hedge, ‘hey come on, Mike, keep going,’ you know. So I, ‘okay,’ so I get away from those bushes or whatever and keep on walking. One of the things in my youth, or whatever, when I was four years old, my dad was a superintendent of buildings. He had many rentals he was in control of and so he had a huge ring of keys and I was fascinated with the keys because they made that wonderful sound, that sounded like money, you know what I’m saying? So, so here’s these keys, or whatever and I went to find his keys in his drawer while he was sleeping or away doing something and I would take those keys out and I also had a fascination to see if it opened up a lock. I’d stick it in the door and try to turn the key and I broke one of them off; snapped, the key broke off inside the lock, you know what I’m saying, so ‘oh shit,’ you know so, so I knew I was in trouble for that, so I put the keys back in the drawer where they were supposed to be and my dad comes in and he sees the broken been up to?’ I says, ‘nothin’’. He says, ‘bullshit, you broke this key off in a lock. Show me which lock you broke it off in.’ So then, you know, so then obviously it could be an emergency, he might have to get in a door. If there’s a broken key in one of the doors, he wants to know where it’s at, more important than 71 punishing me. So I says, ‘it’s over here,’ you know so I took him to the door lock and he fished the key out of there. He had to reach in there with a wire to pull half of the key broken off in there and he got really mad because he said, ‘that key is really important. I need that key. Now you broke it in half.’ So, he’s trying to express to me how important it was not to use the keys in the doors and break ‘em off. So, I was crying, ‘waaa’, you know, all pissed off and shit, so basically, he gets me my own keys. He takes a bunch of worthless keys that he doesn’t use for anything anymore and put ‘em on his own ring and he says, ‘here, you can have a ring too, but you can’t put in any of the keys in the house. You have to go somewhere else.’ And then he says, ‘and don’t put ‘em in no cars,’ he says, ‘hey take it down to the mailbox on the corner and see if it’ll work in there.’ you know, and so I’m walking around trying to find things I can open up with my keys or whatever and I can’t find nothing. I’m finding, you know my mom brought an old lock out, or whatever and I’m trying every key in the lock (inaudible) works. Anyway, so long story short, I put the keys in the back of my wagon and I’m going up and down the street, making my noise, I got my keys and I’m doing my thing, I’m four years old and I says, ‘you know I wonder if the neighbors have any keys.’ So my little wagon and I go up to one of the neighbor’s doors and I knock on the door, she answers the door, mom’s at home from work, back in the fifties, everybody didn’t work, you know, so mom comes to the door and uh she says, ‘hi young man, what do you want?’ You know, and I says, ‘I was wondering if you have any keys, see I got keys like this, do you have any?’ ‘Sure, just a minute,’ you know, so she goes back in the house, comes back out with a handful of keys and I put ‘em in my wagon and I go to the next neighbor’s house and the next neighbors. And back in the day, back in that time, all the keys were made out of brass, you know, so that’s a big thing, or whatever, that’s the important factor of this story. Uh brass, or there were old skeleton keys from the 1800s that are, you know what they look like, the skeleton keys that fit in old locks, or whatever. So I got 72 my keys and I’m putting on more and more rings and I found myself, I found a pull chain that has a little clasp on it and you can make a big ring, a big necklace out of the pull chain, full of rings, you know what I’m sayin’? So, so I got my rings, and I got my, you know, pull chains going together and uh, and I got my keys and I’m going up and down and I’m collecting from everywhere I can and I go to every single house on the block and I go back to my mom, I says, ‘Mom, I was wondering, can I go around the corner down there, just for a minute?’ And she says, for what?’ And I says, I wanna get some keys from the neighbor’s houses. (Chuckles) And she says, ‘What?’ and she looks up the street and one of ladies is out there in front of the house, she has her doorway open, I remember looking down at her, and she says, ‘that’s okay. He asked me for keys and I gave him some. Is that alright? He won’t eat ‘em or nothin’?’ She says, ‘No, he doesn’t eat ‘em. It’s okay.’ She says, ‘okay,’ so the lady goes back in the house. And I say, ‘see, mom. It’s okay with them if I get keys.’ And she says, ‘Well that’s a pretty neat looking collection there you know.’ She says, ‘alright I’ll let you go around the other end of the block down there so you can get some keys. But don’t go in the street, don’t do nothing wrong.’ I said, ‘okay,’ you know, so now I got the right to go all around the block ‘cause I took that as a right go ahead and go around the block.

Michael S.: Yeah.

Mike: And so, it’s just around the corner, you know. So, I went all around the city block and I went to every single door, now I got a huge amount of keys, must have been a hundred keys or so, you know what I’m saying? So, anyway, I get back to the house, my mom comes out, she says, ‘oh my god, where’d you get all those keys?’ (Chuckles). I says, ‘everybody’s givin’ ‘em to me, mom. They don’t care, they don’t mind if I take them, you know. So anyway, so I got the keys for years, I had ‘em, collected ‘em. And every chance I could, I asked people, even when they’re walking down the sidewalk, I say, ‘excuse me, sir, do you have any keys I can have?’ And they see I have a huge 73 collection in my wagon and stuff and so pretty soon they say, ‘you know what, I’ll go home and get some, I’ll be back on the way from work, I’ll, I’ll leave ‘em right here on the door.’ I say, ‘Alright.’ (Chuckles) So people are leaving keys on my doorstep now, you know. My parents are freakin’ out. ‘Where the hell’s all these keys coming from.’ I filled up, I have a dresser, my little three-drawer dresser in my bedroom, and I had so many keys in the top drawer that it collapsed, you know, so then, they’re heavy, you know the damn keys are heavy. So anyway, so I end up filling up the all three drawers were just, it turned into a big block of empty drawers all the way to the bottom, so I filled it up with a little slit on top, I could just shove a key in there, one after the other, so pretty soon I have the whole three-drawer cabinet full of keys, from the top to the bottom and my Pops goes to pull out the drawer and it won’t come out. ‘What the fuck is this?’ I says, ‘It’s keys, Pops, you can’t open it. It’s all full of keys, it’s treasure,’ you know, I was like, ‘Oh, I collect them up and they’re just like money.’ So by this time, it’s a year later, by this time there’s so mean, my dad shows me how to take a piece of steel wool and I can make the key really shiny, you know?

Michael S.: Yeah.

Mike: ‘Cause they’re brass and you can shine it up. So, I polished ‘em up so they looked like gold. To me, they’re gold. You know, you’re five years old, they look like gold to me.

Michael S.: Yeah.

Mike: And I’m a poor kid, in a poor neighborhood, they don’t know what the hell, fuckin’ gold is, you know, so I’m polishing ‘em up, for another year, I’m collecting ‘em, more keys, I got thousands of keys, you can’t imagine the keys that I had. Keys to mailboxes, I had keys to prisons. I had keys to castles, you know huge, giant keys, I said ‘where does that go to?’ And they says, ‘oh it’s a castle gate, I got in England when I was over there a few years ago. You can have it,’ you know. And I had 74 amazing keys, I mean I had keys that would fascinate you just looking at ‘em, even to this day, they’re an amazing collection of keys, you know. So then, I turned six years old. I go from four to six, I’m collecting keys for two years, I’m six years old and I have now got the right to go off the city block for the first time ever, I can cross at the crosswalk and I can go further with my little wagon, and I can go collect keys off of other blocks, you know. So that’s exactly what I’m doing and I (inaudible) with the third block down from my house is a set of railroad tracks. It’s a dangerous, perilous placed that the kids go to play, or whatever. I played on ‘em for ten years of my life, out there on the railroad tracks, on trains and shit like that, but I took my keys down there and I laid ‘em on the rail. And the train would come by and smoosh ‘em. You know what I’m sayin’? The train doing the Amtrak, it’d go by doing seventy-five miles an hour and they hit these keys and make ‘em flat as a piece of pancake, and they fly off the rail, usually, you know so then after the wheels hit ‘em a few times and so then I go and collect the keys, now they’re smooshed. They’re even more fascinating than they were to begin with. There’s a skeleton key that’s all flattened out, like a piece of paper. And so then, I’d take the keys and I’d bend ‘em around a screwdriver and I could make ‘em so that they’re rings and they’re bracelets, and stuff. It’s a key that’s a bracelet. Now they’re for sale. (Laughs) You wanna buy a bracelet? It’s made from a key. It’s really cool, it’s all made out of brass and it shines real pretty. So now, I’m selling back to some of the same ladies that gave me the key to begin with. I’m selling ‘em back bracelets and rings and stuff and they’re a hit. But people love ‘em, you know. So they’re lined up to buy these things. So everywhere I go, they’re, and I have ‘em in my wagon, I had whole displays of different things that I made with the keys and you can also, because I got money for the first time, you can lay out quarters on the railroad tracks and pennies and nickels and stuff and when the train smooshes ‘em, it turns ‘em into a perfect bracelet of shiny pennies. You could imagine, that a big hit, too. They’re part of my inventory, you know, so I have quarter and nickels and dimes and pennies 75 and stuff, all smooshed, and they’re all mercury head dimes and wheat back pennies and you know back in the day, so anyway so, I polished ‘em all with my little steel wool and it made a beautiful bracelet made out of pennies, all the faces, all the pennies, but it’s all smooshed, you know, so and so people are loving the jewelry, you know, so they just love the idea, they love the jewelry, they think it’s so cool that they’re all fused together and, ‘how did you make it?’ I says, ‘well, I used a thirty-ton train to make that one,’ you know. I waited for the Amtrak to come by to make this one right here,’ you know, they’re like, ‘oh my god, that’s amazing,’ you know, so and I was walking down the street and I had a big ring full of them around my neck and some guy, I’m sure he was a dealer, I’m sure he was an antique dealer, back in the day. And he says, ‘hey that’s a pretty neat looking necklace, young man. You want to sell it?’ And I said, ‘sure,’ you know. So I sold it to him for five bucks, you know, bunch of keys on a necklace.

Michael S.: Mmhmm.

Mike: So now, I’ve got cash, you know. So, then I come back, I’m six years old and I got more cash than I think my parents have, you know. I have, you know, a couple hundred bucks, you know what I’m sayin? It’s like shit I got all kinds of cake, you know. So, my parents are seeing that and they’re like, ‘What the fuck did you get all that money?’ I said, ‘I’m selling my keys.’ So, he’s taking it away, you know, so I look over there, you know, he’s taking money off the top of it so he could go buy groceries, for my sisters and shit, you know. And I don’t have a clue, you know. So, I don’t know what’s going on, you know. So, I keep getting my money shortened up every time, you know, so. So, anyway so I made a dream up at the time. People used to say, ‘if you had three wishes, what would you wish for?’ And I says, ‘All I wanted, because at the time I had the opportunity, I would do it myself, all I wanted was to be able to put in my pocket, and pull out money anytime I needed it. You know what I’m sayin? I want reach in my pocket, I don’t care if it's a five or ten or a one-dollar bill, as long as I can pull it out of there and it 76 never ends. I wanted the endless pocket of money. So, what I did, because my parents kept snatching up my money out of my pockets and everywhere else they seen it, they’d take it, you know. And so, I had in my house and in my bedroom, next to my bed, there was a place where the floorboard, that goes along the wall, separated from the plaster wall a little bit. There was a little gap in between there. And so, and I reached in there one time trying to find the bottom of it and it went way down deep, it actually went into the basement into some sort of crawlspace right there and what I do is, I started shoving my money into that spot, you know. So, I can reach in there with my little and pull money out but my parents couldn’t. So, I shove it in the wall right there, and to me, the magic came true that I wished for. I could reach in the wall at any given time and pull out money anytime I needed it, you know what I’m saying. And there was things for kids to buy at the local hardware store, the toy store, there was candy, there was gumballs, I was fascinated with all of them, you know. So, I, oh I gotta get enough gumballs. And so I had a place to stash my money and my parents couldn’t find it and uh, it was just a gold mine to me. I was like, ‘All right!’ I could put all the money I want in there, I didn’t even know how much it was at six and seven years old, I couldn’t even count how much was in there, but it was enough in there, that I could reach in there and sometimes it was a twenty, sometimes it was ten, sometimes it was a one, you know, but it was always a surprise to me. ‘All right, it’s a ten- dollar bill!’ you know. And off I’d go to spend money you know. Anyway so, I also had this think where I had routes, since I was able to accomplish the key route, you know, go to get keys off of people’s doors or out of their houses or something, now I would also look underneath machines for money. ‘Cause I could drop down and put my face against the sidewalk and I could see if there was something shiny underneath this machine, whatever it was; vending machine out there, outside it was either ah, you know they sold ice or they sold laundry mats, you know have machines and now everywhere I looked, there was machines that you could dispense things out of; 77 candy bars and stuff like that. But the people couldn’t see underneath it, it was a big heavy machine you couldn’t move it, you know, so so, I take a coat hanger and I made it into a hook and I reach under the machines and I pull out the shiny thing and I was kind of at first, I was hoping it was keys, but it was money. ‘Oh wow, it’s a quarter,’ or ‘oh wow, it’s a dime.’ So, pretty soon I had a route. I went out on my route almost every other day and I’d go to the machines and see what’s underneath them. ‘Oh wow, this has got more underneath that one,’ you know. So, I went around the machines and I actually worked a deal with my mother, ‘cause one time she’s in the laundry mat and she’s short on quarters to make the machine go. She says, ‘damn. Hey, Mike have you got any money in your pocket?’ I says, ‘no, I don’t have any money, ma. Sorry.’ And then she says, ‘Well where can I get a couple of quarters?’ I said, ‘I know a way, Mom. If you push this machine back, I’ll reach underneath there and pull out any money that’s underneath there.’ She says, ‘No way.’ And I says, ‘Watch, you’ll see.’ So she leans one of the washing machines back and I reach underneath there and pull out a quarter. I says, do it again on this one, you know I could see something shiny, so she pulls it back and I got a dime, you know, so I walk around the laundry mat and I think I got like two or three bucks and I says, ‘you can have the three or four quarters you asked for mom, I want the rest.’ So, after a while, I had a route. I went from ice machine to different coke machines, to different and it was actually, you know a genuine route that I went around on a daily basis and I got money every single time I did it. So, my money was endless at that point, you know. So, I was making money at seven years old that most kids only dreamed about, you know, so. But anyway, it was all good stuff, man. I got ripped off for a bike when I was seven. My dad bought us brand new bikes, or whatever. It was a big accomplishment for Christmas. He saved his money and got us all nice bikes. It probably cost about a hundred bucks a piece.

Michael S.: Yeah?

Mike: And somebody came in our driveway and stole them all. They loaded up a truck and stole all of our bikes, you know one time, or whatever, so we’re all, you know miserable crying and everything else and so my dad says, ‘Well, I can’t afford to get another one you know, I’m broke. I spent all my money on them first bikes.’ This is at a time when our house payment was three hundred dollars a month, you know. Same for the mortgage on the house.

Michael S.: Yeah.

Mike: So anyway, so he says, ‘I can’t get another one, or whatever, Mike, I’m awful sorry.’ So I was determined to get my own, you know what I’m saying? So, I save up enough money and bought my first bike by myself. It was better than the one I had ripped off. It was a Schwinn Varsity, you know, back in the day. So anyway, I bought my own stuff, my own clothes, my own bike, my own everything, and my parents gave allowances to my sisters, but they never gave me an allowance. They says, ‘Well, you probably go more money than us. Forget it, you don’t get one.’ When I was real young, I found out that there is such thing as a two-hundred and fifty-thousand-dollar bill, you know, I heard, I read in a book or something where they had different denominations of bills back in the forties and fifties, where you could go down and buy a five-thousand-dollar bill. By the time I was about ten years old, I says, ‘I want one of those bills. I see a hundred, I have a hundred and I want the next biggest bill. What’s the next biggest bill,’ I’m asking at the bank and they said, ‘Well, the next one is five thousand dollars.’ I says, ‘Well, it’s gonna take a while to save that.’ But I saved my money when I was nine, ten, maybe eleven years old and I saved up five thousand bucks. And I went down to the bank, I wanted to buy one of those bills. That was my whole objective. I saved for years just to try to get that money, enough to buy one of those five-thousand-dollar bills. So, I go down to the bank and I says, ‘Okay, I’m ready. I want to buy one of those bills.’ And they said, ‘What bill?’ And I said, ‘I want one of those five-thousand- dollar bills.’ And they say, ‘Son, they haven’t made those since 79 the fifties. You know, they stopped making ‘em.’ I said, ‘What!’ you talking about?’ They told me they have five-thousand.’ ‘No, they stopped doing that,’ you know and the reason they stopped is because people would launder money. To me I was so heartbroken that I couldn’t get a five-thousand-dollar bill, so instead, my dad talks to me and says, ‘why don’t you put it in the bank?’ I say, ‘What for?’ He says, ‘they got this thing called interest. Your money will grow, while you do nothing.’ I says, ‘what are you talking about?’ He showed me my first bank account, that I could make money. I think at the time it was like maybe five or seven percent or something. It was good money. So, my five-thousand-dollar bill earned me money while I wasn’t even doing nothing with it, you know. So, to me that was the answer. I says, ‘Aw man, I can make money off of doing nothing.’ And still do my route and still do all the different things I was doing, you know. And at the time there was paper route too. I had to have a paper route, you know. And I learned, it was really interesting, that I learned from one of the other kids that had a paper route, ‘cause we all meet at the same place in the morning and the kid’s crying about something, I says, ‘What’s up, man? What’s wrong?’ You know as we’re rolling our papers. We used to have to roll ‘em up and put a rubber band on each one, you know. So, we had a little system for doing that, you know what I’m saying. So, after a while I paid my sisters to roll ‘em up and put rubber bands on it, so I wouldn’t have to do it, ‘cause I had to do so many of ‘em, you know what I’m saying. So, I gave them money to sit there and put the rubber bands on, you know, so. And I remember we were in that little circle doing that and the boy keeps kind of crying, or whatever, he says, ‘oh man, I went collect and I can’t get the money from this guy.’ I say, ‘What do you mean?’ He says, ‘Well, he gets the paper every day and he won’t pay me the five dollars he owes me.’ I said, ‘What’s his address, I’ll go get it,’ you know. So, after a while I would be the collector for other kid’s paper routes. Because I didn’t have any inhibitions whatsoever. My daddy, what he taught me, when I was a kid, 80 because he was a Marine D.I. because we’re in a place having hamburgers one time and I say, ‘Dad, I’m out of ketchup.’ He says, ‘Go up and ask that guy for ketchup.’ I’m, ‘oh no, I’m not gonna do that.’ He says, ‘listen, go up and ask that guy for some ketchup, I’m not gonna get off my ass to go do it. You gotta go do it.’ And I says, ‘There’s no way, Pops. I don’t wanna do it.’ He says, ‘Listen, here’s the deal. If you don’t go up and get that ketchup from that guy, I’m gonna paddle your ass right now in front of the whole crowd of people.’ So, I went up there to ask for ketchup. ‘Mister, can I have some ketchup?’ And I turn around and he’s laughing back there at the table and the guy gives me ketchup, and I says, ‘Can I have some more?’ And he says, ‘Sure,’ you know. So, I learned at about three or four years old, that to go up and ask for ketchup, you know. Don’t be embarrassed or inhibited because my Pops will paddle my ass if I don’t. So, I learned from that point on that you can go ask people for things and they’re not gonna hurt you. But, if I didn’t do it, my dad would hurt me. So, that’s what I did. I went up and I started collecting for people and I had no inhibitions whatsoever. I’d go right up to their door and say, ‘look, you owe five dollars for this paper route, and I’m here to collect for it.’ And they’d say, ‘Ah, come back next week.’ I’d say, ‘Fuck that next week, pay me right now, or I’m getting my Marine dad to come over here, come and lean on your ass.’ You know, so they paid. So, I go back and give the kid their money, but I got a percentage for doing it. You know, I’d keep a dollar for every five bucks I collected for those guys or something and they, you know, they accepted that because they couldn’t get it out of the guy, you know. So, you can’t be afraid for asking for something, ‘cause it’s worse than not asking for it, whatever it is. And even to this day, just yesterday I met a girl that, in fact, couldn’t ask for things, I said, ‘look, you gotta go ask,’ you know, so you’re not gonna get it if you don’t ask for it and it’s not gonna happen just by chance. Nobody’s gonna come along and say, ‘hey you look like you need money, here you go. You gotta go ask,’ you know what I’m saying? The worse that’s gonna happen is they’re gonna say, ‘no’. Just like any fail, the worst thing that 81 somebody is gonna do is say, ‘no’. They’re not gonna beat you up or throw you down on the ground, you know. So, I learned a long time ago, to ask for the sale, close the deal, make it happen, you know, so. little Oxford (inaudible) story.

Mike: One day, I’m going along. I’m probably sixteen or seventeen, you know I’m getting to that age where I’m out on my own, doing my own thing, on my bikes and, you know, not quite driving, yet, so I don’t have a car. But I meet up with a guy and he’s from Florida and he’s also on a bike. He’s bigger than me, older than me and he’s tougher, he’s a big guy, you know what I’m saying? So, he says, “Mike, you want to make some work real hard,’ because I tried raking leaves and that’s back breaker, I tried mowing lawns, that’s a back breaker, and there’s never no end to mowing a lawn. When you mow somebody’s lawn, I go by and say, ‘Okay, you owe me fifteen dollars. That was the agreed upon price.’ ‘Yeah, but you didn’t edge it.’ I said, ‘what do you mean edge it?’ ‘Well, you didn’t cut the edge right along the sidewalk right here.’ So, I cut the damn edge and I go back, ‘Okay, you owe me fifteen dollars.’ ‘Well, you didn’t do the bush.’ I says, ‘Oh man, this is bullshit,’ you know, it never ends. Landscaping never ends. The people always have one more little thing that you gotta do to get your money. So, I said, this isn’t for me, you know.

Michael S.: Okay.

Mike: So, I says, ‘Okay,’ so this guys asking me, I say, ‘is it, is it labor intensive? Am I gonna wear myself out doing it?’ He said, ‘No, no, it’s real simple, it’s easy, it’s clean, you won’t, you won’t have a problem with it. Come with me and I’ll show you how to make some money.’ So, I say, ‘Okay, where do we have to go?’ He says, ‘You have to go to Portland,’ which is five miles away from my house. It was kind of a long ride, but I says, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ So, we go to Portland and he takes me to a truck stop. 82 The first truck stop I ever seen in my life and it’s a place called Jubitz Truck Stop. You should look it up one time, it’s the biggest truck stop west of the Mississippi.

Michael S.: How do you spell it?

Mike: Uh, Jubitz, J-U-B-I-T-S, or something. Jubitz. So, at the time there was thousands of trucks out on this huge lot and the guys come from miles around and they trade loads, they take away trailers and put new trailers on and, uh it’s a big truck stop. And truck, and you know they have gift shops and sorts of shit and fuel. Of course, they have fuel and oil and all the different things you need for the rig. So, the guys pull in there and they get their fuel tanks filled up which is thousands of dollars, you know. Even back then, even the back when the time we were doing it, it was still five or six hundred bucks to fill up those huge fuel tanks. Anyway, so, we’re at the fuel station and, you know, at the, on the pumps and uh, and this guy he says, ‘Come here, I wanna show you something,’ so, he goes up to one of the truckers and says, ‘Hey, trucker, is there any way we can put some wax on your mural?’ And what he meant is, on the back of a big cab, when you have a trailer, uh when you have a trailer on a truck, they’re together, but when you take the trailer away, they call it a bobcat, you know, when you just have the front tractor?

Michael S.: Yes.

Mike: Without the trailer. And on the back of the bobcats, on the back of these big truck motors are huge giant murals that the guys have painted on the back of that. Most of them are nude, most of them are women, reclining or something. And a lot of them are giant eagles, big flags, you know different things that they have airbrushed on the back of the cab, that shows that they are different than all the other truckers.

Michael S.: But you can’t see it when there is a trailer on there?

Mike: Right, so, so they put a lot of X-rated material up there, you know.

Michael S.: Okay.

Mike: Women with big boobs and stuff, you know. But when they’re bobcatting away, they’re showing off, just like the guy that has the big Harley-Davidson, or something, got the women with their boobs on the back and they’re, they’re showing off to all the guys, ‘Look what I got,’ you know, said, ‘I’m bad,’ and the murals cost five hundred, maybe a thousand, maybe even two or three thousand dollars, depending on the detail, who did it, what artist. It’s like a tattoo.

Michael S.: Mmhmm.

Mike: Each one is individual and they’re airbrushed on the back of the truck and they’re real important to the driver. They all love ‘em. At the time, there was no such thing as leased trucks. They’re all owned by independent ‘wildcatters’, they called ‘em. The big truck drivers owned their own rig. And they then take the trailers that were leased and they would move the trailer from one side of the country to the other, whatever they’re gonna do, and uh, so what they did, the guy says, ‘Can we do your mural for you?’ ‘cause he didn’t have a trailer on it, I could see the mural. And he says, ‘Here’s what you do, Mike. You go up on this ladder,’ and they have a ladder so that you can climb up to wash your windows and stuff, and we borrowed the ladder from the truck stop and we go up on the ladder and you put wax on her, just regular Turtle Wax onto the mural and then wipe it off and it’s real shiny and it’s polished and it’s covered with wax and it’s perfected, you know. And so, then he turns to the driver and says, ‘There you go, driver,’ and the driver gave him forty bucks. He said, ‘Here you go.’

Michael S.: So all you’re doing is waxing, cleaning up their art?

Mike: Yeah, cleaning up their art, without taking it off.

Michael S.: Did the truckers all know about that?

Mike: They called us the ‘Glad Hand’ because we’re able to climb up in there and we could use our hands and they can’t. You know, they’re tired. It’s a big truck, they can’t get in there to do it and 84 we can stand on what’s called the ‘fifth wheel’ and reach up there and just do it. And with the little rags, me and this partner of mine, and he’s bigger than me, so he did the top, I did the bottom and pretty soon we’re done. And we split the money, fifty-fifty. So, he gives me twenty bucks and he says, ‘Do you wanna do another one?’ And I says, ‘Hell yeah.’ And we run up to another trucker, ‘Hey, can we do your mural?’ ‘No,’ you know, ‘I got no money.’ ‘Okay.’ So, we run up to another one, ‘Can we do your mural?’ So, now, ‘If you ask those guys, I’ll ask these guys,’ and pretty soon we’re locked in. I says, ‘Hey, I got one over here.’ So he come running over and we do it, ‘Got one over here.’ So, now we’re waxing murals and we’re making good money, you know. Two-hundred dollars apiece, four hundred bucks a day, you know. So, I says, ‘Man, this is the easiest money I ever made.’ I said, ‘This is great. Thanks, man.’ He says, he’s got his money, he’s counting his four hundred, his two hundred dollars, whatever, I got my two hundred dollars, he says, ‘You wanna do it tomorrow?’ I says, ‘Hell yeah.’ So we gathered together about six hundred bucks apiece in two days, one weekend. He says, ‘I got enough money, Mike. I’m going back down to Florida.’ I said, ‘How you gonna get there?’ He says, ‘Oh, I hitchhike on the trucks.’ I say, ‘How do you do that?’ He says, ‘Come here, I’ll show you.’ So, he goes up to one of the truckers that’s parked right there and what they, this is at the time when they had all the CBs were going crazy. ‘Hey truckers, you know we got a convoy.’ They had music, they had songs, everything was CB at the time, you know. And so, he walks up to one of the truckers and say, ‘Trucker, can I use your radio?’ And so, the trucker leans out and hands him a microphone with a big curly cord going up into the truck and so he gets on the truck and now you can hear when he keys the mic, you can hear all the other trucks are broadcasting what he’s saying because they all got it on the same channel. They all put it on channel 19, that’s the truckers channel. So, anyway, so, this guy, this friend of mine, he gets on the radio and as soon as he keys the mic, you can here, ‘Hello, hello, hello. Hi, hi, hi, hi, ‘cause all the other trucks are 85 echoing, ‘cause they all got the radio on the same channel, see. So, he keys the mic, he says, ‘Hey truckers, is anybody heading to Florida out there? I need a ride. I’ll keep you awake all night, and I’ll talk to you and you can keep on driving and I don’t have any luggage or nothing. I have nothing I’m taking with me.’ So, all of a sudden, one of ‘em answered back, ‘Yeah, where you at?’ He says, ‘I’m over here by the gas pumps, come get me.’ And he said, ‘Okay, here I come.’ So, they come and they pick him up because they need to stay awake. They want company all the way down to Florida, you know, so, from Portland to Florida, three-thousand miles, you know what I’m saying. So, off he goes. He says, ‘See ya later, Mike.’ He says, ‘Oh by the way, you can keep on doing the murals, you know.’ I next mural, the next mural. Anyway, so, I go up and I’m doing it by myself, ‘Hey mister, can I do you mural?’ ‘Sure.’ You know, so I get the ladder and I’m up there and I charge forty bucks, fifty bucks and I’m doing the mural and uh, getting the cash for it straight outright and it takes me longer and I’m doing one guy’s mural and some of the paint comes off on my rag. And I look down at the rag and I say, “Holy shit,’ you know, so I fold the rag, so he can’t see it and I go really light, you know, I don’t want to do it any harder than that, you know, so I get him done and I look down at the rag when he drives away and I got my money in my hand, and I say, ‘Damn, there’s a risk involved here,’ and don’t want that trucker to see the paint ‘cause he’ll freak out, he might kick my ass. You know, so I’m thinking, ‘Shoot, you know there’s a drawback to this business and the big guy left to Florida. And he would have said, ‘Fuck you,’ type of thing, but I can’t and I’m a little guy and so, shoot, I gotta be careful. I says, ‘Dammit, you know, maybe this isn’t the perfect job opportunity that I thought it might be’, you know what I’m saying, so I says, ‘Damn,’ you know. So, I think about going up to the next trucker and I want to do his mural, but I’m apprehensive about it now. I says, ‘Damn, I don’t know if I can do it.’ I go up to the other truck and the next is in there and I 86 figure myself, maybe I can get like a waiver that says if I damage it I won’t, you know, be responsible for it, you know, ‘cause my mind seen ‘em taking the smile off the woman’s face, or something, you know. Anything stupid, I says,’ It’ll ruin the whole thing. You know, I’ll be out a thousand dollars to have to paint it over again or something stupid, you know. So, I’m trying to think, how I can say to the guy, ‘Look, if anything happens, I don’t want to be responsible.’ So, I go to the next guy and says, ‘Hey, can I do your mural,’ and he says, ‘sure.’ I say, ‘Listen, if anything happens, I don’t want to be responsible. Are you okay with that or what?’ He says, ‘What do you mean?’ I says, ‘Well, if the, if the paint comes off or something,’ He says, ‘No, that things airbrushed on there good. It’s not gonna come off.’ I says, ‘Will you agree that if it comes off, I’m not responsible?’ He says, ‘Well, maybe you ought to not do it.’ You know, so I’m thinking, ‘Damn, there goes the fucking business.’ I’m in the negative all of a sudden. I’m thinking, ‘Dammit,’ I says, ‘Well, is there anything else I can do for you?’ He says, ‘Well come up here, Mike and take a look at this right here.’ He says, ‘See the front wheel on my truck?’ I says there’s a big giant wheel and underneath the hubcap, they have to grease it. You know what I’m saying? Well, these trucks have got, some of them have got a million miles on ‘em. You can imagine, they drive all over the country, they never turn ‘em off. They never turn a big diesel on and off because it’s harder to start ‘em up than it is to keep ‘em running. Plus, they have refrigeration units, they have air- conditioning, they have their TVs and all these different draws to the battery, so they just leave the truck run all night, you know, so they just sit there idling, you know. Ba-ra-ra-ra as the truck sits there and the guy’s in there sleeping in the cab, you know, inside the truck, anyway, so, he says, ‘See underneath this hubcap on my front wheels,’ and it’s a big flat wheel that all made out of aluminum and it’s polished real pretty and stuff and he says, ‘Underneath there, they take off this hubcap right here and they grease the front end of it, so that the axle grease will stay on the wheel so that doesn’t burn up the bearings. I says, ‘Okay.’

Michael S.: Mmhmm

Mike: He says, ‘But right here, see the way the oil is coming out of the hubcap and spraying all over my wheel?’ I says, ‘Yeah.’ He says, ‘You can wipe that off of there.’ I says, ‘What are you paying?’ He says, ‘I’ll give you ten bucks to do each wheel.’

Michael S.: Okay.

Mike: I says, ‘Okay, I’m on it,’ you know. He says, ‘It’s real important,’ while I’m sitting there wiping it off, whatever, I have a special chemical that I’m taking it off with. He says, ‘It’s real important that we take that off there because CHP will come up beside of us and they’ll give us a ticket for that and the ticket’s like a couple hundred bucks.’ So he says, ‘You gotta have it done. And usually the truckers do it themselves, but it’s a pain in the ass to bend over to do it and I’m sure you can make money off of it.’ And I says, ‘Damn, I’m on it,’ you know. So, so pretty soon, I’m going, you know, truck to truck, ‘Hey, can I wipe the grease off you wheel?’ And, ‘Sure,’ you know. I charge five bucks,’ and says, ‘Okay.’ So, I’m doing it real quick and I, now I can do ten times more than the murals, you know what I’m saying, because every truck seems to have grease, and I can see the situation from far away. ‘Oh, there’s one that needs it right there.’ So, I run up on to him and you know, I can angle. Now one of ‘em had a really dull looking, uh aluminum wheel, he says, ‘It’s kind of dull,’ whatever you know, and I’m gonna wipe it off anyway and he says, ‘Go ahead and do it.’ He says, ‘Would you polish the wheel?’ And I said, ‘Well, how do you do that?’ He says, ‘You use a special chemical, it’s called Mother’s Polish and if you rub on it real hard with the rag right there, it’ll make it look like chrome.’ And so, I took it, and I wiped it on the, on the dull aluminum wheel, pretty soon, it looks like chrome. I said, ‘Son of a bitch, that works pretty good,’ you know, but it’s a lot of work and you end up with a lot of tarnish on the rag and that’s important for later. You know with this tarnish on the rag, and so you have to use a new rag for each wheel, so I says, ‘Okay.’ I did it for him and he says, 88 ‘I’ll give you twenty-five bucks for doing that.’ And I says, ‘I’m there,’ you know, so, I got fifty bucks to do both sides and they look like brand new wheels, or whatever and these are off to the races. And so I says, ‘Man, that’s a great opportunity, but it kind of wears you out, you know. It’s more labor intensive than truck that are dull and I was wondering if that shit would work on that. So, I go to the next driver, I say, ‘Hey look, I see a dull spot on your tank, can I polish that off, to make it look nice?’ He said, ‘Sure. What do you charge?’ I says, ‘I don’t know, twenty bucks?’ He says, ‘Okay.’ You know, so, I’m doing both sides, forty bucks. And so, I’m now in the business of polishing the aluminum to make it look like chrome. So, one of the things I learned in my life is that, if you take a cotton wheel, which is a wheel made out of pieces of cotton stuck together and sewn together and you spin it with a drill or a grinder, it spins very fast, and you can use that to polish things, you know what I’m saying? So, I went home and got one of these things and I went back to the truck stop and now I can use my machine to polish it much quicker than my hand. Ten thousand revolutions vs. two hundred, what you can do with your hand. So, anyway, so I go out to the truck and I say, ‘Hey, can I turn that thing to chrome?’ and he’s like, ‘Sure,’ you know so, so to make the story shorter, I’m doing all the trucks every piece of aluminum on the truck. And I had a price list. I says, ‘To do the tanks is one price, to do the wheels, another price. I went down to an anno-anodization plant, a place where they take a, take a trucks parts, you know what I’m saying, I went into the plant, and I says, and you know it stunk like crazy because it was two hundred tanks with different chemicals, a thousand volts of electricity and a lot of things involved, I said, ‘what do you guys charge to anodize a tank on a truck?’ They said, ‘Well, first we have to take the fuel and you have to dump the fuel, and you don’t get your money back on that.’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ Then he says, ‘Then we have to tank it through twenty different tanks, it costs four hundred dollars apiece or something like that and we take eleven days to do it.’ And I said, ‘Four hundred dollars apiece?’ And he 89 says, ‘Yeah, that’s four hundred bucks.’ And I says, ‘Okay, thanks.’ So, now I go back to the truck stop loaded with ammunition. I says, ‘Hey look, you can have it done at the anodization plant over there for eight hundred bucks, or I’ll do it for eighty.’ ‘Okay, do it,’ you know. So, now I get my machine out there and I crank away on it, and I crank it out and it comes out just like brand new, or whatever and they’re going like, ‘Yeah, that was worth it.’ So, now they get on the radio, ‘Hey, I got a glad hand over here doing tanks and wheels and stacks, you know the big exhaust stacks, and the fifth wheel and everything else. He does it all, man for a couple hundred bucks, he could do your whole rigs.’ Now I got trucks in a line, waiting to get done, you know. I says, ‘Son of a bitch, and I’m getting exhausted and the stuff’s kind of dirty, getting all over the place, all this tarnish, you know what I’m saying, from the, from the rags and stuff get sprayed because this uh, the machine is throwing a lot faster, so you end up covered with this sort of black tarnish shit, you know what I’m saying, from the machine. So anyway, so I says, ‘Damn, I gotta get help,’ you know, so I look around and they have a thing called a ‘lumper’, which is a guy that loads and unloads trucks for a truck driver and they usually charge a hundred bucks, you know, they’ll lump your truck and usually what it means is they go in the back of the trailer and they move a pallet of stuff from the back of the trailer to the front of trailer so it’s balanced when you go over the scales, so it’ll be balanced. And they call these guys ‘lumper’. Yeah, they hang around big truck stops and they have a sign that they make out of cardboard and a magic marker and it says, ‘Lump’. L-u-m-p, you know what I’m saying?

Michael S.: Okay.

Mike: So, they show, they’re lumpers. You know what I’m saying? So, that’s the crew that is willing to go in the back of these hot-ass trailers and move that shit around. I remember doing it a couple times, and said, ‘Oh my god, it’s exhausting.’ And you had to have two or three guys in each truck to pass the cases of stuff over the top of the load to the front of the load because they 90 can’t take off the whole load to move the pallet in front and then put it all back on; way too much involved, so they just have these guys lump it from one end to the other. So, I was doing that for a while and it’s too exhausting and said, ‘this isn’t for me, it’s too sweaty.’ But I went to the lumpers that day and says, ‘Hey, you guys want a job?’ and they said, ‘Doing what?” and I says, ‘Well, you’re not going to lump a truck, but I’ll have you just polish some wheels and shit.’ They’re like, ‘Alright, what’s the pay?’ and I said, ‘I’ll give you a hundred bucks.’ And they said, ‘Okay, you know, for now.’ So, now I got a line of trucks coming in, I got my lumper guys polishing away and I’m back in control. I’m looking for the derby hat, you know. Instead, I wanna just be the guy that directs them where to go, what to do. I have a whole list that I had printed out of all the different variable that you can have done. I can either do your wheels, your stacks, I can do the mural, I can, you know, lump the load, I can, you know take care, I can secure your truck overnight for a price, you know, so I’ll put a guy sleeping right on top of the load, you know, sleep right there and anybody gets near your truck, he’ll yell at ‘em, or you know, scare ‘em away or whatever and or, so I had a whole list of services of different things to do and, what I did is, I took an old station wagon, and I took an old set of stairs that you go to unload an airplane, regular commercial airplane, they have the big stairs, the gangway they call it, that goes up to the side of an airplane. And I took one of those apart and I put the stairs on, I welded it right to the back of my, of my convertible car and, and I put an easy boy recliner chair in the front of it, so I could drive with my car, right up, and it’s the same level, ten feet up, next to a truck driver’s door and they could literally open the door and fall right into the recliner and now I got ‘em in the front of my car right there and I whole list of all the different services we can do for his truck, on the other side he had some cold beers, already sitting on ice, and in front of him, is a little TV that’s plugged into my car and he can watch TV. And so I turned to the driver, I yell out the window to him, I says, ‘Where do you want to go, driver?’ And 91 he says, ‘Take me to the showers,’ you know so, so now I can take them from the truck to the showers, which sometimes is a long walk and now I’m driving ‘em, catering to their needs and at the same time, when we get to the showers, they climb down off the chair, and they had a list of all the different things they want done to the truck. And I say, ‘Okay, let me see, you want your stacks done, tires, wheels, fill up the air in the tires, check the load, secure the load overnight.’ You know, I had all these different things, and so I turned to him, I says, ‘Five hundred dollars.” And they whip out of their pockets. Every one of the truckers, at the time, have these huge wads of cash, and they pull five hundred dollars out of there, like it was nothing, you know what I’m saying? So, and we even went so far as some of the guys that would drive the truck for ‘em and go fill it up with fuel, so they could take it over to the fuel island, ‘cause the fueling takes a long time. It takes an hour to sit there waiting for the fuel to fill up in these huge tanks. So, we would save the receipt and bring back to the driver and we’d charge ‘em a certain dollar for that and they’d charge for the fuel and pretty soon, I’m handling a lot of money going back and forth and I’m doing all the services and I got all my guys working for me and I made everybody wear a uniform, so we all look the same so we look professional. So that we didn’t look like a bunch of idiots out there, we all had the same uniform on, you know what I’m saying?

Michael S.: Did you brand the name of your little business?

Mike: Yes, we were the diner shiners.

Michael S.: Did you have to get permission from the truck stop?

Mike: What I did was, I went to the truck stop because I wanted to get exclusive on it, so I went up to the guy that owned the truck stop, his name was Jubitz, an old man, he’s an old grandpa, you know. And I went into his office and I said, ‘Hey Mr. Jubitz, how you doing?’ He says, ‘Yeah, what do you want, son?’ I says, ‘I got this idea, what I’m doing for the trucks, I’m doing all these services and stuff for ‘em, is there any way that I can do it 92 exclusively? I got a crew of guys, we’re all in uniform, you see ‘em out there,’ they’re all standing outside of his window so he could look out of his executive offices and see us out there on the lot. And he says, ‘Well, listen son, I don’t want you to get run over by a truck or nothing,’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I wanna give you a quarter of the lot over there, next to, next to the truck wash and you can set up a big tent and set up everything you need right there, where I can keep an eye on you guys at the same time, you won’t get hurt.’ I says, ‘That’d be great,’ you know, I says, ‘you don’t want no money for it?’ He says, ‘Naw, I need it for the truckers. They need the service and they’ll appreciate it.’ You know, so I says, ‘Okay. Would you put it in writing?’ and he did. So, you know, I got it in writing that I was the only guy that’d be doing it out there. Me and my crew, the Diner Shiners, and we’re kind of like detailing trucks now. And at the same time, we do all these different services, and it’s so willing to pay for no matter what, whatever it costs, we take ‘em in four wheelers, usually they bond to my crew, and we take ‘em to church. Because they can’t get off the trucks, they can’t get away from the lot without having it secured and they wanted to go to the Presbyterian church that was three miles away. Some were Jewish, they want to go to the Synagogue, five miles. We take them to their denomination, wherever they, if they have the addresses and stuff and they pay us like a hundred bucks. Each one of ‘em was glowing. Every one of the truckers are very religious, I learned because they’re taking their life in their hands, they love to pray and to worry about the Lord above ‘em and stuff and take their truck down the road to make it go from point A to point B, safely and all that stuff. So, if that little blessing, whatever made me more money than all the detail work involved. And while we’re going, I would take ‘em to a different place other than a restaurant. They’d pay a hundred dollars to go to my house and have my girlfriend cook ‘em lunch. Because it wasn’t restaurant food, you know what I’m saying. It was something, it was home cooked meal, and we’d have great stews, and great, you know, roasts and different 93 things on the barbeque and stuff, and they’re like, ‘Oh man.’ And they go to our house and for one hour of their life, they get to relax, they go to church, another hour, they get to have a home cooked meal and they go back to their truck, they can forget about everything about life and go back and their loads are secured, the fuels are tanked up, they’re ready to go, everything is polished, you know, so we’re checking their oil. We’re doing everything we can possibly do to a truck. Now they’re back in the truck and going for the haul. And they can go rested. And they can feel really good about not having all the different drawbacks to being in that trucker’s life.

Michael S.: What’s the lesson and what kind of money did you make?

Mike: Oh, I made hundreds of thousands of dollars a week, man. It was so much money involved with it, you know. Because there were so many trucks. I was not only doing trucks, but pretty soon, Harley Davidson motorcycle gangs showed up. So, I would do two hundred motorcycles, you know. I seen all the different pieces of chrome on the bike and all the aluminum had to be polished out. And they wanted, all of them wanted it done and they paid the big money because they’re rich and all. And I started to learn that there’s other people that have serious money. Eventually, I did Kirby vacuum cleaners because it took eleven days to break down a Kirby vacuum cleaner, send it to a factory and have it polished and send it back. And they had to pay like sixty bucks for each one of them to have it done, so they could sell it as a used vacuum. Well, I would do it right on the spot with my machines and my men in about five minutes.

Michael S.: Did the Kirby dealers come to you?

Mike: I went to the first Kirby dealer because I thought, they’re all aluminum, let’s see if this shop over here sells ‘em used. And sure enough, they had brand new and used. And the used ones were less and stuff, but I could make ‘em look like the brand new ones, and the guys paid for it, now. They lined ‘em up as they go to the shop every day, they’d have ten of them lined up. Kirby called up Eureka, called up Hoover, they called 94 up Hoover and says, you know, ‘Mike, come down to Hoover,’ and I says, ‘Where’s it at?’ you know, and so was getting turned on as different guys, and by the way, I have this motorcycle at home, can you do my bike?’ ‘Sure,’ you know. ‘I have a truck, can you do?’ ‘Sure,’ you know, so then one day, I’m driving along and I look up and I see Coca-Cola, International. A huge, giant place with a thousand Coca-Cola trucks out there in the lot. And one, this little Mexican guy was out there scraping away with a razor blade, the giant sign that says, ‘Things go better with Coca-Cola.’ They’re taking off the side of, the big sticker off the side of the truck tank, which is all made out of stainless steel and I went up to the office, I says, ‘Man, that guy’s ruining that tank. You can see the scratch lines all over it.’ I says, ‘I can take that off of there without ruining the tank and you can put your other sticker on it.’ He says, ‘Oh, you can? How much do you want?’ And I says, ‘Well, what’ll you pay me for it?’ I think he told me, ‘I’ll give you five hundred dollars a side, so I made a thousand dollars off each truck, to take off the big stickers and put on the ones that says, it did say, ‘Things go better with Coca-Cola,’ and they put on ‘Enjoy Coke,’ was the new one.

Michael S.: How’d you take ‘em off?

Mike: I used chemicals. I used my knowledge in chemicals and the polishers and stuff and I took it right off. And what I did is, I walked along and poured a chemical on it and it fell right on the ground, smoking. And he says, ‘God dammit, I never thought in a million years, it’d come off that easy.’ Yeah, in the meantime, I had a contract with them, and I had ‘em sign it and everything else, so I didn’t get screwed out of the deal and have ‘em just do it right around my back and also, I had the exclusive rights to do every truck on the lot. A thousand trucks, you know what I’m saying? So he says, ‘This is going to take some time.’ I says, ‘I got a crew of ten guys, we’re gonna come over,’ so anyway, so I’m doing the Cola trucks, I’m doing the Kirby vacuums, I’m doing motorcycles, I’m doing semis and I got crews in every different direction, you know, and I’m running around every 95 different way, and one day I went in front of a Safeway food store and I realized that the frames around the front of the store were made out of aluminum. I says, ‘Mister, I can make this look like this,’ and by this time I had samples that I bring with me. Everywhere I went, I had a sample and I would take the old paint that was all pitted and had holes and scratches all over it and I’d polish it and it looked like brand new on half of it. So, I says, ‘I can make this look like this.’ And every place I turn, they said, ‘do it,’ you know, ‘don’t even waste time, just do it.’ And I so I’m doing store fronts, I’m doing, at one point I polished a chain link fence so it looked like chrome. So, any trucker that had any questions, I said, ‘We’re gonna do it like the fence right there.’ And they’re like, ‘Holy shit, man. Do it.’ You know, so one day my guys are all kind of burned out and I had twenty guys working for me, we’re I’m making a thousand dollars a day and I’m making serious money, and we go to the races. I said, ‘Listen guys, I wanna treat everybody to the International Stock Car Races. ‘All right,’ you know, ‘we don’t have to work?’ I said, ‘Hell, no.’ So we go out there and the a lady named Shirley Muldowney, she’s a famous car driver, so she turned to me and she said, ‘Listen, our semi came through the truck stop, the other, we had the cars in the back of the truck. Have you guys did the truck?’ And I said, “Yeah, and I didn’t know it was you.’ And she said, ‘Yeah.’ She says, can you do my ‘drag car?’ I says, ‘I certainly can.’ So they got us pit passes and free everything we wanted, you know, free dinner, free beer, free whatever. And she says, ‘Hey, listen my other friends out here want to do it, too.’ So, we did like a hundred and fifty drag cars, just insane. And the funniest thing was that she lined nothing up line. That thing would just shine, you know like a brand new car. And they get to do the race, they’re doing a two hundred and eighty mile an hour race and they drag it with another truck back down to the starting line and it had to be re-done again, the whole truck, the whole car. So, the biggest secret to making any money is to take something that’s worthless and turn it into 96 something valuable. And it takes the idea, the ingenuity and the insight to outside the thinking box to figure out what it takes to make something, improve it. And that’s the lessons for everybody that does any sales, whatever it is, they do the same exact thing, they take something, that either isn’t working, or it’s working slowly, and they figure out how to accelerate it into a money-making proposition, by simply adding something, or taking something away from it, so that it’s improved.

Michael S.: We’re doing something different. Now let’s go back to that PNO and why you hung it upside down in the store.

Mike: It has an aesthetic value that’s different and it’s a curiosity and people scratch their head and say, ‘How in the heck, number one, did you get it up there, number two, why, and how come it looks so much better?’ You know what I’m saying? That looks different upside down than it does from looking down at it from myself. When you gotta carving in front of you and your carving it out, you’ve executed it from this level, you’re looking at it from this perspective, looking down at it, or whatever, so if you take the same piece and turn it around and turn it upside down, you’ll see all the mistakes. ‘Oh, I didn’t get a chance to do back there, I didn’t do the bottom of the feet.’ You can see it, so when you stand it back up on its regular point of view, that’s the angle of execution, they call it, so when you, you change something around to a different angle of execution, you see something different. It’s a whole different perspective. So, you had to learn, I had to learn over my lifetime, that I can’t sell a sculpture like elevated up, I can’t put it up on a pedestal and sell it the same as I can on the ground because I didn’t take the time to do all the things underneath. All the underside, the bottom of the chin isn’t done, the bottom of the ears isn’t done, the bottom of their legs, so you have to change either your perspective on it, or put it back to the original place where you carved it to sell it, so that they don’t see all the mistakes and they don’t see what isn’t done, they see only what is done and you don’t have to waste a lot of time doing all the stuff on the bottom side and the back side. That’s how I made really well 97 doing carvings, because all the other artists made it a point to get down on their knees and they, they carved underneath and all sorts of places that wasn’t really necessary to carve because the person’s not gonna appreciate it, number one, and they’re not gonna display it from there. So, by hanging from the ceiling, upside down, I can see that the piano had different angles and lines that weren’t normally appreciated. You know, you can see the way the whole volume of it looks different. The, the shape and the lines and the different things that the artist that made it, you know, Baldwin or whoever, you know, they took a lot of time to make this thing. But you don’t see it when you’re looking straight on at it, looking at the keys. You know, so and you lose all the art value of what the piano actually looks like when it’s big and far away and you’re looking straight down on it. You can’t usually look straight down on a piano on a stage unless you get lifted up above it, looking straight down on it. So, there’s a difference artistic view from down below you see different lines and a different perspective that you don’t see when the piano’s on the ground. And by doing that, or whatever I learned right away that you can just simply hang it upside down and get twice what It’s worth.

Michael S.: So we’re talking about perspective, we talked about Jackson Pollock and you decided to start doing paintings.

Mike: Well, my dad was a painter all of his life. He painted three thousand canvasses that he knows about and none of them sold. And I started to say, ‘Why wouldn’t they sell?’ He stopped painting for forty-five years and just went away from it. He enjoyed ‘em, they’re all over the house and every single wall in my life, when I grew up as a kid, there were all these paintings everywhere and they weren’t sold, so they started to varnish and turn brown after fifty years of hanging on the wall they get dusty and stuff. I said to myself, ‘Someday, I’m gonna inherit my father’s paintings. When he’s dead and gone, they’re not gonna know what to do with all these paintings, they’re not gonna sell it at any stores or any um, any galleries, so I have to figure out what to do with ‘em myself. I’m gonna be stuck with 98 ‘em.’ And, by the way, I do have a hundred of ‘em right now that are all over this house, that I still haven’t worked on because what I decided to do was to add to it. I wanted to take this painting that was already painted by somebody else, and add to it, without ruining and feeling like my dad might be looking down at me, ‘what are you doing to my painting, ruining it?’ But I would just simply add a little detail or add more color to it to brighten it up and to make it more appealing to the average person to make it look better. So, I had to learn how things are looked at, you know, from the artists view, I had to learn about execution levels, you know, get the perspective levels of where he was standing when he painted the painting and stuff. And I also to add to it without ruining it, you know. So, I wanted to not ruin the painting. So, eventually, I wanted to practice, this is before I got my dad’s actual paintings, so, I was in this swap meet, and I seen this big giant canvas and it was already painted by somebody, it was this ugly looking thing, whatever it was on there, it looked stupid and I bought it cheap, I bought it for like five bucks or something, for the canvas because it was only good for just painting over it, and uh, and the guy sold it to me quickly, it was an easy sale. So, I took it home and I added my own paints to it, and I painted it over again, but I did it just abstract, ‘cause I really don’t know how to paint very well, detail. I’m not a, artist in that perspective, I can’t paint beautiful paints, or whatever. I did the Jackson Pollock on it and I didn’t want to do random squirts of paint because that has too much of what’s called quantum mechanics, like you don’t know where it’s gonna land or how it’s gonna splatter, so it’s totally haphazard. So, I learned about Monet’s painting, how he painted. And he would place each piece of paint onto the canvas exactly where he wanted it to be and, and I wanted to learn what made his so appealing and how he made a living off it for seventy-five years. He painted this same garden behind his house for seventy-five years. And he had twelve people that he basically paid all their things in life with. He had gardeners, he had his family, his kids, his wife, his mother and father, so he painted for twelve people and they all made a living off of his 99 painting for seventy-five years, but it was the same garden. And I thought, ‘Isn’t that amazing that you can take the same garden and have different perspectives and still keep people pleased and have a huge demand for your paintings by the time he died, people are paying millions of dollars for his paintings while he’s still alive. So, that was a big plus, too. So, I wanted to study Monet, and I did. And I wanted to apply it to the paintings, which I did. And the first one that I did, I painted it and put it out, just on the corner, just a bunch of paintings, leaning against the tree and, and when I sold it to a woman from La Jolla, she came along and says, ‘Oh, I love it, I gotta have it.’ So, I stuck my hand out and says, “Lady, put ‘em there, whatever you want because I didn’t want to beat myself up. A lot of artists, and this is an important lesson, will beat their selves up because either a, they work on the same project for a year, a long time, too much time invested in one painting and at the same time, they’ve invested a lot and energy and money, and their souls and their, their thinking pattern, their soul, and so pretty soon they say, ‘Damn, I want to get this thing sold, so they say it’s worth five thousand dollars, but I’ll take a thousand for it. And some guy’ll come along and (INAUDIBLE), they’ll say, ‘I’ll give you five hundred dollars for it,’ and some artists will say, ‘Okay, I’ll take it.’ So, they’re beating themselves up for forty-five hundred dollars, you know, so then they’ve taken away their make it so that they sold themselves short. So, I didn’t want to sell myself short on the first one, at the same time I didn’t want to sell it, it’s a big cumbersome piece, I didn’t want to wreck it or poke a hole through it, I wanted to sell it, so, I put my hand out and says, ‘Lady, put in there, whatever you think it’s worth.’ And so I turned my head the other way and she shoved a bunch of money, out of her purse and into my hand and when she drove away, I counted the money and it was over four hundred dollars. I says, ‘Oh my god, I’m an artist.’ I was repressed as a child to go near my dad’s paintings because he thought I would ruin ‘em, which I did. A couple times . . .

Michael S.: Yeah.

Mike: I put my finger or I’d through a football around the house it hit one of his wet canvasses and it’d wipe out something he’d worked hard on, you know, repressed and scolded and beat down and never get near the paintings, no matter what. And this is my chance to paint my own, and I did, and I sold the first one. And I says, ‘I beat my old man, and his three thousand the lady came to a sale of mine that I had a month or two later and she says, ‘Hey, you wanna come see the painting that I sold to her,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I would.” And so, I went to see the painting and she took me to her big beautiful home in LaHoya and she had nothing in the house. It was very, what they call, sparsely decorated. She had one Ming vase at the entranceway and everything else was just simple pieces of furniture without any clutter. People that have a lot of wealth, usually don’t have a lot of clutter in their life. They don’t buy things as a mistake, they don’t buy things because they like it, they don’t buy things impulsively, they what’s usually a valued item that they’re going to covet and love, you know. And in front of her six-chair dining room table that was gorgeous, you know, from Europe or something, was my painting hanging on the wall and she had invested two hundred into the frame on it. But now when you seen that painting, you know, and it’s just a big abstract, you know, uh, choreographed bunch of paints, just on suddenly I seen the value of it. I says,’ Wow, no wonder she gave me that money for it because look at it. It looks like it’s worth a million dollars and the place that it’s at because it’s very chaotic in a place that’s very organized, you know. So, that, it I’ve sold over three-hundred-fifty paintings that I, I make as fast as I can, I’m looking at one right now as I sit here. There’s a big canvass against the wall, right next to a, a actual canvass that looks, it’s a exact copy of Van Gogh’s, Irises in a Garden, so I got mine sitting right next it, you know, and if I have one of those and I love it, and my girl hates it, you know, I have it this kind of behind the door, behind the TV, I love it, I look at it, 101 there’s millions of different little images that are in the Irises, that I love to pull out of there and see the perspective, but I have my canvasses right in front of it that I’m working on. Right now, I’m looking at one that’s full of goldfish and this a sea life goldfish painting that I’m not, it’s not complete yet. But I decided though I had sold three-hundred-fifty of ‘em, there’s no real way to make a living off it. And, uh, and I did all the different tricks that Monet talks about, he says, ‘Never paint a canvass more than ten minutes,’ so that you don’t have any more time in it than that. So, if you get a hundred dollars for it, you’re getting a hundred dollars every ten minutes. So, I did all the different things that he says to do and even then it’s still too hard to make a living off of it because in California there’s such a competitive need for wall space, that if anybody had any more space on the wall to put a painting up, they would just simply cut a frame and make a window, so they could look outside at beautiful California where if we were in New York or Chicago, or Detroit or something, everything is so ugly outside that they’d rather hang the painting in front of the walls, so you don’t have to look outside. So, there’s no real big, giant demand for artists a painter, that you wanna go either to a different city with your work or maybe the sculptures didn’t take the same wall space, so I did very well with sculptures. I made and sold over ten thousand sculptures, so far, in my life and I still have ten of ‘em out in the garden that I haven’t finished that I’m working on right now, and so there’s a big demand for paintings, but there’s not a big demand for floor space, you can still fit a sculpture in that corner over there, or behind there, in the garden, whatever it is, you still got non-competitive spaces in the homes to fill up with sculptures where you don’t that with the paintings, wall, they would hang a, a picture of their mother, you know what I’m saying, instead of a piece of art. Because there’s so many variables to the different arts, you know what I’m saying? So, one of the things I did in my life, is I was going along and 102 there’s a big lot across from the promenade, it’s called, and San Diego’s a big, a strip mall that two or three blocks long, it’s right on the beach, I’m sure you’ve seen it before, it has Tony Roma’s Ribs in there and a pizza place and a few other, uh big anchors, you know that anchor the lot. Anyway, so they spent years building this thing and they spent fifteen million dollars, but they had across the street a huge, giant parking lot that they parked all the heavy equipment that they would roll across the street to work on it. It’s right on La Jolla Boulevard and I seen the potential with this big lot because one day I was going along and some very rich young men from La Jolla, some young people, probably about eighteen years old, had rented the lot and they put Christmas trees on it. But in order to cover the ground, they used a bunch of hay on the gravel and the, but the hay didn’t come off the gravel so easy when, when they went to clean it up. They, they got off the lot, they tried to sell Christmas trees, the Christmas trees are very expensive, they wanted two hundred dollars for a Christmas tree and they didn’t sell any. They had about twenty trees out there, they thought they were gonna go big with the idea, but they didn’t sell not one tree, so they left in a huff and they were angry and disgruntled and they left all the trees laying around the lot that weren’t sold, where were twenty of ‘em. And they left all the hay on the ground which is a bunch of gravel with this hay on it. So, I found out who owned the lot because up until that point, I’d thought it was owned by the city or the state or somebody and now I realized it’s a independently owned lot that somebody had, that you could get to somebody to rent it so I found out who owned it and I found out he owns several pieces of properties of these, and I told him I would clean up the lot and take all they hay away and all the Christmas trees, If I could get the lot cheap and it’s a hundred thousand square foot lot and I rented for about a thousand dollars a month, which is absolute peanuts vs. where the location of it is everything, it’s just the most amazing place in the city and uh, what I did was, I put the art that I was taking from the North, I would take the sculptures, and I put ‘em on the lost right there and everything I touched 103 sold on that lot to the point where I had several of my men that were leftovers from my store, I’d called ‘em up and says, ‘Come on down and work on the lot and they would and they, they helped me out, out there. And I set up a perfect ambiance with five nineteen-fifties fireplaces that made the light come out of ‘em, were all that I used to light up the stuff at night time and that’s all I needed because I did the same dance routine with the sculptures inside the guys teepee. With this lot, or whatever, I started to sell my sculptures off of it, but I spent time, I spent years actually trying to find a Native American, or anybody that would carve me a big T-Rex skull like I’d seen in the museums as a kid growing up. I wanted one of those big T- Rexes even to this day, I actually have one in my garden right here, that I made myself, but I wanted it a T-Rex so bad, that I went to every artist that I could find and said, ‘Make me one of these.’ And I brought book, brought pictures, I brought sculptures, I brought uh, models, I brought everything I could think of to bring to people to make me one of the skulls. And every one of ‘em would make a dinosaur, but it had the ectoplasm on it. It had the skin or the scales or the feathers of what they think a dinosaur is supposed to look like, but I wanted just the bone. And I couldn’t find anybody to make me the bones of a dinosaur, it was very difficult to get someone to carve it, so I spent ten years of my life trying to carve it myself and I went from one that was five inches across, small in my hand and I worked it all the way up to where I was chain-sawing inside the jaws that open up and stepped inside of the skull and chain-sawed the inside of the skull, so that I can make a bigger skull. So, I got to the point where I had one that was about four feet long and two or three feet wide and two feet deep and I put it onto the lot down there that I had and I was finishing it up. I actually carved it and it had teeth and all the hollows and stuff that are involved in a, a real dinosaur skull and I had it out there and I was burning it with a torch to emphasize the different grain patterns and to show the, the contrast between the dark and the light and all the different elements of the wood and I was burning it and a Silver Ghost Rolls Royce pulled into my 104 lot, and it was a big beautiful white Rolls Royce with a European steering on the right side and a guy jumped out of there, his name was Mr. Shapery, Sandy Shapery and he jumped out of his Rolls Royce and he says, ‘Oh my god, what are you doing to that thing? Stop right now.’ And I says, ‘Alright.’ So, I stopped, I says, ‘I’m just trying to enlighten it, I’m trying to enhance it, you know from what it starts.’ He says, ‘No, no, no, it’s finished the way it is. It’s beautiful, I love it, I gotta have it,’ you know. So, his wife got out of the car and she’s pulled out her giant leather bound payroll check book and she opened it up on the hood and at that time I realized this might get good, so I had a friend of mine, who was one of my workers working the lot with me, I says, ‘Start taking pictures, we have instamatic cameras back in the time where you take all the pictures in the little yellow box cameras and then you send it in and they develop the film and send it back to you. So, he stared using up the cameras. I had three cameras in his hands and he started clicking pictures, so to this day I have a picture of the guy jumping out of the Rolls Royce, a picture of him looking at the piece with me, a picture of him with the wife with the checkbook out on the dashboard of the, out on the, the hood of the Rolls Royce, him writing the check, and then the next picture is him handing the check to me and I have this perplexed look on my face and the sculpture’s right behind us in the shot and I says, ‘Mister, there’s no numbers on this check,’ and he says, ‘You write in there whatever you want,’ and I realized right then I get goosebumps right now thinking about it, I says, ‘My god, I made it.’ That’s, that’s what any artist would just love to hear, is a blank check for their work and to go ahead and fill in whatever they want for it. To appreciate it to that degree. And I knew, I started to do a little dance, I says, ‘I knew that somebody was going to come along and appreciate this after ten years of study, that the first person who sees it would actually love it to that degree to give me a blank check for it and obviously he a very influential person. He’s wealthy, I can write the check for whatever I want, and he’s jumping back in his Rolls Royce. He said, ‘Here, deliver it to this address,’ 105 and he handed me two business cards. One was to the address to the business where he was at and the next one he says, ‘Give to the parking attendant when you get there.’ So, I look for the place, it’s downtown San Diego and I found myself standing in front of the Emerald Towers. The one with the big green neon octagons on top of the building. It was a landmark in San Diego, everybody knows that building, for sure. It’s in many different postcards, and everything else. And when I got up to the parking attendant, he says, ‘are you Mike?’ and I says, ‘Yeah,’ and he says, ‘Do you have the piece?’ I says, ‘There it brought out a golf cart and he says, ‘Sit on the back of the golf cart, I’ll take you up.’ And they put another golf cart with a trailer behind it, it has the piece on it. And they went for a different elevator a freight elevator and he says, “Come here, Mike. I gotta take you up the private drive right here.’ So, he opened up a gate and there’s a driveway that goes to the left into the building and to the right is all the retail parking spaces that are downstairs. They have jewelers and bankers and all sorts of different things that are downstairs. And up on top is all residences and then he’s taking me to a right up a private drive up into the building and you go around a little curve, around a corner that’s hidden from basic view from the street and what there is, is a bunch of vehicles parked there, and you know there was five of ‘em that I counted, they were all each had the same exact license plate on it and it said ‘Shapery’. It doesn’t say ‘Shapery one’, ‘Shapery two’, ‘Shapery three’, it simply said ‘Shapery’ on every one of the cars and the cars that I remember in my mind right now, is there was a Silver Ghost Rolls Royce that he drove up in, he had a Lamborghini, a Ferrari, a Maserati and he had a turn-of-the-century MG Midget. And I see a couple empty spaces, and so we’re driving along and we go past the parking garages and we get up to a elevator and it’s a big, giant elevator like a freight elevator and he says, ‘Here we go, right here, Mike,’ and so the elevator opens up with a special key and inside is a second elevator door that’s much small and we walk into the elevator and on the side of the 106 elevator walls are thick leather straps that you can put your hand through and you hold on to it. And he says, ‘Put your hands in the straps, Mike,’ and put my hands in the straps and he says, ‘Hang on,’ and he pushed the button for the twenty- seventh floor and the elevator went up faster than you could count to five. We’re already to the top, twenty-seven stories up, two hundred and seventy feet up off the ground and I lost my stomach, I lost my heart, somewhere back down there and I’m hanging on for dear life to these straps. So, we get to the top and the elevator stops and everything catches up. Your heart, your lungs and everything catch back up to you and I says, ‘Oh my god, that’s fast,’ and he says, ‘that’s the fastest elevator in the world.’ He says, ‘The reason Mr. Shapery wants a fast elevator, he doesn’t want to wait to go up and down. He wants to get here right now, so he had this specially designed and it’s the fastest elevator in the world.’ I says, ‘That is amazing. I love it, it’s a great ride, you know.’ I can’t imagine going back down in it. It was twice as fast, you know, so. So, anyway so, we get off the elevator and we walk out and there these huge two giant doors which huge door knobs and we open up the doors, out comes Mr. Shapery to meet us in the foyer, right there. And as we walk inside of his private home, that’s the penthouse of the twenty-seventh floor of the Shapery building, we walk inside and we in through a giant, purple crystal geode. It’s a big, giant inside of a rock that’s purple amethyst comes from the crystals, we’re walking through it to give you the size perspective and it’s all lit up with LED lights, back in the day, when they were brand new, LED lights. It was a new concept. Anyway, the thing put out this beautiful perspective of blue shine in every different direction. I said, ‘Mister, that’s the biggest geode, I’ve ever seen,’ and he looks at me and says, ‘If you ever see a bigger one, you let me know,’ he says, ‘I wanna get it,’ you know. So, anyway, we take two more steps and inside, on each side of the hallway walking into his, his estate, is giant tanks that are filled with giant sharks. They’re swimming around inside these tanks, you know. They’re leopard sharks on either side and they’re swimming around and there’s other sea creatures in 107 there, they’re all salt water tanks. I’m sure it was made by the, by the show where they do tanks, or whatever. You seen that made. So, anyway so we’re walking past the sharks into his actual domain and we stop down a couple steps into the sunken living room and he’s got a beautiful pool table right there with, it has actual crystal balls for the balls on it and he flat when you look at on the side, but when you get in front of it, it has perspective to the degree where it turns into three dimensions. It’s a beautiful piece of art, I’ll never forget as long as I live. He says, ‘come take a look at where the skull’s gonna go.’ He shows me out in his little garden, which is little rows of corn and beets and carrots and stuff like that all growing up on top of that, the top of the penthouse and he has a little tiny miniature rake and a little hoe and stuff he says, ‘It’s kind of my joke, I have a little garden up here, it’s an organic garden on top of the building.’ And I laugh. I thought it was cute. He says,’ I want to put that skull right in the center of my garden. I want to eliminate the garden and have him climbing out of there like he’s coming through the building like he’s immersing through the floor.’ He says, ‘Oh by the way, did you make out that check yet?’ I says, ‘No, sir, I didn’t.’ I says, ‘Would you like me to make you some skulls and some part of a vertebrae and all that stuff to go with the skull?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want it to make it look like he’s climbing out of there. So, so I went away with the order to make him some skulls, and claws and some backbone and stuff like that, shoulders and stuff, so that he could see the actual climbing of the creature right through the floor into his garden. And so, he’s all excited about that you have some parking spaces downstairs that don’t have cars in it.’ He says, ‘Yes.’ And I says, ‘Is there any possibility that I can make the Fred Flintstone mobile off of the cartoon.’ And he started to dance like a little kid. He danced like he was a duck, you know. So he’s jumping up and down, he says, ‘You 108 can make Flint mobile?’ because he’s seen the irony of, of a Lamborghini, a Rolls Royce, a Maserati and a Flint mobile.’

Michael S.: Yeah.

Mike: You know what I’m saying?

Michael S.: The contrast.

Mike: The contrast of it, you know? So, he says, ‘I gotta have it. Do you need another check?’ And I says, ‘Mister, I’ll fill it out the check for the first check, you know, so I can just add to it.’ He says, ‘Oh my god, make me a Flint mobile. I gotta have it, I gotta have it.’ So, I went away from that with an order for more claws and more backbones and more Flint mobiles, so I didn’t make out the check yet. I figured I’d work on it for a while and also I wanted to get a good idea of what, you know what kind of check I could actually write it for. Of course, every artist in the world and everybody wants to put a million dollars in there you, you know, say ‘I want a million dollars,’ you know. With me the whole time that I was with this whole entire trip, all the way in the elevator, all the way to the top, I wanted my guys that worked the lot, that I had come with me, and it’s kind of funny because he’s a long-haired character, he’s got hair down to his waist and he’s like a hippie. And uh, I had him hold the cameras. I had five cameras in his hand, and as we walked around the apartment, I asked Mr. Shapery if I could take some photos and of course, he was more than delighted to show off some of his acquisitions and so, I took photos through the whole place and where the piece is gonna go and everything One of the things that I took a picture of, he has this most beautiful couch you’ve ever laid your eyes on. And it’s a davenport that’s a giant ‘S’ curve. It has a big, giant shaped like an ‘S’. Each little section is a place big enough for a person to sit. It’s a couch that can hold fifty people on it at one time. And he says, ‘I have this couch designed for my guests and stuff to come over when we have a party. Fifty people can sit here and no matter what seat you’re sitting in, you only need to look over 109 your shoulder to see the giant screen that comes down out of the ceiling he has. He says, ‘You know what, you know we just used our five rolls of film on the downstairs in this house, alone, you know the million-dollar beryl that makes up this kitchen, the cabinets of this kitchen and then we’d walk around taking shots of everything and then, even the view off the windows and stuff. And he says, ‘Damn, you haven’t been upstairs yet, Mike.’ And I says, ‘Son of a gun, shoot, we used up all the camera film and we haven’t even been upstairs.’ He says, ‘Come on up anyways. Let’s take a look at some of the stuff up here.’ So, we walk upstairs and the first thing you see is giant doorway that leads into a bathroom and you walk into the bathroom and there’s a waterfall that pours from the ceiling down a sheet of glass, down onto the floor with no way to get into the bathroom whatsoever. There’s only a big gap underneath it that’s three feet off the ground, and all you’re looking at is this big, giant waterfall, but you can see through the waterfall, there’s all sorts of bathroom behind it. There’s showers and different things and changing rooms and stuff. I say, ‘How do you get into the shower? How do you get in there, Mr. Shapery?’ And he says, ‘You gotta climb underneath the waterfall.’ I says, ‘What?’ And in the meantime, the walls are made out of solid, giant boulder rocks. Absolute rocks that make up the boulder of his bathroom and he says, ‘The Pirates of the Caribbean designer for Walt Disney made this bathroom me, personally.’ I says, ‘Oh my god, it looks just like something from The Pirates of the Caribbean,’ you know, you have these huge, giant walls, waterfalls, huge rocks, and I say, ‘This is amazing bathroom. The most amazing bathroom I’ve ever seen, even to this day.’ He says, ‘That’s the bathroom, now over here is the main bedroom,’ and he took me into his bedroom and what he showed me was the biggest round bed ever made. And when you sit down on it, he says, ‘Here’s why I sit like this,’ and jumps onto the bed with his feet and he spreads his feet apart and it’s a giant, round glass room and as he spreads his feet he says, ‘I watch the sun come up right here between my feet, and then as the day goes by, progresses through the day, I open up 110 my feet right here and I’m facing a different way because the bed moves very slowly and I watch the sunset between my feet,’ and he says, ‘it does it different every single day it’s so that the perspective is so, no matter what, the sun always comes up between his feet and always sets between his feet. Every single day is time different, so that for every day of the equinox. And I thought, ‘Man, I guess if you’ve got this kind of power and shit, you know, you gotta have that kind of bed, this kind of room.’ And the whole ceiling opens up, so you’re sleeping under the stars. It all slides open to become, under the stars, also with the bathroom, it opens up so that you can take a shower in the nude outside, where nobody can see because you’re the highest building in the area. I thought both of those it, ‘cause I done ran out of film. I was so bummed out. I didn’t fill out the check until later, I made the pieces and delivered ‘em to him and he ended up with them up there and it’s still there to this day. I didn’t make the check, because I wanted to make the Flint mobile first. And so, I worked on the sides to it, they’re made out of trees and I, and I worked on the front and the back, I went to a marble, granite quarry and I had pieces of granite big enough to make the big rollers in the front and the back of it. But, as I made the piece, or whatever, each piece was monstrously heavy, huge, the front wheel weighed like maybe three tons altogether, six thousand pounds and at some point, I realized, if I try to put this in his garage, it’s gonna collapse through into the floors below. So, I says, ‘Damn, you know, so I never make the Flint mobile, even to this day, I’m sure he’s bummed out that he doesn’t have the Flint mobile. Instead, I started to change my medium and I went to carving foam because you can make an artificial wheel that looks like it’s made out of granite and artificial sides to the car and, to me, I says, you know what. He probably wouldn’t appreciate that it’s not real. He wanted the real thing. And so, I never did show it to him, present it to him, or anything of the nature. I just blew it off and instead, I wrote the check for a nominal number, I didn’t fill out a whole lot of numbers on it, or whatever, I says, I’m just 111 gonna charge him a fair price for the skull and the pieces because I thought we had future business. I says, I don’t wanna write some stupid thing on there and have him say that’s ridiculous. Fifteen years go by and I’m in the jacuzzi at one of the resorts that I go to. I go to the jacuzzi, I’m sitting in there and the fiftieth richest man of San Diego happens to be sitting across from me. He’s a Korean gentleman that owns an architectural firm and his men drew the designs and made the and he says, ‘Oh you mean the Shapery Tower, Sandy Shapery?’ I says, ‘Yes.’ He says, ‘I know him very personally, I built that building. I’m the, I’m the guy that made the blueprints for the building.’ I says, ‘No way.’ He says, ‘Oh, that Sandy Shapery pulled a fast one on me.’ I says, ‘What did he do? What are you talking about?’ He says, ‘Oh, he gave me a blank check.’ I did the architecture for the building and he gave me a blank check and told me to fill it in for whatever I wanted and son of a bitch, if I didn’t fill it, I filled it in for three percent, which is the normal going rate for an architectural building in the world, buildings all over the world. In Singapore, in Dubai and everywhere else.’ He says, ‘Usually you charge three percent for the architecture work, so I put in three million dollars, ‘cause the building’s worth three-hundred and fifty million dollars. And he didn’t cash the check for me. He stopped the check. And I says, ‘why would he do that.’ He says, ‘Oh that son of a bitch, he made me fight. I had to go to court and fight for a year, just to get my three million dollars out of him. And after fighting for a year, that means I had to show in court every single time it cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars to take off from work to go down there just to show up for the case, so they wouldn’t drop it if I didn’t show up. And after a year of fighting, I finally got my money out of the guy and he meets me outside the courtroom and he says, ‘Oh, sorry I was such an asshole, it’s just a trick I do to all my contractors and stuff. Usually they just blow it off, they can’t afford to come every time, like you did. But he’s talking to Korean who wasn’t about to get cheated out of his money. And he says, ‘Usually, they just blow off the check and 112 just let me have whatever the item is for free because they can’t fight.’ And I thought, ‘Isn’t that clever?’ And so they had a kind of rapport, they kind of respected each other for having done it and the other guy respected him for showing up to get his money, so they became friends. And even to this day, they still go out boating and they go out to dinner and they go to different things, so, of all things, or whatever, I decided I’m glad I filled out the check for a nominal number instead of some crazy number because he never would have cashed it. So, I changed my medium and I was sculpting foam and I was in downtown LaHoya. I had rented a gallery and I had my own studio and gallery combination. I was carving pieces out in front of the gallery one day. I carved three hundred pieces and I had ‘em all on display right there, but they’re made out of heavy duty foam, the same thing they make surf boards out of, and I had all my pieces out and this lady comes down the sidewalk, right there, this is no LaHoya Boulevard and she’s got a Shetland pony behind her. She’s walking with a leash. And I turn to her, she’s a big beautiful lady, big blond lady, and I says, ‘Lady, that’s the biggest dog I’ve ever seen.’ And she’s says, ‘That’s not a dog, that Shetland pony.’ And I says, ‘Where are you gonna go down LaHoya Boulevard with a Shetland pony, looks so odd, out of place?’ She says, ‘I’m going over here to the Children’s Society, they’re gonna take pictures of children that are sick, or whatever, they’re gonna take pictures of ‘em to help ‘em heal.’ And I thought, ‘That’s a pretty noble thing to do,’ or whatever. So, she’s walking by and right then her little assistant catches up to her and says, ‘Mrs. Shapery, Mrs. Shapery,’ and so I run up to her, I says, ‘Are you Mrs. Shapery, Sandy Shapery’s wife?’ And she says, ‘Oh, I divorced that asshole years ago.’ And this is fifteen years later. She said, ‘I divorced that asshole years ago, man. He’s an idiot.’ I says, ‘Really?’ And so, I says, ‘I did the sculpture on top of the building, the skull.’ And she says, ‘Oh, god, I hated that thing. Every single that we invited over, Shapery would have that thing covered up and he would unveil it just to scare the shit out of all the guests.

Michael S.: (Laughing) Really?

Mike: She says, ‘That stupid thing is still up there and so is he. If you want to, you can go up and see him and see the sculpture. And so, I never did go up to him, yet. So, I probably have that in the back of my mind, go up and see him some day, you know. But I still have that bad taste in my mouth that I didn’t make him the Flint mobile, you know.

Michael S.: What a great story. You’ve told a lot of stories. I want you to give a conclusion, like you’re talking to someone who is new in business, and just maybe give them words of encouragement and just your ‘fatherly’ advice, let’s say.

Mike: I’ve read a lot of books in my life that deal with self-help, you know that try to make millions and opportunely ideas and stuff like that. I read from Zig Ziegler and Napoleon Hill and all the different greats, names I can’t even remember. I’ve seen every detailed video DVD I could find on all the subjects and stuff, hoping to get an insight on how to do things their way and to make millions in your lifetime and be happy and content and not tear your hair out working for the other guy. And the best piece of advice I’ve ever heard, and the best piece of advice I can give to somebody else, is the number one thing that you have to do to succeed in this world is to make a list. And you make you list so that it has to be goals that are realistic, it has to be goals that have a timeline to it, it has to be a goal that’s a perspective that you can actually visualize it being finished already, and it has to be something that’s obtainable and realistic. And the more you add to your list, to deal with it, the more that it’s gonna come true without even having to deal with any of it. You don’t have to actually do anything in life. All you have to do is write it down on a piece of paper, draw a picture of it and it will materialize in front of you and become a reality. And the best thing I’ve ever heard in my life from one of the books, I’m not sure who came up with the quote, but it’s conceive, ‘b’ is believe, and ‘a’ is achieve. So, if you can a, b, c every single thing that you do, if you can conceive of it as an idea and believe in it enough to write it down and to draw a 114 picture of it, you will achieve it. It will happen automatically, without anything. It’s called ‘the magic of a, b, c. And I’m sure it’s a truism. It happens to this day, I’m looking down a list right in front of me of all the things, that I’m going to accomplish in the future, of all the things I’ve done in the past, it’s all written down and part of my record of all the different things I’ve achieved and it’s very important to kind of keep ‘em and keep photos of everything, so that if you’re ever feeling downtrodden and your self-worth has dropped, or you don’t feel energetic enough to go out and try to accomplish a different job, or try to apply yourself to something different, I simply look back at all the things I’ve accomplished and it gives me self-esteem and it gives me self-hope and I go forward to achieve whatever it is that’s next in the future. And one of the things I’ve conceived and achieved in my life is when I was a kid watching the story about Treasure Island, you know the wonderful movie from Walt Disney, Treasure Island, and it has pirates that go up to a big, giant box full of booty and they reach with both hands and they pull up in the air and they have diamonds and pearls and emeralds and things pour out of their fingers and they have that wonderful look on their face, like they own the world. I did the same thing and I still, to this day, keep boxes full of treasure that I can simply say, ‘Alright, look at this.’ And I reach into my boxes of treasure and say, ‘Wow.’ Who knows what the actual say, ‘I’m never gonna be poor, I’m never gonna go hungry, I’m never gonna be homeless, I’m never gonna have any needs or wants because I have everything I could possibly conceive of already.

Michael S.: Mike, this has been incredible and I really appreciate you and you could see it all, it’s awesome.

Mike: One more thing, one day, Joan Rivers had a wonderful show on That was her show. And she had her daughter with her. What they do is they walk around New York and they grab people 115 that are climbing out of Lamborghinis and stuff and say, ‘Listen, mister, mister, can we interview you?’ And she’d stop and then they’d recognize her as Joan Rivers, so they felt not threat, she had a microphone, a boom and a camera man all with her at the same time. And so, they would film a few minutes of them interviewing different people that made millions of dollars in their life and she’d say, ‘How did you make your millions?’ And seen Donald Trump walking down the street. She says, ‘There’s Donald Trump.’ So she runs up to him, and he’s busy walking down the street, no entourage or anything and she says, ‘Donald, Donald, can we talk to you for a minute?’ and he turns around and see the camera and, of course, he’s no shy person. He wants to get that interview in there, so, so he says, ‘Sure, what do you want to know.’ And she says, ‘Can we see in your wallet?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, okay.’ So, he pulls out his wallet, and she takes his wallet from him and she opens it up and there’s nothing in the wallet. It has no money, no credit cards, no ID, no information, nothing. And he laughs and says, ‘I just carry it around because I want to carry it around.’ And she says, ‘there’s no money in it. There not nothing. How can you buy anything that you need?’ And he turned to her and said one of the most important life lessons that I’ve ever heard in my life. He says, ‘Lady, anything that I need, I own already. I own the business. If I need a haircut, I own beauty shops, if I need so literally I need nothing.’ And she made a comment, being Joan Rivers, the comedienne that she is, she says, ‘Gosh, I guess it really cuts down on the tipping, too.’ And he laughs as he walks away, ‘he says, I give the people the work, I don’t have to tip ‘em. They’ve got a job because of me.’ So, then he walks away. So now, five years goes by I’m watching the Joan Rivers show, How Did You Make Your Millions and she sees Donald Trump walking down the street, so she runs up onto him again, it’s five years later, he’s aged, she’s aged and she says, ‘Donald, can I talk to you for a minute?’ and he says, ‘Hi 116 Joan, how you doing?’ She turns around, she says, ‘Can I see in your wallet?’ and he says ‘sure,’ so he pulls out his wallet and there is still not a thing in it.

Michael S.: That’s brilliant.

Mike: Isn’t that brilliant? And the person that’s really wealthy in this world, they don’t buy what you’d call liabilities. This is out of the book, Rich Man, Poor Man. He says, ‘People that buy liabilities, which include single family homes, cars, trucks, boats, yachts, whatever it is, they don’t buy things that are liabilities that you have to continually pour money into. All they buy are assets. People that are very wealthy, they only buy assets. If you want a yacht, then you buy a fleet of yachts and rent them out, or you do charters, or you do research with it, or whatever it is that makes you money. He says the difference between an asset and a liability, is a liability costs you money from the moment that you own it and an asset makes you money from the moment that you own it. So, if you buy assets only in your life, your gonna make nothing but money. If you buy liabilities, you’re gonna lose everything you own.

Michael S.: Perfect, well stated. That's the end of our interview. For more great interviews like this, go to http://www.TheMoneyShot.info