Fullerton is in Orange County, but it’s in the North bordering La Mirada, so it’s practically in L.A. County. The loaded white kids and housewives of Laguna Beach in O.C.’s South would have to climb Fullerton’s myriad hills to find anything in common with the railroad suburb sitting in the shadow of Disneyland’s Matterhorn and Angel Stadium. In Fullerton like in many other suburbs in SoCal, the higher your altitude, the more money you make. Of Fullerton’s three high schools, Fullerton Union High sits smack in the middle of the city, serving the highlanders of the North and the lowlanders of the South. I know all this because I do research. I like to know what I’m getting myself into. Know your audience, as Nell would say.
I was a relieved to find out I wouldn’t be speaking to the entire student body. I was going to be speaking to students that were part of the ROP—Regional Occupational Program. I anticipated that my audience would skew more towards the lower income and/or academically challenged end since the rich and/or book smart kids would be too busy trying to make A’s. The rich and/or book smart kids would still have four years after high school to think about becoming doctors, lawyers, accountants, or engineers, or taking over the family business. These ROP kids were going to be firefighters, policemen, mechanics, landscapers, office assistants, drafters, carpenters, dental hygienists, gaffers, and so on.
My stage was the front of a classroom. I didn’t need a microphone. There was no need to dim the lights since I despised the use of PowerPoint. All eyes were focused on me, not some bullet list of fragments.
“You’re probably all wondering what I was like in high school. Maybe you’re not, but I’m going to tell you anyway. I was stoned or drunk maybe ten percent of the time I was there—pot and the occasional acid trip. I did get laid but never hooked up with what you would call an A-lister. The band and drama geek girls had a thing for me. I myself had a thing for the goth chicks but could never manage to get myself dolled up enough to impress one of them. Back then in a southern town, goths were a rare sight. It wasn’t a mainstream thing like it is today. Yeah, I see you rolling your eyes back there, Siouxsie. You’re a normal teenager rebelling against the same stuff every teenager rebels against. You’re just not that original.
“So I muddled my way through math with passing grades. I did all right in English. To be honest with you, I am quite the speller. I wrote a few articles for the school paper. Despite my mediocre showing in high school, I’ve still found success doing what I love to do.
“The secret is pretty simple. I’ve always done what I love doing. During that other chunk of time when I wasn’t wasted or trying to pass a class, I had a camcorder in my hand, and I would talk to people and document their existence. I would talk to anyone about anything. All the money I made working at the ice cream parlor went towards blank tapes. I let everyone in my town know that they were to dispose of their old videocassettes through me alone so I could degauss them and reuse them. I edited, I dubbed, and I’d show the tapes to my friends and family. The more I did it, the better I got at doing it. I followed this one kid around in my art class for three weeks because I thought he was going to be the next Van Gogh. It was probably one of the most in depth character studies I did in high school. This talented guy ultimately ended up in prison for dealing meth. He wanted to cut corners. He couldn’t wait to see where his talent would lead him, and he lost his way. He went to jail, while I ended up hosting a show on the Classic News Channel.
“Success didn’t happen overnight for me. I can’t even count how many times I had pitched my show to low level network execs only for it to be rejected. I was good enough at producing and editing news magazine segments that I could earn a living working at a few networks and even win an award every now and then. But I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do. Then along came a little thing called the internet. I had found a way to distribute all the little idiosyncratic lives I had documented to the world, and slowly but surely the shows began to attract a following. That’s when the network execs began to realize the opportunity they had been missing out on. I’d been out of high school close to twenty years before I was making money doing what I wanted to do.”
Their eyes were glazing over. Here I thought my little monologue had enough shock value to snag their attention and keep them interested in my boring yet atypical life. Maybe it was just too close to graduation. Maybe the kids were just too jaded from all the fake reality shows they were watching. It was time to summon more dramatic life experiences from people other than myself.
“Like a lot of y’all, I knew early on what my calling was. But there isn’t any rule that says you can’t change lanes further down the road. I had a buddy in high school who loved playing video games. I carried around a camcorder; he played video games. He got into a good college. He got his teaching credential. He became a teacher, a noble profession. After teaching for a couple years, he felt like something was missing. When he was teaching or when he was grading tests, all he could think about was getting home to play video games. Then it dawned on him that maybe he should somehow make video games a bigger part of his life. He took a minimum wage job as quality assurance tester for a game studio. He started to teach himself how to program. He ultimately became a game producer. He now produces video games that embed educational elements blending his love of video games with his training as a teacher. Some of you guys have probably played Skate or Spell. How about Protein Hunters or Slope Shooters? Or the number one selling Where in the Heck Is Buford San Francisco? He was lead developer on the latest version of that one.”
Crickets. I scanned the room to make sure the kids were alive. There were a couple kids in the front row, who seemed to be paying attention. I was losing the rest of them.
“The reason I’m telling you about my story and my buddy’s story is so you can take away some lessons from our experiences. ‘Never give up.’ ‘It’s never too late.’ ‘Always be doing.’ ‘Set goals.’ Blah, blah, blah. What you really want to know is, ‘What do I have to do?’ ‘Show me the way, Sheldon.’ ‘Give me the easy-to-follow instructions.’ Unfortunately, there are too many of you here for me to hand out individualized road maps. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. A handful of you lucky randomly chosen bastards are going to get personalized advice from yours truly. The rest of you are welcome along for the ride and will hopefully take something away for yourselves as well. Someone is paying me to be here. I want you guys to get your money’s worth.”
The blank faces morphed into bemused and befuddled looks.
“All right. Who here wants to talk about themselves today?”
The kids looked around waiting for someone to make the first move. Would it be a leader, a cool kid, someone they respected? Or would it be that guy who always raises his hand but no one liked?
“Come on guys. We’re talking about your future here. You may think I’m full of shit, but I guarantee you I’ve talked to a gazillion more people than you have with incredibly varied backgrounds. I’m a lot better at talking to than talking at. Any takers? It’s only advice. You don’t have to follow it.”
I wasn’t going to let them off the hook. One of these kids was going to talk.
“Okay. Who wants five bucks?”
They all started raising their hands. I pulled a five out of my wallet.
“Okay. First one up here gets it.”
A kid with a chinstrap beard and an Angel hat on blasted up from the second row knocking a heavy-set young lady out of the way.
“We have a winner. So, Pamplona, what’s your name?”
“Warren.”
“Well, Warren, you are a lucky man today because in addition to this five dollars, you also get the privilege of speaking with me today in front of your friends.”
“You tricked me, man.”
“No, you tricked me. You made me pull out my wallet to get you up here. You’re a sharp man, Warren—a keen negotiator. So tell us, Warren, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I’m going to be an auto mechanic.”
“Well, surely you’re not just going to work in a garage for some guy making shit wages for the rest of your life? There has to be something more. Are you looking to get into management? Are you going to be a service advisor at a dealership? Maybe join a pit crew for NASCAR or Indy.”
“I want to run my own shop.”
“Well, you’re definitely taking the right step by taking advantage of the ROP. I’m sure you’re also fiddling with cars in your spare time.”
“Yep. I’ve got a Ford Focus I’ve been modding.”
“Customization. Nice. It must be a growing market after all those Fast and Furious movies and all those shows on TLC and Discovery. Are you going to specialize in tuners or are you going to do standard repair work as well?”
“I mainly want to work on tuners.”
“Hmmm. That’s still a pretty small slice of the driving population. Plus a lot of folks tune their own cars. You’re going to have to be pretty badass to capture enough of that market to sustain yourself.”
I could sense Warren in his head counting all the people he knew who drove modified cars who didn’t work on their own cars. It didn’t take him long.
“It would probably be a good idea to mix in some standard repair work. If you can take a transmission apart and put it back together, that’s a pretty valuable skill. Even if you don’t make it on your own, you could always work at some place like Aamco.”
“Trannies are pretty crazy.”
“Oh, I know. Trannies are fucking crazy.”
I never expected to say something like that at one of my speaking engagements. I could cross that one off the list. Now I had a dozen more sentences that I wanted to try to squeeze in before my career as a public speaker was over.
“You’re not going to mind spending a few years in an apprenticeship somewhere to get a good feel for all the different cars and things that can go wrong with them. I mean, you’re not going to make a lot of money opening up a shop and having to turn people away because you don’t know how to fix their cars.”
“Nah. No problem. I know I’ve gotta pay my dues.”
“That’s good. Focusing on your goal helps get you through those tough times when you’re not making a lot of money and you have to do a lot of shitty jobs like cleaning up the garage and the bathroom. By the way, Warren, how are your grades?”
“School is not really my thing. Cars are my thing.”
“That’s great if you’re just an average mechanic collecting a paycheck. But if you’re running your own shop, you’ll wish school were your thing too. Let me make some connections for you. Math is at the core of finance and accounting. English and probably Spanish too are at the core of advertising and sales and just straight up communication. If you don’t know how interest works, you’re going to get ripped off when it comes time to find a deal on your heavy equipment. You won’t know whether to lease or buy because you won’t know how to calculate the present day value of the stream of payments you’ll be making. You won’t know how to budget for costs and overhead because you don’t know algebra. You may have a lot of clunkers rolling into your shop, but if you can’t present yourself in an intelligent manner, I doubt you’ll be seeing too many new Beamers and Benz-Os for regularly scheduled maintenance. It’s those people who can’t change their own oil that are the cash cows. Customer loyalty is how you’re going to build your business.”
Warren and I had a good little talk. When we finished up and I called for a new victim/volunteer I was surprised to see every kid in the room raise his or her hand. I didn’t even have to pull out a five-dollar bill. I was in demand again. I convinced one girl she needed a college degree. I convinced another to enter California state politics after her prospective stint as a public defense attorney. I convinced a kid who wanted to get into construction to retake trigonometry. I called it speed mentoring. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to follow up with each one, so I told the kids to find someone like me whom they could lean on every once in a while for quick dose of reality. And then I got the hell out of there before anyone had the chance to ask me how I had enough time to spend talking to high school students.
Stuck on the 91 westbound I got a call. It was Carla. Knowing I would be talking to a cop I donned my Bluetooth headset and answered the phone.
“So how did it go, amigo?”
“Before or after I dropped my pants onstage?”
“You didn’t!”
“No. But I think I did drop a few ‘F’ bombs.”
“Nothing they haven’t heard before.”
“Exactly.”
“So were they into it?”
“I think so. They all seemed pretty satisfied at the end. They may have just been glad it was over. My approach was a little unorthodox, and I think my normal sense of humor isn’t suited for a high school setting. I had a bunch of stuff I was going to do that I sort of just threw out the window in favor of a more personal and improvised discussion. I don’t know if I can sustain that kind of approach. I might need to just come up with more of a canned routine.”
“It will take some time to get it dialed in, and even after you’re a seasoned veteran like me, you’ll still have bad days. My experience is that if it’s canned, you can usually taste that it’s not fresh. But it sure is a lot easier to fly on autopilot.”
“I like to keep my hands on the wheel.”
“I was talking to Nell, and it looks like you’re already booked for another gig.”
“Tell me it’s not another high school.”
“Sorry, Charlie. It is.”
“Fuck. Can’t I get a group like the whores at the Bunny Ranch—something like that?”
“Keep dreaming. This time you’ll be at El Camino Real in Woodland Hills.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Those kids don’t need motivating. This is a disaster.”
“Boo hoo. Come on, Sheldon. Are you burning out on us already?”
“No. I love the new job, Carla. It’s just that an ex-girlfriend is a teacher at El Camino Real, and I really don’t have an interest in running into her.”
“Yikes.”
I was a relieved to find out I wouldn’t be speaking to the entire student body. I was going to be speaking to students that were part of the ROP—Regional Occupational Program. I anticipated that my audience would skew more towards the lower income and/or academically challenged end since the rich and/or book smart kids would be too busy trying to make A’s. The rich and/or book smart kids would still have four years after high school to think about becoming doctors, lawyers, accountants, or engineers, or taking over the family business. These ROP kids were going to be firefighters, policemen, mechanics, landscapers, office assistants, drafters, carpenters, dental hygienists, gaffers, and so on.
My stage was the front of a classroom. I didn’t need a microphone. There was no need to dim the lights since I despised the use of PowerPoint. All eyes were focused on me, not some bullet list of fragments.
“You’re probably all wondering what I was like in high school. Maybe you’re not, but I’m going to tell you anyway. I was stoned or drunk maybe ten percent of the time I was there—pot and the occasional acid trip. I did get laid but never hooked up with what you would call an A-lister. The band and drama geek girls had a thing for me. I myself had a thing for the goth chicks but could never manage to get myself dolled up enough to impress one of them. Back then in a southern town, goths were a rare sight. It wasn’t a mainstream thing like it is today. Yeah, I see you rolling your eyes back there, Siouxsie. You’re a normal teenager rebelling against the same stuff every teenager rebels against. You’re just not that original.
“So I muddled my way through math with passing grades. I did all right in English. To be honest with you, I am quite the speller. I wrote a few articles for the school paper. Despite my mediocre showing in high school, I’ve still found success doing what I love to do.
“The secret is pretty simple. I’ve always done what I love doing. During that other chunk of time when I wasn’t wasted or trying to pass a class, I had a camcorder in my hand, and I would talk to people and document their existence. I would talk to anyone about anything. All the money I made working at the ice cream parlor went towards blank tapes. I let everyone in my town know that they were to dispose of their old videocassettes through me alone so I could degauss them and reuse them. I edited, I dubbed, and I’d show the tapes to my friends and family. The more I did it, the better I got at doing it. I followed this one kid around in my art class for three weeks because I thought he was going to be the next Van Gogh. It was probably one of the most in depth character studies I did in high school. This talented guy ultimately ended up in prison for dealing meth. He wanted to cut corners. He couldn’t wait to see where his talent would lead him, and he lost his way. He went to jail, while I ended up hosting a show on the Classic News Channel.
“Success didn’t happen overnight for me. I can’t even count how many times I had pitched my show to low level network execs only for it to be rejected. I was good enough at producing and editing news magazine segments that I could earn a living working at a few networks and even win an award every now and then. But I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do. Then along came a little thing called the internet. I had found a way to distribute all the little idiosyncratic lives I had documented to the world, and slowly but surely the shows began to attract a following. That’s when the network execs began to realize the opportunity they had been missing out on. I’d been out of high school close to twenty years before I was making money doing what I wanted to do.”
Their eyes were glazing over. Here I thought my little monologue had enough shock value to snag their attention and keep them interested in my boring yet atypical life. Maybe it was just too close to graduation. Maybe the kids were just too jaded from all the fake reality shows they were watching. It was time to summon more dramatic life experiences from people other than myself.
“Like a lot of y’all, I knew early on what my calling was. But there isn’t any rule that says you can’t change lanes further down the road. I had a buddy in high school who loved playing video games. I carried around a camcorder; he played video games. He got into a good college. He got his teaching credential. He became a teacher, a noble profession. After teaching for a couple years, he felt like something was missing. When he was teaching or when he was grading tests, all he could think about was getting home to play video games. Then it dawned on him that maybe he should somehow make video games a bigger part of his life. He took a minimum wage job as quality assurance tester for a game studio. He started to teach himself how to program. He ultimately became a game producer. He now produces video games that embed educational elements blending his love of video games with his training as a teacher. Some of you guys have probably played Skate or Spell. How about Protein Hunters or Slope Shooters? Or the number one selling Where in the Heck Is Buford San Francisco? He was lead developer on the latest version of that one.”
Crickets. I scanned the room to make sure the kids were alive. There were a couple kids in the front row, who seemed to be paying attention. I was losing the rest of them.
“The reason I’m telling you about my story and my buddy’s story is so you can take away some lessons from our experiences. ‘Never give up.’ ‘It’s never too late.’ ‘Always be doing.’ ‘Set goals.’ Blah, blah, blah. What you really want to know is, ‘What do I have to do?’ ‘Show me the way, Sheldon.’ ‘Give me the easy-to-follow instructions.’ Unfortunately, there are too many of you here for me to hand out individualized road maps. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. A handful of you lucky randomly chosen bastards are going to get personalized advice from yours truly. The rest of you are welcome along for the ride and will hopefully take something away for yourselves as well. Someone is paying me to be here. I want you guys to get your money’s worth.”
The blank faces morphed into bemused and befuddled looks.
“All right. Who here wants to talk about themselves today?”
The kids looked around waiting for someone to make the first move. Would it be a leader, a cool kid, someone they respected? Or would it be that guy who always raises his hand but no one liked?
“Come on guys. We’re talking about your future here. You may think I’m full of shit, but I guarantee you I’ve talked to a gazillion more people than you have with incredibly varied backgrounds. I’m a lot better at talking to than talking at. Any takers? It’s only advice. You don’t have to follow it.”
I wasn’t going to let them off the hook. One of these kids was going to talk.
“Okay. Who wants five bucks?”
They all started raising their hands. I pulled a five out of my wallet.
“Okay. First one up here gets it.”
A kid with a chinstrap beard and an Angel hat on blasted up from the second row knocking a heavy-set young lady out of the way.
“We have a winner. So, Pamplona, what’s your name?”
“Warren.”
“Well, Warren, you are a lucky man today because in addition to this five dollars, you also get the privilege of speaking with me today in front of your friends.”
“You tricked me, man.”
“No, you tricked me. You made me pull out my wallet to get you up here. You’re a sharp man, Warren—a keen negotiator. So tell us, Warren, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I’m going to be an auto mechanic.”
“Well, surely you’re not just going to work in a garage for some guy making shit wages for the rest of your life? There has to be something more. Are you looking to get into management? Are you going to be a service advisor at a dealership? Maybe join a pit crew for NASCAR or Indy.”
“I want to run my own shop.”
“Well, you’re definitely taking the right step by taking advantage of the ROP. I’m sure you’re also fiddling with cars in your spare time.”
“Yep. I’ve got a Ford Focus I’ve been modding.”
“Customization. Nice. It must be a growing market after all those Fast and Furious movies and all those shows on TLC and Discovery. Are you going to specialize in tuners or are you going to do standard repair work as well?”
“I mainly want to work on tuners.”
“Hmmm. That’s still a pretty small slice of the driving population. Plus a lot of folks tune their own cars. You’re going to have to be pretty badass to capture enough of that market to sustain yourself.”
I could sense Warren in his head counting all the people he knew who drove modified cars who didn’t work on their own cars. It didn’t take him long.
“It would probably be a good idea to mix in some standard repair work. If you can take a transmission apart and put it back together, that’s a pretty valuable skill. Even if you don’t make it on your own, you could always work at some place like Aamco.”
“Trannies are pretty crazy.”
“Oh, I know. Trannies are fucking crazy.”
I never expected to say something like that at one of my speaking engagements. I could cross that one off the list. Now I had a dozen more sentences that I wanted to try to squeeze in before my career as a public speaker was over.
“You’re not going to mind spending a few years in an apprenticeship somewhere to get a good feel for all the different cars and things that can go wrong with them. I mean, you’re not going to make a lot of money opening up a shop and having to turn people away because you don’t know how to fix their cars.”
“Nah. No problem. I know I’ve gotta pay my dues.”
“That’s good. Focusing on your goal helps get you through those tough times when you’re not making a lot of money and you have to do a lot of shitty jobs like cleaning up the garage and the bathroom. By the way, Warren, how are your grades?”
“School is not really my thing. Cars are my thing.”
“That’s great if you’re just an average mechanic collecting a paycheck. But if you’re running your own shop, you’ll wish school were your thing too. Let me make some connections for you. Math is at the core of finance and accounting. English and probably Spanish too are at the core of advertising and sales and just straight up communication. If you don’t know how interest works, you’re going to get ripped off when it comes time to find a deal on your heavy equipment. You won’t know whether to lease or buy because you won’t know how to calculate the present day value of the stream of payments you’ll be making. You won’t know how to budget for costs and overhead because you don’t know algebra. You may have a lot of clunkers rolling into your shop, but if you can’t present yourself in an intelligent manner, I doubt you’ll be seeing too many new Beamers and Benz-Os for regularly scheduled maintenance. It’s those people who can’t change their own oil that are the cash cows. Customer loyalty is how you’re going to build your business.”
Warren and I had a good little talk. When we finished up and I called for a new victim/volunteer I was surprised to see every kid in the room raise his or her hand. I didn’t even have to pull out a five-dollar bill. I was in demand again. I convinced one girl she needed a college degree. I convinced another to enter California state politics after her prospective stint as a public defense attorney. I convinced a kid who wanted to get into construction to retake trigonometry. I called it speed mentoring. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to follow up with each one, so I told the kids to find someone like me whom they could lean on every once in a while for quick dose of reality. And then I got the hell out of there before anyone had the chance to ask me how I had enough time to spend talking to high school students.
---
Stuck on the 91 westbound I got a call. It was Carla. Knowing I would be talking to a cop I donned my Bluetooth headset and answered the phone.
“So how did it go, amigo?”
“Before or after I dropped my pants onstage?”
“You didn’t!”
“No. But I think I did drop a few ‘F’ bombs.”
“Nothing they haven’t heard before.”
“Exactly.”
“So were they into it?”
“I think so. They all seemed pretty satisfied at the end. They may have just been glad it was over. My approach was a little unorthodox, and I think my normal sense of humor isn’t suited for a high school setting. I had a bunch of stuff I was going to do that I sort of just threw out the window in favor of a more personal and improvised discussion. I don’t know if I can sustain that kind of approach. I might need to just come up with more of a canned routine.”
“It will take some time to get it dialed in, and even after you’re a seasoned veteran like me, you’ll still have bad days. My experience is that if it’s canned, you can usually taste that it’s not fresh. But it sure is a lot easier to fly on autopilot.”
“I like to keep my hands on the wheel.”
“I was talking to Nell, and it looks like you’re already booked for another gig.”
“Tell me it’s not another high school.”
“Sorry, Charlie. It is.”
“Fuck. Can’t I get a group like the whores at the Bunny Ranch—something like that?”
“Keep dreaming. This time you’ll be at El Camino Real in Woodland Hills.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Those kids don’t need motivating. This is a disaster.”
“Boo hoo. Come on, Sheldon. Are you burning out on us already?”
“No. I love the new job, Carla. It’s just that an ex-girlfriend is a teacher at El Camino Real, and I really don’t have an interest in running into her.”
“Yikes.”
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