It Takes Two Read online

  The rest of our resume consisted of collecting bottles and cans for recycling, and rounding up abandoned shopping carts in the grocery store parking lot so we could return them to their racks to collect the quarter deposit. A friend with a paper route had also let us fill in for him when he went on vacation once, but, like Dad’s rocks, the payoff just didn’t seem to justify the time and labor involved. We wanted to get richer quicker. And have fun while we were at it. Karate, for example, was fun. A karate job would be just the ticket. We took lessons at a local dojo and were getting good at it, but we weren’t ninja bodyguard material yet. And Maple Ridge wasn’t the kind of place where people needed to hire a ninja yellow-belt bodyguard, anyway, much less a matching set. Still, we would definitely keep our eyes peeled for future opportunities there.

  “We could sell something instead,” I suggested. If no one would hire us, we’d just become our own bosses. We could always build a lemonade stand. Who didn’t like lemonade?! Unfortunately, it wasn’t the lemonade part of that rhetorical question that was the deal-breaker—it was the “who” part. We lived on the edge of the city, where residential homes were mixed in with rural farms, so unless it turned out that cows had pockets, a disposable income, and an unquenchable thirst for something besides slobbery trough water, no way were we going to be able to drum up enough customers for a steady lemonade income. Or even much of a sporadic one, for that matter. Still, the idea of making something to sell was what intrigued us the most, so we kept brainstorming.

  One weekend, we were poking through a crafts fair with our mom when we spotted some decorative hangers for sale. Wire hangers were the coat closet equivalent of rocks in the horse pasture—on their own, they were worthless and had a way of always mysteriously multiplying when you weren’t looking. But here they were at the crafts fair, wrapped in colorful nylon ribbon, with people paying nearly $2.00 each for them! Jonathan and I picked one up for a closer look and quickly figured out how the simple knots were tied; it was sort of like the square-braiding every Cub Scout learns in order to make a lanyard keychain no parent in the history of the universe actually ever used. We could definitely DIY these hangers. Mom agreed to help with the tricky little rosettes at the top of each hanger, and JAM Enterprises was officially launched. (The company name stood for Jon, Andrew and Mom. None of us goes by the names our parents have always called us—I shortened mine, Jonathan lengthened his, and our older brother ditched his altogether to go by JD instead of James Daniel.)

  The wire hangers themselves were free, and the material to wrap them was just five bucks for a big roll, so our overhead was low and our profits were steep—we were able to charge $1.75 for each hanger, which cost us all of fifty cents to make. We got good enough at wrapping them that we could knock out a hanger in ten (me) to twenty (Jonathan) minutes. But we weren’t working for ice cream cones anymore: We had our eyes on a much bigger prize.

  When we were 5 years old, we had gotten to visit Dad’s native Scotland for the first time on a family vacation. Seeing all the medieval cliff-top castles and learning the colorful history of brave clansmen and noble knights got us hooked on our heritage long before Mel Gibson made kilts plaid cool again. We wanted to wave our family flag and wear the Scott coat of arms. We wanted to learn how to play bagpipes. But what we wanted most of all was a real sword. And by real, I mean a six-foot-long, two-edged claymore like the ones used by the original Highlanders.

  It cost around $1,200.

  Sure, it was a big number, but when you’re in second grade, $10 and $10,000 might as well be the same, because they both appear in your undeveloped little brain in the file marked “a lot.” They say that knowledge is power, but sometimes ignorance is a better running mate. You can’t be overwhelmed when you’re still too young to even be whelmed* yet. We just dug in and started working like crazy. Our parents gave us a list of family and friends we could try selling our hangers to and gave us permission to sell door-to-door as well. We worked up a sales pitch and tag-teamed everyone with the charm offensive. The trick was to keep the patter going back and forth between the two of us so no one had the chance to interrupt and say no.

  *Is that even a word? Maybe you should stick to math.

  “You can bring some color to your closets,” I would suggest.

  “And the soft fabric we wrap them in means no more hanger indents on your clothes,” Jonathan pointed out.

  “You’ll know whose hangers are whose in your house by the color-coding,” I added. There was even a discount for bulk orders, in case your family was large and being torn apart by constant conflict over hanger ownership.

  We used our top selling point to really clinch the deal: Each and every hanger was carefully crafted by hand to ensure the best quality.

  We were determined to have a respectable sword fund by the time the family returned to Scotland in five years, with maybe a few bucks left over to buy some Oor Wullie comic books. Oor Wullie was a spiky-haired kid who was always cooking up crazy get-rich-quick schemes that generally ended with the town constable giving chase and Wullie complaining, “I nivver get ony fun roond here!” We could relate to that. We had no time for fun anymore, either. We told our friends we couldn’t play because we had hangers to crochet. It made us go a little Martha Stewart. We started fiddling with different color combinations (blue-and-white was a hit; brown-and-yellow, not so much) and even scouted displays in the home section at K-Mart and local department stores to get an idea of what color schemes people liked best. We rolled out special holiday editions—red-and-green hangers for Christmas, orange-and-black for Halloween—because who wouldn’t want to decorate their home for the holidays with coat hangers?

  Then we scored the kind of jackpot small business owners dream about: We knocked on the door of a woman who turned out to own a chain of Americana gift shops in Japan. JAM Enterprises was going global, baby! We would probably be able to buy two swords and a battle-ax at this rate!

  Hanger demand had always outpaced supply, but now it was out of control, even with the freelance help of our brother, JD. To make matters worse, we were hamstrung by the labor restrictions of a factory fore-mom who forced us to shut down during school hours and at bathtime every night. We realized it was time to expand. We were going to have to subcontract. Our classmates were excited to earn their own money, too, so we set up workshop in our living room and paid everyone twenty-five cents per hanger, assigning them just the long, straight bottom stretches of wire—Jonathan and I did the tricky corners ourselves for quality control. We watched Care Bear marathons on TV while we worked. With each finished hanger, I tracked our profits on my mental abacus like a gambler counting cards. The next time we went to the Highlands, I calculated, we could get swords, shields, and armor to start a serious gladiator collection.

  We didn’t pay Mom for her rosettes.

  Predictably, both the hanger market and our interest in sitting inside all day to make them fizzled out after a year or so, but we weren’t ready to take early retirement and spend the rest of our days playing miniature golf and sipping virgin piña coladas poolside. We were obsessed with watching the balance grow in our bank passbooks. Back to the newspaper’s classified section we went to see what opportunities might be awaiting us now that we had run our own business. Maturity, experience, and managerial skills were on our side now, even if we couldn’t drive or work during school hours. Or evenings. Or holidays. Or whenever Jonathan got grounded* for being a brat.

  *Umm, you only get grounded if you get caught. And I’m too good for that.

  This time, our eyes fell on an ad the Parks and Recreation Department had placed. They wanted to hire clowns for birthday parties and parades. All you needed to do was sign up for six Saturdays of clown class and pass your clown finals to earn official clown certification.

  This was a no-brainer. We were born performers! We were always putting on shows for our parents and friends. I had acting in
my blood and Jonathan was funny without even trying.* We showed up for the Parks and Rec class and took our seats alongside the grown-up wannabe clowns, who all cast dismissive “awww, aren’t they cute” looks our way. Clowns are kind of cutthroat, come to find out.

  *Now that, I can definitely agree with. And Drew is a total drama queen.

  We loved clown school and aced every test of clown competency, from twisting balloons into dachshunds to juggling tennis balls (or oranges, or stuffed animals, or pretty much three of anything except rocks, which we still resented).

  We also learned some beginner’s magic tricks and how to apply clown make-up. I wore a bald cap with a tiny hat on it and became Curly the Clown, while Jonathan put on a rainbow wig and called himself Dimples. We graduated magna cum laude at the top of our clown class and were immediately hired by Parks and Rec to start working parades, festivals, and birthday parties for ten bucks a pop. We couldn’t believe we were getting paid to goof off. Our sword fund kept steadily growing.

  The novelty of becoming a different person with traits I could pick and choose is probably what first gave me the acting bug as a kid. I liked to experiment with different characters, which is great if you’re trying out a new pratfall at a kid’s birthday party, but not so great if you think you’re on Inside the Actors Studio and start overanalyzing your “craft” as Curly the Clown. Which is how I came to think I could wow the audience with my Pacino-like range by playing a sad clown once in a local parade. I moped my way along the parade route, head hung low, swiping at invisible tears and occasionally pulling an oversized tissue from my clown sleeve to blow my round clown nose melodramatically. The puzzled looks and lack of appreciative murmurs from the curbside spectators made me realize soon enough that no one wanted to watch a depressed clown turn a holiday parade into the Bataan Death March, but by then I was committed to the character and had to see it through. One thing our parents taught us from the time we were small was to always finish what you started. It was part of a so-called “cowboy code” that our dad drilled into all three of us boys when we were growing up.

  There are lots of interpretations of the unwritten Old West code of honor out there, attributed to everyone from Zane Grey to the Texas Rangers, but the version that served as our family’s moral Mapquest boiled down to a set of principles as simple and straightforward as they were timeless, among them:

  1. Take pride in every task, no matter how big or small

  2. Finish whatever you start

  3. Never break a promise

  4. Don’t turn your back on someone in need

  5. Ride for your brand

  Our work ethic, plus the hyper energy and slapstick humor that we came with, soon turned us into the reigning junior Bozos of Maple Ridge. (Not everyone was cheering us on: One adult rival seemed to think we were somehow cheating by being twins, and would loudly groan, “Not those two again,” if we were hired for the same gig.)

  Moms started asking for us specifically when they booked a party through Parks and Rec, and after a while, we realized that we had enough of a fan base to branch out on our own and rake in a whole lot more than ten or twenty an hour. The going rate in the private sector was $50 to $100 per hour. We made business cards and flyers and became rogue clowns. Rogue clowns in high demand. We even kicked it up a notch by investing in drywaller stilts so we could add a character named Stretch to our repertoire. Stretch came perilously close to becoming Squash early on when Jonathan decided to suit up and march out to the pasture where our horse Ringo was grazing to see if he could swing his stilt-leg over Ringo’s bare back. Ringo, it is important to note, was not your typical stallion, and only really liked children. He’d let you do just about anything, but if any of our horses wanted to be straddled by an 8-foot, polka-dotted clown, it was not going to be Ringo. Mom spotted Jonathan in the nick of time and ran out back to tell him to step AWAY from the horse.

  By the time we boarded the plane for a return trip to Scotland the summer we were 10, we had saved several thousand dollars—enough to afford not only swords and some shortbread, but probably our own knights and a round table as well. Maybe not a round table. Maybe a rectangular, 7-foot one with a live edge, custom-made from a slab of reclaimed acacia. Whatever, we would be totally prepared in the event medieval Vikings ever showed up to pillage Greater Vancouver.

  We had no intention of blowing our whole nest egg at once, though—we were too hooked on the challenge of seeing how much we could make and save, and a zero balance in our passbook would have seriously bummed us out. Our sense of pride shot to the moon once we arrived in Scotland: Our parents forgot to alert the bank they were traveling abroad, and their credit cards were temporarily frozen. It was up to us to save the family vacation. We happily floated Dad a loan.

  We left Scotland that summer with Oor Wullie comic books, a case of Scotland’s favorite Irn-Bru soda, plus our coveted claymore, and two broadswords, starting a collection that would become a lifelong obsession. (Yes, we have worn the custom-made suit of armor displayed in the great room of our Las Vegas house, and yes, it looks best on me.)*

  *Careful, your head won’t fit in that helmet . . .

  Even better, we left with the simple, unshakeable conviction that would carry us from decorating hangers to running a multi-million dollar empire with over 200 full-time and contract employees today: Nothing is out of reach if you’re willing to work hard. That challenge our dad threw down on our 7th birthday was the most useful multiplication table I ended up learning: Dream x effort = reward. No matter how big or small your dream is, if your effort is zero, you’re going to end up with zero at the end of the day. Likewise, the greater your effort, the bigger your reward.

  People say good things come to those who wait. I like to say that’s because the great things are already taken. You have to work really hard to get yourself ready for opportunities as they come. That takes preparation, education, and determination. Luck has nothing to do with it.

  We stuck with our clowning business until we hit high school and started itching for a new venture. We both still thrived on entertaining people, but applying and taking off our clown makeup felt like the world’s biggest time-suck once we were teenagers. Plus, Jonathan was deep in the throes of a clown identity crisis: Dimples sounded too babyish now that he was in eighth grade, and he had to establish street cred because image was everything in the eyes of high school girls.* When a well-respected clown about town named Bubblegum retired, Jonathan snapped up the name and created a new character. Because if you’re Jonathan, and you’ve fallen out of the top bunk as many times as he did before Mom finally said enough and gave us our own rooms, your thought process, too, would go something like this: Nobody will ever take me seriously as Dimples, but the name Bubblegum? That’s legit!

  *Let the hair obsession begin!

  High school changed the equation for us in another way as well: We became a trio instead of a duo, thanks to a kid named Pedro. Pedro, who is actually Iranian and named Pedram, caught our attention when we were out knocking around tennis balls on a public court one afternoon and Pedro kept riding past slowly on his bicycle, dinging a little bell. “Do we know that guy?” I wondered, after about the thirty-eighth time Pedro had dinged us. “Isn’t he that new kid in our homeroom? Maybe he wants to play us,” Jonathan said. That would be fun—we could totally destroy him on the court. Ding-ding, ding-ding. “Hey, c’mere!” we called over.

  Pedro did, in fact, want to play us, and after accepting our magnanimous offer to join the game, he proceeded to whip our butts. He was equally good when it came to volleying one-liners and insults, too. The three of us became instant best friends for life. Pedro was like a long-lost brother, the Persian triplet separated from us at birth. Mom and Dad considered him a member of our family, and Pedro’s very traditional parents in turn counted us as part of their huge, extended clan (we were deraaz-ali, “tall, skinny white kids.”)
/>
  Pedro was eager for us to impress the relatives, including some who would fly in from Iran for feasts and celebrations. Pedro taught us how to count to ten in Farsi, and had us stand up at the table, in front of five generations of their family, to proudly recite our numbers. Everyone’s jaws dropped. Then Pedro’s mother reached over to playfully slap me. Pedro, we discovered, had taught us some of the worst swear words in the Persian language. Fortunately, our unintentional gutter-mouths didn’t keep the party from ending the way they always did at Pedro’s, with the guests all singing and dancing. That warm family vibe and their joy at just being together definitely helped inspire us years later when we set about designing and building our Las Vegas dream home: What we wanted more than anything was a place where everyone we loved could come together to relax, have fun, and just hang out with each other. Singing and dancing optional but encouraged, Pictionary and Ping-Pong mandatory.

  At school, skateboarders were the self-anointed alpha kids. We didn’t skateboard; cool as that was, it wasn’t our jam. Besides, we weren’t the type of kids to pour everything into a single pursuit. That would be like deciding to eat Brussels sprouts and nothing else. Never gonna happen. Jonathan, Pedro, and I were all over the map in terms of all of our interests and skills—we were athletes, but also nerds; we were driven and goal-oriented, but we devoted as much effort to our pranks as we did to our studies and money-making schemes. I felt like I was in my zone whether I was playing on the basketball team or rehearsing with the drama club. If we were interested in some activity, we just went for it, without stopping to worry whether we “belonged” to any particular group.

  We had at least a toe in most of the usual high school cliques, and that fluidity turned us into our own clique: We were confident but never stuck up (cowboy code), and we pretty much ran the school like ambassadors-at-large. The clown suits may have been mothballed, but entertaining people and cracking them up was still our life’s mission, and we were smooth talkers who could get away with a lot. We would’ve been grounded until we were 27 if our parents knew half the stuff we did. Pedro was a willing and worthy accomplice unsuspecting instigator.