It Takes Two Page 3

  Our first big business venture with Pedro on board came in ninth grade, when we spotted these little personal safety devices called Kimo Blasters at a home show. They were marketed to attach to a purse or belt so you could pull a cord to emit an ear-splitting alarm if threatened. Sort of like bear spray for muggers and creepers.

  Jonathan and I had discovered our knack for sales in elementary school, when we decided we wanted to do something exciting for our class. We created a competition around our favorite book series. The best-selling mystery novels by Eric Wilson were the Canadian equivalent of the Hardy Boys, and we were eager to turn our friends on to the adventures of Tom and Liz Austen in such classics as Terror in Winnipeg or Vampires of Ottawa. As head of the Eric Wilson Fan Club at school, I had a vested interest in ginning up membership.

  We bought (or maybe snuck into a field and dug up?) a giant pumpkin, brought it to school, and announced that it would be the grand prize in our contest, which, best as I can remember, involved answering questions about a mystery novel, or maybe drawing something from one of the plots. We hyped it every day, at every opportunity (“WHO WILL WIN THE GIANT PUMPKIN? YOU STILL HAVE A CHANCE!!”), stirring a sort of mob hysteria with our own over-the-top enthusiasm. It was like we were giving away the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, except . . . not so much. We were giving away a mutant squash. Yet we were able to make everyone not only want a useless vegetable, but nearly riot over it. Once we’d discovered the power of persuasion, there was no going back. Which is why, in ninth grade, we decided to order fifty Kimo Blasters wholesale. Bought in bulk, they cost around four bucks each, but we figured we could sell them for at least twice that. Our sword fund had the capital to invest. And our hunch was right.

  We sold out in a day.

  Jonathan and Pedro started giddily crunching numbers and immediately wanted to bite off way more than I thought we could chew.

  “What if we order 10,000 units?” Jonathan suggested. “Heck, if we had the money, we could get 100,000. Then we could make a million dollars. If we bought a million, we could earn eight to ten million!” Pedro seconded the motion. I looked at the two of them with math-nerd pity, and shot them down with what I assumed was unassailable logic.

  “Guys, no. The only reason we sold these was because of family and friends, and they’re not buying any more. We’ve already saturated the natural market. Your projections are based on the market being warm, and the market is cold now.”

  Jonathan and Pedro were sure I was wrong and decided they’d just become blaster billionaires on their own, and maybe if I was lucky they would still invite me along for rides on their private jet.*

  *Maybe he could load our bags.

  They bought 300 more blasters, and sold maybe a couple of dozen door-to-door. They still stubbornly clung to the conviction that nationwide demand for personal alarms would skyrocket any day, and they would be the geniuses who had the market cornered. I’m all for positive thinking, but we’re talking about a country so nonviolent that it’s generally ranked just below Switzerland in lists of the world’s safest places to live. There’s a reason you haven’t seen CSI: Nova Scotia. Jonathan and Pedro sat on those stupid boxes of unsold blasters for years, until Jonathan finally decided to unload them on a buyer who’d take them off his hands for pennies on the dollar. When he went to the boxes in storage to check the inventory, though, he discovered that our brother JD had gotten there first—he’d been quietly giving away the blasters as gag birthday and holiday gifts for years, and the boxes were empty.*

  *We should have gone into burglar alarms instead.

  Salesmanship wasn’t a skill we only applied to the marketplace. We were lucky enough to attend a public school that was experimenting with an independent-learning model that let you complete courses at your own pace and allowed for a lot of creativity. Each course had twenty learning guides you had to complete for a year’s credit. We were always trying to turn assignments into original performances to knock out learning guides faster. If we were supposed to master restaurant vocabulary in French class, we’d do some slapstick routine playing a bumbling waiter and a demanding customer at a Parisian café, and we’d end up with an A because the effort we put into entertaining everyone made up for our butchery of subjunctive verbs.*

  *Parle pour toi.

  The school boasted state-of-the-art technology, including a professional editing suite, and we loved to spend countless hours writing, directing, filming, and acting in videos that we then convinced our teachers took at least as much time to produce as any book report.

  Before we were born, our dad was in the film industry, starting out as a stunt rider on a bucking bronc for a beer commercial, then moving on to acting before working his way up to jobs behind the camera as the director of the second unit. He stayed in touch with a lot of friends from those days, even after he moved on to a career as a counselor who worked with troubled kids. Since socialization was part of the therapy, he often included one or both of us on their field trips. One time, when Warren, one of the kids, expressed a keen interest in movie-making, Dad arranged a visit to the set of Look Who’s Talking Too, which was filming in Vancouver. I got to go along (wearing a white polyester suit) and met John Travolta and Kirstie Alley. Watching them bring a script to life, feeling the creative energy as the director and crew worked to make each scene flawless—even the routine, tedious parts of filmmaking grabbed my interest and excited me. I want to do this, I thought.

  Our drama teacher, Mrs. Evans, had gone to high school with Michael J. Fox, and she used some connections she had with casting directors to send some of her students out on auditions. When we were 15 or 16, Jonathan and I started getting background work with our friend Toni and landed some small roles here and there. We even landed a spot in a national Molson Canadian air-miles commercial that aired during the Grey Cup, the Canadian equivalent of the Super Bowl. We played twins who look out an office building window and spot some guy marching in the street, then race down to join him, starting a sort of flash-mob parade.

  Both of us knew by the time we graduated that we wanted a future in front of, and behind, the camera. We also knew that we didn’t want to be starving artists. We needed a steady income to put this plan into motion.

  Fresh out of high school, about to turn 18, we found ourselves right back where we had been at age 7: brainstorming ways to earn the money it would take to achieve our goal.

  We didn’t bother with the Help Wanted ads this time. We went straight for the cheesy infomercials on TV. Because who better to hang your entire future on than extremely loud strangers urging you to pulverize anything remotely edible (sunflower seeds, giant pumpkins) into delicious vitamin juice, or dial up a psychic to get an urgent message from the beyond (“Never wear plaid”). But wait, there’s more!

  YOU CAN MAKE MILLIONS BY BUYING HOUSES WITH NO MONEY DOWN!!

  That caught our interest. Operators didn’t have to stand by long to wait for our order. We were no strangers to sweat equity: Besides learning how to fix things around the farm as we grew up, we had just finished helping Dad build a big house and barn on a ranch our parents had bought in Alberta, where we had enrolled at the University of Calgary. The demand for student housing was always high; if we could just break into the real estate market, there was no way we wouldn’t make a profit. Our first investment turned out not to be a purchase at all: It was a house with an old lease that students kept passing down to one another. The rent hadn’t been raised in over a decade. A friend of a friend currently held it, and was leaving. We swooped in to take it over.

  The place was a disaster. The basement was crammed with forty years of student crap. It looked like a fraternity house for hoarders. We hauled out seven truckloads of garbage, then finished the basement and created two additional bedrooms. That became our rent-free pad. We rented out all the rooms upstairs and cleared an $800-a-month profit. That beca
me our seed money for the next project.

  This time, we found a $200,000 eyesore near campus whose previous owner evidently had a stucco fetish and an incontinent cat. And possibly some sociopathic tendencies: Everything was painted blood red. The walls gave me angry dreams. Nobody thought we’d be able to do it, and it did take a mountain of paperwork, but we actually managed to get the murderous house for practically nothing: just $250 down.

  That first house, in hindsight, was as easy as flipping would ever get. The fixes were mostly cosmetic—getting rid of the green shag carpet in the master bedroom, pulling stucco off the wall (accidentally taking big chunks of drywall with it), and repainting. We managed to turn five bedrooms into seven. All told, it took us three months. We lived rent-free in it for a year, renting out the extra bedrooms. Then we sold it and walked away with $50,000 clean profit.

  Real estate, we decided, would be the perfect job to keep us afloat while we chased our real dreams.

  Drew

  The flip side of knowing your identical sibling so well is . . . knowing them so well. There was no learning curve when it came to pushing each other’s buttons. We were both hardwired with the same owner’s manual.

  Naturally we squabbled like any brothers do—stupid stuff like, “stop breathing so loud”—but it rarely got physical. Unfortunately, our parents didn’t specifically forbid psychological and biological warfare.

  Our all-time Hall of Fame fight happened in ninth grade, when Jonathan and Pedro saved their lunches all week to stuff inside my locker, which they regularly broke into no matter how many times I changed the combination.

  When I next opened my locker after a long weekend, a cloud of fruit flies emerged. As an added bonus, some rancid black slime was oozing all over my notebooks. I slammed the door shut and was already fuming when Jonathan and Pedro came up behind me in the hallway and snapped the strap on my backpack. The strap broke, and all my books went flying. I went flying, too—right after Jonathan and Pedro, who took one look at my face and ran for their lives. I caught Jonathan right in front of the school. I hoisted his entire body up like a wrestler with ‘roid rage, then “gently” put him down onto the hood of an idling car waiting to pick some kid up in the Kiss and Ride lane. Jonathan wasn’t hurt, but the mom behind the steering wheel kind of lost it.

  Jonathan

  Long before Drew hurled me into traffic in the Kiss and Die lane, Mr. I Never Touched Him left his mark. There’s still a butt print on my head from him sitting on me in the womb.

  Pedro and I may have played some mischievous, lighthearted pranks on him now and then, but we abided by all international peace treaties and inflicted no physical harm. As far as I know, there are no provisions in the Geneva Conventions covering fruit-fly combat. For the record, the way we got his locker combination was for one of us to stand on either side of him, and look over his shoulder. Again and again.

  Because I am far too mature to whine about all the things Drew ever did to me, I’ve created a fun little game, instead, called

  When we were kids growing up, Mom and Dad always dreamed of having their own ranch in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

  Every summer, we’d load up the family station wagon with tents, sleeping bags, and the rest of our camping gear, then head through the deep valleys of British Columbia and over the mountains toward the big-sky prairies of Alberta, 600 miles along the Trans-Canada Highway. We passed the hours with our version of car karaoke, belting out the folk songs we’d sometimes perform as a family for the guests our parents led on trail rides back at our horse farm. If JD, Drew, and I tried to mix it up with the pop songs we’d hear on the radio, Dad would put a stop to it. He didn’t want Billie Jean knockin’ at his door, and there was no way he was ever going to Walk Like an Egyptian or provide backup to Four Non-Blondes.

  “It’s not real music,” he’d joke, “and the driver gets to pick the genre.”

  Rules are rules, so we’d usually wind up back at “Danny Boy” or “Scotland the Brave.”

  In the back seat, my brothers and I would play games, bicker, and try to make each other crack up until Dad’s arm reached over to blindly swat at us. “Stop giggling like a bunch of schoolgirls!” he’d scold, which only made us laugh that much harder, and before we knew it, Dad was laughing too. If we grew too quiet, though, Dad would grow suspicious: Falling asleep on this road trip was strictly forbidden. “You’ll waste the beautiful scenery!”* he said, which left us silently pondering whether bighorn sheep were such attention-seekers that they would pack up and move to Florida if we didn’t notice them for a 23rd or 24th—or 47th—time.

  *So if ungrateful children didn’t look, glaciers melt and the Rocky Mountains get sucked back into the earth.

  Dad is a rugged outdoorsman—the last person you’d ever find chanting “ohm” on a yoga mat—but he’s always known how to be 100 percent present in a moment, whether roping cattle in the high country or just sitting on a fallen log, strumming his guitar. He’ll tell you that he’s as awestruck by the Canadian Rockies today as he was when he first laid eyes on them 64 years ago. He wanted us to know that same sense of wonder,* even though we’d gazed out the passenger windows at the same forests, crystal-blue lakes, and rugged mountain peaks every single summer of our lives on that drive. Nothing was to be taken for granted.

  *By the way . . . the WORST seats in the wood-paneled station wagon were the rear-facing ones that put you on display for the car behind, but it was the only swat-free zone in the car . . .

  Still, I have to admit, Dad had a point we wouldn’t fully realize or have perspective on until years later: It really is pretty spectacular scenery.

  The trips to Alberta had been a tradition since we were babies. When we were toddlers Mom used to pin our sleeping bags tightly shut with giant diaper pins so we couldn’t wriggle out in the middle of the night and freeze to death or wander off to become grizzly appetizers. When we got old enough to hold a tent pole reasonably straight, and could be trusted to drive the stakes into the ground instead of each other, we were expected* to help pitch camp before going to explore the woods or catch some fish for dinner.

  *Jonathan says “expected” because he and JD always bolted off and I was the only one who actually did help.

  Ya snooze, ya lose!

  We’d take our time making our way through the Rockies, peeling off along the way for some great side adventures, like exploring the Gold Rush ghost town at a resort called Three Valley Gap, where we would stop to visit a famous old cowboy my parents knew. His name was Sky Floyd Drew, but everyone called him Sky Blue because he dressed only in blue, from his cowboy hat down to his boots. Mom told us he once broke the world record for spinning the biggest vertical rope loop, tossing it from the top of the CN tower in Toronto.

  Sky Blue hosted a Western revue every night at the Walter Moberly Theater at the resort, singing and performing fancy tricks with his lariat. When we were in the audience, he would throw his rope to lasso Drew or me, then bring us up on stage in front of hundreds of tourists from around the globe and make us part of the show. Neither of us was the least bit shy or reluctant. Having an audience excited us—even when it technically belonged to someone else. If ham-roping were in the Guinness Book, we probably could’ve clinched that record for Sky Blue, too. His performances got us all fired up about creating our own live shows someday, and maybe building our own Wild West town. Even back then, real estate and entertainment were twin ambitions, both literally and figuratively!

  Drew and I had a lot of fun talking about our Western town, and even once built a cardboard-box version in Dad’s office. But the idea didn’t really take off until it was just Dad and me making the Alberta drive once when I was around 14, and I told him what Drew and I had been thinking.

  A lot of parents probably would have just humored a kid with such a farfetched fantasy, or given him a reality check and shot it down righ
t away. But Dad climbed right on board and started hashing out all the details with me. We spent much of the ten-hour drive talking about saloon brawls and stagecoach robberies and everything you’d have expected to see in a real mining town in the 1800s. Would we be able to track down or replicate antique fixtures to make the saloon feel authentic? Were gallows outside the jail an insurance liability, or just too big of a downer? Dad and I spent our whole trip discussing my imaginary town like a pair of deep-pocketed developers mapping out a model community. I called it Silver City, after a real silver mining town in the Banff area around the end of the 19th century. By the time we reached Alberta, Dad and I had worked out staffing, marketing, and even the types of stunts required to put on the ultimate show.

  For our parents, though, Alberta beckoned as more than a vacation destination: It was their promised land.

  Dad was born and raised in the medieval Scottish market town of Lanark, where rebel knight William Wallace first drew his sword in the name of independence for Scotland, slaying the English sheriff Haselrig in 1297. (Wallace was played by Mel Gibson some seven centuries later in Braveheart, the Hollywood version of the uprising.) Dad made his own big push for independence when he was 17, but it was a toilet plunger he wielded, not a sword, and the story never got made into a movie. It was pretty epic, though.

  Dad was a horse lover who grew up watching Western movies and always pictured himself riding the open range someday with real-life cattlemen on a big ranch across the Atlantic. It wasn’t just the cowboys’ work that appealed to him: Dad also admired the simple, straightforward values of the frontier, where authenticity was more the measure of a man than ambition. He may have been entering adulthood at the dawn of the space race, but Dad was more captivated by rodeos than rocket ships.