by Chip Gaines
I called my parents to let them know that I was taking off for three months and would return fluent in Spanish—at least that was the goal. They weren’t quite as supportive of this plan as Joanna was.
“Chip, you have multiple businesses,” they said. “This isn’t college summer vacation anymore, son. Who wouldn’t want to go spend a few months on a beach in Mexico? But you have guys who are counting on you to help feed their families now!”
This negativity really threw me for a loop because it was so out of character for my parents. Even though they sometimes wanted me to play it safe, they had also been my biggest cheerleaders and were the ones who had taught me to just go for it in life. For them to question my plans this way, especially now that I was a pretty well-established grown-up, definitely surprised me. But for some reason, the fact that Joanna was on my side really made this thing feel doable. So against my parents’ better judgment, but with Jo’s support, I signed on with the program. I was headed to Playa del Carmen for just upward of ninety days, and I was going to learn Spanish if it was the very last thing I did.
Joanna was thoughtful enough to throw me a going-away party so that my friends and family could come say good-bye. No fewer than eighty people came to see me off. I thought it was sweet and all, but it also seemed a little strange, given the fact that I was only going to be away for three months. Still, I’ve never been one to turn down a party. I found myself walking around from person to person, explaining how I couldn’t wait to drive down and really learn from the culture. I was really working the crowd, and I gave a pretty touching speech that even made my mom tear up a bit.
Looking back, Jo admits she can’t imagine what she was thinking or why she encouraged that kind of behavior. But she did. She even ordered me a cookie cake that said “Adios, Amigo!”
Back then Joanna had a full-time job keeping the books for her dad at his Firestone dealership in Waco. I was always fascinated with how fast she could enter the numbers on the calculator with one hand while flipping through invoices with the other hand. She worked those numbers like a madwoman and wouldn’t come up for air until the last invoice was entered. Jo could reconcile that account down to the penny. I had no doubt that when I left for my trip, my businesses were going to be in good hands. I told all of my guys (in very broken Spanish) that if they needed anything pertaining to work, they could find her just up the road at Firestone from eight to five.
Somehow, in all of my excitement about leaving, I didn’t really think through the fact that what I was expecting of Jo was going to be very difficult. I knew she had a full-time job, but I severely underestimated the amount of effort it would take for her to keep my businesses afloat for the next three months. But I kept trying to convince myself that I wasn’t asking too much of her. All she had to do was . . .
To do’s:
Joanna:
- manage three irrigation jobs
- check in on a retaining-wall build
- collect rental checks from 30 students on the first of each month
- Deposit those checks (also on the first of each month)
- make sure all subs get paid
- check on the campus laundromat two times per week to ensume we aren’t short on supplies
- water my plants
- Feed my cows
- Feed my fish
Of course, I also had allllll this stuff to do before I left . . .
Chip:
- Pack bag
- Get Cash
- make roadtrip mixtape
- Go to Paradise tan to get my base tan
This may be a good time to fill you in on how I kept up with my finances back then. I was pretty much self-taught in all my operating procedures as a business owner. It should suffice to say that I didn’t actually bother to balance a checkbook—not to mention, I never really knew how much money I had in the bank. This was a few years before you could just log in and immediately have your whole financial universe at your fingertips. The way I operated was pretty old-school. I wrote checks when it felt right and didn’t write them when it didn’t. I kept a wad of cash in my pocket, and I knew things were good if it felt pretty thick. I knew to exercise restraint when it felt a bit slender. These businesses were currently responsible for all the extra dinero* I was taking with me to make this trip possible.
As if my plan weren’t complicated enough, just a few days before I left town I found out that my truck’s radiator was overheating. I took it into the repair shop, and they explained that there was a small crack. The radiator would definitely need replacing, but there wasn’t money in the budget for a repair like that. So against the advice of the mechanic, I put some radiator sealant in it and prayed the truck would make it to the playa.** Just as I was leaving the shop, he reminded me that I’d better take a five-gallon jug of water as backup, just in case. That made sense. I figured that between the sealant and stopping every two hundred miles or so to fill the radiator up with water, I’d (most likely) make it.
So I loaded up the water jug, along with my suitcase and my trusty backpack. Then I grabbed mi perro***—Shiner, my Chow-mix mutt of a best friend and partner in crime. And off we went, leaky radiator and all.
It was a thirty-six-hour drive to the language school, and Shiner and I had budgeted a full week to get there. We allowed time to make plenty of pit stops along the way and not wear ourselves out with the drive. Every couple hundred miles, I would stop to refill my radiator and top off the five-gallon jug. There always seemed to be a little town at about that point where a lone gas station served my purposes perfectly.
But then something changed. Wouldn’t you know it? Twelve hours into the trip, in the middle of the Mexican desert, my truck started to overheat.
I’m not great with cars like Jo’s dad, but even I was smart enough to realize something was seriously wrong. The radiator had gone from requiring water every two hundred to three hundred miles to now needing it every thirty miles or so, and I had run out of water. So there I was on the side of the road with a steaming car, hood up, in the middle of nowhere. No town. No gas station. There wasn’t a soul in sight.
I was feeling great. After all, two things I love most—problem solving and adventure—were both staring me right in the face. Here I was in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country, language-less, with this amazing opportunity to overcome all odds.
I stood on the roof of my truck to get a feel for my situation, and I noticed a small stream that looked to be a ways off. I jumped down, grabbed my lasso,* picked up the empty five-gallon jug, and whistled at Shiner—“C’mon, boy,” and we were off.
We walked what seemed to be at least a mile in that hot sun to the stream I’d seen, filled up the jug, and were on our way back to the truck when we happened upon a lone Brahma bull. I’ve been around lots of cattle in my day, but I can tell you for a fact that there’s just something different about a Mexican bull. How we’d managed not to see him on the way to the stream was a moot point. Regardless of how he’d gotten there, he was now between us and the truck—and he was fired up.
I must’ve looked like a straight-up clown, with my mutt, my five-gallon jug of water (which weighed about forty pounds full), and my cheap lasso, running for my life from a bull in the middle of God knows where. The more I defended myself against this raging animal, the more precious water I lost. And that dang lasso seemed to be doing more harm than good. The only thing saving me now was Shiner’s ferocious defense. By this point the jug had become so light that I could actually use it to strike this beast, which was the equivalent of tickling him with a feather.
We finally made it around him to the other side of that pasture, and in that moment I was honestly just glad to be alive. I quickly poured what was left of the agua** into my scalding radiator, and I can still remember the sizzling sound it made. I had drenched the pasture and the bull with most of the water my truck needed desperately to make it down the road, and there was no way I was going to cross that bull’s path again to go back to that
far-off stream.
My vehicle limped along for five miles or so until we happened upon a little gas station. I’m not going to sugarcoat this. Had that station been any further away, both Shiner and I might have died like Pancho and Lefty in the Mexican desert.
Luckily there was an attendant on-site and, due to our inability to communicate, I invited myself to look around the place and rummage through the back of his shop. As I opened drawers, I came across a half-used tube of J-B Weld. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s basically an industrial version of Super Glue. Together the attendant and I took out my radiator, put this magic ointment on the leak, and then reinstalled it. It was clear by the look on the gentleman’s face that he wasn’t sure whether or not it would work, but it was our best shot.
Considering that the attendant and I weren’t sure that the solution we’d come up with was going to work at all, I had to come up with a plan B. So I pulled out my phone card and used the pay phone at the station to call one of my guys back home. He had told me before I left that if I needed anything at all, he had family in Guanajuato. Now a third of the way into the trip, I knew I had to be getting close to that city in central Mexico.
It wasn’t easy with his broken English and my almost nonexistent Spanish, but I managed to explain the situation to him and ask him to alert his family that I would be heading in their direction. It seemed a whole lot less risky to try to make it to Guanajuato than all the way to the beach. I was sure that if I could just get there, I’d be all right.
Somehow I did in fact make it to the front door of my friend’s madre,* hat in hand, just praying that she’d be willing to help. And boy, did she help.
The family didn’t know any English, and Lord knows I still didn’t know much Spanish. Regardless, they received me with open arms—and lots and lots of delicious food. There were fresh corn tortillas, beans like I had never tasted, and chicken they had raised on their small farm. There was also guacamole, homemade pico de gallo, and grilled fresh jalapenos. I realized this meal might very well have represented a week’s pay for this beautiful family. We ate and laughed and carried on for hours. What I thought would be a quick pit stop ended up being a three-day stay.
Before I hit the road, I tried to give my buddy’s mom a hundred dollars, which at the time would have equated to about a thousand pesos (the equivalent of a month’s wages in Mexico). She refused. She grabbed my face with both hands, pulled me in close, and explained adamantly that she didn’t want the money. But she did make me promise that as I traveled I would pray for her and her family. And somehow, miracle of miracles, I understood exactly what she was saying.
Something about our time together impressed me in a really meaningful way and gave me exactly what I needed to get on my feet and back on the road. Here I was immersing myself in the Mexican culture and, out of pure necessity, also starting to learn the language.
At the same time, I was now realizing how homesick I had become.
MEANWHILE, BACK IN TEJAS . . .
What I didn’t know, of course, was that back in Texas my master plan was starting to unravel. For me, collecting rent checks from less-than-responsible college students had become second nature. But I had not prepared Joanna for the amount of begging and pleading that the process required. Although her talent for bookkeeping was unmatched, I had sorely underprepared her for the events that were about to unfold.
When the rent checks didn’t come in, my subcontractors’ checks started bouncing. Vendors started calling. And one by one, my subs started tracking Jo down at her dad’s tire shop.
It quickly became clear to Joanna why my parents had been a bit opposed to my going to Mexico in the first place. They understood the amount of juggling it took for me to run my businesses, and they knew Joanna wasn’t prepared to handle all of these assignments in my absence without months of preparation. On top of that, she was finally coming to understand that the inner workings of my businesses weren’t all they were cracked up to be.
I hadn’t been fooling her per se. She just never would have guessed that not being able to collect and deposit one month’s worth of rent would have caused this much chaos. It had never crossed her mind that I had no backup. No reserve. Nada. (That’s Spanish for “nothing”!) The money I had taken with me to Mexico was all the money I had in the world.
Not surprisingly, Joanna’s father was furious. Back then, while we were dating, I referred to Jo’s dad as Mr. Stevens. Though he’s Jerry to me now, this story still scares me so much that I’d like to revert to calling him Mr. Stevens for the remainder of the chapter.
For as long as I had known him, Mr. Stevens had been questioning whether I had a legitimate job. And now here were all these people standing in the lobby of his tire shop, demanding the money I owed them. They were making a scene at his place of business, and Joanna was mortified. To say that Mr. Stevens had an impeccable business reputation in town was an understatement, and here I was compromising that.
Thank God this saint of a woman is quick on her feet. She realized exactly what was going on and called my dad in a hurry. Jo actually describes this as the first time she really got to connect with my parents, even though the whole connection was basically the three of them realizing I was delusional.
Jo drove to Dallas to have dinner with my mom and dad and to work the whole thing out on my behalf. They were able to access my bank account and temporarily lend me the money to pay my hardworking crew until I got home to collect the missing rent.
I’m really playing it cool here and glossing over some of the emotions, but they were all mad. I had deeply disappointed all of the people I most respected: Joanna, my parents, her parents. I’d really screwed this up.
MEANWHILE, BACK IN MEXICO . . .
Things were finally starting to look up. Shiner and I finally made it to Playa del Carmen and were getting acclimated to our new lives at the hostel there. And I found that I actually enjoyed sitting in a classroom and learning this new language, no matter how much work it took. For the first time in my life, being stuck at a desk wasn’t downright miserable. It finally clicked with me that maybe the reason behind learning this language in the first place far outweighed the pain caused by sitting in a classroom day after day.
I’ve heard about parents letting their kids take a gap year after high school, and that idea makes a lot of sense to me after my Mexico experience. When you force kids like me to sit in a classroom and “learn,” they struggle to get anywhere. But after getting away from school and discovering what they’re passionate about, they might actually want to learn. They soak it in. I sometimes wonder why we cram education down kids’ throats when the desire to learn comes and goes in life. Forcing it seems like a big waste of time. I say, don’t rush it. If it’s meant to be, it’ll come.
I was about two weeks into class when I aced my first test. I was all excited to find the nearest pay phone and call Jo to tell her about my first A. But when Jo answered the phone, she was already shouting—even before the operator finished informing me that she had accepted this international collect call. (I would like to add that these collect calls were somewhere around twenty dollars a minute, and I was calling her parents’ house.) After such an amazing day of learning Spanish on the beach, this was quite the buzzkill.
“Your business is a joke!” she yelled. “All these people are coming to my dad’s shop demanding to be paid, and there’s no money! Lucky for you, your dad is bailing your sorry butt out. You have three days to get back to Texas, or this relationship is over.” Her tone made it clear that she was not playin’.
My heart broke. There are hard moments in life when you see yourself for the tonto* that you are. This all felt so much bigger than a few bounced checks.
Up until that moment, Jo had really respected me and the work that I did. Even if her dad didn’t get it, she’d found it admirable and courageous that I was an entrepreneur.
Now, not so much.
Also, I’d spent a good bit of time on the
drive to Mexico thinking about when the time might be right to ask Jo’s father for her hand in marriage. That dream suddenly felt like it could slip away in a moment. Not to mention, my hope of becoming fluent en español was disappearing as quickly as the sun had just melted beneath the horizon of this heavenly place.
The goal that I had set was twofold. Obviously, I wanted to learn the language of my guys, but I also had a feeling that if I could really communicate with them, somehow I’d be able to catch a glimpse of the way my granddad thought. And maybe, just maybe, I’d be able to understand him better. So much for both those goals.
Somehow I made it back to Texas in the allotted three days, as promised. By the grace of God, that temporary radiator fix was just enough to get me all the way back home.
I barely remember the drive. I think I probably white-knuckled the steering wheel, sitting straight up in my seat and trying to will myself home even faster than my truck could move. I drove straight to Joanna’s parents’ house because I knew she would be there, and I finally pulled into the driveway at nearly midnight. I was deeply dreading what was about to go down, but there was zero chance I could go home and wait ’til morning to face the music.
If you think I look bad on the cover of this book with my ungroomed beard and mullet, you should have seen me then. I looked rough. I hadn’t showered in three days. Shiner, ever steadfast, remained right by my side as I walked up to their front door. I carried that stupid lasso with me, hoping my Brahma bull story would serve to lighten the mood.
I quietly tapped on that door, hoping (just a little) that everyone had given up on me and gone to bed. I had begun to second-guess reconciling everything in the middle of the night. Perhaps we should just revisit this whole thing after I’d had some rest and a cold shower.
The pitiful look on my face must have been powerful, because just as Mr. Stevens opened the door, I witnessed his expression melt from anger to grace. I don’t know if you’ve ever read the story in the Bible about the prodigal son,2 but this homecoming kind of felt like that. There was no party or celebration awaiting me. However, the acceptance and forgiveness I felt from Mr. and Mrs. Stevens and my girlfriend that night was as powerful as it must have felt for the prodigal son upon his return.