For the Record: 28:50 - A journey toward self-discovery and the Cannonball Run Record
Page 4
Around that same time there was a new re-release of a 1976 short film by Claude Lelouch called C'était un rendez-vous. It featured an anonymous driver, in fact Lelouch himself, driving through the city of Paris at breakneck speed early one morning. The legend was that Lelouche’s personal Ferrari 275 was the steed for this film but it was in fact a Mercedes Benz 450SEL 6.9 - the original German super sedan with the sonorous Italian V12 dubbed over in editing. During the drive you see the car fly past the iconic landmarks of Paris such as the Arc de Triomphe and Champs-Élysées. It had the fantastic reckless abandon to tug at the gearhead heartstrings in all of us. Pigeons being scattered, no hesitation in the running of red lights, smoky sideways slides around turns, the checklist completed with only a Dukes of Hazzard bridge jump left out.
The film ends as the car pulls up to an overlook and a beautiful woman walks up to meet the driver, blissfully ignorant of the drama of the drive bringing him to her. This would obviously be the exact manner in which I would meet my own wife someday. Who could resist such a proposal?
The film, and more saliently its recent push to market where I found out about it, demonstrated the new spectrum of cross country driving events and the idea of point to point speed records were front of mind in American car culture. Even the production strategy - taking something that would be sexy to do in a Ferrari but actually using a more functional and capable German super sedan, mirrored the intellectual's approach to a modern Cannonball.
After we returned home from the rally I found my first job in the car business. I was a generic employee of a racing school at Road Atlanta called the Panoz Racing School and Audi Driving Experience. They did race licensing and general driving skills training at the track. I learned a lot, had a great time, and was not invited to apply there to work the next summer. Apparently they were not interested in seeing how high the Audi A4’s could jump, how well their pit carts could do donuts in the unpaved areas around the storage facilities, or what an amazing off road rally circuit could be made connecting a few parts of the service roads through the infield of the track.
The New York to Los Angeles Rally and the subsequent car business job did quite a bit to quell my immediate interest in breaking the record. At this point, no one had made a recent attempt to my knowledge. The 1979 Cannonball and the 1983 US Express records still stood and the whole idea had not received a lot of press. The desire was still alive but there was no mental image of what a modern attempt would look or feel like. I knew it was well beyond my budget and I knew enough to know I was incapable of fully understanding the risks and long term liabilities of being associated with the record at that point.
In the fall of 2004 I entered Georgia Tech as a freshman, majoring in Mechanical Engineering. I hated pretty much everything about Georgia Tech other than Intramural Sports. It was challenging, my classmates were difficult to relate to, and it blurred any vision I had of what path my life was going to take. I was accustomed to exerting a mediocre effort and getting good grades. The expectation became to put forth an intense effort to get mediocre grades. I got by but found my own self worth in Intramural Slam Dunk Contest Championships and short film competitions rather than a Dean’s list streak.
Growing up I was never one to shy away from an opportunity to try something that others were afraid of. Each year my roommates and I would enter a five minute film contest with something that we called Lecture Crashers. It was a montage of pranks and disruptions we would carry out in the large lecture halls and classrooms of Georgia Tech. In a school of reclusive introverts laser focused on their 9-5 futures, this was an above-the-knee skirt in Amish town.
I found the school to be full of the kind of people I knew I didn’t want to be like. I do not pretend to think that most people approach life, rules, goals, and obsessions the way that I do, nor will I contend that my approach is better. I also know my worldview is typically diametrically opposed to the direction of happiness and contentment. At the time there was a staunch incongruence between where my world was pushing me and where I was hoping to steer. I needed to find new ways to interrupt that inertial pull of the institution.
I got pretty depressed. I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t eat well. I stayed in decent shape but was very emotionally conflicted. The ratio of guys to girls at Georgia Tech was 4 to 1 which didn’t help. I honestly had never had a great deal of success in that department. I never found it difficult to find a date for prom or a homecoming dance in High School but the idea of a meaningful girlfriend relationship was still very foreign.
Georgia Tech is a very diverse place. You could usually count seven or eight languages being spoken in the student center or library. I became proficient at visually discerning between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, and Malaysian people. One way I enjoyed relieving stress was playing what I called Godzilla basketball. Early on the weekend mornings the Asian students who never slept in would be up playing in the recreation center. Yao Ming was an anomaly and generally it was a fairly low skill game where you had almost no contact. I remember one game to 11 where I had 1 assist and 10 points with 7 slam dunks. Lots of fun and a self esteem boost I needed desperately at the time.
At night I would leave my soon to be condemned dorm, walk out to the nearest handicapped spot. My Audi S4 was parked there, still utilizing the ten year expiration from the high school knee surgeries. I would go out at two or three in the morning and drive laps around I-285 which is the ring road around the perimeter of Atlanta. It is about sixty-two miles and I would generally drive it in about forty-five minutes, an average almost thirty miles per hour over the limit.
I went fast but it was never about that. I always planned on trying to do it in thirty minutes but never got around to it. I was exorcising demons, not exercising myself or the car. It was brilliant. Just me, the truckers, and the street lights streaming by. Nothing was accomplished, nothing was learned, I just came home ready to sleep for two hours and to endure the doldrums of another few days.
The major selection of a mechanical engineering path was due to the business program having a terrible reputation and the assumption it was a better route to automotive journalism than the existing alternatives. I quickly decided that was a stupid idea. They don’t pay you enough and the classes were harder than seemed necessary. I had already resolved myself into the idea that my profession was unlikely to be closely tied to my major and that the main service this institution was going to provide me was a name on a resume line rather than vast subject matter knowledge.
I looked around for alternatives and found the relatively new Public Policy Department. I was most attracted to the major by one of the professors who was an ex director of the CIA. Now that sounded like fun. In the introspection of my depression I had come to understand some things about myself. One was how I lacked an emotional sensitivity most people seemed to have. The awareness was too new to really grasp it. I wanted to find some goal or career where it might serve as an advantage. Working for the CIA seemed to check a lot of boxes. I doubted they would issue me a license to kill but it sounded like fun anyway, particularly without any immediate entrepreneurial alternatives. I changed my major to Public Policy.
The second reason that I chose Public Policy was the scheduling. The major was so small that there was no need to offer multiples of the same classes each semester. This meant they were usually all on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I could maintain a full time schedule with 18-21 hours and still have four day weekends. I went to school from 8-6 two days a week and then sat around without much to do. It was perfect. Fortunately the classes were not very hard. Most if it was papers and presentations.
It was in those presentations that I learned something else about myself - I love talking. I love it even more when I don’t know what I am talking about. I love it much more when I don’t know what I am talking about and the stakes are high. I needed an adrenal high and this was the main line of it. Speaking into a sea of judgmental eyes having to sell a bluff and build a logic bas
ed on two or three handholds of factual information was a euphoric rush. When I could pull that off it tickled every nerve that I needed caressed.
It was an interesting time in political and psychological research. The accessibility to computers capable of running advanced regression models on particularly farcical notions was ushering in a generation of Freakonomics styled economists and researchers. Some people were looking at the world in a way that I related to. It seemed like an interesting, albeit functionally useless field of study. I loved the idea of removing emotion and typical assumption from an idea and getting to the bottom of what it might actually take to solve the problems.
The general curriculum and major requirements were new in the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy. The course load walked you through the political science process introducing a new element each semester and asking you to write a paper using that angle as a vantage point. What no one else seemed to get was you could use the same paper over and over again. Also, no one in the classes had any idea what was going on at all.
In my intro class I wrote a paper on alternatively fueled vehicles. This was, predictably, a topic I lacked any positive enthusiasm for and generally flew in the face of everything I believed in or held dear about the world. I did not know much about them but I just started talking. The faster I talked, the more people listened and the fewer questions they asked. I started with two or three things I knew for sure and then built from crazy assumptions into an actual presentation. I continued through each semester examining the same topic from the perspectives of balance of power, legislative process, partisanship, tiered government, bureaucracy, implementation, and blindly forced my way into the gamut of peer and teacher reviews.
By my senior thesis I had built the paper into a formula that actually quantified, in dollars, the incremental cost of every human vehicle mile driven on American society. It blindsided the professorial staff because it was a sixteen week assignment built over four years, half in fact and the other 99% completely fabricated with such an intense hubris behind it they actually believed I hadn’t made up all of the statistical work. My professor asked if I would present it to a larger audience or explore publication of the work but I knew well enough to stop while I was ahead and in front of an audience that did not know enough to call me out on its shortcomings. Never sell past a yes.
Between the late night highway runs, trips to the hot tub, and recycling papers, I was searching. Trust me, I get that this has sounded a bit self-praising and while in hindsight I am proud of some of my independent thinking, this is all coming from a guy who found life very isolating through adolescence. Perhaps it was staging me for something interesting, perhaps it was molding me into the husband my wife would need, perhaps it was just making sure a struggling Italian car dealership would not go out of business one day. I had no idea where my life was headed and how I was going to get there. I had no shortage of aspiration and ideas ran fleetingly through my head with pop star wardrobe change velocity but I couldn’t get any traction. I got into the habit of building a document each year I simply dubbed “The Plan.”
The Plan was a state of Ed’s union. It discussed my psychological state, social successes and failures, business ideas, life vision, friendships, and goals. I figured if I ever got arrested or accomplished something great there would be something entertaining about them. They also served as my personal Last Will and Testament to distribute the iguanas and my car.
A recurring theme of the psychological portion of these writings was actually psychopathy. I didn’t understand it at the time but clinically I have been told that I am a psychopath, which is essentially defined as lacking proper empathy, fear, and sensitivity to certain risks and other social cues. Like most psychiatric conditions, everyone falls somewhere along a spectrum of psychopathy. Depending on test administration, I fall somewhere between 65% and 95% of the way toward the opposite end of the spectrum from the person who would be my future wife, Mother Theresa, and Elmo. All I knew was that I did not feel the way I assumed people normally did about daily situations. It doesn’t make me a bad person, it just makes it a lot easier for me to make bad or dangerous decisions. I also really liked Dexter.
I struggled with a grasp of this as a college student. It was an emotionally insurmountable hurdle as a developing teenager. I grew up in a great family with awesome, well-adjusted parents. They worked hard and instilled some great ideas - the greatest of which was Christianity and an unwavering faith in God. Salvation is marked by a life change, turning from a life of sin and recognizing that grace saves us and reconciles us to God. This was a bit tough for me because I never knew a life where I didn’t feel like I was a Christian. I was born the day after our pastor’s daughter. All of the books I remember from my nursery were Bible stories. It was not dogmatically hammered in but it was always part of my life I gladly accepted and I developed a rational comfort towards it all. To this day, I find faith in God to be one of the simplest concepts for me to remain steadfast to.
The psychopathy manifested itself in what felt like not being afraid. I never felt embarrassed and I deflected insults without credence because my valuation scales for myself and the rest of the world felt so radically misaligned. It was a good thing that I was a Christian because it appeared I might make a very good criminal.
The problem I faced as a kid was that I just hated everyone. I couldn’t stand my teachers or any person of authority. I was egotistical, overconfident, and did not care much for the feelings of others. It made me into a real jerk and cost me a lot of friendships as I navigated a glass case of emotions. I vividly remember the struggle of reconciling the Christian idea that we have to love people in order to truly love God. Feeling as though I could never learn to love or even like people, I had no idea how this made sense.
The disconnect between my sincere feelings and what I knew I was called to do both as a Christian and as a member of society was difficult. What truly matters? It is how you react and treat people? Is it how you feel on the inside? Initially they were very close. I could not suffer or indulge the shallow foolishness I perceived from the average Joe and I let him know that. Over time, though, I was able to separate my guttural proclivity from how I might act. It begged some moral questions regarding sincerity but that is a discussion for another day. Fortunately I found some balance that allowed me to earn some friends, some allies, and avoid some enemies that I deserved.
I knew God was real, I knew how He had helped me through trials and tribulations, healed me physically and emotionally, and blessed me in ways I needed no other explanation for beyond grace. I believed the Bible and I believed I needed to care more about the opinions and well being of others but I just couldn’t. Who else has full faith and understanding of the power and presence of God but felt the way that I did? Satan. The Devil. How many thirteen year old kids have to get their parents to talk them out of the idea that they are an incarnate form of Satan? Well I did. Fortunately they did a good job.
Chapter 4
$1 Million in Debt at 20
Another frequent element of The Plan each year was a status report on my progress in starting my passion project business - an exotic car rental company. In 2006, the summer after my sophomore year at Tech, I finally made some progress toward the idea. My business plan as a fifteen year old five years prior actually materialized into something real. This was the peak of the US lending economy and also the climate that precipitated the downturn. You could get a mortgage without income and you could get a car loan pretty much just by asking for it.
I was twenty and I bought my first Lamborghini. I sold my Audi S4 to use as a down payment and started the business without enough money leftover to make the first payment on it. It was a Giallo Midas (pearl yellow in lay-carperson) 2004 Lamborghini Gallardo. I built a website that was just beyond the look of a well developed Angelfire page but it started to work. I got calls, got the car rented out quite a bit, made the business look like something beyond a shoestring project ru
n out of a dorm room, and actually learned a lot.
What I learned most was how unprepared I was to run a real company with real risks. There was a lot of breath holding through the gambles of a startup environment hoping the odds never played out as they should have. Of course my accounting method was a box of receipts much like Vince Vaughan’s “keepers” from Dodgeball, my marketing was me posting on message boards and driving to car shows, and my contracts had more holes than a butterfly net but I was in business.
It was the talk of campus. “The guy on that terrible MTV show has a Lamborghini and somehow rents it out.” I got a random message via this new website called The Facebook that us college students used to figure out who had the same class schedule. Georgia Tech was one of the first schools to get it and it still had the “Mark Zuckerberg production” tagline at the bottom of each page. The message was from an exotic car enthusiast freshmen who wanted to know how a kid my age had a Lamborghini. His name was Dan Huang. The conversation was brief. Dan was one of those conspiracy theory freaks convinced you needed to guard your internet identity by using anonymous profile pictures so I had no idea what he looked like.
The rental company grew steadily. I bought a Ferrari 360 Modena a few months later and a 360 Spider (convertible) right when the company turned a year old. Gumballer Chris Staschiak actually flew down to Palm Beach with me to pick it up and drive it back to Atlanta. It was another one of those great life road trips. Six hundred glorious miles in a Rosso Corsa, six-speed gated manual, mid-engined V8 Ferrari with a Tubi exhaust. That car was so loud it would shake the entire building when I would start it inside my warehouse unit. Ferrari designed the catalytic converters on those cars to disintegrate internally over time so by the time the car had 50k miles it shrieked like a proper Formula 1 car.