I’d built the shop up over 10 years. From near enough to nothing in a small hole of a garage to a well-equipped 2500 square foot showcase. I had gone from working on every piece of college kid junk that rolled or was towed into the door to strictly English and European luxury cars. I had a reputation that was better than the local Mercedes dealer’s and was known throughout the Midwest as the place to have a Jaguar engine rebuilt. I was known as “the” place to have your car in.
Shortly after I opened up the shop on Lee Street in Bloomington, I met Robin. The shop was two cars deep and one car wide. The rent was $250 a month and what little heat there was, was included. I shared the space with a detailing shop, where the manager spent his days in the bathroom with girlie mags. I was working on anything that came in the door, all the college kid junk that I could handle, and doing pretty well. Robin called and asked me to tow her Ford station wagon in. It was leaking oil faster than she could pour it in, and she wanted to get home to Tuscola (about 80 miles away) for Christmas. I said I’d look at it and called in the tow. There turned out to be a few simple things wrong, and for a couple hundred dollars, I had her going. My friend Steve and I delivered it back to her at ISU student housing. I took her check and license info and noticed that she was a little more than 10 years older than me. I thanked her for the business and went back to my simple existence as a single mechanic.
The next time I heard from Robin was in February. It was sub-zero out and things were breaking left and right. Of course the wagon wouldn’t start, so I had it towed in. This time, it was not fixable. As I told her so, I could hear the tears starting on the other end of the phone. Before I hung up with her, I told her to call me when she found something she wanted to buy and have me look at it before she bought it. I assumed that was the end of that.
Within a half an hour, she called me back. She found a few cars in the paper, but had no way around and would I take her to look at them? To this day, I don’t know why I said yes, but I did. That evening, I found myself in the front seat of my ’47 Chevy with Robin and her five-year-old daughter, going out to look at cars in Bloomington-Normal. We didn’t find any good ones. She asked if we could try again tomorrow. Sure.
The next day, early in the afternoon, she called me. How about I come over for dinner at about six, then we can go look at cars? That was a Friday night. See, there was this waitress at a restaurant that I frequented that I had finally gotten up the nerve to ask out, and I was supposed to go out with her that night. Don’t ask me why I said yes to Robin instead. I went over there at six and had dinner, blowing off Sylvia at the Golden West restaurant. It dawned on me quickly that we weren’t going out to look at cars after Robin put her little girl to bed after dinner. We spent the evening on the couch instead. Thursday night was the last night that I slept in my own bed. She asked me to marry her that Saturday night, and we were married on May 21st, 1988. I was 22 years old.
Over the next five years, the shop grew quickly. In June of 1989, my son was born. To add to the responsibility, I hired more employees to service my growing customer base. I stopped working on college kid junk and began specializing in English and European luxury cars – cars that made more money to work on. Robin stayed home with the kids for the first few years and then decided that she wanted to work with me at the shop. I could use the help with the bookkeeping and phones. I thought it was a good idea. I needed someone that I could trust in the front office and I figured I could trust her to run things.
It was about this time that my past started to haunt me. I’d been molested by a couple of people when I was eight and ten, and for some reason, thoughts of this were flooding back into my consciousness. The issues that I had with my mother, whom I hadn’t seen in years and years, began rearing its head, just like the abuse had been yesterday. It became a very confusing time for me. Why were matters of almost 20 years ago just now surfacing? It made no sense to me. Here I was, reasonably successful at age 25 with two kids, the wife, and everything seemingly going great. I started to see a counselor.
We’d moved the shop into a building off Main Street in Normal. It was about 2500 square feet, had lots of parking, and three hoists already built in. Being less than a mile from a major hospital, we had a direct line to the doctors and other highly paid professionals who drove what we wanted to work on. There were Jaguars, Mercedes, Volvos, Audis, and so on. I was in heaven, at least I kept telling myself so. Something was bothering me though, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.
We were doing large jobs, some taking years to complete. I developed relationships with my clients. Trust was vital when you were charging $20,000 to restore a car. I found it difficult to maintain all of these relationships while I myself was experiencing such ups and downs in mood. I was working 20-plus hour days for a few weeks, and then crashing for a week, and then repeating the cycle.
In December of 1994, I upgraded the computers in the office to IBM 486s one weekend. One of them had a modem in it. A whole 2400 baud rate. It was enough to get online and suddenly experience AOL, the major online service provider at the time. I discovered chat rooms. I found a whole new world of people and a whole new way to interact with them. To my amazement, I stumbled upon the “Abuse Survivors” chat room. I met Allison. Suddenly, I was spending my nights at the shop online, chatting and chatting with people from all over. Allison was from Oklahoma. She was a couple of years older than me, in an abusive relationship, and from what I could tell, a really cool person. I was smitten. Talking online soon graduated to talking on the phone, which turned to talking on the phone a lot. We were like a couple of teenagers, it seemed.
It was Saturday, July 11th, and I was at the shop working. I did something that I rarely, if ever, did: I got the mail from outside the shop. In it was a letter from the town of Normal’s legal department. Curious, I opened it up. The letter stated that since the water had been shut off for 90 days, the building was considered condemned and thus, I was not allowed to inhabit it. I walked over to the bathroom, turned on the tap, ran my hand under the water, and wondered just what they were talking about. So I called the water department, even though it was a Saturday. There was a lady there catching up on some paperwork and she explained to me that while the water valve may have been turned off, sometimes the water still worked – but yes, there had been a shut-off order some months prior. I got a figure from her as to how much it would be to turn it back on and assured her that someone would be there immediately with a check.
And then I started wondering.
If the water bill was that far behind, how were other things? I started digging through the filing cabinets, looking for bills. The uniform service was months behind, the gas was months behind, the electric was on cut-off, the cable was on disconnect, and there were parts suppliers who were owed months of invoices. The State was owed thousands in sales tax receipts. Over the last six months, Robin had refurnished the house right after we moved there. Now, I was seeing how. Things were clearly and completely out of control. I had no inkling that things were so screwed up. I literally sat on the floor in the office, surrounded by all the paper, stunned. How could I have let this get so out of control, so badly? Were the bank payments being made? What else would I find out about, come Monday, when I started making phone calls?
I drove up to the house, which gave me 20 minutes to think about what I was going to do. I didn’t want a scene in front of the kids. I just wanted to get some stuff together, take her key, and leave. I arrived at the house, went inside, and started packing a bag upstairs. When I came down, I informed her of what I’d found, took her shop key off her ring, and left after saying goodbye to the kids. I assured them that I would be seeing them tomorrow. I took Schön with me.
On the way back to the shop, I talked to Allison. She was staying with her parents, having just been beaten up pretty badly by her husband. She was looking to leave Oklahoma. She said that she could be up here in a few days, and she had a lot of bookkeeping experience helping her Dad with his ranch. Not being in this alone sounded better than the alternative, so I told her to come whenever she could.
Sunday, I called Robin and told her that I wanted to take the kids out to lunch. She agreed and I drove up there to pick them up. The kids and I went down to Bloomington, to a restaurant we frequented called Ned Kelly’s and had a good time. They were used to me spending nights at the shop, so there weren’t really any questions to worry about. When I was dropping them off, Robin sent the kids in the house and proceeded to rant and rave at me, and for the first time ever, she was trying to use the fact that she was 10 years older than me as a weapon, trying to “order” me around. It failed miserably.
Monday morning was interesting. I started with the utility companies. Trying to negotiate a $1,200 electric bill wasn’t easy. Trying to get them to not turn the electric off was harder. Same with the gas company. There weren’t many sympathetic ears when you asked to set up a payment schedule. Their idea of payment was “pay the full amount you owe now.” Vendors that I had been dealing with for years were a lot easier. My uniform company was more than happy to hear from me. Parts places that I owed money to were all ears when it came to resolving past due issues and still selling me parts. I agreed to cash terms with all my vendors from that day forward – no more net 30 accounts.
The bank was more interesting. It turned out that the $10,000 money market account was closed. That had been the profit from a Jaguar that I’d sold the previous fall, and I was hoping to keep that money aside. So much for that idea. We’d been paying an exorbitant amount to have checks paid that overdrew the account, hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month. I also called a customer who had always told me that she was available for bookkeeping services as she was retired and always looking for something to do. She showed up by noon.
Then there was the issue of employee morale. Marvin, James, Roger, and Jerry needed to be assured that things were going to be okay, which was hard since I damn near didn’t think so. This was their livelihood, their living, and I had to reassure them. I was honest with them that things had gotten pretty far out of control, but I was working with everyone to make it right. The rumors would fly around town, hell, they already were since the automotive community was so small. Let ’em fly. Livingston Automotive wasn’t going anywhere. Not on my watch.
Allison showed up on Tuesday afternoon, still sporting the remains of a black eye on the right side. After I introduced her to everyone, she went upstairs to get some sleep to restore from her long drive. The next weekend, we built a kitchen and bath into the 12’ by 12’ ground floor of what used to be storage space. With the upstairs as a bedroom, we had a small but functional apartment that provided minimal living quarters for two. It was a little crazy living and working in the same space, but it played out well. There certainly was no commute to work other than coming downstairs in the mornings.
We began advertising and using radio ads. The next year was the best year for the shop ever. We managed to get most of the bills caught up, most of the State caught up, and we even managed to actually make some money. Come Christmas, we put up an 18-foot Christmas tree in the shop and had an awesome time of it. Our employees were doing well, Allison and I were doing well, and the kids were doing well. Even the dogs were doing well. In the office, Allison set up a system to track all the parts we used on customer cars and made sure that they all got billed. She had the front office running efficiently and exactly on top of things. We were making progress on all fronts. We were happy as a couple, in spite of the fact that we were having a personal and business relationship at the same time. However, there were boundaries in place that we respected. The front office was her domain and the shop was mine, yet we kept each other informed as to what was happening regularly. I saw statements and financial sheets daily. There were no surprises. Even the bouts of depression that I had been dealing with seemed to have gotten better. They were still there, but for the most part, I was too busy to have time to get depressed. We saw the kids every day after school, and on weekends, they stayed over. Things were good. Robin moved from Lexington to a small house in Normal. She sold all of the new furniture and everything that she’d bought with our money at garage sale prices. A brand new black leather sectional was sold for $100. It made me sick when I heard about it. Of course, I paid for her move and was still paying her rent. At least the rent was cheaper in Normal.
At the end of that year, Allison and I really thought we had it made. Then the disasters started. We’d been working on a SAAB for some years that belonged to a kid name Chip Gerdis. Chip had just graduated from ISU. He was a nice kid. He’d drop the car off and come back later in the week for it, never in a hurry. We never a worried about getting paid since he always used his father’s credit card. He kept the car in perfect shape for the most part. We met his father once, when he came into town from Quincey, IL, where he lived. One morning my banker called and informed us that we had a chargeback of $25,000 to the business account. “Do you recognize the name ‘Gerdis’?” they asked. We were flabbergasted. His father was claiming to not have authorized most all of the charges over the last three years. The way the credit card system worked, we were screwed. They took the money first and foremost from our account. How were we going to handle being $25,000 in the hole all of a sudden?
Well, there was one way. The restoration of a Jaguar E-Type was almost complete. It had been a five year project. Five years of labor was invested in it when the project was done. We dealt on a parts-only basis, with the parts being paid monthly and the labor due at the end of the project. The labor for the entire mechanical restoration over the five years was $29,250. That represented 450 hours of work on the car, rebuilding every moving part on it. The job came in under budget, and on time, and was a masterpiece. It was the third E-Type I’d done and it was really, really cool. There was only one problem. I knew I wasn’t going to get paid. I had one rule that I tried to never break: don’t work for attorneys – and this guy was an attorney. I knew in my heart of hearts that he’d do something to screw me and I wasn’t disappointed.
I faxed the invoice over to his office on a Monday morning. By noon, I was served with a suit claiming everything from I didn’t know how to work on cars to questioning where my wife went. It was what was called an “interrogatory,” and it was the front line of a bullshit lawsuit. All the questions had to be answered in order to defend against it, and there was no accounting for appropriateness. Of course, I gave it to my attorney who informed me of what I already knew: I could spend thousands of dollars and years trying to get my money or I could just walk away. Give the asshole the car and consider it a lesson learned. I’d already learned the lesson, I may as well walk away. I called my tow truck driver and had the car dropped off in his driveway. There was some satisfaction, though. It was snowing like mad and he’d have nowhere to put it, so his $200,000 1962 Jaguar E-Type was going to get real wet.
It was about now that the Bloomington Amoco transmission shop burned to the ground. I thought little of it. The owner was a real crook and the brother of my landlord, who was also a crook. I didn’t see the connection until I got the letter in the mail telling me that my lease wouldn’t be renewed come March. Then I heard on the street that they were going to reopen the transmission shop in my building. I’d be out of a place to live and to work all of a sudden. I started looking around for somewhere else to work out of and found nothing in the area. I had less than 90 days and no idea where to go. Building something was out of the question. This was when I snapped. I remember being so overwhelmed, so angry, so afraid of what the next phone call or letter in the mail was going to bring that I couldn’t think. I was trying to put a cylinder head for a Mercedes back together, and the next thing I knew, I was beating the wooden stool against a workbench and screaming. A piece of the leg flew back and hit me in the forehead over my left eye and blood flew everywhere. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in a hospital room, being asked a bunch of questions by a nurse. I guess I answered them wrong, because they admitted me, thus, my introduction to the mental health world.
They kept me there for 10 days. In the end, they determined that I was bi-polar. Having been un-medicated, I was having the ups and downs that were to be expected. They put me on lithium and Zoloft and let me back out into the real world. The lithium made me ill and lethargic. My counselor told me to give up the shop and find something less stressful to do. That idea made me even more ill. My father wanted me to move back up north toward Chicago and work for him. He said he’d set me up in his machine shop in a nice low-stress job running a mill. It was sounding better and better. The frame of mind I was in was one of panic, not knowing which way to go.
Allison and I talked about it for a long time, and based on everything that had happened in the last 30 days, we decided that it was best to close the shop. We could plan to literally walk away in mid-March. We could get whatever projects done that we could in the time left and organize things so that the remaining projects could be picked up and finished elsewhere. It really seemed to be boiling down to them or me, and I was making the decision for it to be me.
We spent the next 60 days getting as much of the projects done as possible. We organized the ones we couldn’t and made sure that all the parts were together. When the day came, we loaded our personal stuff, my toolbox, and the office paperwork up into a truck and left. We left James behind with two weeks’ pay to oversee everyone getting back their cars. We left all the equipment and tools plus all the cars on the lot for the bank to take. I was at least trying to make amends. We left Normal for the Chicago suburb of Prospect Heights, and didn’t look back. I was so naive. Maybe just plain stupid.
The day after we left, the landlord changed the locks. He started cleaning out the place, taking everything that wasn’t bolted down over to his shop across the street. Customers were treated rudely when they came to inquire about what was going on. Within a week, it was an Amoco transmission shop. All of my plans to exit with some shred of decency were killed. People started tracking me down at our new apartment in Prospect Heights. I couldn’t answer the phone I was so damn ashamed of what had happened. All those people who I had built relationships with, who trusted me, I had screwed over.
I started at my father’s shop, Livingston Products, the next week. As he had said, he had a job for me at a mill, working in the machine shop. What he didn’t say was that he was going to be giving me more and more things to do. Within three days, he had me running manufacturing, which is what he had planned all the time he confided in me. There was only one problem: working for him caused constant chaos. Everything had to be a crisis – everything. If it wasn’t a crisis yet, he would make it one. If there wasn’t a disaster, he would create one. And more, he micromanaged everything – absolutely everything.
I would be on the plant floor where I had 35 people working for me, and he would come out onto the floor and start ranting and raving at me about a project. It didn’t matter that I had nothing to do with the project or that I may not have even known about its existence – it was still my fault. The screaming matches could only be described as epic. I’d be given a list of priorities – call them A, B, and C – and merrily go on my way to work on them. When suddenly, I was being ranted at for not working on priority Z. It went like that day after day, all day long. At one point, the people in manufacturing wrote him a letter telling him that they thought that his treatment of me was wrong. This was from a bunch of people who needed their jobs, who came from amazingly diverse backgrounds, and spoke five different languages. He found it funny.
In October of 1997, I walked out the door. 35 people left shortly after I did in protest. My mother called me and told me to tell them to go back to work. I said that I would at least recommend it. We all met at a Denny’s restaurant where I told them how touched and amazed I was, but to please go back to work. All but two did. Even now, fifteen years later, I barely speak to my father.
Things weren’t much better at home. Allison was not handling being up in the suburbs well. It was too urban for her. Normal was a small town, and she wasn’t at all prepared for the Chicago area. She couldn’t keep a job and was hiding in the house all day long. She decided to go back to Oklahoma in November. I’d failed at two jobs and now, two relationships in as many years.