Better Than New Page 2

  That’s exactly why waitressing was the perfect fit for me. All in all, Hooters turned out to be lucrative exactly because I looked at it like a business. And though I was more blatant than most, I wasn’t alone. It wasn’t lost on me that other waitresses were showing up for their shifts driving brand-new cherry-red Mustangs and convertible Corvettes and carrying around purses that cost as much as I made in a week. You can gain knowledge from other people’s mistakes as well as your own. And yes, the occasional waitress would be rocking a Chanel bag and shoes while she was two weeks past due on her rent, but for the most part, the Hooters staff was filled with smart, tough, independent women who knew how to run the game. Not exactly the stereotypical idea of a Hooters waitress. In fact, I’m still in contact with the girls I worked with, and they are some of the most seriously successful women I know. Of course, I take some heat from my teenage son, Ethan, who loves to just pop my Hooters factoid into conversations out of the blue. But there you go; my life’s been lesson after lesson on how wrong conventional wisdom can be.

  Ethan in my Hooters shirt on Halloween.

  Business, for me, didn’t stop at the doors of Hooters. I wanted to do more, a symptom of an eighteen-year-old’s impatience and the drive to have it all now—not next month, not next year, but right now.

  I come from a family of meticulous housekeepers. My Gram grew up in an orphanage. At as young as seven years old, she cleaned morning, noon, and night. As an adult, she took great pride in her house, and she always said, “Clean doesn’t cost money; there’s no excuse for your home to be dirty.” I’m always amazed at the number of people who don’t know how to clean their houses or mow their lawns. But as I found out in those first few years of adulthood, people love to pay people to do their dirty work. So I bought a ream of copier paper and some felt-tip markers, and drew up a bunch of flyers advertising my cleaning services: twenty-five dollars for a one-bedroom apartment, and thirty-five dollars for a two-bedroom. I taped them up all around the apartment complex and at some local stores, and the work came rolling in.

  I had to keep in mind that not all people are good people with good intentions. There was the reality that you have to be careful when you’re a young woman going into people’s homes. You have to suspect that there’s a jerk around every corner. I’d always leave a note for Steve with the client’s name and address. And I had no qualms about ditching a job. Always trust your gut. If I didn’t feel safe, I left.

  My first business card.

  My clients were an eye-opener. You see the guy with a sixty-dollar haircut driving a Mercedes with a super-fashionable wife who probably thought I looked like a hot mess in my ratty T-shirt and shorts, and you think “success”—only to find that they were living in an apartment that was in an appalling state, with unopened mail, a clothes trail from living room to bedroom, a sink filled with dirty dishes, and three-day-old takeout containers cluttering the coffee table. It was a revelation that people could look so well put together and have such disorganized, messy homes. I was also amazed that people had brand-new TVs or expensive stereo systems and still lived in a rented apartment they were paying me to clean. They could keep the fancy stereo. I was all about owning a house. Cleaning someone else’s was just a step along the path that led to my own front door.

  The work became a compulsion. I would clean apartments as early as my customers would let me in, and then get to Hooters at ten thirty in the morning to work a double until after midnight, five days a week. I’d walk out with three hundred dollars. I’d come home each night, drag out the little wooden cash box I kept in the closet, and—before I even changed out of my Hooters outfit—count out the day’s take. Add that to the cold hard cash I was getting paid to clean up other people’s messes, and I was doing pretty well. Still, I felt defeated every month when I wrote the rent check. I wanted to be an adult.

  Everything I did was to appear mature and prove my parents wrong. And getting rid of my Geo Tracker was part of that. The sad truth is that I didn’t feel like much of a grown-up driving a white “jeep” with pink and teal accents. At eighteen, I thought image was everything, and that car didn’t suit me. (What I wouldn’t give now for a cute, dependable, sporty ride that cost me less than two hundred dollars a month!) As that wooden box got fuller, I started thinking I needed something that celebrated my success . . . something in the form of a gold BMW 328i convertible. (I know it’s the last thing anyone would expect me to say now, but then . . .)

  A BMW was exotic to me. I was also the child of a former autoworker, and being from Michigan, it was a sin to drive anything other than a car made by the big three American automakers. But I was trying to shed my past, and buying that car would lead to yet another valuable lesson.

  My best friend, Chrissy, and me rocking the beach.

  The car was parked on a tiny used-car lot. I went in and got sold immediately. I remember the sales guy explaining Pirelli tires to me as “guaranteed to never go flat.” (Oh, how I miss the naiveté that comes with being eighteen—I actually repeated this line to the tow-truck driver a few weeks later when I got a flat. He had a good laugh.) The car cost around thirteen thousand dollars, and I was referred to a local bank to get a loan. I filled out the credit application and was given a flat-out denial faster than a car depreciates after you drive it off the lot. I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t have any credit, and as a waitress making cash tips, my stated income was $3.25 an hour.

  I drove home in defeat, in my hated Geo Tracker. Steve listened as I told him what had happened, tears of frustration welling up in my eyes.

  “Hold on. Did you tell them how much you work at Hooters, how much you make in tips?” he asked me.

  I stopped sniffling and looked at him. “No.” That money fluctuated and was in cash, so I hadn’t thought to put it on the credit application.

  “Well, did you tell them about cleaning houses?”

  “No.”

  He looked at me and said, “Give me the bank manager’s number.”

  Steve, ever the charmer, with his charismatic personality, dark brown eyes, and perfect jet-black hair with just a touch of wave, could woo anyone, including me back then. I handed over the business card and he was on.

  I could hear him carrying on with the bank manager. “How’s your day going? Oh, come on now. You shouldn’t be working so hard—you gotta have fun sometime.” It might have sounded like a call leading to a date, but it was a pitch. A sales pitch. Steve got her laughing and engaged, which I learned was always your goal when trying to make a sale. He told her how hard I worked, and how most of what I made was paid in cash. He explained that my income would increase, as this was merely a first step for me. He pitched her like it was a foregone conclusion that I would get that loan—and of course I did. And listening to Steve describe my many great qualities, she must have thought she was lucky to have the privilege of giving it to me. I would have stumbled all over myself to give me a loan, too.

  When he got off the phone, Steve explained, “It’s not about the credit. You don’t have credit. What you have is you. You need to promote you and everything you do.”

  It was all good in theory. So there I was, the proud owner of a gold BMW convertible . . . and a Geo Tracker. Steve got the bank to give me the loan, but he also agreed to give them the title to my Geo Tracker as collateral. I could hear my dad chastising me—collateral meant a lien on the title—but I was also damn proud of myself. I had been able to finance my dream car—I mean, kind of, not really, as my disappointed dad would explain later. And thinking back, I’m horrified by what a materialistic twit I was. However, down the road, when faced with the challenge of getting turned down for jobs because my résumé didn’t list an applicable college degree, I would recall Steve’s pitch to that loan manager and pick up the phone and sell the fact that I was much more valuable than what that piece of paper reflected. The truth is, no one can promote you better than you c
an. From that experience on, I knew it was up to me to show people that there was more to me than meets the eye if I wanted them to support me in whatever business I was doing.

  I’m not going to lie; the car made me smile. But I still had my eye on the prize: a house of my own. Between my two jobs and Steve’s commissions, we actually had a decent amount of money coming in, but we had no established credit. Getting a car financed was one thing, but having great credit to buy a house was something else. In 1995, the market was tight. It was a lot harder to qualify for a loan than it is today. We could afford a hefty mortgage payment, but we didn’t have enough of a down payment for a bank to waive some of the other criteria. Interest rates were high, and there simply weren’t the first-time-buyer opportunities there are now. Today, one of my dogs could get financing. But back then? An unmarried couple, with no real credit history? No way.

  So I hunted for a less traditional way to get my hands on a house. Late one night Steve and I were watching a movie on TV when a Carleton Sheets infomercial came on during one of the breaks. If you don’t know who Carleton Sheets is, you’ve never been desperate to own property without a down payment to get you in. Carleton Sheets was the original king of infomercials. The TV spot itself was exactly what you might envision: Sheets looking straight at the camera, talking right to you, earnest as hell, offering testimonials from people who had used his course to get rich, standing outside their St. Petersburg Spanish Revival mansions. Some bald guy with a comb-over, a paunch, and a hot blond model wife letting you know that he never had to work again. Sheets seemed to be the height of trustworthiness. He looked like a country club golf pro—tall, blond, clean-cut, nicely dressed, with a great smile. He promised that you’d be able to buy a house, no money down, and make a huge profit from flipping it. Steve couldn’t dial the 800 number fast enough. There was an operator standing by to take the order for our very own set of Carleton Sheets’s No Down Payment 12 Cassette Audio Home-Study Course.

  I made it through about three of those tapes. I never discovered the “secret” he was pitching, but I did learn about what is known as a “land contract.” Also called a contract for deed, a land contract is simply an agreement for owner financing. The buyer usually agrees to a big balloon payment five to seven years into the loan and a higher overall interest rate in exchange for a very modest down payment. It also usually means paying way more than market value for a house. I didn’t care about all that. I saw it as my ticket into the real estate market—and into our own home.

  We pored over the real estate section of the Tampa Bay Times looking for land contract deals. Eventually, we found one that sounded perfect, for a house on the Gandy Peninsula. Back then the Gandy Peninsula was a desolate, forgotten part of Tampa. It’s a knob of land that juts out into Tampa Bay, exactly midway between Tampa and St. Pete, full of timeworn neighborhoods clustered around MacDill Air Force Base. There was an air of sadness to the place. And the house, well, the best I can say is that it was a house.

  The house on West Pearl Avenue was one of several homes that an older couple had bought to flip. They’d done the bare minimum—basically slapped some paint on the inside and laid the cheapest linoleum and carpeting they could buy—and then sold the places on land contracts as their kids’ inheritance. It was pretty ingenious, actually.

  The couple that gave me my first opportunity to own real estate (left). The West Pearl Avenue house (right).

  A note for fifty-eight thousand dollars (minus the three-thousand-­dollar down payment) bought us a house that shook when you slammed the front door. It was a nine-hundred-square-foot, three-bedroom, one-bath midcentury. Not good midcentury, mind you, a Tampa, Florida, mid­century. Which translates to the cheapest construction you can find. I was used to northern homes. My parents built the house I grew up in and my dad was so proud of its “R value,” which is basically the efficiency of the insulation. The higher the R value, the greater the insulating power. This house was a minus 20. There was no dishwasher or garbage disposal. The kitchen had simple metal cabinets, and everything was off-white, except for a couple of walls clad in faux wood paneling used in place of drywall.

  As bad as the interior was, what surrounded the house was actually worse. At the side was a nondescript boxy apartment building, where people would dump their garbage along the fence when the dumpsters were full, providing a lovely smell. Our backyard hadn’t been landscaped since Kennedy was president. The people in the houses around us were all seniors, many still working. They were nice, sweet people, but not exactly my contemporaries. There was a gas station on the corner and a crumbling Jai Alai across the street. In the middle of all that loveliness sat my new house.

  The green-and-black mosaic tile that I covered up!

  But it was mine (well, Steve’s and mine). Strange as it might seem, I was over the moon. You have to know this about me: I’m all about the good. I’m not really one for doing things slowly and carefully, weighing the pros and cons of any situation. Sure, this has gotten me into a jam or two. But if I were more cautious, I’d probably still be living in my parents’ house, sleeping in my childhood bedroom, dreaming big dreams while staring up at my Lamborghini and Harvard posters.

  Looking at this feeble house, I just saw potential. Whatever was wrong with it, I knew I could make it right. I focused on the fact that I had a house; I would deal with everything else. It didn’t register for a second that I had paid twice what it was worth. I knew that paying more was the only way I was going to get into a house, so I made my peace with it. Our rent in the apartment had been $1,500, and our monthly house payment was $596.42. The way I saw it, whether we’d paid too much for the house or not, we were still saving money. Now I look back and think that Steve and I, with our fancy cars, didn’t have a clue.

  We didn’t know to have the house inspected or appraised; the couple had assured us it was a great investment. I remember telling my uncle who was an electrician that the house had new wiring. He looked at me with hesitation and said, “All new wiring?” I said, “Yeah—they said it was new wiring.” And I trust that it was—in 1957!

  The first order of business was improvement. We started with the basics: new interior paint and some stick-down tile to cover up the mint-green-and-black mosaic in the bathroom. Yes, I said it. I covered up fantastic original tile. Even worse, I stuccoed the bathroom walls and added wall-paper. But come on—I also wore frosted lipstick back then! But beyond simple things like that, I found I was running up against a lack of knowledge. It was frustrating. I wanted to be able to do all the repairs myself, but as soon as I started on a project, I’d realize I was flying blind.

  As much as I might have done wrong, I did a lot right. I threw myself into that house. It didn’t bother me that in order to fit everything into my schedule, I often worked on the house in the middle of the night. Gardening meant weeding, digging beds, and planting hostas in the dark. I made that house into a little palace. It was the cutest house in the neighborhood. Maybe that particular bar was set low, but still.

  Living in Tampa was really about me rethinking what I took to be gospel. Growing up, I had always assumed I would get married and settle down as soon as possible. I had been raised with the classic Motor City blue-collar ideal that meant you got a job and worked hard for somebody else. I had grown up thinking I would go to college, get a high-paying job, work for thirty years, and retire. But I was finding out that there are many different ways to survive in this world, and it doesn’t have to mean working for somebody else from nine to five. I was also discovering that whatever I did, I could do it all myself. I just had to be willing to make mistakes, learn from them, and put those lessons into action.

  Steve taking a crack at the new dining room.

  Some of the most challenging mistakes were going to be the ones I made in home improvement. But those were also a way to gather really useful knowledge. For instance, it bothered me that my little house didn’t have a dining
room. Looking back, that seems like the least of its defects. But on the cusp of turning nineteen, I had a lot of ideas about being an “adult.” One of them was that adults had dining rooms, and I was damn well going to have a dining room. Mind you, neither Steve nor I had a clue about what we were doing, but we did it. We got a saw and a sledgehammer and decided to add on to the house.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Steve said.

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  The way I figured it, we already had a foundation in the carport slab. The carport also gave us a roofline. All I had to do was cut an opening, put up some walls, and bam, I’d have my dining room. Yes, that was all I had to do.

  And down went the wall. I blame it on Sade. Steve and I might not have had much in common, but we loved listening to smooth jazz. We always had Sade playing in the background, which somehow lent a Zen feeling to remodeling.

  My new dining room with studs in place (left) and framed (right).

  As anyone who has done even a small, basic room addition will tell you, I was being a little ambitious, to put it mildly. Cutting the opening from the living room through to the carport was the easy part. And when I say “cutting an opening,” I mean haphazardly putting a huge hole in the wall, which was easy enough. Framing in the new room? Not so easy.

  It wasn’t until I had actually cut the hole that I realized framing in a room was not something I could snap my fingers to accomplish. We started trying to put studs in place, but it quickly became apparent that framing was beyond our pay grade. Especially when you consider I wanted glass patio doors.