.
[this one wasn't supposed to be next in the beau and mike series--god knows there's paper routes and a crazy week in london that need to be talked about first--but (a) flipping through my ratty old portfolio and finding the pictures, this is what came to mind tonight; and (b) noblesavage requested a post about this chapter of my past awhile ago, so i'm figuring what the fuck.]
so one night in early 1985, beau and i are sitting around his apartment playing backgammon, he's drinking more than a little and we're both attempting to brainstorm our way outta our mutual poverty.
i'm maybe six months into my first job outta architecture school, disillusioned as hell, turning out working drawings for shlock mcmansions of some anonymous hack's design
[and, once they found out i could, coughing up pretty promotional pen-and-ink renderings of whatever abortion i'd just finished drawing
you know--slap a little lipstick on the pig, never hurts]
all for the princely adjusted-for-inflation equivalent of $11.75 an hour--great, huh? yeah, i thought not, too, and by the time the events of this post took place, i was looking for a way out.
and beau? see, this is why i shouldn't skip ahead, because a lot had happened to beau in the ten years since the fox's lair debacle, but now's not the time--let's just say he was between gigs and leave it at that.
the night in question, i'm over at his place and i happen to mention, "get this--chinese guy i work with was talking today about his cousin in new york pushes a noodle cart around manhattan, makes a couple hundred bucks a day."
this gets beau's attention--stops him in mid-roll, actually. "noodles, you say?"
"yeah, noodles--the cousin boils up some noodles, makes a chicken broth or some such shit with spices and chunks of meat in it. guy orders, he dumps noodles in a little cardboard container, fills it to the top with the broth, hands it to the guy along with some throwaway chopsticks, collects three bucks. wife comes by a couple times a day to refill the cart, and that's it--they're cleaning up."
and then, the fatal question: "hell, why couldn't we do something like that?"
the fatal answer: because beau and mike don't think that simple, or that small.
three hours and no small amount of vodka later, the noodle cart has morphed into a 28-foot customized RV, and the noodles and broth have become a full menu featuring stir-fried chicken, beef, pork and shrimp with a choice of six different sauces.
we'd aim it at the UT crowd, and move as they did--park near where they were most likely to need lunch, and then maybe drive over to a different location for dinner. and spring break and summer? padre island, baby!
by the end of the night, we even had a name for our little walk-up chinese operation--WokUp (clever, huh?)--and grandiose plans to franchise the idea nationwide.
we congratulate ourselves on our brilliance, and i head off home to prepare for another day of low-paid drudgery.
i didn't give it much thought after that--hell, if i'd had a nickel for every wild-ass scheme beau and i'd cooked up over the previous ten years, i wouldn't have had to go to work the next day--but a couple days later he calls me and asks me over for dinner.
"what's up?" i ask suspiciously, because twice a week's outta the pattern.
"come over--you'll see."
i walked through the door, and holy shit, he had it all worked out--the apartment was filled with the intoxicating aromas of all the food we had talked about, and spread out before me on the coffee table were scale drawings he'd executed of Unit 1 [as that first RV would be called].
turns out beau had been busy. on the day following our conversation, he'd grabbed every chinese cookbook he could find in the library, and--an amazing cook in his own right--distilled several intricate, time-consuming recipes down to five simple, workable (and incredibly delicious) sauces.
next, he found a motorhome similar in size to what we'd need, taken a few measurements and come home and transformed it into a fully-operational mobile chinese restaurant [on paper, anyway].
finally, he'd searched out a chinese market from which he'd gathered not only the necessary spices, but also an authentic spun-steel wok very much [ok, exactly] like this one:
between bites of hoisin-explosion chicken and sweet-&-sour pork, i point out on the plans where we should probably move this here and adjust that there, and i ask questions like "have you talked to the city yet?", but beyond petty niggling, i can't find much wrong with what he's come up with--it's impressive as hell.
as far as money goes, [as usual] he doesn't have any, but [also as usual] he's already talked a potential investor into coughing up half of what we figured it'd take to start up. the other half? well, there's always the mkf graduation-present BMW sitting out there just begging to be borrowed against.
i ask him: "you really wanna do this?"
he says, "yeah."
so we did.
[stay tuned for part 2]
5 comments:
I so love cliff-hangers!
Gosh , I know I've heard this one already before , but with my shit memory I always get a silly grin hearing it again . Oh mike , why do you always have to tease .
I came back to look at those drawings and, well as you executed the front elevation, nothing can disguise that the design (which I understand was NOT by you) of McMansions is totally lacking in line and proportion.
A cousin of mine in New Jersey's very tony Bernard Township likes to bundle his wife, Fritz and me into the car when we visit and tour around the latest atrocities. My favorite was the "starter castle" tour to an area filled with well-publicized houses over 18 rooms in size on what had been a lovely working farm a year and a half before.
What we saw were vast jumbles of wings gables, bays, oriels, and dormers, the effect being of several undistinguished houses jammed next to or piled on top of each other. Almost universally, the dominant feature on the facade was the barrage of garage doors, in one case five of them in a row. And these houses were on ridiculously small lots given their size and pretension, the effect being of a luxury-class Levittown.
In one case they'd read that a twenty-two room house was occupied by a family of three.
will: thanks--i was afraid the whole cliff-hanger trope was getting tired.
oh, and to be fair, i gotta admit that my old firm's mcmansions were generally a cut or two above those of the competition--but some would say that's like winning a tallest-dwarf competition.
at least back in that time and place, those houses i drew had wide, spacious lots to sprawl on--unlike the crenellated oversized sardine cans you describe, and of which i've seen countless examples shoehorned onto too-small lots here on the west coast.
bb: yeah, i probably have told you this one before, but--as you've pointed out--with the way your memory works, it'll be fresh and new again.
I requested the Wokup story because, at least to my own assessment, it is the defining story of your adult life (just as your father's death is for your childhood).
So, guttermorality, I do like a very good cliff hanger, but I expect there to be two more very good acts on this one.
Because, as it stands now, this is just the appetizer -- the egg roll -- to the story.
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