cha-ching .

I stole this little ditty from the Vanilla Gorilla ...

FTW.

Friday, April 8, 2011

Pay Up Sucker

Moola, Green, Paper, Cheddar, Dough Cheese, Faria, Benjamin’s, Duckits, Chips, Coin, Bucks, Greenbacks.
Money can be called a lot of things, but I prefer just plain CASH!
Let’s talk about the most important part of starting my own Business. Making Money! Lets’ be real. I started that fucking shop to make as much money as possible. I wasn’t shy about it either. I did Tattoo “Pay Up Sucker” on my right palm just so everyone knows why I was in it. Along the way I had some expert tutelage in Boyd Codington. He was a Pro as selling rich fuckers Super high end Hot Rods. No car left his shop for under six figures. I wanted that! Except I was a bike guy working on cars honing my fab skills so I could bitch slap the bike building world. When I opened my own shop I offered something that No other shop in the world offered. Hand Built custom motorcycles that were badass in every way. Anyone that purchased one was pretty much guaranteed to have their life changed for the better. Ha! I swear! In about 1997 these bikes were red Hot! With that kind of product and the power of TV the Cash came rolling in. Now motorcycles are a funny thing. Any fucker that’s willing to plunk down six figures for a “Motorcycle” has got to be nuts or doing some business on the shady side of town. I don’t wanna accuse anyone of any kind of illegal activity, but lets just say some customers didn’t pay in checks. They preferred to skip the whole bank deal and hand me money in a brown paper bag.
Here are a couple of the more memorable ones.

One customer was obviously dealing some kind of freelance pharmaceuticals on a street level because he paid me close to eighty grand in fives and Tens. Shit! That was like a huge 25lb trash bag full of cash! It’s pretty funny I took all that money and paid off a new Ferrari I bought off of Tony Carlini. (He imported it for me, Legally of coarse) He was pissed because it took like two fuckin hours to count all that cash in small bills. He still took it though!

Another time some dude that seemed like a connected guy from the east coast paid me for two bikes he bought in a box full of neatly wrapped bundles of hundred dollar bills. My first wife Karla took the money to the bank to deposit it to cover payroll and what not. She was in the back room of the bank with the bank manager counting out the dough. She said in the middle of counting the manager lifted a couple bundles up to his nose and smelled it. He then pronounced, “This money smells like weed”. Karla was quick on her feet and said “well it’s still good!” and she kept on counting. The manager followed suit.

There’s also the time that I sold over half a million dollars worth of t-shirts and Daytona bike week. Now that’s a lot of cash to try and fly home with. I didn’t want to deposit it in a local bank because they would have obviously tagged it with fees. So I just taped the cash into a bunch of magazines so the money just looked like more pages of the magazine. When I ran it through security? They didn’t even look twice. Piece of cake! That was pre 911 though. Now they would probably give a hard look at the tattooed up white boy traveling with two suitcases full of magazines and no clothes.

I still remember the first time I got a big chunk of cash. A customer named Mike that owed me some money on his bike stopped by the shop. He just walked in like no big deal with like a 10-inch tall stack of hundreds with a bunch of rubber bands around it. He just handed it to me. Seems like no biggie right? Except there was two local Long Beach cops hanging out at the shop bullshitting with me. They got big eyes. That was more than they make in a year. I was cool. I just played like no sweat and kept answering their questions about the bike one of them was wanting to build in his garage.

All of this big cash in hand business seemed to go away ten years ago or so. It was replaced with cashiers checks and wire transfers. The times I actually got paid in cash were few and far between. I miss those hay days of making green. There is nothing quite like having that big knot in your pocket.
jesse