As kids me and Jimmy always had a vision; That vision was to be household names and rich. We tried every get rich quick scheme we could conjure up. We started a lemonade stand, it lasted about a week till every kid on the block was squeezing out more dough then we were. So we had to think of something new, so we taught Jimmy to play guitar which in turn drew customers in by the masses. We thought we had it made, until little jerk Susie began dancing and singing to bring her customers in. Day by day our customers depleted and we needed a new scheme.
That week we began giving free carwashes with every $10 dollar purchase of lemonade. Not only now did we have tons of customers, we had the most customers we had ever had. But like all good things they must come to an end; the local auto-shop a couple of blocks down began hiring pretty girls to wash peoples cars every day for $6 dollars, and boy did they do it quickly. What had taken us 20 minutes took those hoochies 5. That’s when we realized, this wasn’t about lemonade anymore….So after seeing a psychologist about our skimpy outfits and how we were stealing our moms flashy underwear to make money washing cars we decided ok, maybe it is about lemonade but being innovative with it. So we hooked up with a very nice man named tear drop named after the teardrop tattoos below his eyes. He wore all blue with a blue headband and had tattoos from head to toe.
It was at this time that we made the most amount of money we went from making $30 dollars a day, to making somewhere around $10,000. Teardrop would come by every day to check on our plant sells, it wasn’t too hard considering we sold roses for a fundraiser at school before. We would soon realize though that teardrop wasn’t the most trustworthy man. We began expanding our horizons and became door to door salesman. We walked to our neighbor’s house and knocked on the door, but the second they came to door and saw our product they weren’t too pleased.
We would go on to serve 3 years in juvenile hall and teardrop 20. It wasn’t just this, all of our get rich quick schemes would end in failure. I mean, not on the news not knowing we had been inducted in a gang type failure but in our attempt to be the best we would always fail. We were now 22 and our lives were no better as we lived on the couch of a friend in an apartment above a pizzeria. “Jimmy! Please don’t bring that stuff anywhere near me bro, I’ll hit you right upside the head!”. “Come on bro, free pizza, it’s better than going hungry like we used to, enjoy it” Jimmy said with his mouth stuffed with pizza. “That scent just makes me nauseated, and I’m tired of walking around with pizza dough up in my hair”.
“Sup scumbags, moochin some pizza I see” the owner of the pizzeria and our friend says walking up the narrow stairs. “You know Kevin, if you blend anchovies and throw it on there instead of the sauce it’s actually pretty good” Jimmy says munching on pizza. “Did you just say you replaced the pizza sauce with, oh my god that smell is vile, I’m out, I’m going for walk, peace, I said grabbing my coat putting it on as I walked out the door.
I decided to walk down Broadway, something about the vibe there always had my head up in the clouds. Whenever you feel caught between a pizzeria and hard place being around the talented and successful is kind of uplifting. I decided to pass a stage hall and look up at the handsome male actor on the poster, “it takes more than a scheme to become an actor” I whispered to myself as I walked off. Then something struck me, Something Kevin said to me not too long ago that struck curiosity in me. Kevin said he did a couple acting gigs where he delivered pizzas to a pretty girl, do his bit and he would leave, which is how he got the money for his pizzeria. I bet I could do that!
PART 2:
“Another failed attempt, god dangit!” I said hitting the steering wheel. “We didn’t even make it past the auditions!” “Did he say forearm, that’s not real right, do they all expect that…” Jimmy said looking down. “I…..I don’t know Jimmy they all have high expectations, like leaving the toilet seat every time, that’s like getting a lottery ticket and expecting win every single time it’s not gonna happen.” Another scheme down in the dumps, just one more thing we were born without. It was another failed attempt I’d have to write down in my journal.
Ever since our failed lemonade attempt me and Jimmy would write down all of our endeavors in a notebook to remind us what wasn’t gonna work. We are on the 125th page, and I’ll tell you, some schemes can be summed up in only one line….”I think we should give up Trevor, we have High School degrees, maybe not the best but we could maybe get into a decent college” Jimmy says looking over at me. “If we give up on this dream now, how are we gonna dedicate ourselves to college, that takes commitment, and give up on one thing, it reflects upon everything you do”. “I suppose you’re right boss” Jimmy says seeming a little more cheery.
Per usual we arrived home and plopped ourselves on the couch to watch Netflix. “Hey Jimmy pass me my phone bud.” Probably my favorite thing to do in life and my biggest hobby was to browse the internet, I could watch videos and read blogs for days on end. I stumbled across a blog after typing “why am I so bad at everthing” entitled, “entrepreneurstruggles.net.” I decided to click on it merely because the description box below the page had a quite hilarious story about a girl who wanted to become a dancer. The girl hopped on stage after years of training to make it on the T.V. show “Americas next top notch dancer”. Her performance was going amazingly till her heal broke off, which the judges below the stage couldn’t see.
She pranced around the stage on one foot hopping, doing anything from Irish leg kicks, to crumping as it’s the only mobility she had. Needless to say she didn’t make the audition, it sounded just like me, when things are at their peak, they fall straight back down and I fail. I decided to post my stories to the blog, my lemonade stand adventure to trying to make the world’s first inflatable mobile shower for road trips. In case you’re wondering, soap and rubber, yeah they done mix. A week passed by with only a few responses.
About a month later I got onto my “Facenovel” to check my newsfeed. I scrolled through videos of cats and pictures of family members and friends I haven’t seen in years; While scrolling through my feed I noticed something odd, “Is that my story!” A page called “Earthstarhiphop” posted my story on their page with a link to all my stories, “Oh man I put our names, Jimmy get in here!” “Yo Trevor chill what’s going on”. “Look at this” I said, pale white pointing at my laptop; Jimmy read through the story and instantly realized what was going on.
We clicked on the link, my account had 46 million views, 2 million comments, and 36 million likes. “Bro when did you post this….a month ago, that’s insane, I’ve never seen so many views on an article before”. “I know Jimmy it’s crazy, but how”. Just as I said that the phone rang, when I picked it up it was my mother. “Trevor didn’t I tell you we were moving passed this incident, this is why you can’t get a job, now you’re gonna go post it all over the internet for everyone to read, are you stupid, It was even on Jimmy Falcon, and Jay Meno!” “Woah woah, mom….did you just say it was on T.V.
Part 3:
Little did we know how famous we became overnight, talk show hosts put our pictures on their show along with the article and toy shops started making teardrop toys and people started naming businesses after our endeavors. Eventually Hellen Dekindagenerous would call us to be on our show. “So boys what would you say led to your fame” Hellen said leaning towards us with the mic. “Lots of failure and not giving up, it is through failure we achieved such success” I said proudly staring at Jimmy. “Well I wouldn’t call it success y’all kind of messed up so bad y’all became more infamous than famous” Hellen said laughing.
Something about what Hellen said enraged me, so I did the only thing I knew to do. I stood up on her couch and started jumping up and down, to tell her this is me and this is who I am, it was at that moment that I knew….I made it. From then on me and Jimmy would go on to do shows such as “V.T.M Cribs”, “The Walking Zombies” and characters on cartoons such as “Loofa Bob”, “The decently odd parents who are fairies” and “Ed, Ed, and Alfred”.
The moral of this story is really, to achieve anything you must work hard, but most importantly just be yourself, because it is yourself that achieves great things. It’s what you can achieve, not what you try and be. Also I can order just green M&M’s, I don’t need to but it’s so fun watching the lady picking them out, like from walking around looking like a ghost from pizza dough, to a little Korean lady picking out green M&M’s for me it’s great you don’t even know.