Year One, Part One: 260 Days By The Lake. (written: 02/15/06)

About three months ago, I was standing in our empty house in Rocky River, Ohio. Looking around at what was mine and Katie’s first house together, the indents in the carpet were reminders of where our furniture had been for the previous eight months.

This house had character like no other. It was built in the 1920’s. Then some more in the 40’s. Then the 60’s. I think the garage was added in the 70’s. Someone sat in this house and read newspaper articles about the stock market crash in ‘29, the atomic bomb being dropped, and Kennedy being assassinated.

I had a pretty sweet gig in Rocky River. I lived three minutes away on the same street as the office where I worked. Every day, I woke up 15 minutes before I had to go to work, and I was home by 5:35.

Rocky River was a quiet suburb about 12 miles west of downtown Cleveland. Not only was it close to my place of employment, it was within 5 miles of 12 dozen Irish bars, three malls and a bevy of restaurants, as well as any little odd niche shop you can think of. Not to mention that fact that I could hit a 24 hour grocery store with a golf ball.

The house sat on an acre of property, an almost unheard of amount of land considering it’s location. While the house didn’t look like much from the street, it was about 2000 sq. feet, 2 br, 2 bath, a decked out wet bar in the basement, covered porches and an attached garage.

We got the keys to the house on Valentine’s Day, 2005.

Within 21 days of taking possession of the property, I was fired from my job. An important lesson I learned was: don’t undermine superiors in front of the sales staff no matter how right you are. If you’re right and you know it, voice your concerns privately.

While this might seem an obvious point, when I started with the company 9 months earlier, it was myself and 3 other guys working out of a condo. The environment then was more bachelor pad than corporate. The cool vibe began to erode as soon as we moved into a corner suite at the big office complex in town.

My employment with AMG was terminated Friday, March 4, 2005 at 4:00pm. I played every card I could to keep my job. They weren’t having it. ”We like you, you’re one of our top 2 salesmen, we understand you and your girlfriend from Boston just moved into your first home together, you’re still fired.”

Losing our only source of income was a trying moment for a couple that had lived together for less than a month, and had exhausted their savings buying all the things that make a house operate.

Fortunately, I didn’t have much time to sit around and ponder it. I had to check in for my first round match in the River Oaks Club Tennis Championship in two hours. This may not seem like a big deal in the overall scheme of things, but I had been playing 2-3 times a week for the past 4 months preparing for this tournament. I had won both winter league titles and six consecutive matches until this day.

The day before my first match, I was going over the draw with Lee, one of the club pros. We went over my half of the draw and it looked like cake. I had already beaten most of the people who I would have faced on the way to the finals, and the only person who we considered a threat in the entire draw was the reigning champ who I wouldn’t meet until the finals.

You see where this is going, right?

I lost my first round match 6-4, 7-5 to a guy that I could typically beat with a wooden racket. I had more double faults than aces, and far more unforced errors than winners. They say that tennis is 90% mental, well I was thinking about everything else in the world besides the match.

The worst part about it was, it was the first time I had asked my girlfriend to watch a competitive match of mine. In the past, I had always thought that she would be a distraction, but I was fairly confident that nothing short of a missile attack would distract me enough to lose to this guy. Besides, I thought I could use a little moral support. So what started out to be “kind of a rough evening” at work finished with me choking to some 35 year old hack in front of my girlfriend.

Needless to say, I went home and tossed back a few. I drank a beer in the shower as soon as I got home, and one every 15 minutes afterward. Instead of going to bed and getting up for an early am hitting session, I devoured a 12 pack of Bud Light and played PS2 until 2.

The next morning I went out and got a paper and I scoured the classifieds. Within 24 hours, I had interviews set up with two different car dealerships and I was ready to hit the pavement as soon as I could.

Two days later, (Sunday night around 6:00p) one of the owners of the firm called me and told me that the Cleveland office had reconsidered, and wanted me to come in and talk to them 10a Monday morning. Although I said Friday night “I wouldn’t go back there even if those motherf---ers begged me”, I politely walked in Monday morning and agreed to their fairly obvious terms of reemployment.

However, the reunion was short lived. Three months later the company was sold to a corporation in our nation’s capitol. In a matter of weeks, I went from working for a young, flexible internet company that had 5-12 employees, to a stringent corporate machine with well over 300.

Supercorp’s original plan was to have the sales reps move down to Washington and live in apartments where the monthly rent was higher than the square footage. AKA- the “DC or else” campaign. One guy quit before they even made their offer, another guy took the job in DC, and they ended up allowing myself and AMG’s version of Salacious Crumb to keep our jobs in Cleveland for the time being.

Once I declined the job in DC, I realized that it wouldn’t be long before they got around to firing me. They were already announcing plans to “alter” commission structures and start phasing out residual income. The little man who thought he was my boss also mentioned to me that they weren’t going to keep an office in Cleveland open forever.

On top of that, I didn’t want to spend the next 6 months working out of a broom closet next to Jar Jar Binks. I could have just quit then and there, but instead, I decided to find out exactly how long you can do nothing in corporate America before being terminated. Turns out it’s about 120 days.

So I’ve got some severance pay and some back commission due to me, plus I’ve got some money saved in the bank. The day before I was fired, we decided that we were moving to Las Vegas in six weeks anyway. It seemed like perfect timing, as I had to get everything in my house ready to load onto a truck, as well as give the state I had spent my first 27 years in a proper goodbye.

At the time, the Cleveland Indians were in the midst of a playoff race, the Cavaliers were having preseason exhibitions and the Browns were one week into their 2005 season.

You can be assured that Katie and I stopped by and said farewell for now to all of my favorite sports teams. First we got tickets to see the Indians’ final game of the year against the Chicago White Sox. If both teams named Sox had lost their final games, the Tribe would have been in the postseason. But alas, Boston beat New York and Chicago handled Cleveland to stop us just short yet again.

The next week, we were in Cleveland Browns Stadium watching the Browns take on the playoff bound Chicago Bears. But you wouldn’t have known it at the time. The Bears were 1-2 just like the Browns were. They had a tough defense and a solid run game, but they had a rookie quarterback who wasn’t drafted until the 4th round. Although we trailed for most of the second half, we scored two touchdowns in 38 seconds in the 4th quarter to pull off a 20-10 win.

After the game we went over to The Tequila Ranch and knocked back victory beers with our fellow knucklehead Browns fans while we watched men tossed from and women molested by a mechanical bull.

Two weeks later we bought a big block of Cavs tickets and brought all of our friends downtown to watch the game. Since we bought so many, we bought the 15 dollar tickets, not that it was a bad view, the the air was quite thin. We won the game and LeBron had a few highlights on Sportscenter that night.

Aside from the big planned out stuff we did, we went out to eat, drink and merry just about every other night of the week. We were at Crocker Park or down in the Warehouse District more in those five weeks than we were in the previous eight months. Sooner than we could have realized, we had about a week to box up everything we owned and start piling it by the door.

Next thing I knew, I was staring at empty rooms. All of the boxes and furniture were gone, the cabinets were empty and the only evidence that we were ever there were the bags of trash just inside the garage door, and the hundreds of pounds of dumbbells in the basement.

I walked through the house, fondly remembering songs written in the music room, and drinks with friends at the bar. Adopting our little black bastard, Locutus, and watching him attack our other cat, Anastasia. Poker games in the kitchen, football games in the living room, barbecues in the backyard. Remembering hugs, kisses (and dinners) from the girl that I love when I’d come home from a business trip or even just a day at work. Hours spent mowing that huge lawn on weekends and raking up hundreds of buckeyes in the fall.

I was kind of saddened when I locked that door for the last time, but I was overwhelmingly excited to be departing on a 2200 mile journey across our vast nation.

My girlfriend hadn’t seen our new house at this point. I flew out two weeks earlier and picked a place in two days. It wasn’t all that difficult, there weren’t many results when we searched for new construction, pet friendly and allowed smokers for under 1200 per month. Three to be exact. They were all about the same house, the biggest deciding factor was the view that we had from the one that I picked.

So we hopped in the Tahoe and departed Cleveland at 12pm Eastern Time on Monday, October 31st. We spent our first night in “Effingham” Illinois. Not much to report from Effingham, we watched the ravens-steelers game in our hotel room and ate Lunchables.

The next night we ended up in the bustling urban mecca of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Again, not a whole hell of a lot to do at night in Tulsa, we went to the steakhouse down the street from our hotel, had a few whiskeys with people in Stetson hats and went back to our room. The next day we stopped in OKC and visited the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial. It’s a pretty surreal experience. If something in life forces you to go to Oklahoma City, I’d recommend checking it out.

Wednesday night we stopped in Amarillo, Texas. While in Amarillo, we stopped in and ate at the “Ritz Plaza” hotel (not to be confused with the “Ritz” or the “Plaza”). You could tell it was a pretty amazing place at one point. We ate in a giant indoor courtyard surrounded by statues and foliage. The next morning we stopped into “The Big Texan” down the road (home of the 72 oz steak challenge) and I ate eggs and sausage with a side of rattlesnake for breakfast. By the way, rattlesnake sucks. Which is probably why the menu warned “if you complain, we’ll bring you a live one”.

Thursday was our last full day of driving. After stopping in one of two possible restaurants in Albuqueerque, New Mexico for a crap lunch, we barreled through the Hopi Nation and finally parked the Green Monster in Flagstaff, Arizona. Despite Flagstaff seeming really cool, we didn’t leave the hotel once we checked in, I went down to the lobby and used their free internet service to adjust my fantasy football rosters, then we split a 6 pack and fell asleep.

On Friday, we only had about 250 miles to go until we got to Vegas. We flew through Arizona at speeds that the original Enterprise couldn’t have reached. I don’t normally operate 6600 lb. vehicles at three digit speeds, but it’s Arizona, I turned the wheel once in the entire state.

We pulled into our new driveway around 2pm Pacific Time, November 4th.