It's Time! Page 4

  The gun shows started out a little shaky, but my father was a quick study. Pretty soon he and my mother had a wonderful business for themselves. For fun we’d hit the gaming tables and play blackjack.

  I remember those days with great fondness, my father and mother in their prime, happy to be out with their sons after a hard day of pulling in cash at their shows. After all that, nothing could be better than eating a thick steak, winning at the blackjack table, and then, still dressed in your finest, catching a show.

  This was my new world, my new reality. It was like I was living a scene out of a Martin Scorsese movie. Think Casino or Goodfellas, and picture me walking through the gaming tables in Vegas with a soundtrack blaring along to the tune of my life.

  With the money I was pulling in, I bought my first piece of property, a beachside town house in Port Hueneme, near Ventura, California. It cost me $98,000. I actually didn’t live there, because I chose to live at home in Malibu. But my brother moved into my town house when he first became a police officer in Santa Paula, California, before doing a lateral transfer to the Redondo Beach Police Department. I felt I had the best of both worlds. When Brian worked nights, I could have the place to myself. When my parents were out of town, I had their place to myself. If I wanted a romantic weekend with one of my girlfriends, I’d book a suite at the Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard, below the Hollywood sign.

  These were the great old Almost Famous days of rock ’n’ roll, when the Hyatt became notorious for famous bands partying and tossing TVs out the windows. It wasn’t unusual to see a rock star like Carlos Santana or Rod Stewart walking in and out of the lobby. My dates and I used to hang out at the Comedy Store next door, where we spent many a night watching the likes of David Letterman and newcomers like Jim Carrey, Jeff Foxworthy, and Andrew Dice Clay. Giants of comedy like Robin Williams and Richard Pryor dropped by on surprise visits to work on their new material. It was a wonderful place to take dates for dinner and a show. I sometimes wonder if I don’t have to thank those great comedians for improving my closing ratio with the ladies.

  My father’s friend was the manager at the Hyatt at the time, and I’d be able to swing a beautiful $150 petite suite for a mere twenty dollars a night. When the mudslides hit Malibu, authorities closed the Pacific Coast Highway, making it impossible to drive down to my offices in Santa Monica. So I moved right into the Hyatt for about four weeks while workers repaired the highway. My employers covered the expenses, and I had the time of my life.

  And why not live large? I’d just become a member of a club that would be familiar to many people today: people who sit in cubicles in giant rooms, grafted to headsets and autodialers, selling everything under the sun—copier toner, yes, but also stocks and bonds, real estate, dream vacations, vitamins, protein shakes, cars, and even pets. If you could craft the right pitch, you could sell anything, because people love hearing they’re about to save money on something they most desire.

  Congratulations to me. I had joined a boiler room.

  WELL, of course, everything came crashing down and I experienced one of the worst summers of my life.

  I was working for the bosses, turning over these sales like crazy, when it dawned on me: I knew how to do this now. I could do this myself and keep all the money. A genius idea, and anyone in business would eventually think the same thing. One of the other sales guys convinced me to partner with him. We set up our own shop, and lured all the top salespeople by offering them better commissions. They all came running. I was nineteen years old, and this was my very first corporation.

  Things looked good.

  And then, one day in 1976, while I was driving around town, I realized that the same car was following me everywhere I went. The same white Toyota. This guy was everywhere. Following me to and from work. Parking outside my home at night. Even following me to lunch. I remember coming back to my car with a handful of burritos for my salespeople and seeing the car parked across the street.

  “Hey,” I yelled. “What the hell are you doing?”

  He looked at me wide-eyed, rolled up his window, and zipped off.

  That’s when it hit me: I was being tailed by a private eye.

  Later my attorney informed me that I was being sued for $1 million by my former employers. Well, sure I was: I’d lured away their entire sales force and I was beating them at their own game. I hadn’t expected them to be happy with what I’d done, but I was still a little naïve. Then my partner was accused of stealing leads from our former employer. It was another scene out of Glengarry Glen Ross, where the Jack Lemmon character does something similar, with horrible consequences.

  Here I was, thinking I was pursuing the American dream, but really it was built on distrust and lies. I was ashamed. And embarrassed. This was not the way my parents had raised me. I couldn’t really take pride driving that flashy car around if I knew someone had good reason to ruin me.

  I remembered what my father said when he caught me cheating at solitaire: if you can’t do it honestly, there’s no point in doing it. Dishonest business is ultimately unsustainable. You can’t keep it up, because it always collapses on itself.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation like that. My girlfriend Amelia and I were at the Hyatt House for a romantic weekend, and I had just found this all out. It was the worst weekend of my life. I didn’t know how to handle it. I was just a kid. All night long, I lay in bed thinking, What’s going to happen to me? What if I had done it another way? How can I make amends?

  I got an idea.

  I went into my former boss’s office early that Monday morning and apologized. I asked him to hire me back. If he did, I’d bring all the salespeople with me.

  I mentally crossed my fingers and waited. He bit.

  I got about 90 percent of the sales force back. I negotiated a decent deal for myself, too. More money than I was making before, including ownership in the company. The owner even sprung for all my legal bills. As soon as we all started producing like the old days, I got a raise on top of that.

  It seemed like all my troubles were over. Then, one day, I was summoned to the office of a federal postal inspector. The guy wore a gun on his hip, and leafed through a thick sheaf of federal documents on his desk and had me read them. I didn’t quite understand them, but he was a good man, and patient.

  “You’re walking a thin line,” he said.

  What a shock—it turned out that the hallowed Reroute Pitch danced uncomfortably close to fraud. Anytime you mail products sold as a result of a deceptive pitch, you commit mail fraud. If you’ve used the phone to make your pitch, you can tack on wire fraud.

  Fantastic.

  Admittedly, the federal codes were debatable. But still, the inspector said, if the feds felt like getting zealous, they could just shut us down. Or they wouldn’t. It was all a matter of how a U.S. attorney read the statutes and how hard he or she felt like working.

  At one point, telemarketing rooms were such a popular federal investigative priority that the local network news actually sent an undercover reporter to apply and be hired and trained by my staff. One day I got an intercom call from our receptionist that there were people with cameras outside our Venice, California, offices. Three minutes later, the camera crew and the female reporter were walking down the hallway to the salesrooms, asking for the owner. This was actually my “first time” on TV. If you had been watching, you would have seen me walking away to call my lawyer.

  All of this scared me. At the time I was hearing of sleazy marketing tactics in other parts of the telemarketing industry—companies that were selling people empty packages or bilking seniors out of their last cents, all because they had answered the phone and gotten caught up in a salesman’s enticing pitch. I made a decision. “To hell with this,” I said. “I’m quitting.”

  Don’t get me wrong. I loved the money and it was fun while it lasted, but I didn’t want to live my life always looking over my shoulder. By now I was twenty-four years old, and rather t
han be scared about what came next, I felt confident that I would always be able to make decent money by starting businesses, testing them to see how well they performed, and making a decision about whether to continue operating them after a good chunk of data had come in.

  For a while I helped develop and manage a company that sold nutritional products. My mom actually became one of my top independent distributors. I dabbled again in telemarketing, using my own pitch—a clean pitch—where we called people and asked about their business needs and told them about our products. I had as many as fifty salespeople working the phones and grossing close to $10 million in sales a year. I was beginning to see the value of the soft sell, of educating consumers and letting them arrive at the decision to buy on their own. I firmly believe that the best salespeople know how to let the customer sell themselves on a product. All the salesperson has to do is educate and excite them by saying as little as possible but meaning as much as possible. You create the sizzle and then “close” the deal. I did some motivational speaking at the time, too, sharing what I’d learned about salesmanship and living a healthy life.

  BUFFERISM NO. 4

  “BSC: BALLS, SKILL, CONFIDENCE.”

  BSC is my theory of life. You can do anything if you have these three things. Some people focus exclusively on skill—preparing, training, becoming professional. That’s good, but don’t neglect the other two. Beyond these three, you’ll need luck and timing. But if you focus on BSC, that’s a strong base to work from.

  Outwardly, my life was back to awesome. I’d get up in the morning, stick my surfboard in my new Mercedes 560 SL convertible, and drive to work with the top down and the board sticking up in the front seat, buckled in beside me like a surfing executive. We’d shut the office at 1:00 p.m. and I’d go surfing. On weekends, I still worked with my family at collectors’ shows. As I learned that business, I worked with my mom to promote my own SportsBuff Collectible Shows in Vegas and the Los Angeles area. Between the booth rentals and the entry fees we charged people to enter, we could gross upward of $100,000 on those shows in a weekend.

  In the background of my life, however, simmering on a different track, was a family secret that was about to change my life forever.

  4

  SECRETS

  Every family has its secrets, things that the adults never discuss with the kids and that you have to piece together for yourself as you get older. Our family was no different. When he was seventy years old, my father finally got a look at his real birth certificate and discovered that he was actually sixty-nine years old, not seventy as he believed. His father, the prizefighter Johnny Buff, had falsified my father’s age when they were filling out his military enlistment papers. My father had spent his whole life thinking he was one year older.

  There was only one reason my grandfather would have done this. My father had been running around with a tough crowd in New York City. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, he’d been kicked out of Catholic school for punching a priest. He punched the clergyman in the throat and sent him spilling down a flight of stairs. It was a nasty incident, but my father had become enraged when he saw one of his best friends being viciously disciplined by the priest.

  It’s hard to purge your record after pulling a stunt like that. My father was headed for trouble if he didn’t clean up his act. While military service is not right for everyone, it was for my dad. He entered the military and became a stand-up guy.

  My brother Brian and I were still coming up empty-handed every time we tried to piece together our family history. Every time we saw photos of John Lesky, aka Johnny Buff, he was depicted with a woman who was not our grandmother, and children who did not include my father. To top it off, we never got a chance to meet him. Johnny Buff had died in East Orange, New Jersey, in 1955 at the age of sixty-six, two years before I was born.

  Brian and I wondered: Was our father Johnny Buff’s illegitimate son? Or was he the product of a marriage that had ended in a quick divorce? We still don’t know the answer to these questions, because my father was not the kind of man who took kindly to being interrogated.

  He never told stories of his experiences in World War II. In fact, my father seemed to frown upon such tales. He kept a case that held all the medals he was awarded for his military service. Peeking into that case, seeing his Purple Heart, among others, was all I needed to imagine what he’d seen and experienced. He was a walking military historian and proud of his service. Unlike some veterans, he bore no ill will against his former combatants. His attitude was, “I served my country. You served yours. We should both be proud of that.”

  That was the world my dad inhabited. He wasn’t one to talk about personal stuff in his past. But when I was a young man, I was struggling to understand his past because so much of it was a mystery. I love old movies, especially those old films noir where characters played by guys like Humphrey Bogart try to sift through lies and deceit and long-buried skeletons in the closet. I had no idea that I was about to become that detective.

  In 1987, when I was in my late twenties and running my telemarketing business and my SportsBuff gun and collectible shows, I was watching boxing matches on TV. More than anything, I couldn’t help noticing the man announcing those fights. From time to time, they printed his name on the screen.

  He was tall, handsome, and debonair. That tuxedo of his gave him a James Bond look.

  Every time they flashed his name on the screen, I felt chills run through me.

  The guy’s name was Michael Buffer.

  Now, big deal, you say. What’s in a name? But you see, all of us have a sense of how common our names are. If your name is John Smith, you don’t blink an eye when you meet another Smith. Dana White is not going to freak if a fan comes up to him, hysterically saying, “Dude, you’re never gonna believe this! My last name is White, too!”

  But in all my life I’d never met anyone named Buffer. Believe me, by the time I was in my mid-twenties I’d traveled enough, looked in plenty of phone books, and had always come up empty. And now my friends and everyone in my office were asking me, “Hey, is that boxing announcer guy your brother?”

  At the time, Michael and I did share certain facial similarities. That and the name were enough to pique my interest. From then on, whenever I got a chance, I’d make a point of watching the fights and paying special attention to Michael Buffer’s mannerisms.

  Every time, I’d get the same feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  Something’s going on, I thought. I don’t know what it is.

  I didn’t know how to bring this up with my parents, so I squelched it. Buried it. Tried to put it out of my mind. But that didn’t work. If you liked the fights, as I did, you were going to keep seeing Michael Buffer.

  A couple of years passed. I was taking a long road trip with my dad to check out some gun collections for his own collection or the business. We were having a great time, hanging out, talking our heads off about everything under the sun. My job, sports, the fights.

  We were on a part of the drive where my father had the wheel. I figured, what the hell.

  “You know,” I said to him, “a lot of people have been saying that that fight announcer guy must be my brother. We look a little alike and we have the same last name.”

  My father was stone-faced.

  “Isn’t that funny?” I said, kind of hoping to lead him out but prepared to shut up now.

  Silence.

  The man who rarely talked about his past surprised the hell out of me. He looked away from the road and eyed me quietly for a second.

  Thinking.

  Then he looked back at the road.

  Finally he said six words that changed my life: “I think that is your brother.”

  You gotta be fucking kidding me! I thought.

  As we made our way north, he began to tell me his story. Once upon a time, he’d met a girl and fallen in love. They were young, and married hastily, the way so many young people of that generation did. My father went to w
ar, and when he returned home he was greeted by his wife and his bouncing baby boy. But the marriage, which had come together in a hurry, fell apart. The young couple had split, and she’d taken their son.

  From what I could decipher over the years, my father saw Michael last when the boy was two and a half years old. After that, my father never saw either the boy or his mother again. Shockingly, my mother had known all along about this relationship—and my father’s firstborn son—but had never breathed a word of it to us.

  Not just one but both of my parents had kept this secret from Brian and me.

  I was stunned. I was glad that my father was driving or I probably would have driven us off the road.

  How do you like that? I had another brother. He was out there in the world, on TV, making a name for himself. And he knew next to nothing about us.

  “Would you ever want to meet him?” I asked my father.

  He shrugged it off, suddenly awkward and uncomfortable. I knew the conversation had run into a brick wall.

  But I didn’t let it die. Together, my brother Brian and I pressed the issue. Sometime later, we had a more serious conversation with my father and he admitted that he had long wondered how his other son had turned out. He was proud of Michael’s success, but he was torn. He didn’t know if his son, who was now in his early forties, was interested in hearing from him after all these years.

  “Don’t worry about him,” we told him. “Think about you. Are you open to meeting him?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I began working the phones to find out more about Michael. At one point I even called the offices of Don King, the great boxing promoter, to track down Michael. And one night a few months later, Michael was announcing a fight at the Country Club in Reseda, where they filmed the opening club scene in the film Boogie Nights. It’s just over the hill from our home in Malibu. The show was live, and we were watching in my dad’s home.

  “Look,” we told him, “he’s here in town right now. Why don’t you call him?”