Years ago, I was working in Suffern, New York, as a fresh-faced estimator at a body shop built inside an old firehouse. It was a weird, gritty place—charming in the way that asbestos and oil-stained floor drains can be. The owner was smart, successful, and yelled at me every single day. I think he thought that was “mentorship.” And maybe it was. Honestly, if he’d just slowed down long enough to explain why he was yelling, I probably could’ve learned a lot faster. But I picked it up anyway, mostly by absorbing stress like a shop towel. One of the strangest parts of the job was this: when a car was done, it was my responsibility to deliver it to the customer. That meant final inspection, collecting the deductible, answering questions, and making sure the car didn’t look like it had been parked in a haunted sawmill. The problem? We didn’t wash our own cars. Not because we didn’t want to, but because we couldn’t . I don’t remember if it was a village ordinance, a plumbing issue, or jus...

  Long before I had a driver’s license, I got my start in the auto body business the same way a lot of great stories start: by crashing something. I was a kid in a tiny upstate New York town—the kind of town where the bike squad was basically The Sandlot , if you subtracted the pool, Wendy Peffercorn, and added a lot more trespassing. There were maybe eight of us with bikes, and we rode everywhere: fishing rods strapped to handlebars, jumping off the roofs of abandoned school buses onto roofs of junk cars at the junkyard, and once even staging a full Royal Rumble using old mattresses stacked under a roof ledge. How any of us survived Gen X childhood is a miracle. One day I decided to bomb down a washed-out trail where a railroad trestle used to be. Abandoned tracks were everywhere back then, and this one had a big, eroded drop-off with ruts from dirt bikes. I wasn't trying to impress anybody—I was alone, just a kid entertaining himself in a world without Candy Crush or cell phon...