Getting a job can be the toughest job most of us have. It was true for me back in 1989. My qualifications were puny, my education was irrelevant, and my most pertinent publishing experience was working for Kinko?s. There was no way I could get work writing about cars.
I had just given up on grad school and was staring down the necessity of actually starting a career. I had always read car magazines obsessively and knew I had some writing talent, but the only things I had ever published were in The King?s Page, the newspaper at San Marcos High School in Santa Barbara, California. I knew no one in the publishing business, no one in the car business, and was pretty lousy with a wrench.
So I decided to write my way into the business. During the summer and fall of 1989 I composed my own parody of Car and Driver titled, naturally, Car and Pearley. It meant borrowing cars from people at Kinko?s and my grandmother (that?s her 1969 Fiat 124 Sport Coupe), and talking friends into posing for other photos. I made props, I shot photos, and I laid out the pages using desktop-publishing skills I learned at Kinko?s on my then girlfriend?s Macintosh SE. I put together 150 copies at the Kinko?s store in Ventura, California, and then sent them out to every automotive publication I could find. Car and Pearley was ludicrously successful. I was invited to visit Road & Track?s offices in Newport Beach, interviewed with several magazines at Petersen Publishing, was flown to New Jersey to meet...