The Product

In 1974, I was born in a small, Texas town called Port Arthur; the only child of Richard Allen and Martha Parker. As a child, I spent lots of time thinking and reflecting on life and the things around me. You see, I had so many little things that made me different from the other little kids that sometimes it was hard to find friends. People laughed at me about my clothes and my horrible lisp. Since I was one of the only kids in the neighborhood with no brothers and sisters, I had little protection from scuffles with other kids.  In this environment, the entertainment was usually to pick on someone, and I was always the number one target.

The city I grew up in had little industry outside of refinery work, which at the time was slowly going downward. There was a large degree of poverty and drugs in the area. This was the beginning of the crack cocaine epidemic, and I watched many people around me fall victim to the disease.

My parents did a great job of working with what we were given. My father worked as a sewage plant operator for the city, earning approximately seventeen thousand dollars per year, while my mother stayed at home and watched children for friends to earn extra income.  This was far from gainful employment.  The funny thing was, he made just enough money for us not to qualify for the financial assistance that others around us got from the government and the state, so the lack of money was also an issue. 

I remember one year I got only two pair of jeans that happen to be the same color.  I wore one pair everyday so that they would eventually fade in color, so that it would look like I had lots of different clothes.  Someone at school must have figured out what I was doing, because they wrote the word “Monday” on the tag part of my jeans, so when I came back to school with the same jeans on Tuesday, I was busted.

I learned very early on that hard work would make me successful, and found it to be my escape. That was the arena where I felt complete peace. I literally spent hours thinking about what it would take for us to become wealthy, because for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how people could financially live out the lives I had seen on television.