Lobo
To protect people the stories may be true but the names will be changed.
It was Easter of 1998, I was working for a tattoo shop that liked to also do side work at biker rallies, the owner whose name we will say was Dash, was dating a girl who had a young teenage brother who liked art, so the owner decided he would bring on this kid as an apprentice and asked me to mentor him. He was my first and I had lots of visions on how to properly train him, we will call him Ken Park. Now the first thing I wanted to know out of all of this was how humble true loyal and honest was this kid before I devoted so much time into him. I definitely could tell he was a hard worker because at the biker rally he was in the hot sun a lot helping bring in customers sterilizing equipment watching the front doing paperwork and just about anything us artists screamed for him to do. He handled all the heavy lifting he did a lot of hard work and at the age of 15 years old this was quite a task. After the biker rally was over which this was 3 days long and Easter in Axell Texas, it was time to load up the trailer and get ready to move on. It was just me and him in the hot sun loading huge racks of designs chairs tables and whatnot into this small travel trailer, it was also very hot this time of year both of us sweating I had made a lot of money so much to where money was falling out of my pockets, this gave me an idea. So while I was going in loading something into the trailer he was going out grabbing something new to bring into the trailer, what I did at that point was I dropped a $50 bill on to the floor of the trailer. Now mind you the way you got an apprenticeship back in 1998 was you worked hard to learn scrubbed did anything and everything the artist’s asked with no question, and you didn’t make a dime doing it. So I walked out to grab another thing is he walked in when I came back and he went out that $50 bill was still there, I did this roughly three or four times and that $50 bill still laid there. Finally I said hey Ken is that your $50 bill you drop? And all shy and sporadic and scared he was like no sir no no that’s not mine I don’t know where that came from. Which that made me chuckle a little bit but from that point on I knew this kid was honest so I told him I said it is yours now pick it up you deserved it for all your hard work. Now throughout the years I would say that kid he turned out to be just as loyal and honest as ever just from that first day and in this industry you never know what you’re going to come across. Now Ken had his ups and downs throughout his career but that story is for another time.
