ON THE BUSINESS FRONT, things did not improve. I learned that clients were far more dangerous than the competition. It seemed that every time I got ahead, one of my clients would sting me, leaving me with unpaid bills. After a few more years of struggling, I decided that I had had enough of advertising and its risks and decided to focus solely on clay animation. I moved my office to a warehouse and opened ClayMagic Productions.
Though we had a few successes, ClayMagic Productions never flew. All the while, I was steadily descending deeper into debt. Close to fifty thousand dollars’ worth. I was receiving daily collection calls from nasty people, while my stomach acid digested my stomach lining. In spite of my promise to Jenna, I was now forced to work long days. In the final months of my business I was working up to a hundred and twenty hours a week just to stave off financial collapse.
All this time I did what I could to shield Keri and the girls from our financial realities. I scrounged gas money and ate soup every day for lunch at a soup kitchen a few blocks from the warehouse where the bread sticks were free.
Finally I admitted defeat. I began closing down my business while I looked for a job, realizing that it would likely take a decade to pay off my business debts. Coincidentally, that same week I received a phone call from an old business associate I had not spoken with for more than a year. He said that he had recently heard of a job and for some reason kept thinking of me. It was a design and marketing position for a bank in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The pay wasn’t great, but it was far more than I was making, and my salary would be tax free. Our family would have an adventure while I whittled away at my debts. It was, I decided, an answer to prayer. But when I prayed about the position, I felt a strong impression to stay put—that it was only a distraction. A distraction from what? I thought. Without knowing why, I turned down the job.
•
Throughout this time I never forgot my grandfather’s blessing. Now, as I was approaching the watermark year of thirty, my feelings of inadequacy ran unchecked. I was having a premidlife crisis. I was a college dropout, a failure at business and mired in debt. I was anything but famous. The promise of my grandfather’s blessing could not have seemed more distant.
In retrospect, I suppose that I never doubted my grandfather’s blessing, for my grandfather was, to me, infallible. I had witnessed too many miraculous things at his hands. What I really doubted was myself. I began to wonder if I had lived so much below my potential that I had betrayed the promise of my grandfather’s blessing. This possibility weighed heavily on my mind. It was not the loss of fame and fortune that disturbed me, rather the fear that I had lost something much deeper and more costly. I wondered in my heart if I had let God down.
One May evening I was at my grandfather’s house helping him with some chores, when I found my feelings particularly bothersome. At the end of the night I asked my grandfather if he had another blessing for me. He looked down for a moment, then said, “Yes. Come with me.”
He led me to his den, laid his hands upon my head and, to my astonishment, he began to repeat, nearly word for word, the blessing he had given me twenty years previous—with one exception. He added a line. “My beloved grandson,” he said with authority, “you are about to embark upon a mission that will touch the hearts of the children of men in a way you cannot now fathom.”
I arrived home that night as confused as I had left. Nothing of that magnitude was happening in my life. I wrote my grandfather’s words in my journal and promptly forgot them.
Then my former boss, Evan Twede, called. His agency was running a well-funded campaign for the Salt Lake City mayoral race, and having just broken up with his third partner, he asked for my help. He generously offered to split all the profits we made from the race. I accepted his offer.
Although we lost the race, our candidate had made it through the primary and come close enough to an upset that we made a name for ourselves. And for the first time in months, I had money. Enough, at least, to pay my bills at home.
It was at our candidate’s “victory” party that we met a man who planned to run for the U.S. Senate. Robert F. Bennett was a tall, Lincolnesque man whose father had, years previous, been a U.S. senator from Utah. He was also a millionaire entrepreneur, one of the founding partners of Franklin Day Planners, a large Utah-based company.
As a young man, Bennett had gained some national notoriety as the man President Nixon had believed to be Deep Throat—Woodward and Bernstein’s unnamed source who broke the Watergate scandal. In the Senate race Bennett was a long shot, but I liked Bennett and I wasn’t in much of a position to be too picky with my clients. Besides, if you believe in the candidate, it’s better business to take long shots. It’s as a friend once told me: Always pick fights with people bigger than you. If you win, you’re a hero. If you lose, you’re courageous.
Bennett’s candidacy came at the right time in my life. The Senate race turned out to be the most expensive Senate race in Utah history. In just six months I was able to pay off my business debt and still manage to put a little away.
And I was beginning to regain some of my lost confidence. In the heat of the campaign I decided to run for the state legislature.
