Everyone told me not to work for Doug Conkle. “He’s ripped off every contractor in town,” they said. “He doesn’t pay his bills.” “He might pay you for awhile, but eventually you’ll get screwed.” But I was in my ‘say yes to all job offers’ phase, so I took the job, and told my friends, “He’ll pay me.” No one was convinced.
The job started as a case of mistaken identity. I’ve gotten a few jobs that way. “You work on mobile homes, right?” “Sure.” “That’s your job, fixing up mobile homes?” “I can fix mobile homes.” “But that’s not your main job?” It went on like that for awhile, and then, “Can you do drywall?” “Yeah.”
Conkle owned a few mobile home parks around the western US, and he and his wife spent their days moving from one to the next, living in a large motorhome. Before he got into real estate he was a first mate on a cargo freighter, and he still took a job on a ship from time to time.
That must be where he got his management style. On a ship, it makes sense to keep your crew busy with routine maintenance — cleaning, painting, minor repairs. But in a mobile home park, especially one as distressed as Conkle’s properties, there tends to be more work than there is time to do it all, so you have to prioritize.
I started with a bathroom remodel — really more of a total rebuild, because the floor below the tub had completely rotted out, as had some of the walls, and some previous repairs had not been done particularly well.
Before I could finish the job I was hired to do, Conkle asked me to repair the skirting on several homes around the park. This was the tenants’ responsibility, but he complained, “These people will never do it, so we just do it ourselves and I bill them for it.” A couple tenants weren’t happy with this arrangement and thought I was the right person to yell at about it, but it turns out that I’m not a very satisfying person to verbally abuse.
Next he had me build a storage shed, which I almost finished before he pulled me off to skirt another home. In that one I found a massive plumbing leak, filling the plastic sheeting under the house like a giant, upside-down waterbed. I poked a hole in the plastic to let the water out and told Conkle I wouldn’t touch the home again unless it was to fix the plumbing. It was likely that a large section of the floor would also need to be replaced.
Back at the original home, I finally got to finish the bathroom and then started rebuilding the roof trusses in the living room. Some of my tools were stolen from the job site, by a particularly stupid tweaker who was trying to use my drywall screw gun to make a repair on his car, and then became frustrated when he learned that the batteries on cordless tools have to be recharged. He hadn’t stolen the charger. I’m told he exclaimed, “I thought they were supposed to be cordless! What’s the point if you still have to plug in the charger?”
Without going into detail, I got my tools back. I’m also told the thief is now sober and doing well, and I’m happy to hear it.
Conkle came into the house one day to check on the project. We got to talking and it turned out he was from the same part of California where I grew up. I told him I used to go to punk shows in his home town. And then he asked the dreaded question, “Which groups did you see?”
He called them “groups.” We didn’t see groups, we saw bands. We didn’t go to concerts, we went to shows. I always hated talking about music with anyone outside of the tribe. If I told him he wouldn’t have heard of any of the bands, I’d sound like a snob. If I listed off a few of them, he’d ask more questions, and my answers would only be increasingly confounding. I opted for snobbery — one awkward moment and it’s over, versus one after another, and another …
Then he began talking about his tenants, and it was clear that he had only disdain for them. His attitudes, his phrasing, the way he talked about money — all suddenly familiar. “Ah, I know who this is,” I thought. I’d met this guy before, a thousand iterations of him.
I suppose it’s possible to run a successful business when you despise your customers, but why would you want to? It sounds like a miserable way to make money.
Across the road, a hoarder was being evicted and moved into an assisted living facility. The scene was at first heartbreaking, then disgusting. No one had been in the home in many years. Mountains of clothing, much of it never worn, intermingled with moldy, half-eaten sandwiches; years-old jugs of milk; envelopes full of cash; dead cats; jars of urine and feces.
Conkle wanted me to clean out the house, and it took all the restraint and self-control I could muster not to tell him to fuck right the fuck off. It was a job for a hazmat team, not a general contractor. So he hired a teenage kid to do it.
It took several days to get everything out of the home, and it filled two large construction dumpsters, which Conkle didn’t want to rent until the last possible moment, so he had the kid pile the trash on the ground, and then he hired an excavator operator to bring his machine and scoop all the garbage into the dumpster.
Dumpster rental: $50 per day. Excavator with operator: $180 per hour. In other words, for every two hours of excavator time you could rent the dumpster for a week.
Conkle also needed to install some culverts and dry wells for drainage. He’d originally tried to get me to dig the trenches for the culverts by hand.
Time to dig by hand: 8 hours at $25 per hour. Time to dig with an excavator: 5 minutes at $180 per hour.
Thankfully I helped Conkle see reason on that one. Besides, I still had a lot of unfinished projects around the property, and that was becoming increasingly frustrating.
When the excavator arrived, Conkle decided to have him clear brush and weeds from a mobile home pad, which was a much better job for a smaller machine. It took half the morning for him to realize he was wasting money, and then he was suddenly in a rush, grabbing any laborer he could find to get the culverts in the ground so the shovel operator could bury them before end of day.
When things didn’t go smoothly, Conkle panicked. He finally started doing math in his head. He began to tremble. He snapped at his laborers. They snapped back. And then, one of the funniest sentences I’ve ever heard on a job site: “This is costing me five cents a second!”
I wasn’t the only one who found it funny, and a beet-red Conkle stormed off his own job site in the grip of a mental breakdown. I wondered how many of these his wife had talked him down from over the years.
With the hoarder house emptied, Conkle wanted to remodel it and sell it. His concern was that if he demolished it, as he should have, he would be hit with all kinds of regulations, like asbestos abatement laws. A few coats of fresh paint would be much cheaper.
The house was still quite ripe with the disturbingly sweet smell of decomposing waste. I suggested that if he insisted on remodeling, he start by painting the entire interior of the home with Kilz, a brand well-known for its odor sealing capabilities, but Conkle insisted that any paint would work.
I ended up agreeing to do a little work on the house after it was painted. It still smelled bad, but it was tolerable. Conkle insisted on cutting corners. Some of his laborers and I began using his name as a verb for any half-assed repair. Leaky drain line? Conkle it with a little duct tape. You bought three different types of flooring at a surplus sale and don’t have enough of any of them to do the whole floor? Just Conkle them together, it’ll be fine.
After several months of moving me from one project to the next, without ever letting me finish anything, Conkle and Mrs. Conkle decided to go south for the winter. He wanted to wrap up our business arrangement, but he also wanted the first home I’d worked on completed. He had a buyer lined up, and he proposed a three-way trade.
I would complete the remodel and install a new roof on the home. Conkle would pay me for any unexpected repairs, as I was continuously finding new problems inside the walls and ceiling. I would provide the roofing materials at my own expense, but he would be responsible for all other materials. The buyer would give Conkle a sum of money for the home, and she would give me her travel trailer as payment for the new roof.
There were weather delays, but I completed the project. I took delivery of the travel trailer, and I emailed Conkle the bill for the unplanned repairs. The total was a little over $3,000. He pretended not to understand the bill.
When we spoke on the phone, he tried to change the terms of our deal. He claimed he’d never agreed to pay me for the extra repairs. In effect, he tried to cut himself out of the equation entirely. So I put a lien on his mobile home park.
I followed all the correct procedures and notified him properly, but Conkle didn’t respond. He could have challenged the lien in court, but he missed his window. If he ever wanted to sell the property he would have to pay me. And as it turned out, he did want to sell.
Conkle rolled back into town and we had a tense conversation in the grocery store. By tense, I mean that I said bad words to him in front of a lot of other people. He was visibly rattled, and complained to other shoppers and store employees, but he had a hard time finding a sympathetic ear. I’m not the most friendly guy, but I have more friends than Conkle.
Ultimately he agreed to pay what he owed. We met at the bank the next morning. He wanted to watch me cash his check so I couldn’t claim he’d never paid. I’ve noticed that dishonest people tend to think that everyone else is also dishonest.
In the bank lobby, he was shaking, with tears in his eyes. Paying his debt was traumatic for him. I wrote him a receipt and filled out a form to remove the lien, but I made him file it and pay the fee, which also made him very upset.
Some time later I saw him in the hardware store with his wife. He avoided me, but she wanted a fight. I wasn’t interested. I’d already won. Her attacks devolved into her telling me I stank. I said she was probably right — I’d been cleaning the barn. The owner had a later conversation with them about what is and is not appropriate behavior in his store.
Conkle sold his trailer park for around half a million dollars. It should have sold for at least four times that amount, but he could never hold onto his tenants, so occupancy was below fifty percent. He couldn’t get qualified contractors to work for him because he didn’t pay his bills. He always cut corners when it came to maintenance and repairs.
Had he treated workers fairly and given tenants a good value for their money, people would have wanted to work for him, and his park would have been at full occupancy, at a higher monthly rate, like every other mobile home park in town.
Instead he’d saved thousands of dollars, and lost millions.
You might say he Conkled himself.