Mulholland lived inland but his house had still taken a beating. A tree branch had fallen through his carport, just missing his Escalade, and almost all the vegetation in his yard had been either flattened or uprooted. Defiantly, Mulholland, his wife, their seventeen-year-old daughter, and their thirteen-year-old son John (Mulholland's two older sons no longer live at home) had hunkered down during the ten-hour storm as winds battered the modest two-story brick home. This might seem rather foolhardy, but once I got to know Mulholland, it didn't surprise me at all.

When I pulled into his long dirt driveway, Mulholland fairly bounded out of his house to meet me. His handshake was akin to meeting an oncoming linebacker, fast and firm and delivered with no small amount of elbow-pumping force. Though a relatively squat man, about five nine and broad, he possessed a coiled energy, like a crouched cat stalking its prey. He was wearing his work "uniform," which consisted of a tucked-in polo shirt, jeans, black Rockport sneakers, and an ID badge clipped to his shirt that read spiderman mulholland, bennet shuman architects, the name of the architect he partnered with much of the time. He was exquisitely clean-shaven, and his full black hair was gelled into a politician's helmet. He looked less like a daredevil and more like someone who might sell me kitchen appliances.

We headed to his office, a one-story, three-room building separate from the main house, to talk about his work. Or, more specifically, for Mulholland to talk about his work. Best described as a one-way conversationalist, Mulholland doesn't interact so much as preach; it is as if he's speaking in ALL CAPS. He also likes to make an enthusiastic hooting noise before and after sentences, a sort of hybrid of "Hooo boy" and "Whoopee," and often follows particularly exciting declarations with a high-pitched, wheezing laugh that causes his face to scrunch up in a manner reminiscent of Jeff Daniels in the movie Dumb and Dumber. So, for instance, were Mulholland eating a sandwich, he wouldn't describe it so much as champion it. "WOOOOOO! NOW THAT'S THE BEST SANDWICH IN FLORIDA RIGHT THERE," he would say in his loud, raspy voice. "I MIGHT JUST GET A COOLER AND FILL IT WITH THOSE SANDWICHES, HEH, HEH, HEEEAHHHHHH."

Not that Mulholland ate any sandwiches while I was with him, or, for that matter, any solid food. At the time, he was on day three of one of his semi-regular fasts (he alternates between three-day, seven-day, and ten-day liquid fasts, and his wife and kids often join him). Over the course of two days, all I saw him consume was water, V-8, Gatorade, and coffee. "I'm stronger when I'm fasting than when I'm not," he explained to me. "Your body and your mind become sharp, son. It's like a RAZOR," he said, snapping his fingers. "You think by not eating you'd get weak" — and here he shook his head emphatically — "I came off a twenty-one-day fast about ten years ago and it was in the heat of summer and 111 degrees and I was just out there flying down the sides of buildings, JUST FLYING."

So, in observance of his fast, he drank his "breakfast" of black coffee while giving me a tour. His office was large, exceptionally clean, and lined with bookshelves, which included a mixture of building maintenance tomes such as Sick Buildings, and motivational books such as Do It Now!" and Break the Procrastination Habit. The walls were pasted with various trade school diplomas (the Exterior Design Institute), thank-you notes (from the SWAT team I'd read about, on behalf of the sheriff), framed news clips ("Spiderman Coaxes Jumper Off of a Water Tower"), and motivational reminders ("Take a look at your appearance. Do you look like a polished professional?"). An assortment of photo collages from his Marine Corps days graced the walls.

I pointed to a picture of him standing in a jungle, wearing fatigues and camouflage paint and cradling an enormous black gun. "That's my rifle there, that's my puppy," he said in the manner of someone identifying a nephew or a niece in a family snapshot. "That's an M-40 A1 sniper rifle, ten by magnification, fires around 2,550 feet per second with a bolt tail projectile. I could hit a helium balloon on the wind at three and a half football fields away. I have a 20/17 shooting eye. I outshot everybody in the Marine Corps except one man."

And the next photo, of a bunch of soldiers suspended from lines below a helicopter in jungle terrain. Rappelling?

"Nope, that's spy rigging," he said. "They hooked us up, chained us in, and took us up. Four guys go out north, south, east, and west. The helicopter comes in and you lock yourself in, with each line shorter than the other. When the helicopter starts going you start walking and it just picks you up. [So the soldiers are hooked, one above the other, to the same line.] On that day, we lost four guys. They got killed. They hit the power lines. It was just a miscalculation." He shook his head in a brief moment of remembrance, then headed toward his computer. "Hey, you gotta see my DVD!"

He popped in a disc and the hard-charging chords of Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild" blared from his computer speakers. Mulholland nodded along. "OH YEAH, HERE WE GO!"

The screen came to life and there he was, hanging upside down about a hundred feet below the top of a skyscraper, attached at the waist by a long rope, looking something like an unspooled yo-yo. As I watched, he inverted himself and began walking along the side of the building, then running, using the tautness of the rope to remain perpendicular. With a strong push of his leg, he launched himself into the air and did one, two, now three spins before landing against the glass with arms out, cushioning the impact like a cat falling from a height. Then he tore off the other way across the building, soaring out thirty feet — "THIRTY-SEVEN FEET, SON," to be exact — performing twelve turns in the air and finally wrapping himself around the edge, briefly disappearing from sight. "After twenty-two years on buildings, you name it and I can do it," he said as we watched. "If you open your legs, it slows your speed, if you close your legs you spin. I can see the building and after a while you can get pretty good at it, so I never hit my back. Probably been six years since I hit my back."

The video was impressive — I felt like I was watching a segment on That's Incredible! or some new extreme sports competition on late-night ESPN2 — but I wasn't clear how these stunts helped him with his job. He explained that he used his rappelling and wall-climbing skills to make high-risk repairs — whether it be fixing a flagpole as he had done in Denver or doing mechanical repairs on top of a water tower or ascending a cracked atrium — that would otherwise require cranes or helicopters or a team of specialists. At this point in his career, however, the bulk of his job involved assessing buildings damaged by water intrusion for insurance purposes, often focusing on toxic mold danger. As part of this process, he often rappelled down the sides of these buildings to examine their exteriors and take samples, using wall-walking systems to go from side to side, thus eliminating the need for multiple rappels. Doing so allowed him to save his clients time and money, reach areas that would be nearly impossible to reach by other means, work alone when need be, and do repair work on the spot. A one-day building inspection, he told me, can pay up to $5,000. Considering that he has inspected over four thousand buildings and cleaned the windows of or repaired an additional eight thousand in his twenty-plus years on the job, that adds up. In the past year, working with Shuman, he estimated he'd taken in $400,000.

Pages: 1   2  

Copyright © 2006 by Chris Ballard. Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Tags: Career & Money

About the Author

After a string of oddball jobs, Chris Ballard found his calling at Sports Illustrated as a staff writer covering the NBA and writing features. He has written profiles of people with offbeat professions for the New York Times Magazine and is the author of Hoops Nation, which was named one of Booklist's Top Ten Sports Books of 1998. Ballard recently moved from New York City to Berkeley, California. More