Trucks have always been hard to test. With a twisty road, a set of bumps, and a long highway you can learn a lot about a car. Throw in a track day and you’re all set. But a truck is a different animal. An animal, in fact. Most people think trucks are about off-roading. Trucks can off-road. But they’re best at making money.

Five years ago, I for the first time saw the light when it comes to trucks. A guy on a bus told me that if you have a truck, you can “always run a hustle, and if you use a truck right, it can pay for itself.” I was still dreaming of buying a sports car, but the idea that a truck could pay for itself merited further investigation.

The more you spend on that sports car, he told me, the more you’ll lose. Want a Mustang? Have you thought about the Cobra? It would look great with tinted windows and some bigger wheels. But it’s really just a liability—and the more you cars you have, the more money you lose.

Trucks are different, he told me. Someone always needs to borrow a truck (and will fill it with gas or give beer in return). And if you use it properly, a truck can put money in your pocket. They can push, haul, and tow. Big trucks with big pricetags mean big paychecks. Got two trucks? Get two paychecks.

I realized that to do anything meaningful, you need at least a 1500, preferably the cheapest you can find. That usually means finding a relative who works at one of the big 3, and working out a deal with a friendly dealer. When gas prices go up, truck prices go down, and after Katrina it was possible to get a 24-month lease on a Dodge Ram 1500 with a Hemi for zero-down and $120 a month.

My friend Kyle has a Dodge 1500 (and two other trucks). He made a deal with a local sports team to tow two 10,000lb trailers five miles across town every Sunday. It took an hour and a half and he got $200.

During the winter, he’d throw plows on the front of his trucks and plow residential driveways for $30 a piece (about 20 minutes), and he’d plow commercial lots for sixty dollars an hour (his friends would man the other trucks).

One snowing night, I met him at his house at 2 AM to accompany him on a plow run. It felt bonkers compared to just about anything else I’ve done in a car. In near total darkness, we sailed down a snow-covered half-mile long driveway off a dirt road with nothing to mark where to plow other than a pair of trees every 300 feet or so. The windshield wipers were covered with ice, and the headlights above the plow were weak and aimed wrong.

As a passenger, I didn’t have much to do but choose the music while he worked the corded controller that controls the plow’s height and angle. After we finished the ten driveways, we headed down to 4 giant commercial lots in Troy, MI. It was still snowing hard.

Kyle kept the controller in his right hand, and as we slammed into the rising snowbank at the end of each push, he’d raise the plow while putting the column-shifter into reverse. Then he’d look over his right shoulder with his left hand on the wheel and floor it. We’d race backwards until we got to the other end of the lot and slid to a halt. He’d drop the plow to “float”, shift into D, and accelerate back toward the snowbank. The Hemi could spin the wheels all the way down the run, but his 4.6L 1500 Dodge could do the same and had a better stereo, so that’s the one he preferred to drive (the Hemi was better at towing, however).

The best part? When Kyle was driving the Hemi and his friend Brandon was driving Kyle’s dump truck. It was coming up on 3PM and we were pushing snow in an empty L-shaped parking lot between two warehouses. The sun was peeking blue through the clouds for the first time all day and transformed the snow from gray to blazing white and this insane Mortal Kombat Megamix came up on the CD. The two trucks floated up and down opposite legs of the L, narrowly missing each other on each stroke in this lumbering slow-motion ballet while a demomic voice churned in the foreground “ROUND ONE, fight, perfect, finish him, fatality, Sonya Blade, Sub Zero, Scorpion, fight!” and those five terrific minutes more than made up for the twelve hours of being cold and drowsy while occasionally pushing random people’s cars out of snowdrifts and gnawing on old roastbeef submarine sandwiches.

And he’d paid for the sandwiches, since his trucks had long since paid for themselves.