Chapter 76: Suzie’s Graduation

Saturday, May 28, 1983

The house was mostly complete by Thanksgiving, but there were still enough items on the punch list to keep us from moving in. The kitchen needed some more work, as did the hardwood floors, and the driveway was going to be gravel until the following spring, when the weather would allow us to lay down some blacktop. We were ready to move in by Christmas, but that was just too hectic. We would wait until January.

Dum-Dum got some nice presents at Christmas. Following the closing on the investment, everybody at the Buckman Group was added to the list for Tough Pup Christmas presents. We all got a gift basket with Tough Pup chew toys and rawhide chews, including some rope toys from their new red, white, and blue All-American Pup collection! It warmed my heart to know that my dedicated service in the armed services of our great nation allowed us to protect our right to have patriotic puppies! Dum-Dum growled and tried to pull my arm from the socket when we played with the ropes. She was an official Tough Pup!

Marilyn’s family, all bazillion of them, came down the week between Christmas and New Year’s. They were on the way to Orlando and the time shares they had bought there. We offered to put them up for the night, but we only had the one spare bedroom, and they had a convoy of five cars and about twenty-some people! I arranged for rooms at the nearest motel and let her parents and youngest siblings stay with us. The little ones camped out on the living room carpet in blankets. We did take them up to the new house, and they oohed and ahhed appropriately. We promised to come up in the spring, after the move, and stay for a few days before taking another parents-only vacation.

Business went smoothly. I hunkered down with Missy to come up with names of various investment possibilities. I also took her out to Bellevue for a board meeting and introduced her to Bill Gates. The three of us tossed around various company names that he was familiar with, through his contacts on the west coast. One thing I had quickly figured out was that the venture capital business was much more about the size of your Rolodex than it was your wallet.

Our next technology deal was with a guy named John Walker, who lived in the San Francisco area. He had bought his company, Autodesk, in 1982 for $10 million, but that was mostly in deferred royalties. They were cash-poor and idea-rich. Bill got us in the door, and we put in $500 grand, which got us ten percent, and an option for another million before the IPO. I knew this was one of the companies that would last and be an industry leader, so I handed over my money and let him think he had put one over on us. This was going to become another multi-billion capitalization company.

We did a couple of small deals in the Baltimore area and hired a couple of additional people for the tax law and due diligence aspects. They got a decent paycheck, but they didn’t become partners. By our accounting, the value of our investments was already worth quite a bit more than what we had started with, between the general market rise and the specific private equity deals we had done. When some of these outfits did their IPOs, we would be worth a fortune. Everybody started tossing ideas around for new investments. John, Jake Senior, and Melissa knew the local business environment better than I did (especially John, a very well-connected lawyer), and Melissa and I were able to network with people for Silicon Valley deals.

Missy’s marriage collapsed shortly after the turn of the year. She didn’t talk much about it, but I got the impression that the pair just drifted apart. She never said he was catting around on her, and I didn’t think she was the type to fool around on him. John helped her find a decent lawyer, and while he didn’t take her husband to the cleaners, he did keep him from getting his hands on Missy’s shares in the company.

Missy moped around for a bit, and Marilyn and Taylor got to talking about it, and they decided to do an ‘intervention.’ They roped Andrea and Tessa and a few other women they knew into a Chippendales party. Okay, I don’t know if they were technically speaking the ‘Chippendales’ dance group, but it was a bunch of male strippers. She had done this a few times my first time around, too, and I knew exactly how it would turn out. I smiled when she told me she’d be home by eleven or so. As I expected, she came home somewhere around four in the morning, drunk as a skunk (they had rented a limo, I insisted on that), and horny. She had her way with me, I rolled over and went back to sleep, and Marilyn had a two-day hangover the rest of the weekend. I have no idea what Missy did when they got her home, but she seemed happier afterwards.

Dum-Dum proved easy to train, Marilyn not so much. It’s easy to train a dog and I had done it several times over the years. As soon as you catch them pooping or peeing in the wrong spot, you grab them, yell at them, rub their nose in it, and smack them with a newspaper. This is standard stuff. On the other hand, Marilyn had never raised a puppy before, and thought I was heartless and cruel, since I was beating a poor and defenseless animal and rubbing their nose in it. I should only yell at them, or something like that, and I swear she found a book that she thought agreed with her. It didn’t, but it was so full of New Age bullshit, it was hard to tell. I had Dum-Dum trained by February.

The nice thing about the town house layout turned out to be the multi-level aspect to it. Our room was upstairs, and I made Dum-Dum sleep down in the kitchen, walled off by a baby gate. She whined, but you couldn’t hear her upstairs. Charlie just loved his new buddy, and they chased each other all around the place. Once she was housebroken, and we let her have free run of the place at night, she mostly slept in Charlie’s bedroom, which was just fine with Marilyn and me! On my first trip, we once had a dog that slept in bed with us, between and perpendicular to us! It made for difficulties in the romance department.

We moved into the new house the week after the Chippendales episode, and if Marilyn was still feeling under the weather, she had only herself to blame. Strangely, she didn’t appreciate my informing her of her own culpability in this state of affairs. In fact, every time I laughed at her, she extended her middle finger and said words that an impressionable young lad shouldn’t hear his mother saying!

The night after we moved in, the lights went out. We had a county-wide blackout. The next day I ordered up an emergency generator. What a pain in the balls!

I hate moving! This was the second time in a year we had done this, and both Marilyn and I vowed not to move again until they put us into pine boxes. I had a local moving company handle it, and it went smoothly, even if the entire process is a clusterfuck.

Everything in the house was muddy by the time we were done. One thing I had learned over the years is that all those beautiful construction site pictures had grass magically edited in. A real construction site is a muddy disaster! We had grass seed planted, and some hay blown around as cover, but it would take several months for anything to look like something other than raw construction.

By April Charlie’s language skills had developed to the point where he was speaking in complete sentences. “Dum-Dum poop!” is a sentence, right?

In April I took a couple of weeks off and made some arrangements with Taylor for another nice vacation. First, we drove up to Utica in the Town Car, since it was the only thing big enough for the three of us plus Dum-Dum in a car cage. That was a long trip; by the end of the trip, I was wishing we had Dum-Dum in the seat and Charlie in the cage! We stayed a few days with the Lefleurs, with Charlie and Dum-Dum living at the house, while Marilyn and I stayed at the Sheraton. Then we got a lift over to the Oneida County Airport, where Taylor had a Cessna Citation II waiting for us.

Our vacation was going to be in the Caymans, which was a place we had been to several times in a previous lifetime. The Citation II wasn’t as big as the G-II I had ridden in from Hawaii to Bellevue and back. It was a bit larger than the Learjet we had last year, with a longer range. I teased Marilyn about rejoining the Mile-High Club, but she refused, pointing at the open doorway to the cockpit. I laughed and told her they could put their headphones on, and Marilyn’s eyes opened wide, and she stared at me until I broke down and laughed at her. That wasn’t on my list of fetishes.

Taylor had rented us a villa on Grand Cayman, on the inner North Sound side of Seven Mile Beach. It wasn’t quite as large and as private as the estate on Eleuthera had been, but it was still private. Marilyn managed to work on her all over tan around our pool. I liked the place, but then I had always liked the Caymans. It consists of three islands, Grand Cayman, Little Cayman, and Cayman Brac, but almost the entire population lives on Grand Cayman, around 50,000 or more. The place is clean and civilized and modern, and simply very nice. There are a lot of restaurants and places to go and things to see and do.

I got Marilyn to talk about what she might want in a vacation home. “You’re serious?”

“Sure, why not?”

“I thought you were joking.”

“I’m always serious about goofing off,” I said with as straight a face as I could muster.

My wife snorted at that. “That’s true enough. So, you’re serious about this? We can buy a place somewhere?”

I nodded. “Yeah, why not? I don’t want to do it until we’re worth about $100 mill, but I figure that’s only another year or two, tops. Also, we’re only talking one place. I’m not going to buy a place on a half dozen different islands. So, what do you want in a vacation spot?”

Marilyn shook her head in mystification. “I have no idea!”

“Well, compare this place to last year, in Eleuthera. That was a lot smaller island, lower population, but the place we stayed was larger and had a much bigger beach and was more private.”

“Oh.” Marilyn gave it some thought and shrugged. “Maybe something in between. La Valencia was simply gorgeous, and it was so private, but there wasn’t anything to do there. Maybe something like that on a bigger island?”

I nodded and smiled. “Okay, that’s a good start. For our next trip, let’s ask Taylor about that. I want something that we can take the kids to for family vacations, but also come to by ourselves for an adult vacation.”

“Just how adult did you have planned?”

I smiled at her. We were just back from lunch, and we were both wearing t-shirts and shorts. Well, I was wearing shorts, and Marilyn had on a denim skirt, and I knew she had nothing else on. I crooked my finger at her and said, “Let’s talk about that,” and we spent the next few hours discussing in detail just what kind of adult vacations would be planned.

Both Dum-Dum and Charlie were growing like weeds. Dum-Dum was a bit of an odd-looking mutt. She looked sort of like a small boxer, at least in shape and form, with bowlegs and a barrel chest, and both parents had been short haired, but her head and face looked like her beagle mother, although a bit wrinkly. She was putting on about a pound or two a week all through the spring, but then leveled out at around fifty pounds. Charlie didn’t grow that fast, but he seemed to take after his mother’s family, with the blond hair of his uncles and a stocky build. He sure didn’t look like any Buckman I’d ever met!

During May, a date occurred that I was simply dreading. Suzie was graduating from the University of Delaware, with both her bachelor’s in Nursing and her Registered Nurse credentials. I had missed it the first time around, but I couldn’t say that I was too busy now. In fact, Suzie really wanted me to come, and Marilyn was pushing for me to go.

Hamilton had loomed over the graduation on the first time through, with his failure to finish college. I had felt unbelievable pressure to succeed from my parents, to graduate, to marry, to have children, and to be successful. In later years, after talking to Suzie, she had told me the same had occurred with her. I remember how I felt so incredibly relieved when she graduated from college, simply so she could carry the burden of the family name along with me.

Now, things were even worse. My much greater success and independence had driven my brother over the edge, along with Mom, and Suzie found the pressures intolerable. She already had a job lined up at Johns Hopkins, and an apartment, and didn’t plan on moving home.

We argued several times in the weeks leading up to the graduation. “This is simply a lousy idea, honey,” I told Marilyn. “There is no good reason for me to go, or you for that matter, and many good reasons not to. Suzie will understand. We can take her to dinner or have her out to the house.”

Marilyn looked at me in a manner to scare me! “Your sister loves you dearly and has specifically invited you to be there. You are going to her graduation. If you die along the way, I am to drag your corpse to the show! You will be there!”

“This is you and Suzie trying to get me and my family back together, and it won’t work. Why can’t you just accept this?”

“Because we love you and we know it kills you to be apart from them. Your father wants to talk to you, and you want to talk to him, I know you do!” she answered, in a pleading wail.

“It doesn’t matter! None of this matters! This isn’t about me or my dad, or even my mom. This is about Hamilton, and not one blessed thing the two of you cook up will change the fact that my brother is a raving lunatic, at least as far as I’m involved. This simply won’t work.”

We argued some more, and she stomped away. We had several such arguments in the days leading up to the graduation, and I wasn’t winning any of them. Finally, the day of the graduation came. We left at the crack of dawn in my car, with Charlie bundled into his car seat in the back. Dum-Dum we locked into the laundry room, with water and some Puppy Chow. It takes about an hour-and-a-half to get to Newark from our house, no matter whether you drive down to the Beltway and around the city to I-95 or cut across northern Baltimore County to pick up 95 directly. Both Charlie and Marilyn slept on the way. I was simply praying for a massive car crash to delay us for eight or nine hours.