Chapter 94: Family Business

Over the next few weeks, we all started healing. Charlie wore an elastic bandage on his arm for a couple of weeks before the X-rays showed his arm wouldn’t fall off. He wasn’t all that impressed, however, since he wanted a big bandage and a really cool scar to show off in school, and he didn’t get either. Boys! Holly and Molly had hardly anything wrong with them and were just fine.

I took the rest of that first week off and played nursemaid and cook. By the following Monday I had worn out my welcome. Once Marilyn could move around easier, she threw me out and told me to go to work and get out of her hair. I left her my Cadillac and took the 380, promising to pick up a couple of car seats for the twins. Next weekend we’d go car shopping for her and pick up another mom bomb.

One night I sat down with my wife after the kids went to bed. I had with me a copy of my will, as well as a copy of hers. “I want to talk about these,” I told her.

“What?”

“Our wills.”

“Oh! Feeling a little more mortal these days, Carl?” she teased.

I nodded but wasn’t feeling all that humorous. “Aren’t you?”

Marilyn shrugged. “Maybe a little. What’s on your mind?”

“Well, right now you and I are each other’s inheritors. If I die you get my money and if you die, I get yours, remember?”

“Well, considering that all the money is in your name, I’ll do better bumping you off than you will bumping me off,” she laughed.

“I’ll keep that in mind. I’m taking all the sharp objects away from you.” Somehow, I wasn’t too worried. Marilyn might talk me to death, but that was her most dangerous ability. “The thing is, when we wrote these, it was right after we got married. I was nowhere near as wealthy as I am now. I mean, you didn’t even know how much money I had, did you? These are just standard wills.”

She nodded. “Yeah, so? What’s the problem?”

“What if we had both died? It all goes to the kids, right? I am worth a billion dollars! Do you want little kids to have a billion dollars to play with?”

Marilyn looked at me curiously, but then her eyes slowly widened, and I could see the chipmunks inside pedaling furiously as she started thinking it through. Nobody had ever heard of Paris Hilton yet, but there was always some jet set kid with Daddy’s credit card and more money than sense in the tabloids. However, nobody had the kind of money that our kids would get if we bought the farm together! The closest I could think of was Gloria Vanderbilt, who became a multimillionaire at the age of eighteen months and ended up in years of court cases and custody battles.

“Wow! I mean, I never thought of that! What do we do?”

It was my turn to shrug. “I’ve been thinking about that, but you have to agree with me. Right now, Tusker and Tessa are named as the guardians of the kids, and I don’t see changing that, do you?”

“No, they’d be really good,” she agreed.

“So, if the kids are being taken care of, I was figuring I’d just give it all away.”

Marilyn stared at me. “What? Give it all away? Give away a billion dollars?”

I grinned back at her. “Sure, why not! It’s not like we can take it with us, right?” My wife just stared at me with wide eyes and an open mouth. “Okay, maybe not everything, but at least ninety percent. If we leave them ten or twenty million apiece, they’ll be able to do whatever they want in life, and that’s not even ten percent of my holdings. Marilyn, you really don’t understand my money. I make more in a day than we spend in a year. If we bought a half dozen vacation spots, and jetted from one to the other, we still wouldn’t begin to touch the money we have. Let’s give it all away, do some good with it!”

She just stared at me and shook her head in disbelief. “This is crazy!” she replied. “You’re serious? You would give away a billion dollars?”

“Probably more. We’re only thirty-three right now. What if we live to our sixties or seventies? At some point we’ll be some of the richest people in the world. Just how much money do our kids need? There are very few good things I can think of that would happen if the kids became instant billionaires!”

“Holy shit!” she exclaimed. Marilyn shook her head. “I need to think about this!” I nodded sympathetically. It was a lot to take in. “Want a drink?”

“Sure.” I got up and followed her into the kitchen. I was wearing my regular slacks and a Hawaiian shirt. Marilyn had on pajamas under her heavy robe. She was still on the mend, and we hadn’t gotten around to testing out how well the stitches were holding, so she wasn’t trying to get me drunk and have her way with me, not yet at least. She sat down on a bar stool at the island and looked at me expectantly.

I stared back. “Wait a minute! You invited me out here for a drink, and you want me to make the drinks?” I exclaimed.

“Thank you, dear.”

“Christ on a crutch!” I grabbed a bottle of semi-dry Riesling off the rack. “Wine okay?”

“Thank you.”

I just rolled my eyes and pulled a corkscrew out and opened it up. I poured two glasses and sat down at the corner of the island, facing her. “You really know how to push your luck!”

“Giving away your children’s money isn’t pushing your luck? They’ll starve without you!” she said teasingly.

“It’s my money, not my children’s money, and if they can’t survive on $20 million, they’re too stupid to pass their genes on to the next generation!” I replied, snorting at the thought.

Marilyn wagged her finger at me. “You’d better be nice to me. What if I decide to divorce you and take my half of your money?”

“Just how nice do I have to be?” I asked lewdly, waggling my eyebrows.

Marilyn blushed. “Men!” She shook her head. “You know, this is one of the most bizarre conversations I have ever had! We are talking about just giving away billions of dollars! What in the world would you do with that kind of money?”

I smiled at her. Just her asking that question made me think she would go along with the idea. “I have no idea. We are talking about some really serious money, like curing cancer or stopping malaria or something. I have absolutely no idea. I mean, the numbers are just staggering! I’m not talking about making the kids’ school a little better. With the amount I can spend, I could buy every school in the state, and have enough left over to buy the school buses, too! What do you think we should do?”

Marilyn just stared at me, dumbfounded. I don’t think she ever really comprehended the financial resources I had at this point. Yes, I went to work and always had some money for nice Christmas presents and we had the vacation home and a nice car, but the only extravagant thing I did was fly charter and use limos in strange places. In this I was strongly influenced by the likes of Warren Buffet. His kids all went to public schools, and he ate in local restaurants, and was a boringly normal guy - and one of the richest men on the planet! (He also liked flying in private jets; he said it was his one serious vice.) Last year he had announced his plan to give away almost all his money, too. I found that quite interesting.

If you are going to be a billionaire, there are a lot worse examples to emulate than Warren Buffet. Hell, if you’re a human, there are a lot worse examples to emulate than Warren Buffet!

“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that,” commented Marilyn. “Can you do that? Just give it all away in your will?”

“Yeah, I guess so. I think what we would do is set up a charitable trust, and then, when I die, most of my assets go into the trust. Then a trustee, maybe even you, gets to decide how to give out the money. Some of these trusts last for years and years and give out millions every year. Howard Hughes’ trust is worth billions, and he died back in the Seventies. They give out hundreds of millions a year to medical research.”

“Huh. I just don’t know what to say.”

“Well, will you at least think about it?” I asked. “I don’t think I can legally do it without you agreeing to it. I wouldn’t want to try, in any case.” I refilled our glasses. “We need to do something in any case. As it stands, if we don’t really do some serious estate planning, when we die, the government will make out like bandits. Inheritance taxes will kill it all anyway.”

“Well, give me some time. This is just unreal!” Marilyn replied.

We finished off the wine and chatted about some outlandish charities to give the money to. I suggested a home for unwed mothers, as long as I got to be the father. That got her spluttering up her wine while I laughed at her. She wanted to donate it to a charity for out of work trailer salesmen, which made me almost cough up my wine as well. We went to bed laughing at it all.

A couple of weeks later I had her come to the office and speak to John and Jake Senior. They had been on my ass for years about this, and now they got to do some serious estate planning. Missy weighed in, too, and used her bottomless Rolodex to find an estate guy from New York to fly down and sit in.

That was how the Buckman Foundation started. We put a few million in now, the money I was giving away anyway, and got used to the idea. Marilyn was made the trustee, but she had no real authority if I was still around. She was happy to let me run it, anyway, since she just didn’t have the grasp of all those zeroes. There were sure a lot of them!

In mid-March, I loaded Marilyn on a plane and had her flown to Miami, and I took a couple of weeks off to play Daddy. I had a limo meet her at the airport and take her away to a clinic run by a top-notch plastic surgery operation. We had been referred there by a doctor at Johns Hopkins. It seems that the best plastic surgeons are in Hollywood or Miami. Marilyn’s abdominal scarring wasn’t severe, but it made her very self-conscious, and they promised that they could reduce it substantially. I told her to ask for a discount package on a pair of DD cups and a face lift, which she refused.

Marilyn came back with just a trace of red on her abdomen, which was supposed to heal and be practically invisible. She was ecstatic about the work done and told me about the most amazing things they were doing with hair transplants. No, I wasn’t bald, not yet; yes, I was starting to get thin in the back. I countered by asking her if she had her tits done, and then checked them out later. They were still her original equipment, but after a couple of weeks missing them, I didn’t mind.

In June we flew up to Utica and dumped the kids and Dum-Dum on Marilyn’s parents, and then we flew to Hougomont for a week, and then took a small seaplane with our luggage to Puerto Rico and took a cruise through the southern Caribbean. We hadn’t done a cruise since our honeymoon, and Marilyn and I deserved an extended vacation. We didn’t take one of those ridiculous owner’s suites for twenty grand a week, just one of the big suites one deck down. At Hougomont we worked on Marilyn’s all-over tan, but on the ship, I talked her into wearing a couple of really skimpy one-piece suits around the pool. The work at the clinic had been so good she didn’t feel self-conscious about it.

After the cruise, we flew back to Utica and landed in a different type of family problem. That summer her parents had bought a new home over in one of the nicer sections of Utica, just off the Parkway, and had torn down the old farmhouse out on the property and put a new modular office building up on the spot. We went over to see it (I had seen it way back when, but this was all new to Marilyn.) She was a bit sad to see her old home destroyed. I thought the thing was a firetrap and a rat motel, and wished I had pictures! Harriet sidetracked us and said that Big Bob wanted to see me in his office. I glanced at Marilyn and shrugged and wandered over.

I should have stayed in the Bahamas! In Big Bob’s office was a second man, tall and cadaverously thin and bald, who I also knew from the past. It was Mark Falwell, Big Bob’s accountant, and his presence could only mean one possible thing.

Big Bob wanted me to loan him some money.

Big Bob was a wonderful guy. He was an excellent father, a generous donor to church charities, and well thought of around Utica. He was an excellent Mom-and-Pop scale businessman, selling a quality product, treating his customers honestly, always paying his debts, and servicing his products far better than the industry standard.

He was an absolute disaster at running a large-scale commercial enterprise.

I had known the man for decades, and I admired Big Bob immensely. Aside from some initial pushing and testing back when we first met, the Lefleurs had welcomed me to their family, and they proved far more of a family than mine had ever been. Still, Big Bob had his issues, and they all directly related to Lefleur Homes.

Big Bob ran his company with several priorities. First and foremost, he pulled cash out of that sucker like there was no tomorrow. If it was a cow, he would have drained so much milk that the thing wouldn’t be able to stand and move to another plot to graze. Second, one of the family jokes was that he had to grow the company, just to give all his kids a job. He treated Lefleur Homes as a giant employment agency dedicated to hiring his children. Third, he did whatever he could to lower his tax liability, which is generally a good thing, unless your business decisions related to this are detrimental to the growth and operation of the company.

A final priority was operating his company as a growing and profitable firm. This priority was way, way down the list of important priorities. It was such a low priority, in fact, that most years his company barely turned a profit. Mark Falwell was the poor bastard with the unenviable task of resolving these priorities. I’ll give the devil his due, though. If Mark had to dance around the accounting standards, he danced like Fred Astaire.

The cash suction priority was handled through any number of means. Before I met Big Bob and got to know the company, I had heard of these tricks, all legal, of course, but I had never seen any single outfit use them all. For instance, for many years, while the house was on the property, the electric feed was on the office with a subfeed going to a panel box in the house. That way the company paid the electric bill for the family. He used the same technique with his telephone bills, running the house line off the company switchboard. All the cars the family drove were company vehicles. The summer house on Sacandaga Lake was listed as branch office, so all the costs there ran through the firm. Whenever Big Bob and Harriet went out to eat, which was three or four times a week, the bills went through the company.

The most amazing technique, which sucked cash as well as lowered taxes, involved the other priority of employing his children. Since all his children went to parochial school, which he had to pay for out of pocket, he had two basic choices. If six children were in parochial school at any one time, and if the yearly tuition averaged $3,300, he needed $20,000 to pay for it. Choice One - pay himself enough money so that after taxes he has twenty grand left. Choice Two - hire all six kids at no show jobs for enough money so that they could pay their own tuition! Their tax rate was nonexistent.

Marilyn was just the first kid who did this. It got bigger. Eventually, the kids were getting $5,000 or more a year, and would be expected to buy their own food, clothing, and other supplies. If they went to college, it continued, with their college tuitions. This lowered the amount Big Bob had to pay himself to care for his children and moved income from his higher tax rate to his children’s lower tax rate. As far as I knew, the kids never actually saw the money, and Big Bob and Harriet controlled it completely. It was the most amazing scam.

The other problem related to family was that Big Bob put all his kids to work. Okay, lots of family outfits do that. Big Bob wasn’t the guy who invented nepotism. Big Bob simply took it to the extreme and did it badly. He ran the company like his family. So, since in a good family (unlike mine) all the children get the same weekly allowance, apply that principal to the company. All family members get the same pay. Mark, who was serving as Big Bob’s general manager, got paid the same amount as Ruth, who was functionally illiterate, had an IQ in the high eighties, and cost us more money than we paid her. Sales managers, like Gabriel and Michael, were paid salaries - and you never pay a salesperson a salary! You pay them a commission, and then turn them loose to make as much as possible, but that would mean they might make more than their brothers. You had secretaries, truck drivers, setup trainees, and salesmen making the same money as the general manager of the firm.