Chapter 4: Big News

Thursday, August 2, 1984

I somewhat outdid myself today and got us to Las Cruces, which was a bit over an hour east of Deming at RV speed.

The extra distance today would make the next two days more pleasant, most likely.

We got ourselves settled at a cute little RV park that a nice older woman ran, and then I got on the phone. I was lucky — they had an old-fashioned phone booth! I suspected this might be a call with some comments I might not want just anyone hearing, though perhaps that was simply feeling humble. It wasn’t like anyone was going to mug me for my Dell shares, after all.

When I got Michael on the phone, he said, “Are you sitting down?”

I chuckled and said, “Michael, I’m in a phone booth, so ... no.”

“Ah! Right!” he said, chuckling himself. “Well ... don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

“I will refrain from saying that.”

That got another chuckle.

“So... “ he said, drawing it out. “For our first formal quarter of operations — bookkeeping-wise we’re being engineers and calling February to April our zeroth quarter, since those numbers are pretty much junk — we had just a touch over one million dollars in net total revenue.”

“That’s seriously impressive, Michael! Congratulations!”

He chuckled. “Honestly, we wouldn’t be here without you. Oh, we’d be okay, I’m pretty sure of that. The numbers say we would’ve been fine. But I’d guess that May would have been at least thirty percent lower without the infusion, and June and July also below, though I can’t say how much below. Anyway, so, that’s good news that it made that much of a difference. I think having you on board is a big deal anyway — I need someone I can trust to bounce ideas off of, someone who’s not knee-deep in the details and who’s off studying business, not knee-deep in the business day-to-day. I swore to myself that one day I’ll go back and get my business degree, but it’s going to be years.”

“I hear that,” I said. “If I had a million-dollar-a-quarter business I wouldn’t be in school either.”

“You’ve got a tenth of one!” he said, chuckling. “Anyway, the bigger news is profit, because anyone can sell a million on costs of one point one, right?”

“Right. ‘We’ll make it up on volume.’”

He laughed loudly. “That one I’ve heard! Often! Okay, so, we ended the quarter with two hundred thousand dollars of inventory — three times what we had on May first, and about half of that I’m attributing, directly or indirectly, to you and how you helped with cash flow. Earnings outside of inventory came out at one hundred sixty thousand. That counts paying me, the guys, renting our space, payroll taxes — the whole shebang. We’re a real, solidly profitable company, and the sky is seriously the limit! I’m already looking at expanding production again, because we could double revenue overnight with twice the space. Maybe triple it — some things really benefit from economies of scale.”

“I hear that. Like I said months ago, ‘Big, man, big!’”

He chuckled, then sighed a bit. “Tomorrow’s the big meeting with the parents. It’s going to upset Dad, but I know he wants me to be happy, and this makes me happy. That, and I’m making a living now. I’m not paying myself much, but I could, and he’ll understand plowing all the money back into the business to make it grow.”

“Of course,” I said. “Gotta build things up before you start living the billionaire lifestyle.”

He made a scoffing noise. “Billionaire, schmillionaire! Millionaire is still a pipe dream at this point. I’d have to be able to take out ... what ... some ridiculous percentage. Talk to me after an IPO — which might be never! Though ... you were onto something, putting that language in there. I thought it was overly enthusiastic at the time, but I didn’t expect this growth curve!”

“Right time, right place. What we both said we were looking for the whole time.”

“Yeah. I’m nervous, because ... Dad ... but...”

“I get that,” I said, and I really did. Not in a way I could ever explain to Michael, but I remembered Dad’s disappointment when I turned my back on getting a PhD in my first life. “He’ll be happy that you’ve found your passion.”

“This is intoxicating, man! I’m glad you’re along for the ride. I really am! And as an investor, not an employee. I’ve already got a friend from Memorial looking for a job and I just have this feeling it’s going to go wrong no matter what I do.”

“Follow your gut on that. That’s about all I can say now. If you want help writing guidelines or something, happy to brainstorm, but I don’t even have book learning on that yet.”

He chuckled. “Actually, I would, but it can wait. I’m not hiring anyone like that for a while. Just ... no. It’ll wait.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“I figure you’re on the road, so ... I can mail a copy to your College Station address, or fax wherever you’ll be.”

“Mail is good. We’ll be in College Station in a couple of days, almost certainly,” I said.

“Mail it is!”

“Thanks for the good news, partner!”

“Really happy to give it to you!” he said.

“Should I call tomorrow night?”

“Nah. Saturday, though. We might be talking all night tomorrow.”

“Sounds good! Saturday it is! By the way, if you want to drop by the house sometime, just let me know. We’ll be in and out for a bit, but then pretty settled,” I said.

“I’m swamped like nobody’s business, but...”

I could hear him changing his mind as he spoke.

“Nah. I was going to say Saturday, but the timing’s just too tight. It’d be silly. Let’s plan on sometime in either mid-August or sometime during the semester. I’m off the academic calendar, anyway!”

“Works for me. We’ll be over in Austin in December, of course.”

“That whole thing stinks!” he said, chuckling. “It’s supposed to be on Thanksgiving! What’s this December 1st stuff? It’s not right!”

“At least it’ll be fun.”

He snorted. “We’re going to clobber you!”

“We’ll see,” I said. “I’ve got some friends on the team this year.”

“Freshmen!” he said, scoffing. “Besides, your coach is your problem.”

“Probably so. Anyway, I’m sure we’ll see each other long before that.”

“Bank on it! Hey, drive safe, man! I do not want any of those ‘in case of death’ clauses being executed!”

“Same to you, going back to Austin,” I said.

“I hear you. I’m always careful. Safe car, too!”

“And glad of it!”

We said goodbye and then hung up.

When I got back, I had to repeat the whole conversation, of course.

Angie asked the obvious question first.

“So ... is that better than our first life? I think so, right?”

“It’s not like I took a balance sheet with me, or memorized it, but I’m pretty sure it’s better.”

“Woo hoo!” Paige exclaimed. “We’re really doing this! And by ‘we’ I mean ‘Steve.’”

“No,” I said, “By ‘we’ you mean ‘we.’ Me right now, but we’re a team and we’re going to stay that way.”

“Yeah,” Paige said, grinning, “But you’re the part of the team that can get Michael Dell on the phone and will sit on the board. I’m not upset at all about that — I don’t want to sit on the board of a company like that. I think I want to sit on the board of something — maybe several somethings — but my own somethings. You’re the one taking on the responsibility of not breaking things, not me.”

“I’m helping,” Angie said. “And, I mean, I really am. I agree with Steve. We did study Dell, and I really don’t think they had that fancy round million-dollar cash flow in their first quarter. It was good, maybe close, but that nice round number would’ve stuck out in my head. Plus, I know some of the twists and turns. Between us, we’ve got the makings of a map.”

“Which Laura may throw a wrench into at any point,” Jas said, chuckling.

“There is that,” Angie said, nodding.

“Let’s celebrate,” Jas said. “Not go crazy, but...”

Our celebration wound up being a nice Mexican restaurant and a couple of margaritas each. I made sure I’d waited more than a reasonable amount of time before driving back to the RV — which wasn’t far away.

Jas was a little feisty tonight in bed, but that didn’t surprise me. Money is, after all, an aphrodisiac, and while we didn’t have a penny more today than yesterday, it felt like we did.

The noises from the other room suggested we weren’t alone in feeling that way.

Friday, August 3, 1984

Today was — no two ways about it — a long haul. In a car, twenty years later with a higher speed limit and less bulk, it would’ve been fine, even no big deal. In the RV? Nearly 500 miles is too many, even on nice, flat, level ground with few turns.

Still, stopping in Junction, Texas (home of not a whole lot, really, though there are some legendary stories of old football training camps held in Junction) would put us well over halfway to College Station. We would arrive at a reasonable time, have some time to explore the nearly-complete house, see how Cammie and Mel were doing, and likely go out to dinner.

Speaking of Mel, that’s what we did for a couple of hours on the drive. Everyone was in favor of telling her, but we still went around and around discussing it. It was a big deal. Of everyone who knew, the consensus was that Mel was the least ‘attached’ to us.

Don’t get me wrong — we’d been close to Mel for years. I truly believed she would keep our secret. Heck — we’d all seen her naked, and I’d had sex with her (and might again — it was at least ‘on the table’).

If anything, that last part upped the ante, according to Jas and Paige. Mel would have to agree that the guy she’d had sex with was really fourteen, not fifty-something. If she came down on the ‘fifty-something’ side of the argument, things could be very, very awkward.

I doubted she would, and so did the girls, but — as Jas pointed out — that’d been a stumbling block she had to get over. Why wouldn’t it potentially be one for Mel?

In the end, we tentatively considered perhaps telling her in mid-August, before classes started. If things went wrong, they could move into the basement and lock off their apartment and never even see or talk to us unless they wanted to. If things went even more wrong, we would help them find an apartment of their own.

None of us thought that was likely, but we were all planners, and that’s what we did — make plans.

About two hours before we reached Junction, my pager went off. The number was from an unfamiliar area code, but we did have friends all over, so ... who knew?

The others came back up and clustered around.

“Who is it?” Angie said.

“Not sure,” I said. “I’ll call it back and see. Maybe it’s a wrong number.”

We stopped at the next gas station and I called from the pay phone, with the girls clustered around, trying to listen.

It turned out not to be a wrong number at all. When the phone answered, the voice on the other end was Gene’s. He was in his dorm room up east. The plan to live together with Sue had fallen apart — not their relationship, just their living together — but they were seeing each other nearly daily.

That wasn’t the news, though. The news came when Gene said, “The reason I paged you wasn’t to catch up. I just got a call from Dad. He knew I could get in touch with you. He says you guys will definitely want to catch the news tonight. Not sure what it is myself — he wouldn’t say — but I gather whatever it is, it’s already a done deal and public, just only in court circles. And it’s something the news will be all over.”

I was pretty sure I knew what it was. There was only one decision in August 1984 that I could imagine Curtis would want to specifically let me and those close to me know about. Still, I wasn’t going to spill the beans any more than I had to, not and risk being wrong.

I thanked Gene, hung up, and told the girls.

“What do you think it is?” Paige said.