Chapter 87: An Ordinary Life

I’d like to say how every day for the next few years was exciting and filled with thrilling stuff, but it wasn’t. Marilyn and I are very boring, and we led boring lives. That suited us both just fine! We’re very average people, just ones who didn’t have to worry about money. We lived in an average suburban rancher. Yes, it was a little larger than the average, and it was on twenty-five acres, but it would not have been out of place in most developments. That suited us just fine. Neither of us wanted a castle, and besides, castles need servants. The entire idea of servants made both of us feel kind of creepy.

If the idea of servants was creepy, the idea of armed security people was even more so. The Buckman Group continued to grow, and I continued to become wealthier. Still, at the time Marilyn was being stalked, we had increased security at the office, with a professional security guard in the lobby. Now, after our move to the new offices, we paid a lot more attention to that sort of thing. The door between the lobby and the rest of the offices was locked, and the lobby had both a receptionist and a security guard (dressed professionally, not like a rent-a-cop.) A guard was on duty even after hours since some of what we were doing was quite confidential. We couldn’t chance a break-in for espionage purposes.

After the disaster with my family, I kept security at the Mount Carmel Road residence, as well. No, we didn’t install a guard shack, but when Marilyn and the kids went anywhere, they were trailed by a black GMC with dark windows. Likewise, when Marilyn went into a store, a professionally dressed security guard would follow her at a distance. Tessa once joked that they were being shadowed by the War Wagon. I didn’t have any personal security. I wasn’t worried about myself, only my family.

Marilyn loved her minivan. I kept two cars, a big Cadillac or Town Car that I kept for driving larger groups with, and my little 380 SL, which I would drive whenever it was just me or my wife with me. If I was going out to dinner with Marilyn, we took the 380. If it was with the family, we took her minivan. The Cadillac (I replaced the Town Car in late ‘84) didn’t get driven all that much.

Marilyn cut her hair. Before, it had been long, going several inches down her back, but after the girls were born, she cut it in a shag, shoulder length. It was still curly, but I think she figured that as a 30-year-old married woman, she couldn’t have long hair anymore. Who comes up with these rules? On the plus side, after Marilyn got back in shape with a decent workout routine with me, her tits had grown another cup size. I approved, but I was hoping that she drew the line at this. If we kept going with this pattern, after our next child she’d be so top heavy she’d fall on her face. D cups were just fine by me!

Holly and Molly, as far as we could tell, were identical twins. Marilyn and I could always tell them apart, however. There was something about them, from the time they were born, that subtly differentiated them. Maybe it was the way their hair curled, or the pattern of faint freckles on their noses. Something about them that only their mother and I could sense separated them. They were also the spitting image of their mother, as best we could tell from pictures of Marilyn at that age. It was spooky, but we first figured it out when Aunt Lynette pulled a black and white picture of Marilyn from a photo album and showed it to us. They were identical!

Marilyn was a stay-at-home mom, and that suited the both of us. Charlie didn’t start kindergarten until the fall of 1985, and we would still have the girls at home for a few more years. Marilyn was a housewife and took care of the kids and the laundry and the cleaning. I worked in an office and cooked dinner. How mundane and boring can you get? I’d come home, play with the kids and Dum-Dum, listen to Marilyn tell me about her day, and then watch television with her after we put the kids to bed. It wasn’t a bad life.

In many ways, it was what I needed to do with my life. The fall of 1983 had been one of the worst times in my life, certainly worse than having to leave home as a teenager, even worse than my jaunt through Nicaragua and having to leave the Army. Having Marilyn and Charlie stalked and attacked, especially by my brother, and the subsequent arrest and publicity and family breakdown, it had all been just too much for me. I wanted nothing more than to put it all behind me and live quietly and anonymously with my family.

Going into the office gave me a routine. I could have just sat back and counted my money, but I knew how to do better than that, and I liked having an impact. We were now investing in companies that I would never have heard of from before, and our investments were doing well. It wasn’t just the big names I knew from before, where I could just buy a stock at the date of the IPO and tuck it away and be a playboy. I was making a difference, helping companies start and grow.

My original brain trust had been one of my biggest advantages in all of this. John and Jake Senior were cautious and acted like the grownups. Jake Junior kept growing the company. He and Missy started up a second investment pool, Buckman Investment Pool II (we’re real inventive in this business) and did as well with it as they did with the first. This time around, we allowed insiders, the members of the brain trust, to buy shares directly, and both Jake Junior and Missy did just that. I happily agreed to this - golden handcuffs are much better than golden parachutes when running an operation! I also let Harlan and Anna Lee know that they could invest with us, without becoming a full partner. They put some of their pension money into shares. At this rate, the Buckman Group was going to be a major player in the private equity business in a few years.

I supervised and worked with the others on identifying investment targets, but then stood back and let the professionals do the work. If that meant I got to go home early one or two nights a week, nobody seemed to mind. I also made sure that we could take some vacations. We tried to take at least a week at Hougomont with the family and another week by ourselves. During the summer we took another couple of weeks. If I got lucky, we would leave the kids with the Lefleurs occasionally, and I would take Marilyn on a business trip to the west coast by ourselves. I introduced her to Bill Gates in the summer of 1985 during a board meeting in Bellevue, and then we took a quick side trip to San Francisco and rode the trolley around. I like cities, Marilyn not so much. She does like nice restaurants and hotel rooms, though, so I just made sure we had a limo on standby for traveling. We also did the same thing when traveling to New York for whatever reason. We’d stay at the Four Seasons, and I’d make sure to take Marilyn to a Broadway show or two. Cats was excellent, but I really looked forward to seeing Phantom of the Opera when it came out in a few years.

We had begun giving away money to charity in 1984. Serious money, anyway, at least by my old standards. Five grand a year each to the Hampstead and Hereford Volunteer Fire Departments was a significant sum to them. While we lived in Hereford in Baltimore County, we were physically closer to Hampstead across the county line in Carroll County. Be safe and give to both! We also donated to the Jacksonville and Reisterstown Departments, just in case. Most of these towns offered mutual aid support to each other. It was a good idea to cover all the bases. Besides, those crazy bastards run into burning buildings! Everybody else, those of us in our right minds, runs out! They needed the money for psychiatric treatment! Let’s add in some money for the local ambulance and EMT companies, too.

The Red Cross got a healthy chunk. If there was one outfit that could be counted on to show up during a catastrophe, it was the Red Cross. God save you if you need to wait on the government for assistance. (Unless, of course, you were in a hot air balloon that was losing lift, and you could get Congress to start talking about the problem. They could fill it with plenty of hot air, and nothing else!)

Rensselaer got a nice piece of the pie. I had always given them some bucks, now I gave them more. Marilyn never quite understood why I gave them money every year, but she never quite understood all that the school gave me - like her! I would never have met Marilyn if I hadn’t gone to RPI. I offered to donate money to MVCC and Plattsburgh State, but Marilyn wasn’t interested.

A few other outfits got some money, too. I gave to the USO, and the 82 ^nd Airborne has a charitable scholarship fund that would get some money. In general, the Army had been good to me. Okay, Hawkins was an asshole, but most of the outfit had been good people.

The interesting thing is how much nicer they treat you the more money you give somebody. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a college or the Red Cross or the United Bumfuck Charitable Trust, the result is always the same. You’re a fish on the line, and they want to reel you in.

$0 to $250 - You are classified as a Guppy. Thanks a lot, we’ll put you on the mailing list, we’ll send you a receipt.

$250 to $500 - You are now upgraded to a Minnow. You get a much nicer thank you letter and get upgraded to our premiere mailing list, so we can ask you again in six months.

$500 to $1,000 - Anybody who gives this much is a Big Minnow! The thank you letter is computer printed, but signed by hand, and in the future, you get a phone call asking for money from a Junior Fisherman.

$1,000 to $5,000 - You have moved up to Flounder. Everything is done by humans now, generally a Senior Fisherman, and you will probably get a call and an invitation to lunch from a Super Senior Fisherman.

$5,000 to $25,000 - If you’re this rich, you get an immediate upgrade to Mega Flounder! Congratulations! You now will be offered oral sex from the Super Senior Fisherman, be placed permanently on the Monthly Fishing Mailing List, and be given a brass plaque on the classroom/storage-locker/large-piece-of-expensive-equipment of your choice. Keep paying though, or that item will be ‘re-donated’ in the future by another Mega Flounder.

$25,000 to $250,000 - Wow! You are a Tuna! Your item will never be re-donated, at least not until it breaks and has to be replaced. The Super Senior Fisherman has now been replaced by a Senior Executive Fisherman, and the oral sex has been replaced by anal sex, giving or receiving, your choice.

Anything above $250,000 - Now you are a Whale! They hand you the keys to the place and offer you free coeds/interns/assistants. The number is determined by just how much you fork over. With enough zeroes on the end of the check, they name the place after you. You have reached the peak of the food chain!

As far as RPI was concerned, I was a Mega Flounder, a fish they had managed to sink a big hook into, and they were planning on reeling me in for years to come. Much effort would come to convert me to a Tuna and beyond. Dollar signs were flashing in the eyes of Dan Berg, President of RPI. Berg was a non-entity as far as I was concerned, but I was hoping to get him to offer the coeds both to me and Marilyn.

When I was at Rensselaer, the President was a zero named Richard Grosh. To be fair, I’m sure he was a nice guy, and beloved by his dog, but as far as the students were concerned, he was a nobody. Our senior year, 1977, however, he was replaced by a real superstar, a guy named George Low. Low was an RPI grad who had grown up to become a senior administrator at NASA during the Apollo years, which gave him some serious street cred at RPI. Even better, he was very personable and frequently met with the students and gave standing room only lectures on space related stuff. Hell of a guy! Unfortunately, he died in 1984 of cancer, and was succeeded by a bunch of nobodies for the next fifteen years, when another science heavyweight, Shirley Jackson, a world class physicist, took over. For the next few years, it would be Berg chasing after me and my dollars.

My worries about geometric progression came true by the start of 1985. No, Marilyn wasn’t pregnant again, but the twins started crawling around. They weren’t twice as troublesome as Charlie had been - they were four times the trouble! It was an exponential relationship. Unlike Charlie, they didn’t go through obstacles, but they got into everything, even the stuff we had childproofed. We set up a large playpen in the living room and dubbed it ‘The Jail.’ Several times a day they would get into something they shouldn’t be into and get corralled and put in jail.