Chapter 91: Oprah

At the end of October our literary agent called. Our book had “tested well” (whatever the hell that meant) and the initial publication run had been increased. Now they wanted to do a book tour and wanted to schedule us for this. So far, we had been conversing on a conference call, but at this I scratched my head and asked the agent to take the train down with details. Then I called Harry down at UMBC and asked him what he thought about this.

“Well, I can’t do it! It’s the end of the semester and I can’t just break away for weeks at a time!” he protested.

“I figured you would say that,” I replied. “Let’s talk to this fellow and see what he says. Maybe I can break free for a few days. Have you ever done anything like this before?”

“No, never,” he replied.

“Me neither.”

The next day the agent showed up and we met in Harry’s office at UMBC. The plan was to release the book officially on October 27, a Tuesday, and we would start our tour by the end of the week. Harry and I just looked at each other and rolled our eyes. Nothing like a little warning! That was next week! The tour was to start on the east coast and work its way west, and last about two weeks.

“This is crazy! I have classes! I can’t just leave for two weeks!” protested Harry.

I nodded. I pulled a calendar off of Harry’s wall and started reviewing the time frame. “You have us starting this tour on Friday the 30^th and going for two weeks.” That would take us through the 13^th, although they might keep it going if it went well.

“Uh...”, the agent stammered.

“Let me see your proposed schedule,” I asked. He handed it over and I looked it over. “How definite is this?” We had television and radio interviews in Boston, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, and LA, with a few other places penciled in the margins. San Antonio, Atlanta, and Miami were noted as possibilities towards the end of the schedule.

“What about Baltimore and Washington?” asked Harry. “I could do those, I suppose, if the timing was right.”

“Those were secondary markets,” commented the agent.

“Secondary to publishing, maybe, but Washington is a primary market for the type of people who will be reading this book,” I replied. “Let me ask you, what’s a typical day for one of these things?”

“Well, normally you would fly to the city the night before. The next morning, we try and have you do a morning talk show on the radio. After that, a book signing at a local bookstore, the bigger the better, then maybe another radio show or a local television station to be interviewed by one of the local people. Maybe another book signing after that. In New York and LA, we’ll try and get you on one of the late-night shows. Then, after that, you fly to the next stop.”

“And who does this? Do we both have to be there?” I asked. I knew that this could help sales of the book, but Harry had a real dilemma with timing.

“Oh, no, we only need one at each location. In your case, we could split you up and have you do different parts of the country.”

“Okay. So, do you go with us? Does somebody meet us at each location? How does that work?” I pressed.

The agent started going over the mechanics of it all. No, nobody would travel with us. That would be too expensive and time consuming. We would get a schedule, and fly from city to city, take a cab from the airport, and stay in a local hotel. The rule was to travel cheap and save your receipts. We would get a daily budget - and allowance.

I rubbed my face with my hand. I looked over at Harry. “I’ll let you do anything local or in DC. I’ll handle the travel parts, but I am calling the limit at two weeks. Anything after that, and you can travel.” I turned back to the agent. “Get the schedule finalized and sent to me as soon as possible and I’ll have my travel agent set up my flights. With any luck, in New York and on the west coast I’ll be able to schedule some visits with some outfits I do business with. Any chance you can simply give me a lump sum payment based on the per diem allowance?”

That took him by surprise. “That would be very unusual! What if your charges are less than that?”

I barked out a short laugh. “Trust me, they won’t be.”

“How can you be sure?” he asked.

I shook my head and smiled. “Because charter flights cost more than the per diem you’ll be allowing, and I won’t be catching cabs or staying at the Best Western. I’m not doing this for the money, but just so the book gets out there and noticed. This is important.” The funny thing was just how much I believed it, too. I had always believed in the importance of infrastructure, and now, after going through Harry’s work and the other reports I had read, it meant even more to me.

“The money’s not important to you?” he asked, confused.

I shook my head. “I don’t think I ever mentioned this at the beginning, but any of my share of the proceeds I’ll be donating to the Red Cross. I assume you can handle this?”

“Exactly what do you do?”

I gave him an odd look at this. I had provided him the same bland biography we provided everybody, but he obviously never connected the dots. “I’m president of the Buckman Group. We’re an investment company. I thought you knew that.”

“Well, yes, but you’re listed as Doctor Buckman, along with Doctor Johnson.”

“Right, I have a PhD in applied math from RPI. I thought you knew that already.” I looked over at Harry and he just shrugged his shoulders back at me.

“So, what is this Buckman Group? Do you work for your family or something?”

Oh, Lord! “Let me make this very simple for you. It’s my company. We’re an investment firm and do private equity and investment deals. I am worth about three quarters of a billion dollars. I’ll have my staff handle the transportation details. With any luck, I’ll be able to meet some clients and investors in my off hours.”

“You’re worth three quarters of a billion dollars?” asked an incredulous Harry Johnson.

“There’s no need to bow to me, Harry. Kissing my ring will suffice.” I turned back to the agent, who was just staring at me. “It’s not that big a deal. I’ll have my travel agent arrange for a small plane to fly me around, a car and driver in each city, and a decent hotel room. If there are any changes to the schedule, get them to her. I’ll give her a heads up when I get back to the office.”

“How come nobody’s ever heard of you?” asked the agent.

“Because I don’t advertise. We’re not a public company. We’re very private.” It amused me at times. I had qualified to be on the Forbes 400 list for the last three years, but they had never twigged to me. That probably wouldn’t last, but as long as it did, I would enjoy the anonymity. Besides, I was way down the list. My friend, Bill Gates, was much higher up than I was.

He left shaking his head, and Harry and I chatted a little while longer. He had seen our operation, but never really understood the amounts of money tied up in the business. He asked about getting involved, but I told him the minimum buy-in to our pools was currently set at a fifty grand, and we weren’t structured like Merrill Lynch or one of the other stockbrokers. Then I told him it wasn’t that big a deal. In many ways I still considered myself a mathematician.

That night I told Marilyn over dinner what was happening. She knew about the book, of course, since I had often spent a few hours at night working on it in my study. She also knew we had sent it off, finished, and had met Harry and his wife. “When does this start?” she asked.

“Next Friday, I think, or maybe the following Monday. I can’t imagine we would get all that much accomplished over the weekend.”

“And you’ll be gone for two weeks?”

I shrugged. “I guess so. I’ve never done this before. I don’t know whether it will be enjoyable or a pain in the tuchas. I am betting it will be the latter.”

“What’s a tookis?” asked Charlie.

“It’s what gets walloped when you interrupt grownups,” I replied with a smile.

“What’s walloped?” asked Holly.

“That’s when Daddy spanks the two of you for being girls,” he told her.

That got the twins to squawking and Marilyn to laughing, and Charlie hopped off his seat and ran off to the kitchen with a big smile on his face, while I simply muttered under my breath about my smart-assed son. “Oh, brother! And you wanted kids?” I asked Marilyn.

“Well, I know what you wanted!”

“We’ll talk about that later!” I answered. “You know, he’ll be the perfect soldier someday. He just loves to pull the pins on hand grenades and toss them around.” That earned me a derisive snort.

In one way, I was glad to get out of town. The Securities and Exchange Commission had decided to investigate the Buckman Group’s ‘miraculous’ returns on Black Monday and the following week. This was our biggest single return in a one day or one-week period since we had started the firm. They were naturally curious and asked for some ‘informal’ talks. Of course, if you wanted to stonewall, feel free. They’ll simply crawl up your anus and take up residence until you decide to cooperate.

When I made my first million betting on the Yom Kippur War raising oil prices, I was such small potatoes nobody knew my name. When I made my next big killing on the Hunt Brothers and the silver market, I was still too small to notice. They were betting billions, and I was betting a few million. The biggest chunk of cash since then was in private equity, investing with Bill Gates and Michael Dell, and the other direct investments we had made. Black Monday had gone back to my pattern of gambling on the market, only now with hundreds of millions of dollars. Somebody had noticed.

I wasn’t going to delay the book tour over this. Melissa was going to be point on this one. She had the various SEC credentials. Most importantly, she could sit there and testify on a stack of Bibles how we had spent the spring and summer discussing the weakening market and developing plans to counter it. She and the various traders could swear how we discussed it ahead of time, that she had been the one to call us into the office, and how we had made the Code Red and Code Green calls based on the market moves and the other’s input. Unless they could prove I was a time traveler, we were going to be safe.

To a certain extent, I had debated with myself making the big gains, even though I was probably inviting Federal scrutiny. Still, I couldn’t get past the fact that while we would make a fortune, it wouldn’t be off a single company. The big charge that brought down so many Wall Street highfliers was insider trading, where an Ivan Boesky or Martha Stewart knew somebody on the inside and made bets in a single stock. We had bet on the market as a whole. Nobody could track this to a single stock or company. We would be safe.

Sunday night, November 1, I drove over to the Westminster airport, where Taylor had a Beechcraft King Air waiting for me, along with a pilot. I was flying into Logan in Boston, well within the plane’s range, about an hour and a half flying time. If I was flying commercial, which is what Simon and Schuster had planned, it would take me half the day. There was a limo waiting for me at the charter office and I was at the Ritz-Carlton fifteen minutes later. If there is one truly wonderful thing about having serious money, it is the ability to fly charter.

The next morning, I was in the studio of WBZ, “NewsRadio 1030”, getting ready to sell the book. Glamorous, it ain’t. Small rooms, cramped spaces, listening to idiots yammer half the time. I had ten minutes from 7:46 to 7:56, with a commercial break in the middle. Then it was out of there and off to WRKO, AM680, “Boston’s Talk Station”, to repeat it all from 8:31 to 8:41. The topic was the “Big Dig”, a new tunnel across the harbor which had been part of a federal roadwork bill passed into law over President Reagan’s veto. Some people were for it, and some were against it. I just said that if we don’t take care of bridges and roads, they collapse. I didn’t tell them that the Big Dig would be a colossal boondoggle. That wasn’t because it was a bad idea, but because Boston politicians have enough graft and corruption in their veins to make any politician proud!

After that I did two book signings, at which a total of four people showed and only two bought the book, and then went off to WCVB, Channel 5, the local ABC affiliate, for a brief talk there. That might get cut down to 60 seconds and slipped in if it was a slow news day. Again, the topic was the Big Dig.

From there I went to the hotel, packed my crap up and went to the airport. I didn’t know or care if it made it to the news. My only thoughts were about why in the world anybody put up with the horseshit of a book tour! This was Day One, and we had nine more to go, not including the intervening weekend.

Monday night I flew to New York, and I had two nights there. Tuesday, I did some radio stations and a book signing, and nothing was scheduled for the afternoon. Melissa had taken the train up, so that we could talk to some people on Wall Street. I took a nap in the afternoon, and then we had dinner with some people from Prudential and Bain. Wednesday morning, I did a local talk show on WNBC after the Today Show was over, and then went to a book signing. The big doings were later that day, fifteen minutes on the Late Night With David Letterman. That was a big deal!

One of the things Harry and I had been told before we went off on our tours (and I was already wishing I had the short and local tour) was to try and find a way to ‘connect’ with the local host or audience. In Boston this meant talking about the Big Dig. In New York, I focused on something else. If you can do it humorously, all the better. This is part of ‘humanizing the news.’ Slap a smile on your face as you announce the bridge collapsed and killed two dozen nuns and schoolchildren.