Chapter 92: Same Old, Same Old

I made it back home the week before Thanksgiving 1987. It was enjoyable to just get back to normal again. For Thanksgiving I did the whole stuffed turkey routine, but I really missed my mom’s oyster dressing. Marilyn simply refused to allow me to bring ‘those disgusting things’ (the oysters) into the house. I occasionally wondered what my family was up to, but after the lawsuits were done, I ignored them. Suzie, I kept track of, but I never contacted her. She had changed her name to Buckner shortly after arriving in Rochester. I wasn’t sure how secure that made her (compared to Buckman, anyway.)

Charlie was now a little over six, and the girls were about three-and-a-half. Charlie was rambunctious, but not in an overly bad way. He was just a boy. One of his teachers advised us to have him tested for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and Marilyn and I shut that idea down real fast! Charlie was simply a boy and did routine boy stuff. He didn’t need to be drugged. A routine grab-him-by-the-scruff-of-the-neck and an occasional swat on the bottom were sufficient to keep him in line. On the plus side, there was none of that ‘Wait until your father gets home!’ bullshit. Marilyn was more than happy to keep the kids in line on her own.

Occasionally he got stupid. One time he got into a tussle in school with a classmate, Johnny Parker, and the two knuckleheads did the ‘ My father can beat up your father!’ routine. We got called to school and met the Parkers, who were equally exasperated with their offspring. I stood and shook Johnny’s father’s hand and said, “Mister Parker is my friend, and I don’t beat up my friends!” Then we made the boys shake hands.

Afterwards, I enrolled Charlie in karate classes at the dojo I went to. Marilyn wasn’t at all in favor of this, figuring he would just get in more trouble. I knew better. The first thing they teach you in any of the martial arts is self-discipline. Then I told my son that if he ever used anything he learned in karate class in a school fight, his next session would be with me! His eyes opened wide at that!

The twins were an absolute delight. They were constantly running around outside and bringing back dandelions and grasshoppers and salamanders and such. In this they were a lot like Maggie, who had brought back every conceivable critter she could get hold of. I knew it wouldn’t last. Sometime around when they hit twelve, the hormones would kick in, and my little angels of sugar and spice would morph into the evil twin spawn of Satan.

Have you ever wondered who came up with the idea of dowries? Then you’ve never had daughters! A dowry is where a man pays another man to take his daughter off his hands. The longer she hangs around, driving him crazy, the more he’s willing to pay. In this regard it’s similar to divorce, where a man pays his wife to go away. I pointed this out to Marilyn once, and she wasn’t amused. Go figure.

We tried to live normally, like your average suburban parents. We’re just not a flamboyant pair. Okay, when traveling we flew by a private jet, and had a limo or car waiting for us, but back home I drove a car and Marilyn drove a minivan. We didn’t live like hermits, either. Every summer we had a big barbecue/pool party and anybody who could come up with a reason was invited. We had the office and teachers and neighbors and friends over. After Charlie joined AYSO soccer, every fall, during soccer season, we had another one for the entire team and their parents, and it just got bigger when the girls got old enough to play.

Until now most people knew I had money, but generally not that I was ridiculously wealthy. After my face was on the cover of Fortune it was known, and when half the housewives in town saw me on Oprah it just got worse. Generally, it wasn’t bad. It also didn’t hurt that we were easy touches for local fundraisers. Still, some people thought that since I was Mr. Moneybags, I should foot the bill completely, so they didn’t have to contribute.

The only time it became an issue was in the Scouts. Charlie was now in the second grade and was a Wolf Cub Scout. It came to a head in early ‘88 before the annual Blue and Gold Dinner. It’s pretty cheap to run a troop or pack. The leaders are all volunteers, usually parents of the Scouts, and work for free. A common joke in any troop or pack is “I’ll double your pay if you do such-and-so!” - which was meaningless, since your pay was zero to begin with! There are some costs for camping trips and hikes, but they weren’t much more than food and some badges, maybe $5 to $10 per event, and the boys (read that as parents) coughed that up for each event.

You could run a troop or pack for maybe a grand or two a year. Back on my first go, in New York, we had done the occasional bottle drive, to collect bottles and cans and return them for the nickel deposit. The boy and a parent would spend a Saturday morning driving around and collecting, and then sorting out and returning various bottles and cans and get smelly and sticky and yucky in the process. Everybody had fun. Maryland didn’t have nickel deposits, so we sold Boy Scout popcorn, sort of like the Girl Scouts with cookies, only not as well organized. Again, generally everybody has fun and eats a lot of popcorn.

Well, we were at one pack meeting talking about this and some woman pops up wondering why certain parents weren’t pulling their weight! She shouldn’t have to drive around, and she had to work, and she shouldn’t have to sell popcorn, when some parents, who she wouldn’t name, could obviously afford to do more! I just looked at my wife and we rolled our eyes, but otherwise kept our mouths shut. The Cubmaster immediately popped up and said that there was no way we were going to have an income tax on the parents of the boys, and that helping to raise the funds was good for the boys’ confidence and pride, and they generally liked it. She gave a loud “Harrumph!” and sat back down, to glare at us for the rest of the meeting.

After the meeting, the Cubmaster buttonholed the woman and told her in no uncertain terms how things operated. Shortly after that, she yanked her son from the pack. It was his loss. I had enjoyed Scouting, and so had Parker. Now it was Charlie’s turn, and he was taking to it like a duck to water. It certainly never hurt a boy to be involved, and he generally learned a few useful things. I had been with him all through Tiger Cubs, and it looked like I was going to keep going in the future.

Some of this took time, and ever since I had started work on the book, I had scaled back my time at the office. Now I scaled it back a little more and stopped going in on Fridays. I spent most of my time schmoozing clients and attending board meetings of companies we were involved in, and otherwise just let Jake Junior run the show. Missy, too, since she had really grown into the investment job. In some ways I was even more proud of her than I was of Junior. John began cutting back his time, too, but he was in his 60s and had earned a break.

Over Christmas, we took a couple of weeks off and went to Utica and then Hougomont. The difference was that this time, on the way south from Utica, we landed at Westminster and picked up the Tusk family and flew them down with us. We had room at the house, and really enjoyed ourselves. We spent a lot of time running after Holly, Molly, and Carter as they chased seagulls, and trying to keep Bucky and Charlie from swimming to another island. It was also convenient to have ready babysitters for when one set of parents wanted to go out without the kids. Marilyn and I wanted to invite the Buckminster clan down for a week, too, but Harlan had made major, and was in Germany as a battalion exec. We might not see them for another year or two!

I skipped my 10^th reunion at RPI in ‘87. Somehow it just felt weird. That seemed so long ago, and like a different life. I had been a scientist then, and only in ROTC so I could pledge Kegs and meet Marilyn again. Life had been so simple. I just wanted to find Marilyn again, and then settle down without any money problems. Instead, I had gotten a doctorate, gone career in the army, become a zillionaire, and written a book. I wasn’t sorry about any of it, but it sure seemed strange at times!

One thing did work out about having money - it was easy to get babysitters! Like I had told Marilyn back in 1983, on the night of my high school reunion when Hamilton had first started stalking us and had scared poor Becky Devlin, that girl wasn’t about to keep her mouth shut about the tip I paid her! The Buckmans were known as generous tippers, and we had a choice of girls to babysit the kids.

We did a date night about once a month, usually out to dinner and a movie, or sometimes down to the Meyerhoff to see the symphony. Date night would always involve stockings and not pantyhose, and Marilyn usually went braless and commando style, and we often detoured on the way home to go parking. If any of the babysitters noticed that Mr. Buckman was always smiling when he got home, and that Mrs. Buckman was always giggling, they didn’t say anything.

I surprised myself when I got a call early that spring from Simon and Schuster. They had made money on Eat Your Peas! and wanted me to write another book. The surprise was that I didn’t hang the phone up on them! They wanted another book like the first one, but on a different topic. The topic was to be political economics, which we had touched on in Eat Your Peas! Specifically, they wanted me to expand my thoughts on how politicians were constantly starting things without ever figuring out how to pay for them, like the various Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid programs. You pick a field, there was a program started by a politician, with no idea if it worked or how to pay for it.

I was intrigued. A big part of Eat Your Peas! was that our politicians lacked the discipline to finish what they started and make it work. You had to hold their feet to the fire. When I was a kid, it was the Democrats who would pass all these crazy programs as part of LBJ’s ‘Great Society’, and the Republicans were constantly hounding them because the Democrats couldn’t pay for this stuff. The Republicans weren’t any better, since they cut taxes under Bush II, and radically raised spending.

I told them I would need a co-author or two, somebody to do the research, maybe an economist, to help. The nice thing about academics is that they always have these students around who need extra credit or a paper or a thesis, and you can tap them to find things out. If they found somebody for me to work with, we could write it and have it ready by the fall. When I told Marilyn, she just laughed and asked when she was supposed to get my gun to shoot me.

Tessa and Marilyn coerced me into attending our 15^th high school reunion in June of 1988. It was pleasant, but not as fascinating as our 10 ^th. To be honest, it brought back a lot of memories of Hamilton and my family. The collapse had started that night. Well, it started a month earlier, during Suzie’s graduation, but Hamilton started stalking us that night. I ended up explaining what had happened to several people, including Shelley Talbot and her husband. The cops had questioned them, but they had questioned just about anybody from high school who knew me, and she wasn’t the only girl they talked to. Worse, several people I barely knew treated me as their long-lost buddy, and then hit me up for an investment in their business. I wasn’t sorry to leave at the end, and we simply went home. I wasn’t sure I would come back for the 20^th.

Meanwhile, we continued to just live our normal lives. Charlie was really getting into the whole dirt bike and motocross thing! Many weekends would see us taking him and his bike to a race somewhere. He was actually pretty good and was winning some of his races and climbing in the standings. He finished the season in second place overall, which only made him want to do better.

There was some real high comedy with this. The twins had gotten over their fear of the noise and crowds, and now were eager to go and watch. However, since they were so small, they insisted we put them up on our shoulders to watch the races. I would load one of the girls up, and Marilyn would load the other. That was still a problem, in that I was still seven inches taller than Marilyn, so one girl was always sitting higher than the other. If the ground was uneven, we could stand so that Marilyn was up higher than me, but in mid-June we were out near Hagerstown and our spot was level. The girls kept fussing and we kept swapping them back and forth. Finally, Holly, who was sitting on my shoulders at the moment said, “Daddy, you need to get a taller Mommy!”

I tried to keep the smile off my face as I looked at Marilyn, who was starting to stew. Molly got in on it then, adding, “We need a Mommy your height, Daddy!”

I did my best to keep a straight face, and told my wife, “You know, they’re right! I’m thinking maybe blonde, blue-eyed...” I held my hands in front of my chest, like I was playing with a pair of bowling balls.

“Very funny, the three of you!” I just started laughing, and for the rest of the afternoon, every time we swapped the girls, I would start laughing again.

It got worse that night, back at the house. After dinner, with the kids all washed up and fed, and Marilyn and I laying back in our recliners, the girls came into the living room and went up to their mother’s feet. I noticed Charlie, however, hanging back by the archway, so I knew he was up to something. Marilyn was laying back, barefoot and watching the news with me, and the twins went up to her and each went up to one of her feet. Then they looked over at their older brother.

“One foot for each of you. You have to pull evenly,” he told them.

Holly and Molly grabbed their mother’s ankles and began pulling. Marilyn looked up at all of this and said, “What in the world are you two up to?”

“Charlie says that in order to make you taller, we need to stretch you!” answered Holly.

Unbelievable! I slapped my face and turned to stare at my son, who was grinning from ear to ear and scampered off down the hallway. Then I started laughing helplessly as our daughters tugged on Marilyn’s ankles. She was laughing too, and ordering them to stop, it wasn’t going to work!

“It will work better if you start to tickle Mommy’s feet,” I told them.

That really got the girls to working, and Marilyn, who is very ticklish, started crying out! “No, NO, NO! Stop it! Don’t tickle ... NO! ... Stop!” She began kicking her legs up and down, and the girls kept trying to hold on. “Stop!” She looked over at me. “Get them to stop!” I just laughed until my sides hurt, and the tears came. Marilyn had to finally reach down and snag the girls and drag them into her lap, and tickle them back. For years after I could tease her about her height by telling her we’d get the girls to pull her ankles again.

Then, in late June Marilyn blackmailed me into something I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to do. Well, maybe blackmail isn’t the proper term. Fraud doesn’t seem right, either. Coercion, that’s what it was, coercion! I was totally unprepared for her idea. My pants were on the floor, and Marilyn was giving me a blowjob, when, right at the point where I should have been happily sighing in bliss as she swallowed, she stopped and said, “Carling, I was thinking, maybe we could have another child...”

All contracts entered into when the parties aren’t wearing pants are to be considered null and void! All contracts entered into when the parties are exchanging bodily fluids are to be considered especially null and void! I couldn’t even argue about it at the time, since we were sixty-nining and Marilyn was sitting on my face at the time she made this announcement. I was being smothered and sexually tormented at the same time. It’s just not fair!