Chapter 121: Children, All Sorts

1996 - 1997

Well, I survived the ‘96 election. As close fought elections went, this was cleaner than most, simply because neither of us gave the other any dirt to throw. I’m not talking about our records as public servants, but about the personal stuff. By now my life was an open book. What was Steve Rymark going to accuse me of, killing my brother? Please! Old news! As for him, believe me we looked! His zipper seemed tighter than mine. Donna Rymark simply glowed as she grew bigger during the campaign. When she gave birth to another son in August, the only thing we could think to do was to visit them in the hospital, all of us, kids included, each carrying a large box of infant disposable diapers and smiling for the cameras.

It was an expensive election. We had to match Rymark ad for ad, and he had a lot of money to spend. There was a feeling at the Democratic National Headquarters that a bunch of us who were tied to Gingrich were vulnerable, and they funneled some money to local candidates. Additionally, the Maryland Ninth is not a poor district, especially in the Baltimore County area, and Rymark had more than a few donors able to give the maximum. He had a war chest ample to fight me.

Rymark spent a lot of time beating on me about being a member of the Gang of Eight and shutting down the government and being a buddy of Gingrich. The best I could come up with was that he was a liberal Democrat who hated the Second Amendment. I just kept up my regular ground game, donating to worthy causes, speaking to every group available, and pushing the incumbency card hard. November 5, my 41^st birthday, I managed to get reelected. It was a 55-45 win, which was half the margin I had been averaging. By most standards it was a landslide, but to say it was unnerving was an understatement. Steve Rymark called at half past eleven that night and conceded quite graciously. By the time I made my speech, it was too late for anybody to give a shit.

Maybe I’d get lucky and in 1998 he’d run for something else, anything else! On the downside, most of the upcoming races would have Democratic incumbents, like Parris Glendenning for Governor or Barbara Mikulski for Senator. Then again, the good news for me was that we were no longer in an era when the loser could try again in a few years. Nowadays, if you lost, you were through. I wouldn’t have to face Steve Rymark and his unbelievably adorable family ever again. On the downside, if Donna Rymark ever decided to run for office, I was up shit creek! If they went to picture ballots, all she had to do was wear a low-cut blouse and I was totally screwed.

Ultimately, about a month after the election, Steve was approached by the re-elected Clinton White House and offered a position as the United States Attorney for Maryland, replacing Lynne Battaglia, who took a job as a Federal Judge. It was a no-brainer move. At the start of the year, he had been an assistant county prosecutor, and at the end of the year he was the Federal prosecutor responsible for the entire state. If he did well there, he could run for Senate or Governor someday.

If the Democrats were hoping to tar and feather the Gang of Eight and ride us out of town on a rail, they uniformly failed. All of us survived the election, as did Newt. The same could not be said for all of our colleagues, however. The Republicans still controlled the House, but we lost ten seats to the Dems, making it 228-206-1. Newt held onto his position as Speaker, but there was some loud grumbling. More than a few of our colleagues were looking at the results, and at the much tighter races they had fought to stay where they were and were pointing fingers at Gingrich for making life a lot more difficult for them. On the plus side, nobody was pointing fingers at me or anybody else in the Gang of Eight (Seven now, since Rick Santorum was a Senator and beyond us mere Congressmen). For one thing, they had all voted as Newt had demanded we vote, so the blame for their seriously depleted campaign chests was on him.

I’m not sure if Newt noticed the finger pointing. I am sure that if he did notice, he didn’t care. He was on a mission, a mission to destroy Bill Clinton. He began talking about impeachment, at least quietly, and seemed to be looking for an excuse to make it happen. He took the stunned looks on the faces of those he talked to as approval.

Impeachment is a big deal, a damn big deal! It had only been used twice so far, once on Andrew Johnson after the Civil War, and once on Dick Nixon after Watergate. Johnson’s real crime was that he was a moderate in a time of radicalism; the Republican Congress wanted the South to suffer, and Johnson wanted things to settle down. They trumped up some charges and put him on trial; Johnson won by a single vote. Nixon’s offenses were much more serious and legitimate, and it never actually got as far as an actual impeachment. Nixon was told that he would be impeached if he didn’t resign first, so he resigned. They never actually got around to drafting the paperwork.

Now Gingrich was hunting around for anything he could lay his hands on to fry Clinton’s ass. The Constitution is delightfully vague in some areas, and this was one of them. A President can be impeached for ‘treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors’. Treason and bribery were self-explanatory, but what was meant by high crimes and misdemeanors was left blank. Johnson’s crime was ignoring the real powers in Congress and the Cabinet, not precisely what the Founders had in mind. Nixon’s crimes involved real crimes, like ordering break-ins and running a slush fund out of the Oval Office. Clinton’s crimes, such as they were, seemed to fall quite a bit lower down the scale, but Newt was pushing hard.

So far, all that was known for sure was that there had been allegations of bribe taking in the Whitewater real estate mess in Arkansas; although Clinton never got the money, a friend did. To what extent any of this was credible was questionable. There was a single person making the complaint and it was a legal quagmire. Considering that the Clintons lost money on the project made a lot of us figure it wasn’t worthy of the investigation - if you make money, okay, it’s bribery; if you lose money, you’re stupid and deserve whatever happens to you. As far as Clinton’s numerous marital affairs, so far there was just a whole lot of smoke but no sign of any fire; how that would end up in an impeachment nobody could figure out. You don’t get impeached for screwing around, you get divorced! The same applied to all the other little nonsense around the joint, the FBI files and the Travel Office issues. It’s embarrassing, but not something to be impeached over.

One of the most common jokes at the time was:

’Q: What do you get when you cross a crooked lawyer and a crooked politician?

A: Chelsea!’

On the plus side, since I wasn’t a Senator, I didn’t have to vote on the impeachment. I resolved to not vote for the impeachment in any matters crossing my desk in the House. If Hillary cut his schlong off with a rusty machete that would be sufficient for me.

My enemies weren’t only on the Democratic side. Newt Gingrich was of the opinion that if you weren’t for him, you were against him. Shortly after the election, I discovered I was no longer on the Armed Services Committee. I was now back in Science, Space, and Technology. I was about in the middle of the pack. I think that if the House had a committee on extinct animals, I would have been assigned there. On the plus side, my old buddy Harlan now had enough time in the Army that with accrued leave and a variety of other credits he could retire in February of 1997. He managed to get an assignment for a few months directly with the Armed Services Committee, and found himself a future position with United Defense, the manufacturers of the M109 Paladin howitzers that he had worked with earlier in his career.

I lost a couple of junior staffers when it became known that Gingrich had me in his sights. My senior people could see what was happening, but they could also see that Gingrich was getting more than a little nutty. I told them that Gingrich was going to wear out his welcome sooner rather than later, and that sticking with me might just work out better in the long term. At least we didn’t lose our offices. The House rules wouldn’t let Gingrich send me packing off to Cannon and the Cages, which was certainly something he had to be contemplating.

Meanwhile a massive crisis was brewing in the Buckman household. It had been simmering for a dozen years now and was now finally erupting into a full-blown disaster. The twins were twelve-and-a-half years old, rapidly approaching thirteen, and were in the seventh grade. My wonderful little angels were no more. They had died, killed by zombies, and their brains had been sucked out and replaced by the spawn of Satan.

On a daily basis came anguished cries of ‘MOM!’ and hateful stares at me as they screamed ‘YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!’ followed by a SLAM as a bedroom door closed suddenly and forcefully. These outbursts were caused by my simple existence and perpetual survival on the planet. From what I could determine Lucifer’s daughters simply objected to my possession of life.

I was at a loss to explain the cause of this sudden hatred for me. Marilyn was no help whatsoever, rolling her eyes at these outbursts and telling me to leave them alone, it was ‘growing pains’. Both girls hit puberty within a day of each other. They were changing, too. Up until now they had been short and a bit scrawny, with their mother’s round face and upturned nose, but my family’s straight hair. Now, while they were still short, they were filling out, and weren’t all that scrawny anymore. In fact, they were growing breasts and their hips were getting broader. Worst of all, I was not the only male noticing. Their brother Charlie tended to tease them mercilessly, occasioning head slaps from the parental unit nearest him when we caught him. That wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was that other males were noticing, males who were not interested in teasing them. Even the daughters of billionaire Congressman can get bra straps snapped and requests for ‘dates.’

Neither their mother nor their father went along with any of this nonsense, but only I had to suffer their wrath. Marilyn escaped most of it. It just wasn’t fair.

I had gone through this once before, with Maggie. (Alison, with her Williams Syndrome, had been nowhere near as nutty.) I had thought Maggie was impossible, but I had never contemplated going through adolescent hormones with twins! I started telling Marilyn I was going to permanently move to Washington. “Only if I can go with you!” was the response. The screams of outrage from Holly and Molly got especially loud when I asked Marilyn what she thought of sending the girls to boarding school in Switzerland, and only bringing them back when they turned eighteen. Both Marilyn and I knew the girls were listening to us and watching, so when she said we should look into it, they ran screaming to their room, and slammed the door behind them. She watched them run, and then looked at me and smiled. “You’re mean!”

Music began blaring from down the hall. “You think so?” I asked.

My wife snorted and went back to making a pie.

Another time they announced they were going to leave, “And there’s nothing you can do about it!” This they told us right after an argument before dinner, so we were all in the dining room together.

I nodded thoughtfully, and then commented, “Well, you might just want to know, you’ve heard about GPS, right? The global tracking stuff? Well, when you two were babies, we were worried about kidnappers, so we had tags surgically implanted inside you. We can find you anywhere in the world.” I was keeping a straight face through this. Marilyn simply rolled her eyes, and Charlie grinned and nodded.

The girls were thunderstruck, of course. They didn’t realize GPS wasn’t around when they were born. “You didn’t!” cried Molly.

“Where is it?” yelled her sister.

“Small of your back, near the spine.”

“Yeah, I have one, too,” added Charlie. He spun around, lifting his shirt up from behind and running a finger along his lower back. “Right about here. I can feel it under the skin...”

Both girls screamed and ran from the dining room. Moments later we heard the door to their bedroom slam shut. Marilyn said, “Will you stop teasing them?” to me, and to Charlie she added, “And your father doesn’t need any help from you!”

Charlie looked over at me, and I said, “Nice touch there - ‘ you can feel it under the skin.’ They’re down there right now looking for the scars and trying to trace it out.”

Marilyn swatted me. “You’re not helping!” She sighed and stood up. “I’d better go tell them.”

“Can we do it after dinner? It’s actually nice and quiet right now.”

“NO!” She left the dining room and headed down the hall. Charlie and I finished setting the table and we served ourselves. Ten minutes later Marilyn led the twins back into the dining room; she looked amused; the twins looked murderous. Charlie started laughing and then grabbed his plate and ran out of the room before they could kill him.

At least they weren’t dating yet. We had decided that wasn’t happening until high school. Marilyn had told me in no uncertain terms (stern face and finger wagging, etc.) that no junior high school boys were going to have the same level of fun with her daughters that I had enjoyed at that age. I laughed pretty good at that - and agreed!

The summer of 1997 I went from being extravagantly wealthy to oil sheikh wealthy, although it wouldn’t show up for a few years more. At the summer barbecue, held the first weekend in June this year, I managed to have a quiet break with Missy Talmadge, my lawyer Tucker Potsdam, and Dave Marquardt. We had been working with Dave since we made our first investment in Microsoft fifteen years ago, and now he was a partner in the Buckman Group’s Silicon Valley investments. Even though I was no longer active in the Buckman Group, I had spent a lot of time there, and still knew the business.

(Normally Jake Junior would have been there as well, but he had taken the G-IV to Ireland with his family. His wife had family still over there, and they were taking a vacation. I simply told him to bring me back a bottle of whiskey from as many Irish distilleries as he could find, and I’d run a taste test afterwards.)

Dave Marquardt asked me, “So, what do you think is going to happen in Cupertino this year? When do you think they are going to file Chapter 11?”

Cupertino meant Apple Computer, of course. I smiled at Dave. “Now is the time to buy Apple cheap,” I answered.

Dave and Missy stared at me. “Buy? Are you kidding me? The stock is dropping through the floor!” exclaimed Missy.

I nodded. “Steve Jobs is going to slit Gil Amelio’s throat sometime soon and take over again.”

“So what? They threw him out once before for screwing up. Why would he do any better now?”

On the face of it, that was true. He had been forced out back in ‘85 in a boardroom coup and had spent the next decade puttering around Silicon Valley and Hollywood. NeXT Computer proved a bust; Pixar and the Disney connection were wonders. When Apple bought NeXT last year, they were letting a wolf back into the fold. “Look, on the face of it, what you said is correct. My take on it is that Moses has been wandering around in the desert long enough, and it’s time for him to lead his people again.”

“He doesn’t have enough money to do what needs to be done over there,” commented Dave.

“Have you followed the technology he developed with NeXT? He’ll suck that into Apple and prune away the deadwood. Don’t forget, the man might be an asshole, but he’s a supremely talented asshole, and he has a vision for what he wants to do, which is something neither Sculley nor Spindler nor Amelio did.”

“That still doesn’t get him the money to keep the doors open.”

“He will after you and Bill Gates put in a couple of hundred million,” I told him.

That made everyone blink. “Are you serious?” asked Missy.

I shrugged but nodded. “Hey, I’m just a dedicated public servant who has no control over his investments, since they are all managed by a blind trust, so what do I know.” That earned me some sly grins and smiles, since everyone there knew how easily the rules for blind trusts could be manipulated. “What’s the downside, though? If we split it with Microsoft, a mix of voting and non-voting stock, a hundred million each, the most we lose is the hundred million. Let’s face it, it’s serious money, but it won’t bankrupt either Microsoft or us. What’s the upside? Again, let’s face it, you ain’t going to be buying Apple stock much cheaper. It is all upside potential. We could make a fortune on this when he turns it around, and I know the guy is going to do that!”

“What’s in it for Bill?” asked Dave.

“Microsoft Office for Apple, and no grief from Jobs about it. Bill makes his investment back just on the basis of additional software sales.”

Dave Marquardt looked thoughtful at that. He was on Microsoft’s board just like Jake Junior was. The kind of deal I was describing was possible, if the two men pushed Gates on it. He looked over at Missy. “You know, he almost makes sense!”

“That’s a very frightening thought, isn’t it? Jake gets back next week. When he does, how about we sit down and talk about it?”

One of the nice things about private enterprise is that speed is so much faster for everything. If I had proposed something like this with Congress, it might come up for review in about ten years or so. Instead, Missy (and Dave on a conference call) sold it to Jake Junior when he came back from Ireland, and then they called Bill and told him they wanted to see him. He wasn’t about to turn down two board members, so they flew out the next day, and ironed out the details inside of a week. Gates met with Jobs about a day after Jobs ousted Amelio. The ultimate deal announced in Boston at the summer MacWorld Expo was that the two companies would invest $185 million between them in a fifty-fifty split, with a mix of seventy percent nonvoting and thirty percent voting stock. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made nice on stage, and swore undying love and devotion for each other, and announced a bunch of Microsoft software would be made available on Apple computers.

In a few years we would be as wealthy as Croesus!

That summer I faced a crisis uninvolved in politics. It was in July, a hot day, and I had worked in Washington that morning. Rather than fly back home, I had Tyrell fly me to Westminster in the early afternoon, where I drove over to my offices and I had a meeting with Cheryl and my staff, and then walked next door to have a meeting in my campaign office. Then I went home. I went into the house, curious about the little red Nissan I saw parked in the driveway. Charlie didn’t own a car, although he did own a motorcycle that he couldn’t drive on the road yet (he was still fifteen.) I went into the house and found Marilyn knitting something in the living room. She looked up at me and said, “Hi, honey. Home early?”

I leaned down and kissed her, and then flopped down in my recliner. “Somehow I just couldn’t bear another minute of solving our nation’s problems. Whatcha’ making?”

“You said you wanted a new pair of slippers.”

I smiled and nodded. Marilyn makes some great slippers from rug yarn, warm and floppy, and surprisingly durable. They were sort of like really oversized socks that were stiff enough to stay up above my ankles. My last set was blue and a bit ragged. These were two-tone red. “Sounds good. Now, if I can get you to start knitting a flag, I’ll take some photos, and we can use them in the next campaign.”

“Yeah, right! Me and Betsy Ross!”

We both had a laugh at that. Dum-Dum was sleeping on the couch and snoring. “Where’s the kids?”

“The girls went shopping in Towson with some friends. Charlie’s in the pool.”

“Whose car is that outside?” I asked.

Marilyn grinned. “That belongs to his new girlfriend, Missy Something-or-other.”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, boy! Let me guess. She brought her bikini?”

Marilyn simply smiled and kept knitting. Charlie was a ‘chick magnet’ at Hereford High. He was a big kid, good looking, handsome, muscular, and a jock. He had played both basketball and football on the varsity team last year, unusual since he had only been a sophomore. He might not have been able to drive, but it seemed like there was a steady stream of young ladies available to give him a lift. I would occasionally get an amused comment from one of the security guys who tailed him around, that they couldn’t keep up with the changing cast of young ladies.

“I’m going to change,” I announced. “What’s for dinner?”

“Hamburgers? We can grill them?”

I glanced out the window. It was a beautiful and sunny day. “Sounds good.” I stood up and grabbed my briefcase. I went into my office and dropped off my briefcase, and then I went to our bedroom and changed into a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts. When I came out of the bedroom, I went into the kitchen to grab a cold beer, and as I did so, I looked out through the window to the pool. Nobody was in the pool. Curious, I went out through the patio door.

No, my eyes weren’t deceiving me. The pool was empty. There were a couple of beach towels on the grass at the side, and a pair of pink flip-flops, but no kids. Grimacing to myself, I set my beer down on a patio table and went over to the pool house. The shades were partially drawn, and I couldn’t really see inside, but the noises I heard made me very suspicious. Half dreading what I was about to encounter, I grabbed the doorknob and twisted. The door popped open, and there was Charlie, naked as the day he was born, laying on his back on the carpet, with an equally undressed Missy on top of him, straddling him and grinding down on him. They looked even more shocked than I felt when they looked up at me.

“Oh, Christ!” I muttered.

Missy squealed and rolled off my son, trying to cover herself and scrambling for her clothing, and leaving Charlie laying there, his tallywacker pointing at the ceiling. “DAD!” he protested.

I stepped back. “Playtime’s over! I want you two dressed in two minutes!” I closed the door behind me as I left the pool house.