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 some day. 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 millions. 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 pretty 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 high fliers 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 how in the world anybody actually 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 pretty 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.
Letterman: So you say that it's a good idea to block traffic at all times of the day to fix potholes.
Me: What I say is that if you don't fix the potholes, sooner or later the road collapses, and traffic is blocked anyway.
Letterman: But shouldn't these things last longer?
Me: They do, but you still have to keep fixing them. This is nothing new; we've been doing it a long time. For instance, well, I'm not very familiar with New York, but I've been told there's a small town somewhere to the east of here. I've never been there myself, but I think the name is ... Brooklyn? Maybe you've heard of it?
(Audience laughter!)