"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 actually 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 Even though I was no longer active in the Buckman Group, I had spent a lot of time there, and still knew the business.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 about 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 definitely 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 50-50 split, with a mix of 70% nonvoting and 30% 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 totally 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 15.) 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 really 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."