“She is. Are you really looking for a dog?”
“I’ll need to clear it with the boss, at home, but I might be. We’re in a town house now, but we’ll be in a new house by the end of the year. I’ve had dogs before.”
He glanced at the photo and smiled. “I can’t imagine working here if you didn’t like dogs. Cats, too. Once we get the funding, we’re already thinking about cat toys.”
“Good. I think the market for that is even larger.” We went into the conference room to sign papers.
I talked to Marilyn about it that night, and wasn’t surprised when she said yes. While the Lefleur family hadn’t owned pets, Marilyn certainly had nothing against them, and over the years we owned many dogs and cats. Saturday I called the phone number and got the directions to Taniqua’s home and we drove down there. It was in Pimlico, about half a mile from the race track, in a nice and neat black working class neighborhood. Marilyn was a touch nervous, but I had been in the area before, and it was quite safe. My father’s parents had owned a home in the neighborhood back before all the whites moved to the suburbs. Only the color changed; it had been a working class neighborhood before and still was. We met Taniqua, who was still living at home, and then she walked us down the street to her brother’s house. We set Charlie down to inspect the puppies, and five minutes later were the proud owners of a mutt!
She was just two months old, and barely weaned. Momma wasn’t looking at us very happily, playing with her baby. Charlie thought this was all just marvelous! He wanted all of them! I’m not that crazy. Taniqua asked who I was and what I was doing at the company, so I told her, and her eyes just about popped out of her head. I laughed and told her to tell her boss that she moved one of the puppies out, and ask him about that job in sales.
Five minutes after we got home, while Charlie stood there and watched, the puppy peed on the carpet. I was in the kitchen scrounging up an old newspaper to start paper training her. Marilyn called out, “Oh, honey, your dog just made you a present!”
I came back just in time to see the puppy starting to poop. “Oh, good Lord! You little dummy.”
Charlie was fascinated. He was also just starting to talk. He had figured out ‘Ma’ and ‘Da’ and was now in the point and babble stage, as well as trying to repeat whatever he heard. You spend the first year teaching them to walk and talk, and the next seventeen telling them to sit down and shut up! His eyes lit up and he started going, “Dum dum dum dum.”
And that’s how Dum-Dum got her name.
Chapter 76: Suzie’s Graduation
Saturday, May 28, 1983
The house was mostly complete by Thanksgiving, but there were still enough items on the punch list to keep us from moving in. The kitchen needed some more work, as did the hardwood floors, and the driveway was going to be gravel until the following spring, when the weather would allow us to lay down some blacktop. We were ready to move in by Christmas, but that was just too hectic. We would wait until January.
Dum-Dum got some nice presents at Christmas. Following the closing on the investment, everybody at the Buckman Group was added to the list for Tough Pup Christmas presents. We all got a gift basket with Tough Pup chew toys and rawhide chews, including some rope toys from their new red, white, and blue All American Pup collection! It warmed my heart to know that my dedicated service in the armed services of our great nation allowed us to protect our right to have patriotic puppies! Dum-Dum growled and tried to pull my arm from the socket when we played with the ropes. She was an official Tough Pup!
Marilyn’s family, all bazillion of them, came down the week between Christmas and New Years. They were on the way to Orlando and the time shares they had bought there. We offered to put them up for the night, but we only had the one spare bedroom, and they had a convoy of five cars and about twenty-some people! I made arrangements for them at the nearest motel, and let her parents and youngest siblings stay with us. The little ones camped out on the living room carpet in blankets. We did take them up to the new house, and they oohed and ahhed appropriately. We promised to come up in the spring, after the move, and stay for a few days before taking another parents-only vacation.
Business went smoothly. I hunkered down with Missy to come up with names of various investment possibilities. I also took her out to Bellevue for a board meeting, and introduced her to Bill Gates. The three of us tossed around various company names that he was familiar with, through his contacts on the west coast. One thing I had quickly figured out was that the venture capital business was much more about the size of your Rolodex than it was your wallet.
Our next technology deal was with a guy named John Walker, who lived in the San Francisco area. He had bought his company, Autodesk, in 1982 for $10 million, but that was mostly in deferred royalties. They were definitely cash-poor and idea-rich. Bill got us in the door and we put in 500 grand, which got us ten percent, and an option for another million before the IPO. I knew this was one of the companies that would last and be an industry leader, so I handed over my money and let him think he had put one over on us. This was going to become another multi-billion capitalization company.
We did a couple of small deals in the Baltimore area, and hired a couple of additional people for the tax law and due diligence aspects. They got a decent paycheck, but they didn’t become partners. By our accounting, the value of our investments was already worth quite a bit more than what we had started with, between the general market rise and the specific private equity deals we had done. When some of these outfits did their IPOs, we would be worth a fortune. Everybody started tossing ideas around for new investments. John, Jake Senior, and Melissa knew the local business environment better than I did (especially John, a very well connected lawyer), and Melissa and I were able to network with people for Silicon Valley deals.
Missy’s marriage collapsed shortly after the turn of the year. She didn’t talk much about it, but I got the impression that the pair just drifted apart. She never said he was catting around on her, and I didn’t think she was the type to fool around on him. John helped her find a decent lawyer, and while he didn’t take her husband to the cleaners, he did keep him from getting his hands on Missy’s shares in the company.
Missy moped around for a bit, and Marilyn and Taylor got to talking about it, and they decided to do an ‘intervention.’ They roped Andrea and Tessa and a few other women they knew into a Chippendales party. Okay, I don’t know if they were technically speaking the ‘Chippendales’ dance group, but it was a bunch of male strippers. She had done this a few times my first time around, too, and I knew exactly how it would turn out. I smiled when she told me she’d be home by eleven or so. As I expected, she came home somewhere around four in the morning, drunk as a skunk (they had rented a limo, I insisted on that), and horny. She had her way with me, I rolled over and went back to sleep, and Marilyn had a two day hangover the rest of the weekend. I have no idea what Missy did when they got her home, but she seemed happier afterwards.
Dum-Dum proved fairly easy to train, Marilyn not so much. It’s easy to train a dog and I had done it several times over the years. As soon as you catch them pooping or peeing in the wrong spot, you grab them, yell at them, rub their nose in it, and smack them with a newspaper. This is pretty standard stuff. On the other hand, Marilyn had never raised a puppy before, and thought I was heartless and cruel, since I was beating a poor and defenseless animal and rubbing their nose in it. I should only yell at them, or something like that, and I swear she actually found a book that she thought agreed with her. It didn’t, but it was so full of New Age bullshit, it was hard to tell. I had Dum-Dum trained by February.