Missy Talmadge blinked and said, "Well, that was fun. Are you two serious about this?" I sat back down and outlined my investment plans. She just nodded and agreed with them. At one point she looked over at my father and asked if he was in agreement. He said he was, so she just shrugged and pulled some paperwork out of her desk. Fifteen minutes later she had the check and I had a brokerage account.
She led us out, but on the way, we were waylaid by an older gentleman, who called the three of us into a very large and rich corner office. He introduced himself as the branch manager and asked, politely, what had happened. I took the lead in explaining the situation. I finished by stating, "Here's the bottom line. I'm not doing business with Mr. Hardesty. If I do business with your firm at all, it will be with Miss Talmadge. If that breaks some sort of rule, then give me my check back and you can just shred these papers. I am sure that Merrill Lynch would be more than happy to talk to me. I think they're a couple of floors up, aren't they?"
"That won't be necessary, Mr. Buckman.", he replied, and for the first time, a man at this outfit was using that title with me, and not my father. It was a curious feeling.
On the drive home, Dad smiled and asked, "Think you were a little rough on Bill Hardesty back there?"
I smiled back. "What I think is that you can do better. He has you into mutual funds his company runs, right?"
"Yes."
"And occasionally you find him trading in something you hadn't authorized, but afterwards he tells you it was a great deal, right?"
"Yes. So?"
"Dad, he's churning your account and putting you into high cost proprietary funds. I can guarantee he makes more from your account than you ever will."
Dad stared at me for a second, but didn't reply.
The money I got from the lawsuits was going to be seed money. How many times have you ever thought, boy, if I'd only known about this company or that company, way back when, I'd have bought it and be rich? Wouldn't you have liked to have bought Microsoft or Xerox or Apple or Wal-Mart back when they were tiny and nobody had ever heard of them? Well, obviously I had heard of them.
There was more, however. As part of my MBA classes I had to take a finance class, and the professor had discussed the accounting practices and stock market analysis of the conglomerate craze of the Sixties, and how it had risen and fallen in the Seventies. I had even worked for several years at an ITT subsidiary, so I knew what most of the conglomerates would do in the next few years. This was the last gasp of the conglomerates. Within three years, their stocks would tank. You can make just as much money betting a stock will drop as you do that it will rise.
That was why I discussed options. This can give you incredible leverage betting on the rise or fall of a company, although you have the possibility of losing everything if you bet the wrong way. There were other ways to make money, too. The scenario I outlined of the rise of oil prices following another Arab-Israeli war would be duplicated in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War. The Israelis won the war, but the price of oil quadrupled. This happened again in 1979. For real money, the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market in '79 and silver prices quintupled in a matter of months, and then collapsed in 1980. Ride the wave up, and then ride it back down. By the time I got to college, I could have a million dollars. By the time I graduated, many times that.
This wasn't what I wanted in life. I have never really understood the burning desire some people have for inordinate wealth. A nice house, fine. Maybe a vacation place. But three, or four, or five places? Some people buy homes that they never actually even visit or live in! Want a boat? Okay, not my cup of tea (a boat is a hole in the water you try and fill with money) but I've had a lot of friends who liked them. How many do you need, though, and what's the fun of having a boat that you can't even steer, but have to hire a crew and captain to run? How many planes can I fly at once? How much is too much?
I wanted enough to have a nice home, maybe a vacation place. Hell, just be able to take a vacation when I wanted to! Fly first class, or even better, be able to charter a plane! Put my kids through college and pay for my daughters' weddings. And no debt, no credit cards! The worst arguments Marilyn and I ever had were not about the kids, but about money! Or about our lack of money! Everything else was a piece of cake.
I've been rich and I've been poor. Rich is better.
Chapter 7: Growing Up
A few days after starting my brokerage account, Dad drove me up to the Miyagi Dojo up on York Road. Mom still wasn't all that happy with either one of us for not giving her the money to put in the bank. It's not that she was going to steal it, but if I gave her twenty grand to invest, all I would ever see was the twenty grand, spent on college. If college were to cost less, she would hold onto the money until I needed it later. It would be used to pay their portion of any wedding expenses. Forget about earning interest on the money!
She was just starting to get over her mad when Dad took me to Miyagi's. That just got her started on why I needed to learn to fight. I would just get in trouble and go to jail again, and this time she wouldn't let me come home. Or Dad either. Later I told him that jail might be quieter. He just grinned and swatted the back of my head.
Lance had been in my grade going through Hampton Elementary. Almost all, about 95%, of the students there ended up going to Towsontown Junior High. Not all, however; the school boundaries between elementary schools and between junior high schools were not exactly identical. There were always a few kids each year who got caught in the overlap. Lance had ended up at Ridgely, which was to the north of us.
I hadn't seen Lance in a couple of years. He was the only kid in the entire school who hadn't been Caucasian. He was Japanese-American, though none of us knew how many generations ago they had come here. Mind you, this was during the Sixties, when the northern Baltimore County suburbs were about as white as chalk. If you went there now, they'd be just as rich, but as integrated as any other suburb. Nowadays right next door to St. Paul's is a Korean Catholic church, and they are at least as large. In 1969, being a Jap in Timonium was pretty damn unusual.
I didn't care. He was a nice guy. I always figured he would have more problems being gay than being Asian. This was a major no-no back then, and could actually get you arrested and jailed. He kept it quiet, but when I was around him, my 'gay-dar' would start pinging like crazy. I know that most women don't believe in gay-dar, but most guys do. We can tell. It's not 100% certain, maybe more like 90%, but we can tell. I have known only a few guys in my life who I have known were gay who I couldn't tell, a fellow teacher at MVCC for one, and one of my cousins, who I was never completely sure about anyway, for another.
It's not like I care. I am totally able to distinguish between the act and the person. I don't care if you fuck donkeys, as long as they're consenting adult donkeys. I have never understood the bit about how the gays are going to lead the youth of the world astray. Sure, sounds like fun - be ridiculed and beaten up by yokels, have family members shun you, be jailed and lose jobs! I bet you can get lots of people to sign up with a membership package like that! And I have also never understood how this might be tempting to a young person who is still 'learning about his sexuality.' If you have to learn, you're already gay. Ever since I was old enough to figure out that I could use my gizmo for more than just writing my name in the snow, I've known I was totally straight.