“Carl! That’s awful!”
“Yeah, I know. So you tell me. What do you want me to do?”
She looked at me confused. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that you’re more important to me than eight mill,” I told her.
That made her eyes open wide. “He really wanted you to loan him eight million dollars? Whatever for?”
I shrugged. “What it is is that his banks want him to stop blowing his money on shit and keep it in the company, and they won’t keep lending to him until he starts acting like a grownup. He figures that his good old son-in-law can loan him the money and not notice that he’s screwing around.”
It was her turn to sigh. “I want to protest, but I really can’t. It sounds like him. Can you do something for him?”
“Honey, for you I would give him the money, but I can’t put the company at risk. There’s more than just me there, you know. If I do this, it will have to be out of my own pocket.”
“That’s just insane. He expects me to make you go along with him, doesn’t he?”
I nodded. “You’re the loving and dutiful daughter, and I’m just the idiot she married.”
“Well, you’re my idiot! Do you want me to tell him no?”
“No, just be with me when I tell him no.” I stood up. “Let’s go bell the cat.”
Marilyn took my hand and I helped her to her feet. We walked back to the office holding hands. I knocked on Big Bob’s door and found him still inside with Mark Falwell. I introduced him to Marilyn. “I asked Marilyn to be here during the discussion. Maybe you’d want Harriet to be here, too?”
He gave me a very strange look at that. Harriet was a woman, and thus had no place in a business meeting. Still, he shrugged and went to the door and yelled out, “MOTHER!”
Harriet came scurrying in. She found the rest of us seated, and she sat down as well. “I want to discuss a counterproposal. First off, the Buckman Group will not be making any loans. As I said earlier, we aren’t a bank, we buy equity. If you want to sell us your company, then we can talk, but we won’t be loaning any money.”
“On the other hand, you are my father-in-law, and I care quite a bit for the family. Bob, I don’t know what you need the money for, and I don’t want to know, but if you need cash, I’ll give you some money. I’ll write you a check today for a million or two, or whatever you want, no questions asked, as a gift. Or I can have a bank check overnighted to us tomorrow. Do with it whatever you want. Your choice. But I won’t loan you or the business the money or invest in the business. This would be from me, not the Buckman Group.”
I think everybody looked shocked at this. Marilyn seemed happy, her father not so much. He started stewing about not needing charity, and how Lefleur Homes was such a great place to invest. I just sat there and let him run down, and then he stood up and stomped out of the room, followed by his wife. That left me with Marilyn and Mark. I looked back at the door they had left through and said to Mark, quietly, “Now that the kids have left, you want to come up with something reasonable I can do to help?”
“I told him you wouldn’t go for it.”
I shrugged. “Big Bob has a terminal case of selective hearing disorder. He only hears what he wants to hear.” Marilyn giggled at that.
Mark gave a wry smile and nodded. “So true, so true. Some kind of loan guarantee would be sufficient. We can arrange floorplanning over at Rome Savings Bank if you put some money into an account there to act as collateral against the proceeds. That gets us the floorplan covered, and he’ll just have to live with the loan covenants.”
“What’s he want to do with the other money?” I asked.
“A whole fleet of new vehicles, and a fourth lot down in Binghamton.”
I rolled my eyes. He now had three lots, with the third being in Syracuse; the Sacandaga Lake home didn’t count in this. “Tell him to buy rebuilt haulers and cargo vans, it will cost him only fifty cents on the dollar, and a better choice would be going north towards Lowville. He’ll pick up more traffic out of Watertown and the Adirondacks there.” Binghamton turned out to be a money pit back on the first go-around. “Hell, the banks just want him to run this place like a business! Is that so hard?”
Mark didn’t answer, and I waved it off anyway. “Put something together I can live with, and I’ll do it out of my own pocket, but I can’t tie up my company. Unlike Big Bob, I have to look my partners in the eye, even if they are junior partners.”
“I hear you.” We stood up and shook hands, and then exchanged business cards. Afterwards Marilyn and I headed out. We drove back to her parents’ new house, while Mark explained the facts of life to Big Bob. I was actually pretty glad that we were leaving the next day to go home. Mark and I could negotiate the terms of the guarantee by phone, and overnight any paperwork back and forth. Big Bob would just have to live with what Mark and I came up with.
Don’t mix business and family. It never works.
Chapter 95: A Dinner Party
Whatever my desires are to stay quiet and out of the spotlight, I have an annoying tendency to open my fat yap every now and then and spout off about something. This manifested itself in my co-authoring the two books, and getting into a high profile pissing match with a U.S. senator. I promised Marilyn I would behave, and she just nodded and shook her finger at me, and then I turned around and accepted a speaking engagement in front of the American Conservative Union. I think at that point Marilyn gave up on making me behave, and just focused on making me be polite.
I continued talking, scheduling things when convenient. I was invited to appear on Meet the Press at the end of March, and Marilyn pushed me to go, simply to get me out of the house and out from underfoot while she recuperated. I drove down to Washington the night before and went through the same process as before, and found myself in a panel discussion with three reporters on one side, and me and a fellow named Grover Norquist on the other side, discussing balancing the budget. Yes, that Grover Norquist, the fellow who singlehandedly introduced gridlock to Washington by getting Republicans to essentially gut the federal tax system and destroy the federal budget process. In 1989 he simply seemed an interesting gadfly. The damage he managed to do didn’t become apparent until much later. I was chosen because Paying the Bills had recently been quoted by several Democrats as an example of what was wrong with the Republican Party. This had generated a reprint, and more media interest. We were considered the ‘new, young faces of the Republican Party.’
Garrick Utley was the host at that time, and he had Tim Russert and some other nobody with him as the reporters. Norquist’s position was that government was simply too big, and ate up too much in the way of tax revenues. The only way to make government smaller was by cutting taxes. Starve the beast, and the beast will get smaller. This narrative, which he had been spouting since his college days in the late ’70s (he was a year younger than me) fed directly into Ronald Reagan’s worldview — “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem!” In a number of ways, he was an interesting man, and unlike what some said, was not a radical bomb thrower. The problem was that the world was a lot more complicated than he made it out to be. There is a saying that for every serious problem there is a solution that is quick and simple — and wrong! This was just such a solution.