This wasn’t an unusual situation, historically speaking. Since nobody actually cared all that much about the V.P., he didn’t need to be all that handsome. FDR looked rather patrician; Truman looked like a clerk in a shoe store. JFK was young and handsome; LBJ looked like a sad sack hound dog! Neither Truman nor LBJ would have had a shot at running for President after their boss had served his full term, but wasn’t everybody surprised when they died! Now I was in the same situation. GWB was arguably better looking than me, and my replacement probably would be, too.
When we went to Delmont, we took the small and quiet version of the zoo, and most of them stayed in the parking lot. Even though I had survived an assassination attempt just a year ago, I wasn’t terribly worried. We had several dozen agents around us in three layers — immediately around us, more wandering through the nearby crowds, and the rest farther out, wandering randomly. Meanwhile, Marilyn and I wore cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirts, sneakers, sunglasses, and big straw hats. We didn’t look like the President and First Lady of the United States. We looked like a couple of gym teachers from the local junior high.
One thing I noticed, in the pictures we saw of the races and Winner’s Circle, was that Megan was in a lot of the pictures. Charlie might be getting kissed by the local Miss Motocross, but he often had an arm around Megan while he did so. I saw her in enough photos that I called in one of my Secret Service agents and broke about a dozen laws. Who was this girl? I sent him off to do a very quiet background check.
It came back pretty much like Megan had told me at the wedding. Megan Morgan, born Megan Pulaski on May 4, 1984, in Elkhorn, Nebraska, a small neighborhood on the outskirts of Omaha, which had just this year been annexed by Omaha. Her father, John, was a family law lawyer and her mother, Barbara, worked as a receptionist at a local park called Chalco Hills. She lived her entire life in Elkhorn in the same house with her parents and two younger brothers, John Jr. and William (he went by ‘Will’.) She went to public schools, first Westridge Elementary, then Elkhorn Middle School, and finally Elkhorn High. Good grades, cheerleader, Girl Scouts, all the usual stuff. Got a part in a middle school play in the 7th grade, and was hooked. Her last two years in high school she played the female lead in the school play, to rave reviews. After high school, Megan went to the University of Nebraska, where she majored in theatre.
Following her graduation from Nebraska, Megan took the bus to Hollywood and Vine, in the hope that she would soon be discovered and become the next Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor. Fortunately, she had a cousin she could stay with while she went about being discovered. On the advice of her agent she changed her professional name to Megan Morgan, since it sounded less ethnic and more alliterative. Unsurprisingly, discovery never happened, and like millions of aspiring actresses before her, she ended up waiting tables in bars and clubs while doing bit parts and non-speaking background roles. Some of the jobs had some nudity (unnamed dancer in a strip club in a biker movie, unnamed doomed sorority girl in a horror flick, etc.) but there was no evidence she had done anything worse than that.
While I wasn’t any kind of expert on Hollywood, I knew enough about the business to know that every year thousands of kids, guys and girls, hop off the bus from Omaha and every other damn place with stars in their eyes and dreams in their hearts. A handful make it big. Most end up working bit parts and whatever they can land for a few years, and then move on. Some end up making a living as character actors or doing commercials. Some drop down to the lower levels, where they end up doing XXX stuff and can’t ever show their faces in public again. Megan hadn’t sunk to that point, and instead seemed to be in the vast middle ranks. Back in Elkhorn and Lincoln, she was damn hot stuff. In Hollywood, she was just one more good looking leggy blonde with big tits. They grew them on trees out there.
I kept my mouth shut, and didn’t even tell Marilyn I had her investigated, since that would have been tantamount to telling Charlie. Charlie seemed happy. Maybe he was settling down after all, inconceivable as that might be. If she was a gold digger, she was certainly subtle about it. There had been no requests for money or loans or influence from my son. Megan might simply have come to the conclusion that whatever she was looking for in Hollywood was a real long shot, and that a relationship with Charlie Buckman was a better long term possibility. Even that sounded too cold and calculating. Maybe they were simply falling for each other, and she was spending time with him.
So there we were, Marilyn and I, on Sunday, August 26, in the early afternoon, on the side of the track, in a couple of folding chairs and with a six-pack of Iron City on ice in a cooler between us. The weather was in the mid-70s, the sky was clear, and the day was beautiful. In front of us, a bunch of filthy and muddy guys in colorful racing leathers went round and round, half the time on the ground and half the time flying through the air. Marilyn and I cringed more than once, but by now we were used to that. I can’t even ride a bicycle without both hands on the handlebars. Charlie had all the luck in the family on that score.
And then he ran out of luck.
He was leading on the third lap, and overtaking the lagging racer, and was being closely followed by the rest of the pack. Suddenly, the guy in front of him went down, and my son was fucked. He crashed into the downed bike and fell off, collapsing into the wreckage. The riders behind him, half of whom were airborne, couldn’t evade. One after the other, they slammed into the pileup, generally stopping their crash on my son’s body. Within seconds there was a giant clusterfuck of broken bikes and broken bodies, with Charlie’s at the bottom.
It took all of thirty seconds to happen, as Marilyn and I stared in horror and disbelief. The race was over. Officials came pouring out onto the track, some waving flags and shutting it down. Around us everybody was on their feet and screaming. Pit crews and sponsors came out, and a couple of ambulances pulled up. Marilyn was crying as she held onto me. Beside me, one of the agents in my travel detail vaulted the fence and headed down to find out what had happened to Charlie. Within seconds, Doctor Tubb and his nurse showed up at our sides.
It was strange watching this unfold in front of me. My son was underneath that unholy mess, and yet one of the odd things that ran through my head was that this was bound to make the news, and for once it wouldn’t be because I was there. A crash like this was definitely going to make the highlight reels. Then a chill ran up my back. It might not make the reels, either. They normally don’t include it in the highlights when somebody is killed.
It took several minutes to unpeel things. Most of the young men were able to walk away from it, though some looked a little battered and shaken up. A few more had to be carried out, but they were conscious and would give a wave or a thumbs up. Often they had to wait to pull a bike off somebody under the pile, to get to the next person down. As I scanned the group in front of us, I could see the agent on the periphery, but I could also see some guys in Red Bull uniforms, and standing with them was Megan Morgan, a shocked expression on her face.