Chapter 4: The Mistake

Even before my bankruptcy, managing my resorts was a real challenge. I was able to buy the resort because the owner had lost his liquor license after his bartender sold heroin to an undercover detective. I found out soon afterwards that I had as much in common with the employees of Wiseda as oil and water, not to mention my customers, many of whom had prison records. I had to fire my janitor after he stood up and urinated on the bar during business hours. Not long afterwards, someone set my truck on fire out in the parking lot. The first time that I brought my wife Rhonda to the bar, to hear the country and western band I had installed there, she sat and sobbed at our table for the entire evening. She couldn't believe that we owned such a terrible place.

I knew I needed some help, someone as tough as nails who I could depend on and trust in any circumstances to help me clean the place up. My biological father fit the bill perfectly. I knew that he had just been laid off from his job as manager at a lumber company in the Northwest, and so I called him. He flew down from Oregon to look at the properties and within a few weeks he had installed himself in a double-wide mobile home at Oakes Waterfront Park. He agreed to manage my properties for me, and his wife would look after the general store next to their home.

My dad loved to work, and tough as he was he had little difficulty earning the respect of even my most hardened employees. They called him "Pappy" and deferred to him because he made it clear that he would tolerate nothing less. At Wiseda he was in his element. When he was younger he used to leap onto bars and proclaim: "I can out-fuck, out-fight and out-drink any man in here." The room would fall silent while he stood up there, arms folded, waiting for a challenge. No one ever said anything. They were scared of him.

My father was also one of the nicest men in the world, so long as he wasn't drinking, and he was a peerless manager. We worked together to change the bar into the kind of place that wouldn't drive a man's wife to tears, as it had mine. This wasn't easy. Some of our employees were frightening new customers away. The worst of all of them was J.R.

J.R. was 6 feet 4 inches, slim, sinewy and as mean as a snake. He'd worked on drilling rigs until a knife fight in a bar cut him up so badly that he lost the strength in one of his hands. The fight happened three years ago, in Wiseda. Soon after I met him, he asked me to guess how many times he had been married. I shrugged my shoulders. "Four?" I guessed, "Five?"

He laughed. "Nine," he said, watching me carefully to gauge my reaction. I did my best to remain expressionless.

"You must pay a lot of alimony," I told him. "How do you handle all of that on what I'm paying you?"

"That's the trouble with your kind," he said, grinning. "Who ever divorces them?"

I stared blankly at him for a long moment. "I never thought of that," I replied, flatly.

J.R. was a major roadblock in our efforts to improve relations with the Clear Lake police department. He played third base on the bar's softball team. The night before we were to play the police department, J.R. got drunk in the bar and announced that any policeman who tried to run past him would have his legs broken.

The police chief called me the next morning. It seemed that everyone in Clear Lake had been present to hear J.R.'s drunken ranting. The game was canceled. Even the police were afraid of J.R. My dad's eyes narrowed when I told him about the phone call. "Great," he said. "Now we can finally fire that bastard."

We had wanted to fire J.R. for a long time, but knew that it we'd have to have a good reason. He was as volatile as gasoline and never went anywhere without a nine-inch knife strapped onto his belt. The police department had provided us with the ideal solution to our dilemma: We could fire J.R. and blame them.

We still thought that J.R. might still try to kill us, and so we staged the night of his firing as carefully as the opening night of a play. While our security guards loitered strategically across from us at the bar, my dad and I sat down with J.R. in one of the bar's scarred, dark wooden booths. We both held cocked .38 caliber revolvers under the table.

J.R.'s face didn't betray anything when we told him that we had to let him go because of what the police chief had told us. My dad and I watched him slide his knife out of its sheath. It was freshly sharpened on both sides and had a blood channel in the center. It gleamed in the light like a polished mirror as he slowly and deliberately picked his teeth with its tip. I could feel my hand shaking under the table. The handle of my revolver was slick with sweat. Both my dad and I knew that we would only have a second or less to react if J.R. decided to attack us. He held our attention like a magician. We didn't dare to even blink. J.R. was deciding whether it was worth his while to kill us.

J.R.'s knife floated downward to rest against his bare forearm. He looked down at it as he began slowly and deliberately shaving the hairs from his wrist to his elbow. Not only was he demonstrating just how sharp and deadly his knife was, but each return stroke of the knife could easily be extended to a lethal jab straight to my heart. The blood channel in the knife's center would allow him to quickly pull the knife out again and go after my dad.

The three of us sat there, not noticing how quiet the bar had become. J.R.'s dark hairs continued to pile up against the knife blade and sift downward like ashes onto the white linen tablecloth. The knife made an evil scraping sound. I could feel my hands turning into two blocks of ice as my body prudently rerouted blood away from my extremities. Finally J.R. looked up and right into my eyes.

"I'm going to kill him," he said. His words hung in the air between us like a bad smell. I wanted to look to my dad for support, but couldn't.

"Kill who?" I inquired, doing everything in my power to keep my voice level and even.

"I'm going to kill the police chief." He nodded as he uttered the words, as though he were agreeing with himself. I let some of the air I'd been holding in my lungs seep out, but didn't yet dare to move my eyes. "I don't blame you guys," he said as he lowered the knife out of view and slipped it back into its leather sheath. My dad and I finally looked at each other. We had been spared.

My father and I had many similar experiences, all in the line of duty. We broke up fights, and evicted drug dealers and prostitutes, like two gunfighters hired to clean up Dodge City. However, things weren't always rosy between us. My dad could either be a maudlin, or a mean drinker. When he was maudlin, he would lapse into talking about how much he loved my mother, often forgetting that his new wife was present. Most of the time he just got squint-eyed and mean. I had to move him out of managing the bars, for his own good.

Then, one day in January 1985, the worst happened. I was reconciling receipts with deposits so that I could pay my taxes. Something was wrong. No matter how many times, or how many ways I tried entering the figures into my calculator, Oakes Waterfront Park came up $15,000 short.

Oakes Waterfront Park was where my father and his wife lived. They ran the resort and no one oversaw them. The deposits were entirely my father's responsibility. Everything seemed to point to him, or to his wife. I felt sick inside, and terribly sad.

My business partner, Rhonda's grandfather, had none of my misgivings. "We have to fire him, Ken," he said. I just looked at him. What I was feeling was beyond words. "And, we have to get our money back," he added firmly.

I told my partner that I would fire my father, but that I would be responsible for the missing money. He nodded, considering this. It was worth it to him to have me do the firing. All he cared about was his investment.

I walked back to my car, feeling as though my body was slowly turning to lead. I had fired hundreds of people as I rose through the ranks at General Cable, but I had never felt like this before.

Two days later, I caught up to my father outside of the general store at Oakes Waterfront Park. "I need to talk to you," I said. My heart felt as cold and lifeless as a stone. My father stood waiting. He looked tired and old .

"There's some money missing from the resort," I told him. "A lot of money." My father kept looking at me. I felt like an insect impaled upon a pin.

"I talked to my partner, Ed." I plunged on, feeling compelled by some kind of terrible momentum, a nameless gravity that was pulling me into a dark, lonely pit. "Dad, I have to let you go."

I had said it. We stood there, father and son, together, but miles apart. I felt the way I had when I was ten and shot my first bird with a BB gun. An invisible chasm had opened between us, a chasm so deep and so wide that it defied description.

My dad smiled sadly. He lifted his arm up and squeezed my shoulders. "I understand your position," he said. I waited for him say something else, to deny my accusations, to say anything to lift the cloud that had descended around us. Instead we stood there awkwardly until he dropped his arm to his side. I couldn't bear it any longer. He had already forgiven me.

"I have to go," I said.

I hurried away to the safety of my car. I glanced up as I drove away. My dad hadn't moved. I watched his figure grow smaller and smaller in my mirror until I couldn't see it anymore. He was sixty three years old.

My dad remained in the mobile home for several more weeks while I ran the businesses without him. Finally, he and his wife moved down to Concord, California to manage an apartment complex. I continued to pore over the books, trying to find out exactly what had happened. There was much more money missing than I had first thought, more money than I thought my dad or his wife could ever possibly steal. About three weeks after my father had moved away for good, I finally understood the scale of mistake that I had made. I sat in my office with my chin in my hands staring at the figures, numb with shock, disbelief and grief. I had been wrong.

The real culprit was the bar manager at Wiseda, a woman named Sandy. When I told her that there was money missing, she said: "Today's my last day. I have to go." She had stolen over $100,000. I felt no joy in telling her that I knew. All that I could think of was my Dad, and what I had done to us.

It would be many years later before my father and I would have some semblance of a normal relationship again. By then all of the resorts were in receivership, and I had almost nothing to my name. I had told him many times how sorry I was, but in the end it never really mattered. I had made a mistake that probably hurt him as much as anything else that had ever happened in his long and difficult life, a mistake that he would carry with him until the day that he died. We knew all of this but it didn't matter. We were tied with blood and bound by love. He was my father and I was his son.