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After I sold the air business, there was no reason on God’s green earth to stay in the house on Neck Lane. None. But there was no getting out because of StarKick.
Let me explain.
We came to Marquard, Massachusetts, because of the gas station I bought and because my wife Betsy was in fact a Marquard three hundred years removed. There were no Marquards left in Marquard, and after marrying me on a pass and a prayer she was Betsy Reggerio so nobody even knew she was a Marquard to begin with. No one in Marquard would have known it if we had not named our first-born Celine Marquard Reggerio. By the time she was six everyone in the town of Marquard called her Quacks for short. When she made a good play in soccer or tennis—and Celine was very good as a child—they would quack like ducks in appreciation.
From what I knew of Betsy’s family, the Marquards believed they had a right to their space in the world and their place in the United States of America. Betsy was born with that kind of confidence, but Reggerios from Revere acted as if we could get traction in life only if we kept our heads down and our asses up. My father had a good job at the Fire Department and my mother made it to cafeteria supervisor at the elementary school. My brothers and sister were like that, too: civil servants, school teachers. Reggerios had always stayed in their lane until I came along with some kind of business bug that ate at me like a disease: I wanted to build my own company, to make my own way, to dream the American dream all day long.
All Betsy Marquard wanted, bless her, was for me to be happy. She did not mind one bit when I came home from the gas station I owned in town with grease on my hands that left telltale smudge marks on her most intimate quadrants. After one such encounter—with smudges everywhere on both of us—I started to talk about air, and Betsy tried not to laugh.
“Everyone needs to put air in their tires,” I said. “Air is the one thing everybody needs.”
“I never pay to put air in my tires. And I never will.”
“But you would if you had to because it’s a couple of quarters and you drive away happy. Fifty cents—it’s no big deal.”
“It’s free at your station,” Betsy said.
“But it won’t be free forever,” I said.
“It’s air,” Betsy said. “Nobody wants to pay for air.”
“We pay for water. We pay for gas on the stove.”
“That’s different,” Betsy said.
“Actually,” I said. “It’s not.”
***
Good thing Betsy was an angel. I knew the All-American Air business was up for grabs in Massachusetts and so I sold the gas station outright to stake myself to a new start with a bigger upside. I wanted Betsy to get something out of this, too, so with a chunk of the money we went looking for a house on her favorite streets in Marquard. We looked at all the beautiful places we could not afford until the real estate lady finally took us to 9 Neck Lane on the bend of a back road connecting two state highways, with beautiful trees standing guard on both sides. There was more traffic than we would have liked but otherwise 9 Neck Lane seemed like just another white house with black shutters in Marquard out of our price range. The house was right off the road—not ideal—but there was a brook that ran all the way through the back of a lot that backed up against a protected town forest. That was more than enough to set me quacking.
There was only one thing wrong—the price was a least $100,000 less than what it should have been.
“Are there vampires?” I asked the real estate lady. “Is it haunted?”
“Nothing like that,” she said.
“It’s an old house,” Betsy said. “Every house has a history.”
We went back outside for the third time. For the first time the real estate lady pointed and I could see a crack, or at least the shadow of one that ran from the foundation about five feet high and across the windows to the kitchen at the corner of the house. Upon further review I could see the kitchen table was less than ten yards away from the road.
“A pick-up went sliding through the guard rail,” the real estate lady said. “No one was hurt.”
“The house had a car accident?” Betsy said.
“They used the insurance money to build a brand-new kitchen,” the real estate lady said. “With granite counter-tops. Should we take another look?”
***
The gun was to our head: the lease was up on our place in Marquard in three weeks and I needed to go make some money pronto in the air business. I wasn’t afraid of damaged goods. Why should I be? No car had hit the house before or since in—what?—a hundred years. It was a great house, a beautiful house, and it was a bargain. How could we go wrong?
I caught Betsy crying in the middle of the night before the closing but that was the only sign she had her doubts. We went ahead with it the next day anyway after I told her the house on Neck Lane was just temporary—a year or two to get the air business going—and then we could reach for the sky.
“Don’t worry about the house,” I said to Betsy. “Air is the thing that counts.”
The money left over from the gas station was enough to start ongoing operations but the air business was hard as hell, with me going station to station across Massachusetts and then New England, making sure the machines worked and the quarters got picked up, counted, and banked. One problem was you could not get every single station in a town to buy in, meaning there was always a place in a town, at least one, where you could get your air for free, no purchase necessary. But it also meant gas station owners had to worry about keeping the air working and giving away something for nothing, which is not the American way. Another problem was the banks had no idea how to lend money to a company that brought a wheelbarrow’s worth of quarters to the teller every week.
Let’s face it: people thought there was nothing to the air business to begin with. Try to say the air business without sounding stupid. Better to be in waste management. We just seemed weird.
The real problem was the company sucked the life out of me, the way companies do. I was away too much. I missed some of Celine’s big middle-school games. Without Betsy, I don’t know where I would have been, but she never said a word about the house on Neck Lane again—never even complained when we had to take out a second mortgage just to keep the air business expanding into franchises throughout New England. Celine was getting ready to begin at Marquard High School before I turned the corner and put the house and the air business up for sale.
We had been in the house on Neck Lane for five years.
By now All-American Air was a slam dunk, a home run. Everything I said about the air business turned out to be true, with more and more stations turning their air conundrum into a revenue opportunity. Even Betsy said she never thought twice any more about paying for air at the gas station I used to own.
I had no problem selling the business for much more than I hoped—we felt rich for the first time—but the house on Neck Lane was another story. We had been there over seven years now, for Chrissakes, most of Celine’s life as a child, but the time had come to make good on my promise to Betsy, the one I had made years ago.
If we could sell the house on Neck Lane, she could have any house she wanted in Marquard.
We paid off both mortgages with the sale of All-American Air and we were living on Neck Lane for nothing. I would never have to work again unless lightning struck—and what were the chances of that? Betsy and I went to all Celine’s freshman soccer games together and our baby girl was the star of the show, a filly finally growing into her long legs, a female jock hearing appreciative quack-quacks from start to finish. We started to show the house at a good price—Betsy had made a beautiful home for us—and the real estate lady said it was only a matter of time because everybody wanted to live in Marquard.
I felt no pressure, no worries. I started to play the guitar—I even took lessons. For the first time in my life I was home-free.
Meanwhile beware the entrepreneur, the business nut with time on his hands. That was me with my feet up on the weekends, playing bad guitar, watching football, wondering what was next. I was too young to retire but too smart to jump into something just for the sake of jumping into it.
That was when it hit me, the same way it did with the air business.
Lightbulb: field goal kickers on the sideline, warming up by kicking into a net, needed someone to hold the ball or they were out of luck. I saw an opportunity for the inevitable automation of the game. The world needed something like a guitar stand to hold that football for the kicker, and I was just the man for the job.
You might not know that being an entrepreneur is like a sickness that won’t go away no matter how rich you get. There I was in my living room on Neck Lane, the farthest room from the kitchen, enjoying the good life and the big screen, knowing happiness and success—more than any man deserves—were not enough for me by a long shot.
When you have a dream, as I did again, no amount of logic or reason is going to make a bit of difference. You will sacrifice yourself—and your wife, your children, and your family will be the next to go. If your business fails, then you will end up with nothing at the end of the day, not even a roof over your head.
Within a week I was up to my neck in StarKick. I was back in business and may God have mercy on my soul.
***
Our problem was simple: nobody would buy the house on Neck Lane.
People came to kick the tires, just like we did, but when they heard about the pickup truck taking out our kitchen they all ran for the door like scatbacks. The granite counter-tops made no difference. We cut the price and then cut it twice more. We even got to a closing once before the buyers got cold feet about another vehicle hitting the updated kitchen.
In normal circumstances—had I not jumped into StarKick with both feet—we could have held onto the house and moved into something bigger and better, a pretty place Betsy had picked out a few blocks from downtown Marquard. By then it was too late, because I was already having my prototypes manufactured in mainland China, and I had to go back and forth and back and forth. Before you knew it, StarKick was eating into our cushion and leaving the house on Neck Lane behind was no longer an option.
By now Celine was a full-grown and full-blown teenager full of spit without the polish—and the best damn soccer player in the district.
“Why do we have to move?” Celine said to Betsy and me one night. “I’ve grown up in this house. I love my room. I love this house.”
“I promised your Mom when we moved in,” I said.
“You promised her we would move out before we moved in? What kind of promise is that?”
Betsy and I looked at each other. The time had come.
“There was an accident in the house,” I said.
“A car—a pickup, actually—hit the kitchen.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It was an accident,” I said. “A car accident. A fluke.”
“There’s no way it could happen again,” Betsy said.
Celine looked from Betsy to me and back with her jaw so far down on the floor you could see the glitter of her braces. She was growing into her legs by now: in another year, maybe not even, she would become a beautiful young woman—but for now she was that most dangerous of animals, the American teenage girl.
“I’m never going into that kitchen again,” she said. “I don’t want to die eating cornflakes.”
***
You had to be willing to risk everything—that was the lesson of All-American Air. I plugged away on StarKick prototypes and went back and forth to China nine times. I missed Celine’s games and conference championships and birthdays. I missed everything that mattered. I kid you not. But the money from the second second mortgage on 9 Neck Lane made all the difference. Thanks to the additional capital, I broke through with the New York Football Giants, and that meant StarKick was golden with teams throughout the country—high school, college, and the pros.
If you are the type of person who watches football today then you know the ultimate fate of StarKick. Everybody—every kicker, every team—has one, two, three, a half-dozen of the suckers, and they order a new set every year. Overnight, StarKick became the one thing no kicker on any level can do without. A year later, faster than you can say Pete Gogolak, I had suitors from all the major sporting goods companies in the world. Even the Chinese came in on the silent auction before Wilson took home the StarKick bauble in the end.
Given the success of All-American Air and now StarKick, I never felt better about the sacrifices I had to make and the ones I had imposed on my family. Check in hand, I came back from the city late that night, ready to tell Betsy that all of the sacrifices had been worth it—that we could finally get that house she wanted in Marquard and the hell with Neck Lane. We could bulldoze the house or run it over with an SUV for all I cared. In my hand I now held a blank check to do whatever we wanted with the rest of our lives.
Betsy came out of the bathroom with the smallest smudge in that little valley between her breasts that I had so loved.
“Take off your nightgown,” I said.
Lit up from behind in the bathroom lights, I could see Betsy for what she was: a beautiful woman getting older and wider, with these little smudges all over her private places.
“He’s a mechanic.” Betsy looked me in the eyes. “The one who showed me how to use the air at your old gas station.”
“It’s my fault,” I said.
“Mine, too,” Betsy said. “But I had to get out of this house.”
***
I decided to stay in the house on Neck Lane with Celine for her senior year in anticipation of a full Division I scholarship in soccer. She loved it, we had history there, and I had always liked that kitchen despite the imminent danger. There was no reason in the world to leave.
