Startup

by S. Jerrold Kaplan

  “Follow me,” the driver said. “I have a message for you in the car.” When we got under way, he handed me a piece of paper. “Call home,” it read.

  This was extremely odd. There wasn’t anyone at home, so I deduced that it must have meant to call my parents. After all, only they would think that a child, grown and gone for twenty years, who had never lived in their current house, would call their place home. How they had tracked me down I couldn’t imagine.

  “You can use the car phone,” the driver said. I dialed Palm Beach and a sleepy male voice answered.

  “Hello, Father?” I said.

  “Jerrold!” Only members of my family called me by my full middle name. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in a limo in New York on my way to White Plains.”

  “A limo!” he said. “Fancy. What are you doing there?”

  “I have a meeting at IBM headquarters in Armonk tomorrow.”

  “What about?”

  “Well, they want to buy the company.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want to do it.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” he bellowed. “Sell it while you can!”

  “Thanks, I’ll think about it.” I didn’t want to get into a long discussion, and besides, he wouldn’t understand.

  “Grant me this one last wish,” he pleaded.

  “Dad, I said I’ll think about it. I’m not the only one involved, you know.” Then I realized what he had said. It didn’t sound like his usual histrionics. “Is everything OK?”

  “Fine,” he said. Of course, this made no sense. If everything was fine, why was he tracking me down in New York in the middle of the night? So I waited.

  “Listen, I’ve got some bad news,” he said. “I’m going to die.”

  “You mean for real?”

  “Believe me, I’d fake it if I could.”

  “Come on. You’re kidding, right?” This wasn’t something a dying man would say, even my father. But then again, humor is the way many Jews deal with tragedy, especially death.

  “No, really. I’ve got cancer of the liver. It’s advanced.”

  I couldn’t believe it. For the past three years, I had been totally wrapped up in my work, so much so that the rest of my life—family, friends, recreation, reading, music, anything other than GO—had virtually ceased to exist. I had always justified this by believing that my life was merely on hold, slowed down like the body of a hibernating bear, to be revived on cue with the coming spring. I had ignored birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and the other events by which people mark the passage of time, figuring that I would apologetically hop back into the parade later. But now I was faced with the stark reality that life went on without me, ready or not, and once these landmarks were passed, there was no turning back to revisit them. Wrapped in a cocoon of meetings, memos, and milestones, I had let my family drift away like a neglected water lily in a gentle pond, only to find it withered and out of reach when I needed to retrieve it. It’s one thing to skip a birthday present; it’s another altogether to skip your father’s life.

  I didn’t know what to say. “Christ, that’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”

  “Not as sorry as I am.”

  “How long have you got?”

  His voice grew weak. “A few months maybe. It doesn’t hurt or anything. I wanted you to know, so you can take care of your mother.”

  “How’s she taking it?”

  “Pretty well. But I think she’s upset about having to find another golf partner.” He wasn’t a particularly introspective man, so I expect that the metaphorical interpretation was not intended. She was seventeen years his junior, only sixty-five years old, and her mother—my grandmother—was still going strong at eighty-nine.

  “Look, I’ll turn around and come down there right away.” I knew that missing the meeting with Cannavino could be disastrous. GO would soon be out of money again, and there was no telling if I could get things back on track. Startups are like babies—you can’t just take a break when something important comes up. But I knew the right course of action was to go to his side, even if it meant losing the company.

  “No, that’s silly, go to your meeting. What are you going to do, sit around Palm Beach for months waiting for an old man to kick the bucket? Remember, work comes first. Come when you get a chance.”

  He had a point, so I reluctantly agreed. “OK, I’ll come and visit as soon as I can.”

  “Close the deal first,” he insisted.

  “Dad, I love you very much.” This was something we rarely said, though we both knew it to be true. I was determined to change that in my own family, when I had one.

  “I’ve got no regrets,” he said. “I have a family that I’m proud of, and there’s really nothing else I want to do. Besides, what’s left to live for? My golf game is terrible.” He hung up.

  I stared at the floor, listening to the tires thumping over the seams in the concrete highway like an irregular heartbeat, wondering about the choices I had made in my life. But I had to put this out of my mind, at least until after the Cannavino meeting.

  The next day, I took the long ride to Armonk. The weather was gray and overcast; sharp gusts of wind badgered the trees into giving up the last of their leaves. The IBM facility was in the middle of nowhere, forty minutes from the nearest hotel. When I arrived at the sprawling campus, it was drizzling. Identical buildings seemed to stretch for miles across the undulating grassy hills, distinguished only by discreet road signs with a confusing jumble of letters, numbers, and arrows.

  The visitors’ entrance in the main building was sixties industrial chic—clean, cold, and antiseptic. Wide expanses of glass and steel formed a cavernous chapel with a raised central pulpit where the receptionist sat. The only other furniture was two Bauhaus-style benches of chrome and leather. A lone Japanese visitor occupied one of them, in the slumped posture of an underling; I sat on the other to wait for John Kalb, who was to chaperone me for the day. I noticed that the bench’s upholstery was frayed and worn. A pail in one corner of the room patiently collected rainwater dripping from a leak in the roof. The place looked deserted.

  A short time later, Kalb arrived to sign me in.

  “Is this corporate headquarters?” I asked incredulously.

  “This is worldwide headquarters,” he said, grinning. “This is where the rubber meets the sky.”

  We walked down an endless series of corridors, most of them lacking any signs of life. At one particularly desolate intersection, a television played to an nonexistent audience. There wasn’t a chair in sight, even if someone had decided to stop and watch for some reason. Yet this electronic sentinel droned on. “IBM internal news network,” Kalb explained. “I believe it’s worldwide, operating around the clock.”

  Kalb led me down an escalator to an executive dining room decorated with dark wood paneling and woven beige wallpaper. A picture window looked out on a pastoral scene of bare trees on the banks of a pond. A single duck paddled around aimlessly, confused by the changing season. On one wall of the room a small sign hung below a picture hook: “Art is temporarily removed.” There was a call button for the waitress, but it didn’t work.

  The meeting was scheduled from twelve-thirty to two-thirty. We waited over an hour for Cannavino to show up, then Kalb called his last known location. Cannavino was still waiting to present his yearly plan to a review board; no telling when he could break free. Just when we were ready to give up and leave, he arrived, distracted and hungry.

  I made my pitch as he wolfed down his lunch. “Jim, I’ve thought about the possibility of IBM buying us out, and I don’t think it’s the way to go. For one thing, to build a market in pen computers, you need a credible independent party to license the operating system to other manufacturers. For another, I’d rather see your money go into building great products than into lining the pockets of GO stockholders, at least at this point.”

  He was visibly disappointed.

  “I’d
like to propose something different,” I said. “Take a twenty-five percent equity position with an option to buy more later. License our software technology on ‘most favored customer’ terms, and I’ll give you a partial credit against IBM royalties for all licensing revenues I get from others. That way, you can participate in the growth of the market beyond only your share. Then we can jointly develop the hardware, which you can manufacture and only GO and IBM can sell.”

  “You know, I could do this alone if I wanted to,” he said.

  “True, but I can offer you quick time-to-market, and you know how important that is.” Shortening product-development cycles was all the rage inside IBM, and I was trying to push one of his hot buttons. He wasn’t looking any happier, so I tried another button. I knew that he was in the middle of a difficult face-to-face negotiation with Bill Gates over their cross-licensing agreements. “If you back me, I can get you into this market way ahead of Microsoft.” I wasn’t at all sure what, if anything, Microsoft was thinking about in this area, but it didn’t really matter, because Cannavino took the bait.

  His eyes narrowed. “What does Gates think of you?”

  “He’s scared enough to want to beat us to the punch, and without your help, he just might.” I was bluffing, though this proved to be a prophetic fabrication. But our time was almost up, and I knew I had only a few minutes to light a fire under Cannavino if GO was to survive. This put him over the top.

  He turned to John Kalb and said, “OK, work something out. I want this deal done in two weeks.” Kalb, who had sat silently throughout, was surprised at this sudden call to action. He knew that two weeks was grossly unrealistic, particularly now that we had discussed a completely new structure for the relationship.

  “Jerry, thanks for coming,” Cannavino said. He threw on his raincoat and rushed out to his next appointment.

  Kalb walked me back to the main entrance, saying very little. I offered to get the ball rolling by writing up a summary of the proposed relationship and faxing it to him. “That would be a help,” he said, scratching his head. I left for the airport.

  The next morning, I got up early to work on the proposal, then faxed it to Kalb before nine, knowing this would give him half a day to work on it in New York. I needed to get things going fast, not only so that GO wouldn’t run out of money, but because I was frantic to get down to Florida to see my father.

  Kalb called me at home two days later, on a Sunday afternoon, to talk about the deal. But he’d had little time to sort out his thoughts and seemed reluctant to react positively to anything. “I don’t like your proposal, but I’ll think about it and call you back on Monday,” he said.

  He didn’t. Finally, I caught up with him late on Tuesday, and he explained that he’d been tied up with other matters. This seemed strange, given the urgency that Cannavino had expressed at our Armonk meeting. Kalb asked for a few more days to study the situation and promised to get back to me before Thanksgiving, which was the following weekend.

  Then, to my utter amazement, he dropped off the face of the earth. Cannavino’s deadline came and went without note. To this day, I haven’t got a clue as to what happened.

  But desperate as I was to close a deal, I had something more important to do.

  Once I realized we weren’t going to get the IBM deal settled quickly, I called my staff together and told them of the problem with my father. “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. You’re not going to want to call me, but I want you to know that it’s really OK to phone me any time of the day or night.” I knew that business would grind to a halt if I was unavailable to approve job offers, sign certain papers, and keep working on IBM. Only Robert and Kevin really understood how critical the situation was—every day we didn’t close the IBM deal, we risked running out of money. But they respected my decision and did what they could to fill in. I took off for the airport.

  The common practice in Palm Beach was for doctors to release terminally ill patients to die in their own homes, if at all practical, rather than in the cold and unfamiliar environment of the hospital. This placed a significant burden on their families, however, who were usually poorly equipped, either physically or emotionally, to deal with the bodily requirements of the dying.

  As soon as I got to the house, I went straight to the master bedroom to see my father. Mother had converted the room into a kind of command center. At its heart was an adjustable hospital bed, surrounded by tables covered with monitors, catheters, and other rented equipment, as well as an extensive collection of medicines and painkillers. She had hired a nurse to relieve her during the day, and when I first arrived she was handling night duty herself—a foolish economy that we quickly corrected.

  My father was deteriorating rapidly, unable to stand up or relieve himself on his own. You could actually see his entire skeleton through the skin, which had turned thin and waxy, and was mottled with the blue and brown remains of blood vessels. He was clothed in an adult diaper and a T-shirt. A catheter led from under the diaper liner to a clear plastic bag hanging from a railing around the bed. Every so often, small sections of gooey yellow fluid moved a few inches toward the bag, then came to rest again. Whoever was on duty periodically swabbed his lips with a wet tissue to keep them from cracking while he slept, and occasionally fed him a small quantity of water from a dropper when he got thirsty.

  I didn’t know a human being could become so frail, and was shocked to find him in this condition. The last time I had seen him, he was trying to persuade my mother to play nine holes with him, because none of his regular partners were foolish enough to go golfing in the rain. As my grandmother once observed, “It never rains or snows on Murray’s golf course.”

  My brother and two sisters were already in town, and had been for some time. At that moment, my little sister Amy and her husband, Hal, were at the house, preparing to go out to dinner with some friends as a well-deserved break. They were standing at the foot of the bed. My mother was on one side, I was on the other.

  “Murray, Jerrold is here,” she whispered in his ear.

  I took my father’s hand. “Hello, Dad,” I said. He slowly turned his head and smiled. His eyes darted around, but they didn’t seem to focus. His fragile fingers curled around mine. Then his other arm rose slightly, appearing to point at Hal. He parted his lips and inhaled slowly, in preparation to speak. My mother and I leaned in.

  “Now I can die,” he rasped weakly. I was badly shaken.

  Oddly, my mother was upbeat. “Hal, he says he likes your tie.”

  I wasn’t going to correct her. That was the last thing I ever heard him say, for he soon fell into a coma.

  During the next few days, I learned a new respect for my mother. I had mainly seen her as a rather self-indulgent socialite, always complaining about what a strain it was to have to go out so many nights a week, or about how many people to whom she owed return invitations. But for the weeks leading up to my father’s death, she showed a degree of selfless devotion to his needs, no matter how distressing, that I had never witnessed before in my life.

  One morning, I answered the phone. “This is Doctor Mash, of the Miami Brain Bank,” said a pleasant woman’s voice. An implausible name if I ever heard one, but she sounded sincere enough. “I know this is a difficult time, but I have an important request to make. I understand that your father is in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease.” This was true; it was the main reason he had been so upset about his golf game. “We do research on this subject and would very much like to ask if we could remove his brain for study after he dies.”

  I was incredulous. I remembered my father’s long-standing advice on the virtues of a good education: “They can take away your money, they can take away your business, they can take away your house, but they can’t take away your brain.”

  “This is a joke, right?”

  “No, I’m dead serious,” she said. A poor choice of words, I thought. “We will arrange to pick his body up, transport it to our facility in Miami,
and have it back to the funeral home in Palm Beach within a few hours.”

  I decided to risk asking my mother. To my surprise, she agreed. I made the arrangements, and she signed the necessary papers.

  His condition continued to worsen. Inexplicably, we had a hard time getting a doctor to come to the house and check on him. We finally persuaded the son of one of his bridge buddies, an M.D., to take a look. He came by early in the morning, on his way to work. “I should just warn you that he could remain this way for several weeks. Don’t assume that this will be over too soon,” the doctor said after his examination. He left, and again we were on our own.

  By this time my father was unconscious. My mother took me aside. “Jerrold, we have plenty of help here now. Why don’t you go and take care of your business? I’ll call you back as soon as it’s over.” Once again she surprised me. Having overheard many of my phone calls to the office, to the directors, and to various IBM offices, she was beginning to understand that something was very wrong.

  “I couldn’t do that,” I replied.

  “Don’t be silly. After all, it’s what your father would have wanted.”

  I went in to see him again. He was completely unresponsive.

  “You’ll call me right away if anything happens?” I asked my mother.

  “Absolutely.”

  I booked a flight for late that afternoon. When it was time to leave for the airport, I called ahead to check the departure status. To my amazement, the plane had already left. “Sorry sir,” said the agent. “There was one at four-oh-five, but there’s nothing at four-fifty.” For the first time ever, I had missed a flight.

  It turned out to be one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me. Within the hour, my mother called me in to look at my father. She was concerned because his breathing had changed. It was now a labored, steady pattern of deep breaths, as though he were gasping for air. Every few minutes he would abruptly stop, then convulse as if slapped on the back, and begin again. It seemed strangely familiar. Then I remembered that this was the same thing that happened to my cat, and for the same reason: kidney failure. My mother had commented earlier in the day that the urine bag was filling much more slowly than usual. I suddenly felt comforted, more in control by virtue of my other experience with death. I knew what to expect.