Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

Late December

“How much is enough?” The others on the gondola didn't recognize the sharp edges to the question. But coming from my brother-in-law it came with attendant arrows. And I didn't have to ask, how much of what.

The snow fell in fluffy piles, like baked marshmallows atop sweet potatoes. They looked so light, but were piling into what would become Aspen Mountain’s 200 inch base. The gondola swayed in the howling wind. It was day five of our annual seven-day Christmas vacation. All ten of us in the immediate family plus assorted relatives, cousins and those people we called Aunt and Uncle, but had no blood relation. In the evening, when the cold outside made the chairlift up more unpleasant than the thrill ride down the mountain, the “family” would fill the hotel bar. Even those that didn't ski showed up for drinks. My father-in-law was paying.

And while the week was supposed to conjure up visions of late nights by the fire watching “It’s A Wonderful Life,” it resembled “Call of the Wild,” where the mountain lions looked beautiful walking across the snowy tundra until they charged, ripping off the head of an unsuspecting deer. Our annual family stand-off always took place amid a scene of natural beauty, where animals tore each other apart attempting to fend off extinction.

My wife, Christina, stood behind me in the gondola and squeezed my arm until I felt it. A credit to her strength, fighting through the Under Armour long underwear, the thinsulate sweater, the North Face jacket. I turned to look at her as we stood in the crowded pod, leaning on each other for support, an odd metaphor for her family.

“Cam, is that a metaphysical question or a rhetorical one?” I asked.

“I'm just wondering Wade,” he said. “It seemed like a lot coming out of the business, especially in a tough year.”

“Thanks Cam, but I believe your check was bigger this year as well,” I volleyed. “So I'm not sure there is much to complain about.” I said it loud enough so Cam could hear me and way too loud for a small cart of 10 increasingly uncomfortable strangers swaying 150 feet above the fluffy, frozen pillows. The kids were at ski school, other members of the family took various routes to their day I had the good fortune of making the 20-minute ride up with an angry Cameron Wander.

Three generations of Wanders had run the family media business, but none had done it as well as me. One other note, all those who ran the business were Wanders. “I'm not a Wander, I'm the son -in-law.”

Cam didn't see it that way. The credit for the company’s double digit growth five years in a row seemed to flow through Cam’s blood lines, but it never made it to my desk. It stopped and settled somewhere on the graves of the previous generations of Wanders.

After the morning incident we didn't see Cam and his wife Laura for the rest of the day. The benefits of a ski vacation, you can be separate in your togetherness.

Apple Jacks, the après Ski bar at the bottom of the big mountain was quiet, the crowd of young skiers had done their damage. Arriving fresh from the slopes, slamming beers until they couldn't walk, then slipping away to their under-stocked/over-crowded rooms of shared housing. They left their skis, snowboards and assorted paraphernalia including, but not limited to gloves, boots, jackets, socks and depending on the day the occasional bra, strewn across the re-fabricated tables made out of the old bowling lanes.

By the time the Wander clan arrived the place has been restored, cleaned up, ready for a more mature crowd who wanted imported beers, the kind they don’t have on tap. We wanted Scotch, a 12 year not six, maybe a Kahlua and cream. Our crowd was the middle aged group of skiers who first retired to our rooms for some clean up. We stowed our skis to ensure their overnight safety, massaged our wives sore feet hoping for something more. We took hot baths or Jacuzzis. We removed our various braces and supports so that we could come back tomorrow and “ski hard” and feel young. We were careful not to overdo, watch the back, and that reconstructed knee and the tail-bone that was hurt from our one attempt at snowboarding.

My wife and I were the last of the family to arrive and it was clear Cam had started early. My wife calls him an ugly drunk, but he’s not, he’s an angry drunk. He’s angry sober for that matter and I couldn't blame him. If my father overlooked me as heir to the family business and gave it to my brother-in-law, the first non-blood member of the family in three generations, I’d be pissed too.

I managed to avoid him while making my way through every one of the other family members for whom I feel varying degrees of regard. In hindsight this was a strategic error. It gave him more time to drink.

Sometimes he has more tact, but the shots of Patrone had loosened whatever inhibitions were left and turned up a flame on the fuse from the morning. He was ready to blow.

“How much was the pool you put in last year?” he shouted to no one in particular. “Do you still put those hockey tickets through the company?”

I tried to have a discussion with my wife over his increased heckling. But he was a boxer, chasing me, jab after jab. Ignoring him became impossible.

“And the bonus, was it more than your salary?” Bam!

Circling me, seeing what I would take. What I could take.

“What was the criterion for that monster bonus?” Pow!

Like the challenger, wondering when I’d respond and unleash the terror behind the champ’s punch, he taunted. Everyone was listening. They all saw the fight rising in the distance, coming our way. A morning mist traveling across the horizon, cutting through the mountains.

They heard my mother-in-law’s voice climb and then everyone else battled his volume. And soon everyone was talking louder, shouting in an attempt to drown him out, but they sounded like idiots each asking inane questions in voices more appropriate for a tarmac.

He kept coming. “How much is enough? The money is for all of us.” The others stopped trying to compete. Mouth spitting, words flying, everybody looking at the two of us. And finally Cam went for the knockout. The words that had been forming in his mind for years. The thoughts that laid there late at night in the back of his skull like a tumor:

“I could do a better job running this company. I could do it. And I’m a Helluva lot cheaper.”

The bar was quiet now. He was trying to hurt me. Or his father. Or the universe. But he was also providing his audition tape for the other board members, who were now standing awkwardly with my in-laws.

“You’re not even a blood relative,” he said. “You’re doing nothing but gouging us? Nothing’s gonna be left.”

He looked around at the other members of the family and concluded: “Enjoy it while you can everybody, because the bank account is running low.”

“That’s enough,” my mother -in-law said, angling at my defense. But it wasn’t really me she was defending. She was protecting the family from the embarrassment of the situation. Trying to tamp it down before word got out that perfection had a crack in it.

“Why didn’t you ever ask me to be in the business?” he said, his voice now a hoarse whimper. “Why didn’t you ask me to be on the Board? I can do it.”

I’d pictured the moment for years and I always saw myself growing six inches and looking down at him and saying: “I think the fact that your father never hired you is a pretty good indication that you can’t do the job. Frankly, you’re unemployable.”

Maybe it was the raging fire that lit the room and pulled the colors from the paneled walls, or the snow falling silently on the blue mountain. Or maybe it was because the chairman of my board, my father-in-law, was sitting six feet away. Whatever it was I wasn’t in the mood to elevate things. There amid the contrasts, the whole family, tucked together into a corner of the world. Me, my wife, our two kids, Cam, his wife, their two kids and my 77 year old in laws. It was their time to show the family off, their time to prove to the world that we could do it: A family business, family vacations, all perfect.

In their world the slightest flare up gets smothered in a wet blanket of gifts, chocolate chip cookies and heavy doses of small blue pills drowned in mouthfuls of colorful vodka drinks.

No fights, no disagreements. The family motto was: If money could solve it, it’s not a problem.

So I didn’t retort. I didn’t fight back. I let Cam continue because I’d found that once he got going only he could stop himself. Challenging just got him more animated. He was a volcano that began with huge hurls of energy, exploding, convulsing, actually erupting. And then that phase stopped and another began. He oozed miles and millions of pounds of hot lava. Ever so slowly it ran over everything in its path. Killing it all. This was Cam.

But he made it tougher and tougher to ignore. He moved closer to me. I could feel his breath and his hands were in my face and then it slowed and continued and slowed and continued and then, like a windup toy whose batteries had run low, he slowed, almost to a stop.

I hadn’t even had a drink, but my face was the color of overripe tomatoes. And he gained energy again, started coming, he kept coming. My wife, her head in her hands, my father-in-law looked like he was gonna have a stroke, his hand over his mouth, my mother-in-law crying, ‘no Cam, no, no.’ My sister-in-law reached for his hands trying to pull him back down into his seat, embarrassed by the scene, but more than likely thinking this public lecture was long overdue. Our kids were playing Frogger on a 25 year-old video game stuck in the corner next to a Pac Man machine the size of a phone booth.

Cam, five eight and skinny as a ski pole with a belly full of beer was not a terrible threat. But I was done. Done being his whipping boy especially on this topic and I turned and began walking out. And then he started pointing and I couldn’t hear anymore because of the distance and the din and then I heard it. At some point he screamed it, something, something, something, “You pussy.”

That’s right, a pussy. For walking out I guess. I’m not fighter, but what forty year old taunts another man with an epithet last used in a fraternity house?

And he screamed it and everything stopped. It got deathly quiet and I felt all the eyes of the room on me. So I turned back around and unlike my reaction in college when I would have charged him, the consequences be damned, I walked back toward the table where he was standing, and my wife somehow made her way between us, thinking I was gonna hit him, which I wasn’t. But she was pushing me away and I began to tell him what a piece of shit he was, and that if it weren’t for me he’d be on food stamps.

Suddenly he changed course. Maybe his better judgment said to flee rather than fight. Or maybe it was his wife’s inch deep nail marks in his arm (a manicure I helped finance). And he stormed off.

And right on cue my mother-in-law jumped in: “Where shall we go for dinner?”