My life fell apart in May when I turned 24. Up until then, I had a sweet existence. I was well maybe not the man, but at least a man on campus. I’m pretty smart, actually really smart. I tell you that, not to brag, just because it’s necessary for you to understand my lifestyle. It started when I was four, my dad bought a lottery ticket and the next day he won the lottery: 92 million dollars – after taxes. It was the biggest lottery win ever in Oklahoma. I remember him and my mother laughing about his chances the night before he won.

Before he even told my mom, he took me with him down to a lawyer’s office, created a will leaving everything to my mother (except the Caddy he was going to buy, which for some reason he left to me – his then four year old son), created an Educational Trust in the amount of $2,000,000 dollars (again, for me) and then went to a Cadillac dealership and bought himself a gold Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Then, he had a heart attack while walking up the sidewalk to our house.

Mom and I were stunned. Mom was looking out the front door, she’d heard him honking the horn of his new car. I was in his arms. I don’t know why it happened. The doctor who performed the autopsy said that he was as healthy as a horse, but I guess it was just his time. I remember he smiled at her, then let out a little sigh, kind of like a puppy’s bark, and gently folded down onto the sidewalk. Even as he was collapsing, he set me gently down on the grass, while still looking at my mother. That’s one of the ways that I know that he loved me. Even dying, he didn’t drop me.

My mom is pretty smart too, beautiful as well. But really, wicked, wicked smart. That’s one of the reasons that she didn’t get along with her parents. They wanted her to go to college (Yale, full-ride academic scholarship), but she wanted to marry my dad. Unforgivable words were exchanged and they pretty much turned their backs on her, until it was too late to turn back around. Anyway, after burying her husband, she put me in the University School for Gifted and Talented Children at the University of Tulsa. I graduated at 9 (as opposed to 12), graduated from Tulsa’s Washington High School’s IB program at 11 and started attending Harvard University at 15. In between High School and College, my mother decided that I needed a challenge. She hired tutors for me and they went to town.  Chinese, Spanish, business lessons complete with apprenticeships at her companies, Running, and, of course, Martial Arts. We had a Wing Chun sifu and an ex-Navy Seal for that last one. The ex-Navy Seal was the head of her security detail. Homeschooling with a vengeance. I was lonely. 

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It was exhausting. Meanwhile, my mother was translating a 92 million dollar fortune into “some real money”, as she liked to say. Everything that she touched turned into more gold, muffler shops, bakeries, restaurants, stocks and bonds, options, oil and gas leases, real estate, newspapers, insurance agencies, software, banking, by the time I hit 24 she should have been ranked on the Forbes list, but didn’t want to be. “Who needs, who wants the notice?” she’d say. “Only suckers pick up their cards before the dealin's done!” I think she had a thing for Kenny Rogers.

Anyway, I decided after I turned 15 that I needed a break. I remembered that my dad had set up an educational trust for me and so I snuck off to the lawyers to see what it was all about. Turned out my dad had put 2 million dollars into an escrow account where it’d been happily growing ever since. My dad had told the lawyer to put $1,000,000 into Apple, the other million into Microsoft and said, invest all the dividends into those two stocks unless he told the lawyer differently. The account was loaded, but there was a catch, evidently, my dad did not want me to be a perpetual student. He thought that a college degree meant a college degree and that was it. So I was entitled to as much money as I could spend (within limits) while achieving my Bachelor’s degree, provided my grades stayed up, and then I was out on my own. All the rest of the money would then change over to a retirement account at that point.