Текст книги "The Wolf of Wall Street "

Автор книги: Jordan Belfort

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Текущая страница: 33 (всего у книги 39 страниц)

CHAPTER 37

SICK AND SICKER

T he sheer insanity of it!We were cruising along at 39,000 feet and there were so many cocaine molecules floating in the recirculated air that when I got up to go to the bathroom, I noticed that the two pilots were wearing gas masks. Good. They seemed like nice-enough guys, and I would hate to see them fail a drug test on my account.

I was on the run now. I was a fugitive! I needed to keep moving, to maintain.To rest was to die. To allow my head to come down, to allow myself to crash, to allow my thoughts to focus in on what had just happened, that was certain death!

Yet…why had it happened? Why had I kicked the Duchess down the stairs? She was my wife. I loved her more than anything. And why had I thrown my daughter into the passenger seat of my Mercedes and driven through a garage door without even buckling her seat belt? She was my most prized possession on earth. Would she remember that scene on the stairs for the rest of her life? Would she always visualize her mother crawling upward, trying to save her daughter from…from…what?…The coked-out maniac?

Somewhere over North Carolina I had admitted to myself that I was a coked-out maniac. For a brief moment, I had crossed over the line. But now I was back, sane, once more. Or was I?

I needed to keep snorting. And I needed to keep dropping, dropping Ludes and Xanax and lots of Valium. I needed to keep the paranoia at bay. I needed to maintain my high at all costs; to rest was to die…to rest was to die.

Twenty minutes later the seat-belt sign came on, serving as a clear reminder that it was time to stop snorting, time to drop Ludes and Xanax—to ensure that we’d hit the ground in a state of perfect toxic poise.

As my attorney had promised, Dave Beall was waiting on the tarmac with a black Lincoln limousine behind him. Janet at work, I figured, already hooking me up with transportation.

Standing there with his arms crossed, Dave looked bigger than a mountain. “You ready to party?” I said buoyantly. “I need to find my next ex-wife.”

“Let’s go back to my house and relax,” replied the Mountain. “Laurie flew to New York to be with Nadine. We got the whole house to ourselves. You need to get some sleep.”

Sleep? No, no, no! I thought. “I’ll get all the sleep I need when I’m dead, you big fuck. And whose side are you on, anyway? Mine or hers?” I took a swing at him, a full right cross that landed squarely on his right biceps.

He shrugged, apparently not feeling the sting of my blow. “I’m on your side,” he said warmly. “I’m always on your side, but I don’t think there’s a war. You guys are gonna make up. Give her a few days to calm down; that’s all the woman needs.”

I gritted my teeth and shook my head menacingly, as if to say, “Never! Not in a million fucking years!”

Alas, the truth was somewhat different. I wanted my Duchess back; in fact, I wanted her back desperately. But I couldn’t let Dave know that; he might slip, say something to Laurie, who would then say something to the Duchess. Then the Duchess would know that I was miserable without her, and that would give her the upper hand.

“I hope she drops fucking dead,” I muttered. “I mean, after what she did to me, Dave? I wouldn’t take her back if she were the last cunt in the world. Now, let’s go to Solid Gold and get some strippers to give us blow jobs!”

“You’re the boss,” said Dave. “My orders are just to make sure that you don’t kill yourself.”

“Oh, really?” I snapped. “Who the fuck gave you those orders?”

“Everybody,” said my big friend, shaking his head gravely.

“Well, then, fuckeverybody!” I sputtered, heading to the limousine. “Fuck every last one of them!”

Solid Gold—what a place! A smorgasbord of young strippers, at least two dozen of them. As we made our way toward the center stage, I got a better look at some of these young beauties, and I came to the sad conclusion that most of them had been beaten over the head with an ugly stick.

I turned to the Mountain and the Uniblinker and said, “There’re too many dogs in this place, but if we look hard enough I bet we can find a diamond in the rough.” I craned my head this way and that. “Let’s walk around a bit.”

Toward the back of the club was a VIP section. An enormous black bouncer stood before a short flight of steps cordoned off by a red velvet rope. I headed straight for him. “How ya doing!” I said, in warm tones.

The bouncer looked down at me as if I were an annoying insect that needed to be squashed. He needed a little attitude adjustment, I reasoned, so I reached down into my right sock, pulled out a stack of $10,000 in hundreds, and peeled off half and handed it to him.

With his attitude now properly adjusted, I said, “Would you bring me the five hottest girls in this place, and then clear out the VIP section for my friends and me?”

He smiled.

Five minutes later we had the entire VIP section to ourselves. There were four reasonably hot strippers standing in front of us in their birthday suits and high heels. They were all decent-looking, but none of them was marriage material. I needed a true beauty, one I could parade around Long Island to show the Duchess once and for all who was boss.

Just then the bouncer opened the velvet rope and a naked teenager made her way up the steps, in a pair of white patent-leather go-to-hell pumps. She sat down next to me on the arm of the club chair, crossed her bare legs with complete insouciance, and then leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek. She smelled of a mixture of Angel perfume and a tiny drop of her own musky aroma from dancing. She was gorgeous. She couldn’t have been a day over eighteen. She had a great mane of light-brown hair, emerald-green eyes, a tiny button nose, and a smooth jaw-line. Her body was incredible—about five-five, a pair of silicone C-cups, a gentle curve to her tummy, and legs that rivaled the Duchess’s. She had olive skin, and there wasn’t a single blemish on it.

We exchanged smiles, and her teeth were even and white. In a voice loud enough to cut through the stripper music, I said, “What’s your name?”

She leaned toward me until her lips were almost pressing against my right ear, and she said, “Blaze.”

I recoiled and looked at her with my head cocked to one side. “What kinda fucking name is Blaze? Did your mother know you were gonna be a stripper when you were born?”

She stuck her tongue out at me, so I stuck my tongue back at her. “My real name is Jennifer,” she said. “Blaze is my stage name.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s very nice to make your acquaintance, Blaze.”

“Awwww,” she said, rubbing her cheek against mine. “You’re such a little cutie!”

Little?Why…you… little hooker in stripper’s clothing! I oughta smash you one!I took a deep breath and said, “What do you mean?”

That seemed to confuse her. “I mean you’re…a cutie, and you have beautiful eyes, and you’re young!” She offered me her stripper’s smile.

She had a very sweet voice, Blaze. Would Gwynne approve of her, though? In truth, it was still too early to say if this one would make a suitable mother for the children.

“Do you like Quaaludes?” I asked.

She shrugged her bare shoulders. “I never tried one. What do they make you feel like?”

Hmmm…a novice, I thought. No patience to break her in. “How about coke? Have you tried that?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Yeah, I love coke! Do you have any?”

I nodded eagerly. “Yeah, mountains of it!”

“Well, then, follow me,” she said, grabbing my hand. “And don’t call me Blaze anymore, okay? My name is Jennie.”

I smiled at my future wife. “Okay, Jennie. Do you like kids, by the way?” I crossed my fingers.

She smiled from ear to ear. “Yeah, I love kids. I wanna have a whole bunch one day. Why?”

“No particular reason,” I said to my future wife. “I was just wondering.”

Ahhh, Jennie!My very antidote to the backstabbing Duchess! Who even needed to go back to Old Brookville now? I could just move Chandler and Carter down to Florida. Gwynne and Janet would come too. The Duchess would have visitation rights, once a year, under court supervision. That would be fair.

Jennie and I passed away the next four hours in the manager’s office, snorting cocaine, as she gave me private lap dances and world-class blow jobs, in spite of the fact that I hadn’t been able to actually get it up yet. I was now convinced, however, that she would make a suitable mother for my children, so I said to the top of Jennie’s head, “Hold on, Jennie. Stop sucking for a second.”

She craned up her neck and offered me her stripper’s smile. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”

I shook my head. “Nothing’s wrong. In fact, everything’s right. I want to introduce you to my mother. Hold on a second.” I pulled out my cell phone and dialed my parents’ house in Bayside, which had had the same phone number for thirty-five years.

A moment later came my mother’s concerned voice, to which I replied, “No, no, don’t listen to her. Everything is fine…. A restraining order? So fucking what? I have two houses; she can keep one and I can keep the other…. The children? They’ll live with me, of course. I mean, who could do a better job raising them than me? Anyway, that’s not why I called, Mom; I called to let you know that I’m asking Nadine for a divorce…. Why? Because she’s a backstabbing bitch, that’s why! Besides, I already met someone else, and she’s really nice.” I looked over at Jennie, who was fairly beaming, and I winked at her. Then I said into the phone, “Listen, Mom, I want you to speak to my future wife. She’s really sweet and beautiful and…Where am I right now? I’m in a strip club down in Miami…. Why?…No, she’s not a stripper, or at least not anymore. She’s putting all that behind her now. I’m gonna spoil her rotten.” I winked at Jennie again. “Her name is Jennie, but you can call her Blaze if you want. She won’t take offense at that; she’s a very easygoing girl. Hold on—here she is.”

I passed the cell phone to Jennie. “My mom’s name is Leah, and she’s very nice. Everyone loves her.”

Jennie shrugged and grabbed the phone. “Hello, Leah? This is Jennie. How are you?…Oh, I’m fine, thanks for asking…. Yes, he’s okay…. Uh-huh, yes, okay, hold on a second.” Jennie puther hand over the mouthpiece and said, “She said she wants to speak to you again.”

Unbelievable! I thought. That was very rude of my mother to blow off my future wife like that! I grabbed the phone and hung up on her. Then I smiled from ear to ear, lay back down on the couch, and pointed to my loins.

Jennie nodded eagerly, leaned over me, and started sucking…and grabbing…and yanking…and pulling…and then sucking some more…. Still, for the life of me I couldn’t seem to get the blood flowing. But my young Jennie was a trooper, a determined little teenager she was, not about to quit without giving it a full college try. Fifteen minutes later she finally found that special little spot, and next thing I knew I was hard as a rock—fucking her mercilessly on a cheap white cloth couch and telling her that I loved her. She told me that she loved me too, at which point we both giggled. It was a happy moment for us as we marveled at how two lost souls could fall so deeply in love so quickly—even under these circumstances.

It was amazing. Yes, in that very instant—just before I came—Jennie was everything to me. Then an instant later I wished she would vaporize into thin air. A terrible sinking feeling washed over me like a hundred-foot tidal wave. My heart sank into the pit of my stomach. I visibly sagged. I was thinking of the Duchess: I missed her.

I needed to speak to her desperately. I needed for her to tell me that she still loved me and that she was still mine. I smiled sadly at Jennie and told her that I needed to speak to Dave for a second and that I’d be right back. I went out into the club, found Dave, and told him that if I didn’t leave this place right this second I might kill myself, which would put him in deep shit, since it was his responsibility to keep me alive until things settled down a bit. So we left, without saying good-bye to Jennie.

Dave and I were sitting in the back of the limo, on our way to his house in Broken Sound, a gated community in Boca Raton. The Uniblinker had fallen in love with a stripper and stayed behind—and I was now considering slitting my wrists. I felt myself crashing; the cocaine was wearing off and I was falling from an emotional cliff. I needed to speak to the Duchess. Only she could help me.

It was two in the morning. I grabbed Dave’s cell phone and dialed my home number. A woman’s voice answered, but it wasn’t the Duchess’s.

“Who’s this?” I snapped.

“It’s Donna.”

Oh, shit!Donna Schlesinger was just the sort of catty bitch who’d eat this shit up. She was a childhood friend of Nadine’s, and she’d been jealous of her since she was old enough to understand the concept. I took a deep breath and said, “Let me speak to my wife, Donna.”

“She doesn’t want to talk to you right now.”

That enraged me. “Just put her on the fucking phone, Donna.”

“I told you,” snapped Donna, “she doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“Donna,” I said calmly, “I’m not fucking around here. I’m warning you right now that if you don’t put her on the phone I’m gonna fly back to New York and stick a fucking knife through your heart. And then, when I’m done with you, I’m going after your husband, just on general principles.” Then I screamed, “Put her on the phone right fucking now!”

“Hold on,” said a very nervous Donna.

I rolled my neck, trying to calm myself down. Then I looked at Dave and said, “You know I didn’t really mean that. I was just trying to make a point.”

He nodded and said, “I hate Donna as much as you do, but I think you ought to let Nadine be for a couple of days. Just back off a bit. I spoke to Laurie, and she said Nadine is pretty shaken up.”

“What else did Laurie say?”

“She said that Nadine won’t take you back unless you go to drug rehab.”

Just then over the cell phone: “Hi, Jordan, it’s Ophelia. Are you okay?”

I took a deep breath. Ophelia was a good girl, but she couldn’t be trusted. She was the Duchess’s oldest friend, and she would want the best for us…but, still…the Duchess had crawled inside her mind…manipulated her…turned her against me. Ophelia could be an enemy. Still, unlike Donna, she wasn’t evil, so I found her voice somewhat calming. “I’m okay, Ophelia. Will you please put Nadine on the phone?”

I heard her sigh. “She won’t come to the phone, Jordan. She won’t speak to you unless you go to rehab.”

“I don’t need rehab,” I said sincerely. “I just need to slow down a bit. Tell her I will.”

“I’ll tell her,” said Ophelia, “but I don’t think it’ll help. Listen, I’m sorry, but I gotta go.” And just like that she hung up the phone on me.

My spirits plunged even lower. I took a deep breath and dropped my head in defeat. “Unbelievable,” I muttered under my breath.

Dave put his arm on my shoulder. “Are you all right, buddy?”

“Yeah,” I lied, “I’m fine. I don’t wanna talk right now. I just need to think.”

Dave nodded, and we spent the remainder of the ride in silence.

Fifteen minutes later I was sitting in Dave’s living room, feeling hopeless and desperate. The insanity seemed even worse now; my spirits had plunged to impossible depths. Dave was sitting next to me on the couch, saying nothing. He was just watching and waiting. In front of me was a pile of cocaine. My pills were on the kitchen counter. I had tried calling the house a dozen times, but Rocco had started to answer the phone. Apparently he’d turned against me too. I would fire him as soon as this was resolved.

I said to Dave, “Call Laurie on her cell phone. It’s the only way I can get through.”

Dave nodded wearily and started punching in Laurie’s number on the cordless phone. Thirty seconds later I had her on the phone, and she was crying. “Listen,” she said, snuffling back tears, “you know how much Dave and I love you, Jordan, but, please, I’m begging you, you gotta go to rehab. You gotta get help. You’re about to die. Don’t you see it? You’re a brilliant man and you’re destroying yourself. If you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for Channy and Carter. Please!”

I took a deep breath and rose from the couch and started walking toward the kitchen. Dave followed a few steps behind. “Does Nadine still love me?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Laurie, “she still loves you, but she won’t be with you anymore unless you go to rehab.”

I took another deep breath. “If she loves me she’ll come to the phone.”

“No,” said Laurie, “if she loves you she won’tcome to the phone. You two are in this thing together; you’re both sick with this disease. She might be even sicker than you for allowing it to go on so long. You need to go to rehab, Jordan, and she needs to get help too.”

I couldn’t believe it. Even Laurie had turned on me! I never would’ve thought it—not in a million years. Well, fuck her!And fuck the Duchess! And fuck every last soul on earth! Who gave a fucking shit anymore! I had already peaked, hadn’t I? I was thirty-four and had already lived ten lifetimes. What was the point now? Was there anywhere to go but down? What was better, to die a slow, painful death or to go down in a blaze of glory?

Just then I caught a glimpse of the vial of morphine. There were at least a hundred pills inside, fifteen milligrams each. They were small pills, half the size of a pea, and they were a terrific shade of purple. I’d taken ten today, which was enough to put most men in an irreversible coma; for me, it was nothing.

With great sadness in my voice, I said to Laurie, “Tell Nadine I’m sorry, and to kiss the kids good-bye.” The last thing I heard before I hung up the phone was Laurie screaming: “Jordan, no! Don’t hang—”

In one swift movement I grabbed the vial of morphine, unscrewed the top, and poured out the entire contents into the palm of my hand. There were so many pills that half of them tumbled on the floor. Still, there were at least fifty, rising up in the shape of a pyramid. It looked beautiful; a purple pyramid. I threw them back and started chewing them. Then all hell broke loose.

I saw Dave running toward me, so I darted to the other side of the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, but before I could put my lips to the bottle he was on me—knocking the bottle out of my hand and grabbing me in a bear hug. The phone started to ring. He ignored it and took me down to the floor, then stuck his tremendous fingers in my mouth and tried scooping the pills out. I bit his fingers, but he was so strong he overpowered me. He screamed, “Spit them out! Spit them out!”

“Fuck you!” I yelled. “Let me up or I’ll fucking kill you, you big fuck!”

And the phone kept ringing, and Dave kept screaming, “Spit out the pills! Spit them out!” and I kept chewing and trying to swallow more pills until, finally, he grabbed my cheeks with his right hand and squeezed with tremendous force.

“Oww, fuck!” I spit out the pills. They tasted poisonous…incredibly bitter…and I had already swallowed so many of them it didn’t really matter. It was only a matter of time now.

Holding me down with one hand, he picked up the cordless, dialed 911, and frantically gave the police his address. Then he threw down the phone and tried scooping more pills out of my mouth. I bit him again.

“Get your fucking paws out of my mouth, you big fucking oaf! I’ll never forgive you. You’re with them.”

“Calm down,” he said, picking me up like a bundle of firewood and carrying me over to the couch.

And there I laid, cursing him out for a solid two minutes, until I started to lose interest. I was getting very tired…very warm…very dreamy. It felt rather pleasant, actually. Then the phone rang. Dave picked it up, and it was Laurie. I tried listening to the conversation, but I quickly drifted off. Dave pressed the phone to my ear and said, “Here, buddy, it’s your wife. She wants to speak to you. She wants to tell you that she still loves you.”

“Nae?” I said, in a sleepy voice.

The loving Duchess: “Hey, sweetie, hang in there for me. I still love you. Everything’s gonna be okay. The kids love you, and I love you too. It’s all gonna be okay. Don’t fall asleep on me.”

I started to cry. “I’m sorry, Nae. I didn’t mean to do that to you today. I didn’t know what I was doing. I can’t live with myself…. I’m…sorry.” I sobbed uncontrollably.

“It’s okay,” said my wife. “I still love you. Just hang in there. It’s all gonna be okay.”

“I’ve always loved you, Nae, since the first day I laid eyes on you.”

Then I overdosed.

I woke up to the most horrendous feeling imaginable. I remember screaming, “No! Get that thing out of my mouth, you fucker!” but not being sure exactly why.

I found out a second later. I was tied to an examining table in an emergency room, surrounded by a team of five doctors and nurses. The table was positioned upright, perpendicular to the floor. Not only were my arms and legs tied but there were also two thick vinyl belts affixing me to the table, one across my torso and the other across my thighs. A doctor in front of me, dressed in green hospital scrubs, was holding a long, thick black tube in his hand, the sort you would expect to find on a car radiator.

“Jordan,” he said firmly, “you need to cooperate and stop trying to bite my hand. We have to pump your stomach.”

“I’m fine,” I muttered. “I didn’t even swallow anything. I spit them out. I was only kidding.”

“I understand,” he said patiently, “but I can’t afford to take that chance. We’ve given you Narcan to offset the narcotics, so you’re out of danger now. But listen to me, my friend: Your blood pressure is off the charts and your heartbeat is erratic. What other drugs have you taken besides morphine?”

I took a moment to regard the doctor. He looked Iranian or Persian or something along those lines. Could he be trusted? I was a Jew, after all, which made me his sworn enemy. Or did the Hippocratic oath transcend all that? I looked around the room, and over in the corner I saw a very disturbing sight—two policemen, in uniform, with guns. They were leaning against a wall, observing. Time to clam up, I thought.

“Nothing,” I croaked. “Only morphine, and maybe a bit of Xanax. I have a bad back. I got everything from the doctor.”

The doctor smiled sadly. “I’m here to help you, Jordan, not to bust you.”

I closed my eyes and prepared for the torture. Yes, I knew what was coming. This Persiranian bastard was gonna try to stick that tube down my esophagus, all the way into my stomach sac, where he would vacuum out the contents. Then he would dump a couple of pounds of black charcoal into my stomach to push the drugs through my digestive tract unabsorbed. It was one of the rare moments in my life when I regretted being well read. And the last thought I had before the five doctors and nurses attacked me and forced the tube down my throat was: God, I hate being right all the time!

An hour later my stomach sac was completely empty, except for the dump truck worth of charcoal they’d forced down my throat. I was still tied to the table when they finally removed the black tube. As the last inch of tubing slid up my esophagus, I found myself wondering how female porn stars were able to deep-throat all those enormous penises without gagging. I knew it was a strange thought to have, but, still, it was what had occurred to me.

“How you feeling?” asked the kind doctor.

“I have to go to the bathroom really bad,” I said. “In fact, if you don’t untie me I’m gonna take a dump right in my pants.”

The doctor nodded, and he and the nurses began undoing my restraints. “The bathroom’s in there,” he said. “I’ll come in there in a little while and check on you.”

I wasn’t quite sure what he’d meant by that, until the first salvo of gunpowder came exploding out of my rectum with the force of a water cannon. I resisted the urge to look inside the bowl to see what was coming out of me, but after ten minutes of exploding salvos I gave in to the urge and peeked inside the bowl. It looked like the eruption of Mount Vesuvius—pounds of dark-black volcanic ash exploding from my asshole. If I weighed a hundred thirty pounds this morning, I weighed only a buck twenty now. My very innards were inside some cheap porcelain toilet bowl in Boca Raton, Florida.

An hour later I finally emerged from the bathroom. I was over the hump now, feeling much more normal. Perhaps they’d sucked some of the insanity out of me, I thought. Either way, it was time to resume Lifestyles of the Rich and Dysfunctional; it was time to patch things up with the Duchess, curtail my drug intake, and live a more subdued lifestyle. I was thirty-four, after all, and the father of two.

“Thanks,” I said to the kind doctor. “I’m really sorry for biting you. I was just a bit nervous before. You can understand, right?”

He nodded. “No problem,” he said. “I’m just glad we could help.”

“Could you guys call me a cab, please? I gotta get home and get some sleep.”

It was then that I noticed that the two policemen were still in the room and they were heading directly for me. I had the distinct impression they weren’t about to offer me transportation home.

The doctor took two steps back, just as one of the policemen pulled out a pair of handcuffs. Oh, Christ! I thought. Handcuffed again? It would be the Wolf’s fourth time in chains in less than twenty-four hours! And what had I really done? I decided not to pursue that line of thinking. After all, where I was going I would have nothing but time to think about things.

As he slapped the cuffs on me, the policeman said, “Pursuant to the Baker Act, you’re being placed in a locked-down psychiatric unit for seventy-two hours, at which point you’ll be brought before a judge to see if you’re still a danger to yourself or others. Sorry, sir.”

Hmmm…he seemed like a nice-enough fellow, this Florida policeman, and he was only doing his job, after all. Besides, he was taking me to a psychiatric unit, not a jail, and that had to be a good thing, didn’t it?

“I’m a butterfly! I’m a butterfly!” screamed an obese, dark-haired woman in a blue muumuu as she flapped her arms and flew lazy circles around the fourth-floor locked-down psychiatric unit of the Delray Medical Center.

I was sitting on a very uncomfortable couch in the middle of the common area as she floated by. I smiled and nodded at her. There were forty or so patients, mostly dressed in bathrobes and slippers and engaged in various forms of socially unacceptable behavior. At the front of the unit was the nurses’ station, where all the crazies would line up every few hours for their Thorazine or Haldol or some other antipsychotic, to soothe their frazzled nerves.

“I gotta have it. Six point O two times ten to the twenty-third,” muttered a tall, thin teenager with a ferocious case of acne.

Very interesting, I thought. I had been watching this poor kid for over two hours, as he walked around in a remarkably perfect circle, spitting out Avogadro’s number, a mathematical constant used to measure molecular density. At first I was a bit confused as to why he was so obsessed with this number, until one of the orderlies explained that the young fellow was an intractable acidhead with a very high IQ, and he became fixated on Avogadro’s number whenever a dose of acid hit him the wrong way. It was his third stay in the Delray Medical Center in the last twelve months.

I found it ironic that I would be put in a place like this—considering how sane I was—but that was the problem with laws like the Baker Act: They were designed to meet the needs of the masses. Either way, things had been going reasonably well so far. I had convinced a doctor to prescribe me Lamictal, and he, of his own volition, had put me on some sort of short-acting opiate to help with the withdrawals.

What troubled me, though, was that I’d been trying to call at least a dozen people on the unit’s pay phone—friends, family, lawyers, business associates. I’d even tried reaching Alan Chemical-tob, to make sure he’d have a fresh batch of Quaaludes for me when I finally got released from this insane asylum, but I hadn’t been able to get in touch with anyone. Not a soul: not the Duchess, my parents, Lipsky, Dave, Laurie, Gwynne, Janet, Wigwam, Joe Fahmegghetti, Greg O’Connell, the Chef, even Bo, who I could always get in touch with. It was as if I were being frozen out, abandoned by everyone.

In fact, as my first day in this glorious institution came to a close, I found myself hating the Duchess more than ever. She had completely forgotten about me, turned everyone against me, using that single despicable act I’d committed on the stairs to garner sympathy from my friends and business associates. I was certain that she no longer loved me and had uttered those words to me while I was overdosing only out of sympathy—thinking that perhaps I might actually kick the bucket and she might as well send me off to hell with one last bogus “I love you.”

By midnight, the cocaine and Quaaludes were pretty much out of my system, but I still couldn’t sleep. It was then, in the wee hours of the morning, on April 17, 1997, that a nurse with a very kind heart gave me a shot of Dalmane in my right ass cheek. And, finally, fifteen minutes later, I fell asleep without cocaine in my system for the first time in three months.

I woke up eighteen hours later to the sound of my name. I opened my eyes and there was a large black orderly standing over me.

“Mr. Belfort, you have a visitor.”

The Duchess! I thought. She had come to take me out of this place. “Really,” I said, “who is it?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know his name.”

My spirits sank. He led me to a room with padded walls. Inside was a gray metal desk and three chairs. It reminded me of the room the Swiss Customs officials questioned me in after I’d groped the stewardess, except for the padded walls. Sitting on one side of the desk was a fortyish man with horn-rimmed glasses. The moment we locked eyes he rose from his chair and greeted me.

“You must be Jordan,” he said, extending his right hand. “I’m Dennis Maynard ^*10.”

Out of instinct I shook his hand, although there was something about him I instantly disliked. He was dressed like me, in jeans and sneakers and a white polo shirt. He was reasonably good-looking, in a washed-out sort of way, about five-nine, average build, with short brown hair parted to the side.