Catching the Wolf of Wall Street

^{CHAPTER 11} THE MAKING OF A WOLF

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” said the Bastard sympathetically, and he leaned forward in his cheap black armchair and rested his bony elbows on the conference table. “It’s always a shame when kids are involved.”

“Yeah,” I said sadly—and, yeah, right! I thought. This is what you live for, Bastard! You relish stripping a man of all his worldly possessions! What else could make a feeble life like yours worth living? “It’s sad for all of us, Joel, but I do appreciate your concern.”

He nodded dutifully. OCD, however, was shaking his head suspiciously. “I don’t know,” he said. “I really thought you two would stay together; I really did.”

“Yeah,” I replied glumly, “so did I. But there’s just too much water under the bridge. Too many bad memories.”

It was a little after ten, and I was singing on Court Street again, albeit to a slightly smaller audience. The Witch, the Mormon, and my towering attorney, Magnum, were all conspicuously absent. The Witch, I was told, was busy with another case today, no doubt destroying some other poor schnook’s life; the Mormon was busy attending to personal matters—probably still in bed with one of his Mormon wives, trying to conceive a fresh litter of Mormon babies; Magnum, on the other hand, was busy doing nothing. In fact, the only reason he wasn’t here this morning—in the heinous subbasement of 26 Federal Plaza—was that he thought it would be good if I spent some “alone time” with my captors. And while his words seemed somewhat logical, they also seemed suspiciously convenient, considering I had just written him a check for a million dollars last week. (Why show up anymore when he could take the money and run?)

So it was just the three of us this morning: the Bastard, OCD, and myself.

“You’re being quiet this morning,” said OCD. “If you don’t want to talk about your personal life, it’s okay.”

I shrugged. “What’s there to say, other than that my wife must have been sleep-talking during our wedding vows?”

“You think maybe she’s having an affair?”

“No, Greg! Not a chance,” I said confidently. Of course she is! I thought. She’s fucking that dimwitted Brooklynite Michael Burrico. A dunce like him was an easy target for a prospecting Duchess. “She’s definitely not cheating. What’s going on with us cuts much deeper than that.”

He smiled warmly. “Don’t take offense; I’m just trying to make sense of it all. Usually, when this sort of thing happens, there’s another man waiting in the wings. But, hey, what do I know, right?”

Now the Bastard chimed in: “Like Greg, I’m also sympathetic to your plight, but the only thing you should be worried about now is your cooperation. Everything else is secondary.”

Yeah? What about my kids, asshole?

“Joel’s right,” said OCD. “It’s probably not a good time to be getting divorced. Maybe you and Nadine should wait a bit, until all the commotion dies down.”

“All right,” snapped the Bastard, “so let’s get down to cases, then. Last time we spoke, the market had just crashed and you were out of a job. What happened next?”

What an asshole! I thought. I took a deep breath and said, “Well, I wouldn’t actually say I was out of a job, because what I had at LF Rothschild wasn’t really a job in the first place. I was a connector, which is the lowest of the low on Wall Street. All I did was dial the phone all day and try to get past the secretaries of wealthy business owners. It was a pride-swallowing siege—but one that I had no choice but to grin and bear. The only thing keeping me going was hope for the future.” I paused for effect. “And then came the crash.

“I still remember what it was like coming home that night on the express bus: You could’ve heard a pin drop. There was a certain fear in the air that I’d never experienced before. The media was sensationalizing things to the point of hysteria, predicting bank failures, massive unemployment, people jumping out of windows. It was the start of another Great Depression, they said.”

“A depression that never came,” added the Bastard, straight-A student of obvious history.

“Exactly,” I said. “It never came, although no one had any way of knowing that back then. Remember, the last time the market had crashed was in ‘29, and the depression came right on the heels of that. So it wasn’t all that far-fetched to think it would happen again.” I paused for a moment. “Now, for people who’d actually grown up in the Great Depression—like my parents—the prospect was utterly terrifying, but for people like me, who’d only read about it in history books, it was simply unimaginable. So, whether you worked on Wall Street or Main Street that day, everyone was scared shitless what would happen next.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Everyone except Denise; she was as cool as a cucumber!”

“That’s pretty impressive,” reasoned OCD, “considering how broke you two were.”

“Yeah,” I said quickly, “and it would have even been more impressive if she had the slightest idea the market had crashed.” I smiled ruefully.

The Bastard narrowed his eyes. “She hadn’t heard it on the news?”

I shook my head slowly. “Denise never watched the news. She was more of a soap-opera girl than a news girl.” I paused for a moment, and a profound wave of sadness overtook me. Denise might have had her shortcomings, but she was still a great wife. And she was gorgeous, one of those dark-haired Italian beauties who every teenage boy fantasizes about in high school. She was a great wearer of black leather miniskirts and white cotton sweaters, the latter of which were softer than a baby’s bottom.

Thinking back now, the way the two of us had cocooned ourselves in our tiny Bayside apartment had been pure magic. We had sworn eternal love for each other, certain that our love could conquer all. Yet, somehow, we’d managed to destroy that love. We allowed success and money to go to our heads. We allowed it to separate us, to eat away at us. Ultimately, it would turn her into a world-class shopaholic and me into a rip-roaring drug addict. And then came the Duchess—

“—still with us?” snapped the Bastard. “You need to take a break for a few minutes?” He offered me his sadistic warden’s smile.

“No, I’m fine,” I said. “Anyway, Denise had no idea the market crashed, so the moment I walked through the door she threw her arms around me, as if I were a conquering hero. ‘Oh, my God!’ she said. ‘You’re finally home! How was your first day as a stockbroker? Did you break the company record for the most stock sold?’”

OCD and the Bastard started chuckling.

I chuckled back. “Yeah—it was pretty funny, all right, except by mid-November we were down on our hands and knees, rolling up nickels, dimes, and quarters to pay for shampoo. But it wasn’t until a month after the crash that I decided to throw in the towel and leave Wall Street.

“It was a Sunday morning, and Denise and I were sitting in the living room, like two zombies, looking through the help-wanted section. After a few minutes, I came across something that struck me as odd. ‘Check this out,’ I said to her. ‘There’s a company advertising for stockbrokers, and they’re not on Wall Street; they’re on Long Island.’

“She looked at the ad and said, ‘What does PT, FT mean?’

“‘Part time, full time,’ I answered, and I found myself wondering what kind of brokerage firm hired part-time stockbrokers? I’d never heard of that before. Still, given my circumstances it seemed like a reasonable idea. So I said to her, ‘Working part-time might not be such a bad thing. Maybe I could earn a few bucks while I’m looking for something else,’ to which she nodded in agreement.

“Anyway, neither of us thought much of it at the time, and when I called the next morning, I was completely turned off. A gruff male voice answered the phone and said, ‘Investors’ Center. How can I helpya?’ and I knew right on the spot that it wasn’t a switchboard operator. And the company’s name sent shivers down my spine. I was used to names like Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, names that resonated with Wall Street.

“I could only imagine myself saying, ‘Hi, this is Jordan Belfort, calling from the Investors’ Center in Butt-Fuck, Long Island. I’m no closer to Wall Street than you are, so why don’t you send me your hard-earned money? You’ll probably never see it again!’”

“Very prophetic,” snapped the Bastard.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “although the Investors’ Center wasn’t in Butt-Fuck, Long Island; it was in Great Neck, Long Island, which is actually a pretty nice part of town. The company was on the second floor of a three-story office building.” I paused for a moment. “You know, I remember pulling up to the building and feeling rather impressed. I was driving Denise’s old piece-a-shit Datsun, which was the only car we had at the time, and I was saying to myself, ‘Hey, this place doesn’t look so bad!’ But then the moment I stepped into the boardroom my jaw dropped.

“The space was much smaller than I’d anticipated. It was maybe twenty feet square, and there wasn’t a single thing about it that resonated of Wall Street. There were no computer monitors, no sales assistants, no stockbrokers pacing back and forth. There was nothing but twenty old wooden desks—all of them weathered-looking and arranged haphazardly. Only five of the desks had brokers behind them, and there was no pump whatsoever, just a low-level murmur.

“I’d worn a suit and tie to my interview, and I was the only one in the boardroom dressed that way. Everyone else was wearing jeans and sneakers, with the exception of one guy. The only problem was that his suit looked like it came straight out of a Salvation Army box. To this day, in fact, the guy still sticks out in my mind, because of his dim-witted expression. He looked lobotomized. He was in his early thirties, and he had the greasiest black hair imaginable—as if he showered in motor oil and—”

The Bastard began nodding his head again, as if to say, “Move on.”

“Well, whatever,” I said. “The manager was sitting in a small office at the front of the boardroom, and he seemed oblivious to everything. He was yapping away on his phone, talking to his wife, I recall, and saying something about their dog being sick. When he saw me, he held up an index finger, to which I nodded dutifully. Then he kept on talking.

“His name, as it turned out, was George Grunfeld, and two years prior he’d been a social-studies teacher. He was in his mid-to-late forties, and he happened to be the spitting image of Gabe Kaplan, the teacher from Welcome Back, Kotter.” I smiled at OCD. “Remember Welcome Back, Kotter, Greg?”

OCD nodded. “Yeah, with Travolta.” He looked at the Bastard. “You ever watch Welcome Back, Kotter?“

The Bastard flashed OCD a dead smile. “Yeah; up your nose with a rubber hose,” he said tonelessly.

“Ah, there you go!” I said warmly. “That’s exactly what Travolta used to say to Mr. Kotter.” I smiled at my new friend, pleased that I was finally able to find some common ground with him. Alas, he refused to smile back. Instead, he stared at me, stone-faced.

I shrugged. “Well, anyway, he looked just like him, bushy everywhere—his hair, eyebrows, mustache, knuckles. It looked like someone had glued a bunch of tumbleweeds to the guy!”

OCD shook his head, amused, while the Bastard stared ominously.

“Anyway, George finally hung up the phone and came over to greet me. ‘Just pick a free desk and start dialing,’ he said after a few seconds of small talk.

“‘That’s it?’ I said. ‘You’re hiring me?’

“‘Yeah, why not? It’s not like I’ll be paying you a salary or anything. That’s not a problem, is it?’ I was about to tell him that it wasn’t, when one of the salesmen suddenly popped out of his chair and started pacing back and forth. George motioned toward the guy and said, ‘That’s Chris Knight; he’s our top salesman. He’s got a helluva rap. Listen…’

“I nodded and focused my attention on Chris, who was tall and lanky and had a face longer than a thoroughbred’s. He was no older than twenty, and he was dressed like he’d just strolled in from a keg party. I remember being appalled at how terrible he sounded. He was mumbling, slurring; I could hardly understand the guy! Then, out of nowhere, he started screaming into his telephone, in short rapid-fire bursts of ludicrous sales hype. ‘Jesus Christ—Bill—I guarantee it!’ he screamed. ‘I guarantee this stock is going up! You can’t lose here—it’s impossible! I have information-it’s not even public yet—do you hear me? I don’t think you do, because I have inside information!’ And then he yanked the phone away from his ear and held it out in front of his own nose and stared at the receiver with contempt. Then, after five seconds of staring, he put the phone back to his ear and started screaming again. I looked at George and said, ‘What the hell was that all about?’ and George nodded his head knowingly and said, ‘He’s pretty good, isn’t he?’ And I just shook my head in disbelief and said nothing. Meanwhile, Chris was still screaming, ‘Don’t you understand? We can’t lose here, Bill! I promise you! The stock is going to the moon! No ifs, ands, or buts! You gotta buy it now-right now!’”

I shrugged and said, “During my six months at LF Rothschild, I never heard anything so ridiculous, and I’m not just talking about all the securities laws he was violating but also his complete lack of professionalism. All this screaming and shouting and ridiculous sales hype was so Mickey Mouse-ish that no one with even the slightest bit of financial sophistication would give this guy the time of day.”

The Bastard held up his hand. “Let me get this straight,” he said skeptically. “You’re saying you’re not a proponent of sales hype?”

I turned the corners of my mouth down and shook my head. “No, I’m not, actually. Selling through hype is a complete waste of time. In military terms, it’s like carpet bombing. It’s very loud and menacing, but it’s only marginally effective. At Stratton, I taught a different style of selling, which was the equivalent of dropping laser-guided smart bombs on high-priority targets.” I shrugged. “Let me take things in order and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.”

The Bastard nodded slowly.

“All right,” I said. “So as awful a salesman as Chris Knight was— or, should I say, as untrained a salesman as he was—it was what came out of his mouth next that truly shocked me. ‘Oh—come on!’ he screamed at his client. ‘The stock’s only thirty cents a share. Pick up a thousand shares, that’s all I’m asking! It’s only a three-hundred-dollar investment; how could you go wrong?’

“With that, I turned to George and said, ‘Did he just say thirty cents a share?’ And George said, ‘Yeah. Why?’

“‘Well, it’s just that I’ve never heard of stocks that cheap. I was trained at a Big Board firm—meaning we sold mostly New York Stock Exchange stocks. And even then, the stuff we did on NAS-DAQ was in the fifteen-to-twenty-dollar range.’

“Meanwhile, Chris was busy slamming down his phone in anger. Then he started muttering: ‘That motherfucker hung up on me! What a rat bastard!’ So George looks at me and says, ‘No worries, he’ll get the next one. But either way, you should sit next to him for a few days, so he can show you the ropes.’

“Well, I was about to break out into outright laughter, but then George added, ‘He did make over ten grand last month. How much did you make?’

“I looked at George in disbelief, wondering how a moron like Chris Knight could make ten thousand dollars in a month; then something very odd occurred to me. ‘Wait a second,’ I said to him. ‘How the hell did he make ten thousand dollars working on three-hundred-dollar trades?’ Then I explained to George how a three-hundred-dollar trade at LF Rothschild would yield a commission of between three and six dollars—depending on how aggressive you wanted to get with the client. And sometimes the commissions were even lower than that, I added, especially on tickets of a half million or more.

“So George waved me into his office to offer me a visual explanation. He grabbed a sheet of paper off his desk and said, ‘These are the only stocks you’ll be recommending here. There are six of them.’ He handed me the sheet of paper, and I took a moment to study it. ‘KBF Pollution Control?’ I muttered to myself. ‘Arncliffe National?’ I was about to say, ‘I’ve never heard of any of these stocks,’ when George pointed to a column of numbers and said, ‘These are the bids for the stocks,’ and I saw that they were all under a dollar. I was about to say, ‘These must be real pieces of shit if they’re all under a dollar,’ when he pointed to another column of numbers and said, ‘And these are the offers. Everything in between is your commission.’”

I paused for a moment to let my words sink in. Then I smiled and said, “You might find this hard to believe, given my current level of sophistication, but back then I didn’t understand the difference between the bid and the offer. I mean, I knew you sold at the bid and bought at the offer, but I’d never really considered what happened to the money in between.

“You see, with big stocks the difference between the two is small, maybe half a percent, and only occasionally do the brokers get a sliver of it; usually it’s glommed up by traders. In fact, at Rothschild, the brokers would go absolutely wild when a block of stock came with a spread in it. They would call their clients and bang them over the head, because they were making double commission.

“But at the Investors’ Center, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The spreads were enormous—at least fifty percent or better. I said to George, ‘How could the bid for Arncliffe National be twenty-five cents and the offer be fifty cents? My commission can’t really be a quarter a share, can it ?’ to which he replied, ‘Sure, why not?’

“I said, ‘Well, let’s just suppose a client purchases a quarter million dollars of Arncliffe National’—that was an average trade at LF Rothschild—‘Would my commission really be $125,000?’ I asked.

“‘Yeah, in theory,’ he answered, ‘but it doesn’t really work that way, because no one puts that kind of money into penny stocks.’

“‘Why not?’ I asked.

“‘Well…’ he replied, not that confidently, ‘we… uh… we don’t call people who have that kind of money. We call working-class people.’

“‘Really?’ I said. ‘Why call people who don’t have money to invest in the stock market? It seems illogical.’

“‘Yeah, maybe so,’ he replied, ‘but rich people don’t buy penny stocks.’

“‘Why not?’ I asked for the second time, to which he started hemming and hawing. He really had no answer other than telling me just to trust him, which I did. In retrospect, I think I was too beaten down to argue, because under normal circumstances I would have debated him until I was blue in the face. In any case, I decided to take his words as gospel and go along with the program. I took a seat next to Chris Knight and then wrote a script for a cosmetics company called Arncliffe International.”

“Why’d you choose that one?” asked OCD.

I shrugged. “It seemed like the dog with the least fleas. I mean, they had no real sales to speak of and there were something like fifty million shares outstanding. But, on the positive side, they’d just landed Macy’s as a customer, which I knew would sound good in a sales pitch. That, and the president of the company had once been a vice president at Revlon, and I knew that would sound good too.

“Anyway, when I finally was done with the script, I remember feeling very impressed with it. I’d made Arncliffe National sound like IBM or at least the next Revlon, and I hadn’t even lied that much. Of course, I’d omitted some material facts—meaning, information that the client really deserved to know to make a decision— but all in all I hadn’t really violated any securities laws.”

The Bastard shook his head gravely. “Material omissions are violations of securities laws,” he snapped.

“Yeah, I’m aware of that now. In fact, I was aware of it then too, although I knew it would be difficult to prove. See, what’s material and what’s not material is somewhat subjective. Don’t kid yourself— on Wall Street, material omissions are the rule rather than the exception. And that’s at big firms as well as small ones.”

A few moments of silence passed.

“In any event, as fabulous as my Arncliffe script was, Chris Knight hadn’t grasped the true beauty of it. ‘You’re wasting your time with that,’ he said, pointing to my script. ‘You don’t need a script to sell stock. You just swear to the clients that the stock is going up and they buy from you.’

“‘Yeah, well, thanks for sharing,’ I said, and then I picked up the phone and started dialing. I was using leads George had given me, which were actually return postcards from people who’d responded to a mass mailing. On the front of the cards was some cheesy sales hype along the lines of Make a Fortune in Penny Stocks, and on the back there were people’s names and phone numbers. They seemed like total dunk shots, these leads. I mean, what better lead was there than someone who’d filled out a postcard and dropped it in the mailbox?

“So when I got my first prospect on the phone—some friendly Southerner named Jim Campbell†—I had reasonably high hopes. In a totally upbeat tone, I said, ‘Hey, Jim! Jordan Belfort calling from the Investors’ Center! How are you today?’

“‘Uh, I’m awe right!’ he answered. ‘How you doin’?’

“‘Oh, I’m great. Thanks for asking. Now, Jim, if you recall, about a week ago you mailed me a three-by-five postcard, saying you were interested in investing in penny stocks. Does that ring a bell?’ And after a few seconds of silence, Jim finally said, ‘Uh, yeah, I guess I did that. I mean, it sounds like sumthin’ I’d do!’

“I remember thinking, Good God! He was so eager! So incredibly receptive! It was mind-boggling. I maintained my composure and said, ‘Great, Jim. Now the reason for the call today is that something just came across my desk, and it’s the best thing I’ve seen in the last six months. If you have sixty seconds, I’d like to share the idea with you. You got a minute?’ And Jim said, ‘Sure! Fire away!’ With that I rose from my chair and prepared to give Jim my shpil. I remember catching a glimpse of Chris, who was sitting in his chair, watching me, and sipping a bottle of Evian.

“Into the phone, I said, ‘Okay, Jim, now, the name of the company is Arncliffe National, and it’s one of the fastest-growing companies in the cosmetics industry. All told, it’s more than a thirty-billion-dollar industry, cosmetics, growing at twenty percent a year. And it’s virtually recession-proof—yielding consistent growth in good times and bad. You follow me so far?’

“‘Yeah!’ said an impressed Jim. ‘I follow you.’

“‘Great,’ I said, and I went on about giving him some very loose facts about Arncliffe—the names of some of the products they sold, where the company was headquartered, and then, finally, I touched on the contract they’d just signed with Macy’s. Then I said, ‘But as good as all that sounds, the most important thing in any company is management. Wouldn’t you agree?’

“‘Yeah,’ answered Jim, ‘of course.’

“‘Good,’ I said shrewdly, ‘and in the case of Arncliffe National, management is blue chip all the way. The chairman of the board, a man named Clifford Seales,† is one of the most astute minds in the cosmetics industry. He was a former VP of Revlon, a key player over there. And, with him at the helm, Arncliffe can’t go wrong.

“‘But the reason for the call today, Jim, is very specific: Clifford Seales is about to go down to Wall Street to tout his stock, and he’s going on the heels of staggering sales growth and a major contract announcement. He’ll be going to banks, insurance companies, pension funds—the institutional players. And you know what they say, Jim: Institutional money is usually smart money, and even when it’s not, it’s not enough to fuel the market anyway. You follow me?’

“‘Oh, yeah!’ said Jim, ‘I sure as hell do!’

“‘Good, Jim. Now, the stock is trading at only fifty cents a share right now, which is ridiculously cheap, considering the company’s future. And the key to making money here is to position yourself now, before Seales goes to Wall Street and meets with all the fund managers and pension managers, because once he does that, it’s too late.’ I paused for effect. ‘So what I’d like you to do is this, Jim: Pick up a block of one million shares of Arncliffe National’—and splat went a mouthful of water from Chris Knight’s mouth. Then he started choking, and then he popped out of his chair—Evian in hand—and ran toward George’s office. I shook my head in disbelief and continued with my sale, noticing for the first time that the other brokers were gathered around me. ‘It’s a cash outlay of only half a million dollars,’ I said casually, ‘and it’s not a question of funds today or tomorrow, Jim; you have a week to pay for the trade. But, believe me,’ I said, lowering my voice to just above a whisper, ‘if you position yourself now, before Seales comes down to Wall Street, the only problem you’ll have is you didn’t buy more. Sound fair enough?’”

“You asked the guy for half a million dollars?” asked OCD, chuckling.

“Yeah, I did. That’s what they used to do at Rothschild, so it just sort of slipped out. But, meanwhile, as I was waiting for Jim to respond to my half-million-dollar request, George came running out of his office, with Chris Knight in tow. I heard George muttering, ‘Someone go get a tape recorder! Hurry up! Who’s got a tape recorder?’ And then Jim said, ‘Uh, I’m sorry, Jordan, but I think you got the wrong guy. I work in a hat factory. I’m a machine operator. I only make thirty thousand a year.’” I paused for a moment. “Anyway, not to belabor the point, I ended up closing Jim for ten thousand shares, which was a five-thousand-dollar trade, which was one of the biggest trades in Investors’ Center history. I was about to learn that Investors’ Center was no small-time operation. They employed over three hundred brokers and had over thirty offices—all of them small, and all of them just as mismanaged as this one.

“But getting back to Jim Campbell for a second, I’d convinced him to buy the stock with the money in his IRA, which was the only real savings he had.” I paused and let out a troubled sigh. “And if you’re wondering if I felt guilty about that, the answer is yes: I felt absolutely horrendous. Despicable. I knew he shouldn’t be investing his IRA in a penny stock. It was much too risky. But I was so utterly broke at the time that the words rent money, rent money were playing in my head like a broken record. In the end, they drowned everything else out, including my conscience.

“Then, the moment I hung up the phone, I was instantly awash in the admiration of my peers—quashing any residual doubts. I remember George saying to me: ‘Where did you learn to sell like that, Jordan? I’ve never heard anything even remotely like it! It was amazing!’ Of course, I won’t deny that I relished every last drop of his admiration. And, not surprisingly, the rest of the brokers were equally taken with me. They were all staring at me wide-eyed, as if I were a god. I felt like a god at that moment. The dark cloud that had followed me around since the meat business had finally evaporated. I felt like a new man, or, better yet, I felt like myself again.

“Right then and there, I knew that my financial problems were finally over, and I knew that Denise would finally have the things we’d talked about and dreamed about during the dark days. A world of infinite possibility had suddenly opened, a world filled with a thousand opportunities. And from there things moved very quickly, starting when George approached me a few weeks later, asking me to train the salesmen.

“It was almost identical to what had happened in the meat business, when the manager asked me to train the salesmen. And again, just like in the meat business, my training sessions quickly turned into motivational meetings, and the room began to pump. In addition, I went about reorganizing the office, setting up the desks classroom style and instituting a dress code, and I put an end to all this nonsense of part-time stockbrokers.

“What I was trying to do, in essence, was to make the place feel like Wall Street, to make the brokers feel like true stockbrokers. And I got resistance from no one; they all followed me blindly— both George and the salesmen—and everyone’s commissions soared, especially mine. My first month, in fact, I took home a check for forty-two thousand dollars.” I paused for a moment, letting the number sink in. “And let me tell you something: It was more money than I’d had in my entire life. Straightaway, Denise and I paid off all our bills, and then we went out and bought a brand-new Jeep, a Wrangler, for thirteen thousand dollars. Then we both bought new wardrobes. I bought her her first gold watch, then a diamond tennis bracelet. And at the end of the month we still had ten thousand left over!

“The next month I made sixty thousand dollars, and I went out and bought the car of my dreams: a brand-new pearl-white Jaguar XJS.” I smiled at the memory. “It was the two-door model, the one with twelve cylinders and three hundred horsepower. The thing was a total beast. And while Denise refurnished our apartment, I was paying back all my old creditors from the meat business. And the next month I made another sixty thousand, and that was it; that was when Denise and I looked at each other in awe. We simply didn’t know what to do with all the money. We had everything we needed, and money was pouring in faster than we could spend it. I remember one day in particular, when we were sitting at the edge of a long wooden dock in Douglaston, not far from where Investors’ Center was. It was the middle of March, and it was one of those warm winter days where you feel the first hints of spring in the air.

“I think I remember this day so vividly because it was one of the few times in my life when I’d been truly happy, truly at peace. It was late afternoon, we were sitting on two fold-up lounge chairs that we’d carried down with us, and we were holding hands, watching the sun set. I remember thinking that I’d never loved a person as much as I loved this woman, that I’d never thought it was even possible to love someone so purely, so completely. I didn’t have a single misgiving about her, not a single second thought.

“On the other side of Little Neck Bay, I could see the edge of Bayside, where Denise and I lived, where I grew up, and just behind me was the North Shore of Long Island, where I would be moving in a few years and raising a family.” I shook my head sadly. “In a million years I would have never guessed that home wouldn’t include Denise and that the mother of my children would be another woman. It would seem utterly impossible at the time.

“But what I had no way of knowing back then was that the insanity—as I’d come to call it—was right around the corner, slowly creeping up on me, without me knowing it.” I shook my head once more. “In the end, it spared no one. Not me, not Denise, not my family. Almost everyone I knew and everyone I grew up with would come to work for me soon, or at least become financially dependent on me. You understand what I’m saying?”

They both nodded, then the Bastard said, “How long after this did you meet Danny?”

I thought for a moment. “Not long; maybe three or four months. I’d seen him around the building a few times, but I’d never said more than a few words to him. Kenny, however, was about to reenter my life almost immediately. It was that very weekend, in fact, or the weekend after, when he called me out of the blue and asked if I’d train him to be a stockbroker.”

“How did he know you’d gotten in the market?” asked OCD.

“From his cousin Jeff. He was one of the few people I still kept in touch with from college. Jeff had told Kenny how well I was doing. But I was totally turned off by Kenny’s call at first. I mean, the last time we’d crossed paths, the guy had crashed one of my meat trucks, then left me with a three-hundred-dollar food bill. And what vague memories I did have of him were entirely negative. There was something a bit off about him, something I couldn’t put my finger on. And that was even before I met Victor Wang. Together, though, the two of them were like a complete freak show: the budding Blockhead and the Talking Panda.” I rolled my eyes. “Anyway, let’s just say my memories of Kenny were less than fond. I had him pegged as someone who loved to talk about rolling up his sleeves and working hard but hadn’t the vaguest idea what the concept meant.”

“Why’d you hire him, then?” asked OCD, smiling.

I smiled back. “That’s a damn good question, Greg… but let’s just say the Kenny Greene I met in the meat-and-seafood business and the Kenny Greene I met the second time around were two different people. I mean, he was still a budding Blockhead and everything, but now, at least, he was a humble budding Blockhead. He seemed to know his place in the world. In fact, one of the first things he said on the phone was that he wanted to meet me for a cup of coffee so he could pay back the money he owed me.

“The only problem was that I didn’t need the money anymore. So I was tempted just to say to him, ‘Fuck you, pal! Where were you and your damn checkbook when I needed you?’ But, of course, I didn’t. Truth is, there was something about the Blockhead that I liked. I mean, even to this day I still feel a certain warmth toward him, although I have no idea why. He’s like having a giant lapdog that pisses and shits all over your house, but you know he doesn’t mean anything by it; he just can’t control himself. Yet every morning you can be damn certain he’ll be out on your front lawn, fetching your newspaper.

“Anyway, the two of us met at a little Greek diner, just down the road from Investors’ Center, and the moment we sat down Kenny handed me a check for three hundred dollars, along with an apology for having crashed my meat truck. Then he told me how his cousin Jeff was always telling him that I was the sharpest guy around and how there was nothing more in the world he wanted than to work by my side, as my right-hand man.” I shook my head and chuckled. “It’s rather ironic that Kenny had more foresight in this department than I did. He was convinced I would be the next great thing on Wall Street, while I had zero aspiration in this area. I think I was just too shell-shocked from the meat business still; that, and I was so in love with Denise that I didn’t want anything to change.”

OCD narrowed his eyes. “What made Kenny believe in you so much? I mean, I understand that he heard you give a sales meeting at your meat company, but it still seems like a bit of a leap of faith on his part.”

“Yeah…” I said open-endedly, “well, I actually missed one important thing. You see, I wasn’t really sure if Kenny was cut out for the stock market, so rather than agreeing to train him on the spot, I told him after the meeting to come to the Investors’ Center that night, so I could give him a firsthand demonstration of being a stockbroker. And it was after hearing me on the phone for the first time that he swore loyalty to me. Does that make more sense?”

OCD nodded. I nodded back and took a moment to think back to that night. Then I started chuckling. “What’s so funny?” snapped the Bastard.

I shook my head quickly. “You don’t want to know,” I replied.

“Actually, I do,” he shot back.

“Well, if you insist,” I said with a smile, and I gave my neck a nice, slow roll. “Okay… so rather than just meeting me at the Investors’ Center, Kenny offered to pick me up at my apartment. When he pulled up to my building, he wasn’t alone; he’d brought his girlfriend along for the ride with him.” I paused for a moment, twisting my lips at the thought of her. “Let’s just say she had tits the size of NFL footballs and the lips of a goldfish. She wasn’t gorgeous or anything, but she was one of the sexiest little numbers I’d ever laid eyes on.

“In any event, the two of them sat in the boardroom and watched me do my thing on the phone—and, of course, I couldn’t help but ham it up a bit for the Goldfish, who was busy undressing me with her eyes as I pitched into the phone. I ended up having a pretty decent night—making around three grand—and I remember her whispering to Kenny how wet she was getting, just from listening to me. But it wasn’t until the ride home that I got my first pure dose of the Goldfish and, for that matter, Kenny Greene.

“We were in Kenny’s red Mustang: He was behind the wheel, I was in the passenger seat, and the Goldfish was sitting between us, on the armrest, wearing a tiny midriff T-shirt and some wildly sexy perfume. We were on the Cross Island Parkway near the exit for Bayside, when Kenny said to her: ‘Go ahead, sweetie, tell him!’

“‘No,’ she whined, ‘I’m too embarrassed, Kenny!’

“So Kenny said, ‘Fine, I’ll tell him, then,’ and he looked at me and said, ‘She got really turned on watching you sell tonight, so she’d like to blow you. And trust me: The girl can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch! Just look at her mouth. Pucker up for him, sweetie.’

“I looked at the Goldfish, astonished, as she stared back at me with her fabulous goldfish lips puckered up into a sensuous pout. Then she started nodding her head bashfully, as if to say, ‘I’d really like to blow you, sir!’”

I paused for a moment, searching for the right words. “Now, I want you to know that I had every intention of resisting the Goldfish’s charms; I mean, I loved Denise with all my heart and soul and I had never cheated on her before. But then the Goldfish began rubbing me over my jeans and sticking her NFL footballs in my face. While she had me still stunned by that, she crawled down to the little foot area in front of me and slowly unzipped my fly.” I paused and shook my head gravely. “Well, needless to say, the Goldfish overpowered me, and next thing I knew she was giving a world-class blow job as we cruised down the Cross Island Parkway.

“And as I groaned in ecstasy, Kenny the Pervert kept one eye on the road and one hand on the steering wheel, and his other eye on the Goldfish’s mouth and his other hand holding back her brown hair, so it wouldn’t disturb his view.” I shrugged. “I shot my load, if I recall correctly, right in front of P.S. One Sixty-nine, where I’d attended public school.

“Anyway, I want you both to know that I felt absolutely terrible when I walked in the door that evening. I felt dirty and disgusting, and I swore to myself that I’d never cheat on Denise again. And I continued to feel guilty long after that, especially when the four of us were together.” I paused and shook my head gravely. “I think that was the most difficult part of all—that Denise and the Goldfish became good friends. But that was the way it went down; Kenny got his wish and became my right-hand man, and the four of us became inseparable.”

Just then the door swung open and in walked the Witch, dressed in black. The three of us looked at her, speechless. She sat down next to OCD and said, “What did I miss?”

Nothing but silence.

Finally OCD said, with mock formality, “Well, Jordan was just giving us some valuable insight into his relationship with Kenny Greene and the Gold—”

“And I think this is a good time to break for lunch,” reasoned the Bastard.

“Yeah, I’m famished,” I agreed.

“Hmmm,” muttered the Witch. “You’ll have to fill me in, then, Joel.”

Indeed, I thought, and maybe you can convince her to blow you while you’re at it—although, on second thought, she looks like a biter!

We broke for lunch.

CHAPTER 12 LEAPS OF LOGIC

Precisely one hour later, I was back in the Bastard’s dungeon, with two slices of pizza digesting in my stomach and my three captors staring at me intently. I had spent the last fifteen minutes talking about the Blockhead—explaining how he’d insinuated himself into every aspect of my life, both business and personal. He did everything for me, I told them, almost like a second wife. And although I maintained no official rank at the Investors’ Center, anyone who saw us together knew I was the boss. And Kenny was fine with that; in fact, he relished it.

There are kings and there are kingmakers, I said to my captors, and the Blockhead was definitely the latter. I explained how Kenny began spending the bulk of his day running the operations of what had now become our office within an office. We had our own section at the back of the boardroom where our staff sat. At the time, we had four connectors, three stockbrokers, and one female sales assistant, all of whom had sworn loyalty to me (at Kenny’s urging).

And I was now saying, “What impressed me most about Kenny— or should I say, what baffled me most—was the never-ending stream of friends he paraded into the office. And they were all cut from exactly the same mold: in their late teens or early twenties, from reasonably good families, and reasonably well educated.”

“Interesting,” said the Bastard. “And these were his former drug clients?”

I shrugged. “For the most part, yes, although I wouldn’t place too much emphasis on that. These were good kids, not derelicts. It was like the movie Risky Business, where Tom Cruise becomes ‘pimp-for-a-night’ and hooks up his high school buddies with a happy hit squad of high-class hookers. That’s what Kenny did, and his friends kept right on coming.”

“And where did Victor Wang stand in all this?” asked the Witch.

Uh-oh! I thought. Victor’s goose was cooked now! “Well, the Chinaman—I mean Victor—stayed out of the mix for a while. He was too busy waiting on the sidelines, observing. See, he and Kenny had this completely bizarre friendship at the time. It was a mixture of love, hate, and mutual contempt, and, depending on the moment, how they felt about each other was a complete crap-shoot. They could be best friends, mortal enemies, or anywhere in between.

“In the spring of 1988, when all this was happening, Kenny and Victor were on the outs. I would only find out later that it was because of me.”

“Why is that?” asked OCD.

“Because Victor had taken Kenny’s swearing loyalty to me as a personal affront. Since they were kids, they’d always planned on going into business together, and since Victor was the brighter of the two, he was their undeclared leader. Even when Kenny had brought Victor to my meat company, it was only for him to scope things out, to see if the idea was worth stealing for him and the Blockhead—which, of course, it wasn’t. But flash forward eighteen months later, and the same forces were at work when Kenny called me out of the blue wanting to be a stockbroker.

“In the beginning, he had every intention of learning what he could and then going off with Victor. But what Kenny hadn’t counted on was being blown away when he heard me on the phone. Suddenly he realized that there were other people out there even sharper than his beloved Victor Wang. So he shifted loyalties; rather than trying to tap my brain for knowledge and wisdom, he took the opposite approach, throwing every last drop of himself into promoting me—and trying to turn me into a king.”

“What a sordid tale,” muttered OCD.

“Yeah, it certainly is. But, anyway, to sum up all this Victor Wang business, Kenny had tried to get him into the picture while we were still at the Investors’ Center. He’d begged Victor to swear loyalty to me, but Victor refused; he was too proud. So he pooh-poohed the whole stock-market idea and continued dealing coke.” I shrugged. “And as the months passed, I quickly grew in power, and the window slammed shut in Victor’s face. In less than a year, Stratton would be Stratton, and most of Victor’s friends would be working for me. The dullest would go on to make hundreds of thousands a year, the sharpest would make millions, and a select few would make tens of millions. The latter were the ones I backed in their own firms, which I used to expand my nefarious empire and keep the regulators off balance. Ultimately, Victor would come to own one of those firms—namely, Duke Securities—and the only reason I agreed to finance him was to placate the Blockhead.

“I had been entirely against it at the time, because I knew Victor for what he was: a man of perceived insults and silent grudges. He could never stay loyal to me, nor anyone else, for that matter.” I looked into the Witch’s black eyes. “Make no mistake about it, Michele: Victor is, was, and always will be an insane character. He’s two hundred pounds of indestructible muscle surrounded by fifty pounds of lavish fat, and he’s not scared to go to fisticuffs if the need arises. In fact, he once hung my gay butler out the fifty-third-story window of my apartment—and that was after pounding the guy’s face into chopped meat!”

My captors stared at me, astonished. “Yeah, it’s a little-known story. My gay butler stole fifty thousand dollars from me, after Nadine walked in on him having a gay orgy in our apartment.” I shrugged. “I can give you all the dirty details if you want, although violence, I assure you, played no role at Stratton. What happened with my butler was a single aberration, as well as a testament to Victor’s savagery. Danny, on the other hand, is not a savage. The moment he saw Patrick bleeding, he ran into the bathroom and started vomiting.”

The Bastard held up an index finger and said, “Excuse me,” and he leaned over and whispered something in OCD’s ear. Now the Witch leaned over and added her own two cents.

I made no effort to eavesdrop. After all, I was too busy lost in thought, wondering how my life had spiraled so far out of control. Perhaps if I’d followed my mother’s advice and gone to medical school, maybe I would have become a cardiac surgeon like my first cousin; or maybe I would have become an orthopedist, like my other cousin; or perhaps I’d be a lawyer now, like my sainted brother, Bob. Who knew anymore? It was all so complicated.

Just then my captors broke from their huddle. “Okay,” said the Bastard, “let’s move on to Danny now. When did you two finally meet?”

I thought for a moment. “In June of ‘88,” I said, “which was right around the time I decided to leave Investors’ Center. I knew the place was a total scam by then, and if I didn’t leave soon my clients would get slaughtered.” I paused for a moment, considering my words. “Scam is probably too strong a word, though. I didn’t think what I was doing was actually illegal.”

“You don’t really expect us to believe that?” sputtered the Witch, with a disturbing twitch of her nose. I flashed her a dead smile. “Yeah, Michele, I really do, and, frankly, it shouldn’t come as much of a shock to you. The Investors’ Center was a licensed brokerage firm with a compliance department, a trading department, and all the other bells and whistles. They were even members of the NASD! It wasn’t like they were operating in the shadows!

“Every other month they’d take a company public, and right there on the front page of the prospectus it would say: This deal had been reviewed by the SEC.” I shrugged. “And, also, you keep forgetting how broke I was at the time. When I walked into the Investors’ Center, the only thing I was thinking about was rent money. It was driving all my decisions.” I let out an obvious sigh. “I can’t explain it any better than that, although I will admit that once rent money was no longer an issue, I began to notice a few things. At first I tried to rationalize them, but with each passing month it became more and more difficult. And I felt more and more terrible inside.”

The Witch: “So why not quit if you felt so bad?”

“Well, believe it or not, Michele, that’s exactly what I had in mind when I met Danny. That was actually how I met him in the first place: I was hanging out on my terrace, playing hooky from work. I was dressed in my usual garb—a white terry-cloth bathrobe— and I was pondering the direction of my life. I had a pretty decent nest egg by then, so I wasn’t under any pressure. All options were open to me—all options except opening a brokerage firm, which I had already ruled out.

“It was mid-June now, and George had broached the subject with me. He’d called me into his office and said, ‘The owners of Investors’ Center are making a fortune. It’s a shame to leave so much money on the table, don’t you think?’

“And my answer to George was: No, I didn’t think! I wanted no part of owning a brokerage firm, especially one like the Investors’ Center. My meat-and-seafood debacle was still fresh in my mind, and I knew that every business appeared lucrative from the outside looking in; it was only when you were on the inside looking out that you got the true picture. Of course, George had no idea of that, because he’d never been in business before. All he saw were dollar signs, not a single liability.”

“So you met Danny while you were on your terrace?” asked the Bastard.

“Yes, I was living on the fourth floor, and Danny was playing with his son, Jonathon, in the playground. Jonathon was two at the time, and he always stuck out to me, because he had this terrific head of platinum-blond hair. He was incredibly cute. Anyway, after a few minutes of playing the good father, Danny appeared to be getting bored, and he drifted off to the side and lit up a cigarette. Eventually we locked eyes, and I flashed him a warm, neighborly smile.

“I think what shocks me most about this day is how normal Danny looked. He had on powder-blue golf shorts and a matching short-sleeve polo shirt. It was a golfer’s ensemble, I thought, or maybe it was a yachter’s ensemble. It was difficult to tell. Either way, I would’ve never guessed he was a Jew.”

The Bastard stared at me, confused. I continued: “Anyway, as Danny and I exchanged hellos, I noticed that Jonathon had made his way to the top of the sliding pond. At first I was impressed, because it seemed like a mighty feat for a two-year-old, but then it occurred to me that I should probably say something to Danny.

“And then, suddenly, Jonathon lost his balance and I screamed, ‘Holy shit! Watch out, Danny! Your son!’ And Danny spun around just in time to watch Jonathon take this wild tumble off the sliding pond and hit the pavement like a lead balloon.” I paused and shook my head gravely. “I’ll tell you the truth: At first I thought the poor kid was dead. I mean, he was just lying there, motionless, and Danny was also motionless, too astonished to move.

“Finally, though, after a few painfully long seconds, Jonathon lifted his head and started looking around, but he wasn’t crying yet. That came a second later, when he locked eyes with Danny. Then he went absolutely wild—screaming at the top of his lungs and flailing his arms about and kicking his legs wildly. So I figured I’d run downstairs and give Danny a hand. It seemed like the neighborly thing to do.

“But when I reached the playground, Jonathon was crying even louder. He was in Danny’s arms and literally going ballistic! I said to Danny, ‘You want me to go find your wife for you?’ And Danny recoiled in horror and said, ‘Good God! Find anybody but her! Please! You can call the cops, for all I care, and have me arrested for being a bad father, just don’t call my wife, please!

“Of course I thought he was kidding at the time, so I nodded my head and smiled. But he didn’t smile back, and that was because he wasn’t joking. I wouldn’t find out why, though, for a few more days, until Denise and I had the pleasure of going out for dinner with them and watching Nancy pull a lit cigarette out of his mouth and throw it in his face. But, not to jump ahead here: Jonathon did finally calm down, at which point Danny said to me, ‘My wife tells me she sees you hanging out on your terrace all week in a bathrobe. What do you do for a living?’

“‘I’m a stockbroker,’ I replied casually.

“‘Really?’ he said. ‘I thought you needed to work on Wall Street to be a stockbroker.’

“I shook my head no. ‘That’s a total misconception. Everything is done over the phone now. You could be anywhere. I, for one, work in Great Neck, and I made over fifty grand last month.’

“‘Fifty grand!’ he said. ‘I don’t believe it! I have a bunch of friends who are stockbrokers, and they’re all sucking wind since the crash!’

“‘I only deal in small stocks,’ I said. ‘They weren’t hit as hard by the crash. What kind of work do you do?’

“‘I’m in the ambulette business,’ he answered quickly, ‘and it’s a total fucking nightmare. I have seven vans that constantly break down and seven Haitian drivers who barely show up for work. I’d torch the place, if I thought I could get away with it.’

“I nodded in understanding. Without even thinking, I said, ‘Well, if you want to make a change, I’m sure I can get you a job at my company. I’ll train you myself,’ to which Danny looked me in the eye and said, ‘Pal, if you prove to me you’re making fifty thousand a month, I’ll be at your doorstep, six a.m. tomorrow morning, ready to shovel shit for you!’”

“When did he actually come to work for you?” asked the Bastard.

“The next morning,” I said. “True to his word, he was waiting at my door, holding a copy of The Wall Street Journal.”

“What about his ambulette business?”

I shrugged. “He never went back. He had a fifty-fifty partner, and he just handed the guy the keys and said, ‘See ya later, pal. Nice knowing you!’ and that was it. He cold-called for me for the rest of the summer and then passed his broker’s test the first week of September. George, meanwhile, was becoming more and more aggressive with me about opening up our own brokerage firm. The SEC had started investigating the Investors’ Center. If word leaked out, he said, the firm would quickly collapse.

“What worried me most was that I had just convinced Lipsky and the Penguin to come work for me. The Penguin had finally thrown in the towel on the meat-and-seafood business, and Lipsky’s furniture business was on the verge of bankruptcy. So, in a way, I was responsible for them now too. That was why I finally agreed to go with George to see a lawyer, because I wanted to gather intelligence.”

“Which lawyer did you see?” asked the Bastard.

“His name was Lester Morse, although Danny and I used to call him Lester Re-Morse, because everything about the guy was remorseful, or, better yet, moroseful. He was the ultimate doom-and-gloomer, almost difficult to fathom.

“I mean, every person he knew was either rotting away in jail or had lost their last dime to the SEC. And the way the Moroser told a story made you want to slit your own wrists. He would start off by saying what a great guy someone was and how he’d made a fortune in his heyday, but the story would quickly degenerate into a cautionary tale, and he would end by saying, ‘… and what the government did to him was a real travesty. He’s in Allenwood now, and he won’t be getting out for ten more years.’ Then he’d shake his head and move on to the next victim.”

“Interesting,” mumbled the Bastard.

“Yeah,” I said, “what’s even more interesting is that one of the names he brought up was Bob Brennan, the Blue-eyed Devil himself.”

The Bastard perked up. “Oh, really! What did he say about him?”

I shrugged. “He said he was the only person to ever walk away with all the marbles—two hundred million, by Lester’s account.”

“Hmmm,” muttered the Bastard. “Did he say anything else?”

“Yeah, he said that Bob was too smart to get caught. He said that he was always two steps ahead of the regulators and that he covered his tracks like an Indian. I remember being very intrigued at the time—swearing to myself that if I ever decided to go into the brokerage business, I would want to be just like Bob Brennan.

“You see, Lester didn’t paint out Bob to be an archcriminal—in fact, quite the contrary. According to Lester, it was the fault of overzealous regulators, along with a two-tiered justice system that was biased against penny-stock firms. WASP firms, on the other hand, got away with murder.”

“Did you believe him?” asked the Bastard.

“For the most part, yes, although I won’t deny that his words seemed a bit self-serving. I knew enough at this point to realize that penny stocks stacked the deck against the clients, although a stacked deck and blatant illegality are two different things. Meanwhile, Lester’s office reminded me of the Investors’ Center. It was small and dingy and didn’t reek of success. And Lester reminded me of an aging leprechaun. He was a squat five foot four, and he was completely bald on top, with thick swaths of curly gray hair over his ears.”

“So it was just the three of you at the meeting?” asked the Bastard.

“No, there were four of us. Mike Valenoti was there too.” I looked at OCD. “Mike, I’m sure, you’re familiar with.”

OCD nodded. “I have a bunch of questions about Valenoti.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said. “If there was a single person who helped me turn Stratton into Stratton, it was Mike Valenoti. He was the operational brain behind everything, the one who kept the place cranking away on all twelve cylinders. He was my first mentor—even before Al Abrams—and he was also the first Wall Street wizard I’d ever met. I mean, his breadth of knowledge was absolutely staggering!”

I shrugged. “But to save you time, I’ll tell you that Mike Valenoti is completely innocent in this. He was always trying to keep me on the straight and narrow, and I was constantly swearing to him that I was doing things right. In the end, though, he became so overwhelmed with the influx of business that he couldn’t see the big picture anymore. He had no idea I was breaking the law.”

OCD twisted his lips for a moment. “I appreciate your loyalty to Mike,” he said, “but it seems just a tiny bit implausible that someone as sophisticated as Mike wouldn’t know what was going on.” He flashed me a quick, disbelieving smile. “You see what I’m saying?”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah, what you’re saying makes total sense, Greg. But it also happens to be totally wrong.” I paused for effect. “Understand that ninty percent of Stratton’s business was completely legitimate: We didn’t steal money from clients’ accounts, we didn’t take fraudulent companies public, and, contrary to what the press might say, our clients could always sell if they wanted to.” I shrugged. “Of course, our sales practices left a lot to be desired, but whose didn’t? Prudential-Bache’s? Lehman Brothers?

“ Pru-Bache was busy ripping off grandmas and grandpas, and Lehman Brothers made them look like choirboys. In fact, it was the Lehman Brothers’ scripts that served as the blueprint for Stratton’s!” I shook my head slowly. “The fraudulent side of Stratton occurred in tiny blips, and unless you were privy to those blips, everything seemed normal. But let me get back to Lester’s office for a second.

“First, I quickly realized that George Grunfeld was completely worthless. He knew even less about the brokerage business than I did, and every word that came out of his mouth was utter nonsense. Lester, however, was a different story. He was knowledgeable enough, but he was completely devoid of charisma. He spoke in a low, squeaky drawl, and his words came out slowly, painfully, as if a turtle were speaking.

“I found it hard to keep my mind in one spot, so I just sat there, pretending to listen, sneaking peaks at Mike out of the corner of my eye. Lester had painted him out to be some kind of operations guru, but up until now he’d said only a few words. From a physical perspective, I was entirely unimpressed. He was dressed in a cheap blue suit and an even cheaper rayon shirt, and his hair was askew”—kind of like yours, Bastard, although Mike’s hair was salt-and-pepper, while yours is a plebian shade of mud brown-“although, in retrospect, I should have known an old Wall Street war dog when I saw one.”

“What’s an old Wall Street war dog?” asked the Bastard.

“It’s someone who’s worked on Wall Street for far too long and who’s been through bull markets and bear markets, someone who’s seen the dizzying excesses and the crash-and-burn stories. It’s someone who’s seen countless men go from rags to riches and then back to rags again, and then back to riches once more. He’s seen the hookers and the drugs and the ludicrous gambling, and he’s seen Wall Street go from the dark ages of fixed commissions and physical stock delivery to the modern era, where discount brokerage firms compete with Merrill Lynch and stock trades settle electronically.” I shrugged. “There are only a few true old Wall Street war dogs left in the world, because most of them have already died of either a heart attack or cirrhosis of the liver. But if you’re lucky enough to actually find one, they’re worth their weight in gold.

“And Mike Valenoti was one of this dying breed. Perhaps I should have known it the moment I laid eyes on him. I should have noticed the battle-ravaged look in his eye as he sat there listening to George’s and Lester’s inanities. He kept his chin tucked between his collarbones and his shoulders slumped over, as if he were about to fall asleep. And then there was Mike’s nose, which was a real showstopper! It was coated with red spidery veins and was the size of a sweet potato! Yet, on the flipside of that, Mike had the most intelligent brown eyes I’d ever seen. They were utterly piercing, and you could tell just by looking at them that he wasn’t missing a trick.

“Anyway, not to belabor the point, the simple fact was that Mike and I hit it off fabulously that day. We spoke exactly the same language, and it was the language of Wall Street. When he started a sentence, I finished it, and vice versa. In fact, by the time the meeting was over, I’d given Mike a full-blown sales pitch, pretending he was a customer. And, of course, it completely blew him away, as it did Lester.

“But I think what’s even more important about this day is the effect Mike had on me. Suddenly, I felt like the old Jordan again.” I shrugged. “Whatever the case, I knew I’d sounded sharper than sharp that afternoon, so it came as no surprise to me when Lester called me at home that night and told me that I should consider opening my own brokerage firm. Apparently Mike had pulled him aside after the meeting and said that he’d work for me for free-meaning for no up-front salary. All he wanted was a small percentage of the profits. In return, he would build me a first-class operations department to rival any firm on Wall Street.

“Lester, too, was willing to work for free. He would file all the necessary forms with the NASD and then accompany me to my membership interview. In return, all he wanted was a shot at representing the companies I took public. Whether or not they decided to use him wasn’t my responsibility. I just needed to make the introduction; he would do the rest.”

“What about Grunfeld?” asked OCD.

I shook my head. “George was out. In fact, it was the first thing Lester brought up. He served no useful purpose, squeaked Lester. He was a helluva nice guy, but he was deadweight. Between Mike and me we had everything we needed to run a firm.

“Anyway, I told Lester I would think about it, although, deep down, I really didn’t have any intention of going through with it. I was still gun-shy from the meat-and-seafood debacle, and I figured I’d just wait and see for a while.”

“Where are we now on the time line?” asked the Bastard.

“Early September,” I replied, “which is when things start to really heat up. First, Danny passed his broker’s test, and I called him up to my apartment for a training session. Sitting on my living-room couch, I began.

“‘Okay,’ I said to him, ‘here’s the deal: The first key to selling stock is to learn to read from a script without sounding like you’re reading from a script. You follow me?’

“‘Yeah,’ he said confidently, ‘and it’s no problem whatsoever.’

“‘Good,’ I shot back. ‘Just pretend you’re an actor on a stage: You raise your voice and lower your voice; you speed up and then slow down. You keep your clients interested, hanging on your every word. And don’t even think of picking up the phone until you know the answers to all potential objections. You can never sound stumped, Danny—ever!’

“He nodded confidently. ‘I got it, buddy. You don’t have to worry about Danny Porush. He can sell ice to an Eskimo and oil to an Arab!’

“‘I’m sure he can,’ I agreed. ‘But, remember, you have to know this script like the back of your hand. You can’t stutter; it’s the first sign of a rookie salesman, and a client will smell it right over the phone.’ I smiled at him, while Denise looked on with anticipation. I had told her what a great salesman Danny was, in spite of never actually hearing him sell before. But he had a very cocky demeanor about him, so I just knew he’d be great.

“With coffeepot in hand, Denise smiled at Danny and said, ‘You want me to go into the kitchen, so I don’t make you nervous?’

“And Danny waved her off. ‘Please, Denise, this is like shooting fish in a barrel for a guy like me!’ And Denise shrugged and said, ‘Okay, well, I’ll just stand here and listen, then.’ And Danny nodded, and I handed him a script for Arncliffe National.

“‘Okay,’ I said, ‘just pretend you’re pitching me over the phone, and we’ll role-play back and forth.’

“He nodded and took the script from me, then cleared his throat with a couple uhums and uhus. Finally, with great confidence, he said, ‘Hi, is Jordan there?’

“‘Yeah,’ I replied quickly, ‘right here. How can I help you?’

“Danny rolled his neck, like a prizefighter stepping into the ring. ‘Hi, Jordan, this is Danny Porush calling from… calling from… calling from, uh, the—uh—the—uh… the In… Investors’ Center. How… are you today?’ and then he paused and started sweating.

“Denise said, ‘I think I’ll go into the kitchen and leave you two boys alone.’ And a suddenly humble Danny replied, ‘Yeah, I, uh, think that’s a good idea, Denise. This is a bit harder than it looks,’ and then he wiped a bead of sweat off his brow.”

“Come on!” said OCD. “You’re exaggerating; he couldn’t have been that bad!”

I started laughing. “He was, Greg! In fact, he was so bad that, when he left the apartment that night, Denise said, ‘There’s no way he’s gonna make it, honey. He sounds retarded. I mean, why was he mumbling all night? Why couldn’t he just speak up like a normal person?’

“‘I’m not really sure,’ I answered. ‘Maybe he’s got a rare form of Tourette’s that only comes out when he sells,’ and Denise nodded in agreement.

“Anyway, I made it a point to go to work the next morning, because I wanted to witness the carnage firsthand, and that’s when something odd happened, something very unexpected. I was sitting a few feet from Danny, trying to contain my laughter. He was doing the old, ‘Hi—uh, this is, uh, Da-anny Por-ush. How, uh, are you?’ But then, after about five seconds, suddenly—snap!—he completely stopped stuttering and he started sounding totally unbelievable. Almost as good as me, in fact, but not quite.” I winked at my captors.

“He started closing accounts left and right, and two weeks later, as a sign of friendship, I asked him to take a ride into the city with me to see my accountant. October fifteenth was right around the corner, and I was still on extension for my ‘87 taxes. Of course, Danny happily agreed, and off we went. We hopped into my pearl-white Jaguar and we headed into Manhattan on a Wednesday afternoon.

“Now, mind you, up until then I thought Danny was completely normal. He dressed conservatively, he acted conservatively, and he came from a very good family. He’d grown up on the South Shore of Long Island, in the town of Lawrence, which is a very wealthy area, and his father was a big-time nephrologist. Danny referred to him as the Kidney King of Brookdale Hospital.

“However, on the home front, Denise had been hearing some very strange rumors about Danny: namely, that he and his wife, Nancy, were first cousins. Of course, I told Denise she was crazy, because there was no way Danny would withhold such a fact from me. Most of the time we spent together he was bitching about his wife, explaining how her sole mission in life was to make him as miserable as possible.

“So, I figured, why wouldn’t he confide in me that he and Nancy were first cousins? It made no sense. I mean, if it was true, it would definitely be playing a role in things. But I could never figure out a way to broach the subject with him, so I just kind of brushed the whole thing off, dismissing it as a vicious rumor.

“In any event, after I finished with my accountant, the two of us hopped back in my Jaguar and headed out of the city. We were somewhere around Ninety-fifth Street on the edge of Harlem when the insanity started. I remember Danny saying ‘Jesus Christ! Pull over! You gotta pull over.’ I pulled over and Danny jumped out of the car and went running into a dilapidated bodega with a cheap yellow sign Groceteria. He came running back out a minute later, holding a brown paper bag. He jumped back in the car with this insane smile on his face, and he said, ‘Drive! Hurry up! Head north, to One Hundred Twenty-fifth Street.’

“‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ I muttered. ‘That’s Harlem, Danny!’

“‘It’s all good,’ he said knowingly, and he reached into the bag and pulled out a glass crack pipe and a dozen crack vials. ‘This stuff will make you into Superman. It’s my gift to you, for all you’ve done for me.’

“I shook my head and started driving. ‘You’re fucking crazy!’ I snarled. ‘I’m not smoking that shit! It’s pure evil.’

“But he waved me off. ‘You’re exaggerating,’ he said. ‘It’s only evil if you have constant access to it, and they don’t sell it in Bayside, so we’re in the clear.’

“‘You know, you’re a real fucking retard!’ I sputtered. ‘The chances of me smoking crack right now are less than zero. You got that, pal?’

“‘Yeah,’ he replied, ‘I got it. Now, make a left up here and head toward Central Park.’

“‘This fucking guy,’ I muttered to myself, and I shook my head in disgust and made a left turn. Fifteen minutes later I was in the subbasement of a falling-apart Harlem crack den favored by toothless hookers and Haitian winos, and I was putting the glass pipe to my lips while Danny held a torch to the bowl. And as the crack sizzled like a strip of bacon, I took an enormous hit and held it in for as long as I could. An indescribable wave of euphoria overtook me. It started in the base of my aorta and shot up my spinal column and bubbled around the pleasure center of my brain with a billion synaptic explosions.

“‘Oh, Jesus,’ I muttered, ‘you—are—the—best—friend—I—ever-had, Danny!’ and I passed him the pipe.

“‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You are too; we’re brothers to the end,’ and he reloaded the pipe with more crack.”

OCD shook his head in disbelief. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Why would you do that?”

The Witch said, “Because they’re drug addicts, Greg; they have no shame.”

“How long did you stay there for?” asked the Bastard, in the tone of the morbidly curious.

“For a very long time,” I said, nodding. “You see, the thing about crack is that once you get started, there are only two ways to stop: The first is to run out of money, and the second is to die of a heart attack. Fortunately, our binge ended with the former, not the latter. I only had about seven hundred dollars in my pocket and Danny had about five, so we pooled our money, like good socialists, and were able to keep our binge going well past midnight.”

I shrugged. “On the brighter side, though, I was able to gather some very valuable intelligence during our binge. You see, like all drugs, there are various phases of the high, and with crack they’re particularly acute. If you’d like, I’ll share them with you.”

OCD shook his head gravely. “You know, it’s a mystery to me why I’m interested in hearing about this, but since you’ve let the genie out of the bottle, you might as well get on with it.”

I flashed OCD a knowing smile. “It would be my pleasure, Greg. The first phase of a crack high is the euphoria phase. This is when you feel so incredibly wonderful that you want to just scream from the fucking hilltops: ‘I love crack! I love crack! And all of you out there who ain’t smoking this shit don’t know what you’re missing!’” I shrugged. “And if you think I’m kidding, just take a hit of it yourself and you’ll see what I mean.”

“How long does that phase last?” asked the Bastard.

I shook my head sadly. “Not long enough,” I replied. “Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes; then it’s over and you slide into phase two, which is almost as good, but not quite. It’s called the diarrhea-of-the-mouth phase, which is somewhat self-explanatory. In this case, however, the sort of drug-induced oral diarrhea spewed out differs from your garden-variety oral diarrhea that the typical sober bullshit artist slings at you.”

“What’s the difference?” asked the Witch, searching for a way to peg a bullshit artist when she saw one.

I narrowed my eyes sagely. “Well, it’s very difficult to describe meaningless drug talk to those who’ve never immersed themselves in it, but let’s just say that it consists of an endless stream of inane ramblings, which other people in the phase think are brilliant. Yet, to all those outside the phase, they sound like complete nonsense.”

OCD seemed to understand: “So it was during this phase that you did the bulk of your intelligence gathering, I assume.”

“Indeed, Greg; that’s a very logical assumption. Danny and I were sitting on a concrete floor, beneath an asbestos-laden ceiling, with our backs against a cheap plasterboard wall, which was in the process of shedding two coats of lead-based paint, while three toothless crack whores looked on in admiration, and I said to him, ‘I can’t think of a better place to ride out a crack high than this, buddy. Right?’

“‘No way,’ he mumbled. ‘Think I’d steer you wrong?’ And he put the pipe to his lips and took another hit.

“‘Let me ask you a question,’ I said. ‘You know, there are some pretty crazy rumors floating around the building about you and Nancy being first cousins. Of course, I know they’re not true and everything, but I just figured I’d let you know, so that you’d be aware that people were spreading rumors about you.’

“Suddenly he started coughing violently. ‘ Ho-bee Jesus….’ he muttered, ‘ho-bee Jesus,’ and he shook his head quickly, as if trying to gain control of the rush. After a few seconds he said, ‘It’s not a rumor, buddy, it’s true. Nancy and I are first cousins. Her father and my mother are brother and sister.’ He shrugged.

“‘Aren’t you worried about inbreeding?’ I asked him. ‘I mean, Jonathon seems pretty normal so far, but what about your next kid? What if he comes out deformed?’

“Danny shook his head. ‘The risk is low,’ he said confidently. ‘My father’s a doctor and he checked it out. But if I do get dealt a shitty hand, I’ll just leave the mutant on the institution steps. Either that, or I’ll lock it in the basement and lower down a bucket of chopped meat once a month.’

“Remember, I’m not the one who said this—Danny was! Besides, we were in the middle of the diarrhea-of-the-mouth phase, and even the most absurd things make sense then!”

OCD and the Bastard started chuckling. “So what other intelligence did you gather?” asked the Bastard.

I nodded, eager to change the subject. “Well, I also found out that he’d snorted his last two businesses right up his nose. See, before the ambulette service there was a messenger service in Manhattan, and that’s when he started smoking crack: with the bike messengers. That was the start of Danny’s financial demise. Before that, he’d always been successful; now, however, he was a shell of his former self. His confidence was shattered; his bank account depleted; and his wife, never a bowl of cherries to begin with, was determined to turn his life into a living hell.

“Anyway, we didn’t leave the city that night until after midnight, and it was only then that I realized that I’d forgotten to call Denise. And it was also then when I started falling off an emotional cliff, hitting bottom just as we got off the exit ramp for Bayside, and I landed right smack in the heart of the worry phase.” I paused for a moment, feeling worried just thinking about the worry phase.

I took a deep breath and said, “This is phase three: a vicious onslaught of negative thoughts washing over you like a killer tsunami. You worry about everything: mistakes of the past, problems of the present, and anything that might pop up in the future. In Danny’s case, his worries had to do with money, and I knew this because, just as we pulled off the exit ramp, he said, ‘Citibank is about to foreclose on my condo and throw my family into the street. You think you can lend me ten thousand dollars? I have nowhere else to turn.’

“I took a deep breath, trying to draw power from Danny’s worries, figuring that if Danny’s life was in worse shape than mine, then how much did I really have to worry about? ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Do you have any Valium or Xanax to take the edge off? I’m not feeling so well.’

“He shook his head no. ‘I don’t have any. But why don’t you smoke the screen? There should be a little crack resin on it. It’ll make you feel better.’

“I nodded and grabbed the pipe. ‘Thanks; hold the wheel while I light up. I don’t wanna burn myself.’ And Danny grabbed the wheel, and that’s how we made our way through Bayside: with me smoking the screen and Danny steering the car.

“On our way up in the elevator we didn’t say a single word to each other. We didn’t even lock eyes. We were both too embarrassed. And I remember swearing to myself that I would never speak to him again. I knew someone like Danny could not be good for me. Someone who talked about his family the way he did, someone who consumed drugs the way he did, and someone who had the fucking audacity to lead me into the depth and despair of a Harlem crack den—I knew he would only bring out the worst in me.

“Anyway, the moment I stuck my key in the lock, the door swung open and there was Denise, crying. I looked at her with panic in my eyes. My heart was literally beating out of my chest. I threw my palms up in the air and opened my mouth to say something, but no words came out. That’s when I entered phase four, the suicide-contemplation phase.

“There are only two known antidotes to it: The first is the massive consumption of benzodiazepines—preferably Xanax or Valium and Klonopin. The second is massive quantities of sleep, on the order of two or three days. Anything less and you still might attempt suicide. And as I stood before Denise, reeking of urine and hookers and crack and funk, she took pity on me, and she loaded me up with enough Xanax to knock out a blue whale. Then she undressed me and tucked me in. And then I passed out.”

“Jesus,” muttered OCD.

I nodded in agreement. “Yeah,” I agreed, “Jesus is right. In fact, it would take me three days to recover, which takes us to Sunday morning. That’s when I entered the resurrection phase, which is the most productive phase of all. Your brain’s dopamine stores have fully replenished themselves, and you’re promising yourself that you’ve officially learned your lesson this time. You know what you did was completely foolish, and only a crazy person would do it again; and you’re definitely not a crazy person!

“What makes this phase so productive is that you can look at all your worries now with an icy detachment, dismissing the imagined ones and devising strategies to deal with the real ones. It’s a time of tremendous clarity, a time when a man takes stock of his life. And as long as you’re not a full-blown crack addict, thinking about heading back to the crack den again, you emerge from this experience a much better man, a more focused man, and—”

“Oh, please!” sputtered the Bastard. “Save your rationalizations for the less informed! Crack doesn’t make you better or more focused; it’s pure evil, nothing more.”

OCD let out a single chuckle. The Witch raised an eyebrow. I said to the Bastard, “You have an excellent point there, Joel, although, in this particular case, the resurrection phase happened to be unusually productive, because I quickly realized that I had only one thing to worry about, and that was the Investors’ Center. If George was right, then I needed to make a move now, before the shit hit the fan. To sit and wait would be like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand.

“So the next day I pulled Kenny aside and told him that I was ready to make a move. The Investors’ Center was on the way out, I explained to him, and we needed to start setting things up now, in anticipation.”

“What about your future partner-in-crime?” asked the Witch. “Did you lend Danny the money?”

God—how I would have loved to just smack her in that mousy little head of hers! I smiled warmly at the Witch and said, “Yes, Michele, I did, and if you want to know why, the answer is, I’m not really sure. On my way to the office I had every intention of firing him. I really did. But when I saw him sitting at his desk, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. He looked nervous and embarrassed. And when we finally locked eyes, he flashed me the saddest of smiles, then he put his head back down and started dialing again. I remember staring at him—watching him bang away at the phone—and feeling utterly confused inside.

“I really wanted to fire him, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. He had a wife and kid, both of whom I knew and both of whom I cared about. And I knew how talented he was, so greed was gnawing at me too. So I decided to lend him the money and keep him in the fold. I would just keep my guard up and make sure I controlled him.

“But a few days later, on my way into the building, the doorman stopped me and handed me a certified letter. I looked at the envelope and froze: It was from the SEC. Without even opening it, I knew it was a subpoena.”

“What was it for?” asked the Bastard.

“For records,” I answered, “as well as a personal appearance. And while it didn’t give a specific date, the next morning Lester Re-Morse called bright and early and said, ‘I think the Investors’ Center is going to shut its doors this week. In fact, it’ll be a miracle if they make it past Wednesday.’

“‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ I snapped. ‘How can the SEC shut them down before they even investigate them?’

“‘The SEC’s not shutting them down,’ he replied. ‘They’re shutting themselves down. They’re out of money.’

“Out of money! I thought. How the fuck could that be! ‘How on earth could they be out of money, Lester? They were making a fortune!’

“‘No, no,’ Lester squeaked. ‘They were making a couple a million a year at most, and they sucked it all out of the firm. The rest of Wall Street has been shorting their stocks since Wednesday, when word of the investigation leaked out. So it’s only a matter of time now.’”

I looked at my captors and shrugged. “And those were the famous last words from Lester Re-Morse. Brokerage firms all over Wall Street were shorting their stocks, figuring the investigation would put them out of business. So now the whole thing was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“‘How long will it take to get my own firm started?’ I asked him.

“‘It’ll take you anywhere between six and ninth months.’

“‘Six to nine months! I don’t have six to nine months! I’ll lose everything if it takes that long.’ Then something else occurred to me. ‘Oh, Jesus! What about our paychecks, Lester? Monday is payday!’ to which he mumbled, ‘Yeah, well, you know… let’s just say that if I were you I wouldn’t hold my breath. Brokers never end up getting paid when this sort of thing happens. I would just write the whole thing off.’

“I started laughing at Lester’s words, because Danny was supposed to get his first paycheck on Monday. It was close to forty grand, and it would be the ultimate crushing blow for him. I knew right then that if I wanted to keep Danny in the fold I would have to carry him until I set things up. Yet Danny was only one of my problems. I had seven other people in my crew, and, as loyal as they were, they wouldn’t wait six to nine months. ‘There’s gotta be a quicker way, Lester. Six to nine months is a death sentence for me. I need to speak to Mike Valenoti; maybe he knows a way.’

“‘I already spoke to Mike,’ said Lester, ‘and he’s with you. He said he’d come to my office today and sit down with you if you’d like. We can meet at twelve.’

“‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there at twelve.’

“‘You know, come to think of it,’ said Lester, ‘you could start off as a branch of another brokerage firm. It’s called an OSJ, which stands for Office of Supervisory Jurisdiction, and—’

“I cut him off. ‘Yeah, I know what an OSJ is, and they’re a total nightmare. The owner constantly tries to fuck over the branch manager. I don’t want to start something that’s going to blow up in six months.’

“‘What you’re saying is true,’ replied Lester, ‘and normally I wouldn’t recommend one to you. But I happen to know a little firm that’s a diamond in the rough; they have no operations to speak of, just a tiny office on Maiden Lane, a block off Wall Street. You could open a small office on Long Island and pay them a percentage. The owner happens to be a very honest guy—an altogether lovely guy, in fact. But he lost all his money in the crash, and he’s on the verge of going bankrupt.’

“‘What’s his name?’

“‘Jim Taormina. And the firm is Stratton Securities.’”

“And there we go,” said OCD, with a smile.

The Bastard said, “Okay, so there we have it. We’re finally at the beginning—one day and five hours of cooperation later.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “well, no one will ever accuse me of not being able to tell a good story, right?” I smiled warmly at my captors. I was at the guts of the story now, and it was a milestone of sorts. The four of us had bonded in a strange yet altogether pleasant way, and I couldn’t help but marvel at Magnum’s wisdom. In his absence, the walls of formality had come tumbling down, replaced by a hearty familiarity and esprit de corps. In fact, I finally felt like part of Team USA!

Alas, the Witch was quick to burst my bubble. “So this is when you embarked on your life of crime,” she said. “Everything before this was simply a warm-up.”

“So what happened next?” asked the Bastard.

I shrugged and let out a great sigh. “Well, the rest of the day was utter insanity. Before I went to Lester’s, I called George Grunfeld’s house, but his wife told me he wasn’t home. ‘He’s at the office taking care of paperwork,’ she said, and by the tone of her voice I could literally hear the paper shredder whirring in the background.

“Then I called the Blockhead and told him what was going on and that he better get down to the office to take care of our ‘paperwork’ before the federales raided the place. And then I called Danny and told him the bad news, that he wouldn’t be getting paid on Monday. Of course, Danny being Danny, he took the bad news in stride.

“‘I got bigger problems than that,’ he snarled.

“‘Oh, really?’ I said. ‘Like what?’

“‘Well, I’m still married to Nancy,’ he replied. ‘Isn’t that enough?’

“As usual, I resisted the urge to ask him why the fuck he’d married his first cousin in the first place. But I told him not to worry, that I would cover his mortgage and expenses and whatever else he needed until I sorted things out. To that, he thanked me graciously and told me that he was with me to the bitter end. Then I hung up the phone and headed for Lester’s.”

“I’m curious,” remarked the Bastard. “What kind of documents were you looking to destroy?”

“Scripts, mostly, and maybe some buy tickets and sell tickets. But, in truth, there wasn’t much I could destroy that wasn’t stored in two or three other places. Nevertheless, on my way to Lester’s there was a plan forming in my mind. Things were becoming very clear to me. In fact, this would mark the beginning of what I would come to think of as my Great Window of Clarity. It started on the car ride to Lester’s and lasted through the beginning of 1993, when I settled my case with the SEC and sold the firm to Danny for $180 million. It was a remarkable time in my life, a four-and-a-half-year period during which there was no problem too complicated for me to work through. My brain was in overdrive, it seemed. I could be going in twenty directions at the same time yet find each destination without making a single wrong turn.” I paused for a moment, considering my words.

“I’m not trying to sound cocky here; believe me, that’s the last way I feel right now. I’ve been humbled by my own life: by my drug addiction, by my indictment, and by my”—backstabbing— “wife leaving me on the courthouse steps. But I’m just trying to paint a picture for you, a picture of what I was like back then, so you can see why everyone followed me blindly: people like Mike Valenoti and my father, and Danny and Kenny and Jim Taormina, and, ultimately, thousands of other people who would come to work at Stratton.

“It was a time when I had all the answers, when I was able to master the brokerage business in a matter of days—both the operational side and the trading side. Mike would come to call me the world’s most able pupil, and many others would eventually call me just the same. And, alas, many of them belonged on a who’s who list of securities felons.” I shook my head sadly. “Anyway, I would look back at this time with mixed emotions, and with a healthy dose of wonder.

“In some ways, I think it was the very clarity that led me to drugs and hookers and to everything else. I’d always suffered from insomnia, but suddenly I found it impossible to sleep more than a couple hours each night. I couldn’t quiet down the thoughts that were roaring through my head. In the early nineties, I was managing the trading accounts of four different brokerage firms— Stratton, Monroe Parker, Biltmore, and a secret account I held at M. H. Meyerson, which I used to balance out the others—and I knew what each firm had in its account, right down to the share.” I paused for a moment, letting my words sink in.

“When the clarity finally faded, I found myself desperately trying to recapture it. I tried a dozen different businesses: I made movies, started a vitamin company, worked with Steve Madden Shoes; I even tried short-selling stocks—figuring I could make money attacking the industry I’d created.

“But, in the end, I couldn’t recapture it. I never got back to the point where I felt like my brain was firing on all cylinders.” I shook my head sadly. “Sometimes I wonder if I ever will. I mean, I know I have a long road ahead of me and that I’ll probably end up spending a considerable amount of time in jail, but after it’s all said and done—after I’ve done my time and paid my debt to society, so to speak—I wonder if I’ll ever accomplish anything extraordinary again. I wonder if I’ll ever have another window of clarity.” I let out a genuinely heartfelt sigh.

After a few moments of silence, OCD finally said, “I have a sneaky suspicion you will, but I hope for your sake—and for the sake of the public at large—that you do something more positive with your next window of clarity.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” said the Witch, and she narrowed her eyes at me and cocked her head to the side at a very knowing angle, as if she were studying a tiny lab specimen. “I think what bothers me most about you is how you took a God-given gift and misused it. A common thief or even a thug, for that matter, is much easier for me to stomach. But you—well, it was nothing more than greed that motivated you, greed in all its forms, for all things carnal, and for all things self-serving. It was that and an unbridled lust for power.”

There was more silence, as the Witch’s words hung in the air like nerve gas. Finally the Bastard said, in the tone of the peacemaker: “Well, I think we all agree that the final chapter of your life is yet to be written, but for now we need to stay focused on the present— or the past, I should say, and, more specifically, on your meeting at Lester’s office.”

Yes, I thought, you are my savior and protector, Bastard, and that speaks volumes as to the horrific status of my life. After all, you would like nothing more than to see me rotting away in a jail cell, yet there’s another human being in the room who wishes me even greater harm than you do.

I nodded and said, “Right… well, by the time I reached Lester’s office, my window of clarity was fully open, and I had worked things out in my mind. There were three things I needed to accomplish: First and foremost, I needed to cut a deal with Mike; second, I needed to cut a deal with Jim Taormina; and, third, I needed temporary office space to interview salesmen until my permanent space was set up.

“So when I got to Lester’s office, I didn’t waste a second. It was just the three of us this time—Lester, Mike, and myself—and I went right to work. ‘Just name your price and I’ll pay it,’ I said to Mike. ‘All I ask is that you take the bulk of your pay as a percentage of profits, or, better yet, as a percentage of revenue. This way you’ll never have to worry about me trying to fuck you over by running personal expenses through the company.’ I smiled at him, trying my best to ignore that world-class schnozolla of his. ‘I know how valuable you are, Mike, and I can’t do this without you. You’ve forgotten more about this business than I’ll ever learn. You’re my linchpin, my secret weapon.’

“Mike, of course, loved that, and I knew he would. See, on Wall Street, the back-office people are the unsung heroes, the ones who keep the machinery humming, while the brokers and bankers make a fortune. They’re dramatically underpaid, in my opinion, and they’re wildly underappreciated. So it came as no surprise to me when Mike said, ‘I don’t need a salary. Just pay me whatever you think is fair, and I’ll be fine with it.’

“I had already checked this with Lester, and a first-class operations guy was worth one hundred fifty thousand dollars a year, he said. So I said to Mike, ‘How’s ten percent of revenue up to half a million a year?’ And that was it. Mike was mine. Then I turned to Lester and said, ‘Call Jim Taormina and get him down here. I want to cut a deal with him before the day is out. What’s standard for an OSJ?’

“Lester mumbled, ‘Well… uh—’

“‘Ten percent of revenue,’ snapped Mike, ‘plus a ten-dollar ticket charge, only on the buy side, though. Sell tickets are free. But the most important thing is that I don’t want him holding our money. We get to sweep the trading account once a week. He can hold a small deposit, maybe twenty-five thousand; that’s it.’

“I nodded. ‘All right,’ I said to Lester. ‘Call Jim, and tell him that I’ll pay fifteen percent of revenue, but with a cap of thirty thousand dollars a month; that’s the most he can make off me. After that, I keep everything. You think he’ll go for that?’

“‘Uh, of course he will,’ mumbled Lester. ‘He’s on the verge of bankruptcy. But he’s, uh, sort of a low-energy guy, Jim. I’m concerned you might scare him off

“‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I know exactly how to speak to a guy like Jim. Just get him down here and I’ll do the rest,’ and, of course, I was right. And Stratton got started just like that. Lester excused himself from the conference room, and Mike spent the next few hours giving me a crash course in the brokerage business. And when Jim finally showed up, he was a complete lay-down. I cut a deal with him in less than a minute.”

“And what about your SEC subpoena?” asked the Bastard.

I chuckled. “Yeah, well, that turned out to be the biggest joke of all. In fact, by the time they got around to deposing me, Stratton had already been in business for a year! And when they did actually sue Stratton, they never tried to use what happened at the Investors’ Center as a knockout punch.” I shrugged my shoulders. “But that’s the SEC for you: The right hand never knows what the left hand is doing.”

After a few moments of silence, the Bastard asked, “How much longer did the Investors’ Center stay in business?”

“About five or six minutes,” I said casually. “In fact, after I left Lester’s office, I swung by the Investors’ Center, which bore an odd resemblance to what I imagined the headquarters of the Third Reich looked like as the Russians were closing in on Berlin. There were papers everywhere, and brokers were running around carrying boxes, but that was nothing compared to the next week, when our paychecks bounced. Then brokers started tearing things off the walls.”

I shrugged. “Not surprisingly, the Blockhead turned out to be very adept at this sort of thing. First, he wheeled out an industrial-size Canon copier for our future brokerage firm, and then he used a crowbar to break into the office’s safe and steal all the new-account forms. There were literally thousands of them, a veritable gold mine of people who’d shown a propensity to invest in penny stocks. It was those new-account forms that served as our first lead source, when we started cold-calling two weeks later. That was how long it took to get our space together.”

“What did you use in the meantime?” asked OCD.

“I used my friend’s car dealership. It was just down the road from the Investors’ Center. I stayed there for about two weeks, until I found the right space, in the town of Lake Success, Long Island. It was just east of the Queens-Long Island border, and in spite of being small, the building was clean and upscale. With a bit of cramming, I figured we could fit twenty brokers in the boardroom. That would be perfect, I thought. With twenty brokers I could make a fortune.”

OCD, with a chuckle: “Twenty brokers?”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah; I guess I set my sights a bit low.”

“What was the breakdown of ownership?” asked the Bastard.

“Seventy-thirty,” I replied. “Seventy percent me, thirty percent Kenny.”

“Danny wasn’t a partner?” asked the Witch.

“No, it was just the Blockhead and me. Danny bought in later, over time.”

The Witch again: “How much start-up capital did you put in?”

“About eighty thousand,” I replied quickly. “And despite my owning twice as much as Kenny, we split the investment equally: forty thousand each. That was because I was the lead horse,” I said respectfully. “So splitting the investment seemed fair. The only casualty in all this was Elliot Loewenstern, the budding Penguin. What happened at the Investors’ Center had spooked him, and he took a job in Manhattan, at Bear Stearns. He did come back, of course, right after I hit on my idea of selling five-dollar stocks to the rich.”

“And when was that?” asked the Bastard.

“About a month later,” I replied casually. “In early November.”

“What made you think of it?” asked OCD.

I cocked my head to the side and smiled. “Do you mean was there a eureka moment?”

“Yeah,” he shot back, “a eureka moment. As in, Eureka! I just figured out a way to steal a quarter billion dollars and fuck over the SEC in the process!”

Hmmm, I thought, very clever and cynical this OCD was. Alas, he also happened to be right, although I would dispute the amount of money I stole. I mean, it couldn’t have possibly been a quarter billion dollars! Or could it? With a sinking heart, I said, “Yeah, well, whatever the amount was, I tell you the God’s honest truth that I didn’t start Stratton with bad intentions. But, like they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

“Fair enough,” snapped the Bastard. “You can tell that to the judge at the appropriate time.” He flashed me his warden’s smile. “But for now let’s just stick to the facts.”

I nodded in resignation. “Well, it started with George Grunfeld and what he’d said to me my first day at the Investors’ Center. This whole notion about rich people not buying penny stocks had never made sense to me, so I had Danny do a little experiment for me—trying to sell penny stocks to rich people. But rich people weren’t interested. So I figured maybe they were turned off because the stock was less than a dollar, so I found a six-dollar stock and had him try that. But that didn’t work either, and I have to say it surprised me.

“I mean, I really thought rich people would go for that, but when I called Danny into my office, he completely disagreed. ‘Maybe if I were calling from Merrill Lynch,’ he said. ‘But not when I’m calling from Stratton Securities; there are just too many things working against me. They haven’t heard of me, they haven’t heard of the firm, and they haven’t heard of the stock. You see what I’m saying?’

“‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I see exactly what you’re saying,’ and—boom!— just like that it hit me. I had my eureka moment. ‘Come back in here in fifteen minutes,’ I said to him, and before he was even out the door I had already picked up my pen and started writing a new cold-calling script. Fifteen minutes later, he was back in my office and I was explaining my new system. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘when we call someone for the first time, we’re not gonna try to sell them anything; we’re just going to introduce the firm and ask them if they’d be interested in hearing from us down the road.’ I handed him my new script. ‘Read this to me and tell me what you think.’

“He looked at the script for a second, and then started reading: ‘Hi, this is Danny Porush, calling from Stratton Securities. I know you’re busy, so I’ll get right to the point. You probably haven’t heard of us before, because for the last ten years we’ve been strictly an institutional block-trading firm, dealing with banks, insurance companies, pension funds.’ Danny started laughing. ‘This is classic…’

“‘Just shut up and keep reading,’ I said.

“He nodded and continued on: ‘However, we’ve recently opened up our doors to the more substantial private investor, and what I’d like to do, sir, with your permission, is send you out some information on our firm, Stratton Securities, and then get back to you down the road, next time we’re making a recommendation to one of our institutional clients. Sound fair enough?’ Danny stopped and flashed me one of his famous smiles.

“Ironically, Stratton really had been in business for ten years, and the only business they had done was trading with other brokerage firms, and since brokerage firms are considered institutions, I wasn’t really lying about Stratton’s business being strictly institutional.” I smiled at my own twisted logic. Then I gave up my smile and said, “I won’t deny that the script was a bit misleading, but that’s besides the point.

“Anyway, Danny was getting about ten leads a day, and after a week it was time to execute step two of my plan, which was to start off by selling a big stock, meaning a New York Stock Exchange stock they were familiar with. That’s why I chose Eastman Kodak: because of the name recognition and also because it was a very sexy story. They were in litigation with Polaroid at the time over patent infringement, and my script focused on how Kodak was sure to trade higher once the litigation settled.

“Yet, as good as my script was, Danny wasn’t all that impressed. He said, ‘Even if someone buys ten thousand dollars of Kodak, my commission is only a hundred bucks. So what’s the fucking point?’

“‘Think of it as a means to an end,’ I replied. ‘Next week, after they’ve paid for their trade, we’ll call them back for step two.’ And, with that, Danny shrugged and walked off, spending the next ten days opening accounts on Kodak, twelve of them in all, and each for around five thousand dollars, which was a hundred shares.

“Then I called him back into my office and explained step two, which wasn’t quite what he thought it’d be. ‘You mean you don’t want me to get them to dump their Kodak and buy a house stock?’ he asked.

“‘No,’ I said. ‘I want you to tell them that everything looks great with Kodak and that they should hold it for the long term.’ I handed him a script I’d written for a company called Ventura Entertainment.” I paused, offering my captors a wry smile. “I’m sure you’re all familiar with Ventura; it was the first stock we ever recommended.”

“Yeah,” said a cynical OCD. “And it was also the most overvalued entertainment stock in the history of entertainment stocks.”

I nodded sheepishly. “Yeah, but it wasn’t intentional. I just couldn’t keep up with the demand.” I shrugged. “But, that aside, Ventura was only a six-dollar stock back then, a tiny start-up not even listed on NASDAQ yet. It was still trading on the Pink Sheets. In truth, it could have just as easily been a penny stock, but by sheer coincidence the company’s president, a man by the name of Harvey Bibicoff, had been thinking the same thing as me— namely, that a six-dollar stock sounded more valuable than a twenty-cent stock. So when he took Ventura public, he structured it with only a million shares outstanding, as opposed to the twenty million shares a typical penny stock would have.” I looked at OCD. “You follow me, I assume.”

He nodded. “Yeah; a million shares at six dollars is the same as twenty million shares at thirty cents.”

“Exactly,” I said. “On a mathematical level they’re one and the same; however, on an emotional level they’re entirely different. And as Danny stood in my office, studying the script, I knew it was perfect, especially the opening, where I transitioned from big stocks to small stocks.

“‘Read it to me,’ I said to him. And he nodded and started reading: ‘Mr. Jones, two reasons for the call today. First, I wanted to give you a quick update on Kodak. Everything looks great there; the stock is right where we bought it, and it looks to trade higher over the short term. There’s been heavy institutional interest over the last few days, so for right now we’ll just sit tight.

“‘And the second reason for the call is that something just came across my desk this morning, and it’s perhaps the best thing I’ve seen in the last six months. It’s one of our own investment-bank deals—a company we’re intimately familiar with—and the upside is much greater than Kodak. If you have sixty seconds, I’d like to share the idea with you.’ Danny looked up and said. ‘This is fucking great! Let me give it a whirl!’

“I nodded in agreement. ‘Okay, but remember: These people are rich and sophisticated, so they’re not going to fall for hype and bullshit. You use logic and reason, and massive pressure. Never forget, Danny: We—do—not—work—on—callbacks! You have only one shot with these people. So stick to the script like glue.’ With that, Danny reminded me once more that he was Danny-fucking-Porush and that he could sell oil to an Arab and ice to an Eskimo! Then he nodded and walked off.”

I shrugged. “In retrospect, it’s rather ironic that I was only hoping to get a slightly bigger trade from my new system—maybe a thousand shares of Ventura, versus two hundred shares—but that was what I had in mind at the time.

“But five minutes later Danny came running back in my office, literally out of breath. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he snapped. ‘The first guy bought twenty thousand shares from me! Twenty—thousand-fucking—shares! Then he apologized to me for not buying more! He said that he wasn’t liquid right now, but as soon as he was, he’d buy more. Can you imagine?’

“And that was it. In that very instant, I knew. I knew that Danny’s client hadn’t made a distinction between sending a hundred twenty thousand dollars to Stratton Securities and sending a hundred twenty thousand to Merrill Lynch. And it was all because we’d recommended a blue-chip stock first. Meanwhile, Danny was happier than a pig in shit, because he’d just made twenty thousand in commission. But what he didn’t know was that I’d just made an additional sixty thousand dollars below the bid. And that was where the real juice was!”

“Explain that,” said the Bastard.

“Okay, follow me for a second: Ventura was five bid, six offer-meaning that if a client wanted to buy it he had to pay six dollars, but if he wanted to sell it he could only get five dollars. That’s why Danny’s commission was a buck a share, or twenty thousand dollars. But Harvey was giving Ventura warrants that had an exercise price of two. In other words, Ventura was costing me only two dollars a share. All told, on Danny’s twenty-thousand share block, I made sixty thousand below the bid, plus ten thousand above the bid, which was my half of Danny’s commission. And all of that was from a single phone call, from a single lead. But that was only the beginning.

“I knew right then and there that if Ventura went up, and there were thousands of clients in the system, they would send in millions more.” I paused for a moment, considering my words. “Of course, it would turn out to be hundreds of millions more, but at the time I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I still had serious obstacles to overcome, not the least of which was that Harvey had only a million warrants to sell, and with my new system, I would eat through those in a matter of weeks. Then I would have to buy stock in the open market.

“But first things first, I thought; I had to shut down the ‘Old Stratton’ and retrain everyone. But I went to Mike first to tell him my plan. It sounded good, he thought, but I could tell that he definitely wasn’t bowled over. ‘Give it a shot,’ he said casually. ‘However much business you bring in I can handle with no problem.’ And those were the famous last words of Mike Valenoti.

“A minute later I was standing in front of the boardroom, ready to give the meeting of a lifetime. I still remember this day like it was yesterday. ‘Everyone, hang up your phones!’ I said to the brokers. ‘Hang up your phones right now! I have something to say.’

“Most of them were right in the middle of calls, and they didn’t hang up the phones at first. So I winked at Lipsky, and he rose from his chair and began disconnecting their calls in mid-pitch. Then Danny joined in the act, and a few seconds later the room was quiet.

“‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Now that I have your attention, I want you to gather up your leads, your pitches, your rebuttals, your client books, and anything else on your desk that relates to being a stockbroker. I want you to gather it all up and throw it right in the fucking garbage can!’

“Of course, no one did anything at first; they were too dumbfounded to move. So Lipsky started snarling at everyone. ‘Let’s go! Chop chop! It’s time to clean house, like the boss says!’ And next thing I knew, Danny and the Blockhead were walking around holding trash bags, and the last vestiges of the old system were disappearing before my eyes. Within minutes, there were only twelve wooden desks, twelve old telephones, and twelve obscenely young stockbrokers, dressed in varying degrees of cheap, off-the-rack suits. And they were all staring at me wide-eyed, waiting to hear what I’d say next.

“‘I want everyone to listen up,’ I said, ‘because what I’m about to say is going to change your lives forever. The simple fact is that all of you are going to be rich beyond your wildest dreams.’ And I went on to explain my new system to them, pointing to Danny as proof that it worked.

“‘How much commission did you just gross in one trade?’ I asked him.

“‘Twenty grand!’ he shot back. ‘Twenty—fucking—grand!’

“‘Twenty fucking grand,’ I repeated, and I began pacing back and forth, like a preacher, letting my words hang in the air. Then I stopped. ‘And using my new system, Danny, how much do you think you can gross in a single month? Just a ballpark…’

“He pretended to think for a moment, playing the part perfectly. ‘At least a quarter million,’ he said confidently. ‘Anything less and I’ll fall on my sword!’ And with that, the room broke out into complete pandemonium.”

I shrugged. “The rest was easy. I retrained my Strattonites, using the straight-line theory. It was something that I’d come up with at the Investors’ Center but hadn’t considered crucial then, because when you’re speaking to poor people it’s more a question of whether or not they have money to invest; if they do, convincing them is easy. But with rich people, the rules are entirely different: They do have money to invest; it’s just a question of convincing them that you’re the one to invest it with. Are you smart enough? Are you sharp enough? Do you know things their local broker doesn’t? Are you a Wall Street wizard, worthy of managing a rich man’s money?

“That’s exactly what the straight line did: It allowed a twenty-year-old kid, with a high school diploma and an IQ just above the level of Forrest Gump, to sound like a Wall Street wizard.” I paused for a moment, thinking of a way to explain the theory. “In essence, it was a system of scripts and rebuttals that allowed even the most dim-witted of stockbrokers to control a sale. It kept things moving forward, from point A to point B—from the open to the close—until a client finally said, All right, for Chrissake! Pick me up ten thousand shares! Just leave me alone!’ I know it sounds simple, but no one else had ever done this before. There were hundreds of scripts floating around Wall Street, but no one had ever organized them into a cohesive system.

“Anyway, for ten solid days I taught it to them—going back and forth, role-playing, like I’d done with Danny that night—until they knew it so well that they could recite the fucking lines in their sleep. Actually, I only spent half of each day teaching them; the other half they spent cold-calling, building a massive war chest of leads to call.

“And finally, on day ten when the leads came due, they started opening accounts on Kodak with such ease that it was literally mind-boggling. It was as if the straight line could turn even the weakest salesman into a total killer. And that emboldened me even further, and I began pounding at them even more mercilessly, promising them riches beyond their wildest dreams.

“‘I want you to start spending money now,’ I preached to them. ‘I want you to leverage yourselves! To back yourselves into a corner! To give yourselves no choice but to succeed! Let the consequences of failure become so dire and so unthinkable that you won’t be able to stomach the thought of it.

“‘Understand this,’ I said. ‘When Pizarro came to the New World, the first thing he did was burn his fucking ships, so his crew would have no choice but to hack out an existence in the New World. And that’s what I want you to do! I want you to cut off all exit ramps, all escape routes!

“‘After all, you owe it to the person sitting next to you to dial the phone. You owe it to every other Strattonite sitting in this room to dial the phone. That’s where our power comes from: from one another, from a collective effort, from the combined energy of a room full of the most motivated people to ever hit Wall Street, a room full of winners!’”

I paused and took a moment to catch my breath. “Anyway, you all know what happened next: Seven days later they began pitching Ventura, and all hell broke loose. Blocks of tens and twenties began slinging around the boardroom like water, and money began falling out of the sky.” I shook my head slowly. “And I can’t even begin to describe how quickly we grew from this point. It was as if gold had been struck, and young prospectors began showing up in Lake Success to stake their claims. At first they trickled in, then they poured in. It started from towns in Queens and Long Island and quickly spread across the country. And just like that, Stratton was born.

“Anyway, it was only a few weeks after this when I walked into my office one morning and found Jim Taormina waiting for me. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Stratton is yours,’ and he handed me a set of keys he was holding. ‘I’ll sell you the place for a dollar and be your head trader. Just please take my name off the license!’

“And then Mike came in, the old Wall Street war dog, who’d thought he’d seen everything. ‘You have to stop them!’ he begged. ‘We can’t handle any more business right now. We’re on the verge of blowing up our clearing agent.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this, Jordan. It’s absolutely incredible….’ The funny thing was that our clearing agent—meaning the company that processed our trades—couldn’t handle the influx of volume and was threatening to pull the plug on us unless we slowed things down.

“And then came the Blockhead. ‘I’m underwater with commissions,’ he said, panic-stricken. ‘I can’t keep track of them. Millions are pouring in, and the bank keeps calling me.’ I had put the Blockhead in charge of our finances, and he was underwater now-drowning beneath a sea of money and paperwork.

“In any event, these were all good problems, problems that were easy to handle. With Jim Taormina, I did as he asked: I bought the firm from him for a dollar and made him my head trader. With Mike, I did as he asked too: I stood before the boardroom and gave a sales meeting that turned the whole thing into a positive.

“With piss and vinegar, I said, ‘What we have here is so powerful and so effective that the rest of Wall Street can’t even keep up with us!’ And, with that, my Strattonites clapped and cheered and hooted and howled. Then we spent the next two weeks just getting leads, which ultimately fueled our growth even further.

“And to help the Blockhead, I turned to my father, who was still unemployed. He was a brilliant man, a licensed CPA who’d spent the better part of his life as the CFO of various private companies. But he was in his mid-fifties now—a bit too old and way too overqualified to land a good job.

“So I recruited him—reluctantly at first, but I recruited him nonetheless. And he moved into the Blockhead’s office, where the two of them had the pleasure of driving each other crazy. Mad Max quickly bared his fangs—calling the Blockhead a fucking twerp and a fucking moron and a thousand other fucking things, including, of course, a fucking blockhead. And the fact that the Blockhead was allergic to cigarette smoke was something Mad Max relished beyond belief—consuming four packs a day and exhaling thick jets of smoke right in the Blockhead’s face, with the force of a Civil War cannon.

“But, that aside, you can see how I had the whole thing wired now. Between Mike and my father I had my rear flank covered, and between Danny and Kenny I had a tip of a sword that rivaled the Mossad. And I… well, let’s just say that I had all the time I needed to sit back and give meetings and focus on the big picture— and to resolve the last missing piece of the puzzle, which was where to find more warrants that would provide me with cheap stock, like Ventura warrants did.”

I looked at OCD and smiled. “Care to guess who I turned to for that?”

OCD cringed. “Al Abrams,” he muttered.

“Indeed,” I said. “Mr. Al Abrams, the maddest of all Wall Streeters.” I cocked my head to the side and stared down OCD. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Greg, but I once heard a rumor that Al was writing letters to Bill Clinton about you, saying you were a rogue agent.”

OCD shook his head wearily. “He’s one crazy old bird, that guy. When I arrested him, he had a hundred documents on him, some more than thirty years old!”

“Well, that sounds like Al,” I said casually. “He never liked to throw things out. He’s what you call a careful criminal.”

“Not careful enough,” said the Witch. “Last time I checked, he was still behind bars.” She flashed me a devilish smile.

Yeah, I thought, but not because of you, Cruella; it was OCD who’d caught him. But I kept that thought to myself and said, “Actually, I think he’s out now, probably back in Connecticut, driving his poor wife insane.” I looked at OCD. “Just out of curiosity: When you arrested him, did he have any food in his pockets? Any half-eaten Linzer tortes? He loved those.”

“Just a few crumbs,” answered OCD.

I nodded in understanding. “Yeah, he was probably saving those in case of a famine…” and I spent the next few hours explaining how Al Abrams had taught me the dark art of stock manipulation. Thrice weekly we’d meet for breakfast at the local Greek diner, where I had the pleasure of watching Al consume countless Linzer tortes, with half the torte making its way into his mouth and the other half making its way onto his cheeks and forehead; meanwhile, he would be drinking cup after cup of overcaffeinated coffee, until his hands shook.

Through it all—through all the slobbering and shaking and squeaking and squawking—he gave me the education of a lifetime. But, alas, unlike my education from Mike, this one concerned the dark side of things, the seedy underbelly of Wall Street’s over-the-counter market—which was the precursor to the NASDAQ—where stocks traded by appointment, and prices were set at the self-serving whims of dark-intentioned men like Al and me.

Most troubling, I admitted, was that it wasn’t long before I was teaching Al a thing or two. Within weeks, in fact, I was modernizing his rather dated stock scams—bringing my own flair and panache to them, along with the sort of brazenness that would come to characterize the Wolf of Wall Street.

By now it was a little after five, and I was finally done singing on Court Street for the day, a day that my captors considered a great success. After all, they now knew exactly how Stratton Oakmont came into existence and how—through a series of tiny coincidences and happenstances—it wound up on, of all places, Long Island.

Before I left the debriefing room, the last thing I asked the Bastard was how long he thought it would be until I actually got sentenced. Would it be three years? Four years? Perhaps even five years? The longer the better, I thought.

“Probably four or five years,” he answered. “These things have a way of dragging on sometimes.”

“That’s true,” added the Witch, “and they won’t be easy years. Your cooperation will be made public sometime next year, and we’ll be seizing your assets accordingly.”

Now OCD chimed in, offering me a thin ray of hope: “Yeah, but you’ll have a chance to start a new life. You’re a young guy, and next time you’ll do things right, hopefully.”

I nodded in agreement, hanging on to the words of OCD and the Bastard while ignoring those of the Witch. Unfortunately, they would all be wrong, and I would be seeing the inside of a jail cell long before that.

And I would lose everything.

^{CHAPTER 13} THE REVOLVING DOOR

Two Months Later

Southampton Beach! For better or worse, there was no denying that Meadow Lane was a fabulous place to watch the walls of reality come crashing down on me. The blue waters of the Atlantic were just behind me; the gray waters of Shinnecock Bay were just before me; and on either side of me, stately mansions—like mine—rose up from out of the dunes, like Greek temples bearing silent witness to how wonderful it was to be a wealthy WASP or a nouveau riche Jew.

My particular mansion, which would soon be owned by OCD and the Bastard, was a sprawling gray and white affair, built in the Cape Cod style. On the rear deck, a pool and Jacuzzi looked out over the Atlantic; on the front lawn, an all-weather tennis court looked out over the Shinnecock; and out in front, a row of immaculately trimmed box hedges rose up twelve feet in the air, concealing the property from view.

At this particular moment, I was sitting on a shabby-chic couch in the mansion’s shabby-chic living room, staring into the doelike eyes of Sarah Weissman,† self-proclaimed Jewish blow-job queen. She was sitting less than two feet away, wearing a black cotton turtleneck and black knit leggings, accentuating a tight little body that reeked of past beauty and present-day bulimia.

Nevertheless, the Blow-Job Queen was still a looker. Only twenty-two, she had a pleasantly narrow face, gleaming black hair, jet-black eyes, olive skin, a first-class nose job, ortho-perfect teeth, and a lower lip lusher than the Nile. And despite knowing her only fifteen minutes, I thought she seemed like a reasonably good egg. We’d met this evening at a local AA meeting and had hit it off instantly. She was newly sober (less than a week, actually), battling a triple addiction to crack, booze, and self-induced vomiting, the latter of which I found rather disgusting. But she was on the rebound now, fresh out of detox and back in the Hamptons, ready to resume her life.

Up until now we had made mostly small talk—trading war stories about our drug addictions—but apparently she was ready to get down to business, because she was in the middle of saying, “…that it’s Jewish girls who give the best blow jobs in the world. Did you know that?”

“Uh… no,” I answered. “I’ve never dated a Jewish girl before.”

“Well, they do,” she said proudly, “and if you want, I’ll prove it to you.”

“Yeah, that would be great!” I answered, and the Jewish Blow-Job Queen quickly went to work—rising into a crouch and kneeing her way toward me with a lubricious smile on her face. Instinctively, I leaned back and rested my head on a soft, circular throw pillow, as the Blow-Job Queen reached forward with her tiny hands and unzipped my fly. Then, with remarkable efficiency, she pulled down my jeans to my ankles, climbed between my legs, and twisted her long black hair into a ponytail.

Suddenly she paused.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing, silly,” she said, as she removed her gold necklace, on the end of which dangled a diamond-studded Jewish star. She put it in her pocket. “I don’t want it to get in my way.”

I nodded in understanding, and I closed my eyes, hiked up my legs, and prepared for the blow job of a lifetime. It would be just what the doctor ordered, I thought. One hummer from the Blow-Job Queen and I would forget about the Duchess forever!

“Oww!” snapped the Blow-Job Queen. “There’s something jabbing me in my butt!” I looked down and—Christ! My ankle bracelet was jabbing the Blow-Job Queen in her bony butt.

I lowered my legs with the speed of a jackrabbit. “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a beeper I wear for work. It’s okay; keep going.”

The Blow-Job Queen narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “A beeper, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said, “a beeper.”

A few moments passed as she continued to stare. “All right,” she finally said. “I’ll take your word for it,” and she slowly leaned over and started blowing me… and it was one of those long, sumptuous blow jobs, the sort a man only gets from his wife during the courting period.

I started moaning in appreciation: “Oh, God, Sarah! It feels sooo good. You were right: Jewish girls do give the best blow jobs!”

“ Uhm-hum,” she mumbled, unable to speak.

“Ahhhh…” I moaned, and I closed my eyes and let my nervous system dissolve… letting my problems drift further and further away… until nothing mattered anymore… just the Blow-Job Queen and her blow job… and my mind started to wander…wander to the Duchess…. What was she doing right now? Was she at home with the kids, or was she out with another man? It was a weeknight, so she would probably be home with the kids… although I was hearing rumors that she was having an affair with her personal trainer, some Romanian dirtbag named Alex… although that was unimportant now…. It was the kids who were important… they were everything to me….

Just then—a cool sensation! I opened my eyes and the Blow-Job Queen’s head was popping up, a concerned expression on her face. “What’s wrong?” she said. “It doesn’t feel good?”

I looked down—oh, Christ! My penis looked like a strand of overcooked spaghetti! How very fucking embarrassing! “Oh… uh… no,” I mumbled, “everything’s fine. I mean, it’s the best blow job I ever got. It’s just that”—desperately I searched for the proper words—”uh, it’s just that you’re the, uh, the first girl I’ve been with in like, uh, ten years. I mean, not including my wife, of course—I mean, my ex-wife, or my soon-to-be ex-wife is more like it.” I paused for a second, asking myself if the fact that I’d slept with close to a thousand hookers while I was married to the Duchess meant I was now lying to the Blow-Job Queen.

I sat up straight and took a deep, troubled breath and let it out slow. “I’m really sorry,” I said softly. “Maybe it’s too soon for me. I’m not sure.” I shook my head sadly.

The Blow-Job Queen took no offense; instead, she offered me the warmest of smiles, an altogether maternal smile. “That’s okay,” she said. “I think it’s sweet that you’re nervous. It makes me want you even more.” She smiled again, and I noticed that her teeth were very white. That’s good, I thought. The Blow-Job Queen has very white teeth.

“Now, lie back down and relax,” she said warmly. “And stop worrying! Everything’s gonna be fine.” And, with that, the Blow-Job Queen placed her tiny hand on my shoulder and gently pushed me back down. “Just relax your mind…” she said, in a tone normally used by a hypnotist, “relax your body… relax everything… it’s all gonna be okay….”

I nodded dutifully and closed my eyes, thinking—Jesus H. Christ! The Blow-Job Queen really has her shit together! I mean, here she is, three days sober, a crack addict, a bulimic, an alcoholic, most certainly a pill-popper, and probably an anorexic too, yet she’s completely taken control of the situation. I felt lucky to have her.

And indeed I was. In no time flat, the Blow-Job Queen was humming away, with the sort of unbridled relish you usually see in porn videos. A few minutes later, I screamed, “Oh, my God! I”—I held back the words love you, which was what I truly felt like screaming, and screamed—”can’t take it anymore!” And a split second later I was done. True to her word, the Jewish Blow-Job Queen had gotten the best of me, and my body was now limp.

Just then she popped up her head and wiped her chin with the back of her hand. “So how do you feel now?” she asked provocatively.

“Amazing, Sarah. I feel truly amazing.”

She smiled broadly and kindly. “I’m glad,” she said happily. “I’m really glad,” and she started looking around the living room at the towering sandstone fireplace behind her, at the dozen pieces of shabby-chic furniture surrounding her—all the couches and armchairs and ottomans and coffee tables and end tables and the throw pillows and flowers and vases and paintings on the walls and, just off the living room, the shabby-chic dining-room table, which was larger than a horseshoe pit. Then she looked up at the thirty-foot ceiling, and then, finally, she looked at the plate-glass wall that ran the entire length of the back of the house and looked out over the Atlantic.

“You know,” she said, “this place is really beautiful. I mean, I’ve been around money before, but this place reeks of old money! You know what I mean?”

Old money? Jesus! If there were newer money anywhere in the Hamptons, I was yet to find it. Perhaps she meant evaporating money? That would be more accurate. “Thanks,” I said, “but it’s not old money, Sarah. It’s as new as it gets.” I smiled, eager to change the subject. “Anyway, you want to take a walk on the beach? It’s a beautiful night tonight.”

“I can’t,” she said sadly. “I gotta get home; my boyfriend’s waiting for me.”

I popped upright. “Your boyfriend! You have a boyfriend?”

She shrugged. “Yeah, I live with someone. I probably shouldn’t be here. You know what I mean?”

I took a moment to run that through my mind and decided she was right: She probably shouldn’t be here. But, then again, at this time of year there weren’t many girls in the Hamptons, so if I let the Blow-Job Queen go I would be alone again. I took a moment to study her features. Was she beautiful enough? Could she stand up to the Duchess? She had a very nice nose, the Blow-Job Queen, and perhaps I could find peace through her blow jobs. In fact, maybe I could even turn her into another Duchess! I could take her shopping and buy her clothes and jewelry, and then take her out for fancy dinners; maybe I would even introduce her to my kids. After all, she was sober for three whole days now and was definitely on the rebound. All in all, I would say, she was a very good catch!

And so it was that five days later I convinced the Jewish Blow-Job Queen to break up with her boyfriend, and I moved her into my mansion on Meadow Lane, where twice a day she gave me world-class blow jobs and occasionally made love to me. And it was perfect. We exchanged our first “I love yous” on day seven and started talking marriage on day ten. She shrugged off my ankle bracelet as if it were no big deal—in fact, the Bastard, in a rare moment of humanity, had eased my restrictions, changing them from a twenty-four-hour lockdown to a midnight curfew—and I shrugged off her excusing herself from the dinner table and vomiting up her food with the same kindness and understanding.

Meanwhile, my cooperation was going fabulously. I hadn’t heard from OCD in weeks, which, according to Magnum, was par for the course. After all, I had spent a solid month singing on Court Street, going through all of Stratton’s deals while giving OCD and the Bastard the education of a lifetime. Now they needed to do their homework—to subpoena records, interview witnesses, follow paper trails.

On a down note, my meeting with the Blue-eyed Devil had turned out to be a complete waste of time. He was far too cagey to get caught speaking on tape, especially to someone under indictment. Nevertheless, my captors had taken my failure in stride, assuring me that it wasn’t my fault. As long as I tried my best, said OCD, I would receive my 5K letter. It was all about honesty; just remember that, he’d urged, and I’d emerge from jail still a young man.

And that was the last time we’d spoken, with the exception of a brief heads-up call, during which he told me that Danny had made bail and that Victor Wang had finally been indicted. And without saying it, the message was clear: Danny was cooperating, and Victor had become the Witch’s captive, her personal trophy to be put on display.

Whatever the case, it was sometime around Thanksgiving when I finally introduced the kids to the Blow-Job Queen. And she was wonderful with them; in fact, with the exception of one hiccup-she suffered a panic attack, accompanied by violent body shakes, while the four of us were having lunch in East Hampton—I began to view her as a suitable stepmother for the children. And while we hadn’t actually set a wedding date, it was only a matter of time. We were perfect together, two damaged souls who had somehow managed to fix each other.

And then disaster struck. It was the week before Christmas, and we were lying in bed together, happy as clams. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was watching TV and she was reading a book. I glanced over and noticed that she was wearing granny glasses. I also noticed a tiny scar beneath her chin. I stared at the scar. Not very attractive! I thought. Then I stared at the granny glasses. Even less attractive! I thought. Then I lowered my gaze to her tiny chest and her reed-thin arms. Downright ugly! I thought.

We were lying beneath the white silk comforter, so I couldn’t take in her whole body, but, in spite of that, there was no denying that I’d caught her at a very bad angle. And that was it: I no longer loved the Blow-Job Queen.

I took a deep breath and tried to steel myself, but it was no use. I couldn’t have her in my house anymore. I needed to be alone, or with the Duchess. Perhaps I could convince the Duchess to get back together for the sake of the kids. Alas, I had already tried that angle, to no avail. The latest rumor was that she was banging Michael Bolton, that ponytailed bastard of a singer!

In any event, the next day I threw the Blow-Job Queen out—or at least tried to, at which point she had a nervous breakdown in my living room, threatening suicide. So I told her that I was only kidding, that I didn’t really want to end things. I was just getting cold feet as a result of all the turmoil in my life.

To that she smiled sadly and asked me if I would like a blow job. I pondered that for a moment, knowing that this would most certainly be the best blow job of all, considering the Blow-Job Queen would now be blowing me to maintain her position on Meadow Lane.

But in the end I told her that I wouldn’t, although perhaps I would later. She seemed relieved by that, so I quickly excused myself, saying I needed to take a quick ride to see my sponsor, George, who lived just down the road.

“Can’t you just come over with a straitjacket and take her away?” I asked George. “I don’t see any other solution.”

Those weren’t the first words I’d uttered to George that afternoon, but they were close to the first. The first were: “I’m in deep shit, George. The Blow-Job Queen is threatening to commit suicide, and my dick is so sore from all the blow jobs that it’s ready to fall off!”

George and I were sitting in his French country kitchen on opposite sides of his bleached-wood table, while his wife, Annette, a five-foot-tall, beautiful Brooklyn firecracker with strawberry-blond hair, perfect Irish Spring skin, and a ferocious Brooklyn accent fixed us coffee. Actually, it was more than coffee (it was donuts, muffins, coffee, and freshly cut fruit), because Annette never did anything half-assed, especially when it came to achieving her life’s primary mission, which was to make George’s life as comfortable and wonderful as possible. And, in truth, George deserved it.

At sixty-two, he was twelve years older than Annette and served as living proof that a leopard can change its spots. Those who hadn’t heard from George in the last twenty-two years would warn you: “If you see this guy walking down the street, cross it and don’t make eye contact. He’s angry and dangerous, especially when he’s drunk, which is always. And if he does happen to beat you up or simply hold you upside down by your ankle and shake you for a while, don’t bother calling the cops, unless you tell them that it was some six-foot-tall, two-hundred-fifty-pound guy named George who assaulted you. This way they’ll know to bring tranq-darts!“

Whatever the case, George eventually got sober, and spent the next twenty-two years of his life redeeming himself. He made his first fortune in real estate, his second fortune in drug rehabs, and, along the way, helped more recovering Hamptons alcoholics than any other ten men combined.

Ironically, the first time I met George was on TV, when his menacingly handsome face popped onto my screen at three in the morning, while I was in the midst of a cocaine binge. George was doing an advertisement for his rehab facility, Seafield, and he was saying things like, “Are you stoned… drunk… high? Where is your family

right now? You need help; Seafield has the answers…”. My response to that was to throw a bronze sculpture through my TV screen, putting a premature end to George’s commercial.

Yet I remember thinking at the time that the face on my TV was the sort I would never forget—those gruffly handsome features, those piercing brown eyes, that perfectly coiffed salt-and-pepper hair—which was why it didn’t take long to recognize him when I ran into him six weeks later in Southampton, in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. And now, eighteen months after that, he was much more to me than just a sponsor. In point of fact, he was like a father.

“I can’t just come over with a straitjacket,” said George, with a few shakes of his enormous head. “You know, I warned you about this: Two alcoholics dating are like two dump trucks running into each other.” He shrugged his enormous shoulders. “Anyway, like I said before: You—are—not—done—with—your—wife—yet. It’s too soon.”

Just then Annette chimed in, with her wonderful Brooklyn accent: “Oh, what’s the harm, Gawge? A few BJs ain’t gonna kill anyone! Jordan’s lonely; he needs to have a little fun!” With that, she padded her way across the gleaming terra-cotta floor and placed the coffee and consumables on the kitchen table.

“Annette,” said George, staring at her for a second too long, “he does not need to be encouraged in this department.” Then he looked at me and said, “I’ll see if I can convince Sarah to check into Seafield, but only because I think it would be good for her. In the meantime, I suggest that you don’t date for a while. You should stay alone for a year and learn to be by yourself. And keep going to the high schools, giving antidrug lectures; that’s the best way to spend your free time right now, being productive and not getting laid.”

I promised George that I would, and for the next four weeks I followed his advice to the letter—almost. The “almost” had to do with an occasional tryst with a young Russian gold digger—or a Natasha, as the newspapers referred to them—courtesy of a casual acquaintance of mine in the Hamptons, a local playboy type who could send a posse of naughty Natashas to all four corners of the earth at the drop of a dime.

Pretty soon, though, that got old too. In fact, by the beginning of April, I decided to close the revolving door for good, or at least for a while, and I settled into a daily regimen of boringness and tediousness, punctuated by weekend visits from the kids and nightly dinners with George and Annette.

Yes, it was boring and tedious, all right, but it also gave me a chance to find myself, to try to figure out who Jordan Belfort really was. The last decade of my life had been unspeakably complicated, and the child my parents had sent out into the world bore little resemblance to the Jordan Belfort of today. So who was I now? Was I a good man or a bad man? Was I a battle-hardened career criminal or an upstanding citizen who’d simply lost his way? Was I capable of being a loyal and loving husband, or was I a habitual whoremonger who would refuse to wear a condom until his dick fell off? And what of my drug addiction? Was the beast merely sleeping or had I kicked the habit for good?

All these questions and many more like them had been ricocheting around my skull as I passed the rest of my winter in exile. The insanity, as I had come to think of it, had penetrated every aspect of my life and had destroyed everything in its path. So this was my chance to finally sort things out, to get to the bottom of things. The only question was, how long would I have?

Not long, as it turned out, because OCD quickly broke the boredom.

It was a Monday evening when he called, and it was a disturbing call to say the least. I was sitting in my living room, on an armchair, when the cordless phone rang. I put down my AA handbook and picked it up. “Hello?”

“Hey—it’s me,” said OCD. “Are you alone?”

Given the fact that it was the FBI calling, I actually looked around my own living room to make sure that I was alone. “Yeah,” I said, “I’m alone.” And I stood up and started pacing around nervously. “What’s going on? How’ve you been?”

“Busy,” he replied. “Following up on things. Anyway, how ya holding up out there? Slept with any Ruskies lately?”

“Very funny,” I replied, with a healthy dose of nervous laughter. “I’m done with the Natashas for now. I can’t take their accents. You know, da, da, da… blah, blah, blah. It gets annoying after a while.” On the advice of Magnum, I had told OCD about the naughty Natashas, lest it come out on the witness stand under cross-examination. So OCD did his own investigation, and, not surprisingly, came to the legal conclusion that there was nothing inherently against the law about getting raked over the coals by gold-digging Russians. “Anyway, what’s going on?” I asked. “I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

No response at first, just a few moments of sickly silence, the sort you hear when a time bomb ticks down to zero and there’s a seemingly endless delay before the explosion. Finally he said, “Not much, really, but I need you to wire up against Dave Beall.” More silence. “I know this isn’t pleasant for you, but you need to do this.”

“Why?” I snapped. “He’s nobody!” And even as the words escaped my lips, I knew how ridiculous they sounded. It had nothing to do with whether or not I had committed crimes with Dave Beall (of course I had, simply because I’d committed crimes with all my friends), and it had everything to do with whom Dave Beall could lead them to.

OCD, calmly: “Who he is isn’t what’s important; what is important is that I know he’s one of your closest friends.” He paused for a moment, as if searching for the right words. “Listen—I don’t take any great pleasure in this, and, believe it or not, neither does Joel. But this is something you have to do. I want you to try to set a dinner meeting with him, okay?”

With a sinking heart: “Yeah. I mean, what fucking choice do I have, right?” I let out an obvious sigh. “When do you want me to call him?”

“There’s no time like the present,” said OCD. “Can I make the call?”

I shook my head sadly. “Yeah, what’s the fucking difference anymore? Where do you want me to set the meeting?”

“In a restaurant, a quiet one, somewhere on Long Island, but not in the Hamptons. It’s too far for me.”

I thought for a moment. “How about Caracalla, in Syosset? It’s Italian, small, quiet, good food.” I shook my head in despair. “It’s as good a place as any to betray my best friend, you know?”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” said OCD. “If the shoe were on the other foot, he would do the same thing. Trust me.”

“I do trust you,” I said, but what I didn’t say was that I knew he was wrong. Dave would never betray me. “Go ahead, make the call. Let’s get it over with.”

“All right, hold on a second…” Silence for a moment, then two clicks, then: “This is Special Agent Gregory Coleman of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The date is April third, 1999, and the time is eight p.m. This is a consensually recorded phone conversation between Jordan Belfort, a cooperating witness with the federal government, and David Beall.” Another moment of silence, then I heard the dull-thudded ringing of Dave’s home telephone, and with each ring my spirits sank lower. The moment Dave picked it up, it occurred to me that I was no longer lower than pond scum.

Now I was lower than the mucus that feeds off pond scum.

^{CHAPTER 14} A CRISIS OF CONSCIENCE

In a way, David Michael Beall came to represent everything that could have been righteous and pure about Stratton Oakmont. Born in the ultrahick town of Burtonsville, Maryland, where sports like horseshoes and cow-tipping were the favorite pastimes, he had grown up dirt-poor and without the benefit of a father. It was the sort of do-it-yourself childhood in which a deep cut was stitched up by your own mother, using a heated sewing needle and thread.

Intellectually, Dave was neither overly bright nor overly dumb; he was average. And he wasn’t much of a salesman; he was too honest and forthright, speaking with the sort of slow Southern drawl that couldn’t convince anybody to do something they didn’t want to do in the first place.

Like most kids from Burtonsville, he didn’t grow up with a burning desire to be rich—that would come later—but what he did grow up with was a clear understanding that the world was filled with few chiefs and many Indians and that he was an Indian, and there was nothing wrong with that.

Normally, a six-foot-two-inch country bumpkin like Dave Beall would never go to college; instead, he would take a job at the local garage, doing oil changes and tune-ups, and then pass his weekends trying to get into the skintight jeans of the local Mary Joe Something-or-other. But as luck would have it, Dave was blessed with two wonderful things—speed and strength—which together earned him a full ride to the University of Maryland on a wrestling scholarship.

Along the way, he met a beautiful blond Jewess named Laurie Elovitch, who was half his size and his complete opposite. Laurie was from Long Island, and she came from a very wealthy and politically connected family, so after she and Dave graduated, they moved up to Long Island to be near them. It was understood that a guy like Dave—whom you would normally find sitting on a bale of hay, wearing denim overalls and no shirt—would be a fish out of water in cutthroat Long Island. Everyone assumed that Laurie’s father, Larry, would help Dave find his way, that he would use his political connections to get Dave a decent job (perhaps in the parks department or in sanitation).

But again, fate would intervene in the life of Dave Beall—when, in November of 1988, Laurie stumbled upon a help-wanted ad in the New York Times and Dave became one of the first young Americans to answer the Stratton call-to-arms. Like many young bucks who came after him, he drove to his interview in a piece-a-shit car, wearing a piece-a-shit suit, which, in his case, was so tattered that his future mother-in-law had to use masking tape to stop it from coming apart at the seams.

Nevertheless, he passed the mirror test without incident and then went through the training program and learned how to sell— or, in Stratton terms, he learned to become a killer. Twice a day, as I stood before the boardroom and did my thing, he also came to believe that greed was good, that clients should either buy or die, and that a life of wealth and ostentation was the only true path to happiness.

And—voilà!—six months later, Dave Beall was driving a convertible Porsche, dressing in $2,000 suits, and speaking with the unbridled cocksureness of a world-class stockbroker.

However, it was through his marriage to Laurie that his fate would ultimately be sealed; Laurie would strike up the closest of friendships with the Duchess—thereby thrusting Dave and I into a very unlikely one. We were an odd couple, for sure, yet, as my drug addiction spiraled out of control, Dave became the perfect companion for me. After all, he never had much to say in the first place, and now I was too stoned most of the time to understand him anyway. So we watched movies together, the same ones over and over again—James Bond, mostly, and original episodes of Star Trek—while we holed up in my basement, with the shades drawn and the lights dimmed, and I consumed enough drugs to knock out a family of grizzly bears.

Of course, Dave loved his drugs too, but not nearly as much. (Who did, save Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones?) Either way, he was always sober enough to keep an eye on me, which was the Duchess’s order. Her own patience had already run out, so she put Dave in charge of making sure I didn’t kill myself before she figured out a way to get me into rehab.

Eventually, she did, but not before I did try to kill myself.

And as I had stood in Dave’s kitchen two years ago, distraught and desperate, chewing on a hundred tablets of morphine, he wrestled me to the ground and stuck his fingers in my mouth and scooped the pills out. Then he called an ambulance and saved my life.

Four weeks later, when I emerged from rehab and arrived in Southampton with my marriage in tatters, it was Dave and Laurie who came out to the beach and did what they could to help us pick up the pieces. While I was well aware that that was something only the Duchess and I could do, it was a gesture I would never forget.

Yet even more telling was how Dave and Laurie acted after my indictment: While most of my friends ran for cover, Dave stood by me, and while most of the Duchess’s friends jumped on the dump-your-husband bandwagon, Laurie tried to convince her to stay.

It was for all those reasons that, as I now sat with Dave in Caracalla restaurant, I felt like the world’s biggest louse. I wore dark-blue Levi’s, which concealed OCD’s devilish little Nagra, and beneath my black cotton sweater was OCD’s ultrasensitive microphone, which was rising up my sternum and coming to rest just to the right of my breaking heart.

Although it would be just the two of us this evening, we were sitting at a table for four, set for four, with a starchy-white tablecloth, bone-white china, and gleaming silverware. Dave was sitting just to my left, less than two feet away—so close, I thought, that OCD’s microphone would pick up the sound of his breathing. He wore a navy sport jacket over a white T-shirt—typical dress for Dave Beall—and on his large, handsome face he wore the most innocent of expressions: a lamb waiting to be slaughtered.

After a few minutes of small talk, he handed me a stack of papers. “You mind taking a look at these?” he asked. “I’m thinking about going into the currency-trading business. People are making a fortune in it.”

“Sure,” I replied—and Jesus Christ! I thought. How terribly simple this is going to be! This so-called currency-trading business was the latest scam floating around, and I had no doubt that I could get Dave to incriminate himself in under a minute. Still, this had nothing to do with what OCD and the Bastard were interested in; rather, they wanted to know about the brokerage firm Dave had worked for after Stratton closed. Whatever the case, it would be just as easy to get Dave to spill the beans about that.

So I spent a few moments pretending to look at his papers, which had words like yen and deutsche mark plastered on them as I snuck peeks around the restaurant out of the corner of my eye. Caracalla was a small place, with maybe fifteen or twenty tables. At eight p.m. on a Wednesday, only a few of them were occupied. It was mostly middle-aged couples, none of whom had any idea of the utter deceit that was transpiring just a few yards away. OCD and the Mormon were waiting for me in the parking lot of a local movie theater, so it was just Dave and me…. the man who’d saved my life… the only friend who’d stood by me.…Our children were friends… our wives were friends… we were friends!… How could I do this?

I couldn’t.

Without even thinking, I put down the papers, excused myself from the table, and headed for the bathroom. On the way, I stopped at a waiters’ station and snatched a pen. Inside the bathroom, concealed by a stall, I grabbed a paper towel out of a dispenser, leaned it on the wall, and in big block letters I wrote: DON’T INCRIMINATE YOURSELF! I’M WIRED!

I looked at the note for a second, my heart beating out of my chest. If OCD and the Bastard found out about this, I would be dead meat. They would break my cooperation right on the spot, and I’d be sentenced without a 5K letter. Thirty fucking years! I thought. I did the calculations: I would be sixty-six years old! I took a deep breath and tried to steel myself. There was no way OCD could ever find out. I was certain of it.

Emboldened by that thought, I exited the bathroom and headed back to the table, my eyes darting around the restaurant, like a jackrabbit’s. No one looked suspicious. The coast was clear; there were no government agents.

The moment I reached the table, I placed my left hand on Dave’s shoulder and put my right forefinger to my lips, in the sign that says: “Shhh!” In my left hand was the note, folded in half. I removed my hand from his shoulder, unfolded the note with my fingers, and then placed it on the table in front of him.

As I sat down, I watched his blue eyes literally pop out of his beefy skull, like hat pegs, as he read the note to himself. Then he looked at me, dumbfounded. I looked back, stone-faced. Then I nodded slowly. He nodded back.

“Anyway,” I said, “as far as the currency-trading business goes, I think it’s a good thing, but you need to be careful. There’s a lot of cash floating around there—at least that’s what I hear; everyone’s taking kickbacks. I mean, it was one thing when you and I did it, but it’s different when there’re strangers involved.” I lowered my voice for effect. “Let me ask you a question,” I whispered. “You never deposited any of the cash I gave you, did you?”

He looked at me wide-eyed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m broke right now.”

“I understand that,” I whispered, “but I’m not talking about right now. I’m talking about two years ago. I’m worried about the quarter million I gave you. What did you do with the cash?”

A bead of sweat began running down his thick brow. “I think you were stoned back then, big guy! I’m broke right now….”

And that was how the evening went down.

An hour later, when I handed OCD the tape, I felt a slight twinge of guilt, but only a slight twinge. After all, if OCD were to find out about this, he would understand. Ohhh, he would still have no choice but to throw me in jail for the next thirty years; but he wouldn’t take my betrayal personally. He would agree that there’s only so low a man can stoop before he’s no longer a man, and, tonight I had reached that point, and, yes, tonight I had acted like a man.

On my way back to Southampton, I realized that I had found something very important this evening, something that I had lost many years ago, on that very first day I had walked into the Investors’ Center and saw the spreads.

My self-respect.

^{CHAPTER 15} THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF KARMA

It was karma, I thought.

After all, what other explanation could there possibly be that, within three days of slipping Dave Beall the note, the Duchess called me to reconcile? Actually, it wasn’t a. full reconciliation, but it was a major step in the right direction.

“So,” said my luscious Duchess, walking arm in arm with me along the water’s edge, “if you buy me a house in the Hamptons, I think it’ll be really good for us. We’d get rid of the Old Brookville house and see each other all the time again. Who knows what’ll happen from there, right?”

I nodded and smiled warmly as we walked in silence for a few moments. We were walking west, toward the setting sun, and in spite of it being April, it was still warm enough at five o’clock that our matching blue windbreakers were all we needed to protect us against the salty breeze.

“Anyway,” continued the Duchess, “I was really mad at you for a while. I never really got over what happened on the stairs. I mean, I thought I did, but I just kind of buried it under the rug, along with a lot of other things.” She paused for a moment, squeezing my arm tighter. “But I’m as much to blame as you for that. You see, all those years I thought I was helping you, I was actually killing you.” She shook her head sadly. “But how was I to know? I was so codependent at the time, I didn’t know which way was up anymore.”

“Yeah,” I said softly, “you’re right; but only about the last part. What happened with the drugs wasn’t your fault; it wasn’t really anyone’s fault; it just kind of happened. It slowly, insidiously crept up on us.”

She nodded but said nothing. I soldiered on, in an upbeat tone: “Anyway, I was a drug addict and you were a codependent, and together we made a mess of things. But at least we made it out alive, right?”

“Yeah—barely,” she said. “I’ve had to work really hard on myself over the last six months. You know, codependency is a terrible disease, Jordan”—she shook her head gravely—”a terrible, terrible disease, and I was about as classically codependent as you can get.”

“Yeah,” I said solemnly—and what a fucking joke! I thought. Codependency, shmodependency… blah, blah, blah! The whole thing was fucking laughable. Yes, the Duchess had been codependent, but to actually seek out a self-help group that had the audacity to call itself Codependents Anonymous? Still, when the Duchess had first started talking about it, I wanted to have an open mind. In fact, I even asked George if he’d ever heard of such a group, and, surprisingly, he told me he had. Yes, they existed, he said, but no one took them seriously. It was a man-haters club more than anything, a place where they turned meek women into pit bulls. In short, he concluded, they were dangerous.

But that was the Duchess: always aspiring to be perfect at something, and this was her latest gig—to be perfectly codependent. So I had no choice but to go along with it, to pretend that codependency was the latest rage. On the plus side, though, anything that motivated her to put away her prospecting shovel was fine with me.

Just then I felt a playful nudge. “What are you thinking about? I see those wheels of yours turning.”

“Nothing,” I replied. “I was just thinking how much I still love you.”

“Well, I love you too,” she said. “I’ll always love you.”

Shit! The second half of her statement was not encouraging! After all, by saying that she would always love me, she was inferring that her love was not of a wifely nature, which is to say of a spread-your-legs nature. Instead, it was of a you’re-the-father-of-my-children nature or a we-share-history-together nature, both of which were unacceptable to me. I wanted wifely love. I wanted lusty love. I wanted the sort of love that we used to share—before I’d been dumb enough to get myself indicted! Still, this was a beginning, a starting point from which I could maneuver her accordingly. “Well,” I said confidently, “as long as we still love each other we can work the rest out, right?”

She nodded slowly. “Over time, yeah, but we need to become friends first. We were never really friends, Jordan. In the beginning, all we did was have sex; I mean, we hardly came up for air, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said gravely—and what the fuck was wrong with that? I thought. Those were the best times of my life, for Chrissake! All those lazy afternoons we made love in the closet, all those nights on the beach, the way we did it doggie-style in the back of the limousine, that time in the movie theater, during Interview with the Vampire, while that old couple one row up rolled their eyes. Who could ask for anything more?

“Yeah is right,” added the Duchess. “We were like two sex maniacs!” Suddenly she stopped and turned to me. Her back was to the ocean now, her blond hair shimmering brilliantly in the afternoon sunlight. She looked like an angel, my angel! “So what do you think, honey? Will you buy me the house?” She puckered up her lips into an irresistible pout.

“I’m not against it,” I replied quickly, debating whether or not to nail her with a kiss, “but with everything that’s going on right now, don’t you think it would make more sense for you to move in here?” I motioned toward the dunes. “Let’s give it a shot and see what happens, Nae! If it doesn’t work, I’ll buy you the house in two seconds flat.”

She shook her head sadly. “I can’t do that yet; I’m not ready.” Then, nervously, she added, “Is it the money? Is the government hassling you?”

I shook my head. “No, I can still spend what I want, as long as it’s reasonable.”

“Well, what does Greg say?”

I smiled. “Greg who? Greg my lawyer or the other Greg?”

“Greg your lawyer!”

I smiled again. “He doesn’t say much, Nae. He’s trying to negotiate the best deal he can, that’s about it. But the good news is that he thinks”—thinks!—“we can keep the houses for a while, at least until I get sentenced, and that won’t be for another four years or so. So we have some time.”

Not letting go: “Where does that leave me? Will you buy me the house or not? It’s only a million dollars, Jordan. It’s a lot less than Old Brookville, so I’m sure the government will be happy with that, no?”

I shrugged. “One would think, although I would still have to get it approved.” Just then something odd occurred to me. “You already found a house, Nae?”

She shrugged innocently. “No, well… not really. I mean, I did see something that would be perfect for the kids and me”—then, as an afterthought—”and maybe perfect for you too one day!” She smiled eagerly. “So what do you think, honey? Will you buy it for me?”

I smiled back, thinking how wonderful it would be to live with the Duchess and with the kids again! No more Jewish blow-job queens and Russian Natashas; how wonderful that would be! “I think we should go look at the house right now,” I said, smiling, but what I didn’t say was: “Before I actually buy it for you, Duchess, I’m gonna make damn sure you’re not playing me like a fiddle!”

“She’s playing you like a fiddle,” snapped my longtime private investigator, Richard “Bo” Dietl, sitting across from me at a table for two at Caracalla. “I’m certain of it, Bo.”

“Maybe so,” I replied, “but I need to know for sure. You know, I was just starting to get over her when she called, and now she’s got me back on the hook again.” I paused, and shook my head angrily. “But this is it, Bo; if she fucks me over this time, I’m done for good.”

“That’s fair enough,” Bo said skeptically, “but I still think it’s bad karma, this planatation of yours. And it ain’t so legal either.”

I shrugged noncommittally, amazed at how well I understood Bo-speak, which required that you not only disregard Bo’s odd habit of calling everyone around him Bo (in spite of his own nickname being Bo) but that you also disregard the ending atation, when he chose to add it onto an unsuspecting noun. So a plan could be a planatation, and lunch would be lunchatation. Still, Bo was smarter than a whip, and he happened to be the best private investigator in the business.

“I’m not too worried about the bad-karma part,” I replied casually, “because I’ve done some damn good things lately.” I smiled knowingly, resisting the urge to explain to Bo that the reason I’d chosen Caracalla was because I’d created so much good karma last time I was here (by slipping Dave Beall the note) that I was certain it would offset any bad karma I might create with my latest plan, which was: to bug the Duchess’s Codependents Anonymous meeting. “So I’m pretty much bursting at the seams with good karma, Bo.”

“That’s fair enough,” he said, “but I still can’t bug the roomatation for you. If we get caught, they’ll throw us both in jail for that.”

I shrugged again and then took a moment to regard Bo.

As always, he was dressed impeccably, with his two-hundred-pound, five-foot-ten-inch frame swathed in a $2,000 gray pinstripe suit with a size-fifty chest, a crisp white dress shirt with an eighteen-inch neck, and a solid gray crepe de chine necktie, knotted flawlessly in the Windsor style. On his left hand he wore a diamond pinky ring that looked heavy enough to do wrist curls with, and, along with the rest of him—that gorilla-size neck, those broadly handsome features, his perfectly coiffed grayish beard, that slightly thinning head of hair—it gave off the regal whiff of a classy mobster.

Of course, Bo was not a mobster; he had simply grown up around them, raised in that section of Ozone Park, Queens, where an Irish-Italian kid like Bo had only two possible career paths: to become a cop or a mobster. So Bo became a cop—rising quickly through the ranks of the NYPD and earning his gold shield at a remarkably young age. He then retired young and used his connections, on both sides of the law, to build his company, Bo Dietl and Associates, into America’s most well-respected private-security firm.

Over the years, Bo had been a tremendous asset to me—doing everything from protecting my family to investigating the companies I took public to scaring away the occasional low-level mobster who’d made the mistake of trying to muscle his way into Stratton’s business. Right now, however, Bo had no idea that I was cooperating; perhaps he suspected it, I thought, but he was too professional to ask. Besides, when it came down to it, Bo was my friend, and, like any friend, he didn’t want to put me in a position where I had to lie to him.

“I understand what you’re saying,” I said to Bo, “but I’m not asking you to bug the room.”

He shrugged. “So what are you asking me to do, then: hide in the fucking closet?”

I smiled warmly. “No, no, no; I would never ask you to do anything so sneaky and underhanded. What I want you to do is wire up one of your female operatives and have her infiltrate the meeting.” I winked. “As long as the bug is on her, it’s legal in this state, right?”

Bo stared at me, astonished. I continued: “Anyway, I’m pretty sure that a recorded conversation with one side consenting is perfectly legal.” I chose not to tell him why I was so sure. “So as long as we keep the bug on her, we’re in the clear!” I gave my eyebrows two quick up and downs. “It’s a pretty good plan, don’t you think, Bo?”

“Jesus,” muttered Bo. “You—are—one—twisted—fuck, my friend!”

I shrugged. “I’ll take that as a compliment from a guy like you. Anyway, I can only imagine what these women say in these meetings. I mean, think about it: We’ll be like two flies on the wall. If nothing else, it’ll be the laugh of the century!”

Bo, the caveman: “What the fuck does this codependent shit mean anyway? It sounds like a boatload of crap to me.” He shook his head in disbelief. “I bet you some of those women could benefit from some time in a mental ward. You know what I’m saying, Bo?”

I nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I know exactly what you’re saying, but this is the Duchess’s latest trip: She’s an aspiring codependent, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Anyway, will you do this for me, Bo? Will you ride this out with me to the bitter end?”

“Yeah,” he answered unenthusiastically. “I’ll ride it out with you, Bo. But if your wifeatation ever finds out about this, she’s gonna crucify you!”

I dismissed his concern with a flap of the back of my hand in the air. “Don’t even worry about that, Bo. I’m not gonna tell her and you’re not gonna tell her, so how the hell is she ever gonna find out?”

Just then a tall, thin waiter came over with our drinks. He wore a red waiter’s bolero, a black bow tie, and no expression. He handed Bo a snifter of Jack Daniel’s, and me a Coke. Bo looked up at the waiter and said, “Bring me another one of these drinkatations, Bo, will ya?”

The waiter stared at Bo, confused. Bo pressed on: “What’s wrong, Bo?”

I said to the waiter, “He’d like another one, please.”

The waiter nodded and walked off.

Bo shook his head in disgust. “Fucking guy,” he muttered. “He don’t barely speak English and they got him serving us lunchatation. It’s a fucking travesty.” With that, Bo lifted his glass. “Any ways, I hope you get the answer you’re looking for, Bo, because my experience with these things is that a woman’s secret thoughts are never pretty.”

“What a crazy bunch of women!” muttered Debbie Starling.†

It was two nights later when one of Bo’s favorite operatives, Debbie Starling, muttered those very words into a Long Island pay phone, just a few blocks from the Duchess’s Codependents Anonymous meeting. Bo and I were on the conference call. “I’ve never heard anything like it!” she added. “I mean, I don’t know how to even describe it to you guys. It was like, uh…” There were a few moments of silence, as I sat on the edge of my seat, and Bo, I assumed, sat on the edge of his own seat. He was working late this Wednesday evening, still in his office, waiting for Debbie’s postmeeting debriefing.

I had never met Debbie, but, according to Bo, she was perfect for the job. In her mid-forties now, she had spent most of her career camped out on a park bench, looking sexy and vulnerable, waiting for a would-be mugger to approach. When he did, she would lure him close and then slap the cuffs on him. Then she would blow a whistle—at which point half a dozen of New York’s finest would emerge from the shadows and beat the shit out of the guy. Then they would arrest him.

Still, this wasn’t what impressed Bo about Debbie, especially when it came to this operation. In fact, it had more to do with Debbie being in the drama club back in her college days, where she’d earned rave reviews from the critics. She was perfect, Bo had said. She was a born actress, who could infiltrate the man-haters club faster than the Duchess could say codependency! So he wired her up and sent her behind enemy lines.

Finally, the aspiring actress spoke: “You know, maybe I could explain it to you guys this way: You ever see the movie Jerry Maguire?”

“Yeah,” we replied in unison.

“Okay, well, remember that scene in Renee Zellweger’s living room, where all the divorced women are sitting around, bitching and moaning, calling men the enemy?”

“Yeah,” we said again.

“Well, it was like that—but on steroids!”

We all broke up over that one, but after a few seconds I found myself wanting to jump through the phone. Bo regained his composure and said, “All right, Debbie, so what went down in Fantasyland tonight?”

“Well,” said Debbie, “it seems like Jordan’s wife is the ringleader over there. Does that surprise you, Jordan?”

“No, not at all,” I said. “That’s how she is. Whatever she’s hot for at the moment, she plunges into headfirst. Today she’s an aspiring codependent; tomorrow she could be an aspiring astronaut; there’s no rhyme or reason, no telling. But I love her anyway.”

“Well, she’s very beautiful,” noted Debbie.

No shit! I thought. Why else do you think I’m in love with her— because of her fucking personality? Christ, she’s enough to drive any five men crazy! “Thanks,” I said, “but that’s not why I love her, Debbie. Beauty is only skin-deep”—while ugliness cuts straight to the bone, I thought. “It’s her personality I love: her feistiness, her quick wit, the way she gives me a run for my money,” and the way she used to blow me while I was driving my Ferrari on the LIE during rush hour, as truckers honked in appreciation. “Looks have nothing to do with it, nothing at all.”

There were a few moments of silence, while my bullshit hung in the air like Los Angeles smog. Finally Bo said, “All right, so what’s the verdict, Debbie: Does she love him or not?”

“Yes, she loves him,” said Debbie—my spirits soared!—“but she also hates him”—my spirits plunged! Debbie paused for a moment. “More than anything, I think she’s just confused.”

“Confused about what?” I asked.

“Yeah,” added Bo. “What the fuck does she have to be so confused about? She ain’t the one who got indicted! It’s un-fucking-believable, these women.”

Debbie, with patience: “Are you finished, Bo?”

“Yeah, I’m finished,” he muttered. “So what’s the story with the house?”

I immediately perked up. “Yeah, did she bring up East Hampton?”

“Not directly,” said Debbie—shit! I thought—”although she did say that she wanted to move out of Old Brookville.”

I perked up again. “Oh, really? Did she say why?”

“Yes; she said your name is in the paper all the time, and she’s embarrassed”—my spirits plunged! “She says people are looking at her funny, especially at your daughter’s school. She just wants to get away from it all and take the kids with her.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound too promising,” I said softly.

“No it doesn’t,” agreed Bo. “I think it’s time you stop this housitation hunt. You know, Bo?”

“I wouldn’t jump the gun,” countered Debbie. “See, right after she said that, then she started saying that she still loved you. She even said that she missed being with you.”

“Well, that’s great!” I said.

“Well, don’t jump the gun there either,” warned Debbie. “A second later she said she hoped you’d die in a fire, or something along those lines. That way she’d be rid of you for good.”

“Can you imagine?” snapped Bo. “You can’t trust these females for a second! You turn your back and they stick the knife in!”

Debbie, losing patience: “You’re not being constructive here, Bo.” A short pause, then, “Listen, Jordan: Like I said, she’s very confused right now. Maybe you should give her some space for a while, just give her some time to sort things out. Then maybe she’ll come back to you. Either way, you have one thing going for you, Jordan.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“She hates her father even more than she hates you.”

“Well, that’s comforting,” I said. “He abandoned her when she was three.”

“So where does this leave us?” Bo asked Debbie. “Can you give us an opinion on this thing?”

“I’m not really comfortable doing that,” Debbie said. “Maybe if I go back next week I can find out more. I’m sure she doesn’t suspect anything. I was welcomed into the group with open arms. I think they were just happy to drag someone else into their misery.”

“This might take a long time, Bo,” said Bo.

“I don’t have a long time,” I shot back. “My wife is not gonna stop pressuring me with this; I know her.” And I was running out of time for other reasons as well, reasons that I couldn’t share with Bo and Debbie. Next month I would be going before the judge to enter my guilty plea, and, as part of that, I would have to put together a detailed financial statement. Of course, all this would be done in secret; nothing would be announced until next year, after my cooperation became public. But, still, the best time to sell the Old Brookville house would be now, before I completed a financial statement.

Bo said, “There’s gotta be a way to get her to spill the beans quicker.”

The former actress: “Maybe I could strike up a friendship with her. I mean, what if I walked into next week’s meeting, hysterically crying, saying that my husband just beat me or something?” The actress paused for a moment. “From what little I know about your wife, Jordan, I think she would come running to my side to help me.”

Oh, good Lord! I thought. I was going straight to hell with this one. There was no way I could ever let this happen. Never! Not in a million years! “That’s an amazing idea, Debbie! You could invite her out for a drink even, and then get her sloshed. You should see what she’s like with a couple of drinks in her. It’s like truth serum!” Good God—what was I saying? “And I know the perfect place for you to bring her: It’s called Buckram Stables. It’s some old WASP hangout in Locust Valley; it’s nice and quiet there, so you can make a clear tape.”

“This is terrible,” said Bo. “I can’t allow this to happen”—a pause—”without giving Debbie some sort of small bonus, if she pulls it off.”

“Well, thank you,” said Debbie, “but have no fear: I’ll pull it off. I’ll just bring an onion with me and peel it in the car before I go into the meeting. I’ll walk into that church with tears streaming down my cheeks!”

There were a few moments of silence.

“Christ!” said Bo. “This is bad, really bad. Let’s do it!”

“I cannot allow this to happen!” I said forcefully. And then I said, “The only problem is that it’s out of my control. It’s already been decided. So what can I do?”

“Nothing,” answered Bo. “We’ve passed the point of no return.”

“Great,” said Debbie. “I’ll go buy the onion!”

The man-haters club met once a week, on Wednesdays, and the meeting lasted for an hour, ending at eight p.m. Right now it was close to eleven, and I still hadn’t heard from Bo. So I was pacing back and forth in my living room, trying to remain calm and doing my final calculations as to how much good karma I had left in my karma tank.

In a way, though, the Duchess had brought this upon herself, hadn’t she? I mean, what man wouldn’t want to know his estranged wife’s secret thoughts? I was no worse than any other obsessed husband! The only difference was that I had the resources to take things a bit further than most men. Besides, if she were willing to share her secret thoughts with the first stranger who came along… well, that made her secret thoughts fair game for public consumption.

In truth, I was pretty confident that I would be getting good news tonight. After all, I had gone through everything Debbie had said last week and, all in all, I had distilled the Duchess’s inner thoughts down to two simple truths. Truth one: She still loved me, but she was confused. Truth two: In time, she would miss making love to me so much that she would have no choice but to come back. Yes, even that day on the beach she had specifically raised the issue of sex two times: once referring to us as plain old sex maniacs (which was certainly a good thing), and also commenting on how we never came up for air (which was an even better thing!). Of course, I had heard the past disturbing rumblings about Michael Bolton and her dirt-bag personal trainer, Alex the Douche, but in the end they were probably just that: rumblings.

Emboldened by those truths, I had called Magnum last week and told him what was going on with the Duchess. “Would the Bastard object to me selling my Old Brookville house and buying a much cheaper house in the Hamptons?” Magnum had responded with cautious optimism. He was knee-deep in negotiations with the Bastard, he said, and the Bastard was being his usual difficult self. However, he thought he would look positively on anything I did to cut my expenses. Either way, he hoped to have a deal hammered out by the beginning of May, at which point I would go before Judge Gleeson and enter my guilty plea.

Just then I heard the phone ringing. It was Bo! I made a beeline for the kitchen. When I reached the phone, I froze dead in my tracks. It wasn’t the phone; it was the intercom system that interfaced with the phone. Someone was at the front gate! Who the hell? Cautiously, I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Yo—Bo!” said Bo. “It’s me, Bo!”

“Bo!” I said to Bo. “What are you doing here?”

“Let me in. I’m making a personal delivery, Bo.”

I took a deep breath, trying to remain calm and trying to keep track of all the Bo-Bos. It could only be good news, I thought. Why else would Bo drive all the way out to Southampton? If it was bad news he would’ve just called me on the phone—unless, of course, he was one of those people who took joy in seeing another’s misery up close and personal. No, Bo was not like that! How could I even think such a thing? He was a true friend, Bo, and he’d proved his loyalty to me a thousand times over. He just wanted to bring me the good news in person.

“Yo—Bo!” snapped Bo. “Are you gonna open the gate-atation or what?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry, Bo.” I punched in the gate code and headed for the door.

A few minutes later we were sitting at my dining-room table, beneath a wrought-iron chandelier that cost a bloody fortune. Resting on the bleached-wood table was a small tape recorder. Bo was yet to reveal the contents of the tape; he was still in the process of explaining how former actress Debbie Starling had given an Academy Award-winning performance, quickly worming her way into the Duchess’s confidence.

“….and the onionatation trick worked like a fucking charm,” Bo was saying. “So, Debbie’s sneezing and wheezing her little head off, and the tears are streaming down her face-atation, as she’s telling your wife about how her husband called her this and that and everything else. And, of course, the uh… the Duchess was very sympathetic to that, because that’s how she is with everything.” Bo shrugged. “So the two of them bonded before the meeting even got started.”

I nodded and scratched my chin thoughtfully. “Huh,” I muttered. “That sounds pretty good so far. So what did she say during the meeting?”

Bo shook his head slowly. “It’s not what she said during the meeting; it’s what she said after the meeting.”

I perked up. “Oh, really? They went for dinner?”

Bo began rubbing his beard. “Drinks,” he answered. “You know, like in vino veritas.”

“Interesting,” I said. “So what truths did the vino draw out?”

Bo twisted his lips and nodded in resignation. “Well, I think you could stop your house-hunting, Bo. It’s not recommended given the, uh, current circumstances.”

All at once I felt my heart drop to my stomach. The Duchess had been deceiving me! Such underhandedness! Was there no level she wouldn’t stoop to? To play me for a house showed a complete lack of ethics on her part.

Bo continued: “You know, I came out here tonight because I look at you as more of a friend than a client, Bo.” With that he paused and looked down at the tape recorder, which was no bigger than a deck of playing cards, and then he looked back up. “So I’ll make you a deal, Bo: This whole bugatation exercise has run about five Gs so far, but if you let me destroy the tape before you listen to it, we’ll call it even. I’ll pay Debbie out of my own pocket. But if you make me press the play button, then you gotta pay me. It’s your call.”

With a sinking heart, I looked down at the tape recorder. Christ, it was an evil little instrument! So small it was, so tiny… so very fucking deceptive! It was the bearer of bad news, the bringer of bad karma. “It can’t be that bad, Bo, can it?”

Bo shrugged. “Like I said, Bo: in vino veritas.”

I shook my head slowly, the saddest of smiles on my face. Then I let out a short chuckle that so much as said, “It serves me right!” And a chuckle that also said, “So this is it: the end of the line, the end of a marriage, the end of all my false hope.” My marriage is a coffin, I thought, and this is the final nail in it. I looked Bo in the eye and said, “Play the fucking tape!”

Bo nodded and hit the play button.

All I could hear at first was a low hum and some background noise, then a mumbled exchange with a waiter. Bo said, “I cued it up to the good part. They’re in Buckram Stables, about to make a toast. Listen….”

I nodded and put my elbows on the edge of the dining-room table and crossed my arms, one atop the other. Then I rested my troubled brow on them, staring at the evil tape recorder from a side angle. It was all so terrible. I had bugged my own wife—the mother of my children! And what had Bo said? A woman’s secret thoughts…

Just then I heard the Duchess’s all-too-happy voice: “Here’s to breaking the cycle!” And now the actress’s surprisingly believable response: “Yes! To breaking the cycle of codependency!” Then the unmistakable clink of wineglasses.

“Can you believe this shit?” muttered Bo. “I never even heard of this codependency shit before. It’s fucking mind-boggling.”

I nodded in agreement without lifting my head. Now the Duchess started talking again. She was bitching about me, saying that I had slept with hookers while we were married. Well, what had she expected? She had been my mistress, for Chrissake! She knew what I was up to well before she married me—and now she was holding it against me.

All at once I was jerked alert: “Well, I’ve been having the best sex of my life lately; I’ll tell you that much! I mean, the last few years with my husband were so boring—you know, the same position over and over again.”

Whuh—how could she? She was emasculating me in front of Debbie—a total stranger! Someone in my employ! How could the Duchess say I sucked in bed? I didn’t! I used to rock her world! She used to call me her little prince

Against my better judgment, I snuck a peek at Bo, to gauge his reaction. Was he staring at me? Was he smiling? No. He wasn’t. He was staring at the recorder, his face a mask of concentration. He was nodding his head slowly. And gritting his teeth, the way a person does when they’re trying to make heads or tails of something. Suddenly he looked up. I opened my mouth, to defend myself against the Duchess’s baseless accusations. No words came out. I couldn’t think of anything to say. The Duchess had emasculated me in front of Bo too. To deny it would only make me seem guiltier.

Just then Bo smiled and shook his head. “It’s all bullshit, Bo! Every wife says her husband sucks in bed. It’s par for the fucking course.” He shrugged. “But if you happen to get another crack at nailing her, you should take some Viagratation before you stick it in; then you’ll teach the girl a lesson!” With that he winked and looked back down at the recorder. I rested my brow back in my arms and prepared for more pain.

“Anyway,” said the voice on the tape, “I had a little thing going with my personal trainer for a while, and that was pretty good”—I knew it!—“but then I got sick of him, so I started dating Michael Bolton. You know him? The singer?”

Debbie’s surprised voice: “Yeah, of course! What was he like?”

The Duchess’s voice: “Oh, he was nice. Very romantic, actually. We spent a weekend together in the Plaza Hotel. We stayed in the Presidential Suite, and he filled the whole room up with fresh flowers.” The voice on the tape giggled. “Like I said, he was very romantic.”

I looked up at Bo. “That ungrateful bitch!” I snarled. “You know how many times I filled up the Presidential Suite with flowers for her? She forgets that!”

Bo nodded in understanding and then pointed back down at the recorder. “Listen to this, Bo; this is where it gets good.” I shook my head in disbelief and looked down at the evil little recorder. Bring on the pain, I thought.

The voice of the Duchess, twisting the knife: “Anyway, there’s been some others too: I met a golf pro while I was up in Pennsylvania, learning about codependency, and then I was with one of my old boyfriends for a while, although that was only for old time’s sake.” Then, much happier: “But now I’m involved with a guy who owns a big garment-center company! I kind of like him, actually, although he’s a bit closed off emotionally. I’ll have to wait and see.”

The voice of the actress: “So you think your husband’s gonna buy you the house?”

A suddenly weary Duchess: “Well, I’m still working on him. He’s very slick, so I have to handle him a certain way. See, I know he still wants to get back together with me, so I’m kind of using that to my advantage, you know, hinting that there’s still a possibility.” A pause, then: “I know it’s not the nicest thing to do, but I don’t have much of a choice anymore. I won’t lead him on any longer than I have to, though; once I get him to buy me the house, I’ll file for divorce the next day. Then I can move on with my life. Maybe fall in love with one of the local contractors or an electrician. That would be—”

Bo hit the stop button. “You heard enough, Bo?”

I looked at Bo, speechless. The Duchess had buried me on tape. Yet, of everything she’s said, it was the comment about doing it over and over again in the same position that had wounded me most. There had to be some words I could say to Bo to offset that poisonous comment. I racked my brain for them. They didn’t exist. I had been officially emasculated. The most important thing was to make sure that Debbie was sworn to secrecy. What must she think of me!

“You all right, Bo?” asked Bo.

I nodded slowly. “Yeah, I’m all right. I’m fine.” I took a deep breath and forced up a smile. “Anyway, it sounds like she still hasn’t made up her mind yet, you know, Bo? Maybe there’s still hope, right?” I started chuckling.

Bo smiled warmly. “That’s the spirit, Bo. You just gotta laugh it off.”

I nodded and smiled sadly, and then I looked around my beautiful home, marveling at its very splendor… and how little it all meant. The happiest I had ever been was with Denise, when we had nothing.

Just then Bo reached across the table and rested his massive hand on my forearm, squeezing it gently. In a dead-serious tone, he said, “Listen to me, Bo, because I’m not gonna bullshit you. What’s happened to you over the last six months should happen to no man. There’s no sugarcoating it. It sucks. It all sucks.” He shook his head slowly. “But you gotta take a deep breath now and pick up the pieces. It’s time to be a man. You understand, Bo? To be a man?”

I nodded. “Yeah,” I said softly. “I do.”

He squeezed my arm tighter now. “No woman can get the best of you, Bo, no wife, no girlfriend, no mistress, no one. Except one. You know who that is, Bo?”

I nodded slowly, fighting back tears now. “Chandler,” I said softly.

“That’s right, Bo: Chandler. She’s the only one who counts now; the rest of them will come and go out of your life. And you owe it to her to stiffen your upper lip and hold your head high, and you owe it to that little son of yours too.” Bo smiled nostalgically. “I remember when he was first born and almost died of meningitis. I’ll never forget how my heart dropped when Rocco called me that night from the hospital and told me what was going on. I went to church and said a prayer for him that night.”

I nodded, wiping a tear from the corner of my eye. “Well, it worked. He’s a good kid. He’s growing strong.”

Bo smiled. “Yes, he is, Bo, and he’s gonna keep growing; then he’s gonna look to you one day to show him what it means to be a man and to show him that no matter how much shit comes his way, in the end, he can always come out on top.” Bo shrugged his broad shoulders. “And that’s it, Bo, that’s the way it goes. Your kids are your constants; they’re the only ones who can keep you going through shit like this.

“Anyway, you’re about to find out who your true friends are and who was just along for the ride. Remember, friendships bought with money—”

“—don’t last very long,” I said.

Bo nodded. “And loyalty bought with money—”

“—isn’t loyalty at all,” I added.

“Exactly, Bo.” And with that he reached down to the tape recorder, hit the eject button, and removed the tape and held it up in the air. Then he said, “As far as I’m concerned, this whole thing never happened.” He slipped the tape into his inside suit-jacket pocket. “You don’t owe me anything for this, Bo. All I want is your friendship, because, I, for one, am truly your friend. And I always will be.”

And I knew he was.

^{CHAPTER 16} WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN

The next morning I woke up to:

Broooo!—Broooo!—Broooo!… Broooo!—Broooo!—Broooo!

I opened my right eye and, without lifting my head even an inch off the white silk pillowcase, I rolled my neck to the right and made eye contact with the phone of the future—a chrome-plated technological marvel, with two dozen red blinking lights and the world’s most annoying ring, the latter of which sounded like a tiny sparrow caught in an electrical wire. The phone was resting on a fabulously expensive end table—part of a matching set, of course.

Broooo!—Broooo!—Broooo!… Broooo!—Broooo!—Broooo! “Jesus,”

I muttered. I was so sleepy… couldn’t move. My head seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.

Broooo!—Broooo!—Broooo!… Broooo!—Broooo!—Broooo!

Christ! Who was calling at this hour? The audacity! I popped upright and took a deep, troubled breath. The white silk comforter was draped over my legs now, covering my loins, and in spite of being alone, my vanity caused me to look down at my bare torso and run my fingers over my abdominal muscles. They felt good; I was in fabulous shape. That was important now, especially if I wanted to attract another Duchess, but it wasn’t nearly as important as being rich.

Well, at least I still had my mansion for a while. A shabby-chic mansion could be a very powerful aphrodisiac. I looked around the bedroom. The ceiling was thirty feet above the $150,000 tan and taupe carpet, and my bed was fit for a king. Thick bleached-wood poles, carved to resemble pinecones, rose up at all four corners of the bed, where they supported a canopy of tan and taupe Indonesian silk that matched the carpet perfectly. The Duchess loved her fucking canopies! And she loved her silk too. The mansion had seven bedrooms, and each one had a silk fucking canopy!

Broooo!—Broooo!—Broooo!… Broooo!—Broooo!—Broooo!

Fuck it! I reached over and picked up the chrome-plated phone.

“Hello?” I mumbled, in the sort of overly sleepy tone that implies you’ve been called at an inappropriate hour.

Alas, what I got in return was the bright and cheery voice of my least favorite codependent. “Rise and shine, sleepyhead!” declared the Duchess. “It’s eight-thirty! We have an appointment with the real estate broker in two hours!” Cheery, cheery, cheery!

Why, the impudence! I was speechless! At a complete loss for words! What would she say next, that she was going to wear my favorite perfume today? Christ! If I hadn’t promised not to blow Debbie’s cover, I would be giving the dirty Duchess a piece of my mind right now.

The Duchess, still happy: “Wake up, sleepy-boy! Today’s the first day of the rest of your life!” Then: “Why don’t you have Gwynne make you some coffee?”

“Gwynne doesn’t get here ‘til nine,” I said tonelessly. “And I’m not in the mood for coffee.”

The Duchess, picking up my tone: “Well, someone seems awful grumpy this morning! Why don’t you open the shades and let some light shine in? It’s beautiful outside.”

I clenched my teeth in rage and slowly turned my head to the left, to the fabulous taupe shades. Must be twenty feet high, those fucking shades, and they must’ve cost a fortune! God—how I’d love to have that money right now in cash!

Suddenly—a brainstorm! “You know what?” I said happily. “You’re right! I could use some light in here. Hold on a second, sweetie,” and I leaned over to the end table and grabbed the remote control of the future, which controlled everything in the bedroom, from the shades to the recessed lights to the twelve-foot-high entertainment center just across from the bed, with its forty-inch high-definition TV and $75,000 Fisher stereo system, which included, among other things, a three-hundred-CD disc changer.

First, the shades: Remote in hand, I hit a one-inch LCD square marked SHADES, and just like that, the shades slowly slid open, revealing a pair of twelve-foot-high French doors that opened onto a reddish mahogany deck looking out over the Atlantic. “Ah, light!” I said to the backstabber. “Hold on another second, sweetie,” and then I hit a button marked CD SEARCH—causing a new menu to pop up. I punched in the letters B—O—L—T—O—N, and an instant later Michael Bolton’s Greatest Hits popped onto the screen. This was accompanied by a rather annoying picture of him (with his big nose, narrow face, and ridiculous ponytail), along with a list of all seventeen of his ridiculously syrupy love songs, most of which he’d stolen from other, more talented artists and all of which were meant to manipulate the hearts and minds of unsuspecting females.

My teeth were still clenched in rage when I placed my index finger over the song “When a Man Loves a Woman,” and pressed it gently. Then I moved my finger to the button marked VOLUME UP, and I pressed that too and held it for a few seconds.

The still-happy Duchess: “What are you doing over there?”

“Nothing,” I said, staring at my shabby-chic entertainment center and hearing a few clicks and clacks as the CD changer did its thing. “I’m just putting on some music to start my day.”

“Really?” she said, a bit confused. Then: “Okay! I’m heading out to the beach soon. I figured we’d spend the day together.”

“Well, before you get in the car, Nadine, I think you should know that I’m having second thoughts about the Hamptons thing. In fact, I think you should stay put for a while in Old Brookville.”

Not so happy suddenly: “What are you talking about? I thought we already discussed this.”

Just then I heard the opening notes to the song. I took a deep breath, determined not to tip my hand. “Yeah,” I said icily, “but you’re already set in your ways out there. You know, you’ve got all your activities lined up—all the Mommy and Me classes, the cooking classes. And I know how much you like having Alex as your personal trainer. Alex…” I paused for a moment, letting the Romanian dirt-ball’s name hang in the air. “I couldn’t imagine Alex spending an extra hour and a half driving out to the Hamptons. Know what I mean?”

“He doesn’t train me anymore,” she said nervously.

“Oh, really? What happened?”

“Nothing; we had, uh, a little bit of a falling-out.”

Well, that’s what happens when you fuck your personal trainer! I thought. But I couldn’t just come out and say that, because that would compromise Bo. So I said, “Well, that’s what happens when you fuck your personal trainer! You have a falling-out!” Sorry, Bo!

“What are you talking about?” she said defensively.

With venom: “Oh, you’re gonna deny that you fucked that slime-bucket of a Romanian?”

“I… I didn’t.”

“Oh, save it, Nadine! I know that smelly fuck was sleeping in my bed. I heard all about it.”

Just then I heard the repulsive voice of the ponytailed bastard: “When a man loves a woman, can’t keep his mind on nothin’ else.”

I help up the phone to the ceiling for a second—to the 80-watt Bose surround-sound speakers—and then I put it back to my ear and heard the Duchess say, “…you please turn down the music!”

“It’s not that loud,” I snapped, and I held the phone back up to the speakers again. Then I put it back to my ear and heard her scream, “…with you, Jordan! Stop! Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?” I asked innocently. “Blasting Michael Bolton or talking about the Romanian slimeball? Which one?”

Calm panic: “Who’s telling you all this?”

With a hiss: “Oh, please, Nadine! Who do you think you’re dealing with? I’ve known about this shit for months!”

The Duchess struck back: “Yeah—well—who the fuck are you to throw stones? Like you’ve been a fucking angel out there? You slept with that disgusting Jewish girl who gave you all the blow jobs!” A moment of silence, then the Duchess continued, “I also know about all those crazy Russian girls. You’ll never change! You’re a whoremonger!”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I snarled, “and you’re a fucking codependent, who fucks her fellow codependents—like that washed-up golf pro from Pennsylvania. What did he offer you: free golf lessons with every lay?”

The Duchess, incredulous: “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Through clenched teeth: “I’ll never forgive you for what you did, Nadine. You left me on the courthouse steps, you fucking bitch!”

Right back at me: “And you kicked me down the stairs, you fucking drug addict! I hope you die in jail!”

“Oh, yeah?” I snapped. “Well, I hope you die of codependency!” And I slammed down the phone. “Fucking whore!” I muttered to the phone of the future. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself. Then the phone rang: Broooo!—Broooo! I picked it up in a millisecond: “What the fuck do you want now?”

“Well, fuck you too!” snapped my attorney. “What, are you having a bad morning over there?”

“Oh, hey, Greg!” I said happily. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “What’s going on with you?”

I thought about that for a second. “Oh, nothing really. Just a little spat with my soon-to-be ex-wife.”

“I see,” said Magnum. “And can I ask why you’re blasting Michael Bolton at eight-thirty in the morning? The guy sucks!”

“Oh, shit! Hold on a second.” I pressed pause on the remote control. “Sorry about that. I’m not a Michael Bolton fan; trust me. In fact, I’m gonna toss that fucking CD right in the microwave, just as soon as I get off the phone with you.”

“And why is that?” asked my attorney.

“Is this conversation privileged?”

“All our conversations are privileged.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Well, I just found out that the Duchess was fucking Michael Bolton. Can you imagine?”

“Really?” said Magnum. “The guy’s a loser! She could do better.”

“Oh, thanks a lot, Greg. Maybe you’re not catching my drift here: Michael—Fucking—Bolton was porking my wife!”

“While you were together?”

“No! Not while we were married! Afterward!”

“So what are you so upset about? You haven’t exactly been sitting on your hands out there. Anyway, can you come into the city today?”

“Why? Did something bad happen?”

“I wouldn’t say bad,” he replied, “but it’s not the best news in the world. I worked out your deal with Joel.”

“How long can I keep the houses for?” I asked quickly.

“Well, it’s different for you and Nadine,” he answered cautiously. “But I’d rather discuss it in person. Take a ride into the city, and we’ll order up some sandwiches and have a working lunch. I’d like Nick to be a part of this too.”

I thought for a moment, deciding whether or not to press for more details, but then he said, “And I have some good news for you too, and it concerns your friend Joel. So keep your chin up and I’ll see you in a few hours, okay?”

I smiled into the phone. “You got it!” I said heartily. “I’ll be there by noon.” And I hung up the phone of the future, knowing that Magnum could mean only one thing: The Bastard was leaving the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

My towering attorney was sitting behind his desk, the starchy Yale-man was sitting to my right, and I was sitting directly across from Magnum at just the right angle to sneak peeks at a photograph of him and Judge Gleeson, which had been taken when they worked together at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. And as the three of us engaged in idle chatter about the deficiencies in our golf swings, I found myself tuning in and out—focusing on the picture of Judge Gleeson instead and praying that when the time came he would remember that Magnum and he were good friends.

“…causes me to shank the ball,” Magnum was now saying. “That’s why I keep my right elbow close to my hip.” He shrugged knowingly. “It’s the key to any good golf swing.”

Who gives a shit! I thought. “Yeah, that’s true,” I said, and can we please get down to my case, for Chrissake?

The Yale-man chimed in. “It is,” he added, “but that’s not your problem, Greg. It’s your grip. It’s much too weak; that’s why you keep hitting off the hozzle.” He shrugged. “It’s simple geometry, really. When you cut across…”

Oh, Jesus Christ! Save me! I tuned out again. I had been in their office for fifteen minutes, and so far so good. As I’d suspected, the Bastard was planning to leave the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Just when, Magnum wasn’t so sure, although he’d heard from “reliable sources” that the Bastard would be gone before the year was out. The good news was, that meant someone else would be writing my 5K letter, and, chances were, they’d be more benevolent than the Bastard.

The bad news, however, was that the Bastard would want my cooperation made public before he resigned. There were a multitude of reasons for this, Magnum explained, not the least of which was that my guilty plea (and subsequent cooperation) was a big-time feather in the Bastard’s cap, which he would use to secure a partnership at a major law firm. In addition, there was an emotional component involved, inasmuch as the Bastard wanted his fifteen minutes of fame, where he would get to hold a press conference and say: “Not only have I brought the Wolf of Wall Street to justice, but I’ve also turned him into a world-class rat—thereby making unprecedented leaps toward the eradication of small-cap securities fraud in America.”

What the Bastard wouldn’t say, however, was that small-cap securities fraud was more prevalent now than in Stratton’s heyday. In fact, with the proliferation of the Internet, stock scams had been elevated to an entirely new level, and God only knew how many millions were being lost each day as a result of puffed-up e-mails, fraudulent message boards, and dot-com mania.

Still, there was no denying that the Bastard’s departure was good news for me, so the three of us had felt entitled to spend the last few minutes congratulating ourselves. My lawyers seemed to be chalking it up to some clever legal strategy on their part, although I was convinced that it had more to do with my long-term value as a rat exceeding the Bastard’s patience to work for the federal government at near slave wages. Whatever the case, this information was strictly on the QT, and I was not to breathe a word of it to anyone.

Now the Yale-man was saying, “…inside-out swing plane, above everything. That’s my secret for keeping the ball in the short grass.” He offered Magnum and me a single nod, to which Magnum nodded back accordingly.

I smiled and said, “You know, my problem with this conversation is that all three of us suck in golf “—I raised my chin toward Magnum—”especially you, Greg. So, if you don’t mind, I would appreciate it if you guys would stop fucking torturing me and tell me when I have to forfeit my houses.”

My towering attorney smiled. “Of course: Your house has to be forfeited on January first, and Nadine’s the following June.”

“That sucks,” I said. “What happened to four years from now?”

Magnum shrugged. “Like I’ve always said, Joel is not an easy person to deal with—especially now, while he’s getting ready to leave the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He wants to extract as much blood as possible before he departs.”

The Yale-man said, “In fact, things were even bleaker yesterday.”

“Indeed,” added Magnum. “As of yesterday morning, Joel wanted Nadine to forfeit the Old Brookville house on the same date as you, but we convinced him to back off because of the children. So, in that sense, it was somewhat of a victory.”

“Yeah,” I said sarcastically, “a victory. And it still sucks!” I took a deep, troubled breath and let it out slowly. “And how much money do I get to keep?”

“Eight hundred thousand dollars,” replied Magnum, “plus you each get to keep a car, your furniture, and all your personal possessions, and you get to keep the IOUs you listed. Are any of them collectible?”

I took a moment to run them through my mind. There were three, the biggest of which was with Elliot Lavigne, who owed me $2 million. Back in the day, Elliot had been my primary rathole, kicking me back millions of dollars in cash. At the time he had been a garment-center legend, ascending to the presidency of Perry Ellis while still in his thirties. But he’d also been a world-class drug addict, a degenerate gambler, and a serial whoremonger (which was why we’d gotten along so well), and ultimately he had lost everything, including his job. We hadn’t spoken since I’d gotten sober, and there was no way, I knew, he could ever pay me back. He was completely broke.

The second biggest IOU was Wigwam’s, which was a quarter of a million dollars. Alas, Wigwam was even broker than Elliot, and there was no chance there either. And then there was Dr. David Schlesinger, a Long Island ophthalmologist, who’d married the Duchess’s childhood friend Donna. David was a pretty good guy, although Donna was, for the most part, a wench. Nevertheless, he could pay me back, and I had no doubt that he would. After all, I had lent him $120,000 to start his own medical practice, and now he was raking it in.

Still, the greatest shame in all this was Elliot Lavigne. If he still had money he would definitely pay me back! We’d been like blood brothers, the two of us. I had even saved his life once, after he almost drowned in my pool. Ironically, OCD and the Bastard had never shown much interest in Elliot, despite the cash kickbacks. But that was fine with me; if they didn’t press the issue, I wasn’t about to bring it up.

I said, “I think one of them is; but it’s only for a hundred twenty thousand dollars. The rest are worthless. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. At the rate I burn through money, I’ll be broke in six months either way.”

“Well, you gotta cut back,” snapped Magnum. “And you gotta tell Nadine to cut back too! This is no joke, Jordan. It’s time to hunker down.”

I shook my head no. “I’m not breathing a word of this to Nadine. As much as I hate her, I don’t want to worry her. Anyway, I have more than a year to figure out where she and the kids are gonna live, and, believe me, by hook or by crook I’ll make sure it’s somewhere beautiful.”

Magnum pursed his lips and nodded, as if he were an oncologist about to give a patient a terminal diagnosis. “Well, unfortunately, you’re gonna have to let her know a little bit sooner than you’d like. You see, Joel wants her to sign off on this.”

“Well, that sucks too!” I snapped. “In fact, everything about today sucks!” I shook my head in disgust. “When do I gotta tell her?”

With a hint of a smile: “Today.”

When I first called the Duchess and told her that I needed to stop by to talk to her about something, I was shocked that she didn’t just tell me to go fuck myself. She was a Brooklyn girl, after all, and given the nature of our last conversation, to tell me to go fuck myself was the Brooklyn equivalent of saying, “I think it would be best if we communicated through our lawyers for a while.” And then, a few hours later, when I walked through the front door at a little before five and the kids came running into my arms, screaming, “Daddy’s here! Daddy’s here!” I was even more shocked at how genuinely happy the Duchess seemed over our children’s love for me.

She was a complicated woman, and despite all my grudges and resentments, there was a part of me that would always be in awe of her. She had educated herself, improved herself, and, for better or worse, had aspired for perfection in all aspects of her life. In many ways, she was everything I could never be: perfectly gorgeous, utterly self-confident, and shrouded by an impenetrable cloak of emotional armor that protected her from hurt; in other ways, I was everything she could never be: street-smart, financially self-sufficient, and emotionally vulnerable to a fault.

Perhaps in a different time and place we could have made beautiful music together, for, in the end, it wasn’t a lack of love that had gotten the best of us but all that had preyed upon it—the money, the drugs, the jet-set lifestyle, the false friends. And, of course, there was Stratton, the poison tree from which only poison fruit could grow, including the fruit of our marriage. Only the children had made it out unscathed, a fact for which I would always thank God.

We were sitting at the kitchen table, and I had just finished giving her all the horrific details about the forefeitures—the dates, the amounts, and everything else.

Her response shocked me.

“I’m really sorry,” she said calmly. “I know how much that beach house meant to you. Where are you gonna live now?”

I stared at her, astonished. Could she really be serious? I mean, after everything I’d just told her, she was worried about where I was going to live? What about where she was going to live? And what about the kids?

I was about to lace into her when suddenly it hit me: It wasn’t irony; she had simply walked through life’s raindrops for so long that she assumed she always would. Everything would end up okay for her, she knew, and, odd as it seemed, I knew she was right.

I forced a smile and said, “Don’t worry about me, Nae, I’ll be fine. And don’t worry about yourself and the kids either.” I looked her dead in the eye. “You’ll always be taken care of—no matter what.”

She nodded in understanding, although just what I’d meant by that I don’t think either of us knew. With the utmost sincerity, she said, “I know you’ll take care of us the best you can. Do you know how long you’ll have to go away for?”

“I’m still not sure,” I said. “Joel is leaving the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which is a good thing for me, but I’ll still have to do a few years, I’m sure.” I shrugged my shoulders, trying to make light of it. “And this is the end of the line, Nae: You’re gonna move on with your life and I’m going to fucking jail.” I smiled and winked. “Feel like changing places with me?”

“Nope!” she answered, with a few exaggerated headshakes. “But I promise you that the kids will always know that their father is a good man.” She reached over and grabbed my hand, the way a friend would. “Your kids will always love you, Jordan, and they’ll be waiting for you the second you get out.”

I squeezed her hand gently, and then I rose from my chair and walked over to a floor-to-ceiling window at the back of the room. I leaned my shoulder against it and took a moment to relish the beauty of my property. It was gorgeous this time of year. The lawn was as green as any rain forest, and the pond and waterfall looked like a painting. How different things could have worked out. If only I would’ve done things right.

After a few seconds the Duchess joined me by the window and stared out. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is. It’s hard to believe another family’s gonna live here one day, you know?”

She nodded but said nothing.

Suddenly a pleasant memory: “Hey—remember what we did the day we went to contract on this house?”

She started giggling. “Yeah! We snuck onto the property and had sex in the backyard!”

“Exactly!” I said, laughing. “Those were some funny days back then, right?”

“Yeah, but they weren’t my favorite.”

I looked at her, surprised. “Oh, really? Which were?”

“The first days,” she answered casually. “In that tiny apartment in the city. I loved you so much back then. If you only knew, Jordan. But you never let yourself trust me, because of how rich you were when we met.” She paused for a moment, as if searching for the right words. “I want you to know that I was always faithful to you when we were together. I never cheated on you even once! And, well, what happened this morning on the phone”—she stopped and shook her head quickly, as if she was disgusted with herself—”well, it was a bad showing on my part, and I’m sorry for it.”

“So am I,” I said quickly. “It was a bad showing on my part too.”

She nodded. “And I want you to know that I wasn’t trying to manipulate you with the Hamptons.” Yeah, right! “I mean, yeah, maybe at the end I was, but not at the beginning. When I first came up with the idea, I thought there was a chance for us.” She paused for a moment. “But then over the last few weeks, well, I knew there wasn’t. Too much had happened: too much hurt, too much pain, too many bad memories. I’m not gonna offer you any cheap clichés here, but I think we definitely broke the record for insane relationships, you know?”

I smiled sadly, knowing she was right. “Yeah, I guess we did,” I said, “but it was definitely fun for a while, at least in the beginning.” I perked up my tone. “Anyway, we got two great kids out of the deal, and I’ll always love you for that.” I offered her my hand, palm upward, as if she were truly a Duchess. “So, come on, Duchess; why don’t we go upstairs and give the kids a kiss? Then I’ll get going.” She smiled, then took my hand and off we went— out of the kitchen, through the dining room, through the grand marble entryway, and then up the sumptuous spiral staircase that led to the mansion’s second floor.

When we reached the top of the stairs, I turned east, toward the kids’ rooms, and she turned west, toward the master bedroom. We were still holding hands, so we looked like two sailors leaning into opposing winds. I smiled playfully. “What are you doing?” I asked.

She just stared at me, with her lips compressed into a tight line, as if she were a child thinking about doing something naughty. Then she gave her head a tiny jerk in the direction of the bedroom. “Come inside with me,” she said mischievously.

My eyes popped opened like a pair of umbrellas. “What? You want to make love to me now, after I just told you I lost the houses?”

She nodded eagerly. “Yeah, it’s the perfect time. I was never really in it for the money! It just seemed…” I narrowed my eyes suspiciously; she backtracked. “Okay, I won’t deny that the money definitely helped, but I could have married a lot of rich guys. I chose you because you were cute. And you still are cute!” She winked. “So, come on! Let’s do it one last time before we get divorced, okay?”

“You lead, I follow!” I said happily, and a second later the bedroom door was slamming behind us and we were jumping onto the fabulous white silk comforter, with its thousands of tiny pearls.

We began kissing deeply. Such wanton passion! Such sexual ferocity! Like never before! The Duchess smelled so good it seemed almost impossible. I wanted this woman, to literally possess her, for all eternity.

“I love you,” I groaned.

“I’ll always love you too,” she groaned back.

Bitch! I thought. “Me too,” I said lovingly, and we began wriggling out of our shirts, and—yes—the Duchess was braless! And I pushed my bare nipples against her bare nipples and my bare stomach against her bare stomach—and such softness I felt! Such heat! The Duchess was a raging inferno! Overcome by passion! Couldn’t even think straight!

Suddenly she broke off our kiss and looked at me nervously. Through tiny pants, she muttered, “I hope”-pant, pant-“you don’t think”-pant, pant—“you’re sleeping over tonight.” Pant, pant. “I just can’t”-pant, pant-“bear the thought”—pant, pant—”of waking up to you tomorrow morning!” Pant, pant.

Bitch! I thought. “Of course not.” Pant, pant. “I have a meeting in Southampton”-pant, pant—“first thing in the morning!” Pant, pant.

“Oh, good!” she muttered. “Make love to me”—pant, pant.

And off came our pants, and the Duchess’s legs-perfection! So soft they were! So supple! Like never before! Those luscious thighs, those slender ankles, those heavenly hips! My nervous system was on sensory overload, and I loved it.

“Kiss me softly,” moaned the Duchess. “The way you used to…”

Yes, I thought, I would kiss her softly, just the way I used to, and then I would make love to her, just the way I used to, with myself on top and her luscious legs clamped together, for added friction. The Duchess loved it that way!

With great tenderness, I placed my hands on her cheeks and put my lips to her lips, and I kissed her softly, breathing in every last molecule of her. Her lips smelled utterly delicious, utterly frisky-just like they used to!

So we just lay there, kissing, for what seemed like a very long time.

Finally I broke off our kiss and looked my gorgeous Duchess in her fabulous blue eyes and decided to give it one last college try. “I still love you,” I said softly, praying that she would return my words.

She nodded quickly. “I love you too,” she said. “Now make love to me, sweetie!”

She still loved me!

Then—a shock, as she said, “Wait a second: Let me turn around so we can do it from behind.” Faster than it seemed possible, the Duchess had wriggled out from beneath me and was crouching on her knees now, with her back to me. Then she crossed her arms over her breasts and arched her back, like a cat, pushing her butt out. She said urgently, “Hurry up and grab my arms and hug me from behind!”

Bitch! I thought. She had learned a new trick in my absence! Of all the insults! Who had taught her this… doggie-style cross-armed maneuver? Was it the ponytailed bastard? Or the sleazoid golf pro? Or even worse—the Romanian slime-bucket?

Just then she swung her blond head around and stared at me quizzically. “What are you waiting for?” Pant, pant. “Take me now or lose me forever!”

I stared back at her, speechless.

She smiled coyly. “Oh, come on, silly! You’ll like it this way!”

Bitch! I thought. And then I smiled.

We ended up making passionate love that Thursday evening, and, in retrospect, I think we both knew it would be for the last time. Just why it had to happen I would never know, although I suspected it had something to do with closure, which both of us desperately needed. We had been to hell and back together, and now it was time to move on. In some way, I knew, we would always love each other.