The Wolf of Wall Street

CHAPTER 4

WASP HEAVEN

Like a dog in heat, I searched all twenty-four rooms of the mansion for Mommy. In fact, I searched every nook and cranny of all six acres of the estate until, finally, reluctantly, and with great sadness, I called off my search. It was almost nine o’clock, and I had to get to work. Just where my dear aspiring cock-teaser was hiding, I couldn’t figure out. So I gave up trying to get laid.

We pulled away from my Old Brookville estate just after nine a.m. I was sitting in the backseat of my midnight-blue Lincoln limousine, with my white-cracker-hating chauffeur, George Campbell, behind the wheel. In the four years George had worked for me, he’d said only a dozen words. On some mornings I found his self-imposed vow of silence rather annoying, but at this particular moment it was just fine. In fact, after my recent run-in with the luscious Duchess, a little bit of peace and quiet would be sublime.

Still, as part of my morning ritual I would always greet George in overly warm tones and try to get some sort of response out of him. Anything. So I figured I’d take another crack at it, just for shits and giggles.

I said, “Hey, Georgie! How ya doing today?”

George turned his head approximately four and a half degrees to the right, so I could barely see the whites of his blazing white eyeballs, and then he nodded, just once.

Never fails, God damn it! The guy’s a fucking mute!

Actually, that wasn’t true: About six months earlier George had asked me if I could loan him (which, of course, meant give him) $5,000 to get himself a new set of choppers (as he referred to them). This I gladly did, but not until I tortured him for a good fifteen minutes, making him tell me everything—how white they’d be, how many there’d be, how long they’d last, and what was wrong with his teeth right now. By the time George was done, there were beads of sweat running down his charcoal-black forehead, and I was sorry I’d ever asked him in the first place.

Today, as on every day, George wore a navy-blue suit and grim expression, the grimmest expression his inflated $60,000-a-year salary could reasonably allow for. I had no doubt that George hated me or at least resented me, in the same way he hated and resented all white crackers. The only exception to that was my wife, the aspiring people-pleaser, whom George adored.

The limo was one of those superstretch jobs, with a fully stocked bar, a TV and VHS, a fridge, a terrific sound system, and a rear seat that turned into a queen-size bed with the flip of a switch. The bed was an added touch, to ease my back pain, but it had the unintended effect of turning my limousine into a $96,000 brothel on wheels. Go figure. My destination this morning was none other than Lake Success, Long Island, the once quiet middle-class hamlet where Stratton Oakmont was located.

Nowadays, the town was like Tombstone, Arizona—before the Earps came to town. All these quaint little cottage industries had sprung up to service the needs, wants, and desires of the twisted young stockbrokers in my employ. There were brothels, illegal gambling parlors, after-hours clubs, and all that sort of fun stuff. There was even a little prostitution ring turning tricks in the lower level of the parking garage, at two hundred dollars a pop.

In the early years, the local merchants were up in arms over the apparent gracelessness of my merry band of stockbrokers, many of whom seemed to have been raised in the wild. But it wasn’t long before these same merchants realized that the Stratton brokers didn’t check price tags on anything. So the merchants jacked up their prices, and everyone lived in peace, just like in the Wild West.

Now the limo was heading west, down Chicken Valley Road, one of the finest roads in the Gold Coast. I cracked my window to let in a little fresh air. I stared out at the lush fairways of the Brookville Country Club, where I’d made my drug-assisted approach earlier this morning. The country club was remarkably close to my estate—so near, in fact, that I could hit a golf ball from my front lawn to the middle of the seventh fairway with a well-struck seven iron. But, of course, I never bothered applying for membership, what with my status as a lowly Jew, who had the utter gall to invade WASP heaven.

And it wasn’t just the Brookville Country Club that restricted Jews. No, no, no! All the surrounding clubs restricted Jews or, for that matter, anyone who wasn’t a blue-blooded WASP bastard. (In fact, Brookville Country Club admitted Catholics and wasn’t nearly as bad as some of the others.) When the Duchess and I first moved here from Manhattan, the whole WASP thing bothered me. It was like some secret club or society, but then I came to realize that the WASPs were yesterday’s news, a seriously endangered species no different than the dodo bird or spotted owl. And while it was true that they still had their little golf clubs and hunting lodges as last bastions against the invading shtetl hordes, they were nothing more than twentieth-century Little Big Horns on the verge of being overrun by savage Jews like myself, who’d made fortunes on Wall Street and were willing to spend whatever it took to live where Gatsby lived.

The limo made a gentle left turn and now we were on Hegemans Lane. Up ahead on the left was the Gold Coast Stables, or, as the owners liked to refer to it, “The Gold Coast Equestrian Center,” which sounded infinitely WASPier.

As we passed by, I could see the green-and-white-striped stables, where the Duchess kept her horses. From top to bottom the whole equestrian thing had turned into a giant fucking nightmare. It started with the stable’s owner, a Quaalude-addicted, potbellied savage Jew, with a thousand-watt social smile and a secret life’s mission to be mistaken for a WASP. He and his bleached blond pseudo-WASP wife saw the Duchess and me coming a mile away and decided to dump all their reject horses on us, at a three hundred percent markup. And if that weren’t painful enough, as soon as we bought the horses, they would become afflicted with bizarre ailments. Between the vet bills, the food bills, and the cost of paying stable hands to ride the horses so they would stay in shape, the whole thing had turned into an enormous black hole.

Nevertheless, my luscious Duchess, the aspiring hunter-jumper expert, went there every day—to feed her horses sugar cubes and carrots and to take riding lessons—in spite of the fact that she suffered from intractable horse allergies and would come home sneezing and wheezing and itching and coughing. But, hey, when you live in the middle of WASP heaven you do as the WASPs do, and you pretend to like horses.

As the limo crossed over Northern Boulevard, I felt my lower-back pain breaking through the surface. It was about that time now, where most of last night’s recreational drug medley had worked its way out of my central nervous system and into my liver and lymph channels, where it belonged. But it also meant that the pain would now be returning. It felt as if an angry, feral, fire-breathing dragon was slowly awakening. The pain started in the small of my back, on the left side, and went shooting down the back of my left leg. It was as if someone were twisting a red-hot branding iron into the back of my thigh. It was excruciating. If I tried rubbing the pain out it would shift to a different spot.

I took a deep breath and resisted the urge to grab three Quaaludes and swallow them dry. That would be completely unacceptable behavior, after all. I was heading for work, and in spite of being the boss, I couldn’t just stumble in like a drooling idiot. That was only acceptable at nighttime. Instead, I said a quick prayer that a bolt of lightning would come down from out of the clear blue sky and electrocute my wife’s dog.

On this side of Northern Boulevard, things were decidedly low rent, which is to say the average home went for a little over a million-two. It was rather ironic how a kid from a poor family could become desensitized to the extravagances of wealth to the point that million-dollar homes now seemed like shacks. But that wasn’t a bad thing, was it? Well, who knew anymore.

Just then I saw the green and white sign that hung over the entrance ramp to the Long Island Expressway. Soon enough I’d be walking into the very offices of Stratton Oakmont—my home away from home—where the mighty roar of America’s wildest boardroom would make the insanity seem perfectly okay.