The Wolf of Wall Street

CHAPTER 7

SWEATING THE SMALL STUFF

In ominous tones, and with his brilliant blue eyes bulging so far out of his head that he looked like a cartoon character about to pop, Mad Max said, “If you three bastards don’t wipe those smug fucking looks off your faces, I swear to fucking God I’m gonna wipe them off for you!”

With that, he started pacing…slowly, deliberately…with his face contorted into a mask of unadulterated fury. In his right hand was a lit cigarette, probably his twentieth of the day; in his left hand was a white Styrofoam cup filled with Stolichnaya vodka, hopefully his first of the day but probably his second.

All at once he stopped pacing, and he turned on his heel like a prosecuting attorney and looked at Danny. “So what do you have to say for yourself, Porush? You know, you’re even more of a fucking retard than I thought you were—eating a goldfish in the middle of the boardroom! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Danny stood up and smiled, and said, “Come on, Max! It wasn’t as bad as it seems. The kid deserved—”

“Sit down and shut up, Porush! You’re a fucking disgrace, not just to yourself but to your whole fucking family, may God save them!” Mad Max paused for a brief instant, then added, “And stop smiling, God damn it! Those boiling teeth of yours are hurting my eyes! I need a pair of sunglasses to shield myself, for Chrissake!”

Danny sat down and closed his mouth nice and tight. We exchanged glances, and I found myself fighting a morbid urge to smile. But I resisted it—knowing it would only make matters worse. I glanced over at Kenny. He was sitting across from me, in the same chair Wigwam had sat in, but I failed to make eye contact with him. He was too busy staring at his own shoes, which, as usual, were in desperate need of a shine. In typical Wall Street fashion, he had his shirtsleeves rolled up, exposing a thick gold Rolex. It was the Presidential model—my old watch, in fact, the one the Duchess had made me discard because of its gaucheness. Nevertheless, Kenny didn’t look gauche or, for that matter, sharp. And that new military-style haircut of his made his blockhead look that much blockier. My junior partner, I thought: the Blockhead.

Meanwhile, a poisonous silence now filled the room, which meant it was time for me to put an end to this very madness, once and for all. So I leaned forward in my chair and dug deep into my fabulous vocabulary—extracting the sort of words I knew my father would respect most—and I said in a commanding voice, “All right, Dad, enough of this shit! Why don’t you calm the fuck down for a second! This is my fucking company, and if I have legitimate fucking business expenses, then I’m—”

But Mad Max cut me off before I could make my point. “You want me to calm down while you three retards act like kids in a candy store? You don’t think there’s any end in sight, do you? It’s all one giant fucking party to you three schmendricks; no rainy days on the horizon, right? Well, I’ll fucking tell you something—all this cock-and-bull horseshit of yours, the way you charge your personal expenses to this fucking company—I’m sick and tired of it!”

Then he paused and stared the three of us down—starting with me, his own son. At this particular moment he had to be wondering whether or not I was actually delivered by a stork. As he turned away from me I happened to catch a terrific look at him from just the right angle, and I found myself marveling at how dapper he looked today! Oh, yes, in spite of it all, Mad Max was very snazzy—favoring navy-blue blazers, spread British collars, solid navy neckties, and tan gabardine trousers, all custom-made and all starched and pressed to near perfection by the same Chinese laundry service he’d used for the last thirty years. He was a creature of habit, my father.

So there we sat, like good little schoolchildren, waiting patiently for his next verbal assault, which I knew wouldn’t come until he did one thing first: smoked. Finally, after a good ten seconds, he took an enormous pull from his Merit Ultra low-tar cigarette and expanded his mighty chest to twice its normal size, like a puffer fish trying to ward off a predator. Then he slowly exhaled and deflated himself back to normal size. His shoulders were still enormous, though, and his forward-leaning posture and thin layer of salt-and-pepper hair gave him the appearance of a five-foot-six-inch raging bull.

Then he tilted his head back and took an enormous pull from his Styrofoam cup and downed its fiery contents, as if it were no stronger than chilled Evian. He started shaking his head. “All this money being made and you three imbeciles blowing it like there’s no tomorrow. It’s a fucking travesty to watch. What do you three think, that I’m some sort of yes-man who’s just gonna roll over and play dead while you guys destroy this fucking company? Do you three have any idea of how many people count on this place for their fucking livelihood? Do you have any idea of the risk and exposure that…”

Mad Max went on and on in typical Mad Max fashion, but I tuned out. In fact, I found myself mesmerized by this wonderful ability he had to tie so many curses together with such little forethought and still make each sentence sound so very fucking poetic. It was truly beautiful the way he cursed—like Shakespeare with an attitude! And at Stratton Oakmont, where cursing was considered a high art form, to say that someone knew how to tie their curses together was a compliment of the highest order. But Mad Max took things to an entirely different level, and when he really got himself on a roll, like now, it gave his verbal tirades an almost pleasant ring to the ear.

Now Mad Max was shaking his head in disgust—or was it incredulity? Well, it was probably a bit of both. Whatever it was, he was shaking his head and explaining to us three retarded schmendricks that November’s American Express bill was $470,000, and only $20,000 of it, by his calculations, were legitimate business expenses; the rest were of a personal nature, or personal bullshit, as he put it. Then, in a most ominous tone, he said, “Let me tell you something right now—you three maniacs are gonna get your tits caught right in a wringer! You mark my fucking words—sooner or later those bastards from the IRS are gonna come marching down here and do a complete fucking audit, and you three retards are gonna be in deep shit unless someone puts a stop to all this madness. That’s why I’m hitting each of you personally for this bill.” He nodded in agreement with his own statement. “I’m not running it through the business—not one fucking penny of it—and that’s fucking final! I’m taking four hundred fifty thousand right out of your inflated fucking paychecks, and don’t even try to stop me!”

Why—the fucking nerve! I had to say something to him in his own language. “Hold your fucking horses right there, Dad! That’s a complete load of crap, what you’re saying! A lot of that shit is legitimate business expenses, whether you believe it or not. If you just stop fucking screaming for a second I’ll tell you what’s what and—”

But again he cut me right off, now turning his attack directly toward me: “And you, the so-called Wolf of Wall Street—the demented young Wolf. My own son! From my very fucking loins! How could it be? You’re the worst of the lot! Why the hell would you go out and buy two of the same fur coat, for eighty thousand dollars apiece? That’s right—I called that place, Allessandro’s House of Fucking Furs, because I thought it must be some sort of a mistake! But, no—you know what that Greek bastard down there told me?”

I humored him with a response: “No, Dad, what did he fucking tell you?”

“He told me you bought two of the same mink coat—the same color and style and everything!” With that, Mad Max cocked his head to one side and tucked his chin between his collarbones. He looked up at me with those bulging blue eyes of his, and he said, “What, one coat’s not enough for your wife? Or wait—let me guess—you bought the second mink for a prostitute, right?” He paused and took another deep pull from his cigarette. “I’ve had it up to here with all this cockamamie bullshit. You don’t think I know what EJ Entertainment is?” He narrowed his eyes accusingly. “You three maniacs are charging hookers to the corporate credit card! What kind of hookers take credit cards, anyway?”

The three of us exchanged glances but said nothing. After all, what was there to say? The truth was that hookers did take credit cards—or at least ours did! In fact, hookers were so much a part of the Stratton subculture that we classified them like publicly traded stocks: Blue Chips were considered the top-of-the-line hooker, zee crème de la crème. They were usually struggling young models or exceptionally beautiful college girls in desperate need of tuition or designer clothing, and for a few thousand dollars they would do almost anything imaginable, either to you or to each other. Next came the NASDAQs, who were one step down from the Blue Chips. They were priced between three and five hundred dollars and made you wear a condom unless you gave them a hefty tip, which I always did. Then came the Pink Sheet hookers, who were the lowest form of all, usually a streetwalker or the sort of low-class hooker who showed up in response to a desperate late-night phone call to a number in Screw magazine or the yellow pages. They usually cost a hundred dollars or less, and if you didn’t wear a condom, you’d get a penicillin shot the next day and then pray that your dick didn’t fall off.

Anyway, the Blue Chips took credit cards, so what was wrong with writing them off on your taxes? After all, the IRS knew about this sort of stuff, didn’t they? In fact, back in the good old days, when getting blasted over lunch was considered normal corporate behavior, the IRS referred to these types of expenses as three-martini lunches! They even had an accounting term for it: It was called T and E, which stood for Travel and Entertainment. All I’d done was taken the small liberty of moving things to their logical conclusion, changing T and E to T and A: Tits and Ass!

That aside, the problems with my father ran much deeper than a few questionable charges on the corporate credit card. The simple fact was that he was the tightest man to ever walk the face of the planet. And I—well, let’s just say that I had a fundamental disagreement with him on the management of money, insofar as I thought nothing of losing half a million dollars at the craps table and then throwing a $5,000 gray poker chip at a luscious Blue Chip.

Anyway, the long and short of it was that at Stratton Oakmont, Mad Max was like a fish out of water—or more like a fish on Pluto. He was sixty-five years old, which made him a good forty years older than the average Strattonite; he was a highly educated man, a CPA, who had an IQ somewhere in the stratosphere, while the average Strattonite had no education whatsoever and was about as smart as a box of rocks. He had grown up in a different time and place, in the old Jewish Bronx, amid the smoldering economic ashes of the Great Depression, not knowing if there would be food on the dinner table. And like millions of others who had grown up in the thirties, he still suffered from a Depression-era mentality—making him risk-averse, resistant to change in any shape or form, and riddled with financial doubt. And here he was, trying to manage the finances of a company whose sole business was based on moment-to-moment change and whose majority owner, who happened to be his own son, was a born risk-taker.

I took a deep breath, rose from my chair, and walked around the front of my desk and sat on the edge. Then I crossed my arms beneath my chest in a gesture of frustration, and I said, “Listen, Dad—there are certain things that go on here that I don’t expect you to understand. But the simple fact is that it’s my fucking money to do whatever the fuck I want with. In fact, unless you can make a case that my spending is impinging on cash flow, then I would just suggest you bite your fucking tongue and pay the bill.

“Now, you know I love you, and it hurts me to see you get so upset over a stupid credit-card bill. But that’s all it is, Dad: a bill! And you know you’re gonna end up paying it anyway. So what’s the point of getting all upset over it? Before the day is over we’re gonna make twenty million bucks, so who gives a shit about half a million?”

At this point the Blockhead chimed in. “Max, my portion of the bill is hardly anything. So I’m on the same page as you.”

I smiled inwardly, knowing the Blockhead had just made a colossal blunder. There were two rules of thumb when dealing with Mad Max: First, never try passing the buck—ever! Second, never point the finger, subtly or otherwise, at his beloved son, who only he had the right to berate. He turned to Kenny and said, “In my mind, Greene, every dollar you spend above zero is one too many dollars, you fucking twerp! At least my son is the one who makes all the money around here! What the fuck do you do, besides getting us tangled up in a sexual-harassment lawsuit with that big-titted sales assistant—whatever the fuck her name was.” He shook his head in disgust. “So why don’t you just shut the fuck up and count your lucky stars that my son was kind enough to make a twerp like you a partner in this place.”

I smiled at my father and said jokingly, “Dad—Dad—Dad! Now, calm down before you give yourself a fucking heart attack. I know what you’re thinking, but Kenny wasn’t trying to insinuate anything. You know all of us love you and respect you and rely on you to be the voice of reason around here. So let’s all just take a step back…”

For as long as I could remember, my father had been fighting a one-sided ground war against himself—consisting of daily battles against unseen enemies and inanimate objects. I first noticed it when I was five, with his car, which he seemed to think was alive. It was a 1963 green Dodge Dart, and he referred to it as she. The problem was that she had a terrible rattle coming from beneath her dashboard. It was an elusive son of a bitch, this rattle, which he was certain those bastards from the Dodge factory had purposely placed in her, as a means of personally fucking him over. It was a rattle that no one else could hear, except my mother—who only pretended to hear it, to keep my father from blowing an emotional gasket.

But that was only the start of it. Even a simple trip to the refrigerator could be a dicey affair, what with his habit of drinking milk directly from the container. The problem there was if even one drop of milk dripped down his chin, he would go absolutely ballistic—slamming down the milk container and muttering, “That goddamn piece-a-shit motherfucking milk container! Can’t those stupid bastards who design milk containers come up with one that doesn’t make the fucking milk drip down your godforsaken chin?”

Of course. It was the milk container’s fault! So Mad Max shrouded himself in a series of bizarre routines and steadfast rituals as protection against a cruel, unpredictable world filled with rattling dashboards and imperfect milk containers. He’d wake up each morning to three Kent cigarettes, a thirty-minute shower, and then an inordinately long shave with a straightedge razor, while one cigarette burned in his mouth and another burned over the sink. Next he would get dressed, first putting on a pair of white boxer shorts, then a pair of black knee-high socks, then a pair of black patent-leather shoes—but not his pants. Then he would walk around the apartment like that. He would eat breakfast, smoke a few more cigarettes, and excuse himself to take a world-class dump. After that he would coif his hair to near-perfection, put on a dress shirt, button it slowly, turn up his collar, wriggle on his tie, knot it, turn down his collar, and put on his suit jacket. Finally, just before he left the house, he’d put his pants on. Just why he saved this step for the end I could never figure out, but seeing it all those years must’ve scarred me in some undetermined way.

Odder still, though, was Mad Max’s complete and utter aversion to the unexpected ringing of the telephone. Oh, yes, Mad Max hated the sound of a ringing phone, which seemed unusually cruel—considering he worked in an office that had one thousand tightly packed telephones, give or take a few. And they rang incessantly, from the moment Mad Max entered the office at precisely nine a.m. (he was never late, of course) to the moment he left, which was whenever the fuck he damn well pleased.

Not surprisingly, growing up in that tiny two-bedroom apartment in Queens got pretty wild sometimes, especially when the phone started ringing, and especially when it was for him. Yet he never actually answered the phone himself, even if he so desired, because my mother, Saint Leah, would morph into a world-class track star the moment it started ringing—making a mad dash for it, knowing that each ring she stymied would make it that much easier to calm him down after the fact.

And on those sad occasions when my mother was forced to utter those terrible words, “Max, it’s for you,” my father would slowly rise out of his living-room chair, wearing a pair of white boxer shorts and nothing else, and stomp his way to the kitchen, muttering, “That motherfucking cocksucking piece-of-fucking-shit phone! Who-the-fucking-hell-has-the-goddamn-fucking-nerve-to-call-the-motherfucking-house-on-a-piece-of-shit-fucking-Sunday-after-fucking-noon…”

But when he finally reached the telephone, the most bizarre thing would happen: He would magically transform himself into his alter ego, Sir Max, who was a refined gentleman with impeccable manners and an accent reeking of British aristocracy. It was rather odd, I’d thought, considering my father was born and raised on the grimy streets of the South Bronx and had never been to England.

Nevertheless, Sir Max would say into the telephone, “Hello? How may I help you?” And he would keep his lips puckered and his cheeks slightly compressed, which really brought out that aristocratic accent of his. “Oh, okay, then; that will be quite fine! Righty-o, then!” With that, Sir Max would hang up the phone and revert back to Mad Max. “That-motherfucking-cocksucking-piece-of-fucking-shit-friend-of-fucking-mine-who-has-the-motherfucking-goddamn-gall-to-call-this-motherfucking-house…”

Yet with all the insanity, it was Mad Max who was the smiling coach of all my Little League teams, and it was Mad Max who was the first father to wake up on Sunday mornings and go downstairs and throw a ball around with his kids. He was the one who held the back of my bicycle seat and pushed me down the cement walk in front of our apartment building and then ran behind me, and he was the one who came into my bedroom at night and lay with me—running his fingers through my hair as I suffered with night terrors. He was the one who never missed a school play or a parent–teacher conference or music recital or anything else, for that matter, where he could relish his children and show us that we were loved.

He was a complicated man, my father; a man of great mental capacity who was driven to succeed yet humbled into mediocrity by his own emotional limitations. After all, how could a man like this function in the corporate world? Would such behavior be tolerated? How many jobs had he lost because of it? How many promotions had passed him by? And how many windows of opportunity had been slammed shut as a result of the Mad Max persona?

But all that changed with Stratton Oakmont, a place where Mad Max could unleash his fiery wrath with complete impunity. In fact, what better way for a Strattonite to prove his loyalty than to get berated by Mad Max and suck it up for the greater good, meaning: to live the Life. So a baseball bat to your car window or a public tongue-lashing was considered a rite of passage for a young Strattonite, to be worn like a badge of honor.

So there was Mad Max and Sir Max, and the idea was to figure out a way to bring out Sir Max. My first trial balloon was the one-on-one approach. I looked at Kenny and Danny and said, “Why don’t you guys give me a few minutes to talk to my father alone, okay?”

No arguments there! The two of them left with such alacrity that my father and I had barely made it to the couch, only ten feet away, when the door slammed shut behind them. My father sat down and lit up another cigarette and took one of his enormous pulls. I plopped myself down to his right, leaned back, and put my feet up on a glass coffee table in front of us.

I smiled sadly and said, “I swear to God, Dad, my back is fucking killing me. You have no idea. The pain’s going right down the back of my left leg. It’s enough to drive a person insane.”

My father’s face immediately softened. Apparently, trial balloon number one was off to a flying start. “Well, what do the doctors say?”

Hmmmmm…I hadn’t detected any hint of a British accent in those last few words; nonetheless, my back really was killing me and I was definitely making progress with him. “Doctors? What the fuck do they know? The last surgery made it even worse. And all they do is give me pills that upset my stomach and don’t do shit for the pain.” I shook my head some more. “Whatever, Dad. I don’t wanna worry you. I’m just venting.” I took my feet off the coffee table, leaned back, and spread my arms out on either side of the couch. “Listen,” I said softly, “I know it’s hard for you to make sense of all this craziness around here, but trust me, there’s a method to my madness, especially when it comes to the spending. It’s important to keep these guys chasing the dream. And it’s even more important to keep them broke.” I gestured over to the plate glass. “Look at them; as much money as they make, every last one of them is broke! They spend every dime they have, trying to keep up with my lifestyle. But they can’t, because they don’t make enough. So they end up living paycheck to paycheck on a million bucks a year. It’s hard to imagine, considering how you grew up, but, nevertheless, it is what it is.

“Anyway, keeping them broke makes them easier to control. Think about it: Virtually every last one of them is leveraged to the hilt, with cars and homes and boats and all the rest of that crap, and if they miss even one paycheck they’re up shit’s creek. It’s like having golden handcuffs on them. I mean, the truth is I could afford to pay them more than I do. But then they wouldn’t need me as much. But if I paid them too little, then they would hate me. So I pay them just enough so they love me but still need me. And as long as they need me they’ll always fear me.”

My father was staring at me intently, hanging on every word. “One day”—I gestured with my chin toward the plate glass—“all that will be gone, and so will all that so-called loyalty. And when that day comes, I don’t want you to have any knowledge of some of the things that went on here. That’s why I’m evasive with you sometimes. It’s not that I don’t trust you or that I don’t respect you—or that I don’t value your opinion. It’s the opposite, Dad. I keep things from you because I love you, and because I admire you, and because I want to protect you from the fallout when all this starts to unwind.”

Sir Max, in a concerned tone: “Why are you talking like this? Why does all this have to unwind? The companies you’re taking public are all legitimate, aren’t they?”

“Yes. It has nothing to do with the companies. And the truth is, we’re not doing anything different than anybody else out there. We’re just doing it bigger and better, which makes us a target. Anyway, don’t worry about it. I’m just having a morbid moment. Everything will work out fine, Dad.”

Just then Janet’s voice came through the intercom: “I’m sorry for interrupting, but you have a conference call with Ike Sorkin and the rest of the lawyers. They’re on the line right now and they have their billing clocks ticking. Do you want them to hold or should I reschedule it?”

Conference call? I didn’t have any conference call! And then it hit me: Janet was bailing me out! I looked at my father and shrugged, as if to say, “What can I do? I gotta take this call.”

We quickly exchanged hugs and apologies, and then I made a pledge to try to spend less in the future, which both of us knew was complete bullshit. Nevertheless, my father had come in like a lion and gone out like a lamb. And just as the door closed behind him, I made a mental note to give Janet a little something extra for Christmas, in spite of all the crap she’d given me this morning. She was a good egg—a damn good egg.