Our bizarre menagerie: There were five pleasantly plump, Spanish-speaking maids, two of which were husband-and-wife teams; a jabbering Jamaican baby nurse, who was running up a thousand-dollar-a-month phone bill, calling her family in Jamaica; an Israeli electrician, who followed the Duchess around like a lovesick puppy dog; a white-trash handyman, who had all the motivation of a heroin-addicted sea slug; my personal maid, Gwynne, who anticipated my every need no matter how bizarre it might be; Rocco and Rocco, the two armed bodyguards, who kept out the thieving multitudes, despite the fact that the last crime in Old Brookville occurred in 1643, when white settlers stole land from the Mattinecock Indians; five full-time landscapers, three of which had recently been bitten by my chocolate-brown Labrador retriever, Sally, who bit anyone who dared go within a hundred feet of Chandler’s crib, especially if their skin was darker than a brown paper bag; and the most recent addition to the menagerie—two full-time marine biologists, also a husband-and-wife team, who, for $90,000 a year, kept that nightmare-of-a-pond ecologically balanced. And then, of course, there was George Campbell, my charcoal-black limo driver, who hated all white people, including me.
Yet, with all these people working at Chez Belfort, it didn’t change the fact that, right now, I was all alone, soaking wet, and horny as hell, at the hands of my blond second wife, the aspiring everything. I looked around for something to dry myself off with. I grabbed one of the cascading billows of white Chinese silk and tried to wipe myself. Christ! It didn’t help a bit. Apparently the silk had been treated with some sort of water repellent, and all it did was push the water from here to there. I looked behind me—a pillowcase! It was made of Egyptian cotton; probably a three-million thread count. Must’ve cost a fortune—of my money! I removed the pillowcase from the overstuffed goose-down pillow inside it and started wiping myself. Ahhh, the Egyptian cotton was nice and soft. And such terrific absorption! My spirits lifted.
I scooted over to my wife’s side of the bed to get out of the wet spot. I would pull the covers over my head and return to the warm bosom of my dream. I would return to Venice. I took a deep breath…Oh, shit! The Duchess’s scent was everywhere! All at once I felt the blood rushing to my loins. Christ—she was a frisky little animal, the Duchess, with a frisky little scent! No choice now but to jerk off. It was all for the best, anyway. After all, the Duchess’s power over me began and ended below my waist.
I was about to do a little self-soothing when I heard a knock at the door. “Who is it?” I asked, in a voice loud enough to get through the bomb-shelter door.
“Iz Gwaayne,” answered Gwynne.
Ahhh, Gwynne—with her wonderful Southern drawl! So soothing it was. In fact, everything about Gwynne was soothing. The way she anticipated my every need, the way she doted on me like the child she and her husband, Willie, were never able to conceive. “Come in,” I replied warmly.
The bomb-shelter door swung open with a tiny creak. “Guh mawnin, guh mawnin!” said Gwynne. She was carrying a sterling-silver tray. There was a tall glass of light iced coffee and a bottle of Bayer aspirin resting on it. Tucked beneath her left arm was a white bath towel.
“Good morning, Gwynne. How are you this fine morning?” I asked with mock formality.
“Oh, I’m fine…I’m fine!” Ahhhm fahyn…Ahhhm fahyn! “Well, I see you’re over on your wife’s side of the bed, so I’ll just walk right on over there and bring you your iced coffee. I also brought a nice soft towel for you to wipe yourself with. Mrs. Belfort told me you spilled some water on yourself.”
Un-fucking-believable! Martha Stewart strikes again! All at once I realized that my erection had given the white silk comforter the appearance of a circus tent—shit! I elevated my knees with the speed of a jackrabbit.
Gwynne walked over and placed the tray on the antique night table on the Duchess’s side of the bed. “Here, let me dry you off!” said Gwynne, and she leaned over and began dabbing the white towel on my forehead, as if I were an infant.
Holy Christ! What a fucking circus this house was! I mean, here I was, lying flat on my back, with a raging hard-on, while my fifty-five-year-old plumpish black maid, who was an anachronism from a bygone era, leaned over with her drooping jugs three inches from my face and wiped me with a five-hundred-dollar monogrammed Pratesi bath towel. Of course, Gwynne didn’t look even the slightest bit black. Ohhh, no! That would be way too normal for this household. Gwynne, in fact, was even lighter than me. The way I had it figured, somewhere in her family tree, perhaps a hundred fifty years ago, when Dixie was still Dixie, her great-great-great-great-grandmother had been the secret love slave of some wealthy plantation owner in south Georgia.
Whatever the case, at least this extreme close-up of Gwynne’s drooping jugs was sending the blood rushing out of my loins and back to where it belonged, namely, my liver and lymph channels, where it could be detoxified. Still, the mere sight of her hovering over me like this was more than I could bear, so I kindly explained to her that I was capable of wiping my own forehead.
She seemed a bit sadder for that fact, but all she said was, “Okay,” which came out as, Ohhhhkaii. “Do you need some aspirin?” Daya need sum airrrsprin?
I shook my head. “No, I’m fine, Gwynne. Thanks anyway, though.”
“Ohhhhkaii, well how ’bout some of them little white pills fer yer back?” she asked innocently. “Would you like me to get you some of those?”
Christ! My own maid was offering to fetch me Quaaludes at seven-thirty in the morning! How was I supposed to stay sober? Wherever I was, there were drugs close behind, chasing after me, calling my name. And nowhere was it worse than at my brokerage firm, where virtually every drug imaginable lined the pockets of my young stockbrokers.
Yet my back did actually hurt me. I was in constant chronic pain from a freak injury that occurred right after I’d first met the Duchess. It was her dog that did me in—that little white bastard of a Maltese, Rocky, who barked incessantly and served no useful purpose other than to annoy every human being he came into contact with. I had been trying to get the little prick to come in from the beach at the end of a summer Hamptons day, but the little bastard refused to obey me. When I tried to catch him he ran circles around me, forcing me to lunge over to try to grab him. It was reminiscent of the way Rocky Balboa had chased around that greasy chicken in Rocky II before his rematch with Apollo Creed. But unlike Rocky Balboa, who became fast-as-lightning and ultimately won his rematch, I ended up rupturing a disk and being bedridden for two weeks. Since then I’d had two back surgeries, both of which had made the pain worse.
So the Quaaludes helped with the pain—sort of. And even if they didn’t, it still served as an excellent excuse to keep taking them.
And I wasn’t the only one who hated that little shit of a dog. Everyone did, with the exception of the Duchess, who was his sole protector and who still let the mutt sleep at the foot of the bed and chew on her panties, which for some inexplicable reason made me jealous. Still, Rocky would be sticking around for the foreseeable future—until I could figure out a way to eliminate him that the Duchess wouldn’t pin on me.
Anyway, I told Gwynne thanks but no thanks for the Quaaludes, and, once more, she seemed a bit sadder for the fact. After all, she had failed to anticipate my every need. But all she said was, “Ohhhhkaii, well, I already set the timer on your sauna so it’s ready for you right now”—raghite nahow—“and I laid out your clothes for you late last night. Is your gray pinstripe suit and that blue tie with the little fishees on it ohhhhkaii?”
Christ, talk about service! Why couldn’t the Duchess be more like that? True, I was paying Gwynne $70,000 a year, which was more than double the going rate, but, still…Look what I got in return: service with a smile! Yet my wife was spending $70,000 a month—on the low side! In fact, with all those fucking aspirations of hers, she was probably spending double that. And that was fine with me, but there had to be a certain trade-off here. I mean, if I needed to go out once in a while and swing th
e schlong here or dang the gong there, then she oughta cut me just a little bit of slack, shouldn’t she? Yes, certainly so—in fact, so much so that I started nodding my head in agreement with my own thoughts.
Apparently, Gwynne took my nodding as an affirmative answer to her question, and she said, “Ohhhhkaii, well, I’ll just go on out and get Chandler ready so she’s nice and clean for you. Have a nice shower!” Cheery, cheery, cheery!
With that, Gwynne left the room. Well, I thought, at least she killed my hard-on, so I was better off for the encounter. As far as the Duchess was concerned, I’d worry about her later. She was a mutt, after all, and mutts were well-known for their forgiving nature.
Having worked things out in my mind, I downed my iced coffee, took six aspirin, swung my feet off the bed, and headed for the sauna. There I would sweat out the five Quaaludes, two grams of coke, and three milligrams of Xanax that I had consumed the night before—a relatively modest amount of drugs, considering what I was truly capable of.
Unlike the master bedroom, which was a testament to white Chinese silk, the master bathroom was a testament to gray Italian marble. It was laid out in an exquisite parquetlike pattern, the way only those Italian bastards know how to do it. And they sure as hell hadn’t been scared to bill me! Nonetheless, I paid the thieving Italians in stride. After all, it was the nature of twentieth-century capitalism that everyone should scam everyone, and he who scammed the most ultimately won the game. On that basis, I was the undefeated world champ.
I looked in the mirror and took a moment to regard myself. Christ, what a skinny little bastard I was! I was very muscular, but, still…I had to run around in the shower to get wet! Was it the drugs? I wondered. Well, perhaps; but it was a good look for me, anyway. I was only five-seven, and a very smart person had once said you could never be too rich or too thin. I opened the medicine cabinet and took out a bottle of extra-strength Visine. I craned back my neck and put six drops in each eye, triple the recommended dose.
In that very instant, an odd thought came bubbling up into my brain, namely: What kind of man abuses Visine? And, for that matter, why had I taken six Bayer aspirin? It made no sense. After all, unlike Ludes, coke, and Xanax, where the benefits of increasing the dose are plain as day, there was absolutely no valid reason to exceed the recommended doses of Visine and aspirin.
Yet, ironically, that was exactly what my very life had come to represent. It was all about excess: about crossing over forbidden lines, about doing things you thought you’d never do and associating with people who were even wilder than yourself, so you’d feel that much more normal about your own life.
All at once I found myself becoming depressed. What was I going to do about my wife? Christ—had I really done it this time? She seemed pretty angry this morning! What was she doing right now? I wondered. If I had to guess, she was probably yapping on the phone to one of her friends or disciples or whatever the fuck they were. She was somewhere downstairs, spewing out perfect pearls of wisdom to her less-than-perfect friends, in the genuine hope that with a little bit of coaching she could make them as perfect as she was. Ahhh, that was my wife, all right—the Duchess of Bay fucking Ridge! The Duchess and all her loyal subjects, those young Stratton wives, who sucked up to her as if she were Queen Elizabeth or something. It was totally fucking nauseating.
Yet, in her defense, the Duchess had a role to play and she played it well. She understood the twisted sense of loyalty that everyone involved with Stratton Oakmont felt for it, and she had forged ties with the wives of key employees, which had made things that much more solid. Yes, the Duchess was a sharp cookie.
Usually she would come into the bathroom in the morning while I was getting ready for work. She was a good conversationalist, when she wasn’t busy telling me to go fuck myself. But usually I had brought that on myself, so I really couldn’t blame her for it. Actually, I really couldn’t blame her for anything, could I? She happened to be a damn good wife, in spite of all that Martha Stewart crap. She must’ve said “I love you” a hundred times a day. And as the day progressed she would add on these wonderful little intensifiers: I love you desperately! I love you unconditionally!…and, of course, my favorite: I love you to the point of madness!…which I considered the most appropriate of all.
Yet, in spite of all her kind words, I still wasn’t sure I could trust her. She was my second wife, after all, and words are cheap. Would she really be there with me for better or worse? Outwardly, she gave every indication that she genuinely loved me—constantly showering me with kisses—and whenever we were out in public, she held my hand or put her arm around me or ran her fingers through my hair.
It was all very confusing. When I was married to Denise I never worried about these things. She had married me when I had nothing, so her loyalty was unquestioned. But after I made my first million dollars, she must have had a dark premonition, and she asked me why I couldn’t get a normal job making a million dollars a year? It seemed like a ridiculous question at the time, but back then, on that particular day, neither of us knew that in less than a year I’d be making a million dollars a week. And neither of us knew that in less than two years, Nadine Caridi, the Miller Lite girl, would pull up to my Westhampton beach house on July Fourth weekend and step out of that banana-yellow Ferrari wearing a ridiculously short skirt and a pair of white go-to-hell pumps.
I had never meant to hurt Denise. In fact, it was the furthest thing from my mind. But Nadine swept me off my feet, and I swept her off hers. You don’t choose who you fall in love with, do you? And once you do fall in love—that obsessive sort of love, that all-consuming love, where two people can’t stand to be apart from each other for even a moment—how are you supposed to let a love like that pass you by?
I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, trying to push all this Denise business back down below the surface. After all, guilt and remorse were worthless emotions, weren’t they? Well, I knew they weren’t, but I had no time for them. Forward motion; that was the key. Run as fast as you can and don’t look back. And as far as my wife went—well, I would right things with her too.
Having worked things out in my mind for the second time in less than five minutes, I forced myself to smile at my own reflection and then headed for the sauna. Once there, I would sweat out the evil spirits and start my day anew.
CHAPTER 3
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Thirty minutes after beginning my morning detox, I emerged from the master bedroom feeling rejuvenated. I was wearing the very gray pinstripe suit that Gwynne had laid out for me. On my left wrist I wore an $18,000 gold Bulgari watch that was thin and understated. In the olden days, before the Duchess came to town, I had worn a solid gold Rolex that was thick and chunky. But the Duchess, being the self-proclaimed arbiter of taste, grace, and gentility, had immediately discarded it, explaining to me that it was gauche. Just how she would know such a thing I still couldn’t figure out, given the fact that the nicest watch she’d seen growing up in Brooklyn probably had a Disney character on it. Nevertheless, she seemed to have a knack for these things, so I usually listened to her.
No matter, though. I still maintained my masculine pride with one holdout: a terrific pair of handmade black crocodile cowboy boots. Each boot had been cut from a single crocodile skin, making them absolutely seamless. They had cost me $2,400, and I absolutely loved them. The Duchess, of course, despised them. Today I wore them with great pride, hoping to send a clear signal to my wife that I couldn’t be pushed around, in spite of the fact that she had just pushed me around.
I was on my way to Chandler’s bedroom for my morning nip of fatherhood, which was my favorite part of the day. Chandler was the only thing in my life that was completely pure. Each time I carried her in my arms it was as if all the chaos and insanity was held in harness.
As I made my way toward her room, I felt my spirits lifting. She was almost five months old and she was absolutely perfect. But when I opened Channy’s door—what a tremendous shock! It w
asn’t just Channy, it was Mommy too! She’d been hiding in Channy’s room all along, waiting for me to come in!
There they were, sitting in the very middle of the room on the softest, most glorious pink carpet imaginable. It was another outlandishly expensive touch from Mommy, the formerly aspiring decorator—who was looking mighty fine, for Chrissake! Chandler was sitting between her mother’s slightly parted legs—slightly parted legs!—with her delicate little back resting against Mommy’s firm tummy and Mommy’s hands clasped around her belly for added support. The two of them looked gorgeous. Channy was a carbon copy of her mother, having inherited those vivid blue eyes and glorious cheekbones.
I took a deep breath to fully relish the scent of my daughter’s room. Ahhhh, the smell of baby powder, baby shampoo, baby wipes! And then another deep breath to relish the smell of Mommy. Ahhhh, her four-hundred-dollar-a-bottle shampoo and conditioner from God only knew where! Her hypoallergenic, custom-formulated Kiehl’s skin conditioner; that tiny hint of Coco perfume she wore oh so insouciantly! I felt a pleasant tingling sensation shoot through my entire central nervous system and into my loins.
The room itself was absolutely perfect, a little pink wonderland. Countless stuffed animals were scattered about, all arranged just so. To the right was a white crib and bassinet, custom-made by Bellini of Madison Avenue, for the bargain price of $60,000. (Mommy strikes again!) Above it hung a pink and white mobile that played twelve Disney songs, while strikingly realistic Disney characters went round and round at a merry clip. It was another custom-made touch of my dear aspiring decorator, this one only $9,000 (for a mobile?). But who cared? This was Chandler’s room, the most favored room in the house.
I took a moment to regard my wife and daughter. All at once the word breathtaking popped into my mind. Chandler was naked as a blue jay. Her olive skin looked buttery smooth and utterly flawless.
The Wolf of Wall Street Page 4