And Carter, at less than two months old, was already responding to Nadine in that very miraculous way. It was as if her very presence calmed him, and soothed him, and made him feel that everything was just as it should be. One day I would be that close with my son; yes, if God would give me the chance, I most certainly would be.
By the time I made it through the front door, the Duchess already had Carter in her arms, swaddled in a blue blanket. Rocco Night had pulled the Range Rover to the front, ready to rush us to the hospital. As we headed out to the car I put the back of my hand to Carter’s tiny forehead and was completely taken aback. He was literally burning up with fever. He was still breathing, albeit barely. There was no movement; he was stiff as a board.
On the way to the hospital the Duchess and I sat in the back of the Range Rover, and Suzanne sat in the front passenger seat. Rocco was an ex-NYPD detective, so red lights and speed limits were lost on him. And given the circumstances it was appropriate. I dialed Dr. Green, in Florida, but he wasn’t home. Then I called my parents and told them to meet us at North Shore Hospital, in Manhasset, which was five minutes closer than Long Island Jewish. The rest of the ride was spent in silence; there were still no tears.
We ran into the emergency room, the Duchess leading the charge, with Carter cradled in her arms. Carter’s pediatrician had already called the hospital, so they were waiting for us. We ran past a waiting room full of expressionless people, and in less than a minute Carter was on an examining table, being wiped down with a liquid that smelled like rubbing alcohol.
A young-looking doctor with bushy eyebrows said to us, “It looks like spinal meningitis. We need your authorization to give him a spinal tap. It’s a very low-risk procedure, but there is always the chance of an infection or—”
“Just give him the fucking spinal tap!” snapped the Duchess.
The doctor nodded, seeming not the least bit insulted over my wife’s use of language. She was entitled.
And then we waited. Whether it was ten minutes or two hours, it was impossible to say. Somewhere along the way his fever broke, dropping to 102. Then he started crying uncontrollably. It was a high-pitched, ungodly shriek, impossible to describe. I wondered if it was the sound an infant makes as he’s being robbed of his very faculties, as if instinctively he was crying out in anguish, aware of the terrible fate that had befallen him.
The Duchess and I were sitting in light-blue plastic chairs in the waiting room, leaning against each other, hanging on by a thread. We were accompanied by my parents and Suzanne. Sir Max was pacing back and forth, smoking cigarettes in spite of the no-smoking sign posted on the wall; I pitied the fool who would ask him to put it out. My mother was sitting beside me, in tears. I had never seen her look so terrible. Suzanne was sitting beside her daughter, no longer talking about conspiracies. It was one thing for a baby to have a hole in his heart; it could be patched. But it was quite another for a child to grow up deaf, dumb, and blind.
Just then the doctor emerged through a pair of automatic double doors. He was wearing green hospital scrubs and a neutral expression. The Duchess and I popped up out of our chairs and ran over to him. He said, “I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Belfort; the spinal tap came back positive. Your son has meningitis. It—”
I cut off the doctor: “Is it viral or bacterial?” I grabbed my wife’s hand and squeezed it, praying for viral.
The doctor took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It’s bacterial,” he said sadly. “I’m very sorry. We were all praying it would be viral, but the test is conclusive. We checked the results three times and there’s no mistake.” The doctor took another deep breath and then plowed on: “We’ve been able to get his fever down to a little over a hundred, so it looks like he’s gonna make it. But with bacterial meningitis there’s significant damage to the central nervous system. It’s too soon to say exactly how much and where, but it usually involves a loss of sight and hearing and”—he paused, as if he were searching for the right words—“some loss of mental function. I’m very sorry. Once he’s out of the acute stages we’ll need to call in some specialists to assess how much damage was actually done. Right now, though, all we can do is pump him with high doses of broad-spectrum antibiotics to kill the bacteria. At this point, we’re not even sure what bacteria it is; it seems to be a rare organism, not typically found in meningitis. Our head of infectious disease has already been contacted, and he’s on his way to the hospital right now.”
In a state of absolute disbelief, I asked, “How did he contract it?”
“There’s no telling,” replied the young doctor. “But he’s being moved to the isolation ward, on the fifth floor. He’ll be quarantined until we get to the bottom of this. Other than you and your wife, no one can see him.”
I looked at the Duchess. Her mouth was hanging open. She seemed to be frozen solid, staring off into the distance. And then she fainted.
Up in the fifth-floor isolation unit, it was sheer bedlam. Carter was flailing his arms wildly, kicking and screeching, and the Duchess was pacing back and forth, crying hysterically. Tears were running down her face and her skin was an ashen gray.
One of the doctors said to her, “We’re trying to get an IV in your son, but he won’t remain still. At this age it can be very difficult to find a vein, so I think we’re just going to stick the needle through his skull. It’s the only way.” His tone was rather nonchalant, entirely unsympathetic.
The Duchess was right on him. “You motherfucker! Do you know who my husband is, you bastard? You go back there right now and get an IV in his arm or I’ll fucking kill you myself before my husband has the chance to pay someone to do it!”
The doctor froze in horror, mouth agape. He was no match for the sheer ferocity of the Duchess of Bay Ridge. “Well, what the fuck are you waiting for? Go!”
The doctor nodded and ran back over to Carter’s hospital crib, lifting up his tiny arm to search for another vein.
Just then my cell phone rang. “Hello,” I said tonelessly.
“Jordan! It’s Barth Green. I just got all your messages. I’m so sorry for you and Nadine. Are they sure it’s bacterial meningitis?”
“Yes,” I replied, “they’re sure. They’re trying to get an IV in him, to pump him with antibiotics, but he’s going crazy right now. He’s kicking and screaming and flailing his arms—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Barth Green, cutting me off. “Did you just say he’s flailing his arms?”
“Yes, he’s going absolutely crazy, even as we speak. He’s been inconsolable ever since his fever broke. It sounds like he’s possessed by an evil—”
“Well, you can relax, Jordan, because your son doesn’t have meningitis, viral or bacterial. If he did, his fever would still be a hundred and six, and he’d be as stiff as a board. He probably has a bad cold. Infants have a tendency to spike abnormally high fevers. He’ll be fine in the morning.”
I was bowled over. How could Barth Green be so irresponsible as to create false hope like that? He hadn’t even seen Carter, and the spinal tap was conclusive; they’d checked the results three times. I took a deep breath and said, “Listen, Barth, I appreciate you trying to make me feel better, but the spinal tap showed that he has some sort of rare org—”
Cutting me off again: “I really don’t give a shit what the test showed. In fact, I’m willing to bet it was a contaminant in the sample. That’s the problem with these emergency rooms: They’re good for broken bones and an occasional gunshot wound, but that’s about it. And this, well, this is absolutely egregious for them to have worried you like this.”
I could hear him sigh over the phone. “Listen, Jordan, you know what I deal with each day with spinal paralysis, so I’ve been forced to become an expert on giving bad news to people. But this is complete horseshit! Your son has a cold.”
I was taken aback. I had never heard Barth Green utter so much as a single curse. Could he possibly be right? Was it plausible that from his living room in Florida he could
make a more accurate diagnosis than a team of doctors who were standing at my son’s bedside using the world’s most advanced medical equipment?
Just then Barth said in a sharp tone: “Put Nadine on the phone!”
I walked over and handed the phone to the Duchess. “Here, it’s Barth. He wants to speak to you. He’s says Carter’s fine and all the doctors are crazy.”
She took the phone, and I walked over to the crib and stared down at Carter. They’d finally been able to get an IV going in his right arm, and he had calmed down somewhat—only whimpering now and shifting uncomfortably in his crib. He really was handsome, I thought, and those eyelashes…Even now they stood out regally.
A minute later the Duchess walked over to the crib and leaned over and put the back of her hand to Carter’s forehead. Sounding very confused, she said, “He seems cool now. But how could all the doctors be wrong? And how could the spinal tap be wrong?”
I put my arm around the Duchess and held her close to me. “Why don’t we take turns sleeping here? This way one of us will always be with Channy.”
“No,” she replied, “I’m not leaving this hospital without my son. I don’t care if I have to stay here a month. I’m not leaving him, not ever.”
And for three straight days my wife slept by Carter’s bedside, never leaving the room once. On that third afternoon, as we sat in the backseat of the limousine on our way back to Old Brookville, with Carter James Belfort between us and the words It was a contaminant in the sample ringing pleasantly in both our ears, I found myself in awe of Dr. Barth Green.
First I’d seen him shake Elliot Lavigne out of a coma; now, eighteen months later, he’d done this. It made me feel much more comfortable that he’d be the one standing over me next week with a scalpel in his hand—cutting into my very spine. Then I would have my life back.
And then I could finally get off drugs.
CHAPTER 33
REPRIEVES
(Three Weeks Later)
Just when I actually woke from my back surgery I’m still not sure. It was on October 15, 1995, sometime in the early afternoon. I remember opening my eyes and muttering something like “Uhhhh, fuck! I feel like shit!” Then all of a sudden I started vomiting profusely, and each time I vomited I felt this terrible shooting pain ricocheting through every neural fiber of my body. I was in the recovery room in the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan, and I was hooked up to a drip that released titrated doses of pure morphine into my bloodstream each time I pushed a button. I remember feeling deeply saddened that I had to go through a seven-hour operation to get this sort of cheap high without breaking the law.
The Duchess was hovering over me, and she said, “You did great, honey! Barth said everything’s gonna be fine!” I nodded and drifted off into a sublime state of morphine-induced narcosis.
Then I was home. It was perhaps a week later, although the days seemed to be melting into one another. Alan Chemical-tob was helpful—dropping off five hundred Quaaludes my first day home from the hospital. They were all gone by Thanksgiving. It was a feat of great manhood, and I was rather proud of it—to average eighteen Ludes a day, when a single Lude could knock out a two-hundred-pound Navy SEAL for up to eight hours.
The Cobbler came to visit and told me that he’d worked things out with the Drizzler, who had agreed to leave quietly with only a small fraction of his stock options. Then the Drizzler came over and told me that one day he would find the Cobbler in a dark alley and strangle him with his own ponytail. Danny visited, too, and told me that he was just about to cut a deal with the states, so there were definitely Twenty Years of Blue Skies ahead. Then Wigwam came over and told me that Danny had lost touch with reality—that there was no deal with the states—and that, he, Wigwam, was out hunting for a new brokerage firm, where he could set up shop just as soon as Stratton imploded.
As Stratton continued its downward spiral, Biltmore and Monroe Parker continued to thrive. By Christmas, they had completely cut ties with Stratton, although they continued to pay me a royalty of $1 million on each new issue. Meanwhile, the Chef stopped by every few weeks—giving me regular updates on the Patricia Mellor debacle, which was still in the process of winding down. Patricia’s heirs, Tiffany and Julie, were now dealing with the Inland Revenue Service, Britain’s equivalent of the IRS. There were some faint rumblings that the FBI was looking into the matter, but no subpoenas had been issued. The Chef assured me that everything would end up okay. He had been in touch with the Master Forger, who had been questioned by both the Swiss and United States governments, and he’d stuck to our cover story like glue. In consequence, Agent Coleman had hit a dead end.
And then there was the family: Carter had finally shaken off his rocky start and was thriving beautifully. He was absolutely gorgeous, with a terrific head of blond peach fuzz, perfectly even features, big blue eyes, and the longest eyelashes this side of anywhere. Chandler, the baby genius, was two and a half now, and she had fallen deeply in love with her brother. She liked to pretend she was the mommy—feeding him his bottle and supervising Gwynne and Erica as they changed his diaper. Chandler had been my best company, as I shuttled myself between the royal bedchamber and the basement’s wraparound couch, doing nothing but watching television and consuming massive quantities of Quaaludes. In consequence, Chandler had become a Jedi Master at understanding slurred speech, which would stand her in good stead, I figured, if she happened to end up working with stroke victims. Either way, she spent the greater part of her day asking me when I would be well enough to start carrying her around again. I told her it would be soon, although I strongly doubted that I would ever make a full recovery.
The Duchess had been wonderful too—in the beginning. But as Thanksgiving turned into Christmas and Christmas turned into New Year’s, she began to lose patience. I was wearing a full body cast and it was driving me up the wall, so I figured as her husband it was my obligation to drive her up the wall too. But the body cast was the least of my problems—the real nightmare was the pain, which was worse than before. In fact, not only was I still plagued with the original pain, there was a new pain now, which ran deeper, into the very marrow of my spine. Any sudden movement sent waves of fire washing through my very spinal canal. Dr. Green had told me that the pain would subside, but it seemed to be growing worse.
By early January I had sunk to new levels of hopelessness—and the Duchess put her foot down. She told me that I had to slow down with the drugs and at least try to resume some semblance of being a functioning human being. I responded with a complaint about how the New York winter was wreaking havoc on my thirty-three-year-old body. My bones, after all, had become very creaky in my old age. She recommended we spend the winter in Florida, but I told her Florida was for old people, and in spite of feeling old, I was still young at heart.
So the Duchess took matters into her own hands, and next thing I knew I was living in Beverly Hills, atop a great mountain that overlooked the city of Los Angeles. Of course, the menagerie had to come, too, to continue Lifestyles of the Rich and Dysfunctional—and for the bargain price of $25,000 a month I rented the mansion of Peter Morton, of Hard Rock Café fame, and settled in for the winter. The aspiring everything quickly reached into her bag of former aspirations, pulling out the one marked aspiring interior decorator, and by the time we moved in there was $1 million worth of brand-new furniture in the house, all arranged just so. The only problem was that the house was so enormous, perhaps 30,000 square feet, that I was considering buying one of those motorized scooters to get from one side of the house to the other.
On a separate note, I quickly realized that Los Angeles was merely a pseudonym for Hollywood, so I took a few million dollars and started making movies. It took about three weeks to realize that everyone in Hollywood (including me) was slightly batty, and one of their favorite things to do was: lunch. My partners in the movie business were a small family of bigoted South African Jews, who had been former investment-banking clients of Stratton. They
were an interesting lot, with bodies like penguins and noses like needles.
In the third week of May my body cast came off. Fabulous! I thought. My pain was still excruciating, but it was time to start physical therapy. Maybe that would help. But during my second week of therapy I felt something pop, and a week later I was back in New York, walking with a cane. I spent a week in different hospitals, taking tests, and every last one of them came back negative. According to Barth I was suffering from a dysfunction of my body’s pain-management system; there was nothing mechanically wrong with my back, nothing that could be operated on.
Fair enough, I thought. No choice but to crawl up to the royal bedchamber and die. A Lude overdose would be the best way to go, I figured, or at least the most appropriate since they had always been my drug of choice. But there were other options too. My daily drug regimen included 90 milligrams of morphine, for pain; 40 milligrams of oxycodone, for good measure; a dozen Soma, to relax my muscles; 8 milligrams of Xanax, for anxiety; 20 milligrams of Klonopin, because it sounded strong; 30 milligrams of Ambien, for insomnia; twenty Quaaludes, because I liked Quaaludes; a gram or two of coke, for balancing purposes; 20 milligrams of Prozac, to ward off depression; 10 milligrams of Paxil, to ward off panic attacks; 8 milligrams of Zofran, for nausea; 200 milligrams of Fiorinal, for migraines; 80 milligrams of Valium, to relax my nerves; two heaping tablespoons of Senokot, to reduce constipation; 20 milligrams of Salagen, for dry mouth; and a pint of Macallan single-malt scotch, to wash it all down.
A month later, on the morning of June 20, I was lying in the royal bedchamber, in a semivegetative state, when Janet’s voice came over the intercom. “Barth Green is on line one,” said the voice.
“Take a message,” I muttered. “I’m in a meeting.”
“Very funny,” said the obnoxious voice. “He said he needs to speak to you now. Either you pick up the phone or I’m coming in there and picking it up for you. And put down the coke vial.”
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