Good! I thought. Just as soon as the word got out that the Duchess and I were history, there would be women lining up at the door— lining up!Then we’d see who’s boss!
Now that the Duchess was out of the picture, it was time to put on a happy face and show the children how wonderful life could be without Mommy. No more time-outs for Chandler; chocolate pudding for Carter whenever he felt like it. I took them out to the swing set in the backyard and we played together—while Gwynne, Rocco Day, Erica, Maria, Ignacio, and a few other members of the menagerie supervised the action.
We played together happily for what seemed like a very long time—an eternity, in fact, during which time we laughed and giggled and carried on and looked up to the blue dome of the sky and smelled the fresh spring flowers. Having kids was the best!
Alas, an eternity turned out to be only three and a half minutes, at which point I lost interest in my two perfect children and said to Gwynne, “You take over, Gwynne. I have some paperwork I need to go over.”
A minute later I was back in my office, with a fresh pyramid of cocaine in front of me. And as a way of paying homage to Chandler’s fascination with lining up all her dolls and holding court, I lined up all my drugs on the desktop and held court too. There were twenty-two of them, mostly in vials but some in plastic Baggies. How many men could take all these drugs and not overdose? None! Only the Wolf could! The Wolf, who’d built up his very resistance through years of careful mixing and balancing, going through the painstaking process of trial and error until he got it justright.
The next morning was war.
At eight a.m. Wigwam was sitting in my living room, pissing me off. In fact, he should’ve known better than to come to my house and try to expound on the U.S. securities laws—sketching only broad, meaningless strokes. Christ, I might’ve been deficient in many areas in life, but one of them wasn’t U.S. securities laws. In fact, even after three months of basically no sleep—and even after the last seventy-two hours of complete insanity, during which time I’d consumed forty-two grams of cocaine, sixty Ludes, thirty Xanax, fifteen Valium, ten Klonopin, 270 milligrams of morphine, ninety milligrams of Ambien, and Paxil and Prozac and Percocet and Pamelor and GHB and God only knew how much alcohol—I still knew more about getting around U.S. securities laws than almost any man on the planet.
Wigwam said, “The main problem is that Steve never signed a stock power, so we can’t just send the stock certificate over to the transfer agent and get it switched to your name.”
In that very instant, as foggy as my mind was, I was still appalled at how much of an amateur my friend was. It was such a simple problem that I felt like spitting nails in his face. I took a deep breath and said, “Let me tell you something, you motherfucker. I love you like a fucking brother, but I’m gonna rip your fucking eyeballs out of your head next time you tell me what I can’t do with this escrow agreement. You come over to my fucking house looking to borrow a quarter million dollars and you’re worried about fucking stock powers? Jesus fucking Christ, Andy! We only need a stock power if we wanna sell the fucking stock, not if we want to buy the fucking stock! Don’t you get it? This is a war of attrition, a war of possession,and once we gain possession of the stock we have the upper hand.”
I softened my tone. “Listen to me: All you need to do is foreclose on the note pursuant to the escrow agreement and then you’ll have a legal obligation to sell the stock to pay the note. Then you turn around and sell the stock to me at four dollars a share, and I write you a check, for $4.8 million, which covers the purchase price of the shares. Then you write a check right back to me for the same $4.8 million, to pay off the note, and that’s that! Don’t you get it? It’s so simple!”
He nodded weakly.
“Listen,” I said calmly, “possession is nine-tenths of the law. I write you a check right now and we officially have control of the stock. Then we file a 13D this afternoon, and we make a public announcement that I intend to keep buying more stock and start a proxy fight. It’ll cause so much turmoil that it’ll force Steve’s hand. And each week I’ll keep buying more stock and we’ll keep filing updated 13Ds. It’ll be in The Wall Street Journalevery week—driving Steve crazy!”
Fifteen minutes later Wigwam was leaving my house, $250,000 richer and holding a check for $4.8 million. By this afternoon it would hit the Dow Jones newswire that I was attempting a takeover of Steve Madden Shoes. And while I really had no intention of doing so, I had no doubt that it would drive Steve crazy—and leave him little choice but to pay me fair market value for my shares. Insofar as my personal liability, I wasn’t concerned. I had thought it through, and since Steve and I hadn’t actually signed the secret agreement until a year after the underwriting, the issue of Stratton issuing a false prospectus was a moot point. The liability was more Steve’s than my own, because as CEO, hewas the one signing off on the SEC filings. I could plead ignorance—saying that I thought the filings were being done correctly. It wasn’t plausible deniability at its best, but it was plausible deniability nonetheless.
Either way, Wigwam was now out of my hair.
I went back upstairs to the royal bathroom and started snorting again. There was a pile of coke on the vanity and a thousand lights ablaze—reflecting off the mirrors and the million-dollar gray marble floor. Meanwhile, I felt terrible inside. Empty. Hollow. I missed the Duchess so much, so terribly, yet there was no way to get her back now. After all, to give in to her would be to admit defeat—to admit that I had a problem and that I needed help.
So I stuck my nose in the pile and snorted with both nostrils at once. Then I swallowed a few more Xanax and a handful of Quaaludes. The key, though, wasn’t the Ludes and Xanax. It was to keep my coke high in the very early stages—within that first wild rush where everything seems to make perfect sense and your problems seem a million miles away. It would require constant snorting—two thick lines every four or five minutes, I figured—but if I could keep myself at that very point for a week or so, then I could wait the Duchess out and watch her crawl back to me. It would require some serious drug-balancing, but the Wolf was up to the task…
…although if I fell asleep she would come for the kids and steal them. Perhaps I should just leave town with them, keep them out of her evil grasp, although Carter was a bit too small to travel with. He was still wearing a diaper and he was still very dependent on the Duchess. Of course, that would change soon, especially when he was ready for his first car and I offered him a Ferrari if he agreed to forget his mother.
So it made more sense just to leave town with Chandler and Gwynne. Chandler was wonderful company, after all, and we could travel around the world together as father and daughter. We would dress in the finest clothes and live a carefree life, while others looked on in admiration. Then, in a few years, I would come back for Carter.
Thirty minutes later I was back in the living room—conducting business with Dave Davidson, the Uniblinker. He was complaining about trading from the short side, that he was losing money as the stock went up. I couldn’t have cared less, though; I just wanted to see the Duchess, to let her know about my plan to travel around the world with Chandler.
Just then I heard the front door open. A few seconds later I saw the Duchess walk past the living room and into the children’s playroom. I was discussing trading strategies with the Uniblinker when she came walking back out, holding Chandler. My words were coming out automatically, as if on tape—and I heard the Duchess’s soft footsteps heading to the basement, to the maternity showroom. She hadn’t even acknowledged my presence, for Chrissake! She was taunting me, disrespecting me, fucking enraging me!I felt my heart beating out of my chest.