Mommy’s legs were still spread wide open, in all their glory, when I said, “Anyway, about two months ago Mommy and Daddy were lying in bed on a rainy Sunday morning when she told him about an article she’d read about how some baby nurses and housekeepers mistreated the babies they looked after. This shocked Daddy terribly, so he suggested to Mommy that they have two hidden cameras and a voice-activated microphone installed in that very pink bedroom that I mentioned in the beginning of the story!
“And one of those hidden cameras is right over Daddy’s shoulder”—I pointed to a tiny pinhole high up on the wall—“and as luck would have it, Mommy, it happens to be focused right on the very best part of your glorious anatomy”—and there go the legs, snapped shut, like a bank vault—“and since we love Channy so, so much, this is the room that they monitor on the big thirty-two-inch TV screen in the center of the guardhouse!
“So smile, Mommy! You’re on Candid Camera!”
Mommy didn’t move—for about an eighth of a second. Then, as if someone had just shot ten thousand volts of electricity through the glorious pink carpet, Mommy jumped up and screamed: “Holy shit! Holy fucking shit! Oh, my God! I can’t fucking believe it! Oh-my-fuc-king-God!” She ran to the window and looked out at the guardhouse…then she spun around and ran back, and… BOOM!…down went Mommy, as one of the erotic pivots on her go-to-hell pumps collapsed.
But Mommy was only down for a second. She quickly rolled onto all fours with the speed and dexterity of a world-class wrestler and then popped right back up. To my complete and utter shock, she opened the door, ran out, and slammed it behind her as she left, entirely unconcerned with what the bizarre menagerie of help might think of all the ruckus. And then she was gone.
“Well,” I said to Channy, “the real Martha Stewart would definitely not have approved of a slammed door, now, would she, sweetie!” Then I said a silent prayer to the Almighty, asking him—no begging him, in fact—to never allow Channy to marry a guy like me, much less date one. I wasn’t exactly Husband of the Year material, after all. Then I carried her downstairs and handed her to Marcie, the jabbering Jamaican baby nurse, and made a quick beeline for the guardhouse, not wanting the videotape of Mommy to end up in Hollywood as a pilot for Lifestyles of the Rich and Dysfunctional.
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— beforethe 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 shtetlhordes, 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.