An hour later my stomach sac was completely empty, except for the dump truck worth of charcoal they’d forced down my throat. I was still tied to the table when they finally removed the black tube. As the last inch of tubing slid up my esophagus, I found myself wondering how female porn stars were able to deep-throat all those enormous penises without gagging. I knew it was a strange thought to have, but, still, it was what had occurred to me.
“How you feeling?” asked the kind doctor.
“I have to go to the bathroom really bad,” I said. “In fact, if you don’t untie me I’m gonna take a dump right in my pants.”
The doctor nodded, and he and the nurses began undoing my restraints. “The bathroom’s in there,” he said. “I’ll come in there in a little while and check on you.”
I wasn’t quite sure what he’d meant by that, until the first salvo of gunpowder came exploding out of my rectum with the force of a water cannon. I resisted the urge to look inside the bowl to see what was coming out of me, but after ten minutes of exploding salvos I gave in to the urge and peeked inside the bowl. It looked like the eruption of Mount Vesuvius—pounds of dark-black volcanic ash exploding from my asshole. If I weighed a hundred thirty pounds this morning, I weighed only a buck twenty now. My very innards were inside some cheap porcelain toilet bowl in Boca Raton, Florida.
An hour later I finally emerged from the bathroom. I was over the hump now, feeling much more normal. Perhaps they’d sucked some of the insanity out of me, I thought. Either way, it was time to resume Lifestyles of the Rich and Dysfunctional; it was time to patch things up with the Duchess, curtail my drug intake, and live a more subdued lifestyle. I was thirty-four, after all, and the father of two.
“Thanks,” I said to the kind doctor. “I’m really sorry for biting you. I was just a bit nervous before. You can understand, right?”
He nodded. “No problem,” he said. “I’m just glad we could help.”
“Could you guys call me a cab, please? I gotta get home and get some sleep.”
It was then that I noticed that the two policemen were still in the room and they were heading directly for me. I had the distinct impression they weren’t about to offer me transportation home.
The doctor took two steps back, just as one of the policemen pulled out a pair of handcuffs. Oh, Christ! I thought. Handcuffed again? It would be the Wolf’s fourth time in chains in less than twenty-four hours! And what had I really done? I decided not to pursue that line of thinking. After all, where I was going I would have nothing but time to think about things.
As he slapped the cuffs on me, the policeman said, “Pursuant to the Baker Act, you’re being placed in a locked-down psychiatric unit for seventy-two hours, at which point you’ll be brought before a judge to see if you’re still a danger to yourself or others. Sorry, sir.”
Hmmm…he seemed like a nice-enough fellow, this Florida policeman, and he was only doing his job, after all. Besides, he was taking me to a psychiatric unit, not a jail, and that had to be a good thing, didn’t it?
“I’m a butterfly! I’m a butterfly!” screamed an obese, dark-haired woman in a blue muumuu as she flapped her arms and flew lazy circles around the fourth-floor locked-down psychiatric unit of the Delray Medical Center.
I was sitting on a very uncomfortable couch in the middle of the common area as she floated by. I smiled and nodded at her. There were forty or so patients, mostly dressed in bathrobes and slippers and engaged in various forms of socially unacceptable behavior. At the front of the unit was the nurses’ station, where all the crazies would line up every few hours for their Thorazine or Haldol or some other antipsychotic, to soothe their frazzled nerves.
“I gotta have it. Six point O two times ten to the twenty-third,” muttered a tall, thin teenager with a ferocious case of acne.
Very interesting, I thought. I had been watching this poor kid for over two hours, as he walked around in a remarkably perfect circle, spitting out Avogadro’s number, a mathematical constant used to measure molecular density. At first I was a bit confused as to why he was so obsessed with this number, until one of the orderlies explained that the young fellow was an intractable acidhead with a very high IQ, and he became fixated on Avogadro’s number whenever a dose of acid hit him the wrong way. It was his third stay in the Delray Medical Center in the last twelve months.
I found it ironic that I would be put in a place like this—considering how sane I was—but that was the problem with laws like the Baker Act: They were designed to meet the needs of the masses. Either way, things had been going reasonably well so far. I had convinced a doctor to prescribe me Lamictal, and he, of his own volition, had put me on some sort of short-acting opiate to help with the withdrawals.
What troubled me, though, was that I’d been trying to call at least a dozen people on the unit’s pay phone—friends, family, lawyers, business associates. I’d even tried reaching Alan Chemical-tob, to make sure he’d have a fresh batch of Quaaludes for me when I finally got released from this insane asylum, but I hadn’t been able to get in touch with anyone. Not a souclass="underline" not the Duchess, my parents, Lipsky, Dave, Laurie, Gwynne, Janet, Wigwam, Joe Fahmegghetti, Greg O’Connell, the Chef, even Bo, who I could always get in touch with. It was as if I were being frozen out, abandoned by everyone.
In fact, as my first day in this glorious institution came to a close, I found myself hating the Duchess more than ever. She had completely forgotten about me, turned everyone against me, using that single despicable act I’d committed on the stairs to garner sympathy from my friends and business associates. I was certain that she no longer loved me and had uttered those words to me while I was overdosing only out of sympathy—thinking that perhaps I might actually kick the bucket and she might as well send me off to hell with one last bogus “I love you.”
By midnight, the cocaine and Quaaludes were pretty much out of my system, but I still couldn’t sleep. It was then, in the wee hours of the morning, on April 17, 1997, that a nurse with a very kind heart gave me a shot of Dalmane in my right ass cheek. And, finally, fifteen minutes later, I fell asleep without cocaine in my system for the first time in three months.
I woke up eighteen hours later to the sound of my name. I opened my eyes and there was a large black orderly standing over me.
“Mr. Belfort, you have a visitor.”
The Duchess! I thought. She had come to take me out of this place. “Really,” I said, “who is it?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know his name.”
My spirits sank. He led me to a room with padded walls. Inside was a gray metal desk and three chairs. It reminded me of the room the Swiss Customs officials questioned me in after I’d groped the stewardess, except for the padded walls. Sitting on one side of the desk was a fortyish man with horn-rimmed glasses. The moment we locked eyes he rose from his chair and greeted me.
“You must be Jordan,” he said, extending his right hand. “I’m Dennis Maynard *10.”
Out of instinct I shook his hand, although there was something about him I instantly disliked. He was dressed like me, in jeans and sneakers and a white polo shirt. He was reasonably good-looking, in a washed-out sort of way, about five-nine, average build, with short brown hair parted to the side.
He motioned to a seat across from him. I nodded and sat down. A moment later, another orderly came in the room—this one a large, drunken Irishman, by the looks of him. Both orderlies stood behind me, a couple of feet back, waiting to pounce if I tried pulling a Hannibal Lecter on this guy—biting his nose off, while my pulse remained at seventy-two.