Before I left the trading room, my final instructions to Steve were that under no circumstances was he to let the stock drop below $18. After all, I wasn’t about to shaft the rest of Wall Street after they’d been kind enough to manipulate my stock for me.
CHAPTER 10
THE DEPRAVED CHINAMAN
By four p.m. it was one for the record books.
The trading day was over, and the news that Steve Madden Shoes had been the most actively traded stock in America and, for that matter, the world had come skidding across the Dow Jones wire service for one and all to see. The world! Such audacity! Such sheer audacity!
Oh, yes, Stratton Oakmont had the power, all right. In fact, Stratton Oakmont wasthe power, and I, as Stratton’s leader, was wired into that very power and sat atop its pinnacle. I felt it surge through my very innards and resonate with my heart and soul and liver and loins. With more than eight million shares changing hands, the units had closed just below $19, up five hundred percent on the day, making it the largest percentage gainer on the NASDAQ, the NYSE, the AMEX, as well as any other stock exchange in the world. Yes, the world—from the OBX exchange way up north in the frozen wasteland of Oslo, Norway, all the way down south to the ASX exchange in the kangaroo paradise of Sydney, Australia.
Right now I was standing in the boardroom, casually leaning against my office’s plate-glass window, with my arms folded beneath my chest. It was the pose of the mighty warrior after the fray. The mighty roar of the boardroom was still going strong, but the tone was different now. It was less urgent, more subdued.
It was almost celebration time. I stuck my right hand in my pants pocket and did a quick check to make sure my six Ludes hadn’t fallen out or simply vanished into thin air. Quaaludes had a way of vanishing sometimes, although it usually had more to do with your “friends” snatching them from you—or you getting so stoned that you took them yourself and simply didn’t remember. That was the fourth phase of a Quaalude high and, perhaps, the most dangerous: the amnesia phase. The first phase was the tingle phase, next came the slur phase, then the drool phase, and then, of course, the amnesia phase.
Anyway, the drug-god had been kind to me, and the Quaaludes hadn’t vanished. I took a moment to roll them around in my fingertips, which gave me an irrational sense of joy. Then I began the process of calculating the appropriate time to take them, which was somewhere around 4:30 p.m., I figured, twenty-five minutes from now. That would give me fifteen minutes to hold the afternoon meeting, as well as enough time to supervise this afternoon’s act of depravity, which was a female head-shaving.
One of the young sales assistants, who was strapped for cash, had agreed to put on a Brazilian bikini and sit down on a wooden stool at the front of the boardroom and let us shave her head down to the skull. She had a great mane of shimmering blond hair and a wonderful set of breasts, which had recently been augmented to a D cup. Her reward would be $10,000 in cash, which she would use to pay for her breast job, which she’d just financed at twelve percent. So it was a win-win situation for everyone: In six months she’d have her hair back, and she’d own her D cups debt free.
I couldn’t help but wonder if I should’ve allowed Danny to bring a midget into the office. After all, what was so wrong with it? It sounded a bit off at first, but now that I’d had a little time to digest it, it didn’t seem so bad.
In essence, what it really boiled down to was that the right to pick up a midget and toss him around was just another currency due any mighty warrior, a spoil of war, so to speak. How else was a man to measure his success if not by playing out every one of his adolescent fantasies, regardless of how bizarre it might be? There was definitely something to be said for that. If precocious success brought about questionable forms of behavior, then the prudent young man should enter each unseemly act into the debit column on his own moral balance sheet and then offset it at some future point with an act of kindness or generosity (a moral credit, so to speak), when he became older and wiser and more sedate.
Yet, on the other hand, we might just be depraved maniacs—a self-contained society that had spiraled completely out of control. We Strattonites thrived on acts of depravity. We counted on them, in fact; I mean, we needed them to survive!
It was for this very reason that, after becoming completely desensitized to basic acts of depravity, the powers that be (namely, me) felt compelled to form an unofficial team of Strattonites—with Danny Porush as its proud leader—to fill the void. The team acted like a twisted version of the Knights Templar—whose never-ending quest to find the Holy Grail was the stuff of legend. But unlike the Knights Templar, the Stratton knights spent their time scouring the four corners of the earth for increasingly depraved acts, so the rest of the Strattonites could continue to get off. It wasn’t like we were heroin junkies or anything as tawdry as that; we were unadulterated adrenaline junkies, who needed higher and higher cliffs to dive off and shallower and shallower pools to land in.
The process had officially gotten under way in October 1989, when twenty-one-year-old Peter Galletta, one of the initial eight Strattonites, christened the building’s glass elevator with a quick blow job and an even quicker rear entry into the luscious loins of a seventeen-year-old sales assistant. She was Stratton’s first sales assistant, and, for better or worse, she was blond, beautiful, and wildly promiscuous.
At first I was shocked and had even considered firing Peter, for dipping his pen into the company inkwell. But within a week the young girl had proven to be a real team player—blowing all eight Strattonites, most of them in the glass elevator, and me under my desk. And she had a strange way of doing it, which became legendary among Strattonites. We called it the twist and jerk—where she’d use both hands at once, while she transformed her tongue into a whirling dervish. Anyway, about a month later, after a tiny bit of urging, Danny convinced me that it would be good if we both did her at the same time, which we did, on a Saturday afternoon while our wives were out shopping for Christmas dresses. Ironically, three years later, after bedding God only knew how many Strattonites, she finally married one. He was one of the original eight Strattonites and had seen her ply her trade countless times. But he didn’t care. Perhaps it was the twist and jerk that had got him! Whatever the case, he’d been only sixteen when he first came to work for me. He dropped out of high school to become a Strattonite—to live the Life. But after a short marriage, he became depressed and committed suicide. It would be Stratton’s first but not last suicide.
That aside, within the four walls of the boardroom, behavior of the normal sort was considered to be in bad taste, as if you were some sort of killjoy or something, looking to spoil the fun for everyone else. In a way, though, wasn’t the concept of depravity relative? The Romans hadn’t considered themselves to be depraved maniacs, had they? In fact, I’d be willing to bet that it all seemed normal to them as they watched their less-favored slaves being fed to the lions and their more-favored slaves fed them grapes.