So I just stood there in my boxer shorts for what seemed like a very long time. Then I closed my eyes and bit down on my lower lip and started to cry. I went over to the side of the bed, rested my forehead on the edge of the mattress, and continued to cry. I had given up six years of my life to this pain, the last three of which had been so severe that it’d literally sucked the life out of me. I had become a drug addict. I had become depressed. And I had done things while I was high that were unconscionable. Without the drugs I would have never let Stratton get so out of control.

How much had my drug addiction fueled my life on the dark side? As a sober man, would I have ever slept with all those prostitutes? Would I have ever smuggled all that money to Switzerland? Would I have ever allowed Stratton’s sales practices to spiral so far out of control? Admittedly, it was easy to blame everything on drugs, but, of course, I was still responsible for my own actions. My only consolation was that I was living a more honest life now—building Steve Madden Shoes.

Just then the door swung open, and it was Chandler. She said, “Good morning, Daddy! I came to kiss away your boo-boo again.” She leaned over and kissed my lower back, once on each side, and then she planted one kiss directly on my spine, just over my scar.

I turned around, tears still in my eyes, and took a moment to regard my daughter. She wasn’t a baby anymore. While I’d been lost in my pain she’d given up her diaper. Her face was more chiseled now, and in spite of being less than three, she no longer spoke like a baby. I smiled at her and said, “Guess what, thumbkin? You kissed away Daddy’s boo-boo! It’s all gone now.”

That got her attention. “It is?” she said, in a wondrous tone.

“Yeah, baby, it is.” I grabbed her under her arms and stood up straight, lifting her over my head. “You see, baby? Daddy’s pain is all gone now. Isn’t that great?”

Very excited: “Will you play with me outside today?”

“You bet I will!” And I swung her over my head in a great circle. “From now on I’ll play with you every day! But first I gotta go find Mommy and tell her the good news.”

In a knowing tone: “She’s riding Leapyear, Daddy.”

“Well, that’s where I’m going, then, but first let’s go see Carter and give him a big kiss, okay?” She nodded eagerly and off we went.

When the Duchess saw me, she fell off her horse. Literally.

The horse had gone one way and she had gone the other, and now she was lying on the ground, sneezing and wheezing. I told her of my miraculous recovery, and we kissed—sharing a wonderful, carefree moment together. Then I said something that would turn out to be very ironic, which was: “I think we should take a vacation on the yacht; it’ll be so relaxing.”

CHAPTER 34

TRAVELING BADLY

A hhh, the yachtNadine! In spite of despising the fucking boat and wishing it would sink, there was still something very sexy about tooling around the blue waters of the Mediterranean aboard a 170-foot motor yacht. In fact, all eight of us—the Duchess and I, and six of our closest friends—were in for quite a treat aboard this floating palace of mine.

Of course, one could never embark on such an inspired voyage without being properly armed, so the night before we departed I recruited one of my closest friends, Rob Lorusso, to go on a last-minute drug collection with me. Rob was the perfect man for the job; not only was he coming along on the trip but he and I also had a history with this sort of stuff—once chasing around a Federal Express truck for three hours during a raging blizzard, in a desperate search for a lost Quaalude delivery.

I had known Rob for almost fifteen years and absolutely adored him. He was my age and owned a small mom-and-pop mortgage company that did mortgages for the Strattonites. Like me, he loved his drugs, and he also had a world-class sense of humor. He wasn’t particularly handsome—about five-nine, slightly over-weight, with a fat Italian nose and a very weak chin—but, nevertheless, women loved him. He was that rare breed of man who could sit at a table with a bevy of beauties he’d never met before and fart and burp and belch and snort, and they would all say: “Oh, Rob, you’re so funny! We love you so much, Rob! Please fart on us some more!”

His fatal flaw, though, was that he was the cheapest man alive. In fact, he was so cheap that it had cost him his first marriage to a girl named Lisa, who was a dark-haired beauty with a lot of teeth. After two years of marriage, she finally got fed up with him highlighting her portion of the phone bill, and she decided to have an affair with a local playboy-type. Rob caught her in the very act, and they were divorced shortly thereafter.

From there Rob started dating heavily, but each girl had some sort of deficiency—one had more arm hair than a gorilla; another liked to be wrapped in Saran Wrap during sex, while pretending she was a corpse; another refused to have any sex but anal sex; and still another (my personal favorite) liked to put Budweiser in her Cheerios. His latest girlfriend, Shelly, would be coming along on the yacht. She was rather cute, although she looked a bit like a hush puppy. Whatever the case, she had this odd habit of walking around with a Bible and quoting obscure passages. I gave her and Rob a month.

Meanwhile, as Rob and I spent our final hours gathering essentials, the Duchess crawled around our driveway, gathering pebbles. It was her first time leaving the children, and for some inexplicable reason it put her in the mood to do arts and crafts. So she made our kids a wish-box—a very expensive women’s shoe box (in this case, the former home to a pair of $1,000 Manolo Blahniks) filled with tiny pebbles and then covered with a layer of tinfoil. On top of the tinfoil, the artful Duchess had glued two maps—one of the Italian Riviera and one of the French Riviera—as well as a dozen or so glossy pictures she’d cut out from travel magazines.

Just before we left for the airport, we went into Chandler and Carter’s playroom to say good-bye. Carter was almost a year old now and he worshipped his older sister, although not nearly as much as he worshipped his mother, who could bring him to tears if she took a shower and didn’t dry her hair before leaving the bathroom. Yes, Baby Carter liked his mother’s hair blond, and when it was damp it was much too dark for him. Even the slightest glimpse of a damp-headed Duchess would cause him to point his finger at her hair and scream at the top of his tiny lungs: “Noooooooooooooooo! Noooooooooooooooo!”

I often wondered how Carter was going to react when he found out his mother’s hair was only dyed blond, but I figured he’d work that out in therapy when he was older. Either way, at this particular moment he was in fine spirits, altogether beaming, in fact. He was staring at Chandler, who was holding court for one hundred Barbie dolls, which she’d arranged in a perfect circle around her.

The artful Duchess and I sat down on the carpet and presented our two perfect children with their perfect wish-box. “Anytime you miss Mommy and Daddy,” explained the Duchess, “all you have to do is shake this wish-box and we’ll know you’re thinking of us.” Then, to my own surprise, the artful Duchess pulled out a second wish-box, which was identical to the first, and she added, “And Mommy and Daddy will have our own wish-box too! So every time we miss you we’re gonna shake our own wish-box, and then you’ll know that we’re thinking of you too, okay?”

Chandler narrowed her eyes and took a moment to consider. “But how can I know for sure?” she asked skeptically, not buying into the wish-box program as easily as the Duchess might’ve hoped.