CHAPTER 36

JAILS, INSTITUTIONS, AND DEATH

The next morning—which is to say, a few hours later—I woke up in my office. I felt a warm, altogether pleasant sensation under my nose and on my cheeks. Ahhh, so soothing it was…. The Duchess was still with me…cleaning me…mothering me…

I opened my eyes and…alas, it was Gwynne. She was holding a very expensive white bath towel, which she’d dampened with lukewarm water, and she was wiping off the cocaine and blood that had caked on my face.

I smiled at Gwynne, one of the only people who hadn’t betrayed me. Could she really be trusted, though? I closed my eyes and ran it through my mind…. Yes, she could. No two ways about it. She would see this through with me to the bitter end. In fact, long after the Duchess had abandoned me, Gwynne would still be there—taking care of me and helping me raise the children.

“Are you okay?” asked my favorite Southern belle.

“Yeah,” I croaked. “What are you doing here on Sunday? Don’t you have church?”

Gwynne smiled sadly. “Mrs. Belfort called me and asked me to come over today to keep an eye on the kids. Here, lift your arms up; I brought you a fresh T-shirt.”

“Thanks, Gwynne. I’m kinda hungry. Can you bring me a bowl of Froot Loops, please?”

“They’re raightthere,” she said, pointing to the green marble pedestal where the brass cowboy used to reside. “They’re nice and soggy,” she added, “just the way you like ’em!”

Talk about service! How come the Duchess couldn’t be like that? “Where’s Nadine?” I asked.

Gwynne pursed her full lips. “She’s upstairs, packing an overnight bag. She’s going to her mother’s.”

A terrible sinking feeling overtook me. It started in the pit of my stomach and spread to every cell of my body. It was as if my very heart and guts had been ripped out. I felt nauseous, ready to puke. “I’ll be right fucking back,” I sputtered, popping out of my chair and heading for the spiral staircase. I bounded up the stairs with a raging inferno burning inside me.

The master bedroom was just off the stairs. The door was locked. I started banging. “Let me in, Nadine!” No response. “It’s my bedroom too! Let me in!”

Finally, thirty seconds later, the lock clicked open; but the door didn’t follow suit. I opened the door and walked into the bedroom. On the bed was a suitcase filled with clothes, all neatly folded, but no Duchess. The suitcase was chocolate brown with the Louis Vuitton logo plastered all over it. Cost a fucking fortune… of my money!

Just then the Duchess came walking out of her Delaware-size shoe closet, carrying two shoe boxes, one under either arm. She didn’t say a word, nor did she look at me. She just walked over to the bed and placed the shoe boxes next to the suitcase, then turned on her heel and headed back to the closet.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” I snapped.

She looked me in the eye with contempt. “I told you: I’m going to my mother’s. I can’t watch you kill yourself anymore. I’m done.”

I felt a surge of steam rising up my brain stem. “I hope you don’t think you’re taking the kids with you. You’re not taking my fucking kids—ever!”

“The kids can stay,” she replied calmly. “I’m going alone.”

That caught me off guard. Why would she be leaving the kids behind?…Unless it was some sort of plot. Of course. She was cagey, the Duchess. “You think I’m stupid or something? The second I fall asleep you’re gonna come back here and steal the kids.”

She looked at me with disdain and said, “I don’t even know how to respond to that.” She started walking back to the closet.

Apparently I wasn’t hurting her enough, so I said, “I don’t know where the fuck you think you’re going with all these clothes. If you leave here, you leave with the shirt on your back, you fucking gold digger.”

That one got her! She spun around and faced me. “Fuck you!” she screamed. “I’ve been the best wife to you. How dareyou call me that after all these years! I’ve given you two gorgeous children. Waited on you hand and fucking foot for six fucking years! I’ve been a loyal wife to you—always! Never cheated on you once! And look what I got in return! How many women have you fucked since we’re married? You…philandering piece of shit! Fuck you!”

I took a deep breath. “Say what you want, Nadine, but if you leave here, you leave with nothing.” My tone was calm yet menacing.

“Oh, really? What the fuck you gonna do, light my clothes on fire?”

An excellent idea! And I yanked her suitcase off the bed, stomped over to the limestone fireplace, and threw all her clothes on top of a foot of kindling wood that was already there, waiting to be ignited with the push of a button. I stared down the Duchess; she was standing stock-still, frozen in horror.

Not satisfied with her reaction, I ran to her closet and ripped dozens of sweaters and shirts and dresses and skirts and pants off some very expensive-looking hangers. I ran back to the fireplace and threw them on top of the pile.

I looked at her again. Now she had tears in her eyes. Still not good enough. I wanted to hear her apologize, to beg me to stop, so I gritted my teeth in determination and bounded over to the desk where she kept her jewelry box. I grabbed the box, walked back over to the fireplace, and opened the lid and shook out all the jewelry on top of the pile. I reached over to the wall and placed my right index finger on a small stainless-steel button, and I stared her down. Now tears were streaming down her cheeks.

“Fuck you!” I screamed…and I pushed the button.

An instant later her clothes and jewelry were engulfed in flames. Without saying a word, she calmly walked out of the room, shutting the door behind her ever so gently. I turned back around and stared into the flames. Fuck her! I thought. It served her fucking right, making threats at me. Did she think I would let her walk all over me? I kept staring at the flames until I heard the sound of gravel kicking up in the driveway. I ran over to the window and saw the back of her black Range Rover peeling toward the front gate.

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.