Ahhhhhh…how long had it been since I’d sat in a comfortable chair without cocaine and Quaaludes bubbling around inside my brain? I no longer had back pain or leg pain or hip pain or any other pain. There was nothing bothering me, no petty annoyances. I took a deep breath and let it out…. It was a nice, sober breath, part of a nice, sober moment. How long had it been for me? Almost nine years since I’d been sober. Nine fucking years of complete insanity! Holy shit—what a way to live.

And I was fucking starving! I desperately needed to eat something. Anything but Froot Loops.

Fat-Brad walked over to me and said, “Ya doing okay?”

“I’m starving,” I said. “I’d pay a hundred grand for a Big Mac right now.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Mike and I need to fill out a few forms. Then we’ll bring you in and get you something to eat.” He smiled and walked off.

I took another deep breath, except this one I held in for a good ten seconds. I was staring into the very heart of the bookcase when I finally let it out…and just like that, in that very instant, the compulsion left me. I was done. No more drugs. I knew it. Enough was enough. I no longer felt the urge. It was gone. Why, I would never know. All I knew was that I would never touch them again. Something had clicked inside my brain. Some sort of switch had been flipped and I just fucking knew it.

I rose from my chair and walked over to the other side of the waiting room, where fat-Brad and Mike the Glandular Case were filling out paperwork. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the sixty bucks. “Here,” I said to fat-Brad, “you can have your sixty back. I’m staying.”

He smiled and nodded his head knowingly. “Good for you, my friend.”

Right before they left, I said to them, “Don’t forget to call the Duchess of Bay Ridge and tell her to get in touch with the pilots. Or else they’ll be waiting there for weeks.”

“Well, here’s to the Duchess of Bay Ridge!” fat-Brad said, making a mock toast.

“To the Duchess of Bay Ridge!” we all said simultaneously.

Then we exchanged hugs—and promises to keep in touch. But I knew we never would. They had done their job, and it was time for them to move on to the next case. And it was time for me to get sober.

It was the next morning when a new type of insanity started: sober insanity. I woke up around nine a.m., feeling positively buoyant. No withdrawal symptoms, no hangover, and no compulsion to do drugs. I wasn’t in the actual rehab yet; that would come tomorrow. I was still in the detox unit. As I made my way to the cafeteria for breakfast, the only thing weighing on my mind was that I still hadn’t been able to get in touch with the Duchess, who seemed to have flown the coop. I had called the house in Old Brookville and spoken to Gwynne, who’d told me that Nadine had dropped out of sight. She had only called in once, to speak to the kids, and she hadn’t even mentioned my name. So I assumed my marriage was over.

After breakfast I was walking back to my room when a beefy-looking guy sporting a ferocious mullet and the look of the intensely paranoid waved me over. We met by the pay phones. “Hi,” I said, extending my head. “I’m Jordan. How’s it going?”

He shook my hand cautiously. “Shhh!” he said, darting his eyes around. “Follow me.”

I nodded and followed him back into the cafeteria, where we sat down at a square lunch table, out of earshot of other human beings. At this time of morning the cafeteria had only a handful of people in it, and most of them were staff, dressed in white lab coats. I had pegged my new friend as a complete loon. He was dressed like me, in jeans and a T-shirt.

“I’m Anthony,” he said, extending his hand for another shake. “Are you the guy who flew in on the private jet yesterday?”

Oh, Christ! I wanted to remain anonymous for once, not stick out like a sore thumb. “Yeah, that was me,” I said, “but I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that quiet. I just want to blend in, okay?”

“Your secret’s safe with me,” he muttered, “but good luck trying to keep anything secret in this place.”

That sounded a bit odd, a bit Orwellian, in fact. “Oh, really?” I said. “Why’s that?”

He looked around again. “Because this place is like fucking Auschwitz,” he whispered. Then he winked at me.

At this point, I realized the guy wasn’t completely crazy, perhaps just a bit off. “Why is it like Auschwitz?” I asked, smiling.

He shrugged his beefy shoulders. “Because it’s fucking torture here, like a Nazi death camp. You see the staff over there?” He motioned with his head. “They’re the SS. Once the train drops you off in this place, you never leave. And there’s slave labor too.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? I thought it was only a four-week program.”

He compressed his lips into a tight line and shook his head. “Maybe it is for you, but not for the rest of us. I assume you’re not a doctor, right?”

“No, I’m a banker—although I’m pretty much retired now.”

“Really?” he asked. “How are you retired? You look like a kid.”

I smiled. “I’m not a kid. But why’d you ask me if I’m a doctor?”

“Because almost everyone here is either a doctor or a nurse. I’m a chiropractor, myself. There are only a handful of people like you. Everyone else is here because they lost their license to practice medicine. So the staff has us by the balls. Unless they say you’re cured, you don’t get your license back. It’s a fucking nightmare. Some people have been here for over a year, and they’re stilltrying to get their license back!” He shook his head gravely. “It’s complete fucking insanity. Everyone’s ratting each other out, trying to earn brownie points with the staff. Really fucking sick. You have no idea. The patients walk around like robots, spewing out AA crap, pretending they’re rehabilitated.”

I nodded, fully getting the picture. A wacky arrangement like this, where the staff had that much power, was a recipe for abuse. Thank God I’d be above it. “What are the female patients like? Any hot ones?”

“Just one,” he answered. “A total knockout. A twelve on a scale from one to ten.”

That perked me up! “Oh, yeah, what’s she look like?”

“She’s a little blonde, about five-five, unbelievable body, perfect face, curly hair. She’s really beautiful. A real piece of ass.”

I nodded, making a mental note to keep away from her. She sounded like trouble. “And what’s the story with this guy Doug Talbot? The staff talks about him like he’s a fucking god. What’s he like?”

“What’s he like?” muttered my paranoid friend. “He’s like Adolf fucking Hitler. Or actually more like Dr. Josef Mengele. He’s a big fucking blowhard, and he’s got every last one of us by the balls—with the exception of you and maybe two other people. But you still gotta be careful, because they’ll try to use your family against you. They’ll get inside your wife’s head and tell her that unless you stay for six months you’re gonna relapse and light your kids on fire.”

Later that night, at about seven p.m., I called Old Brookville in search of the missing Duchess, but she was still MIA. I did get a chance to speak to Gwynne, though; I explained to her that I’d met with my therapist today and I’d been subdiagnosed (whatever that meant) as a compulsive spending addict, as well as a sex addict, both of which were basically true and both of which, I thought, were none of their fucking business. Either way, the therapist had informed me that I was being placed on money restriction and masturbation restriction—allowed to possess only enough money to use in the vending machines and allowed to masturbate only once every few days. I had assumed that the latter restriction was enforced on the honor system.

I asked Gwynne if she could see her way clear to stick a couple a thousand dollars inside some rolled-up socks and then ship them UPS. Hopefully, they would get past the gestapo, I told her, but, either way, it was the least she could do, especially after nine years of being one of my chief enablers. I chose not to share my masturbation restriction with Gwynne, although I had a sneaky suspicion it was going to be an even bigger problem than the money restriction. After all, I had been sober only four days now, and I was already getting spontaneous erections every time the wind blew.