“Yes, love,” replied Patricia. She rose from the bench and hooked her arm in mine. We walked along the path, heading toward the hotel. Matter-of-factly, she said, “And then after we hear what the speaker has to say you can answer my last question, okay, love?”

This woman was too much! But I had to love her! My confessor! “All right, Patricia, all right! The answer to your question is: no! I’m a fucking liar and a cheater and I sleep with prostitutes the way most people put on socks—especially when I’m fucked up on drugs, which is about half the time. But even when I’m not high on drugs, I’m still a cheat. So there! Now you know. Are you happy?”

Patricia laughed at my little outburst, then shocked the hell out of me by saying, “Oh, love, everyone knows about the prostitutes—even your mother-in-law, my sister. It’s somewhat of a legend. I think in Nadine’s case, she’s decided to take the good with the bad. But what I was really asking was if you ever had an affair with another woman, a woman you had feelings for.”

“No, of course not!” I shot back with great confidence. And then, with less confidence, I took a moment to search my memory to see if I was telling the truth. I had never really cheated on Nadine, had I?…No, I really hadn’t. Not in the traditional sense of the word. What a happy thought Patricia had placed in my head! What a wonderful lady she was!

Still, this subject was something I would just as soon avoid, so I began talking about my back…and how the chronic pain was driving me insane…. I told her about the surgeries, which hadonly made it worse…and I explained how I’d tried taking narcotics—everything from Vicodin to morphine—and how they made me nauseous and depressed…so I took antinausea drugs and Prozac to offset the nausea and depression…but the nausea drugs gave me a headache, so I took Advil, which upset my stomach, so I took Zantac, to combat my stomachache, which raised my liver enzymes. Then I told her how the Prozac affected my sex drive and made my mouth dry…so I took Salagen to stimulate my salivary glands and yohimbe bark for the impotence…but in the end I stopped taking those too. Ultimately, I explained, I had always come back to Quaaludes, which seemed to be the only drug that truly killed the pain.

We were just approaching Speaker’s Corner when I said sadly, “I fear that I’m completely addicted to drugs now, Patricia, and that even if my back didn’t hurt I still wouldn’t be able to stop taking them. I’m starting to have blackouts now, where I do things that I can’t remember. It’s pretty scary stuff, Patricia. It’s like part of your life has just evaporated— poof!—gone forever. But my point is that I flushed all my Quaaludes down the toilet and now I’m dying for one. I’ve actually been thinking about having my assistant send my driver over here on the Concorde, just so I can have some Ludes. That’ll cost me about twenty thousand dollars, for twenty Ludes. Twenty thousand dollars! But I’m still thinking about doing it.

“What can I say, Patricia? I’m a drug addict. I’ve never admitted that to anyone before, but I know it’s true. And everyone around me, including my own wife, is scared to confront me about it. In one way or another they all rely on me for their living, so they enable me. And cajole me.

“Anyway, that’s my story. It’s not a pretty picture. I live the most dysfunctional life on the planet. I’m a successful failure. I’m thirty-one going on sixty. Just how much longer I’ll make it on this earth, only God knows. But I do love my wife. And I have feelings for my baby girl that I never thought I was capable of. In a way, she’s what keeps me going. Chandler. She’s everything to me. I swore I would stop doing drugs after she was born, but who was I kidding? I’m incapable of stopping, at least for very long.

“I wonder what Chandler’ll think when she finds out that her daddy is a drug addict? I wonder what she’ll think when her daddy winds up in jail? I wonder what she’ll think when she’s old enough to read all the articles and finds out about her daddy’s exploits with hookers? I dread that day, Patricia, I sincerely do. And I have no doubt that day will come. It’s all very sad, Patricia. Very, very sad…”

And, with that, I was done. I had spilled my guts like never before. Did I feel any better for it? Alas, not really. I still felt exactly the same. And my left leg was still killing me, in spite of the walking.

I waited for some sort of sage response from Patricia, a response which never came. I guess that’s not what confessors are all about. All Patricia did was hold my arm tighter, perhaps pull me a little closer to her, to let me know that—in spite of it all—she still loved me and that she always would.

There was no one speaking at Speaker’s Corner. Most of the action, Patricia told me, occurred on the weekends. But that was appropriate. On this particular Wednesday, enough words were spoken in Hyde Park to fill a lifetime. And for a brief instant, the Wolf of Wall Street became Jordan Belfort again.

But it was short-lived. Up ahead in the distance, I could see the Dorchester Hotel rising up nine stories above the bustling streets of London.

And the one thought that occupied my mind was what time the Concorde would be leaving the United States—and how long it would take to arrive in Britain.

CHAPTER 16

RELAPSE BEHAVIOR

I f I earn a million dollars a week and the average American earns a thousand dollars a week, then when I spend twenty thousand dollars on something it’s the equivalent of the average American spending twenty dollars on something, right?

It was an hour later, and I was sitting in the Presidential Suite in the Dorchester Hotel when that fabulous rationalization came bubbling up into my brain. In fact, the whole thing made so much sense that I picked up the phone, dialed Janet, woke her up out of a dead sleep, and calmly said, “I want you to send George over to Alan Chemical-tob’s house and have him pick up twenty Ludes for me, then have him fly them over on the next Concorde, okay?” Only as an afterthought did it occur to me that Bayside was five hours behind London, which meant it was four a.m., Janet time.

But my twinge of guilt was short-lived; after all, it wasn’t the first time I’d done something like this to her, and I had a sneaky suspicion it wouldn’t be the last. Anyway, I was paying her five times the going rate for personal assistants, so in essence hadn’t I purchased the right to wake her up? Or, if not that, hadn’t I earned the right to wake her up through the love and kindness I’d extended toward her, like the father she never had? (Another wonderful rationalization!)

Obviously so—because, without missing a beat, Janet was now wide awake and eager to please. She cheerfully responded, “No problem; I’m pretty sure the next Concorde leaves early tomorrow morning. I’ll make sure George is on it. But I don’t have to send him to Alan’s house. I have an emergency stash for you right here in my apartment.” She paused for a brief instant, then added, “Where are you calling me from, the hotel room?”

Before I answered yes, I found myself wondering what sort of conclusions could be drawn about a man who could call his assistant and ask her to use supersonic transport to satiate his raging drug habit and his obvious desire to self-destruct and not even get a raised eyebrow in return. It was a troubling thought, so I chose not to dwell on it very long. I said to Janet, “Yeah, I’m in the room. Where else would I be calling you from, numnuts, one of those red phone booths in Piccadilly Circus?”

“Fuck you!” she shot back. “I was just wondering.” Then she changed her tone to one of great hope and asked, “Do you like the room better than the one in Switzerland?”

“Yeah—it’s much nicer, sweetie. It’s not exactly my taste, but everything is new and beautiful. You did good.”