I smiled at my wife and said, “Yeah, I’m fine. I just have to go to the bathroom.”

The moment I turned the corner I took off like a world-class sprinter. I swung the bathroom door open, went inside one of the stalls, locked it, and then took out the syringe and pulled down my shorts and arched my back, so my ass was perched in the air. I was just about to plunge in the needle when disaster struck.

The needle was missing the plunger.

It was one of those newfangled safety needles, which couldn’t be injected without first being put into a plunging mechanism. All I had was a worthless cartridge of morphine with a needle on the end of it. I was devastated. I took a moment to regard this needle. A lightbulb!

I pulled up my shorts and ran to the gift shop and purchased a lollipop, then ran back to the bathroom. I plunged the needle into my ass. Then I took the stick of the lollipop and pushed down on the center of the syringe until every last drop of morphine was injected. All at once I felt a keg of gunpowder exploding inside me, rocking me to my very core.

Oh, Christ!I thought. I must’ve hit a vein, because the high was overtaking me at an incredible rate. And just like that, I was down on my knees and my mouth was bone-dry, and my innards felt like they’d just been submerged in a hot bubble bath, and my eyes felt like hot coals, and my ears were ringing like the Liberty Bell, and my anal sphincter felt tighter than a drum, and I loved it.

And here I sat, the hero, on the bathroom floor, with my shorts pulled down below my knees and the needle still sticking in my ass. But then it occurred to me that the Duchess might be worried about me.

A minute later I was in the hallway, on my way back to the Duchess, when I heard an old Jewish woman say, “Excuse me, sir!”

I turned to her. She smiled nervously and pointed her index finger at my shorts. Then she said, “Your tushie! Look at your tushie!”

I had been walking down the hallway with a needle sticking out of my ass, like a wounded bull that had just been darted by a matador. I smiled at the kind woman and thanked her, then removed the needle from my ass, threw it in a garbage can, and headed back to the waiting room.

When the Duchess saw me she smiled. But then the room began to grow dark and… Oh, shit!

I woke up in the waiting room, sitting on a plastic chair. Standing over me was a middle-aged doctor in green surgical scrubs. In his right hand he was holding smelling salts. The Duchess was standing next to him, and she was no longer smiling. The doctor said, “Your breathing is depressed, Mr. Belfort. Have you taken any narcotics?”

“No,” I said, forcing a weak smile for the Duchess. “I guess being a hero is very stressful, right, honey?” Then I passed out again.

I woke up in the back of a Lincoln limousine as it pulled into Indian Creek Island, where nothing exciting ever happens. My first thought was that I needed to snort some cocaine to even out. That had been my problem all along. To inject morphine without a balancing agent was a fool’s errand. I made a mental note to never try that again and then thanked God that Elliot had brought coke with him. I would snatch it from his room and deduct it from the $2 million he owed me.

Five minutes later, the guesthouse looked like a dozen CIA agents had spent three hours searching for stolen microfilm. There were clothes strewn about everywhere, and every piece of furniture had been tipped over on its side. And still no cocaine! Fuck!Where was it? I kept searching—searching for over an hour, in fact, until finally it hit me: It was that rat fuck, Arthur Wiener!He’d stolen his best friend’s cocaine!

Feeling empty and alone, I went upstairs to my sprawling master bedroom and cursed Arthur Wiener until I fell into a dreamless sleep.

CHAPTER 27

ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNG

June 1994

It seemed only appropriate that the offices of Steve Madden Shoes would be shaped like a shoe box. Actually, there were two shoe boxes: the one in the rear, which was thirty by sixty feet and housed a tiny factory, consisting of a handful of antiquated shoe-making machines manned by a dozen or so Spanish-speaking employees, all of whom shared a single green card and none of whom paid a dollar in taxes; and the shoe box in front, which was of similar size and housed the company’s office staff, most of whom were girls in their late teens or early twenties, and all of whom sported the sort of multicolored hair and visible body piercings that so much as said, “Yes, I’ve also had my clit pierced, as well as both my nipples!”

And while these young female space cadets pranced around the office, teetering atop six-inch platform shoes—all bearing the Steve Madden label—there was hip-hop music blasting and cannabis incense burning and a dozen telephones ringing and countless new shoe styles in the designing and a smattering of traditionally garbed religious leaders performing ritual cleansings, and somehow it all seemed to work. The only thing missing was an authentic witch doctor performing voodoo, although I was certain that would come next.

Anyway, at the front of the aforementioned front shoe box was an even smaller shoe box—this one perhaps ten by twenty feet—which was where Steve, aka, the Cobbler, kept his office. And for the last four weeks, since mid-May, it was where I’d kept my office too. The Cobbler and I sat on opposite sides of a black Formica desk, which, like everything else in this place, was covered in shoes.

At this particular moment I was wondering why every teenage girl in America was going crazy over these shoes that, to me, were hideous-looking. Whatever the case, there was no denying that we were a product-driven company. There were shoes everywhere, especially in Steve’s office, where they were scattered about the floor, hanging from the ceiling, and piled upon cheap folding tables and white Formica shelves, which made them seem that much uglier.

And there were more shoes on the windowsill behind Steve, piled so high I could barely see out that gloomy window into the gloomy parking lot, which, admittedly, was well suited to this gloomy part of Queens, namely, the gloomy groin of Woodside. We were about two miles east of Manhattan, where a man of my “somewhat” refined tastes was much better suited.

Nevertheless, money was money, and for some inexplicable reason this tiny company was on the verge of making boatloads of it. So this was where Janet and I would hang our hats for the foreseeable future. She was just down the hall, in a private office. And, yes, she, too, was surrounded by shoes.

It was Monday morning, and the Cobbler and I were sitting in our shoe-infested office, sipping coffee. Accompanying us was Gary Deluca, who, as of today, was the company’s new Operations Manager, replacing no one in particular, because up until now the company had been running on autopilot. Also in the room was John Basile, the company’s longtime Production Manager, who doubled as the company’s Head of Sales.

It was rather ironic, I thought, but dressed the way we were you would have never guessed that we were in the process of building the world’s largest women’s shoe company. We were a ragtag lot—I was dressed like a golf pro; Steve was dressed like a bum; Gary was dressed like a conservative businessman; and John Basile, a mid-thirties chubster, with a bulbous nose, bald skull, and thick, fleshy features, was dressed like a pizza delivery boy, wearing faded blue jeans and a baggy T-shirt. I absolutely adored John. He was a true talent, and despite being Catholic, he was blessed with a true Protestant work ethic—whatever thatmeant—and he was a true seer of the big picture.

But, alas, he was also a world-class spitter, which meant that whenever he was excited—or simply trying to make a point—you’d best be wearing a raincoat or be at least thirty degrees in either direction of his mouth. And, typically, his saliva was accompanied by exaggerated hand gestures, most of which had to do with the Cobbler being a fucking pussy for not wanting to place large-enough orders with the factories.