Now Mad Max was shaking his head in disgust—or was it incredulity? Well, it was probably a bit of both. Whatever it was, he was shaking his head and explaining to us three retarded schmendricks that November’s American Express bill was $470,000, and only $20,000 of it, by his calculations, were legitimate business expenses; the rest were of a personal nature, or personal bullshit, as he put it. Then, in a most ominous tone, he said, “Let me tell you something right now—you three maniacs are gonna get your tits caught right in a wringer! You mark my f**king words—sooner or later those bastards from the IRS are gonna come marching down here and do a complete f**king audit, and you three retards are gonna be in deep shit unless someone puts a stop to all this madness. That’s why I’m hitting each of you personally for this bill.” He nodded in agreement with his own statement. “I’m not running it through the business—not one f**king penny of it—and that’s f**king final! I’m taking four hundred fifty thousand right out of your inflated f**king paychecks, and don’t even try to stop me!”
Why—the f**king nerve! I had to say something to him in his own language. “Hold your f**king horses right there, Dad! That’s a complete load of crap, what you’re saying! A lot of that shit is legitimate business expenses, whether you believe it or not. If you just stop f**king screaming for a second I’ll tell you what’s what and—”
But again he cut me right off, now turning his attack directly toward me: “And you, the so-called Wolf of Wall Street—the demented young Wolf. My own son! From my very f**king loins! How could it be? You’re the worst of the lot! Why the hell would you go out and buy two of the same fur coat, for eighty thousand dollars apiece? That’s right—I called that place, Allessandro’s House of Fucking Furs, because I thought it must be some sort of a mistake! But, no—you know what that Greek bastard down there told me?”
I humored him with a response: “No, Dad, what did he f**king tell you?”
“He told me you bought two of the same mink coat—the same color and style and everything!” With that, Mad Max cocked his head to one side and tucked his chin between his collarbones. He looked up at me with those bulging blue eyes of his, and he said, “What, one coat’s not enough for your wife? Or wait—let me guess—you bought the second mink for a prostitute, right?” He paused and took another deep pull from his cigarette. “I’ve had it up to here with all this cockamamie bullshit. You don’t think I know what EJ Entertainment is?” He narrowed his eyes accusingly. “You three maniacs are charging hookers to the corporate credit card! What kind of hookers take credit cards, anyway?”
The three of us exchanged glances but said nothing. After all, what was there to say? The truth was that hookers did take credit cards—or at least ours did! In fact, hookers were so much a part of the Stratton subculture that we classified them like publicly traded stocks: Blue Chips were considered the top-of-the-line hooker, zee crème de la crème. They were usually struggling young models or exceptionally beautiful college girls in desperate need of tuition or designer clothing, and for a few thousand dollars they would do almost anything imaginable, either to you or to each other. Next came the NASDAQs, who were one step down from the Blue Chips. They were priced between three and five hundred dollars and made you wear a condom unless you gave them a hefty tip, which I always did. Then came the Pink Sheet hookers, who were the lowest form of all, usually a streetwalker or the sort of low-class hooker who showed up in response to a desperate late-night phone call to a number in Screw magazine or the yellow pages. They usually cost a hundred dollars or less, and if you didn’t wear a condom, you’d get a penicillin shot the next day and then pray that your dick didn’t fall off.
Anyway, the Blue Chips took credit cards, so what was wrong with writing them off on your taxes? After all, the IRS knew about this sort of stuff, didn’t they? In fact, back in the good old days, when getting blasted over lunch was considered normal corporate behavior, the IRS referred to these types of expenses as three-martini lunches! They even had an accounting term for it: It was called T and E, which stood for Travel and Entertainment. All I’d done was taken the small liberty of moving things to their logical conclusion, changing T and E to T and A: Tits and Ass!
That aside, the problems with my father ran much deeper than a few questionable charges on the corporate credit card. The simple fact was that he was the tightest man to ever walk the face of the planet. And I—well, let’s just say that I had a fundamental disagreement with him on the management of money, insofar as I thought nothing of losing half a million dollars at the craps table and then throwing a $5,000 gray poker chip at a luscious Blue Chip.
Anyway, the long and short of it was that at Stratton Oakmont, Mad Max was like a fish out of water—or more like a fish on Pluto. He was sixty-five years old, which made him a good forty years older than the average Strattonite; he was a highly educated man, a CPA, who had an IQ somewhere in the stratosphere, while the average Strattonite had no education whatsoever and was about as smart as a box of rocks. He had grown up in a different time and place, in the old Jewish Bronx, amid the smoldering economic ashes of the Great Depression, not knowing if there would be food on the dinner table. And like millions of others who had grown up in the thirties, he still suffered from a Depression-era mentality—making him risk-averse, resistant to change in any shape or form, and riddled with financial doubt. And here he was, trying to manage the finances of a company whose sole business was based on moment-to-moment change and whose majority owner, who happened to be his own son, was a born risk-taker.
I took a deep breath, rose from my chair, and walked around the front of my desk and sat on the edge. Then I crossed my arms beneath my chest in a gesture of frustration, and I said, “Listen, Dad—there are certain things that go on here that I don’t expect you to understand. But the simple fact is that it’s my f**king money to do whatever the f**k I want with. In fact, unless you can make a case that my spending is impinging on cash flow, then I would just suggest you bite your f**king tongue and pay the bill.
“Now, you know I love you, and it hurts me to see you get so upset over a stupid credit-card bill. But that’s all it is, Dad: a bill! And you know you’re gonna end up paying it anyway. So what’s the point of getting all upset over it? Before the day is over we’re gonna make twenty million bucks, so who gives a shit about half a million?”
At this point the Blockhead chimed in. “Max, my portion of the bill is hardly anything. So I’m on the same page as you.”
I smiled inwardly, knowing the Blockhead had just made a colossal blunder. There were two rules of thumb when dealing with Mad Max: First, never try passing the buck—ever! Second, never point the finger, subtly or otherwise, at his beloved son, who only he had the right to berate. He turned to Kenny and said, “In my mind, Greene, every dollar you spend above zero is one too many dollars, you f**king twerp! At least my son is the one who makes all the money around here! What the f**k do you do, besides getting us tangled up in a sexual-harassment lawsuit with that big-titted sales assistant—whatever the f**k her name was.” He shook his head in disgust. “So why don’t you just shut the f**k up and count your lucky stars that my son was kind enough to make a twerp like you a partner in this place.”
I smiled at my father and said jokingly, “Dad—Dad—Dad! Now, calm down before you give yourself a f**king heart attack. I know what you’re thinking, but Kenny wasn’t trying to insinuate anything. You know all of us love you and respect you and rely on you to be the voice of reason around here. So let’s all just take a step back…”
For as long as I could remember, my father had been fighting a one-sided ground war against himself—consisting of daily battles against unseen enemies and inanimate objects. I first noticed it when I was five, with his car, which he seemed to think was alive. It was a 1963 green Dodge Dart, and he referred to it as she. The problem was that she had a terrible rattle coming from beneath her dashboard. It was an elusive son of a bitch, this rattle, which he was certain those bastards from the Dodge factory had purposely placed in her, as a means of personally f**king him over. It was a rattle that no one else could hear, except my mother—who only pretended to hear it, to keep my father from blowing an emotional gasket.
But that was only the start of it. Even a simple trip to the refrigerator could be a dicey affair, what with his habit of drinking milk directly from the container. The problem there was if even one drop of milk dripped down his chin, he would go absolutely ballistic—slamming down the milk container and muttering, “That goddamn piece-a-shit motherf**king milk container! Can’t those stupid bastards who design milk containers come up with one that doesn’t make the f**king milk drip down your godforsaken chin?”
Of course. It was the milk container’s fault! So Mad Max shrouded himself in a series of bizarre routines and steadfast rituals as protection against a cruel, unpredictable world filled with rattling dashboards and imperfect milk containers. He’d wake up each morning to three Kent cigarettes, a thirty-minute shower, and then an inordinately long shave with a straightedge razor, while one cigarette burned in his mouth and another burned over the sink. Next he would get dressed, first putting on a pair of white boxer shorts, then a pair of black knee-high socks, then a pair of black patent-leather shoes—but not his pants. Then he would walk around the apartment like that. He would eat breakfast, smoke a few more cigarettes, and excuse himself to take a world-class dump. After that he would coif his hair to near-perfection, put on a dress shirt, button it slowly, turn up his collar, wriggle on his tie, knot it, turn down his collar, and put on his suit jacket. Finally, just before he left the house, he’d put his pants on. Just why he saved this step for the end I could never figure out, but seeing it all those years must’ve scarred me in some undetermined way.
Odder still, though, was Mad Max’s complete and utter aversion to the unexpected ringing of the telephone. Oh, yes, Mad Max hated the sound of a ringing phone, which seemed unusually cruel—considering he worked in an office that had one thousand tightly packed telephones, give or take a few. And they rang incessantly, from the moment Mad Max entered the office at precisely nine a.m. (he was never late, of course) to the moment he left, which was whenever the f**k he damn well pleased.
Not surprisingly, growing up in that tiny two-bedroom apartment in Queens got pretty wild sometimes, especially when the phone started ringing, and especially when it was for him. Yet he never actually answered the phone himself, even if he so desired, because my mother, Saint Leah, would morph into a world-class track star the moment it started ringing—making a mad dash for it, knowing that each ring she stymied would make it that much easier to calm him down after the fact.
And on those sad occasions when my mother was forced to utter those terrible words, “Max, it’s for you,” my father would slowly rise out of his living-room chair, wearing a pair of white boxer shorts and nothing else, and stomp his way to the kitchen, muttering, “That motherf**king cocksucking piece-of-f**king-shit phone! Who-the-f**king-hell-has-the-goddamn-f**king-nerve-to-call-the-motherf**king-house-on-a-piece-of-shit-f**king-Sunday-after-f**king-noon…”