I took another deep breath. “If she loves me she’ll come to the phone.”
“No,” said Laurie, “if she loves you she won’t come to the phone. You two are in this thing together; you’re both sick with this disease. She might be even sicker than you for allowing it to go on so long. You need to go to rehab, Jordan, and she needs to get help too.”
I couldn’t believe it. Even Laurie had turned on me! I never would’ve thought it—not in a million years. Well, f**k her! And f**k the Duchess! And f**k every last soul on earth! Who gave a f**king shit anymore! I had already peaked, hadn’t I? I was thirty-four and had already lived ten lifetimes. What was the point now? Was there anywhere to go but down? What was better, to die a slow, painful death or to go down in a blaze of glory?
Just then I caught a glimpse of the vial of morph**e. There were at least a hundred pills inside, fifteen milligrams each. They were small pills, half the size of a pea, and they were a terrific shade of purple. I’d taken ten today, which was enough to put most men in an irreversible coma; for me, it was nothing.
With great sadness in my voice, I said to Laurie, “Tell Nadine I’m sorry, and to kiss the kids good-bye.” The last thing I heard before I hung up the phone was Laurie screaming: “Jordan, no! Don’t hang—”
In one swift movement I grabbed the vial of morph**e, unscrewed the top, and poured out the entire contents into the palm of my hand. There were so many pills that half of them tumbled on the floor. Still, there were at least fifty, rising up in the shape of a pyramid. It looked beautiful; a purple pyramid. I threw them back and started chewing them. Then all hell broke loose.
I saw Dave running toward me, so I darted to the other side of the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, but before I could put my lips to the bottle he was on me—knocking the bottle out of my hand and grabbing me in a bear hug. The phone started to ring. He ignored it and took me down to the floor, then stuck his tremendous fingers in my mouth and tried scooping the pills out. I bit his fingers, but he was so strong he overpowered me. He screamed, “Spit them out! Spit them out!”
“Fuck you!” I yelled. “Let me up or I’ll f**king kill you, you big fuck!”
And the phone kept ringing, and Dave kept screaming, “Spit out the pills! Spit them out!” and I kept chewing and trying to swallow more pills until, finally, he grabbed my cheeks with his right hand and squeezed with tremendous force.
“Oww, fuck!” I spit out the pills. They tasted poisonous…incredibly bitter…and I had already swallowed so many of them it didn’t really matter. It was only a matter of time now.
Holding me down with one hand, he picked up the cordless, dialed 911, and frantically gave the police his address. Then he threw down the phone and tried scooping more pills out of my mouth. I bit him again.
“Get your f**king paws out of my mouth, you big f**king oaf! I’ll never forgive you. You’re with them.”
“Calm down,” he said, picking me up like a bundle of firewood and carrying me over to the couch.
And there I laid, cursing him out for a solid two minutes, until I started to lose interest. I was getting very tired…very warm…very dreamy. It felt rather pleasant, actually. Then the phone rang. Dave picked it up, and it was Laurie. I tried listening to the conversation, but I quickly drifted off. Dave pressed the phone to my ear and said, “Here, buddy, it’s your wife. She wants to speak to you. She wants to tell you that she still loves you.”
“Nae?” I said, in a sleepy voice.
The loving Duchess: “Hey, sweetie, hang in there for me. I still love you. Everything’s gonna be okay. The kids love you, and I love you too. It’s all gonna be okay. Don’t fall asleep on me.”
I started to cry. “I’m sorry, Nae. I didn’t mean to do that to you today. I didn’t know what I was doing. I can’t live with myself…. I’m…sorry.” I sobbed uncontrollably.
“It’s okay,” said my wife. “I still love you. Just hang in there. It’s all gonna be okay.”
“I’ve always loved you, Nae, since the first day I laid eyes on you.”
Then I overdosed.
I woke up to the most horrendous feeling imaginable. I remember screaming, “No! Get that thing out of my mouth, you f**ker!” but not being sure exactly why.
I found out a second later. I was tied to an examining table in an emergency room, surrounded by a team of five doctors and nurses. The table was positioned upright, perpendicular to the floor. Not only were my arms and legs tied but there were also two thick vinyl belts affixing me to the table, one across my torso and the other across my thighs. A doctor in front of me, dressed in green hospital scrubs, was holding a long, thick black tube in his hand, the sort you would expect to find on a car radiator.
“Jordan,” he said firmly, “you need to cooperate and stop trying to bite my hand. We have to pump your stomach.”
“I’m fine,” I muttered. “I didn’t even swallow anything. I spit them out. I was only kidding.”
“I understand,” he said patiently, “but I can’t afford to take that chance. We’ve given you Narcan to offset the narcotics, so you’re out of danger now. But listen to me, my friend: Your blood pressure is off the charts and your heartbeat is erratic. What other drugs have you taken besides morph**e?”
I took a moment to regard the doctor. He looked Iranian or Persian or something along those lines. Could he be trusted? I was a Jew, after all, which made me his sworn enemy. Or did the Hippocratic oath transcend all that? I looked around the room, and over in the corner I saw a very disturbing sight—two policemen, in uniform, with guns. They were leaning against a wall, observing. Time to clam up, I thought.
“Nothing,” I croaked. “Only morph**e, and maybe a bit of Xanax. I have a bad back. I got everything from the doctor.”
The doctor smiled sadly. “I’m here to help you, Jordan, not to bust you.”
I closed my eyes and prepared for the torture. Yes, I knew what was coming. This Persiranian bastard was gonna try to stick that tube down my esophagus, all the way into my stomach sac, where he would vacuum out the contents. Then he would dump a couple of pounds of black charcoal into my stomach to push the drugs through my digestive tract unabsorbed. It was one of the rare moments in my life when I regretted being well read. And the last thought I had before the five doctors and nurses attacked me and forced the tube down my throat was: God, I hate being right all the time!
An hour later my stomach sac was completely empty, except for the dump truck worth of charcoal they’d forced down my throat. I was still tied to the table when they finally removed the black tube. As the last inch of tubing slid up my esophagus, I found myself wondering how female p*rn stars were able to deep-throat all those enormous penises without gagging. I knew it was a strange thought to have, but, still, it was what had occurred to me.
“How you feeling?” asked the kind doctor.
“I have to go to the bathroom really bad,” I said. “In fact, if you don’t untie me I’m gonna take a dump right in my pants.”
The doctor nodded, and he and the nurses began undoing my restraints. “The bathroom’s in there,” he said. “I’ll come in there in a little while and check on you.”
I wasn’t quite sure what he’d meant by that, until the first salvo of gunpowder came exploding out of my rectum with the force of a water cannon. I resisted the urge to look inside the bowl to see what was coming out of me, but after ten minutes of exploding salvos I gave in to the urge and peeked inside the bowl. It looked like the eruption of Mount Vesuvius—pounds of dark-black volcanic ash exploding from my a**hole. If I weighed a hundred thirty pounds this morning, I weighed only a buck twenty now. My very innards were inside some cheap porcelain toilet bowl in Boca Raton, Florida.
An hour later I finally emerged from the bathroom. I was over the hump now, feeling much more normal. Perhaps they’d sucked some of the insanity out of me, I thought. Either way, it was time to resume Lifestyles of the Rich and Dysfunctional; it was time to patch things up with the Duchess, curtail my drug intake, and live a more subdued lifestyle. I was thirty-four, after all, and the father of two.
“Thanks,” I said to the kind doctor. “I’m really sorry for biting you. I was just a bit nervous before. You can understand, right?”
He nodded. “No problem,” he said. “I’m just glad we could help.”
“Could you guys call me a cab, please? I gotta get home and get some sleep.”
It was then that I noticed that the two policemen were still in the room and they were heading directly for me. I had the distinct impression they weren’t about to offer me transportation home.
The doctor took two steps back, just as one of the policemen pulled out a pair of handcuffs. Oh, Christ! I thought. Handcuffed again? It would be the Wolf’s fourth time in chains in less than twenty-four hours! And what had I really done? I decided not to pursue that line of thinking. After all, where I was going I would have nothing but time to think about things.
As he slapped the cuffs on me, the policeman said, “Pursuant to the Baker Act, you’re being placed in a locked-down psychiatric unit for seventy-two hours, at which point you’ll be brought before a judge to see if you’re still a danger to yourself or others. Sorry, sir.”
Hmmm…he seemed like a nice-enough fellow, this Florida policeman, and he was only doing his job, after all. Besides, he was taking me to a psychiatric unit, not a jail, and that had to be a good thing, didn’t it?
“I’m a butterfly! I’m a butterfly!” screamed an obese, dark-haired woman in a blue muumuu as she flapped her arms and flew lazy circles around the fourth-floor locked-down psychiatric unit of the Delray Medical Center.
I was sitting on a very uncomfortable couch in the middle of the common area as she floated by. I smiled and nodded at her. There were forty or so patients, mostly dressed in bathrobes and slippers and engaged in various forms of socially unacceptable behavior. At the front of the unit was the nurses’ station, where all the crazies would line up every few hours for their Thorazine or Haldol or some other antipsychotic, to soothe their frazzled nerves.
“I gotta have it. Six point O two times ten to the twenty-third,” muttered a tall, thin teenager with a ferocious case of acne.
Very interesting, I thought. I had been watching this poor kid for over two hours, as he walked around in a remarkably perfect circle, spitting out Avogadro’s number, a mathematical constant used to measure molecular density. At first I was a bit confused as to why he was so obsessed with this number, until one of the orderlies explained that the young fellow was an intractable acidhead with a very high IQ, and he became fixated on Avogadro’s number whenever a dose of acid hit him the wrong way. It was his third stay in the Delray Medical Center in the last twelve months.
I found it ironic that I would be put in a place like this—considering how sane I was—but that was the problem with laws like the Baker Act: They were designed to meet the needs of the masses. Either way, things had been going reasonably well so far. I had convinced a doctor to prescribe me Lamictal, and he, of his own volition, had put me on some sort of short-acting opiate to help with the withdrawals.