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 f**king 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 f**king 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 f**k 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 f**king nightmare. Some people have been here for over a year, and they’re still trying to get their license back!” He shook his head gravely. “It’s complete f**king insanity. Everyone’s ratting each other out, trying to earn brownie points with the staff. Really f**king 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 f**king god. What’s he like?”
“What’s he like?” muttered my paranoid friend. “He’s like Adolf f**king Hitler. Or actually more like Dr. Josef Mengele. He’s a big f**king 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 f**king business. Either way, the therapist had informed me that I was being placed on money restriction and masturb**ion 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 masturb**ion 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.
On a much sadder note, before I hung up with Gwynne, Channy came to the phone and said, “Are you in Atlant-ica because you pushed Mommy down the stairs?”
I replied, “That’s one reason, thumbkin. Daddy was very sick and he didn’t know what he was doing.”
“If you’re still sick, can I kiss away your boo-boo again?”
“Hopefully,” I said sadly. “Maybe you can kiss away both our boo-boos, Mommy’s and Daddy’s.” I felt my eyes welling up with tears.
“I’ll try,” she said, with the utmost seriousness.
I bit my lip, fighting back outright crying. “I know you will, baby. I know you will.” Then I told her that I loved her and hung up the phone. Before I went to bed that night I got down on my knees and said a prayer—that Channy could kiss away our boo-boos. Then everything would be okay again.
I woke up the next morning ready to meet the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, or was it Dr. Josef Mengele? Either way, the entire rehab—patients and staff alike—was getting together this morning in the auditorium for a regularly scheduled group meeting. It was a vast space with no partitions. A hundred twenty bridge chairs had been arranged in a large circle, and at the front of the room was a small platform with a lectern on it, where the speaker of the day would share his tale of drug-addicted woe.
I now sat as just another patient in a large circle of drug-addicted doctors and nurses (or Martians, from the Planet Talbot Mars, as I’d come to think of them). At this particular moment, all eyes were on today’s guest speaker—a sorry-looking woman in her early forties who had a rear end the size of Alaska and a ferocious case of acne, the sort you usually find on mental patients who’d spent the better part of their lives on psychotropic drugs.
“Hi,” she said in a timid voice. “My name is Susan, and I’m…uhhh…an alcoholic and a drug addict.”
All the Martians in the room, including myself, responded dutifully, by saying, “Hi, Susan!” to which she blushed and then bowed her head in defeat—or was it victory? Either way, I had no doubt she was a world-class drizzler.
Now there was silence. Apparently, Susan wasn’t much of a public speaker, or perhaps her brain had been short-circuited from all the drugs she’d consumed. As Susan gathered her thoughts, I took a moment to check out Doug Talbot. He was sitting at the front of the room with five staff members on either side of him. He had short snow-white hair, and he looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties. His skin was white and pasty, and he had the sort of square-jawed, grim expression that you would normally associate with a malevolent warden, the sort who looks a death-row inmate in the eye before he flips the switch on the electric chair and says, “I’m only doing this for your own good!”`
Finally, Susan plowed on. “I’ve…been…uhhh…sober…for almost eighteen months now, and I couldn’t have done it without the help and inspiration of…uhhh…Doug Talbot.” And she turned to Doug Talbot and bowed her head, at which point the whole room rose to their feet and started clapping—the whole room except for me. I was too shocked at the collective sight of more than a hundred ass-kissing Martians trying to get their licenses back.
Doug Talbot waved his hand at the Martians and then shook his head dismissively, as if to say, “Oh, please, you’re embarrassing me! I only do this job out of a love of humanity!” But I had no doubt that his happy hit squad of staff members were making careful notes as to who wasn’t clapping loudly enough.
As Susan continued to drizzle, I began craning my head around—looking for the curly-haired blonde with the gorgeous face and the killer body, and I found her sitting just across from me, on the opposite side of the circle. She was gorgeous, all right. She had soft, angelic features—not the chiseled model features of the Duchess, but they were beautiful nonetheless.
Suddenly the Martians jumped to their feet again, and Susan took an embarrassed bow. Then she lumbered over to Doug Talbot, bent over, and gave him a hug. But it wasn’t a warm hug; she kept her body far from his. It was the way Dr. Mengele’s few surviving patients must’ve hugged him, at atrocity reunions and such—a sort of extreme version of the Stockholm syndrome, where hostages come to revere their captors.
Now one of the staff began doing a bit of her own drizzling. When the Martians stood this time, I stood too. Everyone grabbed the hands of the people on either side of them, so I grabbed too.
In unison, we bowed our heads and chanted the AA mantra: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Now everyone began clapping, so I clapped too—except this time I was clapping with sincerity. After all, in spite of being a cynical bastard, there was no denying that AA was an amazing thing, a lifesaver to millions of people.
There was a long rectangular table at the back of the room with a few pots of coffee on it and some cookies and cakes. As I headed over, I heard an unfamiliar voice yelling: “Jordan! Jordan Belfort!”
I turned around and—Holy Christ!—it was Doug Talbot. He was walking toward me, wearing an enormous smile on his pasty face. He was tall, about six-one, although he didn’t look to be in particularly good shape. He wore an expensive-looking blue sport jacket and gray tweed slacks. He was waving me toward him.
At that very instant, I could feel a hundred five sets of eyes pretending not to look at me—no, it was actually a hundred fifteen sets of eyes, because the staff was pretending too.
He extended his hand. “So we finally meet,” he said, nodding his head knowingly. “It’s a pleasure. Welcome to Talbot Marsh. I feel like you and I are kindred spirits. Brad told me all about you. I can’t wait to hear the stories. I got a few of my own—nothing as good as yours, I’m sure.”