Fair enough, I thought. No choice but to crawl up to the royal bedchamber and die. A Lude overdose would be the best way to go, I figured, or at least the most appropriate since they had always been my drug of choice. But there were other options too. My daily drug regimen included 90 milligrams of morph**e, for pain; 40 milligrams of oxycodone, for good measure; a dozen Soma, to relax my muscles; 8 milligrams of Xanax, for anxiety; 20 milligrams of Klonopin, because it sounded strong; 30 milligrams of Ambien, for insomnia; twenty Quaaludes, because I liked Quaaludes; a gram or two of coke, for balancing purposes; 20 milligrams of Prozac, to ward off depression; 10 milligrams of Paxil, to ward off panic attacks; 8 milligrams of Zofran, for nausea; 200 milligrams of Fiorinal, for migraines; 80 milligrams of Valium, to relax my nerves; two heaping tablespoons of Senokot, to reduce constipation; 20 milligrams of Salagen, for dry mouth; and a pint of Macallan single-malt scotch, to wash it all down.
A month later, on the morning of June 20, I was lying in the royal bedchamber, in a semivegetative state, when Janet’s voice came over the intercom. “Barth Green is on line one,” said the voice.
“Take a message,” I muttered. “I’m in a meeting.”
“Very funny,” said the obnoxious voice. “He said he needs to speak to you now. Either you pick up the phone or I’m coming in there and picking it up for you. And put down the coke vial.”
I was taken aback. How had she known that? I looked around the room for a pinhole camera, but I didn’t see one. Were the Duchess and Janet surveilling me? Of all the intrusions! I let out a weary sigh and put down my coke vial and picked up the phone. “Hewoah,” I muttered, sounding like Elmer Fudd after a tough night out on the town.
A sympathetic tone: “Hi, Jordan, it’s Barth Green. How ya holding up?”
“Never better,” I croaked. “How about you?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” said the good doctor. “Listen, we haven’t spoken in a few weeks, but I’ve been speaking to Nadine every day and she’s very worried about you. She says you haven’t left the room in a week.”
“No, no,” I said. “I’m fine, Barth. I’m just catching my second wind.”
After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, Barth said, “How are you, Jordan? How are you really?”
I let out another great sigh. “The truth is, Barth, that I give up. I’m f**king done. I can’t take the pain anymore; this is no way to live. I know it’s not your fault, so don’t think I hold it against you or anything. I know you tried your best. I guess it’s just the hand I was dealt, or maybe it’s payback. Either way, it doesn’t matter.”
Barth came right back with: “Maybe you’re willing to give up, but I’m not. I won’t give up until you’re healed. And you will be healed. Now, I want you to get your ass out of bed right now, and go into your children’s rooms and take a good hard look at them. Maybe you’re not willing to fight for yourself anymore, but how about fighting for them? In case you haven’t noticed, your children are growing up without a father. When’s the last time you played with them?”
I tried fighting back the tears, but it was impossible. “I can’t take it anymore,” I said, snuffling. “The pain is overwhelming. It cuts into my bones. It’s impossible to live this way. I miss Chandler so much, and I hardly even know Carter. But I’m in constant pain. The only time it doesn’t hurt is the first two minutes I wake up. Then the pain comes roaring back, and it consumes me. I’ve tried everything, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
“There’s a reason I called this morning,” said Barth. “There’s a new medication I want you to try. It’s not a narcotic, and it has no side effects to speak of. Some people are having amazing results with it—people like you, with nerve damage.” He paused, and I could hear him take a deep breath. “Listen to me, Jordan: There’s nothing structurally wrong with your back. Your fusion is fine. The problem is you have a damaged nerve, and it’s misfiring—or firing for no reason at all, to be more accurate. You see, in a healthy person, pain serves as a warning signal, to let the body know there’s something wrong. But sometimes the system gets short-circuited, usually after a severe trauma. And then even after the injury is healed, the nerves keep firing. I suspect that’s what’s happening with you.”
“What kind of medication is this one?” I asked skeptically.
“It’s an epilepsy drug, to treat seizures, but it works for chronic pain too. I’ll be honest with you, Jordan: It’s still somewhat of a long-shot. It’s not approved by the FDA for pain management, and all the evidence is anecdotal. You’ll be one of the first people in New York taking it for pain. I already called it in to your pharmacy. You should have it in an hour.”
“What’s it called?”
“Lamictal,” he replied. “And like I said, it has no side effects, so you won’t even know you’re on it. I want you to take two pills before you go to sleep tonight, and then we’ll see what we see.”
The following morning I woke up a little after 8:30 a.m., and, as usual, I was alone in bed. The Duchess was already at the stables, probably sneezing like a wild banshee. By noon, she would be back home, still sneezing. Then she would go downstairs to her maternity showroom and design some more clothes. One day, I figured, she might even try to sell them.
So here I was, staring up at the fabulously expensive white silk canopy, waiting for my pain to start. It’d been six years now of intractable agony at the very paws of that mangy mutt Rocky. But it wasn’t shooting down my left leg, and there was no burning sensation in the lower half of my body. I swung my feet off the side of the bed and stood up straight, stretching my arms to the sky. I still felt nothing. I did a few side bends—still nothing. It wasn’t that I felt less pain; I felt no pain whatsoever. It was as if someone had flipped off a switch and literally shut my pain off. It was gone.
So I just stood there in my boxer shorts for what seemed like a very long time. Then I closed my eyes and bit down on my lower lip and started to cry. I went over to the side of the bed, rested my forehead on the edge of the mattress, and continued to cry. I had given up six years of my life to this pain, the last three of which had been so severe that it’d literally sucked the life out of me. I had become a drug addict. I had become depressed. And I had done things while I was high that were unconscionable. Without the drugs I would have never let Stratton get so out of control.
How much had my drug addiction fueled my life on the dark side? As a sober man, would I have ever slept with all those prostitutes? Would I have ever smuggled all that money to Switzerland? Would I have ever allowed Stratton’s sales practices to spiral so far out of control? Admittedly, it was easy to blame everything on drugs, but, of course, I was still responsible for my own actions. My only consolation was that I was living a more honest life now—building Steve Madden Shoes.
Just then the door swung open, and it was Chandler. She said, “Good morning, Daddy! I came to kiss away your boo-boo again.” She leaned over and kissed my lower back, once on each side, and then she planted one kiss directly on my spine, just over my scar.
I turned around, tears still in my eyes, and took a moment to regard my daughter. She wasn’t a baby anymore. While I’d been lost in my pain she’d given up her diaper. Her face was more chiseled now, and in spite of being less than three, she no longer spoke like a baby. I smiled at her and said, “Guess what, thumbkin? You kissed away Daddy’s boo-boo! It’s all gone now.”
That got her attention. “It is?” she said, in a wondrous tone.
“Yeah, baby, it is.” I grabbed her under her arms and stood up straight, lifting her over my head. “You see, baby? Daddy’s pain is all gone now. Isn’t that great?”
Very excited: “Will you play with me outside today?”
“You bet I will!” And I swung her over my head in a great circle. “From now on I’ll play with you every day! But first I gotta go find Mommy and tell her the good news.”
In a knowing tone: “She’s riding Leapyear, Daddy.”
“Well, that’s where I’m going, then, but first let’s go see Carter and give him a big kiss, okay?” She nodded eagerly and off we went.
When the Duchess saw me, she fell off her horse. Literally.
The horse had gone one way and she had gone the other, and now she was lying on the ground, sneezing and wheezing. I told her of my miraculous recovery, and we kissed—sharing a wonderful, carefree moment together. Then I said something that would turn out to be very ironic, which was: “I think we should take a vacation on the yacht; it’ll be so relaxing.”
CHAPTER 34
TRAVELING BADLY
Ahhh, the yacht Nadine! In spite of despising the f**king boat and wishing it would sink, there was still something very sexy about tooling around the blue waters of the Mediterranean aboard a 170-foot motor yacht. In fact, all eight of us—the Duchess and I, and six of our closest friends—were in for quite a treat aboard this floating palace of mine.
Of course, one could never embark on such an inspired voyage without being properly armed, so the night before we departed I recruited one of my closest friends, Rob Lorusso, to go on a last-minute drug collection with me. Rob was the perfect man for the job; not only was he coming along on the trip but he and I also had a history with this sort of stuff—once chasing around a Federal Express truck for three hours during a raging blizzard, in a desperate search for a lost Quaalude delivery.
I had known Rob for almost fifteen years and absolutely adored him. He was my age and owned a small mom-and-pop mortgage company that did mortgages for the Strattonites. Like me, he loved his drugs, and he also had a world-class sense of humor. He wasn’t particularly handsome—about five-nine, slightly over-weight, with a fat Italian nose and a very weak chin—but, nevertheless, women loved him. He was that rare breed of man who could sit at a table with a bevy of beauties he’d never met before and fart and burp and belch and snort, and they would all say: “Oh, Rob, you’re so funny! We love you so much, Rob! Please fart on us some more!”
His fatal flaw, though, was that he was the cheapest man alive. In fact, he was so cheap that it had cost him his first marriage to a girl named Lisa, who was a dark-haired beauty with a lot of teeth. After two years of marriage, she finally got fed up with him highlighting her portion of the phone bill, and she decided to have an affair with a local playboy-type. Rob caught her in the very act, and they were divorced shortly thereafter.
From there Rob started dating heavily, but each girl had some sort of deficiency—one had more arm hair than a gorilla; another liked to be wrapped in Saran Wrap during sex, while pretending she was a corpse; another refused to have any sex but anal sex; and still another (my personal favorite) liked to put Budweiser in her Cheerios. His latest girlfriend, Shelly, would be coming along on the yacht. She was rather cute, although she looked a bit like a hush puppy. Whatever the case, she had this odd habit of walking around with a Bible and quoting obscure passages. I gave her and Rob a month.