Nevertheless, my luscious Duchess, the aspiring hunter-jumper expert, went there every day—to feed her horses sugar cubes and carrots and to take riding lessons—in spite of the fact that she suffered from intractable horse allergies and would come home sneezing and wheezing and itching and coughing. But, hey, when you live in the middle of WASP heaven you do as the WASPs do, and you pretend to like horses.
As the limo crossed over Northern Boulevard, I felt my lower-back pain breaking through the surface. It was about that time now, where most of last night’s recreational drug medley had worked its way out of my central nervous system and into my liver and lymph channels, where it belonged. But it also meant that the pain would now be returning. It felt as if an angry, feral, fire-breathing dragon was slowly awakening. The pain started in the small of my back, on the left side, and went shooting down the back of my left leg. It was as if someone were twisting a red-hot branding iron into the back of my thigh. It was excruciating. If I tried rubbing the pain out it would shift to a different spot.
I took a deep breath and resisted the urge to grab three Quaaludes and swallow them dry. That would be completely unacceptable behavior, after all. I was heading for work, and in spite of being the boss, I couldn’t just stumble in like a drooling idiot. That was only acceptable at nighttime. Instead, I said a quick prayer that a bolt of lightning would come down from out of the clear blue sky and electrocute my wife’s dog.
On this side of Northern Boulevard, things were decidedly low rent, which is to say the average home went for a little over a million-two. It was rather ironic how a kid from a poor family could become desensitized to the extravagances of wealth to the point that million-dollar homes now seemed like shacks. But that wasn’t a bad thing, was it? Well, who knew anymore.
Just then I saw the green and white sign that hung over the entrance ramp to the Long Island Expressway. Soon enough I’d be walking into the very offices of Stratton Oakmont—my home away from home—where the mighty roar of America’s wildest boardroom would make the insanity seem perfectly okay.
CHAPTER 5
THE MOST POWERFUL DRUG
The investment-banking firm of Stratton Oakmont occupied the first floor of a sprawling black-glass office building that rose up four stories from out of the muddy marrow of an old Long Island swamp pit. In truth, it wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Most of the old pit had been reclaimed back in the early 1980s, and it now sported a first-class office complex with an enormous parking lot and a three-level underground parking garage, where Stratton brokers would take mid-afternoon coffee breaks and get laid by a happy hit squad of prostitutes.
Today, as on every day, as we pulled up to the office building I found myself welling up with pride. The mirrored black glass gleamed brilliantly in the morning sunshine, reminding me of just how far I’d come in the last five years. It was hard to imagine that I’d actually started Stratton from out of the electrical closet of a used-car dealership. And now…this!
On the west side of the building there was a grand entranceway meant to dazzle all those who walked through it. But not a soul from Stratton ever did. It was too far out of the way, and time, after all, was money. Instead, everyone, including me, used a concrete ramp on the south side of the building, which led directly to the boardroom.
I climbed out of the back of the limousine, said my parting farewells to George (who nodded without speaking), and then made my way up that very concrete ramp. As I passed through the steel doors, I could already make out the faint echoes of the mighty roar, which sounded like the roar of a mob. It was music to my ears. I headed right for it, with a vengeance.
After a dozen steps, I turned the corner and there it was: the boardroom of Stratton Oakmont. It was a massive space, more than a football field long and nearly half as wide. It was an open space, with no partitions and a very low ceiling. Tightly packed rows of maple-colored desks were arranged classroom style, and an endless sea of crisp white dress shirts moved about furiously. The brokers had their suit jackets off, and they were shouting into black telephones, which created the roar. It was the sound of polite young men using logic and reason to convince business owners across America to invest their savings with Stratton Oakmont:
“Jesus Christ, Bill! Pick up your skirt, grab your balls, and make a goddamn decision!” screamed Bobby Koch, a chubby, twenty-two-year-old Irishman with a high-school diploma, a raging coke habit, and an adjusted gross income of $1.2 million. He was berating some wealthy business owner named Bill who lived somewhere in America’s heartland. Each desk had a gray-colored computer on it, and green-diode numbers and letters came flashing across, bringing real-time stock quotes to the Strattonites. But hardly a soul ever glanced at them. They were too busy sweating profusely and screaming into black telephones, which looked like giant eggplants growing out of their ears.
“I need a decision—Bill!—I need a decision right now!” snapped Bobby. “Steve Madden is the hottest new issue on Wall Street, and there’s nothing to think about! By this afternoon it’ll be a f**king dinosaur!” Bobby was two weeks out of the Hazelden Clinic and had already begun to relapse. His eyes seemed to be popping right out of his beefy Irish skull. You could literally feel the coc**ne crystals oozing from his sweat glands. It was 9:30 a.m.
A young Strattonite with slicked-back hair, a square jaw, and a neck the size of Rhode Island was in a crouch position, trying to explain to a client the pros and cons of including his wife in the decision-making process. “Tawk to ya wife? Waddaya, crazy a sumthin’?” He was only vaguely aware that his New York accent was so thick it sounded like sludge. “I mean, ya think your wife tawkstaya when she goes out and buys a new pair of shoes?”
Three rows back, a young Strattonite with curly brown hair and an active case of teenage acne was standing stiff as a ramrod with his black telephone wedged between his cheek and collarbone. His arms were extended like airplane wings, and he had giant sweat stains under his armpits. As he shouted into his telephone, Anthony Gilberto, the firm’s custom tailor, fit him for a custom-made suit. All day long Gilberto would go from desk to desk taking measurements of young Strattonites and make suits for them at $2,000 a pop. Just then the young Strattonite tilted his head all the way back and stretched his arms out as wide as they could possibly go, as if he were about to do a swan dive off a ten-meter board. Then he said, in a tone you use when you’re at your wits’ end: “Jesus, will you do yourself a favor, Mr. Kilgore, and pick up ten thousand shares? Please, you’re killing me here…you’re killing me. I mean, do I have to fly down to Texas to twist your arm, because if I have to I will!”
Such dedication! I thought. The pimply-faced kid was pitching stock even while he was clothes shopping! My office was on the other side of the boardroom, and as I made my way through the writhing sea of humanity I felt like Moses in cowboy boots. Brokers parted this way and that as they cleared a path for me. Each broker I passed offered me a wink or a smile as a way of showing their appreciation for this little slice of heaven on earth I’d created. Yes, these were my people. They came to me for hope, love, advice, and direction, and I was ten times crazier than all of them. Yet one thing we all shared equally was an undying love for the mighty roar. In fact, we couldn’t get enough of it:
“Pick up the f**king phone, please!” screamed a little blond sales assistant.
“You pick up the f**king phone! It’s your f**king job.”
“I’m only asking for one shot!”
“—twenty thousand at eight and a half—”
“—pick up a hundred thousand shares—”
“The stock’s going through the roof!”
“For Chrissake, Steve Madden’s the hottest deal on Wall Street!”
“Fuck Merrill Lynch! We eat those cockroaches for breakfast.”
“Your local broker? Fuck your local broker! He’s busy reading yesterday’s Wall Street Journal!”
“—I got twenty thousand B warrants at four—”
“Fuck that, they’re a piece of shit!”
“Yeah, well, f**k you too, and the piece-a-shit Volkswagen you drove here!”
Fuck this and f**k that! Shit here and shit there! It was the language of Wall Street. It was the essence of the mighty roar, and it cut through everything. It intoxicated you. It seduced you! It f**king liberated you! It helped you achieve goals you never dreamed yourself capable of! And it swept everyone away, especially me.
Out of the thousand souls in the boardroom there was scarcely a warm body over thirty; most were in their early twenties. It was a handsome crowd, exploding with vanity, and the sexual tension was so thick you could literally smell it. The dress code for men—boys!—was a custom-made suit, white dress shirt, silk necktie, and solid gold wristwatch. For the women, who were outnumbered ten to one, it was go-to-hell skirts, plunging necklines, push-up bras, and spike heels, the higher the better. It was the very sort of attire strictly forbidden in Stratton’s human-resources manual yet heavily encouraged by management (yours truly).
Things had gotten so out of hand that young Strattonites were rutting away under desks, in bathroom stalls, in coat closets, in the underground parking garage, and, of course, the building’s glass elevator. Eventually, to maintain some semblance of order, we passed out a memorandum declaring the building a Fuck Free Zone between the hours of eight a.m. and seven p.m. On the top of the memo were those very words, Fuck Free Zone, and beneath them were two anatomically correct stick figures, doing it doggy-style. Surrounding the stick figures was a thick red circle with a diagonal line running through its center: a Ghostbusters sign. (Certainly a Wall Street first.) But, alas, no one took it seriously.
It was all good, though, and it all made perfect sense. Everyone was young and beautiful, and they were seizing the moment. Seize the moment—it was this very corporate mantra that burned like fire in the heart and soul of every young Strattonite and vibrated in the overactive pleasure centers of all thousand of their barely postadolescent brains.
And who could argue with such success? The amount of money being made was staggering. A rookie stockbroker was expected to make $250,000 his first year. Anything less and he was suspect. By year two you were making $500,000 or you were considered weak and worthless. And by year three you’d better be making a million or more or you were a complete f**king laughingstock. And those were only the minimums; big producers made triple that.
And from there the wealth trickled down. Sales assistants, who were really glorified secretaries, were making over $100,000 a year. Even the girl at the front switchboard made $80,000 a year, just for answering the phones. It was nothing short of a good old-fashioned gold rush, and Lake Success had become a boomtown. Young Strattonites, the children that they were, began calling the place Broker Disneyland, and each one of them knew that if they were ever thrown out of the amusement park they would never make this much money again. And such was the great fear that lived at the base of the skull of every young Strattonite—that one day you would lose your job. Then what would they do? After all, when you were a Strattonite you were expected to live the Life—driving the fanciest car, eating at the hottest restaurants, giving the biggest tips, wearing the finest clothes, and residing in a mansion in Long Island’s fabulous Gold Coast. And even if you were just getting started and you didn’t have a dime to your name, then you would borrow money from any bank insane enough to lend it to you—regardless of the interest rate—and start living the Life, whether you were ready for it or not.