Jordan Belfort - Catching the Wolf of Wall Street

I took a moment to run that scenario through my mind and found myself wondering how he was actually catching the squirrels. Must be setting traps, I figured. Then I heard another voice. “Hey, Jordan?”

I looked up and saw a short Mexican man standing there. “What’s up?” I said with a smile.

“I’m Jimmy, the head orderly. Mrs. Strickland told me you’ll be working for me.” Good old Mrs. Strickland! “I assume you don’t actually want to work, right?”

“Absolutely not,” I replied quickly. “How much will it cost?”

“A hundred bucks a month, and you’ll never touch a broom handle.”

“Done,” I said. “How do you want to get paid?”

“Have a friend on the outside send a money order to my sister each month. Then she’ll send it to me.”

“Fair enough,” I said, and the moment he walked away, an Italian-looking guy with an enormous rack of pearly whites poked his head in. “Are you Jordan?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yeah, how can I help you?”

“I’m Russo, the guy who gets things around here. I was watching you play tennis before. You’re pretty good, but I think you’d be much better with the right racquet.”

“What do you got?”

“A Head, Liquidmetal. In mint condition.”

“How much?”

“ Seventy-five bucks.”

“I’ll take it. How do you want to get paid?”

He waved me off. “Don’t worry about it; we’ll work it out later. You and I are gonna do a lot of business together; let me go fetch the racquet.” He walked off.

I looked at Tommy and said, “What a freak show this place is!”

“Oh, you have no idea,” he shot back. “This isn’t exactly what you call ‘hard time.’ In fact, at nighttime, people sneak out into the fields and pick up packages from their friends; some of them even meet their wives for sex. It’s a total free-for-all.”

And indeed it was.

As Tommy and I spent the next few day trading war stories, a seemingly endless stream of inmates offered their services to me. There was Miguel, the Mexican masseur ($10 for a sixty-minute rubdown with no happy ending); Teddy, the Chinese portrait master (for $200 you’d give him a snapshot of your children and he’d re-create it in watercolor); Jimmy, the redneck leather man (for $75 he’d make you a Western-style pocketbook to ship home to your wife); Danny, the gay barber (for six cans of tuna you’d get a trim, while he tried to rub his dick against your kneecap)… and on and on it went. Of course, there were all the jailhouse chefs, who, using a combination of food bought in the commissary, grown in the garden, smuggled in through the fields, and stolen from the kitchen, cooked gourmet meals in a microwave oven.

And just like that I was hooked up: living the Life behind bars.

Yet it wasn’t until the fourth night of war stories that Tommy brought something to my attention that would end up changing my life forever. “I’ve been around some insane people,” he said, “but you, my friend, definitely take the cake. I had my wife Google you because I thought you were full of shit—especially that nonsense about sinking the yacht. I mean, that’s outlandish! Who sinks a yacht? But she said it’s all on the Internet.”

“Yeah,” I said, with a mixture of sadness and pride. “I guess I lived a pretty fucked-up life.”

Tommy shrugged. “It might be fucked up, but the stories are totally hysterical, especially the way you tell them, with all the nicknames: the Blockhead, the Chinaman, Mad Max, the Cobbler, the Drizzler, and especially the Duchess, who I’d like to meet one day.”

I smiled. “Well, I’m sure I can arrange it in a few years. We actually get along pretty well these days. No more throwing things around.”

Tommy raised his eyebrows. “I’ll tell you what you really oughtta do.”

“What?”

“Write a book.”

I started laughing. “Write a book? How am I gonna write a book? I don’t know how to write! I mean, I can write, but not a whole book. Now, if you wanna talk about speaking, that’s something I can do. I’m a really great speaker, I promise you. You put me in front of a room and I’ll make people cry.”

“There’s no difference,” he said confidently. “Writing is all about a voice, and you have one of the best voices I’ve ever heard. Just write down your story exactly the way you tell it to me.”

“I’ll give it a shot,” I said, and then I spent the next week trying to find a starting point for my story. Some very bizarre things had happened to me—in fact, my whole life seemed to be a series of bizarre events strung together, one after the other. I decided to make a list of them.

Before long, I found myself wondering why so many bizarre things kept happening to me. I came to the conclusion that things weren’t just happening to me; I was bringing them on myself. It was as if I were a glutton for punishment. At the top of the list was the yacht debacle, and at the bottom of the list was midge-tossing. I decided to give writing it a whirl.

With pen and paper in hand, I sat in one of the quiet rooms and began writing my memoir. Two weeks later, I was still on the first paragraph. I read it to myself. Then I read it again. Christ—it was fucking terrible! It was some ridiculousness about men in self-constructed ivory towers wanting to jump out after the crash of 1987. Who gave a shit? I didn’t. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I write?

I decided to take a different tack: I would talk about my parents and how they liked to eat at the same diner all the time. I quickly wrote four pages. I looked at them. They were damn good, so I rushed them over to Tommy for a critique.

“Okay,” he said eagerly. “Let’s see what we got here,” and he started reading, and reading… and why wasn’t he laughing? There was a terrific joke in that first paragraph, and he had blown right by it.

A minute later he looked up. “This really sucks!” he said.

“Really?”

He nodded quickly. “Oh, yeah, it’s really bad. I mean, it’s absolutely terrible. It doesn’t have a single redeeming quality.” He shrugged. “Start over.”

“What are you talking about? Didn’t you read that first paragraph?”

Tommy looked me square in the eye and said, “Who gives a shit about the diner? It’s fucking boring, and it’s ordinary. Let me tell you something, Jordan. There are two things about writing you can never forget: First, it’s all about conflict. Without conflict, no one gives a shit. Second, it’s about the most of. You know what the most of means?”

I shrugged, still wounded by Tommy’s contemptuous dismissal of my diner story.

He said, “It means you always write about the extreme of something. The most of this, the most of that, the prettiest girl, the richest man, the most rip-roaring drug addiction, the most insane yacht trip.” He smiled warmly. “Now, that was what your life was all about: the most of. You get the picture?”

Indeed I did, and indeed I couldn’t write it.

In fact, for a month straight, day and night, I did nothing but write—only to have Tommy review my work and say things like: “It’s wooden; it’s irrelevant; it’s boring; it sucks moose cock.” Until, finally, I gave up.

With my tail between my legs, I walked into the prison library, searching for a book to read. After a few minutes I stumbled upon The Bonfire of the Vanities. I vaguely remembered seeing the movie, and, as I recalled, it absolutely sucked. Still, it had something to do with Wall Street, so I picked it up and read the first two paragraphs…. What utter nonsense it was! Who would read this crap?