A quarter-million dollars up my nose: A shy homeschool kid’s best Wolf of Wallstreet impression — and his resulting (temporary) insanity — part 3 Dean Patrick Follow Oct 30, 2019 · Unlisted

Read on for my best Jordan Belfort impression. Source.

If you haven’t read part 1, which includes my motivations for writing this series, check it out here: https://medium.com/@deanpatrick_63570/a-quarter-million-dollars-up-my-nose-a-shy-homeschool-kids-best-wolf-of-wallstreet-impression-4e32db981f3b.

Part 2 is here.

Before I begin part 3, let me share with you one of my favorite poems of all time by the great poet Yrsa Daley-Ward. I adapted a couple of the words to fit my context and added some commentary intermixed towards the end. I believe it encapsulates my journey from parts 1 and 2 and sets up part 3 well, where I delve into even darker aspects of my past. I hope you enjoy.

The Terrible — Yrsa Daley-Ward (adapted)

(Yrsa) You may not run away from the thing that you are, because it comes and comes and comes as sure as you breath, as certain. The thing is deep inside your linings, way down in the marrow. People have a lot of words for it, there are 10,000 names for it and you, wherever you are, it catches you up. It catches you in New York City, wherever you are and whatever it is, the terrible is trying to grip you. And sometimes you’re walking down the street and it tries to knock you clean off your feet. and send you right underground. The terrible comes like a bang in the night, it takes a drink and several more and comes to plague you in the morning. It damn near poisons you with all the drink it needs to stay alive. It toys with you the morning after, stays the entire day squeezing you by the shoulders, making your hands shake. It smiles at you, the terrible. Sitting, arms folded in the corner of the room. It just can’t help itself. It just needs friends. Its such a lonely thing, the terrible. It needs to eat. And it eats whole lives up in one sitting. The terrible claps its terrible hands and everything falls right through them. The terrible is here one month and gone for a while, until the middle of the next. Allowing you to catch your breath. And just when you almost think everything is okay, and when you are not over or under breathing, it surprises you in the middle of the night again. The terrible cannot understand for the life of it why you don’t want to take it to bed with you. it climbs in with you anyway, and it’s just as you thought. The terrible wakes up shuddering and bellows and you try to lock it out of your room but it seeps under the gap between the door and the floor. Perhaps it is your friend, perhaps the terrible is your heart. Perhaps the terrible loves you after all. “Don’t you know I’ve been carrying you throughout all of this??” Says the terrible. “Don’t you know you’re one of the lucky ones??” Shouts the terrible. “Don’t you know I’ve got you, you ungrateful ungrateful creature? You wretch! Don’t you know those dark times kept you stronger?” Thus sayeth the terrible. “Don’t you know the drugs didn’t kill you? They could have or should have and never did. Don’t you know your life has been one magic spell cast after the other? Are you stupid??” Screams the terrible. “Well, are you??” Bellows the terrible. “Don’t you know without me you’d die die die in the mundane? Have you learned nothing? Don’t you know you earned resilience? Don’t you know I kept you rich? No, i didn’t think so.” Sniffed the terrible. shaking his, her, their heads violently in the winds. Turning away from each other and the world. “And why did you never love me?” Demands the terrible. Her, his, their glittering yellow eyes wet with rage.

(Dean) In truth, the terrible has always been there for me. At least since high school. When judgment and loathing crept in. The terrible is the ego unhinged, an expansive net that catches all the feedback hurled by the world. And then, the ego-terrible starts brushing its teeth inside the apartment of your mind. Getting comfortable and proclaiming it will never leave. Builders can not remodel your apartment when someone barricades the door, sealing themselves in, forcing everyone else out.

This impasse demands the question:

(Yrsa) What are the codes for the good and happy things? Did I drown? What are the coordinates to a place above sea level? No one can tread water for ever. No one can swallow salt, and brine and bile forever.

(Dean) In the end, there is only one response one can make..

(Yrsa) Your soul arises, and you let it. Or, you don’t.

(Dean) I am still trying to get out my souls’ way. “People like me” have a tendency to smother our souls. It’s one of those things you learn about yourself over time.

A final note before I get into it. The fact of the matter is that my life the past few years, however irresponsible sounding, has accumulated responsibilities that I take very seriously. A primary one being the management of other’s hard-earned money, including investments I made on behalf of my investors that I still manage to this day. Despite my mental illness, I hold my head high knowing I did everything I could given what I knew at the time to maximize returns on my investor's capital. There was never a moment where I neglected my fiduciary responsibility or bent the rules to fit any short term conveniences or lifestyle choices I may have been considering.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get back into it…

Part 3: G2\H2 (Capital)

After arriving at the G2/H2 ward at Stanford Hospital on Thursday night, I received an IV drip of Ativan to temporarily counteract the onslaught of sleepless cocaine withdrawal I had earned for myself after weeks of binging. My sleep-starved body seized what it now recognized as a rare opportunity for rest, and I passed out within minutes of receiving the IV.

Waking up 16 hours later on Friday afternoon, my mind decided to exact revenge on my mistreatment over the past 8 weeks. I carefully lifted my aching, dopamine depleted head and looked around me to take in the reality of my surroundings for the first time. Sitting up in bed in my turquoise G2/H2 branded pajamas, I pulled open the curtain wrapping around my bed, a small source of readily penetrable privacy, the only kind admissible in a place like this.

I scanned the room and quickly noticed a book sitting on the table across from my roommate’s bed (wait, I have a roommate?). The book’s title splayed across the cover in enormous contrasting white font read: “Living With Schitzophrenia”. Okay so, my roommate is schizophrenic. What does that say about me?

At the time, I was in no mood for entertaining this kind of retrospection. Instead, I immediately flung myself out of bed and charged out of my room with only one goal in mind: To find out who I needed to talk to in order to secure my immediate release from this damned prison cell. No, worse than a prison cell, because at least in prison you are given a sentence with a release date. Mental instability is a subjective state, and a diagnosis of some form of mental illness can be as much an invitation to reshape otherwise normal behavior as confirmation of said diagnosis as it is a descriptive label of objective unstable mental and /or behavioral patterns.

Doctor: “The fact that you are still convinced that you are starting a hedge fund is evidence that your drug-induced psychosis is persisting even after the drugs have left your body.” Me: “I’m sorry Doctor, but have you even heard of Bitcoin? The whole thing is like one big libertarian acid trip. What I’m proposing is totally reasonable once you enter this parallel universe. The SHA-256 hash algorithm is this universe’s general relativity, the rules of the old universe don’t apply.”

Thank god I was at the Psychiatric ward in the heart of Silicon Valley. There aren’t many Psychiatrists in the world that would have allowed me to see the light of day after a comment like that.

As I groggily wandered out of my room for the first sober time on Friday afternoon, I was immediately bludgeoned by the curdling cries of a bearded obese mid-20s man. “Where is Dr. Tracy?” he bellowed to the on-call physician support staff (of which there was at least 1 for every 3 patients present in the ward at any time). “I need to change one of my prescriptions!” His tone was so offensive that this self-diagnosis struck me as entirely redundant.

I carefully avoided eye-contact as I slid around him to get to a nurse, the only figure of even moderate authority in the immediate vicinity. She (a stereotypical middle-aged female nurse) was stationed behind the standing movable table wheeled from room to room during morning rounds. As I approached it dawned on me that to this lady, I was no different from the bellowing head case down the hall. We were wearing the exact same patient pajamas issued to us after being locked into the same mental illness facility.

This was a startling fact, given the chronic severity of the illnesses of the other patients. As this thought flashed through my brain, it sparked a desire in me to make it clear to the nurse that I was not the same as the other patients.

“You see, I’m basically a normal guy who did a little too much blow the other night. I'm actually an upstanding guy, a contributor to society, I go to Stanford!”

I didn’t act on this desire explicitly and instead asked the nurse directly, “Who is in charge of making patient discharge decisions?”. I made sure to ask my question as “normally” as possible. In other words, I spoke in a steady, friendly tone while looking her in the eyes. Whatever I did in an effort to seem normal did not appear to dissolve the nurses’ obvious skepticism of my fitness for said discharge (at least, this was my perception at the time).

Nurse: “The phsyician in charge of the ward makes all discharge decisions. Unfortunatlely he has left for the weekend and the weekend doctor doesn’t come in until tomorrow morning. He’s mostly retired at this point and only works Saturday-Sunday. You’ll have to talk to him tomorrow”.

Mm.. the weekend doctor, that sounds promising. Perhaps part-time status will lend my proverbial Pontius Pilate greater amenability (side-note: messiah complexes are relatively common among schizophrenic patients). Either way, I was trapped here for at least another night so I figured I had better get acquainted with my lodgings.

As I walked around G2/H2, I realized for the first time the true nature of my predicament. Doors marked “high-elopement risk”, meals with no silverware, and the chronic wale-moan-whimper of one or more distressed patients offered a constant reminder.

At mealtimes, despite being plastic, utensils were meticulously accounted for to prevent their repurposing as crude tools of combat by the patients. This policy resulted in some funny encounters between the hospital staff and an Asian male patient who must have been in his 50s, probably bouncing around facilities like G2/H2 most of his adult life. That being said, he was clearly still committed to continuously improving his lot in life as he, without fail, would try and hide his fork and knife in his pajamas and sneak them out of the dining area every single meal. The hospital staff had, of course, came to expect this, and a routine was established of shaking said fork and a knife out of Asian-male-50s shirt, who to his credit, would look as innocent as possible before the inevitable spillage of his cargo sent him into a pathetic fit where he begged the staff to let him stash them in his room.

In fact, he had managed to sneak utensils to his room on a number of occasions as the discovery of a shoebox filled with a dozen or so forks and knives under his bed by a staff member caused a stir throughout the ward. As a result, additional staff members were stationed in the eating area during meals to make sure no mid-meal fork-handoffs were made to our local utensil collector.

Looking back, I consider myself astonishingly lucky to have been placed in a psychiatric ward as well funded as the G2/H2 ward at Stanford Hospital. The ward itself beds at most 20 patients at any one time. The ward is not meant as a final home for the socially unfit, rather it is a holding tank for those in mental crisis. It is a place you go to when you are deemed too dangerous to continue in your current situation. It is a place where you plan your re-integration into society, in particular, because the last go-around didn’t go so well.

On Saturday, my meeting with the weekend doctor ended in bitter disappointment, and the reality of my predicament set in. The way I saw it at the time was that this was a highly risk-averse old doctor so close to retiring that he didn’t want to make any discharge decisions at all for fear of losing his cushy weekend gig. Looking back, his rationale was completely sound.

Weekend Doctor: “Since I wasn’t around when you were admitted to the ward, I have no independent ability to assess your level of improvement over the past 36 hours, which means I’m missing a critical variable in determining your eligibliity for release.”

Well, fine then. To make matters worse, this was memorial day weekend, meaning the physician that was present during my intake would not be returning until late Tuesday morning. The reality of the situation his me like a ton of bricks as I plodded dejectedly out of the weekend doctor's office on Saturday morning: I was stuck in G2/H2 for at least 3 more days.

Thankfully, my Mother (who flew down), Brother (also a Stanford student) and girlfriend (Stanford student) were all on campus at the time and G2/H2 offered extended visiting hours over the weekend — 6 hours a day.

So from 11 am-5 pm each day, some combination of this support group kept me company (read: sane), playing board games and generally laughing at the ridiculousness of my predicament. Everyone was just happy I was okay and I convinced them as well as myself that this was just a bump in the road, a misunderstanding that would be smoothed over upon my release. In particular, the discussion around my hedge fund occupied a lot of time. I mentioned my desire to name the fund after the G2/H2 ward, a suggestion resulting in several minutes of laughter and unanimous agreement that this was a perfect name. G2H2 Capital. Has a nice ring to it, no?

48 well-behaved hours after my initial intake, I was granted yard privileges. This meant I was allowed to join the noontime procession of 10 or so patients who marched out to the hospital atrium for an hour of unstructured exercise in the sun. The atrium consisted of a quarter-acre square plot of grass situated in the middle of the enormous Stanford psychiatric hospital complex, with four 5–10 story buildings flanking each side. I would be lying if I said I didn’t contemplate making a break for it as we passed between the “high-elopement risk” doors and the steel gate blocking us into the atrium.

One instance in particular, on Sunday, I noticed that the staff member escorting us was limping and that I could easily outrun him. But thankfully, my still-developing-21-year-old-male-executive-functioning kicked in and I was able to appropriately weigh the benefits of gaining freedom 48 hours early with the costs of facing the wrath of the judicial system who would no doubt get involved as a result of my shirking a state-mandated lockup inside a high-security psychiatric facility.

It was during one of these short, 45-minute outdoor breaks that I interacted with my roommate for the first time. I grabbed a half-deflated youth football from a G2/H2 supplied bucket containing various sports-balls (each partially deflated to prevent patients from gaining access to hard projectiles) and invited him to toss the pigskin around. To say it bluntly, he was a terrible throw. The ball consistently sailed some 15 feet left or right of me on every toss, with any adjustment on my part resulting in his simply hucking the ball in the opposite direction on the subsequent toss. Nonetheless, I spotted a quivering grin on his face at least once as he wound up to throw, physical proof that this dysfunctional game of catch offered him at least a moment of solace from the drug deadened drudgery of his day-to-day.

On Tuesday after a seemingly endless sober 4 days, I was discharged from the Stanford psychiatric ward. A changed person? Hardly. If anything, I viewed this lock-up as an injustice that needed correcting, my success would show the world that this lock-up was a mistake. I was doing just fine, thank you very much. I had a hedge fund to launch.

The toxicology report

One thing I neglected to mention thus far is that my drug usage extended way outside just cocaine. In fact, in the 2-weeks before my forced sobriety stint in G2/H2 I was committed to taking any drug I could get my hands on, and when you have access to the deep web, that policy meant I did basically all of them. The reference to the wolf of wall street in the title is actually even more appropriate once I reveal that one of the drugs I was so proud to have gotten my hands-on was quaaludes.

Even better, I managed to get my hands on some “Lemons” from South Africa (the drugs that in the movie take 2 hours to kick in, causing Leo / Belfort to enter “cerebral palsy mode” and total his Ferrari without realizing). These Lemons were not cheap, coming in at $250 a pop. I bought 10 of them for a cool $2,500 in early May, about 3 weeks before G2/H2.

The psychiatrist assigned to me after my discharge from G2/H2 went over the toxicology report that was taken during my intake (I have no memory of the test). It was almost comical how long the list of substances I tested positive for was. Let me recall:

Cocaine (obviously) Heroin Alprazolam (Xanax) Quaaludes Marijuana (boring) MDMA Amphetamine (I.e. Adderal. because cocaine wasn’t enough “up”) Methylphenidate (I.e. Ritalin. this one surprised me actually) Oxycotin

Most of these substances are out of your system after 3 days, a testament to the intensity of my commitment to distorting my chemical experience. Originally, I started using different substances to manage the come-downs from Cocaine, but the period directly prior to my lock-up I was so chemically distorted that I figured anything I threw at my brain was better than withdrawal or sobriety.

The psychiatrist was clearly dismayed during her lengthy enumeration of my agents of depraved debauchery. But the real reason I mention her is that the namesake of this essay series comes from an exchange we had about the one substance on the list she didn’t recognize.

“What is a Quaalude?” she asked innocently after she finished reading me the report.

I was pretty taken aback, she was clearly over 50, and I thought that everyone who was around in the 80s at least knew about Quaaludes. How big of a nerd was she?

“Have you seen the movie Wolf of Wallstreet?” I asked. a prompt I figured would be sufficient to jog her memory, assuming she had seen the movie. She had, and it was.

“Oh yeah! I remember that was one of the drugs the main guy used. So what, are you trying to be like that guy or something?”.

Yes. Yes exactly. Finally, somebody understands.

In part 4, I head back to New York City. With my G2/H2 lock-up leaving me with a strong sense of my body's physical limits, I continuously toe the hospitalization line without ever quite crossing it, resulting in a year-long stretch of unchecked self-destructive excess. Stay tuned, and thank you for reading.