The Rich Dude

Every time the Rich Dude enters the sushi bar one bears witness to a highly ritualized event. He leaves his sunglasses on for the trip to the front door to the bar proper. He stands next to the counter, smiling, hair brushed back, and surveys the room through the pair of shining black lenses. Then, with a fluid motion, he snatches the sunglasses from his face and takes a second look around, stretching his wide smile even further, deepening the wrinkles at the outer corners of his eyes. He is a hero and the restaurant spread out before him is another chunk of pineapple in the fruit salad that brims in his bowl of conquests. If a spontaneous round of applause were to erupt for his simple act of entering a building, I doubt that it would catch the Rich Dude off guard in the slightest--in fact, part of me suspects that he anticipates it.


The Rich Dude is truly a renaissance man, for he is fully capable of doing two things, playing the saxophone and having obscene amounts of money. I have never heard him play a note on a saxophone, but I have seen him spend money--and he spends it well.

The Rich Dude is inevitably there to meet his coterie of friends, a cast of approximately eight characters who all share the Rich Dude’s love of sushi (to a somewhat lesser extent) and spending money (to a far lesser extent, for none among them are quite as rich as the Rich Dude). His entourage is a rather mixed bag, but those among them with a little bit of money put on a nice show of acting like nouveaux riches--greetings are accompanied by kisses on the cheek, lapses into foreign language are common (particularly French and Spanish); important men in pink dress shirts known as Robert to others are referred to affectionately as Bobby; art, travel, and romantic comedies are frequently the topic of conversation. Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Slumdog Millionaire are a couple of the Rich Dude's more recent favorites. Let’s take a moment to examine these choices.

When the Rich Dude and his friends gather, there hangs a certain quality in the air about them that seems to cry out swingers or sex cult. Being a cosmopolitan bunch, they needn’t be troubled to observe the morals of the lower classes--and one can hardly be expected to pursue a life of unending pleasure if tethered to a concept as pedestrian as marriage, now can one? In fact, the Rich Dude’s actual wife is nearly never present at these gatherings. Though a number of middle-aged and approaching-middle-age females are. On one occasion, I overheard the Rich Dude refer to one member of his circle as his “booty call.” To hear a man rapidly approaching fifty, in 2009 no less, use the phrase “booty call” is a fate I would not wish on anyone--I think I'd rather hear my own grandpa mutter some vague statement about needing to get his "rocks off." I believe that the Rich Dude and his circle of friends are involved in some serious partner swapping. Whether this is going on in the open, with the consent and endorsement of all parties and their spouses, I cannot say. I tend to think that maybe some are in on it and others are not (I tend to think that if no one else, the Rich Dude and Bobby are definitely in on it). Perhaps this is why Vicky Cristina Barcelona resonates so with the Rich Dude. Though it is no doubt a heavily-watered-down version of the endless bacchanalian held by the Rich Dude and his crew, it does depict an alternative lifestyle--a marriage that can be held in perfect harmony only when it involves three persons (one dude and two women, naturally). Perhaps this scenario is something that the Rich Dude aspires to and that some day he hopes to open the door to his cages and set the animals free, release Antonio the midget amputee from his contract, donate his collection of lotions and lubricants to charity, and settle down to a quiet life with two incredibly attractive women, one of whom might even be his present wife.

On the latter, there was a period of several weeks during which the Rich Dude asked every one of his dining partners the question, "Have you seen Slumdog yet?" I thought that perhaps he was clipping the title for ease of communication, the way that some people will refer to "Wheel of Fortune" simply as "Wheel," but, after hearing him utter the phrase time and time again, I have come to another conclusion. The Rich Dude, being a millionaire and having been a millionaire since birth, actually has no concept of the word "millionaire." It has no meaning to him, is utterly transparent, and is therefore discarded as useless. Imagine if the movie Norbit were instead titled Norbit Person. It would be redundant. The word “millionaire” does have not much meaning to the Rich Dude, for in his eyes, all people are millionaires to one degree or another (though almost everyone on the planet is a millionaire to a lesser degree than the Rich Dude). As a result, the Rich Dude seem to have trouble imagining that other people could ever be encumbered by any sort of financial difficulty.

The Rich Dude, being a rich dude, sees no need for propriety. He seats himself, though a sign standing in my doorway asks him to please wait to be seated. He is respectful of the chef, and in general the other members of the staff, as long as the social hierarchy remains intact and that none of his subordinates forget his or her station in life. In general, he tips well, unless he is forced to wait for anything for longer than he feels he should be expected to wait. In short, he is locked in a constant struggle, a war of ideals in which the restaurant and its workers--who try to ascribe as much as possible to the notion that all customers are of equal importance--clashes with his own idea that his patronage is nothing short of a blessing from heaven above and that his happiness should become the priority of any and all the very moment he sets foot inside my confines. Though the Rich Dude has his favorite among the sushi chefs, he certainly would not fit the bill as others would for having a man-crush. Rather, the Rich Dude sees this chef as something akin to a trusted manservant, someone whose very function in life is to throw a little more elegance onto the Rich Dude's already gigantic shit-heap of elegance. In the army of people whose purpose it is to make the Rich Dude's life as pleasurable as possible, this particular sushi chef is a decorated officer.

Naturally, the Rich Dude's solipsism is all-permeating. The following is a conversation I witnessed between the Rich Dude and his favorite chef upon the Rich Dude's return from a three-month sojourn in Mexico:

The RICH DUDE, wearing sunglasses, enters the sushi bar. He smiles as he turns his head from side to side, scanning the room. With a fluid motion he removes the sunglasses from his face, smiles more widely, and looks around the room a second time. He walks to the sushi bar, behind which a CHEF is preparing sushi.

Rich Dude (hoping to see his own enthusiasm about his triumphant return reflected in the chef, perhaps still holding out for that round of applause): I'm back.

Chef (pretty much not even coming close to reflecting that enthusiasm, in fact, entirely lacking it.): Hey.

Rich Dude: How was the summer? Pretty slow?

Chef: No.

Rich Dude (puzzled): Huh.

That the Rich Dude suffers from certain distortions in his thinking is obvious. He seems surprised to see that I haven't gone out of business during his short absence. He is torn. On one hand, he is happy to find that his favorite sushi bar remains to be visited at his convenience. On the other, he is shocked to find that I haven’t been reverted to the Pizza Hut I was before I became a Japanese restaurant. Perhaps there is the beginning of the realization that the world goes on without him, the white void he imagines the world outside of the boundaries of his senses to be is a figment of his imagination and that, in fact, it is populated with buildings and people who live and die, laugh and love, and have blogs and tweet on a regular basis; the notion that he is an Egyptian king and that all of his favorite people, his sushi buddies, servers, cleaning ladies, drivers, pets, mistresses--even his beloved Bobby, the grey-haired dude with the mustache, pink dress shirts, and Ed Hardy sunglasses with the flaming skulls on the arms--will be cast into the tomb along with him to keep him company in the great beyond, has perhaps died a little.

But the Rich Dude need not fear this void, for his absence is felt heavily by the circle of friends whenever he is away. He is at the center, and without him, the ragtag group of diners that assemble without him are a sad bunch indeed, for they can talk only of the Rich Dude and his exploits. If the Rich Dude were ever to disappear, the group would dissolve and fall away. The circle of friends would go back to dining in clusters of two and threes, ordering the cheapest lunch specials on the menu. The sex cult would lose its cult status and, without access to the Rich Dude’s Mexican Pleasure Palace, become nothing more than a loosely-associated band of perverts, resorting to anonymous trysts in rest stops and airport restrooms. And as the various members continue their Faulkneresque slide into poverty and madness, the Rich Dude watches from high atop a cloud in the sky, serenading his old friends with the most mournful, sonorous saxophone solo the world has ever heard.

The Rich Dude gets exactly two-and-a-half out of a possible five jacuzzi jazz records.