The Horrids

In the normal course of dining out it should not be difficult for all parties involved to follow the social contract. Polite words and smiles are exchanged; the server, chefs, and staff try their utmost to keep the diner happy; the diners, in turn, try not to be utter pains in the ass to those working so hard to give them a satisfactory experience. At the end of the meal the bills is settled, gratuity is left, and everyone goes on with their separate lives. Calls to 911 in the hopes of having a server arrested are not part of the routine dining experience. In fact, it is a phenomenon I was entirely unaware of until the appearance of The Horrids in my sushi bar.

The Horrids are a mother-daughter team of dark-haired harridans so foul that to gaze upon them is to know firsthand the terrors of hell. They are the dung-dropping harpies of folklore, a pair of ready-made additions to the cast of a reality television series that highlights the worst that the human race has to offer. They are shallow, vain, and self-centered to the marrow, and may god help any and all who cross their path.

The Horrids pushed their way into my bar five minutes before closing. They did not seem concerned in the slightest that the place was entirely empty and that they'd be keeping a number of people late simply to serve them. They were utterly unfazed upon taking a seat to see the chef had emptied the refrigerated display entirely of its contents. They ordered water from the server.

Daughter Horrid, an archetypal sorority sister, makes a single mark on the order sheet and places it atop the bar. The sushi chef takes a moment to examine the sheet.

SUSHI CHEF: So just a California roll?

DAUGHTER HORRID: Could I get that with cream cheese?

SUSHI CHEF: Sure.

DAUGHTER HORRID: And could I have that tempura fried?

SUSHI CHEF: Can we get you anything else? We're about to close.

DAUGHTER HORRID: That's it.

The Chef nods and begins to prepare the order, dirtying the bar he has recently cleaned for the night.

A California roll costs four dollars, adding cream cheese is fifty cents, and tempura frying a roll costs an additional buck. The total for the bill, with tax, was $5.95. Six employees were staying late in order to serve the pair. In short, the owners were taking a bath and the employees were kissing what remains of their evening goodbye.

The Chef continues to prepare the roll. Mother Horrid listens to her Daughter Horrid's hateful tirade in which she issue forth a steady stream of vicious gossip about a friend. Suddenly, as if coming out of a trance, Daughter Horrid stops speaking for a moment and looks to the chef.

DAUGHTER HORRID (to Sushi Chef): Don't we get soup?

SUSHI CHEF: Uhhh . . .

Daughter Horrid turns to the Server.


DAUGHTER HORRID: Don't we get miso?

The Server, putting on a show, knowing very well that they don't get miso, takes the order sheet from on top of the bar and looks it over.

SERVER: Well, it looks like miso wouldn't come with this meal.

DAUGHTER HORRID (spitting out the words as if they are made of excrement): Since when?

SERVER (having made the calculation long ago): Well, we serve miso with orders of seven dollars or more, and this looks like it's not going to be much more than five. But, I'd be happy to get it for you as a side. It's only two dollars per bowl. Would you like some?

There is a protracted silence in the room. The hatred is palpable.

DAUGHTER HORRID: No.

There exists a common misconception in diners in that restaurants are not businesses at all, but will happily take loss after loss in order to give away as much food as possible. Many feel that upon entering the building they should be greeted with a bowl of miso soup and a heaping plateful of edamame, even if it is only a reward for ducking in to use the restroom and not to actually order anything.

The chef handed the roll over the top of the bar to Daughter Horrid, who promptly asked for eel sauce. This is a common request among sorority types. Rather than dunk their sushi in the traditional mixture of soy sauce and wasabi, they time and time again opt to for a small dish full of the thick, sweet concoction. I am not sure where this shared affinity comes from. I sometimes wonder if Paris Hilton has written a book, a sort of guide for the lobotomized, on how to enjoy the finer things in life. I have reason to believe that in this book, if it indeed exists, there is an entire chapter devoted to eel sauce.

The daughter, immersing her fried, cream-cheese-filled California roll in the sugary sauce, may as well have been eating a jelly doughnut. The Mother abstained from eating and listened to the continuation of her daughter's black tirade against her friend, nodding solemnly at the pauses in conversation, her face like that of a Disney villainess cast in wax, coated in makeup, and beginning to melt in the summer heat. She is the overseer and her daughter a sort of demon in training. Every nod of the mother's head is an assent, a tiny step along the path she will take to shape her progeny into a perfect vessel of shallowness and stupidity. Like the cruel master whose dog's viciousness is already ingrained, the bulk of the whippings is behind them, and only the smallest rewards are required to maintain what is now second nature.

They lingered much longer than necessary, sucking the ice cubes on the bottom of the glass that the server had long since stopped refilling. The daughter paid the check with a debit card. As the server cleared the dishes, he noticed that she has left no tip.

"Let's go," Daughter Horrid said. "It smells like bleach." The chef cleaned the sushi bar for the second time that night, spraying bleach water on the surface.

"Well, he told you they were closing." Mother said. I was surprised to hear even this much opposition come out of her mouth.

They got up and left. No words of gratitude were exchanged. The manager locked the front door. The server began to wipe down the counter with a wet rag.

"Ha!" he exclaimed. "Look! She left her phone." He held it up to show the chef. It was an expensive data phone with a neon pink rubber case. "Oh, boy. That's what she gets. Instant karma. How do you like that? Barging in like that at the last minute, being rude, leaving no tip. That's what she gets. Forgot your phone, honey? Looks like you're going to have to wait until tomorrow. Oh, and those girls just absolutely live through their phones. She's going to suffer without it." He continued on in that vein for some time.

He peeked around the corner to speak to the manager. "Everyone's gone," he said. "Don't open that front door for anyone." I could see a dark glimmer in his eye as he savored the sweet taste of vengeance. Situating himself behind the counter, he began his closing duties.

The chef held the phone's display for the server to see.  It showed daughter horrid, smiling prettily.  "Look at that," he said.  "A picture of herself.  That really says a lot about a person."

"Funny you never see her smile like that in real life."

After some minutes, the manager crossed the servers line of sight as she headed toward the front door.

SERVER: Where do you think you're going?

MANAGER: Someone called. She forgot her phone.

SERVER: Don't you open that door. We're closed.

MANAGER (as if by repeating herself the magic contained in the words will rob the server of his determination to keep the door locked): But she forgot her phone.

SERVER: Oh-no. We're closed. I've got money out here and that door is not going to open.

MANAGER: Fine. Then you tell her.

SERVER: Gladly.

The server approaches the front door. On the other side, Daughter Horrid waits. She puts on a smile and opens her mouth as if to speak.

SERVER (cutting her off): Sorry. We're closed.

DAUGHTER HORRID: I forgot my phone.

SERVER: I'm not allowed to open the door. You'll have to come back tomorrow.

DAUGHTER HORRID: I need my phone.

SERVER: Sorry.

The SERVER walks away.

Any reasonable person or building would at this point expect the incident to end. Daughter Horrid, through her own stupidity, has left her phone at a restaurant that has closed. Having been given anything she has desired for her entire life has imbued her with a distorted view of reality. A business isn't really closed if she clamors loudly enough for it to be open.

The Horrids got into their luxury automobile and drove off.  There is a wave of calm inside my confines.  The incident, for all intents and purposes, seemed to be over.

Not so, for ten minutes later twin sets of headlights flared in my driveway.  A nervous silence filled the sushi bar.  The employees said little, anticipating a knock at the door.  No knock came.

"Great," the server said.  "They went and got their boyfriends and now they're waiting outside to lynch us over a phone."  Silhouettes traversed the narrow span of my windows.  "Are they carrying pitchforks or torches?"  So began a silent battle with those inside left to wonder what exactly those outside were plotting.  This went on for a number of minutes.  Finally, a messenger (in this case, the dishwasher) was selected to put an end to the evening by delivering the telephone to Daughter Horrid.

For some minutes he remained outside before returning to tell a tale of tears, incoherent babble, and a telephone call to 911.  "She called the cops on you, dude," he said to the server.

The police never came . . . I suspect that perhaps putting a sorority girl's telephone into the Lost and Found until business hours resume is not the crime that Daugther Horrid imagined it to be.  Through a shameless display of histrionics, Daugther Horrid got her phone back--even though to do so she had wasted the better part of an hour driving back and forth and making calls to 911 (while real emergencies doubtlessly went on elsewhere in the city).  This tremendous waste of time, emotion, and city resources could have been avoided if during her dining experience Daughter Horrid had made even the shallowest attempt to foster good feelings between herself and the staff in any of the following ways:

1. Had said "please" or "thank you" even once.

2. Had left a tip.

3. Did not carry with her a smug sense of entitlement and at every opportunity show open hostility toward the staff.

This is a situation in which everybody loses.  The Horrids' own misery is apparent, for the wish to inflict that misery upon every person with whom they come in contact.  They are not merely from hell, they are hell itself--a movable hell that sucks in anyone unfortunate enough to fall within their radius.  And for that they will forever be defeated, they will move on to other friends, other restaurants.  The people who surround them will remain in a constant state of flux, while the Horrids will remain forever married to their own selves, chained to all the stench and misery they bring wherever they go--and no amount of money could ever set them free.

On a scale of zero to five dung heaps, the Horrids are all the dung heaps in the world, all the dung heaps that have ever been, and all the dung heaps to come.

Let's not let it come to this . . .

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.