Vodka Wishes, Caviar Dreams

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

It gets tiresome writing about the poors and the poor, pitiful middle class, and when I do get tired of writing about the poors and the middle class—who almost never offer me the fancy catering I deserve—I like to go hang out at South Coast Plaza and find rich people who will give me a proper lunch, so that I can bite the hand that fed me.

They’re not ultrarich, of course; they’re just moderately rich, i.e., rich enough to incite class warfare among your friends and neighbors but everything is probably leased or in hock to the hilt. The billionaires don’t hang around where I do. They’re off in their secret money vaults, trying to figure out how best to avoid paying child support.

Well, except for Chuck Feeney, of course. You can find him at your neighborhood dive bar, if you happen to live in Elizabeth.

But the low-level millionaires, the guys who wholesale and retail “financial services” (and how’s that working out for them lately?), them you can find lurking at Morton’s.

And so to Morton’s I went.

The occasion was a vodka and caviar tasting, in a side room sans chairs and anyone to talk to. The whole thing was pissing me off, really, because I’d accidentally eaten a five-pound bag of baby carrots and so I had a tummy ache. The Imperia Russian vodka was too strong—!—in its cucumber martini form (it might have been the pepper that was floated on top), but lovely when dressed with lemonade and thyme. There was a gorgeous roast beef station, butter-soft meat on sesame-brushed rolls that were almost Hawaiian bread in their sweetness. There was a salmon station on toast points. And the caviar was to be tray-passed. I stood alone in the middle of the room for almost a good half hour, and there was no motherfucking caviar to be had. Finally, small trays of it were passed on teeny spoons, perhaps six or so grains per, and its saltiness was completely overwhelmed by the crème fraiche on which it rested. The cream was lovely, yes, if you, like I, like to eat cream by the spoonful, but you could not taste the caviar even a tiny. Fuck that shit!

(Pabst Blue Ribbon!)

I was very disappointed with my Morton’s experience. Back in New York, when I was in college, one of my more boorish paramours was a Morton’s waiter somewhere in his 30s; he made $70 thousand a year, which was a lot of money in 1994, and he lived east of Avenue B, in a flophouse embroidered with cat shit. I totally dug him a lot, while he and his cat shit were just a little too good for me. A lot of people were: the guy who wore tights and a cape while he rollerbladed around Manhattan, and whose parents sent him off for “a rest.” The young man in his sixth year of community college who lived with his parents on Long Island. The more I think about it? I hate people.

Last night, over my spoonful of cream, I would have given anything for someone hateful to talk to. Be careful what you wish for!

And so there I stood, in the middle of the room, slowly spinning 360 degrees. More than an hour later, when I’d had my requisite three tiny spoonfuls of cream, I was just ready to go get my car, when a fat dude in khaki and navy and a light blue shirt walked straight up to judgmental, fat-seeing me as he came through the door. “You’re very beautiful,” he said as he quickly walked past, and his fat no longer registered. What an absolutely gorgeous young man!

And thus was the ice broken. Within moments, several gentlemen had swooped in to tell me how much they liked my Pucci-print shoes, my silk Indian skirt, my tie-dyed turquoise blouse I’d stolen from my sister. I was very beautiful, they said, and they liked everything about me. The invisible hand of my marketplace (my milkshake?) had won! We talked Adam Smith for a while, as happens when you try to talk to me, and they did not believe me when I said in fact he was not a proponent of no regulation, just minimal regulation; Smith believed the market would never be able to provide proper education for the poor, for instance, despite what those who yowl for vouchers (their explicit purpose, they’ll tell you in unguarded moments, is to break the back of public education) believe. He also was a fan of tariffs to protect home industries, progressive taxation of the rich, and regulation of wages for labor: “When the regulation, therefore, is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable,” he wrote, “but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.” According to Emma Rothschild, director of the Center for History and Economics at King’s College, Cambridge, as cited by Alan Krueger in The New York Times, “[Smith] saw a tacit conspiracy on the part of employers ‘always and everywhere’ to keep wages as low as possible.” But of course I didn’t have Google with me at the time, and the gentlemen did not believe me. “Laissez faire!” chanted they, over and over, as if somehow the invocation could bring Smith’s demon spirit to the center of our pentacle.

I don’t think they expected a lecture on regulation when they came over to save me from my loneliness, but we all must act in our own self interest.

We didn’t even have a chance to get into Ayn Rand.

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