There’s always room at the top - but only if you’re an alien. Natives need not apply. As an alien it’s strictly: take me to your leader. Me, I’m always an alien. Except over here, of course. I’m frying onions over here, and it stinks - if you don’t mind my saying. But onions I must fry, and there’s nothing alien in that. It brings in the money.
My friend Jimmy lives in a sea of money - potassium sorbate to be exact, which they need a lot of in China. I only know him because I’m a guy who speaks Italian on more or less the same level as Jimmy, which isn’t very high. I saw him last week in Hong Kong. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a $4000 pair of shoes, but Jimmy was wearing them. You could see that they were English, because they looked like boats.
Jimmy likes boats. He’s got an 80 million dollar yacht, or it was before he hung the art and installed a grand piano in the salon. The tender alone is 15 meters, which is about the size of the crew, considering what you get in the way of sailors out by China, where they come pretty cheap. I’m sure they sleep like rats below decks, but fat rats at that. Up in the wheelhouse he has Vikings, complete with beards.
We became friends the first time we met, which was an entirely serendipitous moment in the port of Capri, where I often happen to be. We shook hands at the café and he asked me aboard. I don’t know about you, but I don’t find myself on a boat like that often enough. So it was hard to hide my enthusiasm.
Some guests on a boat like this tend to act like they have a similar one of their own, but for some strange reason they're on this one. Others act like they’re just waiting until their ship comes in, so they’re stopping over while they kill some time. A few seem to enjoy themselves a little too much. As for me, I’m the guy nobody knows, but one thing is for sure. I don’t have a boat like this and there’s no way I’m ever going to get one. I’m just happy to be on deck.
So my new friend and me go crawling all over his yacht - up and down, fore and aft, bridge, heads, and galleys. How can you not admire a perfectly beveled custom mirror with a ¼ in. reveal, set in chrome? I went nuts. And Jimmy, he loved it. Nobody ever went nuts. They just acted as if they had a mirror like that too.
Now we’re pals, so I stopped over to see him in Hong Kong on my way back from Hangzhou, where I was introducing a friend from Parma to some very interesting pig farmers, and I met him at The Jockey Club.
Jimmy has a box at The Jockey Club, which is a lot like his boat, which is to say it’s bigger than my house. But it’s got to be much more expensive, since unlike the boat, The Jockey Club isn’t going anywhere. There’s only so much racetrack to go around in Happy Valley.
I saw that the track was perfect for him, since he never stops running. In fact, whenever he’s there, he’s never in his box, unless he has money on a horse, which is rare. Jimmy doesn’t like to gamble. Money, he doesn’t waste. Money, he spends. But don’t think he isn’t tight with a buck. He’s like a dog chasing a rabbit. Once he gets it, he won’t let go, unless you offer him another rabbit.
He’s a club Steward, which in his case means handing out trophies and shaking the jockey’s hand in the winner’s circle, which he considers a chore. But it does give him a chance to actually run on the track, which he did the night I was there. He was standing next to me one minute, sipping dolcetto high over the field of dreams, and the next minute I see him down on the track, running. Up on the jumbotron comes his face, 50 feet tall. They hand him a trophy and he hands it off to a jockey, who’s bigger than Jimmy. The whole thing took a minute, and then came the flashbulbs. Suddenly, he’s standing next to me again, like he just went to the bathroom.
He’s been over here a half dozen times and I’m not ashamed of it. I never know when he’ll show up. He runs in like this is a crime scene and he’s EMS, but with a limo. He sees me behind the grill and watches me work. He makes me proud of it because it seems to calm him down. And he knows one thing for sure. He won’t be paying for a sandwich. So I turn out to be a good deal. As for me, I love to watch him work - chasing money all over the place and figuring out how to spend it. But once you get a look at him, it’s clear that Jimmy is an all time champion. Cheer is all you can do.
What’s he got that you haven’t got? The shoes, for one thing. But in his case, he needs them. And what do I have that interests him so much, beside chicken cutlets? Beats me. All I’ve got is appreciation, which is maybe what all that money is about. I don’t hold it against him. I feel the opposite, since I was taught as a child that to be rich is glorious, which is what they teach over there.
