The trademark of the American ‘Golden Boy’ chain of family restaurants is a plump giant cherub wearing a diaper and chewing on a chicken leg. Ten-foot-high, three-dimensional effigies of this cherub are to be found sitting on the red tiled roof of every Golden Boy outlet in the state of California. They are made of light but strong weather-proof, matt gold plastic. At night they are illuminated. There are powerful fluorescent tubes inside the cherubs that make them glow with an eerie, internal light.
Let’s say you’re on the freeway heading maybe for Oildale or Shafter or Cucamonga, and you’ve been to see the wife’s family, and you’ve had a long and tiring drive, and the kids are jumping around in the rear of the car, complaining they’re hungry and car sick and needing to pee, and you’d be more than willing to stop but you want something a little better than the usual fast food junk. Then suddenly you see a golden cherub glowing in the sky up ahead of you, and you know right away that civilisation (in the form of wholesome family eating at affordable prices at a Golden Boy) is close at hand. You pull off the exit ramp, into the big car park and there you are. It feels like coming home.
A Golden Boy restaurant is a place without dark, romantic secluded corners. The light is kept bright and even, cheerful and homely. Nobody ever got their head turned or got seduced at a Golden Boy. Nobody ever really got a great meal there either, but then again, they never got a really lousy one, and that’s something these days. You know what to expect from a Golden Boy. The menu is short and simple; soups, steaks, pork chops, salads, pieces of pie and ice cream; nothing fancy and nothing too expensive. Beer and wine are served but no liquor. The waitresses are all aged over forty. They look as though they’ve had some personal tragedy in their lives, but they’re holding up bravely and you’ll be glad to know they don’t want to talk about it. They’re friendly, concerned for your welfare, and apparently chosen for their lack of overt sexuality. They are indulgent but they stand for no nonsense. They aren’t sassy but you get uppity with them and they’ll put you right back in your place. They don’t expect good wages or big tips, which is just as well.
The golden boy, the cherub, pops out at you from every angle: on the menus, on the napkins, on the coasters, on the walls. His big smug face is seen descending around that chicken leg in a kind of ecstasy. But diners at the Golden Boy have seldom been known to experience that, or any other, kind of ecstasy.
There are forty restaurants in the Golden Boy chain; all in Californian locations chosen for their lack of glamour. They are to be found within one long geographical strip, nothing north of San Francisco or south of Los Angeles, and nothing east of Barstow. There is one restaurant in Frisco, near Candlestick Park, and one in West Hollywood, but by design, Golden Boys are not to be found in the big urban centres. They belong out there in the sticks; uncomplicated, unfashionable, and unfailingly profitable.
This is not a franchise operation, you understand. The Golden Boy’s only begetter is one Frank Marcel, and he is comfortably, if not seriously, rich on the begetting. Today, still married to his first wife Mary, he is fifty-four years old; a short, solid, healthy-looking man, with a generally benevolent manner but with a certain cold meanness around the eyes. In 1964 his father died, died comparatively young, and left Frank everything he had: a not very successful diner on the edge of San Berdoo. Frank took over the business. He was kind of grateful to have something serious and substantial in his life. He’d been drifting along not knowing what he ought to be doing, thinking about trying to get into real estate or pool cleaning or working in radio. Frank was twenty-eight years old. He had a wife and an eighteen-month-old son called Virgil. It seemed like being left the diner was his big chance. But shit, he soon found it was hard work keeping that place running. He was busting his ass, working every hour God sent, just to stay in the same place, to keep from slipping back and going broke and wasting what his Pop had left him. There had to be some trick, some way of mastering this restaurant business that made life easier, but Frank sure hadn’t been able to figure out what it was.
Then, one hot, blustering day in early June, eighteen-month-old Virgil crawled his way around the diner when nobody was looking. Frank had enough to do without keeping his eye on the goddam kid all the time. Little Virgil crawled along the tiled floor behind the counter, reached up to its top and somehow, they could never quite figure out how, managed to bring a plate of food (chicken drumsticks, French fries and coleslaw) showering down on his head. Frank was too busy at the griddle even to notice the crash, and in any case he’d have assumed it was just one of the dumb waitresses dropping something again. But Mary, his wife, his English wife at that, with whom he wasn’t getting along particularly well at the time, looked down to see her baby covered in coleslaw, and saw that he was not tearful or unhappy, but instead was sucking on a chicken leg and appearing to have the time of his short life. She had an idea. She went for her Kodak and flashed a couple of snapshots of her offspring. She did it for no particular reason. It was no big deal. Virgil just happened to look cute sitting there and Virgil didn’t look cute very often. It was worth a picture.
She had the film processed and was well-pleased with the results. Even Frank, who was not predisposed to be pleased with anything Mary was pleased with, thought the photographs had a certain something. They had a big blow-up made of the best shot, framed it and had it up on the wall by the milkshake machine. It caused a lot of comment. It was a couple of months before Frank had his big idea.
It took a while to find anyone willing and able to make a ten-foot-high sculpture of tiny Virgil sucking the chicken leg, as shown in the photograph. Besides, he didn’t want anything too literal. He didn’t want anything too artistic. It had to be cute, cartoon-like, a caricature. At last he found a couple of talented, though not too talented, girls who were home from college for the summer and were prepared to take a crack at the job. He fed them a little money and all the hamburgers, Cokes, French fries and shakes they could eat; a surprisingly vast amount. They made a papier-mâché cherub in Virgil’s image. The face wasn’t much like Virgil’s, and the arms looked a little out of proportion (later models would smooth out these imperfections and get the trademark just so), but it was a good piece of work for a first attempt and Frank was thrilled. He loaded it into the back of his pick-up and took it down to the local paint shop where he had it sprayed gold. A week later Frank held a grand renaming and ‘reopening’ ceremony (though the diner had never been closed) at which the golden boy was winched up on to the roof and bolted in place.
From such modest ideas and such tame beginnings are wild successes made. Word got around about this thing, this weird eyesore on the roof of Frank’s diner. People began to travel considerable distances to get a look at the golden boy. Some found it funny and some found it plain ugly, and some said it wasn’t worth the trip, but they kept coming, and once they’d arrived Frank made sure they stayed a while and spent some money. Nobody left without buying at least a burger and a Coke, and before long they could also buy home-made Golden Boy fudge to take away with them, or a souvenir Golden Boy sundae glass with the cherub painted on it. Turnover shot up. Frank became a success and something of a local celebrity. He got invited out by local businessmen. They thought he was a little eccentric but he obviously had a good head for business. He was making money and that made eccentricity forgivable. Suppliers lined up to do deals with him, giving big discounts in order to be associated with the Golden Boy. The bank was falling over itself to lend him money. So he began to expand his operation. Another Golden Boy opened in Palmdale, one in Victorville, one in Norco. By now the cherubs were made of fibreglass and were a lot more streamlined and seamless than the papier-mâché original.
Frank had to think seriously about quality control in his restaurants, about standardisation of portions and procedures. He had to choose colour schemes for internal and external décor. He chose mostly golden yellow, of course, but with certain features picked out in burgundy and Prussian blue. He had to oversee menu design, and he devised a uniform for the waitresses that he thought was pretty snappy. He became concerned with recruiting and training, and he wrote a staff manual bursting with good sense, written in a breezy, unsolemn style. He became adept at spotting new sites. He avoided prime locations and developed an unfailing expertise at finding exactly the right kind of less-than-first-rate location where his style of operation could thrive. Frank became a master of his trade.
Golden Boys settled on southern California like a visitation of incubi, making a small but highly profitable splash wherever they landed. Frank didn’t try to compete with the giant chains and franchises. He didn’t attempt too much too soon. He kept his standards up, his head down, and the bucks kept rolling in.
Frank never underestimated how much of a debt he owed to his infant son. If Virgil hadn’t crawled into the diner that day and tipped up that chicken platter, Frank’s life would have been completely different and infinitely worse. Probably he would still have been sweating behind that counter in San Berdoo. Frank also surely owed something to Mary for having taken the photograph and crystallised the image of the Golden Boy, but this was a debt he did underestimate. So Virgil grew up revered, spoiled and overfed.
As Frank’s success and fortune grew he found Mary a whole lot easier to live with. They had separate rooms. He was away from home a lot, and even if Mary had known about his little flings on the road, and he was sure she didn’t, she’d have put up with them. She knew which side her bread was buttered. And Frank didn’t have enough imagination to think that she might be flinging in his absence. It never occurred to him that what was sauce for the goose might also be sauce for the gander. Life looked pretty good to Frank; materially, domestically, even spiritually.
He only had two regrets.
As he got older and wealthier and a little more worldly, he began to develop the tastes that go with a certain kind of age, wealth and worldliness. He became stylish. He wore expensive suits. He travelled in luxury. He stayed in the best hotels. Not least, he began to develop sophisticated eating habits. His palate cried out for mousses, purées, Châteaubriand, for French sauces, hollandaise, béchamel, Béarnaise, for the finest wines and the very best brandies. He soon got to the point where he would not have been seen dead eating anywhere so bargain basement as a Golden Boy.
And a part of him wanted to make this his profession. He wanted to own and run the kind of restaurant he liked to eat in; something very classy and expensive and European. He thought long and hard about it, getting more and more excited at the prospect. But he talked to his financial advisors, and some of the guys in the firm whom he particularly trusted (not that there was anybody in the firm whom he actively distrusted) and they all told him it was a very bad idea. Ritzy French restaurants were all very well, but they were a pretty good way of losing a lot of money unless you knew exactly what you were doing and unless you had a truckload of luck. Frank, they said, had no expertise in that direction. He should stick to what he knew and what he did best. Frank listened to his advisors. He believed them. He thought they were probably right. Years went by and he never did open the restaurant he wanted to. He knew he’d done the right thing, taken the right business decision, but that didn’t entirely still the urge. The ambition still burned in him, burning all the hotter for being untested. This was his first regret. His second regret was Virgil.
In the very early years of Frank’s restaurant career people had come to the Golden Boy just to get a look at Virgil and compare the human original with the papier-mâché model on the roof. As Virgil grew up there was still a certain amount of entertainment to be had in seeing how the big, sturdy three, five, nine-year-old diverged from the model. ‘My, how he’s grown.’ ‘I’ll betcha he could eat a whole plate of chicken legs now.’ ‘You’re not a baby any more, Virgil.’
Diverge he certainly did. Always spoiled, always kowtowed to, he grew into a thin, gawky, surly, bad-assed kid. His father still loved him and his mother too, no doubt, but precious few others. He simply wasn’t lovable. At school he was smart but lazy, and he had the vicious capacity to lead others astray without straying himself. This took different forms depending on his age and on circumstances. He might persuade small children to eat worms, or get little girls to take off their underpants, or get teenage boys to put sugar in their fathers’ gas tanks. He never did the dirty deed himself and so was never caught and punished, but any time there was trouble in the school or neighbourhood everybody always knew that Virgil was behind it. That suited Virgil just fine.
By the time Virgil was able to drive, Frank was starting to worry that his son might be homosexual. He didn’t know quite why he thought that, it wasn’t as if he knew anything about homosexuality, but there was definitely something strange and not right about his son. So he pressed money on Virgil, bought him a car and told him to take out girls. He made sure Virgil had enough dough to take them out in some style, to rock concerts or whatever, and enough to buy something good to eat on the way home, and maybe (he wasn’t too old to know what kids were like) enough to buy some beer or sweet wine.
Virgil took the money and the car, and he never had much trouble getting dates, but he didn’t seem very grateful to his father. Despite his lack of physical charm and a complete absence of likeable personality he even managed to get the girls to ‘do stuff’ with him, to him. Admittedly these girls might not be exactly the type Frank would have chosen as companions for his son, but Virgil knew he couldn’t afford to be too discriminating. But he didn’t really enjoy all this dating routine because he didn’t really have anything in common with the girls. Even then, his idea of a great evening out would be to find some little, out of the way seafood restaurant and work his way through clam chowder, oysters and lobster. The girls never liked fish. They didn’t like dry white wine. They were always on diets. Virgil found them tiresome and dull. But that didn’t mean he was a homosexual.
He was seventeen years old and a nerdy misfit; an arrogant, antisocial pain in the ass right through his teens, right until he left home to go to college, or rather, colleges. He passed through a number of well-meaning Californian liberal arts establishments, taking a litter of unrelated courses that didn’t amount to much: the novel, the Renaissance, hand-weaving, photography, typing. He never showed much interest in any of them, but he was always able to pass, though always with lousy grades. The life seemed to suit him; a life without responsibilities, with occasional, mild intellectual stimulation, with enough money from home to make it comfortable, and to enable him to hone his tastes in food and wine.
However, something strange was happening to his hormones in all this. He stopped looking like a nerd. He stopped being gawky. He began to develop muscle and to carry himself with a certain amount of poise. Suddenly, almost overnight, he became a good-looking rich boy with money, with good taste in food and drink, with a Ford Thunderbird, with an enormous capacity for having a good time. His dates became classier and better looking. He became the object of more female attention than his father could ever have dreamed of. He still had a highly unattractive personality, but that really didn’t seem to hold him back.
The girls, though plentiful, still weren’t quite right. They still weren’t exactly what he was looking for. But they were getting closer. Occasionally he’d meet one who enjoyed a good bottle of Rioja, or one he could persuade to try sautéed sweetbreads, and back in her room she’d let him smooth her clitoris with Chivas Regal and let it burn gently for a while before licking it off. But he was still a long way from finding the real thing.
All this made Virgil’s life pretty tolerable but Frank still worried about him. And then one day Frank stopped listening to his financial advisors and started listening to his heart. He was over fifty years old now, financially secure. All his ambitions, with one exception, had been fulfilled. He decided he could afford to take a gamble, and if the gamble failed he could stand the losses without facing financial ruin. He decided to open a restaurant in Los Angeles; not a Golden Boy, a real restaurant. He hoped a great restaurant.
Ideally it might have been situated on North La Cienaga, or on Melrose or Wilshire, but he settled for premises downtown, premises close to South Olive Street, not exactly a fashionable location, a little off the beaten track, but not so far off that people who wanted the finest eating experience in all of L.A. wouldn’t be able to find their way there.
He tried to do everything right, as right as he knew how. He called the restaurant Trimalchio’s. No expense was spared on the décor; acres of burgundy carpet, huge, gold-framed mirrors, chandeliers, real oil paintings, china and cutlery and cut glass imported from England. He hired the best waiting staff that money could buy, and chose to pay them more than the going rate to be sure of keeping them. In the kitchen he installed a boy genius chef called Leo who had trained at the Ritz-Escoffier School in Paris and at the Dorchester in London. Probably he was older than he looked, Frank thought he had to be, but he’d been hailed and raved about by every gourmet in L.A. (a growing breed); and his way with duck terrine, veal loin and crème plombières au chocolat left Frank breathless and had him offering an insanely high salary to secure his services. Frank thought he’d done okay with Trimalchio’s. He’d given it his best shot. He’d spent a bundle, an absolute bundle on advertising for the launch, he’d done everything with infinite care and attention, even with love, and of course the restaurant was a flop.
It wasn’t a resounding, spectacular, epic flop; more a gentle deflation, a slow implosion. At first people came to Trimalchio’s, quite a lot of people it seemed, including the important restaurant critics. There were no doubts about the quality of the food, and the customers all appeared to have a good time and to go home satisfied. The reviews, when they appeared, weren’t bad either. None of them damned the food (how could they?), the service or the atmosphere, but neither could they bring themselves to be anything other than lukewarm in their approval. And people kept mentioning the Golden Boy. Somehow people resented paying luxury prices to eat in a restaurant owned by Frank Marcel, the family restaurant mini-mogul. As they ate their breast of mallard with green and black peppercorns they kept thinking of big golden cherubs. The plastic, illuminated golden boys cast long shadows over their pleasure. Business soon dropped away.
Frank wasn’t a man to be completely and utterly destroyed by one failure. At least he’d tried. He’d put a lot of himself into it, and the failure hurt, hurt like hell, but he wasn’t about to jump off a bridge because of it. Neither was he going to pour good money after bad. He was too much of a businessman to keep the restaurant running indefinitely at a loss, but he still had plenty of pride. He decided to run the restaurant for six months. That was enough to keep his self-respect and not to incur too vast a loss. Then he’d close up, pay the bills and put it all down to experience. He was wounded and disappointed, but he wasn’t despairing.
He was far more likely to despair about his son. Virgil was now out of college and untrammelled either by a degree or a career. He had good looks, if you valued that sort of thing, an L.A. apartment, a string of cars and girlfriends, an allowance from Frank that Frank regarded as ludicrously generous (but he did owe that boy); and Virgil had never done a day’s work in his life.
Frank didn’t know where the allowance went, but go it certainly did, and before the end of each month Virgil would be back asking for more. He asked more or less politely and Frank never denied him, but the boy was getting through more money than seemed decently possible. And what did he have to show for it? A couple of closets full of clothes that were out of fashion and therefore unwearable the month after they were bought, state of the art stereos and videos that had to be regularly replaced as the state of the art changed; and a lot of credit card bills for meals that were no doubt exquisite at the time, but could hardly be regarded as an investment for the future. Virgil led a full and colourful social life. He mingled with minor Hollywood celebrities. He went to the right discos and night-clubs, parties and openings. Frank hoped he wasn’t involved with heavy drugs.
Frank didn’t entirely disapprove of Virgil’s appetite for good living since to a large extent he shared it. Frank was prepared to be an indulgent parent, it was just a question of degree. He didn’t want to come the heavy father. He didn’t want to change his son’s lifestyle completely, he just wanted him to live it a little more cheaply.
He met Virgil for lunch in a very reasonable Thai bistro he knew. Frank felt the time was right to take some sort of stand; as much for his own self-respect as for anything else. He knew Virgil needed talking to. He knew that a good father would do the talking. Frank knew he had to try.
Over the Thai fishcakes he said, ‘I worry about you, Virgil. Seriously, I do.’
‘You don’t need to worry about me, Dad.’
‘But I do. I wonder where and how you’re going to end up. I wonder what you’re going to do with your life.’
‘Is this a serious question?’ Virgil asked, bored.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re asking me how I’m going to end up?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well obviously, Dad, I’m going to end up dead, just like everybody else. The trick is to have as good a time as possible before that happens.’
‘And are you having a good time at present?’
‘Well sure,’ said Virgil. ‘Can’t you tell?’
‘At my expense.’
‘Well, that’s one way of looking at it.’
‘As far as I can see, that’s the only way of looking at it. I give you money and you spend it. Maybe you can make me see it another way.’
‘Sure,’ said Virgil. ‘The way I see it you’re going to be dead sooner or later, Dad, just like everybody else. And in your will you’re going to leave me everything, right?’
Frank nodded reluctantly.
‘So the money you’re giving me now is money that would be mine in the end anyway, right? And I think we’d both agree it’s better for me to have the money while I’m still young enough to enjoy it. So, you know, I’m grateful and all but really you’re just giving me what’s mine.’
‘But what if I didn’t have any money to give you?’
Virgil looked blank. He didn’t understand the question. ‘Is that a possibility?’ he asked.
‘We’re just talking here, Virgil, that’s all. I’m asking you to imagine what your life would be like if you didn’t have my money keeping you afloat.’
‘Hey, I know you’re losing money on Trimalchio’s but we’re not going broke, are we?’
‘No. We’re just talking. So what I’m doing is asking you to imagine what you’d do with yourself if you were poor like ninety-nine per cent of the rest of the poor bastards in the world.’
‘Well, I guess I wouldn’t eat so well. Look, hey, it’s an impossible question. It’s like saying what would I do if I was black or blind or a starving peasant. How can you know? But I like to think the same ground rules would apply. I’d try to have as good a time as possible on the limited resources at my disposal. Maybe I’d get a job.’
‘A job?’ Frank sneered. ‘What kind of job? What kind of work could you possibly do?’
‘You know, whatever jobs poor people get: garbage man, filing clerk, working in a gas station.’
‘This is what is really worrying me, Virgil, and I’m longer just talking now, this isn’t just hypothetical. I’m saying that as your father I think it might be a good idea if you were able to do some kind of job, if you had some sort of profession.’
‘You want me to become a lawyer?’
‘All I’m saying, and you know me well enough to know I’m no Puritan, I’m saying that your life is going nowhere and I think a job might do you some good.’
This was not precisely what Frank had intended to say. He was bluffing slightly. He knew there were fathers in the world who would say to their sons, and probably with good reason, ‘Either you get a job or you’re out on your ass.’ Frank almost wished he was that kind of father, but he knew he wasn’t and that was the end of it. He wasn’t going to cut off Virgil without a dime but he hoped that if he could somehow make Virgil aware of the importance of being able to fend for himself in this world, well, it was hardly likely to turn him into a diligent, thrifty, model citizen, but it might make him realise the value of a dollar. It might make him tighten his belt a little. It might make him try to live within his monthly allowance.
‘I look at you, Virgil,’ said Frank, ‘and I see a decent boy. You’re not dumb, you’re not useless, but I just don’t see that you have any skills or talents. I don’t know how you’d survive in this world if it wasn’t for the money I give you. If it wasn’t for me you’d be eating out of garbage cans.’
‘Is that what you want? You want me to start eating out of garbage cans?’
‘No, but I don’t think it would do any harm if you worked up a little more of an appetite between meals.’
‘You want me to get a job?’
Frank wondered if he did. It seemed such an unlikely eventuality he’d never seriously considered it.
‘I don’t want you to have to become a garbage man,’ said Frank.
‘But if I don’t have any skills or talents, who’d ever give me a job?’
‘A lot of people would. I know a lot of guys in business.’
‘Would you give me a job?’
‘Of course I would. You’re my son. If you wanted to be a part of the business you’d make me the happiest father on earth.’
‘Look, Dad, I don’t want anything to do with the Golden Boy, okay? Let’s get that clear. That little golden bastard has haunted me all my life. I’d like to see him melted down and turned into Tupperware. But I’ll make you a proposition. Let me run Trimalchio’s for you.’
‘But it’s closing down in six weeks’ time.’
‘That’s right. So what have you got to lose? Gimme those six weeks. If I haven’t turned it around and made it a success in six weeks you’ll close it anyway. So you’ve nothing to lose. It sounds like good business to me.’
It didn’t sound like such bad business to Frank either. Things weren’t going to get much worse at Trimalchio’s whatever Virgil did, nor, Frank thought, much better. Virgil would see what a hard and difficult job running a restaurant was, and he’d probably despise it, but if by some chance he enjoyed it or even (it seemed impossibly optimistic even to contemplate) proved to be good at it, then he might have found something to do with his life, which was precisely what Frank wanted. At the very least it would keep the boy off the streets, and Frank imagined that Virgil must surely spend less money while working than he did while on a permanent vacation.
Frank gave Virgil the job. On the day he took over Trimalchio’s he fired the entire serving staff. Gone were the good manners, the politeness, the decorum and skill, the knowledge of food and wine, to be replaced by a bunch of big-eyed, sulky, teenage, speed-freak waitresses. They were as thin as filo pasty, dressed in thrift-shop rags held together by studded leather belts and thongs. They weren’t so good at remembering orders but, boy, could they move fast.
He ripped out all the fancy décor, all the chandeliers and wall lights, the chintz and the curtains and the mirrors, the burgundy carpets, the velvet banquettes, the oil paintings. And he didn’t replace them. The floor remained bare. A start was made to strip the ersatz William Morris paper from the walls, but it turned out to be a job that required a certain persistence, so the wallpaper remained here and there in misshapen squares or long, thin, tattered strips. Light, where there was light, came from bare bulbs, car inspection lamps and strings of Christmas tree lights. Elsewhere, nooks and crannies remained in deep, dangerous darkness.
He did replace the tables and chairs, and got in substitutes which resembled unfinished metal sculpture. Irregularly shaped table-tops rusted interestingly. The chairs were as uncomfortable and as unwelcoming as those to be found in any fast food outlet, but these were guaranteed to leave an abstract pattern of bolts and rivets imprinted in your ass. There were no table-cloths, no napkins, no flower arrangements. He got rid of the fine china and went for thick, unbreakable plasticware in nursery colours.
Virgil assembled the loudest lowest-fi sound system he could, and put together background tapes of Bartók and Varèse intermingled with Ethel Merman, Doris Day and the MC5. The noise distorted so much as it slammed through the speakers and smashed around the bare surfaces of the restaurant, that it didn’t matter too much what the music actually was. It was soon converted to abrasive, ugly noise.
Virgil went through the whole establishment changing things, messing things up, throwing things away, wrecking organisation, destroying systems. He changed the prices; everything on the menu went up by thirty percent. But he didn’t change the chef. Amid all the mayhem, little Leo, the boy genius whom Frank had employed, continued to do his stuff. The décor and noise said ‘end of the world’, but the food was still saying delicacy, discrimination, civilisation. The food was, as the second wave of restaurant critics would soon be saying, redefining the new American cuisine.
On opening night Virgil assembled a Felliniesque crew of diners. Trimalchio’s was awash with movie and TV people, food writers, rock stars, gallery owners, interior designers, and they mingled, or at least collided, with teenage hookers of both sexes, Chicano gang members, female body-builders and an over-sixties gourmet society from Pasadena. When one of the Chicanos pulled a knife on one of the gallery owners and was disarmed by one of the female body-builders, who broke his hand in the process, Trimalchio’s success was more or less assured.
Every night the place was packed. And if the crowd was never again quite as colourful as on that first night, there was still the right mix of names and extravagant nonentities to make it a gawper’s paradise. Bookings were solid for weeks ahead. Every night there was overcrowding, noise and chaos, and a vast amount of money spent. There was no way Frank was going to close it down. Virgil presided over it all in his good-looking, bad-assed way, and became one of its attractions. To be insulted by Virgil made a trip to Trimalchio’s complete.
Whereas a fancy restaurant owned by Frank Marcel was seen as laughably démodé, a restaurant owned by his arrogant wastrel son, the Golden Boy run to seed, seemed to be just what the market required. It was wild, new, dangerous. It was the hottest ticket in town.
Frank had various feelings about the new-style Trimalchio’s. They included horror, disgust, disbelief, morbid fascination, grudging admiration, awe, delight. Frank had never understood or followed fashion, but he had seen enough to know that fashions didn’t last. Like the hula-hoop, raccoon coats and goldfish swallowing, Trimalchio’s, he feared, might all too soon become last year’s thing. And this was where Virgil won his father’s ultimate approval.
Virgil didn’t need to be told that fashion moved on. He saw as clearly as Frank did that Trimalchio’s would have a very limited life if it wasn’t able to change. But whereas some people might have tried to make Trimalchio’s more extreme, weirder, wilder and more of the same, Virgil did the opposite. He gradually toned it down. He turned down the noise, softened the lighting and the décor, adopted chairs that you could sit in comfortably. He reintroduced staff who knew what they were doing. He added a few old-fashioned touches, like flowers on the tables and soap in the rest-rooms. And he did it without losing either his image or his clientele. Trimalchio’s remained an ultra-hip restaurant. And the food remained as exquisite as ever. Before long it had turned into more or less the kind of restaurant Frank had always wanted to own. Frank’s golden boy had given him everything he’d ever wanted; twice.
Virgil still hung out at Trimalchio’s once in a while, put in an appearance, chatted to staff and casually abused customers, but his real work was over. The restaurant ran itself. Slowly Virgil returned to his old, idle ways. He was happy and successful and in a very limited way, famous. Then he got an invitation from the Everlasting Club, and his life was never the same again.