The Cronus Club

Immutable Feast

This story is a favorite of mine that was written for a themed anthology that took years to come to fruition and was released with little fanfare. With foodies and exclusive dining experiences getting ribbed in The Menu and Pig, I thought it would be a perfect story to start the year with in my exclusive story archive. Enjoy a bite, and please leave a comment about your meal…

The Cronus Club

By Thomas Pluck

Photo by T.Tseng, used under Creative Commons license.

Believe it or not, the best thing about making billions trading other people’s money isn’t the cocaine-fueled gymnastics with supermodel hookers, or the helicopter rides over the little people crammed together like lemmings in their leased wage-slave rides on the L.I.E., or even the power you take for granted, knowing your name puts you at the front of an invisible line that the proles wouldn’t even know how to get on: it’s the meals.

There’s a whole subset of the economy, an entire service industry dedicated to inventing dishes to wake up our jaded palates, just so me and my fellow masters of the universe don’t pull out a platinum-engraved bespoke handgun and splatter our brains across the walls of a gentleman’s club you don’t even know exists unless your great-great-grandfather bribed some rumpy-pumpy out of a Puritan milkmaid in steerage on the Mayflower.

That’s not exactly true, because I’m a member of one of those clubs, and my heritage is second wave Scots-Irish. My invitation to this rarefied world was through Caleb Anderson, who I’ve known since prep school. He was the only inbred old-money mutant who would give me the time of day, and that was after I stomped his rival on the lacrosse team. There was some hazing, as expected, but soon enough I was welcomed into the Anderson family, and asked to join their firm, which has held seats on the New York Stock Exchange since the day it opened. Caleb split off a hedge fund, and we managed it to great success.

The clubs and organizations we’re part of are on another plane of existence from where I came from. The buildings have hidden entrances. We are driven through Manhattan in blacked-out Mercedes vans apportioned with kid leather seating and sheepskin carpet, with enough sound deadening material to muffle out another 9/11. We were in one of those vans, the headliner twinkling with an artificial starfield that mimicked the night sky as it appeared on the day Caleb was born.

When the most strenuous act you’ll ever accomplish is being squirted out to join the family tree of one of the world’s richest families, you must feel the need to venerate the day it happened. They all do it. It’s kind of cute.