B1026-1 Nouveau Riche

I wasn’t sure how they got into the building. The three of them approached the International gate. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and cutoff shorts. He had flip-flops on his feet and a Houston Astros baseball cap on his head. He held a shaving kit in his hands. His wife wore a plunging-neckline blouse that was twice as big as it had to be. She wore a full skirt, sandals and a big floppy straw hat. She held an enormous wicker purse in her hands. You might have easily confused her with a migrant worker. The young boy, who I thought might have been their child, looked much like a smaller version of his father: the same sort of Hawaiian shirt, cutoff shorts and ballcap. But he had nothing in his hands except a brown paper bag.

They approached the ticket counter and I heard the ticket agent asking the trio if she could help them. The man spoke. “We want three first-class tickets to London.” And then almost as an afterthought, he said, “Round trip.”

The ticket agent nodded her head slowly and smiled - almost as if she didn’t believe them. She gave the impression of an adult listening to the wild fantasies of a child who had just woken up from a dream. The three certainly didn’t look like international travelers to her. To be perfectly fair, they didn’t even look like they had two nickels to rub together. “Well,” she said, “how would you like to pay for those tickets?”

The man smiled and took his wallet out of his shorts. He rummaged through the wallet for a brief time, and then came out with a credit card. He had an expression on his face much like the man who had just discovered the Rosetta stone. “We’ll use this,” he said, offering it to her. The ticket agent raised her eyebrows. Again she smiled as if she were waiting for the inevitable punch-line. This could only be a joke, she thought.

She went to the telephone and called the credit card company and, to her utter surprise, she discovered that this hapless-looking trio actually had the funds to cover the airfare. [This was way back when, before credit card scanning equipment had come into general usage.] When she began preparing the tickets and the boarding passes, she asked them where their luggage was. The man held his shaving kit at the end of his index finger, smiling, and said, “Here it is.” When the agent asked the woman about her luggage, she was shown the woman’s wicker purse, and, of course, the woman’s own version of the smug smile. The boy had no “luggage” at all, unless one were to count the bag of jellybeans he held tightly his hands. “This is all you have for luggage?” the agent asked, incredulously. “This is it?”

“Yup,” the man said, “we’re just going for the weekend. Gambling.”

“You’re going all the way to London just to gamble?” the agent asked.

They nodded their heads in unison. “Third time this year,” they said.

“And you have no luggage?” the agent said. “What about jackets? Do you have any coats that you’re taking along? It’s cool at this time of year in London, you know.”

“Nah, if we need coats, we’ll buy them over there. We’re just going for the weekend.”

Later, when they had received their tickets, they sat in the waiting area. If you used your imagination, you might picture that same trio sitting in the customer return area of an Appalachian Wal*Mart.

It never crossed my mind to look at those three with some sense of envy. Instead, I wondered greatly at a people who could do such an extravagant thing with a plastic credit card, and, at the same time, could hardly dress themselves at all. Why is it that the charism of wealth is at times unmated with the common sense to use it well? Why is it that the nouveau riche oftentimes remind you of a man in a row boat with one oar, whirling in endless circles, because of a want of sense?

Yeah, I might have only a couple of bucks in my wallet (and the brains to use them well). You won’t see me flying to London in my birthday suit to spin the roulette wheel, that’s for sure. And, now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some stuff to take back to Wal-Mart.