Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin by Calvin Trillin Page A

people in the United States, my heart went out to the person who was four hundred and first.
    “He’s nothing but some rich creep,” Alice said.
    “Creeps have feelings, too,” I said. The phrase she had used suddenly conjured up a picture of the poor soul I was worrying about: Rich Creep, the Manhattan megadeal cutter and man about town. He lives in the Carlyle. He dates models. He eats breakfast at the Regency, where deals are made so quickly that a careless conglomerates could find himself swallowing up a middle-sized corporation while under the impression that he was just mopping up his egg yolk with the end of a croissant. He dines every night at places like La Caravelle and Le Cirque. “Bonsoir, Monsieur Cripp,” the headwaiter says when Creep walks in with an icily beautiful fashion model who weighs eighty-eight pounds, twelve of which are in cheekbones. “If I may make a suggestion, the overpriced veal is excellent tonight.”
    On the way to breakfast one morning, Creep happens to see the cover of
Forbes
at the Carlyle newsstand. “The Richest People in America,” the headline says. “The
Forbes
Four Hundred.” He snatches the magazine from the rack and, standing right in the lobby, he starts going through the list—at first methodically and then desperately. Finally, he turns and slinks back to his room. He can’t face the crowd at the Regency. They’d pretend nothing has changed, but then they’d start trying to find some smaller corporation for him to swallow up—the way a nanny might sort through the picnic basket to find the smallest piece of white meat for the least adventurous child. He cancels his dinner date for the evening. He’s afraid he might be given a cramped table near the kitchen, where the draft from the swinging doors could blow the fashion model into the dessert cart.He’s afraid that the same French waiters who once hovered over him attentively while he ate (“Is your squab done expensively enough, Monsieur Cripp?”) will glance in his direction and whisper to each other,
“Les petites pommes de terre”
—small potatoes.
    So who says I have no sympathy for rich people? And this is nothing new. When
Fortune
first published its list of the five hundred largest corporations in America, my heart went out immediately to the corporation that was five hundred and first. Of course, I had no way of knowing its name—that tragic anonymity was the basis for my sympathy—but I always thought of it as Humboldt Bolt & Tube. I felt for the folks at Humboldt Bolt & Tube. I could see them giving their all to build their corporation into one of the largest corporations in America—busting unions, cutting corners on safety specifications, bribing foreign heads of state, slithering out of expensive pollution-control regulations—only to remain unrecognized year after year.
    As the Fortune 500 became an institution in American life, I often pictured the scene at the Humboldt Country Club in Humboldt, Ohio, when an important visitor from Wall Street asks casually over drinks, “Do you have any Fortune 500 companies in Humboldt?”
    For a moment, no one speaks. The “old man,” as everyone in Humboldt calls Harrison H. Humboldt, the son of Bolt & Tube’s founder, looks out at the eighteenth green, the hint of a tear in his eye. Finally, someone says, “No, but we’ve got the third-largest granite pit east of the Mississippi.”
    1982
Invasion of the Limo-Stretchers
    I pinned what Pam Blessinger said about rich people on my bulletin board. For a few months now, it has been in the section I reserve for permanent display, right next to a
Wizard of Oz
quotation that somehow comforts displaced Midwesterners in New York City by statingwhat should be increasingly obvious: “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”
    Pam Blessinger spoke as president of the residents’ association of New York’s Roosevelt Island, which is in the East River in a spot usually described as in the