Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

by Anthony Bourdain

One of the things I’d forgotten about seriously wealthy people, something I’d noticed during a brief previous exposure in college, was that the old-school, old-money kind of rich people? Those motherfuckers don’t pay for shit. They don’t carry cash—and even credit cards seem always to be … somewhere else, as if whatever small sums as might be needed are beneath notice or discussion. Better you pay.

I was a bad person in a bad place, with another bad person, surrounded by other, possibly even worse people.

No kid really wants a cool parent. “Cool” parents, when I was a kid, meant parents who let you smoke weed in the house—or allowed boyfriends to sleep over with their daughters. That would make Sarah Palin “cool.” But, as I remember, we thought those parents were kind of creepy. They were useful, sure, but what was wrong with them that they found us so entertaining? Didn’t they have their own friends? Secretly, we hated them.