"Every man must descend into the filth of his own making before he can call himself clean."
Richard "Dicky" Weed, approximately four hours before stepping in human feces for the first time.
Part One: The Epiphany
There are moments in every man's life that divide time into Before and After. For some, it is the birth of a child. For others, a near-death experience, or perhaps a quiet Tuesday when the universe whispers something true into the hollow of the ear.
For Richard Aurelius Weed III (known to his dwindling circle of friends as "Dicky," and to his expanding circle of enemies as "that prick with the parrot"), the moment arrived on a Wednesday evening in late October, at precisely 7:42 PM, when his personal chef, a Basque man named Iñaki who had once cooked for the Spanish royal family and now deeply regretted every decision that had led him to this kitchen, forgot the truffle oil.
Not ran out of the truffle oil. Not substituted the truffle oil. Forgot it. As in, the risotto (a high-ceremony saffron risotto that Dicky consumed every Wednesday as though it were communion) arrived at the forty-two-seat dining table (Dicky always ate alone, centered at seat twenty-one, because symmetry was "the architecture of the divine") without so much as a whisper of truffle.
Dicky stared at the plate.
The plate stared back.
Somewhere in the east wing of the Bel Air mansion (a fourteen-thousand-square-foot monument to the proposition that money could, in fact, buy taste, but only the kind that made other people uncomfortable), a grandfather clock ticked. A fountain burbled. Nietzsche, the emotional support parrot perched on a custom mahogany stand beside the table, shifted on his feet and muttered, "Fool."
Nietzsche had only ever said two things: "Fool" and "Truffles?" No one knew where he had learned these words. Dicky had purchased him from a disgraced philosophy professor in Portland who claimed the bird had "absorbed the Western canon through osmosis." This was, of course, nonsense. But Dicky had paid forty thousand dollars for him, and at that price, you believed whatever story came with the receipt.
"Iñaki," Dicky said, very quietly.
The chef appeared in the doorway of the dining room, which was roughly the distance of a tennis court from the table. He looked like a man who had just heard a pin drop inside a coffin.
"Sir?"
"What am I looking at?"
Iñaki squinted at the plate. "The risotto, sir."
"What am I not looking at?"
A pause. In the aquarium built into the west wall (a five-thousand-gallon installation housing a single melancholic octopus named Camus), a tentacle pressed against the glass as if trying to leave.
"The truffle oil," Iñaki said. It was not a question. It was a eulogy.
"The truffle oil," Dicky repeated, the way a priest might repeat a confession that has genuinely shocked him. He set down his fork (a custom sterling piece with his initials engraved on the handle, because of course it was) and placed both hands flat on the table.
What happened next has been described by the house staff in various ways. The head housekeeper, Marta, would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Dicky "went quiet the way a tornado goes quiet before it rips the roof off a Waffle House." The sous chef, Trevor, a twenty-four-year-old who was mostly there because he had a face that looked good on the company's Instagram, said Dicky "just, like, stared into the void, man. Like the risotto was a mirror and he didn't like what he saw."
What Dicky actually did was this: he stood up, walked to the floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the entirety of Los Angeles (a city that, from this altitude and this much wealth, looked like a circuit board designed by someone who hated transit) and pressed his forehead against the glass.
He stayed there for forty-seven minutes.
During this time, Iñaki quietly plated a corrected risotto with the truffle oil. It sat on the table, getting cold, getting older, becoming a metaphor that Dicky would later claim was "the most important meal he never ate."
At the forty-eight-minute mark, Dicky turned around. His eyes had the particular gleam of a man who had either achieved enlightenment or was about to do something catastrophically stupid. History would confirm it was the latter, though Dicky himself would never agree.
"Iñaki," he said, "do you know what truffle oil is?"
Iñaki, who had been making truffle oil since before Dicky knew what a truffle was, said, "Yes, sir."
"It's a lie," Dicky said. "Most truffle oil doesn't even contain truffles. It's synthetic. A chemical compound designed to simulate an experience. And we, we, have built our entire Wednesday evening around it." He gestured at the dining room as though it were an exhibit in a museum of human failure. "Around a simulation."
"Sir, we use actual truffle oil. From Alba. You insist on it. It costs four hundred dollars a…"
"That's not the point, Iñaki."
It was never the point. With Dicky, the point was always somewhere else, usually somewhere more dramatic, less logical, and significantly more expensive.
*
To understand how a man like Richard Weed could spiral from a missing condiment into a full existential crisis, one must first understand how Richard Weed had become Richard Weed.
He was born rich. Not "comfortable" rich. Not "we summer in the Hamptons" rich. Dynasty rich. The Weed family fortune had been accumulating since the 1880s, when his great-great-grandfather, Cornelius Weed, had made an indecent amount of money in railroad ties and, according to family lore that no one examined too closely, "creative labor practices." The money had been laundered through four generations of increasingly purposeless Weeds (a senator, a failed novelist, a woman who bred championship poodles and then married one of the trainers in what the family referred to only as "the Incident") until it landed in the lap of Richard III, an only child with no discernible talents, no real education (he'd been asked to leave three boarding schools, two for behavioral reasons and one because he'd tried to convert the chapel into a "sensory deprivation lounge"), and an attention span that could best be described as "atmospheric."
What Richard did have was timing. In 2011, while most of the financial world was still recovering from the hangover of the Great Recession and arguing about whether Bitcoin was a currency or a Ponzi scheme or a very elaborate inside joke, Dicky, then twenty-three and in the middle of what he called his "Portuguese phase," during which he lived in Lisbon, wore only linen, and attempted to learn fado singing with results that his vocal coach described as "a war crime against melody", bought thirty-five thousand four hundred Bitcoin at a dollar each because, and this is a direct quote, "the logo looked cool and I liked saying 'blockchain' at parties."
By 2017, he was worth seven hundred million dollars.
He had not earned a single cent of it through skill, labor, or intelligence. He had stumbled into a fortune the way a drunk stumbles into traffic, blindly, luckily, and in a way that made everyone watching deeply uncomfortable.
With his new wealth, Dicky did what any man with three-quarters of a billion dollars and the emotional maturity of a golden retriever would do: he started businesses. Terrible businesses. Businesses that existed in the Venn diagram between "venture capital fever dream" and "cry for help."
There was WeedPurvey, the "avant-garde vending machine" company that sold artisanal snacks in machines shaped like famous philosophers. (The Kierkegaard model dispensed only black coffee and existential dread. The Nietzsche model, Dicky had a fixation, dispensed nothing at all and charged you anyway. It was, according to a review in Protocol & Panic, "the most accurate philosophical experience available for $4.50.") WeedPurvey burned through forty million dollars in eighteen months before quietly imploding, though three of the machines still operate in a WeWork in Silver Lake, largely as ironic conversation pieces.
There was CumulusCrate, a subscription service that delivered "ethically sourced cumulus-shaped pillows" to your door monthly. It attracted twelve thousand subscribers, most of whom appeared to be bots, and was shut down after the pillows were found to contain a foam compound that was technically classified as a mild industrial irritant.
There was, briefly and disastrously, an attempt to launch a "mindfulness airline" called AirNothing, which promised flights with no entertainment, no Wi-Fi, no food, and no conversation, just you, a window, and "the howling emptiness of the stratosphere." It completed one test flight. The passengers rioted over Nevada.
Through it all, the Bitcoin money kept growing, kept compounding, kept insulating Dicky from the consequences of his own absurdity. He was a man standing in a burning building, completely unaware he was on fire, because the building was made of money and the fire was just his life.
*
But back to the risotto.
After his forty-seven-minute window meditation and his impromptu lecture on the ontological fraud of truffle oil, Dicky did not, as his staff expected, simply sit down and eat the corrected risotto. Instead, he walked (still in his velvet loafers, still wearing the custom smoking jacket embroidered with tiny golden parrots that he'd commissioned from a tailor in Milan) through the mansion, past the infinity pool that overlooked the city, past the garage housing eleven cars he couldn't drive (Dicky had failed his driver's test four times and now employed a chauffeur named Dmitri who was technically a retired Formula 3 driver and who described his job as "the most boring thing that has ever happened to a human being"), past the sculpture garden featuring a twelve-foot bronze of Dicky himself in a toga (a birthday gift from Portia, back when she still thought his eccentricities were charming rather than diagnosable), and into his study.
The study was a room designed to look like it belonged to a man who read books. It contained over four thousand volumes, arranged by color. Dicky had read approximately eleven of them, all partially, and six of those were about himself, profiles, interviews, a deeply unflattering biography titled Weed Money by a journalist who had spent a year following him and emerged, by her own admission, "fundamentally less hopeful about the species."
In the desk's bottom drawer, face-down beneath a stack of unsigned CumulusCrate settlement documents, lay a framed photograph of Portia Malice at a Vanity Fair after-party, laughing at something just out of frame. Dicky took it out approximately once a month to confirm that he was over her: an exercise that had never once produced the intended result and which he performed as faithfully as a man waters a plant he claims to have thrown away.
He sat behind his desk (a reclaimed oak table that had supposedly belonged to Hemingway, though the provenance was questionable and the price tag was not) and called his personal assistant.
Her name was Priya Chakrabarti. She was thirty-one, had an MBA from Wharton, spoke four languages, and had taken this job two years ago because it paid absurdly well and she assumed it would be temporary. She had since come to understand that working for Richard Weed was less a job and more a hostage situation with dental benefits.
The phone rang once.
"Priya."
"It's eleven PM, Richard."
"I need you to come to the house."
"Is someone dead?"
"In a manner of speaking."
Priya arrived forty minutes later, having driven from her apartment in West Hollywood with the resigned efficiency of a woman who had been summoned to this mansion at unreasonable hours so many times that she kept a go-bag in her car. She found Dicky in the study, sitting in the dark, illuminated only by the glow of the octopus tank in the next room, which cast everything in a shifting, aquatic blue.
"Richard, what's happening."
It was not a question. Priya had learned long ago that framing things as questions gave Dicky the impression that the answer mattered.
"I've been thinking about the truffle oil," Dicky said.
"Okay."
"And about simulation. About the layers of artifice we wrap around ourselves to avoid confronting the raw, unmediated experience of being alive."
"You're firing Iñaki."
"I'm not firing Iñaki. Iñaki is a prophet. Iñaki, by forgetting the truffle oil, has shown me the truth."
Priya sat down in the leather chair across from the desk. She had a notebook, because she always had a notebook. She did not open it, because she had a feeling that whatever Dicky was about to say would be the kind of thing she'd want no written record of.
"What truth, Richard?"
He leaned forward. The aquatic light caught the angles of his face, sharp jaw, slightly too-large ears, eyes that were either very deep or very empty depending on who you asked and how much they'd been paid to answer.
"That I am nothing," he said. He swept his arm across the study, the mansion, the city lights beyond. "That all of this is nothing. That I have never, not once, in my entire life, experienced a single authentic moment of human existence. I have been curated. I have been catered to. I have been truffled. And I need to un-truffle myself, Priya. I need to become raw."
Priya looked at him for a long time.
"How raw are we talking?"
"I'm going to live on the streets."
The silence that followed was the kind of silence that fills a room after someone has said something so profoundly stupid that the air itself needs a moment to recover.
"You're going to live on the streets," Priya repeated.
"For one year. Exactly one year. Three hundred and sixty-five days. I will take nothing. I will own nothing. I will become nothing. And from that nothing, I will rebuild myself as a real human being."
"Richard…"
"I've already decided."
"You decided this in the last hour. Because of truffle oil."
"Because of the absence of truffle oil. The absence revealed the void, Priya. And now I must enter the void."
Priya opened her notebook. Then closed it. Then opened it again. "You understand that homelessness is not a retreat. It's not a spa. People die on the streets."
"I know. That's the point."
"That's not the point. That is, in fact, the opposite of the point."
But Dicky was already beyond reach. His eyes had that look: the look he got before launching a doomed business, or buying a painting he didn't understand, or giving a toast at a charity gala that somehow became a twenty-minute monologue about the time he met a shaman in Peru who told him he had "the energy of a confused lighthouse." The look that said: this is happening, consequences are for other people, and any attempt to intervene will only make it worse.
"I need you to set up a trust," he said. "An irrevocable trust. The entire estate, all liquid assets, real estate, the businesses, everything. It goes into the trust. I retain nothing. No access, no income, no safety net. For three hundred and sixty-five days, Richard Weed will, on paper and in practice, be worth zero dollars."
"And who manages the trust?"
"The board. The existing board."
"The existing board is three people: your mother's estate lawyer, who is seventy-eight and mostly asleep; a man named Gerald who you hired because he reminded you of a character from Succession; and your college roommate, Bradley, who is currently on a silent meditation retreat and has not answered an email in four months."
"They'll be fine."
"They will not be fine. And Gerald. Richard, look at me. Gerald's one demonstrated professional skill is finding people even less qualified than himself and handing them authority. It's the only thing he delegates: downward. If you leave him alone with seven hundred million dollars, he will not lose it himself. He will locate a specialist."
"They'll be fine."
"Then find someone else. Hire someone. I don't care. The point is that I am removed from all of it. Completely. Totally. As though I never existed."
Priya stared at him. In two years of working for Dicky, she had weathered the CumulusCrate disaster, the AirNothing near-mutiny, the time he'd tried to sponsor a high school chess team and accidentally funded an underground gambling ring, and the incident, still legally unresolved, involving a rented yacht, a minor member of European royalty, and a Bengal tiger that turned out to not be a Bengal tiger but a very large, very angry domestic cat that had been painted. She had weathered all of it. But this: this felt different. This felt like the kind of idea that starts as a philosophical tantrum and ends with someone's face on the news.
"When?" she asked.
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow."
"I'll leave at dawn. I've already selected my provisions."
"Your provisions."
Dicky reached into the desk drawer and produced a handwritten list on custom stationery embossed with his family crest (a parrot rampant over a burning dollar sign, designed by Dicky himself and described by the herald he'd hired as "heraldically problematic").
The list read:
- One (1) shopping cart (vintage, chrome, sourced from the estate sale of a defunct upscale vegan grocer in Malibu)
- Three (3) artisanal sweaters (cashmere-yak blend, hand-knitted by a women's cooperative in Mongolia, retail value $1,200 each)
- One (1) emotional support parrot (Nietzsche)
- One (1) luxury sleeping bag (rated to forty degrees, retail value $900)
Priya read the list twice. She looked up.
"You're bringing a forty-thousand-dollar bird to Skid Row."
"Nietzsche is not a luxury. Nietzsche is a companion. And besides, he's the only one who understands me."
From the dining room, faintly, came the parrot's voice: "Fool."
The excerpt ends here. Dicky Weed is out now in Kindle and paperback.