Lunch With George Soros

It was yum-MEE! At those prices, that shouldn't have surprised me

Was I surprised this past Tuesday morning when someone purporting to be a representative of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation texted me that my essay on Donald Trump’s plot to make the USA a gay kleptocracy had been shortlisted for this year’s George Soros Prize for Journalism, and that the great man wanted to take me to lunch on Thursday?

Was I ever!

I leapt on Google, and had a hunch that we would be going to the Michelin-starred Babel in the heart of Budapest, a stone’s throw form the Danube. Its hushed, casually elegant dining room has only a dozen tables, but they are set with white linen, and while dining, one overlooks the neighboring Gothic cathedral, bathed in soft light. I was frankly disappointed to learn that I and my fellow short-listers, from Nepal and Sri Lanka, would meet at Brasserie Transylvania Erdélyi Étterem in London’s grotty Finsbury Park neighborhood, best known for being where the tediously abrasive John (Johnny Rotten) comes from. The good news was that I would be nowhere near Viktor Orban, the Hungarian autocrat so beloved of the worst living Americans — your Don Sr, Jaydee Vance, Tucker Carlson, and so on.

I might have expected our multibillionaire philanthropist host, at 117, not to get all my jokes, but I’d have been mistaken. I’m not sure it isn’t disrespectful to describe a person of Mr. Soros’s superannuation as puckish, but damned if he didn’t turn out to be an implacable giggler and practical joker, as witness his urging my fellow short-lister, Vinod Abeygunawardena, to order pattanások a vizeletben. You should have seen our server’s face when Vinod did exactly that. Pattanások a vizeletben means turds in urine!

Motherfuckers commonly confess that the reason they don’t enjoy being around me is that my straight-facedess makes it difficult to tell when I’m being sarcastic. Well, Mr. Soros has forgotten more about straight-facedness than I’ll ever learn. When he leaned toward the center of the table and assured us at a significantly reduced volume that he is indeed committed to swarthy “refugees” from the Global South overrunning Europe and the United State of America, just as right-wingers the world over have accused him of being, we all looked at each other in confusion. He sipped his punch-packing pálinka, a traditional Hungarian brandy made with with plums, apricots, pears, and peaches, at length before slapping the table so forcefully in glee that Anjali Something-or-Other from Nepal lost half her tojásleves (Hungarian egg drop soup), which I’d have ordered myself if our server hadn’t confessed that it’s made with lard.

“Kidding!” he fairly roared. “Pulling your legs!”

Few things in life are more charming than a billionaire whose first language wasn’t English not getting an English idiomatic expression quite right.

When Vinod and Anjali, who’d unmistakably come to yearn for each other over the course of the meal, excused themselves in tandem to use the fürdőszoba, I seized the opportunity to ask Mr. Soros why my monthly cheque from the International Jewish Conspiracy commonly arrives late, and why the IJC is still sending paper cheques through the post while the rest of the world has graduated to online banking, he got a little testy. “As one who has never worked in finance, you should be grateful that you’re paid in any fashion.” I thought it might be the pálinka talking. I suspected it might not be the right time to mention that I hadn’t received my payment for my virtual support of the April 5 Hands Off demonstrations.

Worrying that one of his security detail might take me out back and fuck me up, I began to explain my understanding that every genetic Jew automatically qualifies for a slice of the conspiratorial pie, only for the great man to double up with laughter, pat my hand, and say, “Pulling our legs, boychik. I’ll have someone look into it for you.”