Читать книгу Windows on the World - Frédéric Beigbeder - Страница 20

My childhood takes place in the verdant paradise of a fashionable suburb of Austin, Texas. A house that looks just like the neighbors’, a garden where we drink from the fountain, an open-top Chevy driving toward the desert. Through the window, a sofa and the faces of two children reflected in a TV, and at this time of the day it’s the same all over town, all over the country. My parents try their best to live life like a Technicolor movie: they hold cocktail parties at which the mothers compare notes on interior decoration. Every year, we consume an average of four tons of crude oil. High school? Nothing but spotty white kids in baseball caps listening to Grateful Dead and squashing beer cans against their foreheads. Nothing too serious. Sunshine, coffee bars, football tryouts, cheerleaders with big tits who say “I mean” and “like” in every sentence. Everything about my adolescence is squeaky-clean: lap-dancing bars don’t exist yet and motels are R-rated. I eat lunch on the grass, play tennis, read comics in the hammock. Ice cubes go “clink-clink” in my father’s glass of Scotch. Every week there are a couple of executions in my state. My childhood unfolds on a lawn. Don’t get me wrong: we’re not talking Little House on the Prairie, more Little Bungalow in the Suburbs. I wear braces on my teeth, take my wooden Dunlop tennis racket and play air guitar in front of the mirror with the radio full blast. I spend my vacations at summer camp, I go river rafting in dinghies, hone my serve, win at water polo, discover masturbation thanks to Hustler. All the Lolitas are in love with Cat Stevens but since he’s not around they lose their cherries to the tennis coach. My greatest trauma is the film King Kong (the 1933 version): my folks had gone out and my sister and I secretly watched it in their bedroom despite our babysitter’s injunction. The black-and-white image of this enormous gorilla scaling the Empire State Building, snatching military planes out of the sky is my worst childhood memory. They did a remake in color in the seventies which uses the World Trade Center. Any minute now I expect to see a huge gorilla scaling the towers—believe it or not I’ve got goose bumps right now, I can’t stop thinking about it.

You can thumb through my life in high school yearbooks. I thought it was happy at the time but thinking back on it, it depresses me. Maybe because I’m scared that it’s over, scared because I left my family to make a killing in real estate. I became successful the day I realized a very simple thing: you don’t make money on big properties, you make it on little ones (because you sell more of them). Middle-class families read the same magazines as rich ones: everyone wants that apartment in Wallpaper, or a loft just like Lenny Kravitz’s! So I did a deal with a credit union who agreed to lend me a couple of million dollars over thirty years, then I found a bunch of old cattle warehouses in an old cowboy section of Austin and transformed them into artists’ studios for idiots. My genius was my ability to convince couples who came to me that their loft was unique when in fact I was shifting thirty a year. That’s how I climbed the greasy pole at the agency, stole the job of the guy who hired me, then set up my own company, “Austin Maxi Real Estate.” Three point five million, soon be four. Hardly Donald Trump but it’s enough to take the long view. Like my dad used to say: “The first million is the hardest, after that the rest just follow!” Jerry and David are financially comfortable though they don’t realize that yet because I always play the part of an aristocrat on his uppers in front of Mary so she doesn’t force me to quadruple the alimony. Strangely, money is the reason I left her: I couldn’t keep going home when I had all that dough burning a hole in my pocket. What was the point of earning all that money if I was going to be stuck with the same woman every night? I wanted to be the antithesis of George Babbitt, that dumb schmuck incapable of escaping his family and his town…

“Gimme the camera,” says David.

“No, it’s mine,” says Jerry.

“You don’t know how to take photos,” says David.

“You don’t either,” says Jerry.

“You didn’t even set the flash,” says David.

“You don’t have to when it’s bright,” says Jerry.

“An’ you didn’t set the speed,” says David.

“Who cares, it’s only a disposable,” says Jerry.

“Take one of the Statue of Liberty,” says David.

“Already took one,” says Jerry.

“Last time they were all blurry,” says David.

“Shut up,” says Jerry.

“Gimp,” says David.

“Gimp yourself,” says Jerry.

“Jerry’s a gimp, Jerry’s a gimp, Jerry’s a gimp,” says David.

“Takes one to know one,” says Jerry.

“C’mon,” David says, “gimme the camera.”