Windows on the World. Frédéric Beigbeder

ruthless businessmen? As a father, I hope they choose the second option, but as an American, I can’t help but fantasize about the first. And, in reality, they’re most likely to end up realtors like their father. Forty years from now when I’m incontinent and bedridden in Fort Lauderdale they’ll be changing my diapers. I’ll eat dry crackers and fritter away their inheritance in some Florida gulag! It’ll be great: I’ll have my groceries delivered, order food online and some hooker who looks like Farrah Fawcett in Charlie’s Angels will suck my cock and smile. I love this country. Oh, yes, I forgot: I’ll play golf, if I can still walk. Jerry and David will caddy for me.

      Looking down through the telescope I can see a white cube: the piazza where minuscule restaurant employees are putting chairs out on the terraces for people to lunch in the midday sunshine. I assume ice-cream sellers are putting out their blackboards, and hot-dog and pretzel vendors are setting up their carts round the WTC Plaza. That tiny cube? A stage for open-air rock concerts. That metal ball? A bronze globe sculpted by Fritz Koenig. There’s a bunch of hideous contemporary sculptures: mountains of tangled, stacked, warped metal girders. I have no idea what the artists were trying to say. It’s Indian summer; I hum “Autumn in New York.”

       Autumn in New York

       Why does it seem so invitiiiing?

       Glittering crowwwds and shimmering clouuuds

       In canyons of steeeel

       Autuuuum in Neeeew Yorrk

       Is often mingled wiiith pain

       Dreaaamers with empty haaands

       May sigh for exoootic lands…

      Oscar Peterson on piano; Louis Armstrong on trumpet; vocals by Ella Fitzgerald.

      

      I really must make an appointment to have a vasectomy. In the beginning, with Candace, everything was perfect. I met her on the Internet (on www.match.com). These days Internet dates are dime a dozen. Match.com has eight million members worldwide. If you’re visiting a foreign city, you set up a couple of dates before you arrive, it’s as easy as booking a hotel room. After dinner on our first date, I invited her up to my room for a drink so we could chat some more, and normally, that’s where she should have turned me down, because that’s the rule: never fuck on a first date. You know what she did? She looked me right in the eye and said: “If I’m coming up, it won’t be to chat.” Wow. Together, we went too far too fast: X-rated movies, a few sex toys. It was all too much. Ever since, the sex has been good, but a bit healthier. Like a merger between two lonely egomaniacs, we use each other’s bodies to get off and sometimes I think both of us are forcing ourselves. Hmm. She’s probably cheating on me. These days couples cheat on each other earlier and earlier.

       8:42

      I’ve got a problem: I don’t remember my childhood.

      The only thing I remember is that being middle class doesn’t buy you happiness.

      

      Darkness; everything is dark. My alarm clock goes off, it’s eight o’clock, I’m late, I’m thirteen years old, I slip on my brown Kickers, pick up my huge army surplus bag full of Stypens, correction pens, textbooks as heavy as they are fucking boring, Mom is already up heating some milk, my brother and I slurp it noisily, bitching because there’s skin on the milk, before taking the elevator down into this dark winter morning in 1978. The Lycée Louis-le-Grand is miles away. It’s on the Rue Coëtlogon, 75006 Paris. I’m dying of cold and boredom. I stuff my hands in my ugly loden coat. I wrap myself up in my itchy yellow scarf. I know it’s going to rain and I’ve missed the 84. What I don’t know is that this whole thing is absurd, that none of this will ever come in useful. Neither do I know that this dismal dawn is the only morning in my whole childhood that I will later remember. I don’t even know why I’m sad—maybe because I haven’t got the balls to cut math class. Charles decides to wait for the bus and I decide to walk to school, past the Jardin du Luxembourg, along the Rue de Vaugirard where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived from April to August 1928 (at the corner of the Rue Bonaparte), but I didn’t know that then. I still live nearby; from my balcony I can see kids with the school-bags rushing to school, spewing plumes of cold breath: tiny hunchbacked dragons running along the sidewalk, avoiding the cracks. They watch their feet, careful not to step on the gaps between the paving stones like they’re walking through a minefield. Bleak is the adjective that best sums up my life back then. BLEAK as an icy morning. At that moment, I’m convinced nothing interesting will ever happen to me. I’m ugly, skinny, I feel completely alone and the sky buckets down on me. I stand, soaked to the skin, in front of the Senate which is as gray as my shitty school: everything about school fucks me off: the walls, the teachers, the pupils. I hold my breath; things are awful, everything’s awful, why is everything so awful? Because I’m ordinary, because I’m thirteen, because I’ve got a chin like a gumboot, because I’m scrawny. If I’m going to be this scrawny I might as well be dead. A bus comes and I hesitate, I really hesitate, I almost threw myself under the bus that day. It’s the 84 overtaking me with Charles inside. The big wheels splatter the bottoms of my stupid pleated pants (beige corduroy with turnups that are way too big). I walk toward normality. I walk, wheezing, across the black ice. No girl will ever love me, and I can see their point, I don’t blame you, mesdemoiselles, I can see your point: even I don’t love me. I’m late: Madame Minois, my math teacher, will roll her eyes to heaven and spit. The cretins in my class will heave a sigh just to make themselves look good. Rain will stream down the window-panes of a classroom which reeks of despair (despair, I now know, smells of chalk dust). Why am I complaining when there’s nothing wrong with me? I haven’t been raped, beaten, abandoned, drugged. Just divorced parents who are excessively kind to me like every kid in my class. I’m traumatized by my lack of trauma. That morning, I choose to live. I walk through the school gates like walking into a lion’s den. The building has a black mouth, its windows are yellow eyes. It swallows me in order to feed on me. I’m completely submissive. I agree to become what they make of me. I come face to face with my adolescent spinelessness.

      From the top of the Tour Montparnasse I can, if I try, make out the School of my Wasted Youth. I still live in this neighborhood where I suffered so much. I do not leave this place which made me who I am. I never rebelled. I never even moved house. From my house, to get to my job at Flammarion, I walk down the same Rue de Vaugirard as the little boy whose ears and hands were frozen. I spew the same plumes of cold breath. I still do not walk on the cracks. I never escaped that morning.

       8:43

      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