I’ve been damned by some as an unbeliever, an anti-christ, it pleases me, therefore, and reinforces my self esteem, to know that to others I’m the cool atheist across the street.
My youngest daughter calls me daddy and my mother insists that I was brought up a good catholic kid and on the right track.
So I drink a lot of whisky. So did my grandfather. Who doesn’t? It’s a family thing. At the age of fifteen I was a good father to three kids, and I always went to confession.
Now, suddenly, I’m an apostate Jew. I wake up one morning and that’s it.
Corner shop proprietor Anita Devi — I knew her father, he was like a Rabbi to me, although he was an apostate Sikh — told local reporters: ‘I’m sorting the papers for the delivery wallahs, you know, like it’s 5am, and in walks Dustin Hoffman. “It’s not safe,” he says, “but I’m a very good driver, Mrs Robinson.” I ask you, do I look like a Nazi dentist?’
No comment, no jazz.
However, Kafka told me this sort of thing was a possibility and, hey, Anita, he gave me a couple of other clues too: like, until this beard grew overnight I was Al Pacino a la Godfather 2, like an old dead uncle always insisted I should be. So learn the lesson: never judge a close relative by his cover.
And Bukowski told me once that when I realised I’d failed as a writer I could maybe scratch a living as an Ernesto Guevara look alike. Now I’m a 55 year-old, suburban Ratso Rizzo.
Life’s a bitch.
