Good to Be God Read Online Free PDF Page A

C… Aunt Nora.
    Bazooka.”
    Pause.
    “Henry VIII… Florida Snow… Inca Message… Cabello.
    Working Bags. Merck. Dama Blanca. Reindeer Feed. Jolts.
    Grout.” Pause. “Azucar… Freeze… Double Bubble. Devil’s Dandruff. Carrie Nation. Coconut. Love Affair. Basuco. El Perico. Scorpion. Zip. King’s Habit… Chicken Scratch. Nieve.
    Esnortiar. Happy Trails.” Sniff. “Sugar Boogers. Ghostbusting.
    Mighty White. Copter. Gift of the Sun God. Rich Man’s Speed.”
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    TIBOR FISCHER
    Pause. “And I’m sure you’ve heard many other names.”
    I’ve never understood why heavy drinking or methodically doping yourself is so attractive. Getting wrecked with your pals, once in a while, when you’re younger: okay, indeed, hooray. But my indifference to booze and drugs stems from their failure to change anything: your woes wait for you. Finally, frankly, I’m too impoverished to spunk money on intoxicants. When it gets too much, my solution is to be unconscious. Go to sleep, it costs nothing, and when you wake up your luck might have changed.
    “You must not think of non-being, because non-being is merely another form of being. You must think of non-non-being,” says the Lama with a smile. He gives that digestion time.
    We’re getting deep here if you start thinking about it. What’s interesting about religions is that they all view, this, this here ride, as a bit of a nuisance, a dreary obstacle course, a ghastly bit of gum stuck on our soul.
    I ponder what sort of non-being Hollis was aiming for when he drank the wine cellar at the club I had invested in. It was the sound of “club owner” that made me invest. It conjures up hedonism and beauties in skimpy clothing, international gangsterism, liberating luridness, everything that is the opposite of being an eker and a disappointment.
    I didn’t invest very much, because I didn’t have very much to invest. I owned one per cent of the equity, so that was the ashtrays and two of the smaller chairs, but it was all the savings I had, and most significantly, I invested against the loudly expressed wishes of my wife.
    Investing in a club or a restaurant is notoriously risky, like marriage. In every age, in every land, couples have made a stand against eternity, and individuals have bound themselves together in the hope of profit. I’m still proud of my younger self for 24

    GOOD TO BE GOD
    having that gush of adventure: as when you’re fourteen and you sneak into a club and cross the dance floor to ask the girl with the fabulous breasts for a dance. You’re fearless because you don’t understand that girls with fabulous breasts not only won’t dance with you, they won’t talk to you. I didn’t understand that I wasn’t allowed to invest in clubs.
    You see others successfully breeding their money in trout farms, in pomegranate conserves, in revolutionary golf bags, and you say to yourself: I can do that. But you can’t.
    At first, we liked Hollis a lot.
    We liked him because he hired beautiful waitresses. This is the great secret of being the manager of a club: hire beautiful waitresses, because you might get to sleep with them and it’ll make you popular with the owners. Beautiful waitresses might also prevent anyone noticing that you spend nights in the wine cellar emptying the most expensive bottles, the venerable burgundies, the thirty-year-old whiskies, the cognacs whose price makes you go whoa. Hollis’s drinking didn’t destroy the club, but then a small hole in a keel doesn’t destroy a yacht either, it’s the ocean that does the job. In our case, the banks.
    Despite Hollis and incompetent accountants (who, like Hollis, had come highly recommended) we were very, very close to making it, but the banks pulled the plug.
    Wives are very ununderstanding about you losing money they told you you would lose.
    Altogether, it was a very dispiriting venture. Apart from the waitresses, all present were rather ugly and unglamorous. The only perk to come out