Good to Be God Read Online Free PDF Page B

a difference and I approve.
    Chief among the unfortunate facts: lack of ability. I don’t have any skills. I’m too old to sell my body, and my mind’s pretty bare. I wouldn’t even be much good at menial labour (not that there isn’t stiff competition from Haitians, Cubans and other boat arrivals on that front).
    This may sound obvious, but one of the reasons I was never successful was that I never aimed high enough. I wanted to be successful, who doesn’t? But I didn’t do anything that might have put me on course for the thick chocolate. I worked hard as a salesman, but with the business I was in, and the commissions I was on, I could have done okay, but there was no chance of summiteering.
    I used to say to my customers. “You can have anything you want. Anything. But you have to pay for it.”
    You can have Cleopatra-shaped luminaires. Rainy-morning-shaped luminaires… Anything is possible technically, but you have to pay extra. Predictably, everyone hugged the rut.
    Everything was carefully calculated, products priced to be just affordable by the clients, products with just enough commission to make them worth selling. The cheese was no bigger than required by the trap.
    My investment in the club was another example of my lack of mission. Even if the club had been a success, I wouldn’t have made anything astonishing out of it. Not with one per cent. It would have been pocket money. A good holiday. New suits. No, to make it, you need something that can grow uncontrollably.
    You tend to end up where you start. I know of two cases of 28

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    honourable travel from nothing to abundance. A young lady who married money, and one of my neighbours who was a composer. He used to force me (and anyone else he could lure into his home) to listen to his symphonies. They weren’t the worst things I’ve ever listened to, but close.
    Desperate for money, he composed a jingle for a television quiz which was syndicated all over the world and made outrageous sums of money. He moved into a country mansion, but was more miserable than before since he was celebrated as a jingler, and he eventually topped himself.
    I swish a morsel of cuttlefish into some soy sauce, and I choose the religion business.
    It’s one of the few businesses where not having an ostentatious car or cathedral-like showroom isn’t a hindrance, where, in fact, beggary is cool. For a person of holiness, lack of progress up the power tower can be regarded as a triumph.
    It’s true I know nothing about it. It’s true I have little interest in it. But its great appeal is that you’re selling nothing, and when you are selling nothing you have no product you have to invest in or to make sure is in working order; joining the God squad is about being convincing when you say “it’ll be all right” in reply to the question “do you think it’ll be all right?”
    Religion never has to deliver, it only has to promise to deliver.
    Delivery is always round the corner. Down the road apiece.
    What the Lama was offering was refuelling. He was a refueller, refuelling. It’s about being convincing, and I can be that.
    In my defence, I was honest and decent. For a long time. I wouldn’t dismiss honesty and decency if they gave you a stable income, but they don’t. They’re why I’m sitting with someone else’s credit card in my pocket and a persistent and extremely embarrassing medical condition.
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    And what’s more, I might well be able to deal out some wisdom; it’s difficult to set yourself up as a preacher if you’re twenty, but at my age I can dish out heartfelt counsel on vicissitudes.
    And if you’d like some more “non” on your non-non-being, I’m your supplier.
    Then I realize I’m doing it again. I’m plotting small, I’m thinking like a drudge. First of all, I’m at a big disadvantage in the God game, compared to say the Lama, who has all that Ancient Tibetan stuff to draw on, and who has been at it for