My story starts nearly twenty-two years ago
when I was born. Everyone’s story starts at birth. The great game of chance in
life is what family you will be born into. Before one is even alive, the
direction in which life will take you is already decided, as if by God or mere
chance. Some may argue that being born into wealth is the luckiest thing that
can happen to a person, some think the opposite, that this silver spoon in your
mouth can never be removed. They talk like it’s inevitable that you’ll choke on
it sooner or later. Then there’s me, and I don’t know what I think anymore. Iv
been confused by all the events that have taken place in my life. The things
that happened are so extraordinary that it seems ridiculous not to tell them.
My father was a wealthy businessman, just
like his father before him. Indeed, the family business has been going for 90
years. Centered on investments, the business had money in coal and steel, which
had proved very successful through the times of the great wars. After that it
was clothing factories, before they moved to Asia for cheaper production, and
then it was technology, which would go on to boom in years to pass. The
business was always based in New York, where my father was born. Although he
was born there he wasn’t the typical New Yorker you might meet on the street in
East Harlem back then, even now in 1991 it would be unlikely. He was the kind
of man that you wouldn’t see on the subway, certainly not back then, and if you
did see him, then several hours later you’d be sure you dreamt it. He just
wouldn’t fit in. His rose red cheeks and rather fresh face would bob carelessly
above his clean suit in a grubby subway train. A handkerchief resting pointlessly
in his jacket pocket, potentially its only real purpose would be to wipe the
dust and dirt off the inside of the window beside him. However that would, in
his mind, bring down his overall appearance. You see he had spent almost all of
his childhood outside of Manhattan, in the wealthy suburbs surrounded by people
just like him. My mother hadn’t come from such a well-off family. She was born
and raised in Chicago before leaving her parents and the Windy City to come to
New York. She was working as a secretary here in a law firm. In this environment
surrounded by wealthy people she managed to learn how to act posh. She clothed
herself in the façade of wealth. One day my father had accompanied his father
to the office, where mother worked, to discuss some dull legal matter with the
lawyers. It was here that my parents met. Now it seems so fitting that they
would meet here and their love would spark in a place filled with suits, pretentiousness
and ignorance. Mother would quit her job once they married and she lived with
him in a new apartment, over on West 24th Street, which they rented
together. She worked for the family business in a rather limited role until she
became pregnant. She later gave birth to a healthy baby boy, Michael, my elder
brother. All this happened before I even existed but I can tell of it from the
stories they told me. They told me the story of how they met but dressed it in
romanticism for in actual fact it wasn’t very romantic.
By the time I was born my father’s parents
had passed away and he had inherited yet more money. I was born in 1971 against
a background of rising inflation caused by the war in Vietnam which would
linger on for the next four years. I don’t remember the earliest times of my
childhood but I can imagine that I was very content in a naïve sort of way. One
of my first real memories I have of my father, that is to say not just a memory
that I later formed for myself from a photograph, is the time him and I took a
small rowing boat out onto the pond in central park. I remember the
brown-varnished timber of the boat sitting effortlessly on the water. The pond
glinted green from the algae under the autumn sun. My father’s hands gripping
the oars and casting us to and fro over the water’s glistening surface. The
outlines of the surrounding trees with their leaves coloured yellow, red,
orange and every shade of green reflected in the pond. All the while the great
pillars of concrete with their innumerable silvery windows towered over us, the
sunlight had cast a yellow hue on every square inch it hit. I stared up in awe.
Now, looking back, the beauty of this view contrasts remarkably with the words
he said to me that day. At the time I didn’t realize how grotesque they were, I
was only seven years old after all, but I see it now. He turned to me after
allowing the boat to rest in the middle of the pond and said
“Son, how do you like all this?”
“I like it a lot, I like the view from down
here” I told him with a smile.
“No, I mean how to do you like this life
you have?” He demanded with a frown.
I didn’t say anything, for me it was the
only life I knew. I hadn’t thought about whether I liked life at that point,
for me life just was.
“Listen,” He said, “In life there are two
kinds of people, there are winners and there are losers. Which is it you want
to be Patrick?”
I paused and looked up at him with the
innocent mind of son who is just trying in some way to make his father proud
and said “A winner, father.”
He didn’t smile but a look of quiet
satisfaction came across his face, as if his parenting role for the day had
been successfully accomplished.
I feel a strange sense of guilt looking
back at that day, that I ever spoke those words, but I was a child and I knew
no better. My father had tried to draw me a succinct picture of the world. With
a verbal pencil he sketched it as the great Colosseum. Where man was pitted against man and to succeed in life would
be the death of your enemy. He saw life as one adversarial battle and he tried
to instill in me this same morbid outlook.
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