Good upbringing

"We bribed the judge to declare you the winner. We paid your opponent

to lose to you. The rest is up to you."

Marx Brothers, "Pensees, reliques et anecdotes"

My parents were very indecisive about my upbringing. Right after I was born, they insisted I be a priest, so my father used to read the breviary to me instead of fairy tales, and my mother dressed me in a tiny black cassock and stole instead of diapers. But little got through to me back then—I mostly cried, and besides, after about a year, my parents converted.

When I turned two, my father, fascinated by Westerns, decided I would make a great cowboy. From then on, instead of soft slippers, I wore miniature boots with spurs, a sheriff's star stuck into my bib, which I constantly cut myself with, and a felt hat adorned my head, which rubbed the back of my head dry and left it bald to this day.

The Western craze soon faded, but a fascination with black music followed, and my parents decided they would raise me to be a bluesman. And not just any bluesman, but a very specific one – Ray Charles. From then on, I was smeared with black shoe polish every morning, spent hours practicing rhythm and blues on the piano, and walked to kindergarten wearing dark glasses with a very distinctive gait. Thank God, my parents didn't even think of blinding me.

I went to school dressed in a policeman's uniform. In second grade, they dressed me like a truck driver. In the years that followed, I was raised, successively, to be: a mad inventor, an eccentric painter, an astronaut, a doctor, an actor named John Wayne, and a hockey player, also Wayne, but named Gretzky.

When, in my junior year of high school, my parents decided to raise me to be the Antichrist, I thought something was wrong with them and ran away. I didn't get far, however—my younger brother was being raised to be a bloodhound. Over the next few years of my education, I was raised to be, among other things, a mail carrier, a president, a train driver, a prima ballerina, a jeweler, John Paul II, and Kermit the Frog—despite the fact that my high school was a trade school and I was studying architecture.

One day, my parents had a serious talk with me.

"Despite our best efforts, we haven't managed to raise you to be anything worthwhile," they said. And they added,

"It's time for you to go your separate ways. We only hope you won't disappoint us."

I became a ticket inspector for public transport because I somehow felt it was my calling. My father hanged himself first. Later, my mother jumped out a window. My younger brother, who was considered a melancholic at the time, also committed suicide.