“Postcard From Heaven”
June 1986. Papa called to announce that he’d found the “#1 fantastic school in the world. It is called Le Rosey. It is the top of all the world.” He has decided, without consult/input/opinion, from my Mother or me, that I should start there in September.[1]
Located an hour outside of Geneva, Le Rosey had been around since forever. It was beautiful and basic. The rooms were unheated and dark. The teachers French, English, and apathetic. The food was Swiss [i.e. rigorously portioned, unglamorous, unflavored]. I quickly came to realize that it was less of a school and more of a place where the kids of the wealthy, ruling, and ruthless could shit on the floor without concern for who would clean it up. If the school had a motto it would have been something like: Solis Perrenius Alter est Lamborghinium Perrus Juveniuus Aut Unum. Which [very roughly] translates to “My other Lamborghini is green but I’m too young to drive either one.”
The “#1 fantastic school in the world” it most certainly was not.
Academics ranked very low on the list of priorities of those who attended. Example: An answer to one of our math tests was Air France. I’m not making this up. The national airline of France was of greater value in math class than actual numbers–based math [2]. This is the level of bullshit that went on at Le Rosey.
I was woefully out of my element [primarily because my family didn’t own a fleet of cars nor had any of my uncles been indicted by the Interpol]. It was an unhappy place, and I was miserable for the entirety of my time there.
But no time was quite so dire as the weekends.
Anyone who was anyone – or anyone who was invited by someone who was anyone – left at 11.00am on Saturday. By 11.30am the place was a ghost town. A skeleton staff remained behind to make sure we didn’t set fire to the buildings or ourselves.
The boredom was mummifying. It encased me. Binding me to myself and not letting me go. I’d end up crying by my lonesome. With no one to console me I’d console myself. I was the sufferer and the salve.
Top Gun had come out in May and the soundtrack was everywhere. It helped a little. I’d try to find some comfort in the lyrics of Berlin’s Take My Breath Away. The song is explicitly, totally, and completely about doomed love and bronchial distress. I was a 13-year-old kid who wore Lacoste glasses and dressed in Ralph Lauren. I knew nothing of loss, romantic longing, or general discomfort. I was the human equivalent of a squishy doll.
Connecting emotionally to the song wasn’t easy. I got close to something approximating resonance with “turning and returning to some secret place inside…” But as hard as I rubbed the two sticks of imagination and self-pity together I couldn’t produce much more than a headache.
One Saturday, the teachers tasked with cleaning our cages announced that we were going to the nearby town of Wengen. Why Wengen and not Geneva or Zurich? We were never told. Would it have mattered? It was a day away from the campus and from ourselves.
Wengen is skiing in the winter and hiking in the spring/summer. 85% of the year it is gorgeous as fuck. But on this day it was impressively bleak. The sun had declined to welcome us that afternoon. Dark clouds above and thick fog below. Sheets of rain acting as a geological cummerbund holding the whole look together. No hustle bustle. No tourists. Just a lot of dour Swiss carrying bags of muesli and Evian.
The van dropped us off at a small hotel. We were so few - and the hotel was so empty - that everyone got their own room. As they headed to get drunk the teachers encouraged us to go upstairs and “rest.”
The rooms were small, quaint, and freezing. A single bed, a bureau, and two large doors which opened onto a balcony [which, considering the general vibe, would have been ideal to throw myself from]. I removed my coat, my shoes, left everything else on, and climbed into bed.
The brightness in the room woke me up. My trusty Swatch told me I’d been asleep for two hours. Sunlight knocked on the patio doors.
What I saw when I stepped outside was like a postcard from heaven. The previously-emboldened clouds had been ripped to pieces. Massive shafts of sunlight bounced off the wet ground and back up into the sky to blind the eyes of God. And I knew that, in my 13 years, this was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
An hour after that we were back onto the bus stopping to have dinner at the same roadside bistro we’d visited for lunch.
I left Le Rosey for good in December. Never again speaking to anyone I knew there.
Before their faces matured and hardened, I would occasionally recognize one of them peering at me from the pages of Hello [a glossy European celebrity status magazine my mother subscribed to]. They’d be in Monaco or Paris or, as with Fitzgerald’s Buchanans, “…wherever people played polo and were rich together.”[3]
I’m sure many of the kids, now long grown, continue to be awful and abusive. It was in their blood; they didn’t know any other way. They were born monstrous. If fair’s fair, when the revolution comes, many of them, for crimes against civility and couture, will be first against the wall.
Footnotes
[1] I later find out that the recommendation had come from someone Papa met at a Zurich hotel who had never actually been to the school.
[2] The next semester: My math teacher, Mr. Chadwick, didn’t think that Air France was an appropriate substitute for algebra and I was soon seeing a math tutor twice a week to catch up on all the numbers-based – as opposed to international airline carrier - math I’d missed.
[3] One classmate, the daughter of a famous Italian singing duo, moved to New Orleans in the early–1990s. Shortly thereafter she committed suicide by drowning herself in the Mississippi.