High life | 18 April 2013

New York

I chose to live on 68th street between Madison and Fifth Avenue because it’s next to Central Park and is considered as convenient an address as any in the city. Not too far uptown and the DMZ — 92nd street; not too close to the shopping shrines down by the 50s. The house where I live now used to be the Austrian consulate and from my second-floor flat I can look into a grand embassy structure that no one ever uses as far as I’m concerned. It belongs to Indonesia, although when I bought my new flat I was told it was the Polish embassy and rushed to close the deal as I love Poles. No such luck, although the Indonesians have a tendency to take orders, unlike African personnel, who park everywhere illegally, fill up the street with garbage, and play loud Zulu music throughout. Thank God, most of them tend to congregate near the UN building, way down east, a good two miles from Herr Taki’s abode. Not for much longer. Although I love my fellow tenant Tim Atwater, a Brit artist who lives above, I’ve had the horrible luck to get another neighbour, a disgusting individual whom I’ve never met and of course hope never to have to in future. The smell alone should drive me to the burbs, as this bum is the Fertiliser King, in other words, the shit that owns most of the shit in the world. What horrible luck. Of all the streets and neighbourhoods in the world he had to buy into mine. And no matter how you cut it, the baths, the cologne, the sprays, the man still smells. It’s like living next to a public toilet. Mind you, as I’ve already said, I’ve never met him but I don’t seem to be able to get away from the smell. Yes, I know, it’s mostly in my head, but just as I tend to smell camellias when I read Dumas, I tend to smell shit when I walk by the mansion next door. And it gets worse. The Fertiliser King has decided to build an Olympic-size swimming pool beneath his mansion — chlorine and pee smell better than you know what — and in the process he has managed to cut off every telephone and internet connection in the area. No telephone, no TV, no internet, but people with FM radios have been known to get some kind of signal — mostly about North Korean nuclear threats. This has been going on for months. Needless to say, the Fertiliser King does not have to go through any of this as he’s ensconced somewhere west of here, with Central Park in between us. That is where he bought the most expensive apartment ever sold in the city of New York — for 88 million greenbacks — ostensibly as a weekend pied-à-terre for his daughter Ekaterina. Dmitry Rybolovlev is the undisputed fertiliser king of the world, but I’m not 100 per cent certain that the Fertiliser King who has bought the mansion next to me is one and the same. A wit said that all fertiliser kings look alike, short, broad faces, dead eyes, horrible manners and unable to speak any known language — but could there be two fertiliser kings and could I have the bad luck to live near both of them? One fertiliser king has already bought a chalet in Gstaad and paid for bullet-proof windows, a first even for a place where most guests belong behind bars. (I’ll tell you one place he won’t be visiting, and that’s the Eagle Club.) As everyone knows, the oligarchs from the east like nothing better than buying big mansions which they don’t live in. While Abramovich is making life intolerable for those living in Cheyne Walk, he’s got three other places to park his unattractive noggin. All the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea had to do is say no to a man who, unlike his adversary Boris Berezovsky, will never have the decency to take his own life. But K&C said yes, thank you ever so much, Mister Roman, and could we also kiss your bum, sir? Becoming butlers to oligarch billionaires whose manners resemble those of Gulag guards seems to fit and please the English. Ironically it was in the very same house, now being depraved by Abramoson-of-a-bitch, that I first heard his name mentioned. It was Sebastian Guinness, whose brother Jasper’s 50th birthday it was, who said some Russkie had bought Chelsea. I said he must be as big a player as they come, especially after I was told Abramovich used to sell rubber (quack-quack) ducks outside the Dynamo stadium. I have not changed my mind. Lord Moyne, a very good man, must have had his reasons to turn over the house to members of his family. They in turn flogged it to the duck salesman, who then got the relevant permits to ruin the lives of those living near the river. Maybe it’s better to move to Cyprus for a while. But back to the Fertiliser King. When my friends the Bismarcks rebuilt the Gerald Road police station into a beautiful house, there were some neighbours who complained. The good news is that the neighbours were awful South African accountants, or lawyers, or dentists, or something like that. I am none of the above, and am being abused by the works of some horrible Russian thug who owns the world’s biggest collection of shit and needs a large swimming pool to wash himself in. There is only one thing to do, move. Maybe even to Cyprus.