CHRIS AYRES
Author of Death by Leisure and War Reporting for Cowards
About Death by Leisure
From the New York Times:
“Fast and funny, Death by Leisure has the high spirits of a chick book, because its author is interested in chick-lit things: dates, celebrities, vanity and shopping. But it is also a tale of real woe. Global climate change and the collapse of the American home market should not be conflated as easily as they are here, in a gonzo-style book with topics skittering from $1-per-blackhead California facials to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. But Mr. Ayres somehow manages to cram all these elements into his wild-eyed American adventure... Death by Leisure makes a fine follow-up to the well-received War Reporting for Cowards.”
From the publisher:
Can one man, acting alone, melt the ice caps and bankrupt the global economy? He can try.
All Chris Ayres ever wanted was everything: a supermodel girlfriend, a clifftop bachelor palace, a fleet of chrome-rimmed SUVs. The way he saw it, nothing could stand in his way. Nothing, that is, except for being broke, prematurely bald, and living in a remote sheep-farming village in Northern England.
So he moved to Los Angeles—just in time for a man named Alan Greenspan to invent cheap money. Really, really cheap money. Before he knew it, Ayres had a million-dollar home and a credit-fueled life of leisure and luxury. Not to mention a cushy job as the showbiz correspondent of a London newspaper.
But, uh . . . those idiots you keep hearing about? The ones who brought down the economy by maxing-out on easy cash? The ones who never knew when to stop, who indulged in such mindless self-gratification it would take the combined atmospheres of twenty-five planets just to absorb their carbon emissions? Yep, that was Ayres.
For a while, of course, everything worked out perfectly. For a while, Ayres looked almost like a success. He crashed Michael Jackson’s final, epic birthday bash at Neverland Ranch. He took a supermodel to Hollywood’s biggest gala in a decade. He drank foie gras pina coladas, smeared caviar in strange places, commuted to a thousand-dollar-a-night bunny ranch in Nevada, and bought a TV so large it could beam messages to extraterrestrials. He even met a wife—through an ingenious internet scam.
You could say that Ayres’s excess was almost Gatsbyesque, except that Gatsby never had an adjustable rate, negative-amortization mortgage from a bank that was recently seized by the feds, or a car that was leased from a company that specialized in borrowing depreciation from the Chinese.
But of course none of it could last. Ayres tap-danced around one catastrophe after another, but finally, the apocalypse caught up with him. It’s funny how the 2000s turned out, isn’t it? Or maybe not so funny, now that the banks are going down faster than the oceans are rising and the Great Depression II is here.
Still, as Ayres says, in the long run: there is no long run. So why not enjoy what’s left while you can?
Also by Chris Ayres...
