A Gambler Born and Bred 13

I caught a flight bleary-eyed with £100 to my name on the day that the Gulf War began; 8th of December 1990.
I felt robbed that my pieces for the Standard hadn’t made the page. One day, I’d show them all what they were missing. Or maybe the features editor had just wanted to save a precarious life.
I’d boasted to friends that I’d either write my Parisian masterpiece from a stinking chambre d’hote and wash-up at a restaurant to scrape a living (like Orwell) or I’d write at a desk on a metro platform with a begging-cap. Failing that, I’d go on a nicking spree and write from a classy hotel room. If I got nicked, I could always write about my exploits in jail.

I was met at Charles de Gaulle airport by Jessica, my pal from Draycotts.
I hadn’t slept for two days.
We went to her flat near Arts and Metiers in the 3rd arrondissement and dropped my bag off.
Then, she took me to a café and I had my first café calvados.
‘Guess what?’ she said, wide-eyed.
‘Go on.’
‘It’s France’s first-ever rave tonight!’
We went, of course, but it wasn’t up to much; part of a new exposition centre. There was ambience but no darkness. It was sparsely filled. People were jumping in celebration of something they knew nothing about, like tipsy girls rejoicing an England goal.
Jessica wanted pills so we danced/skipped around people.
‘Got any pills?’ we asked, but there were no Brits around, it seemed. It was full of snooty, smarmy Parisian clubbers. Film crews snaked the dancefloor, clocking the ‘le nouveau vague de la musique’.
We gave up and got drunk in the end.

On Sunday, we walked around town. I’d been to Paris before but I was seeing it through different eyes now. I wanted to stay this time. I knew I’d be in Paris for a very long time that day.
On Monday morning, Jessica went to work. She was teaching English to eleven-year olds at a school in the suburbs.
I went looking for work and met an old Englisher in a café who told me to check the noticeboards for work and rooms to rent at the American Church. I went there and met a shady Moroccan guy who sold me sixty packets of post cards for three hundred francs. He showed me the printed price. I could make a 200% mark-up.
They were hard to sell, though. I went to the Tuileries but kept getting moved on. To Opera, but the same thing happened.
The police just said ‘Black market’ in a French accent and pointed to the way I should leave.

I went to Chatelet and it was much easier going, but people didn’t want my cut-price post cards.
People started to say something about ‘Roma’ as they passed, tittering, but I couldn’t speak French. I got an E in my O level.
After a while, I realised what the problem was. The cards were full of Roman sightseeing places. I’d been to most of them but I hadn’t even bothered to look at the actual pictures when I bought them, or maybe he switched them when he passed them over. I’d only seen money in my hand.
I stormed back to the American Church for my money but he’d gone. So had most of my money.

That evening, Jessica came back with a gaping grin and some wine.
She asked about my day and I told her the story about the post cards. She laughed her head off.
She had news, too. At school, virtually the whole class had seen her at France’s first ever rave on the news on TF1.
For the next fortnight, I scrounged bits of change from Jessica to feed myself and wrote bits of stories and letters at the flat. I couldn’t find work, or I wasn’t looking hard enough.
Then Jessica left for Christmas in England. In fact, all the Brits that I’d met up until then left.
I didn’t want to go back.
I loved Paris with its laissez-faire attitude and bad driving. London had tightened up in all ways whereas Paris was still anarchy. No CCTV and hardly any trouble that I could see.
You could do what you wanted, so long as you weren’t French.
I’d resolved to spend Christmas alone for the first time. I wanted to know what it felt like, being alone when everyone else was with family.
I hadn’t felt I was a part of my own family since about eighteen, so it wouldn’t hurt. I was my own man. Yeah, right. My Dad was an outcast, my Mum was a scorned woman and my three sisters were all women. I always wished I had a brother.

Christmas lunch was a chicken burger without chips. I hated begging on Boulevard Sebastopol. I kept thinking I’d see one of Jessica’s English friends.
With no money, I’d get up, go out into the streets and scrounge five or six cigarettes, go back upstairs and write.
I’d started to write a novel about a young man who kept on robbing things and getting away with it. He was too quick-minded for the police, who were a laughable lot. They’d never catch him because he was always one step ahead. Then he started to make mistakes and became paranoid and had to be institutionalised.
He was writing it from there, pretending to take tranquillisers because he was actually sane enough to write and only kidding the doctors. When he was finally let out, he published his work and lived happily ever after. I can’t remember the title but it was raw talent, or so I thought.

In January, Jessica got back and everything went back to normal. After a while, she told me that I needed a job and should look for a room in a flat. She’d always said that it was only for a while and love hadn’t blossomed for us. We were friends, for sure, but she had a boyfriend by that time and wanted to shag without me in the living-room squeaking on my blow-up bed.

I got a job as an English teacher to airline-staff. It was at a hellhole part of the suburbs in a business tower. I did a week and was fired. The Nigerian boss told me he’d put money into my account but it never showed up. I went back to complain, totally broke, but another new company had rented it. He’d flown the nest. I hated him and kept an eye out for him wherever I went. I couldn’t get him out of my head.

I found a job at La Perla in the Marais. It was a funky Mexican bar-restaurant and I was a finger-dipping barman.
I lasted three weeks.
Then I found a much better job as a cocktail barman at L’Entrepot in La Bastille. I earnt 500 francs a night plus tips. There was no way of stealing from the till because a manager dealt with all the cash.
At that wage, I didn’t need to nick.
I stayed rent-free with Tony in Place d’Aligre and we’d get hammered when I wasn’t working.

In the space of six months, I worked at L’Entrepot, the China Club, Le Casbah and Route Sixty-Six.
Because there were no fruit-machines, I had all the money I earnt at my disposal. Saving was fine so long as I was earning.

My big break came when Lisa, a lovely English girl, introduced me to Alban, a French aristocrat who was in the process of opening a bar-restaurant in Quatre Septembre. He was a party-animal stockbroker and wanted an Englishman to manage it for him.
The place was only a minute’s walk from La Bourse, Paris’s equivalent to The City.
I helped design the interior, ordered all the brands of drink I needed for cocktails and the weird bottled beers, bought bric-a-brac from fairs and marches-puces to give the place some padding. We decided on a basic menu; classic French dishes and Mexican food, which was really popular then.
Alban asked me to model for the promotion of the place. He called it ‘Joss du Moulin’, an invented Gatsby-type character he’d written about. He was also a keen writer.
I was to be Joss, the guy in the suit with my hand outstretched to hide my face, with a girl dripping off me. Very Eighties.

On Thursdays, I did my own night called Dizzyland. I put together the artwork for the little black-and-white card flyers and floated them around to a few places I knew and parties I went to.
An English guy came in on one of those nights and asked me if I’d ever thought about doing a party in a proper venue.
‘Have I?’ I said back to him. ‘Of course I have. Why? Do you want to do one?’
He nodded.
‘I haven’t got a bean. Have you got money to front it?’
He nodded again.
After a short silence, in which our grins became too wide to control, we laughed out loud and shook hands loudly.
‘Let’s do it!’ we said together.
We didn’t even know each other’s names.

Unwittingly, we’d just become the best party organisers that Paris had seen in a long time.
‘Sweet Power’ was born. I already knew plenty of venues from ‘research’ and secured a cave behind Place Clichy for peanuts from a very shabby man that lived there.
I asked a DJ friend from London, Eren, to come and play. We needed two more DJs and he could pick them. I asked Nigel and Adrian to come and do their visuals for us.
We did three parties in the cave, one a month, then the neighbours started complaining, so we had to find a new venue.
Just like the farm shop owners and the pawn shop manager in Colwyn Bay, Paris’ venue owners and managers seemed to love me like their long lost son.
If I had half a chance of getting a place, I’d get it. I described our clientele as a mix of British, American and French. The music was funk, rare groove and, later on, bouncy house.

Techno was a no-no. Venues abhorred techno and all its undesirable elements. Rave music had become the scourge of France by this time.
We didn’t want to rock boats and, besides, I preferred disco to techno. The German stuff that the French kids were getting into was dark and hard. There was little freedom in it for me.
Besides, doors opened with our music. It was so eclectic that no one could put a finger on it. With Eren in charge, the music was assured.

By that time, I’d moved to a flat on my own and had a tremendously pretty French girlfriend, Valerie. Jan Cremer would have been proud.
We dined at fine restaurants and took little holidays together.

I left the job at Joss du Moulin after an argument with one of the owners.
He wanted to put technology on the tills and tighten up by giving a ticket to all the customers before they bought their drinks and then returning again to give their drinks, only to have to return once more to give their change. It meant three journeys instead of two and, when happy hour was on, it was unworkable. It slowed the whole thing down. He was on to me fiddling the till, anyway, so I left with a month’s wages without quarrel.
I stayed in touch with Alban. He was a regular at the parties and a lot of his friends came, because Valerie was head of our French punter-pulling arm. She knew all the BCBG crowd.

Richard, my partner, had the City boys eating from his hand. He’d always book a table at Café Vogue for his inner circle the night before a party to get them in the swing. He knew how to treat people.
I took care of all the musical people, the British barmen and the year-out girls. Once I knew who was pulling their weight, I started giving certain barmen, DJs and other heads free passes.

I was keen to do my own visuals because we couldn’t afford Nigel (he had to account for travel from London, which, with a car, totalled 6,000 francs alone), so Richard bought six 16mm projectors and six slide carousels. I found a beautiful Beaulieu 16mm film camera and started filming stuff straight from the TV. There were lines through it but finding original film reels was out of my class. I filmed around Paris and got Valerie to do silly things when we went away.
Once the reels were developed, I’d splice the film into five-second loops. Using these moving images, I made collages with all the slides onto big white screens at the parties.

I’d been a projectionist and critique for sixties US and British arthouse movies that showed as part of a season during the summer at the Pompidou Centre. My boss couldn’t understand them, so he taught me how to splice and I wrote pieces on films that were going to show.
I was a terrible timekeeper and was fired for not turning up for work as projectionist to a Saturday showing. I was hungover, again.