A Gambler Born and Bred 15

I found a lovely little flat on the sixth and a halfth floor of a rickety tenement in Rue St Denis. It was where the hookers hung out. The street was awash with thieves and drugs, girls hissing at lairy men and men slapping tarts, mopeds racing on pavements and angry shopkeepers everywhere.

One thing was for sure; I’d had enough of all the ecstacy dealers who’d swoop down on my parties and whisk away potential bar money, so I decided to do it myself. All I needed was money.
Richard lent me 5000 francs but said that all he wanted was the money back. Maybe a few pills for himself. He didn’t want to be seen as a dealer in any way; he was a broker.

I called the number of a Dutch guy I’d met in Amsterdam the year before.
Once he’d remembered who I was and what I was on about, he told me to meet him at Waterloosplein. He had a market stall selling jeans.
Being a stickler for clean getaways, I concocted a plan from what a French friend had told me about border controls between Holland and France.
The crucial factor, he said, was that there were no border controls on the train between these two countries, only between Holland and Belgium.
With this in mind, I wrote to the BBC in Belgium, asking if there were any jobs available for writers, hoping they’d write back before too long.
I didn’t care what it said. I just wanted the letter so that I could make it look like it was for a job interview.
The reply came.

In a suit I borrowed from Richard, I bought a single ticket for the quite comfortable night-train to Amsterdam and arrived at eight the next morning.
After breakfast, I took the bus to Waterloosplein and met Johan. We went for a coffee and exchanged, so I snuck off to the toilet and wedged the pills in my underpants.
After a quick goodbye, I went straight back to the train station, bought a ticket for Brussels and got off. Then, I had a beer and bought another ticket for the afternoon business train back to Paris to deter any connection to Holland.
There was no need to show my letter from the BBC. I was suited and booted, white and bright; without information, I was invisible, calm and happy. It was a doddle.

I stopped doing my Dutch jaunts after a few parties. I’d recognised someone on the train back from Brussels but couldn’t put a place or a name to him.
When I heard that the Sheherazade club was closed down because of drug dealing, I realised that he was one of the bouncers from there. He must have been caught. That was as good a sign as any that I needed to tread carefully.
On Valentine’s Day, though, I made 10,000 francs on the pills and another 10,000 on the party.
I’d arrived.
We used the cave St Sabin all the way through spring and summer. Life seemed good. I was doing visuals with Richard at a few other parties and making bits of money.
I went to London and bought an old ford Fiesta from a friend of Nigel’s called Rick. He ran the Pushca parties and had just broken a tooth biting down on a pen on charlie.

The Fiesta was perfect.
With British plates, I could get untold tickets and not have to pay one.
I’d never be stopped. Parisian road police were a breeze compared to London’s.
The next year was wild. The parties became the toast of the town for ex-pats and cross-sections of the French.
Valerie and I argued, and our relationship was beginning to fizzle out. She didn’t like me dealing and I couldn’t hack her tantrums.
One night, standing outside the entrance to my flat together arguing, she screamed to two policemen to check my pockets, which were full of pills, but they thought she was mad and let me off. When I tried walking away, two guys on mopeds started chasing me so I ran around the block and ducked into the toilet of a café and put the bagged pills into the cistern. When I got out, the two guys on the mopeds chased me for a while but when I confronted them they left, so I returned to the café and took the pills from the cistern.