A Gambler Born and Bred 9

On the ferry, I played the fruit-machine for half an hour but when I saw that my funds had already dwindled by twenty pounds, I panicked and sought company elsewhere.
I found a young couple who seemed nice and they invited me to hitch a lift to Paris with them.
I said yes, but then the girl started flirting outrageously with me and the guy got jealous. I had to walk away.

Having hitched to Milan, I phoned Dad’s friend but they hung up as soon as I said who I was, so I took a cheap room for the night and got back on the road to Rome.
I rented a room at a pensione near the Spanish Steps and started writing fiction for the first time. I looked for work but there was nothing for ‘black market’.
After three weeks, with money low, I called Mum and asked if she’d send me some. She agreed, and we had a nice chat. She sounded quite well.
I could understand. I wasn’t there.

I moved to a campsite and hatched a plan with a Brazilian guy to hitch up to North Italy and pick grapes. He said there was money to be made.
The night before leaving, the owner of the campsite unveiled the new taverna that workmen had built in under a week. He put on a party.
I’d started to get tipsy when a gorgeous girl floated in to the taverna.
Everyone wolf-whistled but I just sat there gawping, dreaming.
Amazingly, I caught her eye and my Brazilian mate kept nudging me to do something.
But there was no time for that.
She left.
I was so deep in thought as to how to woo her that I hadn’t even noticed her go.
‘Better luck next time,’ said my friend.
Just as I resigned to drown my sorrows, the Italian girl’s friend came back in and asked if I’d like to join her friend for a drive.
Did I? I was out of there.
The Italian girl sat in the back of a Golf convertible. The roof was up.
An Italian guy was driving and the friend that came to get me was English.
I was invited in to the back. Before pleasantries had a chance, she had feeling my cock over my jeans and had her tongue down my throat. I didn’t even know her name.
I was on fire.
She asked me where I wanted to go.
I didn’t know Rome much but I’d seen that Killing Joke were playing a club called the Roxy that night. They were still my favourite band. I’d wanted to go but only had enough to hitch up north.
‘The Roxy!’ I said.
When we arrived, Catia, the girl, waved at the doormen and we sauntered in, but the band had already played.
We then went on a crazy tour of sparkling piano bars, stopping off for one and moving on.
Arturo drove well and Jo, the English girl, who was Catia’s English teacher, just sat there in the front with him, exchanging quiet words while we fed off each other in the back.
I went back to Catia’s and we made love. The next day, she had my bags picked up by Arturo from the campsite. I never got to say sorry to my Brazilian friend for not going with him.

I ended up staying with Catia for about a month. She kept me as her angelic toyboy.
One time, we went to visit her parents. We went upstairs and she gave me a leather jacket that used to belong to her brother. He’d died in a motorbike accident.
Another leather jacket from a dead man.
After this, she showed me her room and we made love. She screamed as if wanting to outrage her parents, and as we shagged, I had this awful thought that her Dad would come upstairs and stab me. I was always having strange thoughts like that when I was shagging a girl in a strange place, or if she was new.
We made love all the time. She was 22 and I was 18.

Once, she got jealous when I came on to a beautiful girl at a party she’d thrown for me.
At this party, one of her friends was heavily pregnant and kept pleading with Catia about something. Everyone was looking at me and smiling naughtily.
It turned out that she wanted to fuck me (she thought I was an angel). I found it weird that her husband didn’t mind.
Next day, I told Catia that I was homesick and she flipped.
The day after, I was on a plane back to Gatwick. Catia had bought the ticket for me; it was an Alitalia flight. I can still remember her and Arturo sitting at the table in her living-room when I left. They didn’t even look at me when I said ‘Ciao, bella’.

It was good to be back. I moved into my sister’s old flat in Earls Court and found work here and there.
I met another rich woman called Gina and we started to go out together. I took up employment at Yves Saint Laurent and stole suits with a buddy who’d visit as a normal customer. I was fired after a week.
Gina lived in Cadogan Square and I desperately wanted to move in with her. It felt as if I was moving from one mothering fool to another, seeking the easy way out of my problems by placing them in the hands of someone else.
When the second month’s rent was due, I was penniless, having found a fruit-machine that I’d fallen in love with at the Goat In Boots on the Fulham Road.

I began to realise that I couldn’t hold a conversation with anyone when there was a fruit-machine.
It would constantly attract my attention, winking at me, making me lose track of what I was saying, urging me to plough all my money into it.
When I was asked to move out of the flat, I asked if I could stay with Gina for a while.
She was a real party-girl and liked her independence.
I could stay, but not for long.
She told me that I had to stand on my own two feet if I was to get ahead. She said I had everything going for me and I knew she was right. I was good-looking, intelligent, fun to be around and knew how to have fun with women.

After a while, I found a room in Ifield Road off the Fulham Road. I worked hard at the Grosvenor House Hotel as a waiter and had little time for fruit-machines. It seemed to be the only way to deter them from my mind. When I was at a loose end, however, all that would go to pot, and I’d find myself sleepwalking to play a machine.

One night, I met a pair of local villains. It was a double-act. One of them would play the fruit-machine and the other would cause a stink in the bar, attracting everyone’s attention. When the crowd was looking to see what all the fuss was about, the guy on the fruit-machine quickly slipped the plastic coil down the slot and started to clock up credits by furiously teasing it up and down on the mechanism that clocked credit.
I was the only person not watching the commotion in the bar, because I was the only one interested in the machine, of course.
Once he’d won some money, they left and I followed them outside.
I asked them what the plastic coil was and they had no problems telling me.
The coil had been made especially for this purpose and could trick machines into believing that money was being put into the slot.
They showed me the coiled piece of plastic and asked if I wanted one.
‘Fifty quid, mate,’ one of them said, showing me the winnings from his pocket.
I arranged to meet them at the pub the next day, but quickly lost interest in going. I’d play the machines on their terms. I didn’t need trickery, although I knew that trickery was a machine’s biggest asset.

On the flat-front, I was quickly coming to terms with the fact that, however hard I worked my fingers to the bone, I’d still be left with nothing for rent if I played the machines.
I found a spoon that had been used for heroin above my wardrobe when I was packing up my stuff to leave, and when I went to get my suits from it, I noticed that they’d gone. My flatmate had sold them at a shop at World’s End for a fix. I was livid.
Again, I’d only managed to pay the first month’s rent.

Tail between legs, I moved back to Mum’s and found a job.
It wasn’t much of a job, though. I had to sit under a bridge on the River Wey while workers constructed new buildings by the bridge. I had a boat and my job was to save anyone that fell into the water.
This area was used by the homeless and I’d have to tiptoe through the bodies to get to my position in the morning.
Once there, I’d wait for pals to come and visit. We’d smoke dope and drink snakebite. These were early days for Health and Safety.

I was nineteen by then and had my share of girlfriends, but, deep down, I knew that I couldn’t keep one. I’d spend too much time and money on machines for any self-respecting girl to stay with me.
As before, I resolved to save up and leave the country. It was the only way out of gambling, and I knew it.