A Gambler Born and Bred12

Back in Guildford, I started smoking again and decided to save up and go back to London. This time it would be different. I’d make a real go of it this time.
I’d met a girl called Amanda in Val d’Isere. She was bright and bubbly with a nice smile.
We’d got along well in Val but she was always shadowed by a wee Scottish fella called John, who hated me to bits, so I never had the chance to take her out.
All I had to go on was her address, although I’d been too coy to ask her door number.
So, on a crisp Sunday morning, I hitched up to town and found Queensgate Gardens near Gloucester Road.

It was a very well-to-do area. All the buildings were huge and there was a gated square in the middle.
I found a bench that was well positioned at the edge of the gardens and gave onto the shops and tube of Gloucester Road.
This was where I would sit until Amanda appeared from her parental apartment.
I waited and I waited. When the sun started going down, I resigned myself to failure and got up to leave.
At the exact same moment, Amanda came staggering around the corner holding the arm of a friend.
‘Richard!’ she screamed. ‘My God, I was just talking about you.’
She was drunk, and her friend had changed his posture. He now seemed agitated.
I nodded. ‘Hi, Amanda. How are you?’
‘I’m pissed. What d’you think?’
It wasn’t a question so I just shrugged my shoulders.
Her friend eyed me warily. ‘So you’re the stud from Val d’Isere.’
‘Am I?’ I replied.

Since reading ‘I, Jan Cremer’, I had reinvented myself as a self-assured charmer of few words. Unless they were needed, of course.
Amanda shooed her friend away and replaced his arm with mine.
‘You’re coming with me,’ she slurred.
Her parents were away skiing. If only they knew what their daughter was letting herself in for.
I started a painting and decorating business and we found a flat together off Lillie Road. Amanda worked as a secretary at an ad agency.
We stayed together for a year, but I was quick to return to old ways, spending rent-money on fruit-machines.
Even with my part-time bar job at Draycotts, I still couldn’t save enough for rent because it just went, and they rhymed, as the month chimed my name in shame.

The final straw was when she had an abortion. The same had been the case with Gina. I knew that I was far from being father material and that I’d only fail the child. Besides, I had to be in love, and I was fully aware that these girls were no more than convenient conquests. One look at me told these girls that abortion was their only answer.

For the next year, I went from place to place and back to Mum’s, tried going to Paris but had to leave the country after crashing my car into a hotel.

I did a course in copywriting for advertising and managed to get a job with an agency in Kensington High Street.
I gave the painting up and went full-time as a copywriter. It was a small agency and very lax, so I had time to write for myself.
The day before my 25th birthday, Grant, my Canadian art director, and I got drunk at lunch time.
When we got back to the office (I called it the orifice), I made a call to the Evening Standard’s features department.
I was put on to the features editor for the weekend section.
‘If I’m not published by the time I’m twenty-five,’ I said, ‘I’m going to kill myself.’
‘When are you twenty-five?’ he replied, calmly.
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Bring your work in at ten tomorrow. See you then.’
Without waiting for me to thank him, he hung up.

That night, I got drunk and left my car badly parked outside the flat I was staying in.
At nine, I awoke to it being removed.
Neil Norman bought three 1000-word articles for £300 each that day, though, and promised that they would go in soon.
I waited, but nothing published.
I’d started a system of stealing from the till at Draycotts and it was getting out of hand.
I was fired. That was the longest I’d kept a job, even if it was only part-time; two and a half years.

1987, The Summer of Love, had come and gone in a blur. Everything since had been a blur. My life was one big blur. I’d taken trips and ecstacy on a weekly basis all the way to 1990.
The party seemed to be well and truly over.

I was staying at a flat with Nigel, the guy I’d driven across America with.
Jessica, one of the girl that I knew from Draycotts, was going to Paris to teach English and wanted to know if I’d come and stay.
I’d started reading Sartre and renting out weird French films; I knew I was being pulled back to Paris.
I told Nigel that I was going to live in Paris to write so we did a party scheduled for the night before my leaving.
The week before, the flat was robbed. They only took my passport and my ghetto-blaster. It all seemed very strange, but I didn’t need the blaster and West Ken post office issued me with a one-year passport for a fiver the next day.
Another reason for leaving London, again, was that everyone had started to get really cliquey and I hated cliques. I liked to be on the peripheries of many cliques, but they didn’t like people doing that. I never gossiped and I never did anyone down, unless they deserved it, but my anti-tribal ways were never trusted. Cliques seemed childish and elitist.

In 1981, everyone was doing acid and mushrooms, then ecstacy took over in 1986 but it had become very cokey by 1990.
Coke had straightened people up but I preferred tripping. I didn’t want to grow up and be cokey, talking about shit all night.
That’s not to say I wasn’t partial to it myself, only I saw a fake side to myself that I didn’t want to explore. My voice changed back from being a public schoolboy to a Surrey guttersnipe to a plastic Scouser and back again on coke. I must have sounded like a real phoney.