You may arrive in NY on a sunny day of March after you were fired from your job – copywriter in an advertising agency – or after breaking up with a girlfriend: You want to take some distance from the beloved country you know too well and start fresh in the country of Freedom and Opportunities: America…
Problem #1 you have no place to stay; ooops, you find an old girlfriend who lives in Manhattan or a college friend who is doing a training and is sharing an apartment with three other dudes in the East Village. One call from the airport and you find yourself more lucky than you thought: you can use the studio of that girlfriend
who is, herself, mostly living with her boyfriend.
Charming little studio – no light – in Chelsea.
Problem # 2, you have 500 Euros for a few weeks; you have to find a job if you want to stay. 500 Euros will last you 1.5 weeks. But New York is so exciting and Paris …. You’ve been everywhere ; You get in to Le Baron and Matisse and Castel and the new Regine and you are just so sick of that daily, nightly routine. On top of it , you will bump into your girlfriend and it will create drama and tension.
You start asking restaurants if they want a waiter and they ask you some basic questions: what is a vodka gimlet; a » long island », a « sex on the beach », a cosmopolitan – every kind of cosmopolitan – and you find out that you don’t have that much training so you ask French restaurants and the positions are all closed; Bilboquet, uptown, or Bagatelle downtown have a waiting list of potential waiters and without proper working papers you are « non grata »; meantime your friends bring you to fun places like the Box, the
Beatrice, the Rose bar or simply: the Pere Pinard, l’Annexe – where all the French people meet – and you are out of money in a week.
No you just can’t go back to France. NY is just starting to be exciting and you made every night a few new great friends; some girl wants to see you again after a late night at Pink Elephant, and another one wants to go out with you next week with two other girlfriends…
Precisely, she knows this PARTY PROMOTER who offered you $150 to bring 20 people into the same club, a week after. You told him you can bring 30 friends and make $250, because you need that money so badly. The next week you have this great birthday party and you bring 60 people to the Pink Elephant, while your
friend Dave has gone to Los Angeles for the week.
Dave is very nice and offers you 1/2 of what he got paid for this party: which is $400.
That night, they gave you two bottles for free and drink tickets and all your friends had at least one drink each. Amazing. And you had ten pretty girls around you and you were dancing on the banquette all night. King of the Night!
In a week you became a SUB PROMOTER or just a SUB, which is a promoter working for another promoter. Eventually after a few weeks or months, you may graduate to Promoter; but it is very difficult since you can’t be paid legally by the club… So far it’s OK if you make 1/2 what your promoter makes. You can still live for a few weeks, or months. Every time you go out at night you take addresses and numbers of girls – or their name…names you can connect on Facebook…and you invite them the next day to a club and you make $150, $250, sometimes more. Easy life. Free drinks, new « friends » who need you to get into clubs, girls who need you to get free drinks and they start liking you, you.
Well; one year has passed and you have become a student in advertising at School of Visual Arts which gives you the right to work part-time; so now you are not a SUB but a full time promoter and your price is $500 to $800 to bring large groups of friends in to clubs.
Your major asset: pretty girls who follow you everywhere because you are a good looking guy and the French community who love your parties.
Clubs pay a lot for having Euros and pretty girls, so you are quite safe. Problem: Your friends don’t want to pay $1,500 for 3 bottles of Vodka but want to drink for free. … You might want to try anyway…. One day, they will pay (they will get a good job and pay that kind of money).
A few years have passed and you have forgotten everything about Paris, the ex-girlfriend and the nightlife routine in Paris or even a serious (serious ?? boring) job back in Paris or NY.
Mansion who just changed into M2 has given you the night of Wednesday and you must organize 15 promoters + subpromoters and you get $1,500 + a small percentage of the bar.
With all that money you are making 3 times a week, you have become the Prince of the Night in NY; the prince of Euros, or, like Americans say, the prince of Eurotrash. You make sure you don’t drink too much and avoid drugs, because it could ruin your career…
and France is definitely over: advertising also – the salaries are much lower than what your earn today.
BUT you are now the King of the Night, the Prince of Eurotrash in a dream City of Lights that is called Manhattan – the City of Hills – where you go up fast and fall fast… So it will be a challenge everyday from now on to stay on top.
Can you guess what the rest (or restless) time of your life will be? At least one thing: Great memories…You’ve seen Paris Hilton dancing on the tables, Lindsay Lohan kissing Samantha at Bungalow while Mark Ronson is guest DJ, Chloe Sevigny at Beatrice with her brother spinning also, late nights in lofts and after parties in Williamsburg, Brooklyn,
THERE IS ONLY ONE CONDITION THAT MUST NOT CHANGE : YOU HAVE TO BE RESTLESS, CHARMING, AND FOREVER YOUNG; AND THE CITY IS YOURS
BY MARC BIRON
