The Bottom
Olive takes a tumble, loses it all, works like a galley slave, buys the winning ticket and lands on his feet in a land called LA…

The bottom, I have found, is not always the end; sometimes it’s just the bottom. Picture this if you will, I went from owning two popular and successful restaurants to working in a taco stand. And not even my own taco stand. To quote the Grateful Dead, it was a long, strange trip, and I didn’t even use drugs to get there.

Funny thing about hitting bottom and knowing I couldn’t go any lower
(I refused to go on unemployment because, to me, that would only confirm my failure), a kind of serenity came over me, almost like a sedative. It was like coming to the end of a long and scary roller coaster ride in which I could never get my seatbelt fastened, like one of those horrible dreams. There was a relief, things seemed a bit easier, more stable, now that I was at rock bottom. When you’re at the bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up, unless of course you’re digging a hole and then you can always keep on digging. (If you dug all the way to China would you come out feet first? See, these are the kinds of things you think about when you’re at the bottom.)

Optimism, of course, is a requirement, an ally. I was brought up to be an optimist. My mother spoon fed it to me every morning with my hot chocolate. Both my parents are optimists. They would often say,
“oh, it’s not so somber, things aren’t so bad. Everything will turn out okay.” Even when we lost the restaurant and all their assets they said, “we had a lot of fun doing it and it was a great experience. We don’t regret anything.” Those are some great parents. Crazy perhaps,
but great.

Putting my parents sanity aside for a moment and getting back to the story, there I was, working in a taqueria making tacos, enchiladas and burritos, cooking it all in a microwave, and making about $30 or 40 bucks a day. Strange to say but I actually had fun doing it. It was like a mini restaurant, and even though the kitchen was smaller than one you would find in a in a studio apartment, there were enough ingredients on the shelves to cover the great wall of China, with a combination of aromas that included cumin, paprika, smoked chiles, and cooked meats. It was both a store and taqueria and we sold tequila too, at least whatever we could keep the staff from consuming first. It was owned by my friend Alvaro who took pity on me and let me work there. He was one of my biggest suppliers at Texas Coyote. He had the first tortilla factory in France and was the first to import Corona and Red Stripe beers. He was a good guy, especially in light of the fact that
I had outstanding invoices with him for over $10,000 when they closed my restaurant and he was still willing to help me. Perhaps he was just keeping me alive so he could kill me himself one day. Why let the other guys do it? He is still my friend today amazingly enough. Maybe he still hopes I’ll make good on the money I owe him. Talk about an optimist.

Alvaro was also the biggest promoter of salsa concerts in Paris in those days. He would bring in people like Celia Cruz, Oscar Leon and Tito Puente and pack 2,000 people into a night club, including mine. The number of fights that would occur in a Latin club in Paris in those days was insane. You just knew every night that you would see a few and likely be in one or two of them yourself. And guess who started the most fights? The guys, with their famous machismo? No sir, it was the girls. They were the worst. If you even looked at their boyfriends or husbands, they would come and smack you in the face, and then of course, the boys didn’t want to be left out so they would join the dance – bim, bam, boom. That would last about 2 or 3 minutes until security could get over there. They would break it up, everyone would have some tequila, and 45 minutes later, having forgotten the reason for the fight completely, they are all drinking together and having a great time. It was a very funny atmosphere I can tell you.

Afterwards, of course, everybody would be hungry and so you would end up in the 5th arrondisement, better known as the Latin Quarter where there were all night food stands serving all the drunks of the capital. (Oddly enough, the Latin Quarter isn’t named for the Latin people who go there today, but for the students of the nearby Sorbonne who in the 19th century would have been studying Latin and speaking it to each other as they were out in the evening.) Here in the narrow streets of this charming neighborhood you could expect one or two fights if you were lucky, and if not, then it was time to go out again to the opening of another club at 7 am. But that’s another chapter.

My parents in the meantime, who had lost everything thanks to me, had moved about 45 minutes outside of Paris, with me, to a rundown house that my uncle owned and lent to us so we wouldn’t end up on the streets. The house hadn’t been occupied for years and was very damp and musty. We had to do a lot of work on the place to make it habitable which kept us busy and our minds off the reality of our situation. For example, my father, who had intended to retire, was now forced to go back to work in order to sustain him and my mother. All of their belongings had been seized, everything that is except for a great old watermill they co-owned with my brother in Normandy.

Fortunately, we are not a despairing family, at least not for long. A few tears and then a resounding “it’s going to be okay.” (Yeah, right,
self-delusion can be a wonderful thing to help endure all the mess you find yourself in.) Our morale was tough and unaltered and, we figured, someone somewhere was worse off than us. It’s called the theory of down-and-out relativity, and you don’t need to be a physicist to understand or observe it.       

In the midst of all this I continued to work every day (in France that means 7 days a week lunch and dinner) and eventually managed to save $1100 after several months. I don’t know what made me think that was the magic number but as soon as I had that money I darted to the travel agency and bought my one-way ticket to my rescuer country, the United States of Americans. I left my son, my parents, my brother and little sister and flew away with the determination of someone with a mission to save his family from complete ruin (as opposed to almost complete ruin), as well as escape from a country where I was sure
I could never make it again. I owed so much money that the idea of paying it off at some salaried job was ludicrous. I figured that at the salary I would have been able to earn, taxed at 50%, it would have taken me just under 289 years to pay off. The idea of living that long terrified me. You know what they say; eternity is a very long time, especially toward the end.

I know, I know, I was only thinking of myself but then my options, as
I have pointed out, were rather limited. I would have gladly saved the world too but my plane ticket didn’t go that far and besides, in order to save anyone I had to save myself first. It’s like on airplanes when the flight attendants tell you to place your own oxygen mask on before helping others. You can’t save your kid if you can’t breathe and
I needed more than anything a chance to breathe. I also knew that my son was in good hands, actually quite a few good hands, and what
I needed now was to somehow get my damn oxygen mask on.

Anyway, I now owned something again, a plane ticket to America, really a ticket to begin all over again – “Now calling ticket number 18374536189840809121209477298074762729198-B.” Holy shit, that’s me! Here I go. Let’s see what life looks like now across this giant pond I have to cross, clear the hell on the other side of this huge rock hurtling through space that we’re all standing on (gravity – it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law). I touched down at LAX, a runway to one of the most exciting cities in the world – and not bad to look at either – and perhaps a whole new life. How many times does one get the opportunity to start life over? I know what you’re thinking, that it seems to have happened a lot to me. Well, you’re right, but this time, I had a strong feeling, was the last, and if I fucked up this time I wouldn’t have another chance. And so, round two of my adventures in America began. Fasten your seatbelts everybody, there looks to be
turbulence ahead.

 

 

 

The Limo Driver
Racket Lesson
Now I have stayed
Live and Drive
Les Anges
Leaving LA
Coyote Ugly
Drinking in English

The Bottom
Outline