3 Life Lessons From The Red-Light District.
Or, why my first muse was a pimp named Moustache.
When I graduated university, my plan was to become a foreign correspondent. I’d managed to land an internship at a newsroom in Paris, only to learn hours after my plane landed that budget cuts were abruptly shutting it down. My would-be colleagues had known for over a week; it was only after I arrived to a gloomy office filled with moving boxes that it dawned on them — and, very quickly, on me — that everyone had forgotten to tell the intern.
It was 1999, I was twenty-one years old, and without enough money for a return flight.
By the following afternoon, I was sitting in a bar nursing a shandy (yeah, a shandy) on the corner of what appeared to be a rather standard Parisian street, having ambled haphazardly for most of the previous day. The manager was bored before I’d finished introducing myself, but sensed my desperation. “The pay is terrible,” he said, cutting me off. “But okay. Come back at nine.”
By the time I returned later that evening, my mistake was literally blinking over my head in neon lights — in the daylight, I’d somehow missed that this bar, an otherwise chummy English-style pub, was in the heart of Paris’ notorious red-light district.
With a sinking feeling, I surveyed the length of the street. The area had none of the romance or pageantry of its older, more respectable sister, the Moulin Rouge. Here, the atmosphere was perfunctory, clinical, detached, but unmistakably about sex and little else. And the bar — my new internship— was the last port of purity in a sea of skin.
It would become the best job I ever had.
I met Moustache because a young Algerian man asked me for a lighter one morning as I walked home from work. Though I didn’t smoke, out of embarrassment I pretended to search my pockets before coming up empty. His expression immediately turned to poison.
When I replay this moment, which I’ve done often since, I assure you there was nothing in my tone worthy of such a reaction; at worst, my reply was polite. Most likely, it was unnecessarily apologetic. I’m Canadian.
The Algerian made a sucking sound behind his teeth and said, “Should I slit your throat then?”
This particular constellation (Algerian teen/5 AM/slit throat) wasn’t among the several dozen I’d previously rehearsed in my mind while daydreaming about the various ways I’d fend off a theoretical attacker.
Even more disappointing — in real life, I possessed none of the confidence or charisma I assumed I’d call upon during such an encounter. There was no finger jab to the eyeball or elbow to the larynx. No parting quip over my shoulder as I jogged away casually from my now incapacitated would-be assailant. Instead, my skin turned cold. My feet got heavy. We stared at each other, waiting.
And here’s the moment when everything changed: no sooner had I frozen to the spot than a soft voice behind me ended the assault before it began.
“No,” it said. “You shouldn’t.”
Moustache.
Moustache was a short, compact man in his early forties, born to a Moroccan father and Albanian mother. His namesake mustache was so thick, dark, and comically lustrous that it almost appeared glued on, yet remained an obvious source of pride.
I would later learn that Moustache was the head pimp along Rue St Denis, and that over twenty years he’d managed to stake a claim for most of the women, one way or another, and therefore almost all of the money.
Every day at noon he’d settle himself in to a place at the bar, immaculately dressed in suits that suggested banker more than bordello. He’d order two or three drinks, never pay, but stuff a tip into the hand of whichever bartender served him on his way out. Some days he’d sip quietly, staring across the bar at nothing and no one. Other days he’d lean in, tap his fingers on a coaster and say, “Alors?”. This simple opener—my invitation to talk—became the beginning of an education that I’ve called upon countless times since.
3 Moustachisms For Better Living
#1. Ask real questions.
There’s nothing I dread quite as much as an enforced social gathering (office party, school bake sale, whatever) where the setting or circumstances don’t allow for any kind of meaningful interaction. I hate any form of small talk. Plus, I’m terrible at it.
Moustache had a habit of asking questions that veered well beyond our agreed upon level of social intimacy. That said, I looked forward to them regardless. They were real conversations, and they set the bar for the kinds of interactions I’m still seeking out today.
To wit: Moustache would never ask, “How are you?”. He’d ask, “What does it feel like to be a bartender when you were supposed to be a journalist?”. He’d never say, “I like your shirt.” He’d say, “You seem like you’re trying hard to impress someone. Who?” He would also draw parallels back to details from very old conversations in a way that made everyone feel simultaneously violated and understood. The head brewer at our bar was a displaced Scotsman who almost never spoke and literally hadn’t interacted with any customer in over five years. “Neil!” shouted Moustache after him one afternoon, “This beer is flat. I know you think you’re stuck, but you aren’t. You dropped out of art school and followed a woman to Paris. She’s gone. That happens. So make this beer your new art! She’s never coming back but this terrible beer is right in front of me.”
I know what you’re thinking: Moustache sounds like a colossal dick. His brand of back-and-forth is clearly its own form of power play by a man used to controlling people. But that’s only part of the truth. He was also just profoundly bored by the superficial-masking-as-sincere, likely because he otherwise sold the superficial-masking-as-sincere to hundreds of men every day.
Bottom line? When in doubt, get into it. Stop talking about nothing, especially with people you don’t know well. Everyone is fascinating until you start asking them boring questions. Don’t. I probably had a thousand interactions a week working at the bar — in fact, I was explicitly paid to chit-chat with the customers—but I only remember the ones I had with Moustache, and still do, down to the pauses and asides, some fifteen years later.
#2. Say it out loud.
If you can set aside the gender politics of the sex industry in general — and for the sake of this story you unfortunately need to — Moustache largely rose to power because he out-observed his peers. Through nurture and by necessity, Moustache was incredible at reading a room and averting disaster or mutiny. He picked up on everything — a nervous twitch, a flash of envy, a swallowed fury. But more to the point, he immediately addressed those things.
One morning, a couple months into my job, I arrived at work to find a fellow bartender standing outside the bar, jumbling through his bag. “Bugger,” he said. “I left my keys at home.” I almost never worked the early shift, and for that I was thankful—nothing is more depressing than serving alcohol at 10 AM. That said, I was unaccustomed to the rituals of actually opening the bar up each morning, and was certainly never given a set of keys myself. “Well,” he said, giving up, “Let’s go ask Moustache.”
For reasons that are still unclear to me, Moustache apparently had a spare set of keys to our bar; one of the few in the area he did not wholly or even partially own. This was understood as a simple fact, neither questioned nor remarked upon. I followed him into the strip joint directly across from the bar and one of the few open this early — or this late, depending on what time you entered.
There were mercifully few patrons and no active dances. I wasn’t puritanical, but I also didn’t have the energy that morning to feign indifference. That said, of all the things I expected to see behind the black felt door, the one thing I didn’t expect is what we stumbled upon: a business meeting.
Moustache, and about eight dancers, were sitting together around a large table. My friend and I stood off to the side, waiting for an opportunity to interrupt. The dancers were airing grievances, and Moustache was listening to each with such extreme focus that I almost couldn’t breathe. I was rapt.
If you could look past the tassels and false eyelashes, this meeting was indistinguishable from the hundreds of traditional business meetings I’ve since attended. They discussed what was going right, what was wrong, where revenues were growing and why, and how things might evolve in the future.
But what struck me the most was how Moustache kept redirecting the focus from the conversation to its subtext. When two dancers began disagreeing about the justice of how shifts were being allocated, Moustache interrupted and pointed out that the two seemed needlessly competitive with each other — but that he felt like the pay structure within the club helped create that situation. Suddenly the tenor of the conversation shifted; the girls felt partially relieved of their rivalry and could instead talk about ways of redesigning the system that had tacitly encouraged it.
Once I landed jobs I could actually put on a CV, I noticed a pattern. The people I was most drawn to at work were, like Moustache, those would acknowledge what was actually happening in a room. When a meeting got tense, they’d literally say, “Hey, we’re letting things get tense because everyone’s worrying about blame.” Or, when it was clear no one wanted to disagree with a piece of strategy, I had one boss finally say, “Who’s brave enough to challenge me here, because honestly I’m not totally sure of my direction.” More recently, on a frustrated conference call that was devolving into an accusatory who-said-what-to-whom-and-why, a colleague interrupted with, “You know, who cares? We all kind of screwed this up, and we know it. So let’s come up with a really clever way out, and then let’s laugh about it.”
Moustache was the first to show me the power of saying things out loud, right away, and aiming straight for the bit that is making everyone most squeamish.
#3. Look until you see.
Here’s the strangest one of all. Moustache, rather improbably, had a five-year-old son (the product of an uncharacteristic encounter with one of his dancers, who birthed and promptly fled the quivering newborn).
Moustache assumed full custody and led him gently around the 2nd arrondisement with all the reverence of a priest. I remember the little boy as unusually beautiful, with brown, buttery skin and a delicacy to his limbs and movements. Here’s the unreliable part: in my memory, the five-year-old has a thick, silky moustache, too, sitting demurely in miniature above his gently curving lip.
The women of St Denis fawned over Moustache’s son. He understood nothing of his father’s business, save that each stroll along that particular street resulted in a cacophony of unwelcomed kisses and squeals from overly perfumed women. “Moustache! Bring him to me! I’m next! I’m next!” they would holler, leaning out the doors of their clubs, kneeling and cooing into the flushed face of a little boy. In those moments, Moustache looked about as complete and proud as anyone could.
I don’t know why I was so surprised that Moustache was a doting father; though even as we became friends, a part of me still wanted to think of him as a monster, as inseparable from his trade. When I asked why he thought he was so enraptured with his son, he shrugged absentmindedly and said, “How could I not? I wasn’t fathered myself.”
In my role as a journalist, later as a designer, and now as an entrepreneur, I chide myself each time I fail to see people in full colour, even, or perhaps especially, when I’ve felt wronged or underestimated. My biggest lesson from a year working in St Denis was simply that — neither Moustache, nor the women on his stages, nor even the men who paid them— were as easy to define or diminish as I would have liked.
Insisting on the multidimensionality of everyone around you, whether they just screwed up your coffee or your career is, I promise you, a profound relief. You connect more dots. You consider your words. And you find yourself so full of forgiveness that it becomes easy, effortless. Both for others and even, every so often, for yourself.
These were the gifts of Rue St Denis. I’m still unwrapping them today.
I’ve only returned to the bar once since I left Paris. It was just over a year ago, and while the bar itself was as run down and weathered as I remembered it, the street seemed cleaner and less remarkable. Moustache is gone. Many of the clubs have closed; in their place are a strange portfolio of newcomers — a Chinese laundry, a flower store, a Baby Gap.
I carry with me a lot of nostalgia for that era of my life — some false, some amplified by time, but most very real, very true. Looking back, I still can’t imagine that another job could ever so profoundly shape or challenge me as did my very first. Does anyone?
