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Last night was my first time at the casino.
Photographed by Oliver Hadlee Pearch,Vogue, August 2021
It was the most incredible night of my life.
I wrote these words in my diary late in the summer of 2018.
I grew up in High Wycombe, a town 30 miles from London.
I was raised with old-fashioned Christian values, and I spent a lot of time in church.
I enjoyed the sense of community but struggled with some of the teaching and the rigidity of purity culture.
I spent the majority of my time outside of school in ballet classes.
In my search for someone to relate to, I became obsessed with literary outsiders likeOscar WildeandJames Baldwin.
But it was Anais Nin who captivated me.
I readHenry and Junea dozen times, amazed to find so much of myself reflected in the pages.
I wanted to write novelsthat was always clear to me.
When I was 21 a foreign world opened up like a tea flower.
Id already dropped out of school, and we were out in London celebrating my mums birthday.
Before long, we were spending all our time together.
Some clubs even slid you a percentage of the profit when a man bought you a drink.
All you had to do was get dressed up and go out with your friends.
My favorite club wasMaddox.
I wrote down disjointed accounts on hungover mornings, reaching for the laptop under my bed.
Sometimes I wrote in my friend Danas shared house, with her asleep beside me.
He went upstairs to call his wife first.
Dana and I swapped dresses in the bathroom.
We ran away once we got to the club: Libertine.
I told Dana I felt cruel.
If he expected anything else, thats his problem.
And besides, shed said, hes obviously a creepwho brings a notepad to a nightclub?
When someone offers you Champagne, you drink itthats what she said.
Id go out nearly every night and wake up at noon.
If Holly Golightly had lived in London in 2018, our lives might not have been so different.
I no longer had anything to do with boys my own age.
None of this was out of the ordinary in our circle.
We stood on the corner of Piccadilly Circus.
It was maybe midnight, though Id lost my sense of time somewhere around my third margarita.
I did wonder why we were going to a casino.
Neither of the girls had ever expressed any interest in blackjack.
The manager signed us up with memberships as soon as we arrived.
Not them, the short man said when an anxious-looking waitress began to approach us.
Hes a sheik, a bartender told me on my way to the ladies room.
Hes here every summer.
When I returned Georgia was holding my handbag for me.
Were going for a ride, she said.
Georgia took the front seat and control of the music.
But to employ one of the many applicable cliches, not all that glitters is gold.
And then there were the super rats.
Beyond the sparkly center of our world were dark shadows at the edges.
These were weeklong gigs that paid thousands a day.
There were no rules.
There were plenty of rumors.
he insisted and knocked on our door continually, saying, Dix minutes, girls!
Life as a professional party girl was beginning to lose its luster.
I got a boyfriend my own age and enrolled in a new degree course in social anthropology.
I wanted a different adventure.
But still I didnt look back on my time as an image girl with regret.
There had been moments so perfect they still glow in my memory, unextinguished by time and perspective.
Youth and beauty are lucrative, transient assets.
The opportunities to cash in are hard to resist.
Youth and beauty are lucrative, transient assets.
They dropped us off a few streets away, and we ordered a taxi to take us home.
But it took years for the ending of that night to emerge in my memories.
For years it was just the Champagne and the convertible that I remembered.
I didnt even write about it in my diary.
Celine Saintclareis the author of the new bookSugar, Baby.
