What I Learned Growing Up in the Suburbs of Paris

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

The last time I was in Nanterre was a little more than a month ago. That weekend, I spotted Raymond Domenech enjoying a four-cheese pizza at a local restaurant. Rumor has it that the former soccer coach is hiding out in a nice little house close to the Nanterre-Préfecture train station. Which isn't that strange because, just like any other suburban town, everything in Nanterre is all jumbled up together. The rich live right next to the poor, the social housing blocks are right next to pricey semi-detached houses, and Catholic churches rub right up against shiny new mosques.

It hasn't always been like that, though. People who've been living out there for a long time are full of stories from "the good ol' days"—about how it used to be a slum and, of course, May of '68. Maybe when I'm older, I'll be full of tales about the 2002 town council massacre or the fact that the media dubbed it a "cannabis hub." Who knows? Whatever you want to call the place, Nanterre is the town where I was born and bred.

Read: France's First Cannabis E-Cigarette Is Completely Legal

I remember it clearly. The blast made my windows shake. A few hundred meters from where I lay sleeping, a gas leak had completely demolished a building. That's probably my first childhood memory from Nanterre. The second time a noise got me out of bed was when some guy tried to climb up my balcony. He came from the building across the street and had clambered up the tree in front of my window. When I popped my head outside to see what was going on, he got so startled that he fell down into the garden and scrambled off, panicked, looking for a new place to hide. Whatever problem he was facing was a symptom of "Le Bateau"—the gigantic concrete mass of social housing that faced the humble residence my parents bought in the early 1980s.

Terms like "violence" and "insecurity" are lost on me. I've never had any trouble in Nanterre—or anywhere else, for that matter. Even though I was a skinny 85-pound teenager who stumbled around in baggy pants with a Walkman eternally plugged into my ears, no one ever bothered me. I never really thought twice about those guys running the streets surrounding my house. They were just my neighbors. Some of them were even my friends in primary school. It took me a long time to understand the intricate shortcomings of the French educational system, the rife unemployment, and the boredom that drove them to live that life. I guess when the first person you meet walking outside your door is a guy who spends his entire day hanging out right there, in your hallway—there's quite a good chance that you'll end up befriending him.

I'm rarely scared. The only time I've ever cried out of fear was on my very first day of secondary school at this private Catholic institution in Rueil-Malmaison. The sheer immensity of the school campus, the gigantism of the buildings, and the fact that I was surrounded by boys was terrifying to me. To this day, I have no idea how I was ever able to adapt.

There is no shortage of stories from that school. There's the one about the priest who had fooled around with one of the pupils. Or the student who jumped off a bridge. It seemed as if all of my classmates had grown up with divorced, separated, or absent parents. For the latter, it was easiest just to chuck their kids into a boarding school and forget about them. All of these kids grew up to be insecure adults.

There were also those pupils who would lose it because they weren't at the top of their class. Their parents had stuck them there as if they were some sort of real estate investment. The kids were well aware that their parents were expecting a healthy return on that investment. Which, when you've just turned 12, is a lot of pressure.

When you spend your entire youth around boys, you learn to fool everyone into believing that you're much better at things than you actually are. This is true just as much for the bourgeois as for the suburban boys. If you tell someone that you play soccer, then they're going to tell you they play for PSG. If you mention you hooked up with—let's say, Marie-Charlotte—then, all of a sudden, your mate happened to score Madonna last weekend.

The fact of the matter is that when you go to a boys' school like mine, girls aren't exactly accessible. They all lived in their own camp way over on the other side of the school campus. If you were ballsy enough, you could sneak around the woods or cut a whole in the fence to catch a glimpse of them—all the while worrying that the security guard and his dogs would find you. Otherwise, you had to wait until the day was over to go stand in front of their school doors and wait for them to come out—of course you never actually talked to them. I always figured that the guys who hung out in front of my apartment block probably had the same problem because there were never any girls around them either.

Personally, I was in limbo: I was too poor for any girl who came from the nearby Le Vésinet neighborhood and too well-off for a girl from Nanterre. I was always caught between these two social classes—probably one of the key factors that rendered me incapable of properly getting involved in social interaction. So I developed a taste for solitary activities. I'd spend my time listening to music and hoping to become the next Tom Araya, watching movies and imagine I'd grow up to be the next Kubrick, playing football so I could be better than Ginola. Well, that and spending hours on public transportation realizing that I'd probably never amount to any of these things.

Growing up in the suburbs is a study in the art of patience. Even something as simple as just going out became a challenge: We'd have to take a bus, then another bus, then walk for at least 30 minutes trying to find anything fun happening. There was a club we liked to go to called l'Enfer—but to get there we'd have to take the train for an hour. And even then, when we actually made it, there was no guarantee we'd be allowed in. When we actually managed to enter, we'd have to stay out until 6:30 in the morning so we could catch the first Metro home. One night, I missed the last bus and ended up having to walk for three hours.

Back then, Paris wasn't my city but I really wanted it to be—more than anything else in the world. Maybe because it wasn't tangible to me—it was more of an idea. A place where something was always possible, no matter who you were or what you were doing. Those nights that I went to Paris with my friends just depressed me. I'd look at the people sitting around the local bars enjoying their long evenings and there was me—having to head back to my static, narrow suburb.

For plenty, the suburbs are something to be proud of—I mean, how many people have written or rapped about coming from a place like that? Is the place we come from, in some way, a synonym for who we are? Probably.

I just never understood why the ones who came from the suburbs were the same ones burning the place down. I guess we are all consumed by the rage of having built a universe and a lifestyle that we ended up hating because of the loneliness and frustration that come with it.

The sort of frustration that makes you hate your next door neighbor, the guys hanging out in the staircase, the kids living in the opposite building, the people in the suburban town next to yours and so on. Some people have ended up trapped in this hate. But if you only know one way of life—one made up of acting like a big shot and being a dick to basically anything that moves—then it's hard to believe that there's any other way to be.

Le Bateau has since been demolished. My boys' school has become a mixed school. My friends—well, many disappeared along with the concrete housing block. It's not like I feel nostalgic or anything, but most of the things I've learned about life have come from my childhood in the suburbs. So, I guess a small part of me will be there forever.