Still Riding on the Storm

by Robert G. Barrett

  Actually, that’s not taking anything away from No Names. It’s tops. I’ve been going there for yonks and taking Edna pooh bag along was giving her a spoil. No Names is where you go if you want a quick, tasty feed of good, gut filling tucker at the right price. And that’s it. There’s plenty of room, windows on the walls, bread on the tables and you can help yourself to the Palmer Street cheese and orange cordial.

  I wasn’t all that hungry for some reason so I decided I’d just have a spaghetti bolognaise, which was a meal on its own. I sat down with my back to the blackboard menu, but it’s all up there. Fish, osso bucco, soup, schnitzel. Not a vast menu, but everything that’s on it is tops, which I think is a good idea.

  I suppose another way to describe No Names would be Italian home cooking. Edna said the restaurant was nice, but if it was Italian, how come there was a Chinese cook and waiter? I said they worked at the No Names on The Great Wall of China and they were on exchange. Edna nodded that was a good idea. She used to be an exchange student once as well. They exchanged her name for a number. None the less, she was a woman of good taste and went for the scaloppine. Both meals arrived along with lettuce salad almost as soon as we sat down and away we went.

  My spaghetti was excellent, as it always is there. No Names is famous for its spaghetti. Evidently, the Gestapo tortured 15 Italian partisans to death during the Second World War trying to find out the recipe for No Names spaghetti. Edna’s scaloppine was beautiful. A stack of tender, sliced beef covered in a rich, lip smacking, finger licking sauce that tasted of oregano and tomato. I dipped a crust in the sauce and Edna gave me some, and I reckon I might go for the scaloppine next time I’m in there. We finished our glasses of cordial and got ready to leave for the theatre. When I couldn’t believe my eyes. Edna jumped up, pulled a rock lobster out of her kick and offered to pay the bill. What a gal. But being an old fashioned chauvinist, I couldn’t cop that, so after a bit of pushing and shoving I produced a twenty myself and settled up. I got around eight dollars change back from the twenty and if that’s not value I’m Richard Gere.

  It was a bit crowded downstairs, so to shut Edna up I let her shout me a coffee at some place across the road. The two coffees were grouse and cost Edna about three bucks. So after all that whining and dining, where does one take a woman as beauteous as the fertiliser queen from the Central Coast? The Nimrod Theatre? The ballet? I took her to see Beverly Hills Cop 3 at the Hoyts Centre.

  Unbelievable. I cracked it for a good movie as well as a good feed. BHC 3 is a bit like No Names — satisfying. Only instead of oregano and tomato sauce on the fare, you get laughs. I reckon even Shere Hite would get a laugh out of this. The start is a crack up. It kicks off in a big garage full of hot cars in Detroit. A chop shop. Being Detroit, they’ve got a ghetto blaster playing Motown tracks and these two fat panel beaters start miming ‘Baby Love’ by The Supremes. It’s a killer. Unfortunately, these are the first ones to get shot. Bit of a shame that. Evidently, just as Eddie Murphy and his walloper mates are about to bust the chop shop on a routine thing, a bunch of baddies arrive intent on killing everybody. And away they go with the best machine gun shoot up I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen some rippers — Rambo 2, Predator, Bonnie and Clyde. This beats them all hands down. And Eddie Murphy proves conclusively that you can get 60 shots out of a .38 pistol without reloading. I remember seeing the baddies reload. Maybe the big feed of spaghetti slowed me down. Eddie could have reloaded.

  Whatever, when they’ve finished shooting up the panel beaters the baddies take off with Eddie after them in a Porsche and they shoot up all the light posts, cars, garbage tins, stray cats, old ladies and the cops. Unfortunately, during the ensuing melee Eddie’s boss done takes a slug in the chest and croaks in Eddie’s arms. So Eddie’s off to Beverly Hills again to avenge the murder of, dare I say it, his mate. His old china plate. Once in LA it takes Eddie about a NY minute to find out the baddies are up to no good in a fun park.

  There’s a bit of frizzle frazzlin’ around, Eddie risks his life to save two kids, gets hold of some heavy ordnance and it’s on. More action and laughs. Naturally there has to be a head baddy, and who better to be head baddy than John Saxon? We’re talking big B baddy here. Even when he tries to be a goody he’s still a baddy. John Saxon is a turd. As soon as he appeared me and Edna banged our feet on the floor, screamed obscenities and threw rubbish at the screen. Then laughed like drains when he got shot amongst all these mechanical dinosaurs.

  But what about Eddie Murphy and his LA cop mate from the other two movies? They both get shot too. At least twenty times each. I counted the bullets! And praise the Lord, they live. They’re both in the last scene when they re-open the fun park. Bit of plaster and bandages here and there, but good as gold and Eddie even gets the girl, despite his wheelchair. Glory hallelujah! It’s a miracle. Whatever. It was still not a bad movie. Heaps of laughs, action and guns going off. What more do you want on a rainy night in Sydney? I asked Edna and she agreed. Not a bad flick. Adding Eddie Murphy looked funny in one part, walking around dressed up as a purple rabbit or something, and the soundtrack was all right: I hadn’t even noticed. How ignorant of me. I apologised to my guest as we picked our way through the empty machine gun casings and headed for the car.

  Edna seemed happy enough when I was driving her home. I asked her if she had an enjoyable night? She said she did. Thanks Bob. You’re a sweetheart. We pulled up outside her flat, she asked me did I want to have a cup of coffee and pick up that bag of fertiliser? There was an old raincoat on the back seat, the car didn’t smell all that good and Edna didn’t look all that bad in her flannelette shirt and matching ugh boots. I thought, yeah, why not? It’s not as if I have to get up in the morning.

  I rang Madam Zelda and told her I wasn’t all that rapt in Edna. Cool Charm, Mum, Domestos. All the feminine protection products in the world. Nothing could remove the smell of fertiliser. Did she have something else on the books? Anything. Just as long as it didn’t stink. So the Zanzibar Dating Agency sent me out to meet Ruby Bindi I at South Maroubra. Ruby was about as fat as me with skinny legs, had brown skin, dark brown eyes and sort of black afro hair with a hibiscus flower behind her ear. She wore a floral dress with a shell necklace and told me she was Tahitian. Yeah that’d be right. Ruby was about as much Tahitian as Yasser Arafat’s the local Rabbi. She was an Abo. Now anybody who reads my books knows they are racist and I hate Kooris. If you don’t believe me see The Boys from Binjiwunyawunya. I mean, I don’t hate our indigenous people because I’m in the Ku Klux Klan or some sort of crypto fascist. It’s just that my goddaughter married an Aborigine and they got these three real good-looking kids. Alinta’s a stunner. And every time I see them I always buy them things. Or if the family calls in, I give them presents and chocolate milk and tell them stories. And they sit on my knee and look at me with these big, brown eyes and call me Uncle Bob. It’s grouse. They did the same thing during a book signing in Lismore when we took some photos after I got them a whole heap of other stuff. When you’re the author of blood and guts, sex crazed books, it’s not very good for the image to be seen laughing with your goddaughter and giving her kids things. So I’ve been crooked on Aborigines ever since. Still, it wasn’t worth letting my bigotry and intolerance spoil the night, and Ruby did make an effort to look nice in her floral dress.

  She appeared to have a sense of humour and if you handed her a ukulele she might’ve passed for a Hawaiian. Or a Maori. I told her I cleaned tripes in a meatworks and I was off on compo. Ruby drove a library mobile and was doing a writing course at the WEA. She’s submitted comedy scripts for TV and radio. Whatever Ruby’s artistic aspirations, I didn’t feel like giving her too much of a spoil so I headed for the Sussex Centre. However, I stopped across from where all the crabs are suffocating to death in Goulburn Street at the doors of BBQ King number 182. I don’t know what made me. Probably the smell. Or more the succulent aroma coming from the takeaway part. The decor is red seats, laminex tables with mirrors and Chin
ese paintings on the wall. The manager screamed hello at us and we were led to an intimate table for two, next to a doorway that looked like a keyhole, then handed a wine list, a pair of wooden knitting needles each to eat with and a menu with what appeared to be the usual, you know what, Chinese dishes. But this place had a feel about it. Soul? Grunge? Aroma? Maybe it was all the punters around us hoeing in, including the staff on their meal break. Ruby reckoned you could always tell a good eatery by the looks on the eaters, and half the fun about eating out was watching the people around you eat. Simple logic there Rube. Everybody certainly looked happy enough. I went for the Emperor Chicken, Ruby chose Roast Duck with Special Sauce. A plastic ice-bucket arrived full of perfectly steamed rice along with two cans of Lift and while we were waiting for the mains Ruby told me that along with script writing, she and her brother once went on That’s Incredible. I asked her what was so good about two alleged Tahitians that they’d go on That’s Incredible. Ruby told the host her brother had a job and she didn’t drink. I was trying to figure out the logic of this when our food arrived.

  I don’t know how to describe my Emperor Chicken. Steamed white in this beautiful, thin sauce and heaped with coriander, chilli and other spicy, Oriental delights. It was that good I reckon it would have made a North Korean general grab a spray can and paint Guns N’ Roses on Kim II Sung’s tomb. It was unbelievable. The meat simply fell off the bones into the sauce and I soaked it up with rice. Bliss, I asked Ruby baby what her roast duck was like and she said Uncle Donald’s nephew never looked so good. I speared a piece with one of my knitting needles and had to agree. Crispy orange skin in a sauce a little thicker than mine. Delish. Ruby and I tore in scattering bones everywhere and before long our table started to look like a schoolyard in Rwanda. As the obliging waiter took one pile of bones away, I remarked on this to Ruby who asked me did I know what the number one record on the Rwandan hit parade was? Mao he’s making eyes at me? No. Tut-Tut-Tutsi-Goodbye. Somehow I failed to see the logic in this too. All up the bill came to around $24.00 with the Lift and rice and both of us were stuffed. I was that pleased I even left a fifty on the counter. Fifty, I say fifty cent coin that is boy. The manager screamed goodbye at us as he opened the door and we headed off into the night. Seeing as Ruby was a budding comic, I thought I’d better see if I could find some sort of comedy. We took in The Hudsucker Proxy.

  This got good wraps in the papers. The Coen brothers’ funniest film yet said one. I don’t know. Maybe they got a better sense of humour than me. One of the reasons I chose this was because the Coen brothers made Miller’s Crossing, a gangster movie with a touch of humour that I thought was great. Again this is shot in the dark coloured, surrealistic Brazil style. Though it’s not as bad as Leon the Pig Farmer and the special effects are good, especially when I live all alone in an apartment on the 99th floor of my block. I’m sorry. I went into Rolling Stone mode there for a moment. It must have been the spices in the chicken. I meant when these people are jumping from the 41st floor of the building in the film. It’s about a Dubbo from Boice, Idaho, Tim Robbins, who comes to NY and gets a job as a crap kicker in this big company then gets booted up to President so the crooked directors can pull a rort on the stock exchange. But the Dubbo from Idaho makes a motza from an invention and throws a Spaniard into their evil works. Then they plot to get rid of him. Jennifer Jason Leigh tarts it up okay as the love interest in this Mae West/Bette Davis fashion and proves she’s got a pretty lithe body in a dream/dance sequence. Paul Newman earns his money easy as the main baddy, and when he takes his shirt off, proves for a codger he’s got a body a lot better than me. Apart from that, I found laughs a bit thin on the ground and the ending is completely over the top. Still, what do you expect for $11.50 a seat. Quo Vadis and a free cheeseburger?

  I asked Ruby what she thought when the lights came on. She replied, she copped it sweet when the Dubbo from Boice invented the Hula Hoop. But when he backed up and invented the frisbee? If the movie had have gone another thirty minutes what would he have invented next? Rubik’s Cube and silicon breast implants. I thought on this as we left the theatre and you definitely can’t beat female logic and practicality.

  Ms Bindi I thanked me for a lovely evening when I dropped her home. She would love to have slipped into the sheer, Bendon lingerie and entertained me on her water bed for a couple of days, but she had to drive the library mobile in the morning and go to her class in the evening. That was okay. I had to see a specialist in the morning about my Mediterranean back and get an X-ray. See you Bob. You too Ruby. Good luck with your writing course. As I drove home I thought it hadn’t been too bad a night. I hadn’t spent $50 and the meal was excellent. And how often do you get to take out a Tahitian truck driver? In fact another few feeds of duck and rice and Ruby would have made a good Wahoo. If you don’t know what a Wahoo is, get hold of one of my books I’m not allowed to plug called Mele Kalikimaka Mr Walker when it comes out in October. If you can’t wait that long, get hold of Carlotta’s book, He Did It Her Way. And you’ll know exactly what I mean.

  I was still having no luck finding myself a girl to help me with this column. Though, with all my bigotry and prejudices, I don’t like this and I don’t like that, it’s fairly understandable. But I’m not really a racist or sexist dog or whatever. You can’t categorise me that easily. I’m what’s known as an existentialistic mysanthropist. In other words, I live in my own little world and hate everybody. Especially fat people. Which, after ringing the Zanzibar Dating Service, is probably why that crab Madam Zelda sent me out to meet Dolores Dumplington, not far from Rose Bay. I’m overweight myself. But Dolores. Forget about all those corny one liners like, she had more chins than a Hong Kong phone book or she had that many double chins she needed a bookmark to find her collar or she got frightened once by her own shadow, she thought it was a crowd chasing her. Let’s just say Dolores lived in a fat house on a fat street, drove a fat car, listened to fat music on a fat radio, watched fat programs on a fat TV set, sat in a fat chair and drank fat coffee from a fat cup which she stirred with a fat spoon. Dolores had straight, blonde hair, horn-rim glasses with Coke bottle lenses and wore a long, cotton dress with R.M. Williams elastic side boots. Dolores was a bit of a beast. And you reckon she couldn’t talk. Somehow or other I managed to jemmy her into the front seat of the Holden and she never shut up from the word go. I would have liked to have said something, it was like trying to get the last word in with an echo. Though Dolores did mention she was doing something about her weight problem. Aerobics? No. Earlier that morning she’d dropped two 40mg Duromine tablets. Two 40mg Duros! Dolores had enough speed pumping through her fat veins to keep a rave party going for a week. No wonder she couldn’t shut up and sweat kept dripping down her double chins and sogging up her armpits. I’d end up on a murder mutilation charge with that Zelda. Still, Dolores’ pill popping could possibly be to my advantage. She wouldn’t be hungry and I’ll save my money. But she said she felt like a bit of a snack, some Chinese. So seeing as it was a Tuesday and I’d fluked a parking spot just near Paddy’s Markets, I wheeled the fat speed freak across the road to the Park Chinese Restaurant.

  It said on the menu, ‘To the patrons. Welcome. For without your graceful presence Park Restaurant Sydney would be like a garden without flowers’. Graceful presence? I don’t think they had Dolores in mind when they wrote that. I didn’t like the Park Chinese Restaurant. I mean it wasn’t the food, the service or the surroundings. It was all first class. Lots of room, high ceilings, big tables with crisp, white covers. A well-stocked bar, tanks full of fresh seafood if you want. That was the trouble. It was all too nice. I like a bit of grunge in a Chinese restaurant. I like to get abused and have the food thrown in front of me. And especially after living on the Central Coast. When people are polite and treat you with respect it can be rather disconcerting. But for the sake of the column I suffered being treated like a valued customer. I wasn’t all that hungry so I just went for Garlic King Prawns, a glass of lemonade a
nd a large fried rice between us. Dolores chose the Steamed Duck Combination, apple juice and a jug of iced water. While we were waiting Dolores told me she was a public servant on some sort of compassionate leave. I said I was a professional punter; which was why I drove a second-hand Holden with no wheel rims. As she rabbited on I noticed groups of Asian diners sitting around us cooking their own food at the table on a kind of burner. It looked interesting and I wouldn’t mind going back to the Park Restaurant one day and sampling it out. Our food arrived with a smile and my garlic prawns were delightful. Plenty of them, and plenty of garlic on a bed of crispy onions. I couldn’t fault them and the fried rice was almost a meal on its own as well. Dolores’ Steamed Duck Combination had pork, squid, prawns and all sorts of things in it besides duck and was almost enough for two. I managed to snooker a couple of pieces from the rich sauce and it tasted pretty good. Dolores must have thought so. She ate everything including a last grain of rice sitting on my lapel then started to lick the pattern off the plate. All up the bill was around $38.00 and well worth it. As I watched Dolores waddle out the restaurant I was glad it didn’t have a revolving door, because Dolores had a backside like a dumptruck full of meat pies and gravy and if she’d have got stuck I reckon the building would have started to spin around. I needed a laugh after this so despite the risk of giving Dolores a heart attack I walked up the slight hill in George Street to Greater Union where we saw The Ref.

  The main reason I chose this movie is because I like Judy Davis. Okay, she hasn’t got a mouthful of million dollar, Hollywood teeth like Farrah Fawcett, and she broods and she appears to be a bit of an ex-NIDA ham. But she’s a great actress with a lot of presence and perfect timing. In fact this whole movie revolves around timing. Everybody times and delivers their lines perfectly. If you know anybody in the showbiz scene, ask them to tell you the joke about timing and you’ll know what I mean. The movie is set at Xmas. Dennis Leary bungles a burglary and gets his backside chewed up by a Rottweiler so he kidnaps Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey who are just on their way home from a meeting with Mr Wong, their marriage counsellor. The therapy session and what Davis and Spacey end up saying to their marriage counsellor is a riot. Leary takes them back to their house at gunpoint where they await the arrival of their son, who’s a blackmailer, mother-in-law and the rest of the family, which makes me glad I’m a miserable old bachelor. The laughs and lines come thick and fast and just as the film appears to dip a bit in the middle, Judy Davis gets full of plonk and the whole thing takes off again. I roared at times and Dolores’ double chins were going up and down like a deck of cards being shuffled. In fact, Dolores was a bit more hip to the re-bop than I thought, because she pointed out to me that Dennis Leary sang that song ‘I’m an Asshole’ and wrote the book There’s No Cure For Cancer.