It’s not quite as kaleidoscopic as serving up shit, certainly, yet there’s a gentle beauty to undermining people in ways they will best understand—in Hector’s Girlfriend’s case, simply being ignored was enough to torture her look-at-me sense of self. Even so, it’s still only paddling in the shallows of possibility. The following are all things I witnessed first-hand, at various fine establishments. May the record note that I would categorically refuse to testify about these in a court of law. In fact, I’d feign amnesia before I reveal the true identities behind these gunslingers for frontier justice.
* * *
VANESSA
I was a first-year medical student working at a bistro when one night a middle-aged man started choking on his steak. His wife was screaming for help and the guy was going blue and the other waiters started yelling for me to help him. I’d only been studying medicine for three months, but I had to grab him from behind and appease the crowd with a vague approximation of the Heimlich manoeuvre. The steak popped out and he started breathing again. I couldn’t believe it when they left a fifty-cent tip. Fifty cents for saving a guy’s life?
* * *
Marco was a regular. Marco was also a close friend of the owner, so he never paid for his meals or drinks. There were lots of them, too; Marco was like one of those parasitic smaller fish that feeds off the larger fish. He was all ‘look after me, look after me’, but despite the freebies he never tipped. Nothing riles a hospitality worker more than a demanding dick-wad riding the freebie train who doesn’t tip—that’s the trifecta, right there. One night when Marco had finished his free rib-eye, polished off his bottle of free shiraz and ordered his free espresso, the bar manager Dave finally had enough. He didn’t say anything. There was no sniggering conspiracy of ‘Hey, guys, guess what I’m going to do?’. Dave nobly and quietly took matters into his own hands when he disappeared, with an espresso cup, around the back to where the staff kept their bags. Dave served Marco an espresso laced with piss. The beauty of it was that Marco was Sicilian. In Sicily, sipping is for sissies, so he drank it in one gulp. He never suspected a thing. And if you’re wondering why Dave pissed in the cup before adding the coffee, it was because he didn’t want to ruin the crema. A true professional.
As the previous example demonstrates, knowing your customers’ foibles will help tailor the perfect comeback. Call it bespoke revenge, if you will. Colin had made a fortune in weed removal. He had the straggly ponytail, the blonde mistress he boasted to his mates cost him two grand a week to ‘keep’, and the manners of a psychotic baboon. He and his lady friend would sit there for hours drinking Champagne and arguing. When the bottle was empty he’d stand on a chair and wave it over his head. That was his version of ‘Please may I have another’. Classy. Anyway, Colin also liked to drink Coopers Red, a beer that naturally comes with sediment in the bottom. You’re meant to leave the cap on and tip the stubby upside-down for a few seconds to disperse it. Colin liked to do this himself. All part of the ritual, you see. Which made it very easy to ease the cap off, replace it so it looked like it was still intact, and present it to Colin. He upended it and promptly covered his pants in a golden shower of beer. It was beautiful.
Costa was the waiter equivalent of a ninja warrior. A master of the dark financial arts. If anyone had pissed him off—and he was always being pissed off—you’d see him writing down their credit card number on a slip of paper and putting it in his back pocket. I don’t know exactly what he did with these numbers, but knowing Costa’s tastes, it was something very expensive.
Attacking people in their financial goolies is always a good move when the Dead Eyes, forgotten order and chair kicking hasn’t made an impact. A business jerk showing off to a bunch of other business jerks is best targeted directly via the hip-pocket nerve. After a night of being treated like a lowly serving wench, Anja only pretended to run the Alpha Jerk’s credit card through the machine. ‘Your card. It’s no good,’ she told the flustered diner in front of the business contacts he was desperately trying to impress. What made it even better was that Anja was German. Just imagine those impassive Teutonic tones, sternly telling the squirming customer, ‘No. You have no money.’
Tony was one of those show-off drinkers. A guy who needs other people to know he’s a top-shelf kind of a guy. His drink of choice was Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky. Expensive stuff, but he’d always drink it mixed with Coke, which is kind of like adding raspberry cordial to Grange. The joke at Tony’s expense began accidentally. We were out of Johnnie Black and I (yes, this is me) grabbed the bottle off the display shelf. I didn’t notice it was actually a stunt bottle full of iced tea—really old iced tea, with all kinds of disgusting floaties in the bottom. When the manager realised I had served Tony a glass of aged iced tea and Coke, and that Tony drank it, smiled and asked for another, it was decreed that he should receive it henceforth. Tony smoked Marlboro Reds, for god’s sake. His palate was shot to pieces. Over the course of a few months he drank his way through the whole bottle.
And then there was the fly. The fly in the bottom of the customer’s long black. A big, fat blowfly that only revealed itself in the last dark dregs of coffee. Reports differ over whether the fly wound up in the cup by accident or design. It was noted by at least one observer that if it was indeed an accident, it was uncanny that it had been camouflaged in a black coffee.
Social media has changed everything, of course. A waiter’s revenge can now be served up as a big steaming pile of ordure on the internet. It’s not as elegant, certainly—there’s always a price to pay when anything artisan goes into mass production. Social media demands that you can still smell the blood. Bystanders want to see the victim thrashing about in the water, pleading for mercy while the shark circles ahead of the final attack. It’s revenge as a spectator sport.
Take, for example, the tale of a New York waitress named Laura Ramadei, who posted on her Facebook page an open letter to the man who put his hand on her bum and asked if he could take her ‘to go’. Using the name from his credit card slip, a quick Google search had revealed Brian Lederman’s occupation (banker—was anyone really surprised?) and her missive struck enough chords that it went viral. In Lederman’s defence, he vehemently denied this particular incident of arse-grabbing when the New York Post came calling (‘I’ve grabbed plenty of girls’ asses in my life, but I’ve never grabbed hers,’ said Mr Charming), and, look, she had provocatively asked his table if they needed anything else. Lederman then responded in the manner of any self-respecting hedge-fund titan: with the promise to make sure she never worked in New York City again.
There is another alternative when it all becomes too much. You could remember the freedom you sold for twelve dollars an hour and all the juice you can drink. The day is churning with possibility. It would be like wagging school on a sunny afternoon. There will be consequences, you’re aware of that; you can see them shimmering in the distance. But you suddenly realise your days have become a thing to climb vertically, something forbidding and sheer. And you feel the tingle that scampers along your vertebrae when you stand on a precipice. It’s the temptation to . . . just . . . step . . . out. To see what happens. This is the thing you will battle your entire life: the lesson ingrained in all children when they understand their only power over the world is contained in the word ‘no’.
A bag describes a parabola as it’s swung onto a shoulder. The action is weighted with meaning. The choice is easy.
— 6 —
IT’S A MAN’S MAN’S MAN’S WORLD
Maybe it’s a genetic thing. The odds stacked against my table-waiting career, I mean. It’s chromosomal. See, I’m XX. That’s my deficiency, right there. I don’t have a dick. I am sans penis.
I’m not saying possession of a Y chromosome will save anyone from the manifold perils of restaurant life. Not a bit. It won’t save you from half-decaf-soy-lattes, from miserly tippers, from summertime thigh chafe. But it will save you from the unspoken query that lurks in the undergrowth of s
o many innocuous tableside negotiations. The query that hums beneath the ‘still water or sparkling?’, the ‘butter or oil?’, the ‘medium or rare?’. The query that grounds your interactions like a bass line. ‘Are you on the menu?’
It’s just different for men, alright? Men don’t cop half the crap women do, not in everyday life and certainly not in waitering life. Yes, waitering. I don’t like the term waitress. It’s only jobs looked down upon as frivolous that get the gender stick waved at them. Waiter, waitress. Steward, stewardess. Actor, actress. Why don’t we distinguish between doctor and doctoress? Because we don’t want to distract them from the business of saving lives, that’s why. Waiter and waitering will do nicely, thanks very much.
But yes, women. We all cop it, us waiters of the female persuasion, whether fat or thin, big or little, up or down. I’ve been sexually harassed by proxy, for god’s sake. A small boy who can’t have been more than three started stroking my legs, moved onto my rump (‘Nice bum, nice bum,’ chanted the wee tyke) and started to rummage around the best china. His parents, you ask? His drunk dad sat on the sidelines egging him on with paternal pride. At moments like that, it takes all your strength not to howl for the future of humanity.
Any male readers might want to skip ahead at this point to the relative safety of Chapter 7; I promise there’ll be no hard feelings. But please stick around, fellas. I’ll try to make it worthwhile. If you do decide to go, take this thought with you: a woman working the floor of a restaurant is a bit like that line about Ginger Rogers. She did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels.
There was a framed black and white photograph on the wall at the Sabatini Cafe. Apparently it’s quite famous: a street scene of 1950s Italy featuring a Sophia Loren type, a va-va-voom human volcano walking down the street, her hourglass figure vacuum-packed into a white skirt-suit. The woman, shot from behind, remains anonymous but the street is thick with men, every set of eyes locked on her and glistening with intent. They look exactly like a bunch of jackals spying a lame zebra limping across the savannah. A bunch of hungry jackals who haven’t eaten in a month. Occasionally a customer would ask me what it was like working at the Sabatini. I’d point wordlessly at that picture.
I meet Eda on my first day. Eda is the apprentice chef. I’m on my break, sitting in the courtyard, flicking through a true crime book abandoned next to the overflowing ashtray.
‘See him?’ she says, pointing over my shoulder at a photo of a self-evidently dead body, supine on concrete in a dark halo of blood. ‘That’s my cousin.’
Eda was an anomaly. Albanian. Traditional. Married. Only nineteen. But tough. Boy, she was tough.
You’ve got to be tough to survive in a commercial kitchen, no matter what your gender is. The unwritten rule is that chicks have to prove they’re as tough as the blokes, if not tougher. It’s a big ask. When they don the chef’s whites men often seem to wind the clock back about 20,000 years. It must be the proximity to naked flame, I’ve decided. ‘Toughness’ is also considered in purely masculine terms. I’ve seen one or two women maintain an unruffled sense of self. They wind up in the pastry section. The way it usually goes is they over-compensate into a parody of the tough chick. You know the tough chick? The tough chick can take it all then give it back, double. The tough chick is a bitch on steroids. The tough chick has a dick. The tough chick is ready to rumble.
Fuck, yes. Yes, fuck. Right fucking away. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.
Eda was creamily pretty, built to the specifications of a porcelain doll, and when she wasn’t saying fuck, given to flirting with Maurizo, the sous chef. Mo responded enthusiastically in kind. He was a pink-cheeked, baby-faced northern Italian who, at the age of thirty, still lived with his parents. They shared a kiss in the coolroom. It was a fairly chaste thing by all accounts, but Eda either had an attack of the guilts or a twisted desire to have a man fight for her honour. Whatever the case, Eda’s red-faced husband arrived soon thereafter to belt the bejeezus out of Mo.
During service, too. That shows he was really mad. Everyone knows you leave personal matters until after 3 p.m.
He burst through the front door bellowing ‘I’m going to kill him!’ which gave Mo a chance to scurry for the storeroom. Humiliatingly, he was dragged out by one leg like an errant puppy. For the next week Mo nursed a black eye and a far more deeply wounded sense of pride. The incident wasn’t spoken of again. Not when Eda was the cousin of Akhmed the Switch who’d taken a bullet to the head outside a city nightclub. Who knew how many other crazy relatives she had who were still breathing?
Looking back, the Sabatini was the kind of place destined to have ‘63 per cent rating on Urbanspoon’ carved on its tombstone but for that moment in time, at least to my impressionable eyes, it was dazzlingly Old World. It was the intersection of spaghetti marinara and romance. It was the place to make you maudlin with Europhilic nostalgia even if the closest you’d been to Florence or Rome was the plaza at Preston Market.
I lived close by, only a few hundred metres up the road. A two-bedroom terrace house shared with three other people, none of whom were sleeping together. It was cosy. To escape our lack of living quarters I’d sometimes collect coins off mantelpieces and down the back of the couch and splash out on a coffee at the Sabatini. At university I’d sit next to kids who’d take a bottle of Grange from their parents’ cellar for a casual dinner with friends, and I was pilfering loose change for a cappuccino. Vive la différence.
The owner, Gino, was a nuggety pit-bull of a man who had arrived on a boat and spent the next thirty years in grim pursuit of the Australian dream. Think of Vito Corleoni, transplanted to Melbourne instead of New York and in the trade of caffeine and cotoletta rather than bootleg liquor and extortion. The Sabatini was Gino going legit. He’d made his money in a few shabby suburban places and this was his big roll of the dice. It worked. In the eyes of this calmly affluent suburb, the Sabatini ticked plenty of boxes: the boxes for gilt-edged mirrors, ‘Nessun Dorma’ and pumpkin risotto. Even walking through the door gave me such a thrill it bordered on illicit. A tingle down the spine that spoke of what life might be when I no longer lived in a house where someone slept in the kitchen. ‘I work at the Sabatini.’ The words trickled off my tongue like honey.
Gino had a thing for his floorboards. A fetish thing. The wood was a deep mahogany, polished until it seemed to glow with its own light source. It was like a ripe olive, ready to burst. And Gino himself was dark and polished and perma-tanned. The floorboards were almost an extension of himself. Adding to the psycho-sexual overtones, he demanded that they be meticulously, scrupulously clean. We swept a dozen times a day but it was never enough. He’d kneel down in supplication, inspect them like an entomologist studying a line of exotic ants, stand up shaking his head sadly and demand yet more sweeping.
Roger the English waiter knew the direct route to Gino’s heart. He ducked out to the back alleyway and brought back a pile of dust that he presented triumphantly as the fruits of his sweeping labours. ‘Yes, Rog-er, very good, Rog-er!’ beamed Gino, trying out a rare smile on a mouth more permanently set into a thin line of disapproval. But the floors were a far greater source of angst than pleasure. For a while there was a waiter at the Sabatini named Cesare. Cesare disappeared, presumably to the bottom of the bay wearing concrete boots. His crime was to knock over a stack of chairs. It was a heart-stopping moment when Gino rushed over to midwife the fallen tower off his floor, lifting it gingerly as though a baby was trapped underneath.
The staff all froze, mid-action, a still life of horrified anticipation. And there it was. A dent in the floorboards. Their mirrored perfection sullied by a 3-centimetre gouge. Cesare knew he was fucked. Gino maintained his composure long enough to get out to the courtyard where he let rip, hurling around everything that wasn’t nailed down while screaming as if his testicles were in a vice. Picture a 68-year-old man roaring like an outboard motor while he throws chairs around like matchsticks. He was strong, old Gino. And he
certainly had a set of lungs on him.
I’m not even Catholic but was tempted to cross myself. There but for the grace of God and all that.
* * *
MELISSA
There was a heavily pregnant woman who was a week overdue—we’d been having a little chat about it when I seated her and five of her friends. A while later one of the waiters says to me, ‘Where did that table go?’ All six of them had gone and the food was untouched. They’d left money on the table but there was a huge puddle of amniotic fluid on the floor, and it had destroyed the floorboards. They could have told us.
* * *
The Sabatini was a family affair. If Gino was the Godfather, his oldest child Arna uncannily mirrored the fictional Godfather’s daughter Connie. Self-centred, spoiled and bossy, Arna was talked of in hushed tones by her Italian family because—sotto voce—she’d almost been an old maid. Over thirty and single: a fate worse than death, or even lesbianism. But then she found someone who agreed to marry her and all was right with the world once more. Ari was six years her junior, an easy-going schlub of a man who had worked with her when they were public servants in some inconsequential government department. Why he married her, I don’t know. Maybe they gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse. The outcome was inevitable. The minute they were back from the honeymoon he was fastened onto the chain gang to take his place in the family business. From the outside he and Arna were a loveless union, although somehow they had managed to conceive Adriano, the first grandson and therefore the Sun King destined to grow up into a hideous brat.
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