Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  Ari looked like a grown-up Mediterranean version of Kevin Arnold from The Wonder Years and carried himself with the bemused air of a man who had popped out to buy milk and suddenly found himself with a wife, a kid and a bunch of in-laws only slightly removed from The Mob. Ari was Greek, which might have had something to do with his disconnect from the family. The fractious history of Greco-Italian relations meant they treated him like the hired help. He wasn’t really One of Them. This was a man sentenced to probation for the rest of his life.

  Ari was sweet but he was a pushover. Possibly none too smart with it, either. He thought the verb ‘capitulate’ meant taking a dump. Each morning when the effects of his first espresso started to make themselves known in his lower intestine, he’d cheerfully announce to whoever was around, ‘It’s that time of day, I have to capitulate,’ and disappear with the newspaper to the men’s for twenty minutes. I’m still not sure which was worse: the serial over-sharing or the crimes against vocabulary.

  A lot of hospitality jobs mimic the trajectory of a doomed relationship. You go through the initial honeymoon phase where it’s all unicorns and rainbows and shared jokes across the bar. When you meet Gino’s son Carlo, another family member sentenced to work day and night for the term of his natural life, he says, ‘I’ve heard all about you,’ and you know he means good things. It’s a warm feeling. A better-than-good feeling. You are officially a professional waiter. You feel so at home you even adopt their idiom, the way they pronounce Italian words with a frightening rise of volume and a determined accent—and here is your ESPRESSO and CANNOLI; most certainly sir, PREGO!—in a way that only italics and capitals can convey.

  But then you start to hear an old, familiar tune playing faintly in the distance. What is it? Oh yes, it’s the saxophone solo from Yakety Sax. And wait, is that Benny Hill skulking in the corner?

  In my version of the story the problem begins with Carlo, a young man who has accumulated twenty-seven years’ worth of frustration at being the indentured servant of a domineering father. Carlo’s life is mapped out for him. He is the Michael Corleone of the Sabatini. A decent man being slowly yet inevitably corrupted by the family business. While he is measuring out his life in coffee spoons, Carlo is looking for entertainment.

  ‘Ari’s in the office. He wants a word with you,’ Carlo says to me one morning. I trot dutifully to the office only to cop an eyeful of Ari changing into his work uniform. It’s possibly more than Arna has seen in quite some time. At least since Adriano was conceived. For the rest of the day, Ari and I avoid looking at each other.

  Another time Carlo orders me to follow him out to the kitchen. I follow him out to the kitchen. ‘What the hell are you following me for?’ he says.

  The chefs jump on the gag. ‘What are you doing following Carlo around like his little dog? Ar-oooo!’

  In their version of the story I might be young and naïve and ridiculously gullible. But it wasn’t just me with ‘victim’ written on my forehead. Another waiter named Jacinta copped it as well. Her tailor-made indignity was the managers all piling into the toilet after she’d used it. Ostensibly they were making sure she hadn’t been taking an illicit cigarette break. I wasn’t a big fan of Jacinta—she was a chronic whiner with a married lover who liked to sit at table eight and watch her; sometimes he’d even bring his unsuspecting wife with him, which appeared to be part of their sport. Still, sniffing the toilet? That seems a bridge too far.

  Things got even blokier with the arrival of Malcolm, a self-styled Casanova waiter with Coke-bottle glasses and a wife whose pregnancy he used as an excuse for visiting hookers each Friday night. An occasion he looked forward to with unembarrassed relish. Who’s it to be tonight, Cassandra the Asian temptress or Monique the French slut? Choices, choices . . . He was the kind of guy who’d trot out the old ‘who’s the mother and who’s the daughter?’ cliché, a line he believed was both timeless and charming.

  Malcolm tipped the Sabatini’s delicate balance of flora over into outright testosterone overload. To use the modern parlance, we reached Peak Bloke. Eventually we abandoned separate sections and triaged diners based on gender. The arrival of an attractive woman would send the male waiters into a huddle at the bar, where they’d analyse her attributes in the kind of detail otherwise reserved for the football. The male customers were all mine. Or was I all theirs?

  The jury has reserved its decision. Exhibit A for the prosecution: Sergio the professional gambler. Sergio arrived every morning at precisely 11 a.m. wearing the trademark shiny green lycra bicycle shorts in which he had power-walked from his house 3 kilometres away. Every morning at 11.05 a.m. Gino would shove me at Sergio’s table, hissing ‘Smile!’ through gritted teeth.

  Sergio was independently wealthy—his words—and in the process of having artwork specially commissioned for his house. The artwork was to be based around his burnt orange feature wall. He wanted me to come and advise. Not only that, he promised he could treat me to a—his words—Champagne lifestyle. ‘You go to his house,’ Gino says. It’s half-question, half-command.

  Gino is confused. It’s a service industry. It’s not the service industry.

  We had a regular for a while who would often sit alone reading Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. It was a best-seller at the time, but in that febrile environment he deserved a bravery award. Years later, after Harry and I had become friends, he told me that he and his mate debated for a long time whether to ask me out but they never had the guts. ‘You always looked so unhappy.’

  You bet I did. The dream of a better working life was crumbling into dust.

  I turn up for my 11 a.m. shift and because it’s quiet Gino commands, ‘You. You start at twelve,’ which is totally flouting workplace laws, but so is the Sabatini’s cash economy. And it was always You. I never heard him use my name. Not once.

  Anyway, it’s a blazing hot day back before global warming became a news story, when Melbourne still greeted each heatwave like an unexpected houseguest. The Sabatini does not have air-conditioning. It’s brutal. Customers are tetchy. No one’s tipping. Six hours of working in a sauna and I’ve paused to grab a cloth to stop the sweat dripping onto my notebook.

  ‘Daydreaming again, huh?’ Gino hisses in my ear. He snatches my pen and hurls it across the bar. It clatters under the espresso machine. I have to get down on all fours to retrieve it from among the historical coffee gunge and dustballs. He stands there looking at me, his eyes glinting with something close to contempt.

  Gino’s older brother Raphael starts working at the Sabatini. Raphael is sixty-nine years old and illiterate. Everyone tells me on the first shift I share with him. ‘Raphael—he’s illiterate,’ they whisper when Raphael is out of earshot, as though he must remain unaware of his inability to read and write lest the shock be too much. Much like a blind person supposedly has super-sharp hearing, his memory has jumped into the breach to compensate, I’m told. You can give Raphael an order for twelve different drinks and he’ll get it right every time. Unfortunately this is a complete fiction. But he is the owner’s brother, and so you must never mention it while patiently reciting the order to him for the third, fourth and fifth time.

  Raphael has a face that reminds you every time you look at it that the nose and ears are the only parts of the human body that keep growing. He wears a permanent half-grin underneath a friar’s bald pate with a desperate fringing of white and blows his nose with a startling honk.

  ‘When you think, do you think in Italian or English?’ I ask him one day during a lull behind the bar, a question intended to display that I have no problem with the fact he is an illiterate peasant from Puglia and that I’m as hip as any Gen-X to oral history, the wisdom of the elders passed down from one generation to the next.

  Raphael’s chuffed. ‘Why . . . why . . . thanks for asking me what I think. Yes, I think. I think quite a bit.’

  Later he hands me a card. It has his name written in childish, spidery letters and an address. ‘Because we both
have next Tuesday off. So you can visit me.’ He looks at me meaningfully. He winks.

  It dawns on me that Raphael is stupider than a bag full of compost. And he has misinterpreted my being-nice-to-the-aged routine as romantic interest.

  ‘Raphael?’ I begin cautiously over a mountain of wet cutlery after the last customers have gone home. ‘You know I’m not interested, don’t you? I mean, it’s the age gap and everything . . .’

  ‘I don’t mind that you’re young.’ Raphael is missing the point somewhat. I decide to leave it. I need to work more on my honesty.

  He has a parrot. Allegedly. The alleged parrot can talk. Raphael likes to imitate the parrot. He walks around the bar squawking, ‘Raphael has a big dick.’ Apparently Raphael’s parrot has done the necessary background checks and discovered its owner has a penis larger than the average human male. ‘Raphael has a big dick.’ It goes on for days.

  A few months later Raphael returns from holiday in the Philippines with a batik shirt, a carton of duty-free Marlboro Reds and a 21-year-old bride. He proudly shows off her photograph. The men congratulate him like he’s just had a child. In a way, he has.

  He tells me about their first intimate encounter in forensic detail. To paraphrase Michael Bolton, maybe Raphael thinks if we can’t be lovers we can be friends. Or maybe he’s trying to show me what is now so cruelly denied. It sounds like something culled from Penthouse Forum, minus the bit that begins, ‘I don’t normally write letters like this but . . .’

  I will spare you the bulk of the story. Suffice to say, it is prolonged and displays Raphael’s eye for intricate detail. It culminates in this: ‘She took my vest off for me. Then I popped her. She was definitely a virgin. Only twenty-one. But she wasn’t too young.’

  The wife does a runner. A 21-year-old Filipina who speaks no English has turned out not to be in love with Raphael after all. ‘She’s crazy!’ he says, twirling one finger around an ear in the globally recognised signal for insanity. ‘She gambles.’

  When I am sixty-nine years old and a much younger co-worker says ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ and maybe even ‘a caffe latte for table twelve please’, I will not assume he wants to get into my pants.

  This I promise.

  One night we go to the casino.

  We go after work. There has been talk. Everyone is going. James the kitchenhand is going. He is a wriggle-thin sinew of a boy with a quick-draw wit. I have a crush on James. So I am also going.

  Sergio tags along. Thankfully he is not wearing his green lycra bicycle shorts. He has changed into pants and a shirt but is no less annoying.

  It turns out James is not going. He was only joking.

  Dammit.

  We wind up at a nightclub of which I remember little, save for two women dirty dancing with each other while most of my workmates ogle from the balcony. I end up back at the Sabatini with Carlo. For a nightcap. Talk turns to Gino and his floorboard obsession. ‘He’s a hard man,’ Carlo says emotionlessly, sunk into his whisky. ‘You have no idea.’

  * * *

  NICK

  A table of six had been going really hard on the alcohol. A bottle of white was sitting in an ice bucket on a stand but then I noticed someone had put the ice bucket on the table. One of the guys gestured at it and said, ‘You should know my wife has been sick.’ I went to remove it but he grabbed my arm and said, ‘No, no, we don’t want to make a fuss, my wife will be embarrassed. Just bring me another ice bucket.’ They spent the rest of the meal with a bucket of vomit on their table.

  * * *

  I am twenty-two years old and have not even reached the base camp of understanding other people.

  Carlo grabs his car keys. ‘Ride?’ I go with him, not even thinking about eight hours’ worth of alcohol sloshing wildly through his bloodstream. He stops outside my house and turns the engine off. Sits looking at me silently. Those dark, inscrutable eyes. Just like his father’s.

  Was anything meant to happen? I’m still not sure.

  You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure out that one of the reasons the restaurant biz is so full of flux, drama and terror is due to the relative youth of its workforce. But maybe it helps. Dispatches from the frontiers of neural science indicate the human grey matter doesn’t reach maturity at eighteen, when you get to legally drink and drive (albeit not together) in Australia, or even twenty-one, when you get to have a massive party involving the presentation of a giant novelty key.

  Turns out it’s the rental car companies that are right on the money. They’ll stick expensive restrictions on any driver under the age of twenty-five. That’s when a person can be considered a fully-fledged adult. The beautifully named ‘executive suite’—the brain’s prefrontal cortex that calibrates things like risk and reward, thinking ahead and regulation of emotion—isn’t fully baked until a quarter of a century after life springs forth. Crazy stuff.

  So therein lies my theory of why the hospitality industry is so fractious. You’ve got an essentially itinerant workforce of young people with under-developed brains, fuelled by alcohol and other substances, smashing about like atoms. It’s a recipe for disaster.

  I’m no brain surgeon but I do have a law degree being eaten by silverfish in a drawer somewhere. The legal concept of contributory negligence is a handy tool when analysing the chaos of the average twenty-something waiter’s life. In layman’s terms it goes something like this: if I can’t even figure myself out, how the hell am I going to understand my co-workers or the customers?

  Through my jaundiced prism, for example, I firmly believed that the well-dressed middle-aged couple who turned up each Saturday in their shiny European convertible were absolute, utter and complete wankers. Why anyone would drink Champagne before noon was beyond me. They did look terribly self-satisfied, which was a permanent mark against them, but now I’m prepared to admit they were ahead of the curve. Brunch is the new national pastime. Australians are brilliant brunchers. Brunching should have been our exhibition sport at the Sydney Olympics. Smug couple, I’m sorry I treated you with disdain.

  And the women I decided were ex-nuns, forced out of the convent by a harsh, patriarchal culture. Two plainly dressed, sensibly shod middle-aged women who came in once a week to order a single entrée risotto between them. I was studying feminist history at the time but clearly didn’t have as vivid a sexual imagination as I might have. Ari hated them. Less because they were probably lesbians, more because he was an absolute tight-arse. If he caught me giving them bread and butter with their one-entrée-risotto-two-plates he’d give me the look he reserved for the local wino who’d stop by to cordially inquire about any half-empty bottles that might be lying around. But I liked sprinkling a little sunshine on their day, even though Ari eventually screamed at me about my ‘stupid fucking bleeding heart’.

  I cried. Of course I cried, despite deploying all my mental tricks—thinking of puppies, feet and violent movies—to prevent it. Crying at work is inevitable if you’re a woman, although the way it’s frowned upon makes you feel like you’ve failed a really important PowerPoint presentation. There’s something brutally embarrassing about crying at work, simply because it’s so baldly human and you’re not meant to be human at work. But it’s not a sign of weakness. It’s not. Women just produce more water in their eyes when they’re sad or angry or even happy. We’re more . . . tidal.

  There are more things to cry about when Roger and Anna, the English waiters and the combined voice of reason, leave to return home. Then Jacinta gets the chop. Somehow I find myself the only female left standing on a speedway of out-of-control masculinity.

  They start sniffing the toilet after I use it.

  I become quiet. And quieter. Then quieter still.

  It does occur to me that there are other places I could feel insecure when walking in the door carrying an apron rolled in its own strings. It occurs to me so violently that I regularly exclaim to my housemates: ‘I’m out of there! Watch this space, I am so gone!’ Marina, who is an appren
tice chef at an Italian place across town, merely nods her head and keeps combing conditioner through her thick blonde hair. Marina has been the ongoing butt of a thousand ‘jokes’ at the hands of a sadistic chef-employer. What I am going through is nothing. And so the inertia that marks the whimpering end of so many relationships betrays me.

  The Sabatini gets to be the dumper. I am the dumpee. Ari calls one afternoon. He sounds awkward. Says it’s not his decision, it’s come from the others. A bold hospo twist on the old dating furphy ‘It’s not you, it’s me’. After I have hung up the phone I cry, and then I am furious.

  I let them win. Dammit. Dammit!

  I have revenge fantasies about Gino. Why Gino rather than Raphael, or Ari, or Carlo? They say a fish rots from the head down. Gino was the head of the fish. Ergo . . .

  Actually I have revenge fantasies about a few people I crossed paths with as a waiter. I try to keep them thematic. Gino’s buys into the whole Italian thing. It’s a Godfather-lite confection, so I’ve got a Luca Brasi-styled sidekick, a hulking yes-man to do my bidding. He’s gaffer-taped Gino to a chair and gives him the occasional slap across the cheek while I go to work with a blowtorch and a set of pliers. Say my name, bitch. Say my name, you dip-shit of a man.