* * *
Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I rang one Saturday afternoon. Criminally, I was rostered on that night. ‘Sal . . . It’s just getting too much. With uni work and everything. I’m going to have to quit.’
There was silence on the other end. Four seconds, five seconds. Deathly silence. I coughed nervously. I wondered if he’d hung up in disgust. Then Sal came back. ‘Yeah . . . sure.’ It was the last bit that killed me: ‘I understand.’
Other chefs would have been angry being left in the lurch at such rudely, obscenely late notice. They would have given a huge, expletive-laden smackdown. They would have used my cowardice as the perfect excuse to release the pressure valve on the stress bubbling inside. But Sal said it so gently. There was a world of understanding in that ‘I understand’. He was a good man, Sal. He didn’t deserve his fate.
It was at Niente that I came up with a brilliant idea to help fledgling restaurants when they’re at their just-open most vulnerable. There was plenty of time to observe the world through the plate-glass window and watch people walking along the street. When they got to Niente they’d pause. Everyone pauses at a new business. People always get excited about new ways to spend their money. It’s one of the reasons capitalism won the Cold War. They’d look at the menu taped to the window. It read okay. Italian bistro 101, a boring but sound collection of arancini, beef carpaccio and chicken involtini. It worked just fine at the Sabatini, so why didn’t it work here?
Here’s the thing. Restaurants generally get one shot. I don’t mean one shot at critics. Critics aren’t the real concern. Maybe a critic will come in. Maybe not. It’s not so important. It’s the locals whose hearts and minds you want. The everyday people who make or break restaurants are generally willing to take a punt. They’ll visit once in the spirit of neighbourhood loyalty. If they like it they’ll return and, more importantly, they’ll tell their local friends, who will tell their local friends, and so on. It’s like throwing a rock in a local pool and watching the concentric circles go further and further out. But Niente actively repelled people. Most passers-by who peered in the window would recoil in horror, partly at the décor but mostly at the empty room. I could read it on their faces. A big, fat NO.
Of course some would walk straight in before realising their mistake. It’s embarrassing to turn on your heel and walk out, so the overly polite would suck it up, sit down and take the menu being shoved in their faces. That was my job. To get people to stay. To put myself bodily between them and the door. To cut off their escape route while grinning like an idiot and reciting the evening’s specials. I was a combination of bouncer, pimp and Andrew O’Keefe on Deal or No Deal.
I felt bad for the people who did stay—like the elderly gent who sighed and said, ‘If it matters so much to you, dear,’ then surrendered himself to house arrest. Diners cajoled, begged and forced into seats would sit there miserably, in emotional consort with owners who were obviously bleeding from every orifice in some mutation of restaurant ebola. The bolder ones who walked into our web of despair would then slink around pretending to inspect the new joint, but with all their energy focused on edging for the door. The restaurant equivalent of ‘I’m just browsing, thanks’.
Which made me think: what about monetising the rent-a-crowd?
To some extent this already happens. It’s known as the opening-night party, where the liberal application of Free Stuff lubricates the pleasure receptors of bloggers and journalists, who then go home and hopefully write glowing things before the booze wears off. But take it a step further. How about paying people—secretly, of course—to sit around eating, drinking and making like they’re having a whale of a time? Do it each night for as long as it takes the general public to catch the good-time virus. It would be like a flash mob for the restaurant scene, only without the dancing. It would be like the laugh track for a sitcom, only not annoying. Everyone passing by would look in and think, ‘Gotta get me some of that.’ Humans are pack animals, after all—or at least we were, until the internet came along and turned us all into introspective halfwits tapping away on tiny screens while ignoring the world around us. But we’ll get to that later.
And what of Sal and Ron, you ask? By the end they were as defenceless as baby sea turtles, flapping uselessly for their lives along a scorching stretch of sand as the gulls swooped and pecked. I drove past sometimes and the augurs of doom were painted on the window for all the world to see. From ‘brand new menu’ to ‘kids eat free’ to ‘free glass of wine with every main course’, from being open lunch and dinner seven days a week to just dinner, to just Wednesday to Sunday, all the while inching inexorably towards the grave.
Salvatore was forced to go back to working in someone else’s kitchen. Talk about the world’s biggest comedown. When you’re still on the pans each night at the age of fifty, it means something has gone horribly wrong. Every year spent in a commercial kitchen exacts a terrible toll on the body. Oh, the back. Oh, the legs. What do you do when you’re sixty, older? It had been his one shot, and it had blown, badly. I saw him a few years later, in the supermarket late one night. It was Sad O’Clock, the hour favoured by drunk uni students, druggies and insomniacs. His basket was filled with microwave meals for one. I’ll blame it on survivor guilt that I tried to slip away unnoticed into aisle six, but he waved me down. Genial to the end. I asked about Ron. Turned out Sal had survivor guilt of his own. He shook his head. Cursed himself for leading his brother along the merry road to hell. ‘It turns out no one wants to hire an overweight 56-year-old with hearing problems,’ he sighed bitterly. ‘Who woulda thought?’
Time and fashions move on. That stretch of neglected shops has become a buzzing restaurant hotspot, the sort that people get in their cars and drive across town to visit. Wannabe restaurant and cafe owners are paying above-market rent to secure their stake in the gold rush. As for the former Niente, it was snapped up by an Indian family who make a good living buying failed restaurants for a song and turning them around. Buy low, sell high. That’s the creed. It’s now a Teflon-coated success story with a queue out the door. The bit that really bites? It’s Italian.
— 8 —
BABY GOT BANDWIDTH
By this time I’m working in an internet bar, although I have no idea what Linux is. Actually, scratch that—Linux is the kid from the Peanuts cartoons, right?—but my cyber-gag doesn’t go down well with Altus the militant hippy. Altus gazes at me pityingly through his web of dirty blond dreadlocks before bowing his head back over a computer screen embedded in the bar. Altus is so busy saving the world from itself he has no time for frivolous things. A sense of humour, for starters. Money, for seconds.
He’s been one of the Base Station’s repeat customers from the day it opened, but he is also the living symbol of why it is doomed to fail. Anyone over the age of eighteen is welcome to use the computers, which are free albeit reliably dodgy thanks to the mysteries of the Linux operating system. All they have to do is buy something. Anything at all. The Base Station is deliberately non-prescriptive. The owners, a couple in the twilight of their youth breaking free from the invisible shackles of soul-sucking corporate jobs (now where have I heard that one before?), had imagined an energised community of like-minded people jawing over beers and sharing the latest information about—oh, I don’t know, hacking, and the evils of Microsoft, and code or something—but the reality is only slightly less engaging than the drooling demented wearing adult nappies in a nursing home. No matter how gloriously the interweb glows in three-dimensional technicolour with freaks and geeks, flame-throwers and perverts, everyone confronts the online universe alone.
In the future, the internet cafe ought to be studied as an anthropological blip that flared and sputtered out due to technology’s relentless forward march. They sprang into being—the first was in Seoul, the second in San Francisco—thanks to humanity discovering it urgently needed to communicate all sorts of vital things RIGHT NOW, such as celebrities with cellulite and cats that lo
ok like Hitler. And then they were rudely superseded by the very technology they celebrated. They’re the Beta video of the hospitality world.
The internet cafe wasn’t the only weird hospo-hybrid of the 1990s. Businesses that tried to combine everyday tasks with socialising became a bit of a thing. It was as if a general expectation arose that the boredom could be drummed out of workaday life with the liberal application of downlights and swizzle sticks. This is the era when the bar laundrette also made a fleeting appearance. History now relates that ‘edgy’ and ‘fabric softener’ are not terms that mesh naturally together, but that didn’t prevent a few hardy souls proclaiming the future was all about fun, and if that fun was to be had while doing the weekly wash, then hooray. They missed the memo that a laundrette is purely functional. You cannot pimp a laundrette. People don’t want to drink cocktails and flirt while their smalls are on spin cycle.
Technology quickly caught up with the internet cafe then zoomed right on past, but for a brief halcyon period it was a window into an imagined future. Base Station owners Marlon and Danae made the strategic error of imagining it as a bar, and a cafe, and an art gallery, and a performance space. Nuh-uh. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
Internet cafes still exist, of course, but they’ve beaten a strategic retreat to boring old practicality. They’ve given a deep sigh and resigned themselves to the orange laminate and the brown carpet, the bad coffee and the fluoro strip lighting. They’re a no-frills transit lounge into cyberspace for tourists wise enough not to pay global roaming data fees on their wireless hand-held devices. You can’t pimp that.
A quick note: these days it’s common for cafes to provide free wi-fi. This, in my opinion, is madness. Those cafes might as well stuff a wheelie bin full of cash, pour petrol over the top, and strike a match. Their free wi-fi says to the tight-wads of the world, ‘Welcome. Please take a seat for four hours and sip on a single coffee until we indicate we are closing by putting chairs on tables around you.’ It’s a great deal, beyond question, but only for one of the parties involved.
The Base Station deserves a respectful eulogy. It was a noble social, technological and artistic experiment. Its computer system was based on open-source software, about which I know precisely nothing, save for the fact that at the time it was hideously unreliable. (Maybe it still is. I couldn’t say, because I don’t really know what open-source software is. When my computer needs fixing, I have a guy who comes and fixes it. It’s a very satisfactory arrangement.) It was meshed together by Marlon, who in fairness really did seem to know what he was doing. But however much he pored over it while muttering unintelligibly about Java, it remained a web that tore and rent in places unexpected; that at times seemed a cruel psychological experiment on humans and their capacity for optimism. It crashed with unerring regularity—maybe a half-dozen times on a bad night—yet every time an anguished wail would go up from the chubby Brazilian guy who liked to sit in the beanbag and flirt with persons unknown on the other side of the world.
Part of my job was to help people with the computers. Irony alert. Just as Bill Clinton wasn’t the person to be left in charge of interns, I wasn’t the person to be trusted with computer problems. The Base Station’s worked on some Unix system. I still don’t know what that means, exactly. I have a lot of sympathy for Thomas Watson, the former chairman of IBM who will be derided at trivia nights forevermore for declaring there was a world market ‘for maybe five computers’. That was 1946, mind you. I think the man had a fair excuse for underestimating the computer market by a couple of billion units. As for me, in 1994 I heard about this newfangled thing called email from my university friend Elise. I was just back from Europe, where I’d gaily ducked into post offices from London to Moscow for their post restante service. The concept still makes my head spin: anyone can send me a letter—anywhere in the world—and the post office will hold it for me. What need I for this electronic messaging business? How could it possibly replace the great romance of ink and paper? Ha. Hahaha. (In my defence, it does seem to run in the blood. My great-great-great grandfather was an English convict transported to Australia during the Industrial Revolution for machine breaking. Which means he was a Luddite in the true sense. I am merely carrying on the family tradition.)
Marlon was so busy being at the cutting edge that he was in acute denial over the technology on which his business relied. It was as fractious, unpredictable and disruptive as a newborn baby, yet each time it crashed he responded with what appeared to be genuine surprise. In those halcyon early days he and Danae were encased in a soft golden bubble in which nothing could go wrong. They were living the dream: sleeping above their very own niche business, the kind that spawned newspaper articles about trends, written by journalists who never failed to assume an avuncular ‘oh gosh’ kind of tone about what the young people were up to these days.
I guess Marlon and Danae, and a good number of their customers besides, would be called hipsters if they were gallivanting around now. The signs were clear: he liked to wear a beret and cultivate his facial hair. She was overly fond of black. But this pre-dated full-blown hipsterism by at least a decade. Back then these people, young men and women both, were simply slightly odd, artistically inclined individuals. Before they unionised into the fiercest social clique the world has ever known—yet shadowier even than the Masons, denying they exist at all—they were the keepers of the geek flame.
Hipsterism’s over. It’s OVER. It was tagged and bagged when the Sunday papers started to include them in their ‘know your tribe’ features. It’s an era now locked safely away inside the parameters of time; a bygone historical moment to squirm over. But, oh how innocent the Base Station days when a customer’s first transgressive piece of ink was displayed shyly on an upper arm. So many sweet little things with their edgy barcode tatts, all intent on proving they weren’t part of the herd and that individuality was a principle worth dying for.
The Base Station’s system crashed, and it crashed often. Each time I’d put on an Oscar-nominated performance of knowing what I was doing that basically consisted of switching things off and on again. My go-to move. A pagan appeal to the gods of electricity, in part, but mostly something to appease the baleful eyes of customers abruptly torn from their online chats and random cat searches. The place ran on the smell of an oily rag so there was only ever one bartender rostered on at a time. This was both blessing—it’s indisputably fun to rule the bar as a benevolent dictator—and curse, because there was no one else to blame if things went wrong.
The script ran like this. I’d switch things off and on, mutter a bit, say something about ‘Java’, concede defeat, then trudge up the stairs to knock nervously on the apartment door. Marlon and Danae had made it very clear: they didn’t like being disturbed. I never saw inside their living quarters. It was all very mysterious. After a five-minute delay (what the hell were they doing up there?) Marlon would appear, descend the stairs and rummage around doing whatever it was he needed to do, and the screens would give a hopeful glow that made everyone’s hearts leap with joy, like when ET came back to life. Smiles all round. Marlon would give a satisfied nod and retreat upstairs to his lair. Five minutes later—crash. Fade to black. Loud wail from Brazilian guy who was about to get to second base with some anonymous male cybertext lover in Norway or Peru or possibly even at a rival internet cafe a suburb away.
Pad pad pad pad pad. Back up the stairs. Knock knock. ‘WHAT IS IT?’ Marlon would yell, more exasperated this time. (He and Danae had no TV, so I ask again—what the hell were they doing up there?) The charade would go on until the few souls remaining in the bar would realise there was no more cybernetic fun to be had and slink off into the night.
Once the honeymoon gloss wore off, Marlon and Danae realised they had fallen into a trap common to new parents. They’d dealt with the anxiety of a new business by adopting a strict routine. A routine known as ‘becoming paranoid agoraphobics who never go out’. These early-prototype hipsters looked in the mirr
or one day and didn’t like what they saw. If they were going to reclaim their edge, they would have to break out of their monastic existence to engage with the world once more. ‘We’re going out for a few hours,’ they announced unexpectedly one afternoon as I turned on the coffee machine before opening the doors. Now that I’ve had kids I recognise the way their voices were just a little too loud, the cheerfulness just a little too cheery as they willed themselves not to think about the multicoloured disasters that might occur in their absence.
‘Sure! Yes! Go!’ I responded in a similar fashion, trying to inject my voice with every bit of positivity I could muster while inwardly thinking ‘Oh shit, oh shit’ because I was about to be thrown to the nerd wolves.
They lasted only an hour that first time. I saw them sitting in a cafe across the street, keeping an eye on their beloved internet bar in case it caught fire or stopped breathing or something. It was kind of sad, yet also strangely comforting.
They must have taken heart that no major disaster ensued, because after that they made a real effort to get out. Baby steps, but each occasion helped stretch the apron strings a little more. The next time they ventured further—maybe 100 metres down the street to the dodgy Chinese restaurant—then the next time as far as the pub on the corner. It was unprecedented when they went all the way across town to a party thrown by some people they used to know before they opened an internet bar.
That time wasn’t such a success. They arrived home to a bank of computers without a pulse and the bar empty save for a massive guy with ginger plaits mounting a spirited case about getting a refund on his coffee because we hadn’t held up our part of the deal. ‘You. Did. Not. Provide. Me. With. A. Computer. That. Works.’ His voice was shaking with outrage but I held my ground. No way was I going to concede defeat to a six-foot-six hippy with braids to his bum. Whatever happened to peace, love and understanding?
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