Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  Okay, so I missed the peace train by about forty years.

  The hippies who populated the Base Station—first courted by Marlon and Danae as the kind of countercultural icons who’d be good for business, then merely tolerated once it was clear they would only ever cough up for a single soy chai latte—were an opportunistic bunch who’d try to steal whatever wasn’t nailed down. I guess they were living the creed that all property is theft. It’s a defensible political position, but there were only so many times I could tolerate smacking their filthy hands away from the jar of mixed nuts before wanting to sell them out to The Man and call the cops.

  Plenty of them were Hallmark hippies. Kids, really, trying on a fashion, artfully arranging their rags as intricately as if they were Comme des Garçons. They were the sort of people who wrote on the toilet door, ‘If you love something set it free. If it comes back to you it’s yours, if it doesn’t it never was.’ Not everyone at Base Station was sympathetic to such curdled sentiment. Underneath it someone had added: ‘Then track it down and kill it.’

  Altus, however, was a breed apart. He was the quasi-despotic leader of a hippy splinter group, a hardcore bunch of ferals who would disappear for months at a time to the Tasmanian blockades then pop up again looking even wilder and hungrier than before. Altus wasn’t his real name, if you hadn’t already guessed. I’d love to know what was on his birth certificate but he wasn’t the kind of guy you could ask such profoundly personal information. You didn’t chew the fat with Altus. ‘Yo Altus, wassup?’ No. Definitely not. His nom de guerre was taken from the Latin, meaning ‘noble or profound’, he told me without so much as a blush on his tight, pinched face half-hidden in the shadow of a dreadlock mass that relayed his character as succinctly as his charge sheet. He rarely wore shoes, bathed infrequently, and had no aspirations towards worldly goods—in fact, he took great satisfaction in being able to lug everything of value in his life in a filthy army disposal backpack.

  Altus was grimly committed to his cause of Generalised World-Saving like the purest of ascetics. Some people feel they were born in the wrong body; Altus was born in the wrong era. He would have been brilliant tooling around with half of Dickens’ mob in the laneway grime of Victorian England. I could imagine him in a hairshirt, whipping himself into the exalted frenzy of a bloody pulp. If he’d lived in biblical times he was the kind of guy who would have sat on a plinth in the desert for years and then been sainted after a hideous death involving wasps.

  ‘Don’t give them your real details,’ he scolded when I conceded defeat in my moral battle against email. I was setting up my first Hotmail account while he stretched his soy latte out to a third hour. ‘If you use your own information they can use it against you.’

  ‘They?’ I asked.

  ‘They.’ He scanned the room as though they were already there, listening to every word.

  It pains me to concede his paranoia about government spying might have been warranted. But then I’m the sort of person who’ll gladly cough up all sorts of personal information for the chance to win a $5 supermarket voucher. Altus and I were at cross-purposes. When he called me ‘a willing victim of capitalism’, he was right on the money.

  I don’t know what became of him when the Base Station closed down. He’s probably still down at the blockades, older and grimmer and grimier than before. There’s a good possibility he’s been chained to a tree for the past ten years. If he’s wearing a suit and holding down a nine-to-five job I’ll be deeply disappointed. I doubt he is, though. He was too far gone for that, although in one respect he was unimpeachable. No dope. ‘It makes you weak,’ he’d spit to his hippy mates as they went on the nod. It was the same old story. Generation after generation, heroin kills the collective dream. They’d come in, order a single drink between two or three, head to the toilets and fix up. The saggy old green couch was very popular for a lazy-hazy afternoon. The music we played must have helped the heroin dreams, too. Arty electronica: all beeps and whirrs and fuzz that uncannily mirrored the sound of early internet dial-up static. It must have been nice to Major Tom the interior universe like it was one giant mainframe.

  I was living at the time with a hippy-junkie. It’s really not a great combination for a housemate, particularly one still wanting to claim the moral high ground. Caz didn’t believe in tea bags—the staple attaching the string to the bag might leach toxins into the tea, she argued—yet she was perfectly comfortable with the idea of sticking a needle in her arm. I don’t think it was the actual metal that was her major problem, mind you. It was the toxic shit coursing through her bloodstream.

  She did have one decent party trick, which was to get a sheet of aluminium foil and cut a negative image into it using a Stanley knife. Stick it over the TV, put the screen on fuzz and it makes a nice psychedelic display, perfect for looking at for hours when you’re ripped. Credit where credit’s due. But that one bit of pos didn’t make up for a whole heap of neg. She was on the gear then off the gear then back on the gear while swearing she was off the gear but all the while the rent was suspiciously backing up. Take a rummage around her room and there they are, a whole bunch of fits and foils—oh, and that’s where the teaspoon collection has been hiding.

  Like most hippies Caz didn’t believe in property unless it was hers. When it was her turn to buy toilet paper, inevitably she’d leave a stack of torn newspaper on the bathroom floor for bum-wiping duties. ‘It’s fine for me,’ she’d whine when ordered to fork out on some two-ply. She was also a waitress. It was our only common ground, aside from being female and breathing oxygen. She rarely did laundry, so when it was time to go to work she’d pinch my black tops off the washing line. Often I’d have to throw them out afterwards because they’d be so impregnated with her body odour even industrial-grade disinfectant couldn’t shift it. Of course she didn’t believe in deodorant, either. One time she even took my undies.

  Moral of the story: never share a house with a hippy. They’ll make you cry.

  The Base Station was a novel introduction to the world of the bar chick. Bar work is vastly superior to waiting tables, namely because it provides protection against the Visigoths, aka the customers. That half-metre or so of solid, immovable structure between You and Them represents a blissful breathing space. A sort of demilitarised zone, minus the UN.

  * * *

  HAMISH

  A bunch of office girls were drinking heavily on a Friday night. They ordered the eight-course degustation but by the third course one of them wobbled off to the toilets. We found her lying on the bathroom floor. She refused to move so for the next two-and-a-half hours other diners had to step over her. Her friends ate her dinner and drank her wine and they didn’t check on her once.

  * * *

  And it was really quite necessary at the Base Station, where the customers were odder than most. It was an unofficial lonely hearts’ club. This was before Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and long before Grindr and Tinder. Being able to order sex like pizza was only a flicker in a young programmer’s eye. But there were rudimentary ways to hook up. Closed chat rooms, mainly, where people got together for a bit of analog naughtiness. We didn’t ban porn but asked that it be used—you know—discreetly. Not that you’d want to masturbate in a public access bar (well, hopefully not) but all the staff knew to strategically cough before approaching the terminal in a dark corner. That was where the Brazilian guy lurked. A discreet bit of throat-clearing would give him time to switch from whatever hardcore gay sex act he was looking at to pictures of cats in cowboy outfits.

  It never ceased to amaze me how many customers didn’t bother logging out of their email accounts before they left. Did I read them? Are you crazy? Given half a chance, wouldn’t you go rifling through the electronic files of a goth girl with the login name of Madame Bones? It kept me sane, in between performing the other unofficial duties of my job, such as talking the arthouse cinema manager who looked like Seinfeld’s Newman through a torturous break-up, and being friendly to
the bank economist who made a small fortune each year but was so socially inept he’d ask every single woman who crossed his path for a date. These days he’d be pegged kindly as someone on the autism spectrum. Back then he scared people.

  The weirdest incident involved a Canadian skateboarder I’d met in Italy years earlier. One of those over-familiar, talkative, all-round annoying people who latched onto my group at a youth hostel and stuck to us despite rigorous discouragement. We wound up shaking him by sneaking out the back of a bar. Cruel, but necessary. So fast-forward five years and one night at the Base Station a group of backpackers comes in. They do a bit of emailing and piss off again. Enter Canadian guy. Same buzzcut, same three-quarter shorts with pretentiously long key chain, same annoying personality. ‘Have you seen my buddies?’ I point him in their direction before he can remember me. Later that night they come back in. I tell them their Canadian mate was searching for them. They respond in horror: ‘No, man, we’ve been trying to get rid of that little dweeb for three days now.’ I almost felt sorry for him. He’s probably still out there travelling the globe, wondering where everyone went.

  Marlon and Danae tried hard to make their business fly. They tackled it head-on with 16mm film nights, with poetry slams and DJs who played more of that electronica that was like catnip to junkies. All ignored the central business truth that when your clientele is penniless your business will not flourish.

  That was why employees had to pay for their coffee. A cup of coffee cost the business about 20 cents but Marlon and Danae made us cough up market rates. Tight? Tighter than a camel’s arse in a sandstorm.

  They were going down the gurgler but I think the penny-pinching came naturally. A corporate lawyer barrelled in one afternoon, desperate to send some faxes ahead of a settlement deadline. Marlon, spotting an opportunity for shameless profiteering, introduced the bespoke faxing fee of $20. This was peanuts to the corporate guy but once he left and Marlon tried to pocket the cash, complex negotiations ensued.

  ‘But I get the tips.’

  ‘But I own the place.’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m the bar bitch. The tips are mine.’

  ‘But I’m the one who can work the fax machine.’

  ‘You realise you’re breaking the bartenders’ covenant?’

  ‘Okay, well, how about we split it?’

  It’s never a good sign when you’re bartering with your boss over twenty bucks, but there was non-monetary compensation. If it was quiet—which it usually was—Marlon and Danae didn’t mind if I had a smoke at the end of the bar. That was quite forward-thinking of them, and noticeably boosted the profits of the Peter Stuyvesant Corporation. They turned a blind eye to drug dealing in the kitchen. (Maybe some explanation is needed here: it was New Year’s Eve, and Marlon walked in just as a friend and I were exchanging cash for pills. To his eternal credit he rolled his eyes, walked out and later asked me not to do it again.) Nor did they care if I swore in the line of duty. In hindsight, working at the Base Station was a complex system of swings and roundabouts.

  There was one moment when hope shone through the fog. The annual street festival, in the halcyon days before the evils of public liability insurance put an end to communal fun. Traffic was diverted and the whole road became a big, boozy thoroughfare with a slow-moving crowd jazzed up to the max on beer and pills and I don’t know what else. Somehow—I know not how—the Base Station became the place to be.

  And it was fucking brilliant. The place was thick with people dancing on the bar, on the tables, everywhere. I pulled the afternoon shift and was practically whimpering with exhaustion by the end with the amount of booze we’d shifted. I occasionally caught a glimpse of Marlon and Danae through the crowd, grinning from ear to ear as though their faces would split open. It was easy enough to read their exaltation. This was it. The turning point. Their reversal of fortune.

  The next night—dead. And the next night after that. The tide had not turned. It was just a blip. We went back to flatlining. They went back to their mysterious half-life upstairs.

  Just like their business, Marlon and Danae were on the rocks. People confront their demons in different ways. He took to drinking. She took to eating. She comfort-loaded a good 20 kilos. Marlon started flirting with the female customers, which drove Danae insane and forced her into the illicit arms of more of her favourite cheese-flavoured corn chips. It was a vicious cycle.

  They were looking for a way out. One time they lit on the brilliant idea that they could make a bunch of money by franchising the business. Because what the nation desperately needed was a whole chain of failing internet-bar-cafe-gallery-performance spaces. A lawyer put a bullet in that one in their first meeting, telling them it was impossible to franchise a failed idea. Ouch.

  I could forgive them for wanting to Ponzi scheme the Base Station. They were desperate. Those corporate soul-sucking jobs weren’t looking so bad anymore. But then they proved they didn’t have my back, and I couldn’t forgive them for that.

  We had a regular customer named Carmichael. Regular? He was so regular you could set your watch on him walking in the door on the dot of 6 p.m. each night and staying until stumps. He didn’t do much. Just sat there, alone, and drank beer. A lot of beer. He spent more money than a dozen hippies on Welfare Thursday put together, so Marlon and Danae loved him. He was practically keeping the place afloat. But he was creepy, in the blandly non-specific way of all major creeps—like Ted Bundy. Or Jeffrey Dahmer. One night he silently handed me a letter proclaiming love, lust and a bunch of obsessive stuff that made me fairly confident there was gaffer tape and a meat cleaver in his bag.

  * * *

  RICHARD

  A customer died. It was a country restaurant and Neil the pig farmer—in his early nineties, almost deaf—would pull up every day in his brand-new Range Rover. He’d always order a cheese sandwich with the crusts cut off, which he’d then gum for hours because he only had one tooth. One afternoon Neil was asleep in his cheese sandwich for quite some time before we realised he was stone cold dead. After they took the body away, we saw his tooth sticking out of his sandwich.

  * * *

  I kept the letter to be used as Exhibit A if my dismembered body was found in a dumpster, but Marlon and Danae tried to play it down. Thing is, he was by far their best customer, which meant there was absolutely no way they were going to give him his marching orders. Not even if it meant sacrificing a loyal staff member. Eventually we reached a compromise where Carmichael promised to stop staring at me unblinking for hours at a time and I’d try to get on with smoking cigarettes at the end of the bar. It worked for a while, albeit with a fair degree of discomfort. Then he stopped coming in. We heard that he’d been admitted to a psychiatric hospital after he started acting erratically. Even more erratically than usual, I mean. Vacuuming the front lawn at three in the morning, things like that.

  Quite coincidentally, but perhaps (in hindsight) ominously, I was dating another guy named Carmichael at the same time. The chances of two Carmichaels intersecting in a particular time and place are not great. In fact, statistics show you’re more likely to be hit by lightning while being attacked by a shark. Maybe the universe was trying to tell me something. The one I was dating styled himself as a biker bohemian, but in reality he was just a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal with a bad ponytail. Clearly, Carmichaels and I don’t mix. We’re the human equivalent of oil and water. Given the superstition about bad luck running in threes, if I ever meet another one I’ll go screaming in the opposite direction.

  Boyfriend Carmichael was just as much of a bad news story as Base Station Carmichael. Less in a sinister-psychotic kind of way, more in a garden-variety alcoholic, poor personal hygiene and anger management issues kind of way. In a small miracle I decided to divest myself of him. It seemed a straightforward split until the night I got home late after dealing with the usual Base Station weirdness and there he was, sitting in the darkness after breaking in through the bathroom window. He waited until he had my undivi
ded attention before cutting his throat from ear to ear with a razor blade. Something you never really expect to see, especially at 2 a.m. on a Saturday in July. I remember thinking through the shock: how ironic that I would have been better off backing the other Carmichael.

  It was kind of a relief when the Base Station went on the computer crash that never ends several months later. After the throat-cutting incident I didn’t enjoy coming home late after work. Turning the key, wondering what waited on the other side. Ex-boyfriend Carmichael survived, in case you’re wondering. I hear he ended up a suburban solicitor. And maybe I did learn something from the Hippy Life Manual after all, because that’s karma, baby, right there.

  — 9 —

  THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

  I didn’t fall in love with hospitality. That much should be fairly clear by now. But I did fall in love with someone who had fallen in love with hospitality. And that, as they say, has made all the difference.

  And no, he wasn’t a chef. Hell, no. It’s a constant source of wonder to me how chefs have become sex symbols. The only explanation I can come up with is that it’s a primal thing (remember: primal is related to primate). You know: a man, a knife, a naked flame. If you find something compelling in that triumvirate, a crotch-focused frisson, you might be suffering from the pagan practice of chef-worship. Beware. That way there be dragons—or at least the people hilariously called celebrity chefs.

  Just for the record, I’ve dated one chef. A celebrity-free chef. I don’t know if he was up with the latest sous-vide techniques or if he could deconstruct a pavlova, but he was nice. End of story.