Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  And it’s fun. It’s fun to the nth degree. It’s fun-squared. It’s about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on, although the one time I took acid I became convinced I was naked and had to keep looking down every few seconds to check I was still wearing pants. That was weird.

  * * *

  POLLY

  It wasn’t unusual to do four or five straight double shifts at this place. It was really tough, but at least the owner knew he pushed us with the hours. To keep us going he’d rack up brilliant cocaine in the cellar. He’d take us downstairs individually, give us a glass of Champagne, a line and about five minutes to catch our breath. It certainly kept me going.

  * * *

  That’s why all the lectures about drugs don’t work. They ignore the central truth that any kid with a bag of powder and a rolled-up twenty-dollar note will quickly realise. Things like:

  Why do people get wasted and decide it’s a good idea to measure their necks in units prescribed by a standard Bic lighter and then plot the results on graph paper?

  Because it’s FUN.

  Why do people get wasted and wave a water bottle at a disco ball for six hours straight while listening to music that sequences the same thirty-second electronic coda at 140 beats per minute?

  Because it’s FUN.

  Why do people get wasted and decide it’s hilarious to talk in a Jerry Lewis voice for two hours while repeating the phrase ‘My good sir’?

  Because it’s FUN.

  What the anti-drug lobby needs to do is film two heavily wasted people talking like Jerry Lewis while thinking they’re cresting a new wave in comedy. That would be more effective than a poster of a mournful meth-head with weeping face sores. Or they could use the shoes my friend Martha bought on the way home one morning after a big, club-banging night. Rubber, multicoloured things like flotation devices or offcuts from The Muppet Show. Expensive, too. We still look at them and shake our heads in wonder. Was rave culture really that devoid of taste? They ought to be photographed and put on a poster: These Are Your Shoes On Drugs.

  But you know what? Young people are ridiculously supple. They’re supple of body, they’re supple of mind, and they can withstand pushing the boundaries a little. To make myself feel better about having joined the sad class of the middle-aged (young middle-aged, I hasten to add—positively infantile) I’ve found solace in aphorisms. For example: nobody ever said anything important after midnight. Lately I’ve revised it to 10 p.m. Maybe 10.30 p.m. if it’s a weekend. It’s easy to get cranky thinking about all the time I wasted in the stupid belief it was an infinite resource. If I could have it back I’d be fluent in Spanish, have read the whole seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and be a master in the ancient art of kalaripayattu. But the truth is that any young person who doesn’t live a little—I’m simply talking about being open and responsive to the absurdity of the world, in whatever form that might take—is wasting valuable time because one day they’re going to wake up and find they’ve crossed the Rubicon. My moment was when I got prescription sunglasses. That’s when it finally hit me as real, concrete certainty rather than abstract notion: I, too, will die one day.

  If I got a call tonight to say Mick Jagger was dancing at Honkytonks and to come RIGHT NOW I would probably invent some excuse. Thanks very much, but I was out dancing with him last night. Or, I’ve just been kidnapped by Uyghur separatists. In the coin-toss between Jagger and sleep, nine times out of ten I’d take sleep.

  But back then, there was no mortgage, there were no kids, there were no responsibilities (or not ones that couldn’t wait until tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that), there was no left knee that went slightly dinky whenever a step was higher than recommended by Standards Australia. Jagger—LET ME AT HIM.

  It is for the benefit of mankind that Honkytonks no longer exists. A dive-club with turntables in a white baby grand and a relaxed attitude towards its patrons’ choice of refreshment, it was a big gaping maw that exploded the known space−time continuum. It swallowed whole weeks, whole years. It was said that some clubbers never went home, just eked out an existence on the mouldy old couches waiting for the next DJ to come on. There was a separate DJ in the women’s toilets. The only way to get to the basins was to assume a defensive position through an obstacle course of flailing limbs. Mick Jagger, being at the time a very sexed-up sexagenerian, had hit Honkytonks with his entourage, and hit it hard. By the time we arrived he was surrounded by a female whirlwind all hell-bent on getting their piece of rock’n’roll history. Women were twerking2 their arses off to get the great man’s attention and through the force-field of kinetic energy you could occasionally get a glimpse of a big grinning pair of lips with a skinny scrap of a human being attached. One of those sights a person could never forget—like sunrise over the Serengeti, or the Aurora Borealis.

  The way it ended was utterly, pleasingly, textbook rockstar. His bodyguards tapped maybe a dozen of the most attractive women on the shoulder and invited them to a ‘private party’ back at Jagger’s hotel. You might have expected them to sabotage each other’s stilettos with deftly timed kicks and gouge exposed flesh with painted talons. But no. There was a palpable camaraderie among this fragrant bunch of chosen ones. They danced off together up the alleyway, a joyful band of merrymakers, to claim their brief share of a charmed life.

  * * *

  GERALD

  There was a small room next to the cellar where two of the chefs set up bucket bongs to visit through service. I’m not a smoker of pot but I’d always chat to them while they were indulging—the portions were always larger after they had tucked in.

  * * *

  The waiter’s conundrum. At work: exhausted. Go home: wide awake.

  There must be some kind of medical explanation for it. Inertia of the mind. You focus hard on the same activity for eight hours, it’s impossible to take a sharp left once you get home and go straight to sleep. You can’t just turn off the light, reach for blankie and be miraculously rendered unconscious.

  That’s why the post-work debrief is an important psychological process. Skip the knock-off drink and you risk winding up with acute post-service stress disorder. It’s not unlike getting plaque off your teeth. Scraping off the mental gunge increases the chances of sleep.

  Even if you do manage to drop off easily, there are the dreams. The bloody service dreams. Like the one where the coffee orders are piling up and there are a thousand angry caffeine-deprived people waiting for their soy lattes and you’re working that machine like a crazy person but it’s not enough to placate the restive mob. After a nightshift Ben and I would lie next to each other in this twitching, tortured fog of half-sleep, saying sweet things like ‘BUGGER OFF TO YOUR OWN SIDE OF THE BED. AND STOP KICKING ME. I MEAN IT!’ We still sleep with a line of pillows jammed between us—a sad hangover from the days when it was used to block flailing limbs while a zombie army of caffeine addicts marched on us in our sleep.

  Professional athletes have all the luck. To get off the adrenalin high of performance, footballers and swimmers have powerful sleeping drugs shoved down their throats by medical professionals. Socially sanctioned drug taking—cruelly reserved, as are so many things, for the warrior caste. It’s completely unfair. A busy restaurant service is an endurance sport. It’s Olympic racewalking with plates. The body hurts in joints, muscles and crevices. It aches in places it didn’t know it had. The soles of the feet feel as though they’ve been subjected to ten strikes of the rattan cane for some minor littering misdemeanour in Singapore. Stick to it long enough and eventually you will find yourself googling ‘varicose veins + operation’. You will say something unintelligible like ‘oof’ each time you get off the couch because of your sore lower back.

  Yet there is no ticker-tape parade, no breathless commentary. (‘Just look at the way Dubecki sidestepped that toddler while carrying two fish and chips and one soup of the day—I’ve got no words other than magic!’) There is no post-race rub-down
(unless you’re very lucky) and no accredited doctor waiting with a few magic pills. Waiters are forced into the shifty arms of self-medication. There’s always booze, which helps you slow down post-shift but increases the chances of going out. Or the more pathetic dabblings in over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. In any waiter’s medicine cabinet you are guaranteed to find several packets of day-and-night cold and flu tablets with only blank spaces where the mildly sedating night ones used to be, each absence a whispered prayer that tonight, somehow, be different.

  I still have a dream every month or so where I’m failing university. A classic, unimaginative anxiety dream. Whatever weird sub-plots my brain decides to add to spice things up—sometimes I’m being chased by a tiger in the library’s folio section, sometimes there’s a ski run in the student union—it’s always grounded in the same narrative: it’s the end of semester and I suddenly realise with a sick thunk of dread that I haven’t attended a single lecture. Waking up is always one of those moments flooded with relief. Thank god, I feel like sobbing. Thank god those days are over.

  Living with that feeling as a day-to-day reality rather than a dream directed by Cecil B. DeMille exacts a psychic toll—hence the mental vomit that still bubbles up from time to time. Not enough of a psychic toll to elicit a brisk ‘Right! Time to make a few changes around here!’ That would be waaaay too optimistic. After pulling a double shift, getting to that exciting 10 a.m. lecture about constitutional law seems as far-fetched as sprouting wings overnight and flying to university instead of catching the tram. Even when hitting the snooze button, however, the dull understanding that life has gotten dangerously out of whack inhabits the room like a small flatulent dog.

  Here’s a typical shift from those days, set to the jaunty yet whimsical theme song from Cheers and arranged in a montage from a riotous sit-com about a young woman pretending to be a university student while she sabotages her future for a devil-may-care existence limping from paycheck to paycheck:

  Arrive at work a little shaky—nothing serious, just a few heart palpitations—after working the night before. Drink first coffee. You’ve been saving yourself all day for this baby, hoping to time that first caffeine hit for maximum impact (the only instance in the last couple of days you could call yourself a model of restraint). Unfortunately it doesn’t have the desired effect. Gulp a second coffee. Hmm. Might need something a little more. Maybe a couple of Red Bull chasers, just to really get the engine pumping. Ooh, that’s the ticket. But what the hell is that banging sound? Oh, only my pulse. Might need to eat something. Head out the back and scavenge some cold chips left over from staff lunch. Hey waddya know—cold chips aren’t so bad. Might add some more salt, though. Wash them down with Post Mix lemonade. Hang in there—it’s nearly time for the first vodka tonic, disguised as soda water. The trick is to get mildly tipsy, just a warm tingle without getting all sloppy. Still a couple of hours on the feet ahead. No point getting tired.

  ‘Have a Jagey,’ I can hear Wazza say in his chipper twang, the Australian answer to Cockney. Jagermeister. Horrible stuff. It took me a long while to learn there’s actually no such thing as a digestif. It’s just more alcohol. Even now when I’m a few sheets to the wind the instinct is to turn in the direction of a German spirit that tastes like road tar melted down with fifty-six herbs and spices.

  I don’t know if it will digestif anything but Jagermeister will give you a little buzz. A mini-buzz. Nothing more. Being properly high at work is tempting, but not such a good idea. Even less so if you’re a chef. Let’s take time out to pause for a salutary tale.

  There was a chef at the Star named Brad. Brad liked his speed. Not just a dabbler—Brad was an authentic, A-grade certified speed freak, going for Winter Olympic snowfield gold. He was either all up or all down but a psycho either way. So one day Brad is all juiced up, bug-eyed and chat chat chat and madly chopping a huge pile of onions and—crunch—off goes the top of his finger. A classic chef injury. The top joint of the left-hand middle finger amputated clean through on the diagonal. Any chef who’s distracted or going too fast is at risk of joining the club, and old Brad was slicing those onions like a madman. Why? Because he was a madman. So there’s blood spewing everywhere, Brad’s yelping, they wrap his injured hand in a tea towel and one of his chef buddies bundles him to the doctor down the street. Brad comes back half an hour later, slightly whiter than before, his hand swathed in bandages and uttering the dread words ‘Where’s my finger?’ He’s been told to pack the half-digit in ice and take it to the hospital to have it sewn back on. By that time the finger was in the bin. George had heard what happened, came down to the kitchen cursing his head off, and swept the onions, blood and finger into the bin in disgust. Another poor chef had to go sifting through it all for the mangled little stump. The upshot is, Brad gets it stitched back on and three weeks off work to recuperate. George’s pissed because it means he has to pay him sick leave. Brad thinks he’s the luckiest bastard in the world, pops into the kitchen occasionally to wave his bandaged hand about like a trophy and gloat about how it’s all PlayStation and speed, on the company dime. He finally comes back to work, off his head as usual, and within half an hour he does it again. Clean through, in exactly the same spot. There was no point trying to save it this time. The wound was already a needy little blackened stump clinging limply to its reattached blood supply and it was beyond the ken of medical science to make it regenerate twice. He lost his job, too. No way was George going to pay him for another three weeks of amphetamines and PlayStation. ‘Fucking idiot, no fucking way I’m paying that fucking cunt.’ That was the last we saw of Brad.

  Maybe the Brads of this world are a sign. Wrong Way—Go Back. Because one day it doesn’t look so enjoyable anymore. The morning’s painkiller-guzzling contrition doesn’t make up for the night’s idiot adventures. You realise with a flicker of shame that Jerry Lewis wasn’t really that funny first time around. You realise speed has sipped on your adrenal glands until they’re dusty and expired, little puffs ready to blow away in a light breeze. The visitations are getting worse, too. Those monkeys in the peripheral vision whenever you’re tired are just plain freaky.

  Tonight, you tell yourself in the don’t-mess-with-me voice of your primary school teacher Mrs Palmer, tonight it’s straight home, a cup of SleepyTime herbal tea and bed. You will wake refreshed after your medically recommended eight hours’ sleep and greet the day with a yogic sun salutation before heading off to pilates and the farmers’ market.

  But then the dealer turns up on his moped. Mopeds are the vehicle of choice for any middle-class purveyor of proscribed drugs. They think it differentiates them from the blue-collar dealers, who are self-evidently scum. He was just swinging past, he says with a sly smile that shows his evenly spaced teeth, thought he’d pop in to say g’day. Wazza disappears with him to conduct business in the alleyway and comes back looking sprightly and refreshed when only five minutes ago he was quiet and despondent after another fight with Cara. There’s a glint in his eye as he hops around behind the bar doing his Michael Hutchence impersonation while mouthing the words WANT SOME?

  The air crackles with the tension of a young woman deciding between tomorrow’s lecture about the Torrens Land System and a well-deserved pick-me-up after a hard shift.

  Okay then, just a dabble.

  And somehow—inevitably, groans the audience—all of a sudden it’s five hours later and she’s sitting in a dark club with sticky carpet, nursing a seventh beer while discussing the problems of the world in depth. ‘1984,’ Wazza’s saying. ‘I’m at Chevron. I’m in my eight-up Doc Martens, my ripped Levi 501s and a black singlet top . . .’

  Even if you’re not lending your nose to the scientific study of harsh acids on mucous membranes, hospitality is an unhealthy industry.

  Take Bubbles. This is a man who only imbibed fluids if they were espresso coffee or red wine—he preferred a heavy, teeth-staining cabernet—and only swallowed calories if they were steak. I once saw him bite into an ap
ple. He reeled back in surprise as if an exotic parrot had just materialised in his hand, looked from the apple to me, raised his eyebrows as if to say, ‘Interesting . . . so this is what a so-called fruit tastes like,’ and threw it in the bin. His gallstones played up each year. It was an annual event, like Christmas or the grand final. One year the pain was so bad he wound up in the emergency department, running head-first at the wall trying to knock himself out. Did the experience make him increase his fibre intake? No, it did not.

  There were other casualties. Sadder ones. The ghost of Nancy Reagan flits through with a Just Say No poster.

  My old boss Ari from the Sabatini used to work in a video store. He told me that a surprising number of times he’d call up the really late returns only to be told the person had died. I think I mentioned Ari wasn’t that smart. There was a good chance he was speaking to the allegedly deceased person who was simply trying to get out of paying late fines. But the same thing started to happen at the Sabatini, only for real. First to go was Anthony, a devilishly handsome waiter whose slightly turned-down eyes made him look like a friendly koala. Anthony was late for work one day, Ari called his house, Anthony’s mum trotted off to see if he was in his room, then all Ari heard down the line was screaming. Nothing suspicious, the autopsy showed. Apparently it is possible for a 25-year-old to die of natural causes in their sleep. Another good reason to avoid sleep.

  Next to go was Mick. Drink-driving accident. This was the point when Ari stopped calling when a waiter was late, and started just hoping they’d eventually turn up.

  Then James. My dish pig crush. A delightful wastrel of a boy in love with wordplay, the comedic possibilities of the Germanic umlaut, and drugs. In a kitchen where ‘fuck you, motherfucker’ passed for an interesting use of language, he would throw in something like, ‘Did you know the name for a llama birth is an unpacking?’ James showed that going to the ‘right’ school doesn’t always mean a return on investment.