His dad came in to eat one night. I served his table: a grey-haired lawyer with three of his grey-haired lawyer buddies. When it was time for dessert James had decorated a cake with ‘I love my Pa’ written in swirling chocolate letters. It could have been a cruel pisstake—James’s rebellious streak would have caused his parents grief from the moment he learned to throw toys out of his pram—but there was an eye-shining sincerity when he took it out. There was plenty of water under this father–son bridge but his dad was chuffed.
James was a sweet kid who worked like wildfire. If he’d grown up he would have been a thoroughly decent human being, but he didn’t get to grow up because a couple of weeks later he was found dead on his share-house brown modular couch. His housemates hadn’t noticed he stopped breathing until hours after they’d all fixed up together, when his skin was cold and his mouth blue.
And then the Star. A barman called Gabriel. A good Italian boy, an aspiring photographer who didn’t really take photos but like plenty of guys in their twenties wanted to define himself as an artist. He was initially into speed but then upscaled it into a taste for heroin.
Gabriel got the blame for a lot of stuff that wasn’t his fault. Bill, the waiter who stole everything that wasn’t nailed down, took two bottles of reserve wine and let Gabriel take the rap. He chose his victim well. Gabriel was one of those people who could deny accusations until he was blue in the face but no one ever believed him.
Gabriel didn’t steal the wine, but he was nicking from the till to fund his habit. Another case brought to George’s attention where he just shrugged his ‘So what?’ shrug. Gabriel went into rehab once and came out and picked up pretty much where he left off. His parents were beside themselves. They used to drop him off at work and pick him up straight afterwards to stop him heading into the city to score. They took his paycheck, too, but he sidestepped that one easily enough. He’d take off mid-shift saying he was just going to the toilet, then reappear forty minutes later with blitzed pupils. He overdosed once, which gave him enough of a fright to rethink his activities. For a couple of days following the Narcan shot that jerked him back to life, he told me the world had shimmered with beauty. ‘Everything looked so amazing. If I could feel that way all the time then I won’t need drugs. I have to learn how to hold onto it.’
As it turned out, Gabriel couldn’t hold on. His golden glow and the fear of death lurking underneath it saw him through a couple of drug-free weeks before abandoning him with no forwarding address. Back to Russell Street and the arcade where his skinny dealer lurked inside the pinball clang of the games parlours.
George didn’t even bother showing up at the funeral, a gut-wrenching Catholic service with wailing Italians and the coffin decked out in Carlton Football Club colours. Even though he’d known what was going on and did nothing to try and stop it. But it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. That was more than fifteen years ago now. Sometimes I can’t even recall his name without pausing to think. Gabriel. His name was Gabriel. It takes a few seconds before it comes back. One day I know it’s not going to come back at all.
______________________
2 Twerking: a US-originated urban dance that symbolically presents the female partner as eager for sexual penetration via a reverse-entry method.
— 13 —
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE REALLY BLOODY UGLY
You could grapple endlessly with the idea of the good waiter, much in the way of Christians and the parable of the Good Samaritan or Scientologists and the notion of an evil galactic emperor named Xenu. I’m content to approach it in a similar fashion as a purely abstract, theological exercise. By any objective measure I was a terrible waiter. Shit-tastic, Ben once put it in a fit of kindness. Save for being exhumed at the occasional dinner party, my ‘skills’, such as they were, have been blessedly dormant for the past decade. In all probability I remain a terrible waiter. If one day I go stark-raving mad and decide to get into the profession again, an injunction should be sought immediately. An apprehended service order. It won’t be too hard to find a judge I once served who’ll look kindly on the matter.
What makes a good waiter ought to be straightforward enough. Someone who bathes daily and flosses their teeth. It’s very important when reciting the daily specials not to smell like a small rodent died in your mouth. Someone with a basic grasp of social niceties. Start with hello, end with goodbye, and in between throw in a playful bit of banter—something along the lines of ‘And what can I get for you today?’ ought to do nicely. If you want to get really fancy, a memory capable of remembering the regulars’ names, the verbal flair to make dishes sound exciting, and the self-composure to not start crying when saying, ‘Certainly I’ll ask the chef if he can make everything gluten-, dairy- and fructose-free.’
Someone who makes a great waiter? Now that is a far, far trickier subject. The temptation is to talk about the special intuition the best waiters seem to possess; the Jedi mind-reading skills evidenced when one appears with a glass of vermentino just as the words ‘I really feel like a ver—’ are leaving your mouth. (And if you were about to say ‘I really feel like a verdicchio’—well, what then, hey smarty-pants wait-person?) If all else fails, grasp at the pop-cultural shibboleth known as X-factor. But this is where we cast off from the safe shores of objectivity and head out into choppy waters. To the ongoing detriment of humankind, a great waiter can only be in the eye of the beholder.
On paper at least the Rising Star’s head waiter Marcello was among the greats. He had been one of the top waiters at one of the best restaurants in town, an Italian house of indulgence where the masters of the universe congregated to indulge in spaghetti neri and Barolo and left equally corpulent tips on their corporate credit cards. It was the kind of place where the famous chef and the famous clientele treated each other with the manly disdain that underlies a clubbish good humour. For example, there was a notorious businessman who one day announced he was sick of spaghetti neri and demanded a burger. Italians don’t do burgers, generally speaking. Or at least they didn’t until burgers stormed the barricades of world gastronomy. So the chef sent a waiter out to buy a Big Mac, which was promptly served on a white plate.
* * *
HENRY
A regular customer wanted to propose to his girlfriend. He was incredibly nervous about it so we started workshopping it four months before the actual night. He’d call me every few weeks to talk it through and I ended up being a pseudo-mentor for him, feeding him lots of positive psychology: ‘It’s going to be okay.’ So on the big night he gave me the ring before she arrived. I put it in a Champagne glass, but when I brought it out to the table she didn’t look at the glass, she looked at me perplexed as to why a glass of Champagne she didn’t order had just arrived. The guy was totally useless. He was just sitting there without saying anything, waiting for her to notice, so I said to her, ‘Look inside the glass.’ She looks in the glass, sees the ring, and looks back at me in utter surprise. He’s still sitting there like an idiot so I had to say, ‘It’s not from me—it’s from him!’ Luckily it turned out okay. They still send me a postcard on their wedding anniversary each year.
* * *
‘That looks like a Big Mac to me,’ said the notorious businessman.
‘Yes sir,’ replied the waiter, ‘it is almost exactly like a Big Mac, except this one is twenty-five dollars.’
Even among this rarefied company of top-flight professional waiters, Marcello was a stand-out performer. Why? Because he got the sales. He sold more wine, more desserts, more sides than any other person there. That was the secret to Marcello, and the basis of his claim to greatness. He was a salesman first and a waiter second. He was also the only person I have ever wanted to stab in the neck within five minutes of saying ‘Hello, nice to meet you’.
When I think of Marcello I immediately think of eyebrows. Wiry, bushy, crazy face-growths that acted as verandahs for his eyes and quivered with satisfaction whenever he was upselling garlic bread.
Such eyebrows can define a man. Marcello was a fizzing spark of electricity expressly devoted to the pursuit of making money. Salesman first; salesman second; waiter third.
Marcello was a man who liked to put the ‘me’ in team. Every conversation was an opportunity to affirm his greatness—both to himself and to the world at large. To the customers it was a constant, coddling song in the key of Marcello.
‘Let Marcello sort it out for you!’
‘Marcello will take care of it!’
‘Lucky for you Marcello is here!’
‘You only need to ask-a Marcello!’
Anyone sensitive to overuse of the exclamation mark will be cringing but I assure you it’s impossible to covey Marcello’s syntax, and by proxy the true essence of the man, in its absence. Marcello was a walking exclamation mark (by extension that probably makes George a walking colon) who habitually talked in the third person. He pronounced his name with a resounding Mar-cel-lo!, three syllables rising to a sonorous inflection on the ‘o’ like the second coming of the Lord being hailed joyfully to the heavens. Slightly louder than his other words, too, so the emphasis was on blah blah blah MAR-CEL-LO, blah blah—a tactic since imitated by commercial TV networks when switching from normal programming to advertisements.
Talking in the third person is known to lower anxiety. It’s been identified as a good mental trick to employ when going for a job interview. Don’t say it out loud—anyone will think you’re a complete douche—but inside your head change ‘I’ to ‘Felicity’ (if indeed Felicity is your name) and the feelings of self-empowerment will follow. Or so they say.
I don’t know if Marcello had ever read about this and decided to banish the ‘I’ from his life henceforth. Marcello considered reading an effete indulgence one step removed from visiting a sauna. Education was simply time-wasting when he could be making money. ‘Marcello is from the school of life!’ he proudly proclaimed while puffing out his scrawny bantam rooster chest. If Marcello was anxious it was in the way of a person who dances naked at a party while setting their farts on fire and then claims to be really actually quite shy. Maybe Marcello went home after each shift and shed a quiet tear about the world’s cruelty towards a short, hirsute Italian waiter who liked to wear his apron tied almost obscenely high, just under his nipple line. It’s far more likely he tucked himself into bed thinking, ‘Marcello good. No, Marcello great. Marcello sleep now.’
Marcello’s approach to sales was simple. No grand philosophy, no Anthony Robbins seminars, no 20-point cheat sheet. Screw that namby bullshit. Marcello’s success could be distilled to this one simple precept: do not take no for an answer.
If a customer says no, hear yes.
If a customer says yes, double it.
If any waiter decides to follow this professional path—and the financial rewards can be high—it’s important to cultivate an air of ownership. It doesn’t matter that you don’t actually own the establishment in which you work. People respond to being looked after by the boss rather than the second spear-carrier on the left. I don’t know why, they just do. Maybe it’s a mark of their own seniority in the dining room’s brutal hierarchy. Giving the impression every transaction occurred through the prism of his own generosity was a tactic Marcello practised often. Hence this scenario every time I started a shift:
Marcello: ‘Larissa, Larissa, Larissa. So good to see you. So good. How about Marcello make you a coffee?’
Me: ‘No thanks, Marcello.’
Marcello: ‘Just a little caffe latte . . .?’
Me: ‘No, thanks.’
Marcello: ‘Go on, Marcello makes the BEST caffe lattes.’
Me: ‘No.’
Marcello (more insistent): ‘Nah, nah, a coffee, a coffee, a coffee, let Marcello, let Marcello.’
Me (sharply): ‘NO.’
And so on. There is a good chance Marcello will depart this world lying on a restaurant floor with one of his co-workers standing over him in a daze, bloody knife in hand, saying, ‘I really don’t know what came over me, officer. One minute he was saying Marcello insists on making me a coffee, the next I just snapped.’
Bill was another good, potentially great waiter with fruitful insight into the illusion of ownership. A man-mountain with the friendly manner of a golden retriever and ankles that swelled alarmingly so that by the end of each shift he was shuffling around painfully with his shoelaces undone, Bill shouldn’t have been waiting tables. He was too old, he was too fat, but he flogged computers during the day and worked at the restaurant at night to get back on his feet after his own restaurant went under. Sad story redux. It was a well-reviewed restaurant. It was popular with the big-spending business crowd. But it was on a strip that had the misfortune to become the epicentre of Melbourne’s latest heroin epidemic. You can insure against fire, you can insure against theft, but you can’t insure against tabloid headlines screaming ‘Street of Shame’. Bye-bye business.
We all quietly sympathised with Bill at the beginning, imagining that his ego was finding it hard to let go the glow of being el patron, but it turned out there were other reasons customers bailed us up to quietly inquire: ‘That large waiter . . . is he the owner?’ Bill was the only other staff member at the Star who could have rivalled Marcello, but he had gone to the dark side. Probably a problem gambler, possibly a kleptomaniac, Bill was well and truly on the make. He called from Queensland with a story about having his wallet stolen and all his holiday money with it and could we lend him a few thousand until he got back? Live and learn. Eventually he graduated from begging other staff for loans that got paid back at twenty bucks a week if you made a really big deal of it and started sharking the customers. Hence the ‘Is he the owner?’ questions from regulars who were surprised that the owner of such a crazy-busy place would ask to borrow a few hundred dollars, but who were also strangely willing to lend money to the owner of such a crazy-busy place. It sounds implausible, but like all champion hucksters Bill was so good he left a trail of people insisting, ‘But he was so believable.’ His run of bad luck was legendary. Stolen wallets, kids’ medical bills, broken-down cars. He swiped the tips a few times, too. And he was sprung putting his footy tips in on a Monday. The Eye of God had picked eight winners. Amazing.
Bill broke the cardinal rule that you don’t steal from people with less than you. He had a nice house in a nice suburb, a bunch of kids in private school and a wife who liked to tell people at dinner parties, ‘I could have done a lot better than him.’ They deserved each other, really, but the thing was he was an okay guy when he wasn’t hitting people up for money. That possum population explosion in leafy Barton Square? Everyone assumed it was the hippies but it was actually Bill feeding them leftover bread. All that Star ciabatta kept the possums breeding like rabbits.
Marcello, on the other hand, liked to keep things above board. Mostly. When he and Bill teamed up, it was like the Keystone Cops with aprons. The Star’s two crack waiters were overheard one day telling diners they couldn’t sit in their section because it had just been sprayed for cockroaches. The lazy buggers. But Marcello didn’t steal from his workmates, and that is one thing in his favour, although he did think it was okay to steal from the Salvation Army. A bag of ties left outside an op-shop. To Marcello it was manna from heaven, a piece of remarkable good fortune unencumbered by any of the pesky sensitivities that might attach to taking something intended for charity. ‘They were just there . . . no one wanted them,’ he said in his defence. Maybe. They were hideous things. Brightly coloured polyester. He wore a different one every day, each more aesthetically volatile than the last. The Salvos visited the Star to shake their tin just before Christmas and Wazza claimed revenge on their behalf by handing over Marcello’s nightly tips. In place of the fifty dollars he was expecting, Marcello found a note in the tip jar saying, ‘The Salvation Army thanks you for your kind donation. Your soul has been cleansed.’
That was the only way to get at Marcello. Through his wallet. He pretended not to care but the loss o
f that money burned deep in his wretched little soul. To say that Marcello was tight is like saying the sun is hot, or water is wet. Sometimes it seemed self-evident that he was a few slices short of the family pizza, but Marcello was in fact a fully fledged, bona fide multi-millionaire. What kind of guy owns a dozen rental properties and still drives a beaten-up old Barina he bought for five hundred bucks? An old shit-box you could hear coming from half a kilometre away, the dodgy muffler scraping over every speed bump. When it finally died he replaced it with another one exactly the same. He came in beaming one day when a young woman accidentally nudged his fine piece of motoring history in a carpark. The poor lass found herself paying him more than he’d paid for the actual car, all over a dent pre-dating religion that he made out she’d caused. Staged a massive scene and everything. What an arsehole.
Marcello broke all the laws of waiterly greatness. He had no concept of discretion. He didn’t possess the purported psychic abilities of Uri Geller. He was not the kind of waiter who was magically there when the customers needed him, absent when they didn’t. Yet Marcello was one of the greats because of his immeasurable sense of self-belief. His zero understanding of how to read people worked crudely in his favour.
He upsold his skinny arse off, but for every customer who found themselves paying twenty dollars more than they intended for wine, he actively repelled another. That’s what any spreadsheet breakdown of sales per head of staff fails to take into account—that some of those people would never come back while that snivelling Italian guy with the nipple-high apron was there.
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