Prick with a Fork
Page 28
It was a lucky escape but some dreams are hard to kill. Enter the milkbar. In some parts of Melbourne it has become easier to get an espresso than to buy a litre of milk, thanks to the conversion of the aforementioned businesses into cafes. If I want to buy a packet of breakfast cereal, I have to jump on my bike, but if I want to eat artisan granola for breakfast there are three places within walking distance that will serve it to me. What can I say? The world is a strange place.
Brunswick locals might remember it as the place with the dummy wearing a gimp mask in the window. It was a decommissioned milkbar, I should have mentioned, now the home of gimp-loving students and, out back, a floating population of New Zealand backpackers apparently making do without a proper kitchen or much of a bathroom. Inside it was like the black hole of Calcutta. I’m no real estate visionary. All I could see was a dank hole where hope went to die and daylight was just a rumour beyond the unrelenting gloom. Everything about it, to me at least, screamed FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO! but to their credit Ben and Matt did a fair bit of jumping around in excitement. There was room for a veggie garden out the back, and across a laneway was a little red-brick warehouse where a young fashion designer lived in an amazing bijou nest decorated in layer over layer of beautiful things—a tour appended by the guilty realisation that for once we were the wave of gentrification rather than its victim. I had to admire the way she took a sledgehammer the night before we got the keys and smashed the joint back to year zero. Her point was received in the spirit it was intended.
Anyway, Pope Joan opened a disturbingly long time later, after all the nail-biting trials and delays and stuff-ups I won’t bore you with, and it was only finally on that first morning when the doors swung open that I was able to say: ‘Yes, I see. I get it. Well done, fellows.’ Even if it wasn’t in the family, so to speak, I’d be a placard-carrying fan. It’s food that doesn’t lecture you. It’s just tasty and the animals are treated well, and if you mention this book you can get a free coffee.
Actually, no. News just in from our sponsors. No free coffee. Sorry about that.
I’ve learned one very important thing through seeing a hospitality business being nurtured as if by a parent rather than the loveless duty of a state-appointed guardian. I expected the customers to be a floating population of faceless people washing in and out each day, as anonymous as the tide, but they’re anything but. They’re people who live in the ’hood and parents from the local school and those who come by every day and others who trust you for all their birthdays and anniversary dinners. It’s totally gratifying in a way that a person who visits a restaurant once or twice to scribble notes and write a judgement before heading off to the next new place never expected it to be.
I won’t ever get sick of going to restaurants. I might occasionally sigh and regret that the evening will not be spent curled on the couch in my second-best tracksuit pants (which also happen to be my second-worst) watching minor celebrities renovate South Africa, but when I arrive at my destination and say, ‘Table for Biggie Smalls,’ it’s always with a sense of excitement. I do sometimes wonder, however, if I’ve had my fill of deconstructions, of clever visual games, of classic menu items like pavlova in inverted commas that basically mean ‘Surprise! It’s not pavlova at all!’ Sometimes I even have the sneaking suspicion that the meal is the sharing and not the science.
Soft, huh? I’m losing my edge. A restaurant reviewer needs to be impervious to sentimentality or basic human emotion, like Steven Seagal in Under Seige, or Steven Seagal in Under Seige 2. I’m incredibly thankful, then, that whenever I’m about to roll over contentedly and let the world tickle my belly, Pope Joan throws me a timely reminder that people can be truly disgusting, and that the veneer of civilisation that keeps society ticking along hides a phantasmagoria of wrongness. The latest was the Hitchcockian mystery known as: ‘Who is leaving green phlegm smeared all over the bathroom wall?’ The crack team of PJ staff noticed each incident coincided with the regular visit of a small, neat, late-middle-aged woman with a tight bob and red lipstick. She could have been someone’s grandmother. She probably is someone’s grandmother. And she would have her coffee then stand in the bathroom for five, ten minutes, hacking up enough gobs to coat the wall and declare it a new Pantone colour. She denied everything when confronted about it but she was caught green-handed and banned for life. Disgusting. People like that are the reason the aliens keep flying right past us.
When I was a small child I had a picture book called Where Does The Butterfly Go When It Rains? that posed a bunch of questions about where various creatures choose to shelter. You know: The cow goes to the shed. The horse goes to the stable. The chicken goes to the coop. Even then I found it incredibly frustrating that the author failed to answer the title question. In my four-year-old wisdom I reasoned (correctly, I still believe) that if she didn’t have the answer she was completely out of line posing it. Now that I’m all grown up, I occasionally lie awake at night pondering a related mystery: where do the waiters go when they get old?
See, my birthdays are ticking by with increasing regularity but waiters somehow stay the same age. Wave after wave head off to join the real world and they’re magically replenished. Eternally youthful. It’s as if they’re a natural resource ready to be plundered and, unlike coal, infinite.
Of those who choose to stick around, some of course go on to open their own places, thereby perpetuating the cycle of life, death and rebirth as outlined in Eastern mysticism and Catholic guilt. But it doesn’t happen for everyone. Nor does everyone even want to open their own place. I don’t know why; maybe they have no interest in developing stress-related skin conditions. They like floating along shift to shift, year to year, living life like the classic carpark legal disclaimer ‘all care—no responsibility’. Eventually, however, there comes a point when you’ve worked in restaurants so long you can’t do anything else professionally. Same goes for priests and drug dealers. They’re all jobs with a high degree of stickiness. Priests retire to the seminary and drug dealers to Surfers Paradise, but waiters? With their bad backs, their shot knees and tendency to blow all their spare cash on eating and drinking, it’s not exactly a profession known for its prudent thinking about retirement. So it’s got me thinking: other ethnic minorities get their own charitably funded old people’s homes, so why not waiters? It’d be a blast. There’ll be a blanket ban on playing any Ibiza-related compilation, plenty of slate crockery so everyone feels comfortable, and Bloody Marys served each day at 4 p.m. sharp. Bedrooms will be decorated in a light-industrial style with the odd bit of aerosol art, and dinner will be announced with the familiar ding ding ding ding summons of a chef with his larynx surgically removed. There’ll be jugs of jus to pour at the table, now in hands unsteady thanks to the tremors of age rather than the misadventures of last night, although misadventures will be tolerated just so long as they don’t adversely interact with any legitimate medications.
Ben and I are propped up at the bar of one of those new Italian joints cunningly designed to look like they’ve been around since the middle of last century. I’m reviewing it; he’s along for the free booze. He’s also just informed me that he and Matt are opening a new cafe so to keep me from bursting into tears we’re workshopping our home for old waiters and workshopping it HARD. Will it have an honour bar or is that self-evidently a bad idea to rival the Hindenburg? A proper espresso machine is non-negotiable but what do we do about the inevitable fights between the imported Italian bean crowd and the Fair Trade crew? Perhaps a separate wing for the third-wave coffee wankers, who are guaranteed to annoy the crap out of everyone else. (I recently saw a newspaper print a correction about a young man who had been incorrectly described as a barrister. He was, in fact, a barista—proving that not only do baristas take themselves incredibly seriously, but the person who makes your morning brew is now more esteemed than the person who might save you from jail.)
They’ve only been open three weeks. All the staff are in the love-in phase. It’
s kind of sweet, really. You can see a little thrill pass through them every time new customers walk in the door. When they’re not cheerily serving people, they bunch together and stare intensely at the meatballs and arancini and polenta arranged under glass at the bar. Someone drops the phrase ‘mise-en-scene’ while the rest of them nod meaningfully. Must be arts students. I ask the bar chick for her funniest waitering story. She gives me something about a cabbie who shat himself and left his undies on the bathroom floor, whose ‘Sorry . . . sorry’ as he scurried out alerted them that all was not right. And then in the background, over her right shoulder, it happens. The bar guy, Mr Mise-En-Scene, commits a classic rookie mistake while enthusiastically polishing a Riedel glass. The thing about these rather delicate long-stemmed babies is that if you exert too much pressure the bowl breaks off and the stem becomes a very sharp spear. Straight into Cool Bartender’s hand it goes, right into the delicate network of tendons and quite possibly his radial artery, given the rivers of blood spurting everywhere. His consciousness has retreated to a pinprick of light somewhere in the black emptiness of his insensible brain. The only functioning body part is his mouth, repeating, ‘Oh god. Oh god.’ His co-workers are huddled around him but instead of making the usual overtures telling him he’s going to be okay they’re all freaked, too, so even with the 5 per cent of his cerebral cortex functioning normally the message trickles through that he’s fucked. He redoubles his wailing. They bend him over the sink and try to pull the glass out of his hand—every onlooker is wincing in sympathy—but the cries are getting louder, and the blood is spilling out harder, and he’s going white with a clammy tinge of green. Ben and I exchange a glance. I’m picking up what he’s putting down. It’s a glance that says: ‘We just witnessed the death of romance.’ And: ‘They have so much to learn.’ And: ‘Were we ever so young?’
Off to hospital you go, my lad. Take your wounded paw as a sign that you’re better off finishing your uni degree and getting a job where the sharpest thing you encounter is a stapler. Take it as a hint from the gods that things are much sweeter on the other side of the bar. As for us, we’re out of here. Off home, but in truth we’re not really going anywhere. We’re here for life. Because there will always be another one. And another one. Always onwards. Ever on.
Acknowledgements
No woman is an island and clearly no book is either. A multitude of people aided and abetted the writing of this memoir, from helping dust off long-buried memories to giving the author a kick up the bum when she most needed it.
Firstly, to my beloved Ben, without whom none of this would have been possible—thanks, dude. Words fail me, but I reckon you know.
To Jenny Dubecki, a tower of strength, capability and justified eye rolling. Without you our entire domestic set-up would collapse into rubble. You deserve not only a gold medal but silver and bronze, too (and Mum, I’m really sorry about Chapter 12).
My agent Michael Lynch, without whom I couldn’t say the words ‘my agent’, and Jane Palfreyman and Sarah Baker from Allen & Unwin, who were so kind to this little manuscript I almost fell over in shock.
Michael Harden, Hilary McNevin and Roslyn Grundy—you rock. As do you, Janne Apelgren and Nina Rousseau.
Thanks for the moral support and encouragement to Nina Dubecki, Olivia Hill-Douglas and Marcus Sharp, Toby Hemming and Lara Johnston and my girls Sally Jeremiah, Emma Pullen, Chrisi Shorland and Susie Staples.
To Matt Wilkinson and Sharlee Gibb: there’s no one I’d rather be on the runaway hospitality train with than you guys. (Sharlee, if they decide to open another cafe we have to kill them, okay?)
Additional thanks for the generous sharing of wisdom and anecdotes goes to Roger Fowler, Erez Gordon, Chris Lucas, Myffy Rigby, Stuart Neil, Jeff Salt, Rosanne Hyland, Paul McGough, Angie Giannakodakis, Kate Foster, Matteo Pignatelli, Harry Gill, Kathi Jennings, Tony Eldred and Andrea Murphy. If there’s anyone I’ve forgotten I apologise. I love youse all.