High Season Read online

  And just like every other morning I’ve walked into the kitchen at Rae’s, this morning it smelt of sour cooking oil, cigarette smoke and bacon and eggs. Vinnie has been and gone—even though the Porsche was still in the driveway—having cooked breakfast for the guests who ordered it. Vinnie chooses to cook the breakfasts himself for two reasons: first, he hates paying a breakfast chef to do something that he considers unworthy of paid labour; and second, it’s an ideal cure for a hangover. Same as every other morning Vinnie cooks breakfast, this morning the kitchen is a fucking mess.

  I’ve had the privilege of doing a number of services in the kitchen with Vinnie Rae as head chef. And while publicly he taught me everything I know—when what I do is good—he’s not what most people would call an organised or well-prepared chef. And that’s because he doesn’t have to be; when you own the joint, you can do what you like and I get that. It’s just that sometimes it would be nice to walk in and not have to start cleaning up burnt toast and cooked egg whites and dirty pans. And the reason I have to start cleaning up rather than a kitchen hand or an apprentice is because he won’t pay for them to start early.

  Vinnie is big on wage control. He doesn’t give a fuck about food costs, really—he’s happy for the punters who pay the bills to have the best—but wages, forget about it. Every hour that a staff member works is akin to having them reach into his front pocket and pull out his money. It’s an affront to him that people expect to get paid. After everything he’s done for them! Not that anyone ever figures out what it is Vinnie actually has done for them, but that’s beside the point; while you’re scratching your head, he’ll be in the surf dropping in on overweight tourists on rented McTavish mini-mals.

  Scotty was in the house early this morning and that was comforting. Even if he was in a mild panic and rambling on about the carnage of last night which, as far as New Year’s Eves go, was apparently a show-stopper. All of which I missed because I fled home straight after service. Scotty told the usual stories about celebrities and broken glass out by the pool. Broken bottles and broken vows and broken dreams and massive bills—that about covers the early morning gossip among the staff at Rae’s before service begins. Out by the pool . . . I swear that space is a late-night fantasyland of fame and glory and money and models and champagne and—well, you can just picture the redemptive yoga practice come brunch time.

  There’s a barbeque next to the pool area that sometimes inspires guests to borrow a chef from the kitchen and—with the smallest amount of help—throw together a rustic seafood lunch or some late-night Wagyu beef burgers. And maybe it’s because everyone cooks at some stage of their life that some guests feel compelled to share a few of their greatest hits and memories in regards to all things cooking. Some of the tips are pure gold, really . . . It’s not all bad, though. Over the past couple of years I’ve ended up cooking for Baz and CM a few times, dozens of models and various celebrities from around the globe. The people who can sit back, relax and enjoy the service seem to have the best time, whereas the guys who insist on showing the chef a thing or two invariably end up splattered with pork fat and chowing down on burnt beef. Go figure.

  But then, just to shake things up this morning, Vinnie suddenly appeared at the bar, which is open at chest level through to the kitchen, dripping wet and smoking a fag.

  ‘Chef! What’s happening? You on top of it?’ he shouted, blowing smoke into the kitchen as he set about making a juice in the bar blender.

  ‘Yes, Vinnie,’ I replied, a little surprised that he’d hung around after breakfast. ‘We should be okay. Big night last night but I’ll get the boys to hit the ground running. How was the surf?’

  But Vinnie didn’t want to talk about the surf. Other than as something for others to envy. ‘You know me, mate, if it’s big I’m out. It’s all about the mise en place today, Jimmy, all right? Get fucking prepped up—and don’t let that little Choc prick keep disappearing out the back gate.’

  ‘What’s he doing out there?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, c’mon, he’s a fucking pothead. He came walking back from the coolroom last night right when there were guests coming out of the toilets and he fucking reeked of dope. It’s not a good look, mate.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him, Vinnie.’

  ‘And make sure you get the boys to pick those crabs, all right? Get them on the menu for lunch.’

  ‘Yes, Chef.’

  ‘Have you done the lunch menu yet?’ Vinnie asked, like he wasn’t actually taking the piss.

  ‘No, Chef. Scotty’s not ready yet,’ I lied, also taking the piss.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Scotty, why aren’t you fucking ready, mate? It’s fucking New Year’s Day,’ Vinnie yelled to Scotty, who was out in the restaurant area setting up tables.

  Scotty started mumbling something from out on the floor but Vinnie just turned away, laughing. ‘Silly cunt. Can’t hear a word he’s saying. And fucking clean this place up, all right, Jimmy?’

  I shot him a look, like, go easy.

  ‘Yeah!’ Vinnie fired right back. ‘I know it’s busy, mate, but that’s no excuse. You had the kitchen hand do fifty hours last week. He’s taking home more than me.’

  ‘Well, that means he’s getting twice what I get and I did ninety hours,’ I said, starting to get pissed off.

  ‘Don’t be a smart-arse, Jimmy, it doesn’t suit you. And the boxes down in the garage, mate—what the fuck’s going on down there?’

  By now the blender in the bar was going full-blast as Vinnie leant into the kitchen blowing smoke everywhere and shooting down early morning flies with an aerosol can of Mortein.

  ‘Jesus, Vinnie. Go easy on that stuff,’ I warned as I loaded his dirty breakfast pans into the sink.

  ‘You’ve got to do it early, Chef, give it a good spray before you start prepping, all right?’

  ‘Yes, Chef.’ I was starting to warm up.

  ‘And get that little Soda cunt to flatten the boxes out, all right?’

  ‘Yes, Chef,’ I repeated, a little louder.

  ‘And Jimmy,’ Vinnie added as he floated past slurping on his juice, ‘don’t be a smart-arse, all right?’

  ‘Yes, Chef!’ I bellowed. And that’s all he’d wanted to do. Get me fired up before the rest of the staff walked into the joint so they’d see me running rather than just warming up.

  And as the 911 roared to life out in the driveway, its canvas roof folding back into its position behind the rear seats, I strolled out to the restaurant and kung-fu’d the air and side-kicked the flies. It was enough to make Scotty look up for a beat from his screaming vacuum cleaner and flick me a middle finger. And if it were any other day I would have gone on with it . . . but it’s not, and I didn’t. Instead I slapped my face a couple of times, sucked it up, and marched out to the coolroom, the familiarity of its smell already somewhere deep inside me.

  8

  A random stocktake at the Bondi Hotel brought my cosy world undone. Frankly, I had disappointed myself—and, more significantly, the general manager—during my time punching in numbers on the cash register in the drive-through. We shared a first name and he seemed to genuinely like me but when he sat me down one morning and said he had to let me go because the inventory was so many dollars out, the numbers shocked me. I protested, of course, but who else could he blame? I had the keys to the cash register and the coolroom; I refilled the cigarette shelves and replaced the bottles of wine. It’s just that, until the three-monthly stocktake rolled around, I was in a space which might fairly be described as heaven on earth. Bondi in spring is a glorious thing: I always had cash in my pockets and a spare cigarette for the bums down the laneway where the drive-through operated at the back of the hotel; I was a trusted and even well-liked employee . . . and yet I was living a double life.

  My heroin habit had become more concentrated after my stint in hospital. I let the late-night partying slide and slipped into the daylight gig of being a drive-through attendant. JD did the business of scoring for me, which kept the supply
side of things comfortably mysterious. It just seemed a matter of convenience that he dropped by at the same time each morning and laid a deal on me. I was enjoying my time out of the kitchen. Life seemed easier, less dirty and hot, more colour and movement. And my time in the drive-through, while not profitable for the hotel, allowed me to reflect on what it meant to be a chef. And that reflection was brought about partly because everyone around the hotel still referred me as ‘Chef’; it was like the job of cooking had named me and no matter how much I might want to fuck with my identity, people seemed to know me better than I knew myself: like, of course you’re a chef Jimmy, that’s what you were always going to be—and what’s wrong with that?

  After my meeting at the hotel with Big Jim I was feeling particularly low and decided to go see my mother. No biggie, give her a call and catch up, maybe tick her up for some cash and family news. As soon as I rang, though, I knew it was a mistake. Her first line was something like . . .

  ‘You’re never gonna guess what’s happened to me!’

  And naturally she wasn’t interested in hearing anything from me except, ‘What’s happened to you, Mumma?’ As if she couldn’t actually conceive that I would be anything less than fascinated by what was going on in her life. Which was the same old story: some rich client had fallen for her and was going to take her away from all this.

  The capacity of my mother and some other women I’ve known to lay themselves down at the foot of some romantic dream of Prince Charming riding up and carrying them away—well, fuck me if it’s not the most amazing thing. And it’s like the dream never ended for my mother; like she was always and forever just some little girl biding her time and one day . . . one day he was going to crash through that door and carry her away. And of course at the brothel, they did that seven nights of the week.

  So I trotted up to Bondi Junction, where she’d suggested we meet—just for a minute, mind, and no scenes, please. I sat down with the ladies to morning tea. Annie, the madam of the joint, was all professional sweetness and light. ‘Hello, darling, how are you?’

  The others joined in.

  ‘Look girls, a famous young chef.’

  ‘Keep your hands off, ladies, I saw him first.’

  I have to admit, I was a sucker for it. And let’s be clear: this was no teenage junkie ho club; this was in the ‘top class’ category of working ladies—and if you could get past the multiple oxymorons and sheer theatricality of the place, well . . . maybe you were never meant to do that anyway. It was instantly clear to me that problems did not exist here; this was a space of dreams and fantasy, a perfect world where a man could take a scotch on ice at the bar and nibble on some cashews while a bevy of scantily clad and adoring females satisfied his every need. A gentle shoulder massage, a giggle at his every word—truly, life had never been quite this grand.

  But of course no one wants to see their mother at this point in the story.

  ‘I’m not here for the candy, ladies.’

  Giggle, giggle.

  ‘I just need a little cash and to check up on my mum.’ Soothing massage.

  ‘Back up now, girls. Give a man some breathing space.’

  And with a departing scrape of fingernails on skin and a flicking of hair, they did. In this darkened room with its warm soft lights and faint piano, the temperature set to make you want to loosen your tie, every man was king as long as he paid. And really, that’s the deal. What you’re paying for in places like that is not really the sex; obviously that’s the money shot, but the reason some places charge a hundred dollars an hour and others, like this one, five hundred, rests with their capacity to make a man feel like a king. In this world, the man is an all-powerful, all-knowing, wise and wonderful provider and expert lover. And there’s no shortage of just-rich-enough cabbies prepared to pay for that illusion.

  There was something about my mother that was not cut out to survive in the everyday world. And while it hurt me to see the way she deluded herself with impossibly romantic notions, I got so used to seeing her broken that I found I couldn’t be angry with her after a while. I just came to accept that she probably wasn’t going to change that much and, if I wanted to spend time with her at all, I would have to accept her the way she was.

  My mother had six children and she loved us all. I was her second-born son and I was always close to her when I was a kid. I was fourteen years old when my parents divorced. It didn’t particularly bother me when she ended up working as a hooker. It was more like the culmination of who she was rather than a desperate decision. If anything, it was something of a miracle that she’d managed to raise six kids at all.

  Organising my first job for me at Oliver’s in Townsville was her way of setting me up for the future. And she was serious about it. She didn’t want me to fail: she was always talking me up and pushing me into things. But she was never so much a mother as someone to confide in. And while those conversations were becoming less frequent the older I got, there was nothing I wouldn’t have done to make the world a better place for her. Fortunately, she felt the same way about me, and on this particular visit to the brothel she gave me a pile of cash.

  When Annie and the other girls caught on that there wasn’t going to be any great scene between my mother and me—that after a catch-up on family gossip and a few drinks we would simply go our separate ways—they let slip their various masks and alter egos and for a time became who they really were. No one was kidding themselves that life was perfect or that any one of us had woken up as kids and dreamt that this was the life we were going to lead, but the need for everyone to bullshit everyone else wasn’t an issue.

  The wind tunnel that is Bondi Junction seemed a little more bitter than usual that day as I walked away from the brothel and back towards the train station. I wondered at the time how it was all going to end. How was it possible that, after a few years of working at the Bondi Hotel, all I had to show for myself was a fistful of cash from my mother and a very demanding heroin addiction? I fantasised about drug runs to Thailand and dealing smack or growing pot and then, instead of doing anything so sensible, I raced down the escalator and jumped aboard a train to Kings Cross.

  9

  It was my mother who suggested I try a place in Balmain called Sorrentino’s. She knew someone who knew something and I caught a bus across the harbour and liked what I saw. Balmain has more hotels per capita than just about anywhere else on earth.

  The sun shone differently in Balmain: like it was outback rather than coastal, tree change rather than sea change. There was plenty of money around but it wasn’t uptight—more creative than Rich Dad, Poor Dad. You could bump into semi-retired rock stars, film directors or painter-dash-sculptors who might sell pots for five grand rather than fifty cents at the Saturday market. In the late eighties it had that lazy, everyone’s-a-home-owner kind of feel, which was nice given that I wasn’t old enough to care I wasn’t one of them. It never occurred to me that I should save any money or invest or indeed do anything other than work just hard enough to meet my most pressing needs.

  The job at Sorrentino’s was cold larder, which wasn’t glamorous, but I was happy enough without the pressure of being in front of the stove. I was actually determined to clean up my act and get a proper job again, a job in a big enough kitchen where I could learn some shit and fit in with a crew. And the crew at Sorrentino’s were great but old. This was general Italian food rather than regional cuisine; a trattoria rather than fine dining. But it was busy and well liked and had been there for a long time, so it had that lived-in feel which I always like in a place. If a restaurant’s too new I struggle to trust it somehow, as if they haven’t worked out who they are yet. This joint was under no illusions.

  I worked with two head chefs during my time at Sorrentino’s. They were both good cooks and painted a picture for me about what was possible in a future of some kind. These guys were journeymen; they’d been cooking forever and were able, after negotiating what seemed like a huge salary, to walk into the kitchen
and start work and by dinner time have everyone singing their praises. These guys weren’t experimenting and they weren’t surprised by a ‘compliments to the chef’; they were playing a familiar tune which had worked in the last place they cooked or maybe it was a couple of places ago. They knew what their strengths were and how much they were worth. And both of them showed me a few tricks without finding the need to turn into any great mentor.

  Doug, the owner of Sorrentino’s, was better to me than he had to be. I don’t know if he’d been told about any personal problems I was struggling with or if it was just in his nature, but as an owner he seemed to have complete faith that I would and could succeed as a chef. He didn’t let me near anything I was likely to rip off and wouldn’t tolerate me coming in late. This was fine by me. I needed the weekly wage just to stay afloat. Life aboard the gravy train had ended after Bondi.

  My biggest problem was that when I got straight or even semi-straight, I entered into some sort of reality I wasn’t prepared for. At times life seemed illogically hard and physically painful even. Muscle aches and pains, stiff joints and lethargy . . . Sometimes I’d look at myself in the mirror and go, dude, you are a young man, what the fuck is the problem here? And because I never got straight long enough to properly detox, and because I never managed to give everything up, just swapping the witch for the bitch, it seemed only logical that I would end up self-medicating with heroin again whereupon, like magic, I would feel ‘normal’. But because I’d left Bondi and JD behind, I had to score for myself, and that meant catching a bus or a train up to Kings Cross and dealing with the street hustlers. Which I didn’t really mind, it’s just that it took a few hours to do that from Balmain and Doug wasn’t the sort of boss who liked to give me a whole lot of time off. So my drug using at that point became an every-few-days affair. On those days I didn’t go up to the Golden Mile, I simply smoked some grass and got smashed on cheap wine and good whisky.