High Season Page 7

  ‘Dude,’ I would say, concerned about how upset he was getting, ‘just don’t do it.’

  And Terry used to smile as he wrapped the belt tighter around his arm, searching desperately for a vein that had any courage, before he’d put his shot away and tell me not to worry.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he’d say. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’

  And I was like, ‘I know that, man.’

  ‘You’re younger than me,’ Terry would say. ‘You’ll understand in a few years.’

  ‘I won’t be using in a few years.’

  ‘Sure you won’t,’ he’d say, and smile. ‘I won’t be either. Right?’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  I was surprised that people who used smack always felt like they couldn’t stop, that they had no control. I’d heard the rumours before I started of course, and maybe that was what attracted me in the first place: the idea that a drug could be so powerful that you had no control over whether or not to get the next shot. It seemed like a challenge in some ways, like the ultimate game of truth or dare.

  I’d watch Terry the Hairdresser walk back outside onto busy King Street after his shot, and he’d be strutting, like now everything was okay. He’d be smiling and waving to his customers, his face held to the sun. And in those brief moments of euphoria, Terry was Mr Respectable. He was Mr Fucking Hollywood Hairdresser. Everything came together for him over the next ten minutes or half-hour or even hour, if he was lucky. And then some broader reality would start to creep in, like an anxious snake in the veins, and it wasn’t just a psychological thing, it was physical; the body would begin talking and what it started saying was, you really need to start thinking about the next shot now or these worms of discontent are going to eat away at you from the inside out.

  12

  Alice sends through a photo of an old couple deep in conversation on a park bench. It’s an ironic scene. Alice is a people person. She needs to spend a set number of hours with adults in order to feel connected to the world. It’s hardly too much to ask for. Part of the problem with living in Byron Bay at this time of year is that most of the locals have left town for somewhere quiet. And they leave because the cafes, streets and shops become overrun with backpackers and tourists.

  Simple things like shopping for groceries require strategic planning and a commando’s precision. Given the kids don’t really understand the finer points of such missions, stress builds to the point where it becomes easier not to go into town at all. Soon—because your friends who don’t work in hospitality have all departed—a sort of suburban isolation sets in which quickly becomes all-encompassing, like an endless stretch of time in which nothing seems to change.

  Alice’s recent obsession with the garden is in part inspired by the desire to witness change. It’s like the miracle of watching a fern or shrub spring back from a particularly brutal pruning serves as proof that life is not a stagnant thing but a process of constant metamorphosis.

  Two weeks ago, Alice turned up at work unannounced with the kids trailing along behind her. Our kids like Rae’s; they’ve become familiar with the building’s hidden spaces and comfortable curves. They know intimately, like children do, the most comfortable places to fold into and stretch out on. And I like to encourage such confidence and familiarity—in winter. Alice was aware that turning up with the kids just as lunch service began was going to throw Vinnie, me and the restaurant out; that’s exactly what she planned to do. So aggrieved had she become at not spending any time together as a family that she decided it was time to make a statement.

  Vinnie immediately ordered the kids some fries with tomato sauce and Alice a flat white, all the while berating me for not spending more time with my family. ‘Jesus, Jimmy, are you still here? Will somebody tell this bloke that the place is capable of running without him for a couple of days?’

  Then, in a fuck-you to the already overworked chefs, he loaded up a plate of very time-consuming-to-prepare petits fours for the kids to munch on while they waited for their fries. ‘Are you going down for a swim, Alice? Do you need some sunscreen for the kids? Some towels? Just grab them from reception.’

  ‘Thanks, Vinnie.’ Alice smiled, playing along. ‘We’re fine. We won’t be long. The boys just wanted to see their father.’

  ‘Of course they do,’ Vinnie said, full of indignation, like how could you abandon your own children, Jimmy?

  ‘They haven’t seen him at all this week,’ Alice added, her voice slightly high-pitched.

  ‘I’ve told him,’ Vinnie said, shaking his head.

  And Alice knows—because I’ve told her after other such impromptu drop-ins—that while it might be a real gas for her and Vinnie to stand around for ten minutes banging on about how fucked I am, how I can’t even organise the kitchen to the point where I might get a little time off, the price of such fun is, for me, more of the same.

  ‘I keep telling him, love,’ Vinnie said, as he personally delivered the fries to the boys, who were moulded around the freshly laundered linen on table four. ‘Get your roster fixed up.’

  Table four has the best seats in the house. It’s the first table booked for whatever VIPs are around on any given day and, because Alice turned up at quarter to twelve, Scotty was now going to have to do a miraculous quick-change as soon as the boys finished their fries in order to reset it for lunch.

  It’s not that Alice is unaware that each time I follow Vinnie’s sage advice and roster myself off for two or three consecutive days he reaches for the red pen and starts crossing out shifts where I’ve rostered on other chefs. Failing that, he’ll sack someone or send the kitchen hand home early and the phone will ring and Vinnie will say something like, ‘I’m not paying you a hundred grand a year to lie around on the fucking beach, mate.’ And his tone of voice will be adding, how fucking dare I think that’s okay?

  The boys managed to smear the tablecloth with at least half the tomato sauce and quickly devoured the plate of petits fours . . . minus the biscuit crumbs on the floor and the chocolate fingerprints that patterned the chairs.

  And suddenly the clock struck midday and the first of our lunch guests began arriving and Vinnie, with the slightest shrug of his shoulders, directed a look at me that said, thanks for that, Jimmy; you’ve set everyone back fifteen minutes, the restaurant’s a disgrace and your kids are now running around the hotel in their boardshorts and thongs looking for towels and sunscreen.

  Children are not catered for at Rae’s. Really, call up the office and tell Marionne you want to spend thirteen hundred bucks a night in room one and, by the way, you’ve got a two-year-old.

  ‘So sorry,’ she’ll murmur. ‘We’re all booked out that weekend.’

  And that’s because Rae’s is a sexy place; a romantic getaway; a lover’s nest. It’s a place to have a blow-out, unwind and relax—to drink too much and sleep in and order room service for lunch.

  Alice understands all this better than anyone. But the thing is I made certain promises to Alice when we met; things like not letting life get so busy that we ended up not spending any time together. They were promises that I was desperate to keep. Hospitality doesn’t lend itself to happy families, though. It’s the hours: breakfast, lunch and dinner. If a chef spends the vast majority of their time cooking those meals for other people there’s a price to pay at home, where partners and kids are doing the same thing, all the while wondering what Dad, or Mum, is cooking for the guests at the restaurant.

  We’ve talked so many times about opening our own place. But each time we go to put it together something happens which demands our time or focus or money or . . . maybe I just never wanted to anyway. After running the Pasta Man all those years ago, I got a strong sense of never again wanting to get trapped anywhere seven days a week. I liked the freedom of leaving a job and moving on. And I liked learning new cuisines and new menus, things I could never have dreamt up if I didn’t work in a whole lot of different kitchens.

  13

  Johnnie was my new busi
ness partner at the Pasta Man. I’d met him a few years earlier in Queensland, where he’d run a spectacularly unsuccessful fashion business, and we’d clicked instantly, like old mates. And like me, he could see the opportunity that the Pasta Man represented. We organised to work four days a week each. There would be one day where we’d cross over and work together and the rest of the week we’d run our three days independently of each other. We had Rosemary, my Italian junkie princess from down the street, and Bruce, my old flatmate from the Bondi days, to help us out on our respective days.

  And really, our biggest problem was me. I had control over the cash register and the casting vote on whether to pay bills or pay myself—and I just kept paying myself rather than the business. And while some entrepreneurs might believe that’s exactly how you get rich, the problem with my model was that all the money went up my arm. Given we weren’t yet paying the Italians for the pasta and bulk sauce they were providing us, the date when we had agreed to start paying was beginning to look like the end of good times and the return of me doing a whole lot more hours for a whole lot less money. So to avoid the issue altogether, I took to getting the most outrageous, most money-hungry, most desperate heroin habit to date. What the Pasta Man became after a couple of months in was my best opportunity yet to pinch as much money from a cash register as I could in order to get as fucked up as possible.

  Implementing that business model was a great shame for everyone involved. Essentially, I squandered everyone’s good intentions and ripped off the business and pissed it all up against the wall. Not all of it was bad. Like I said, using smack is not all downside; it gets a lot of negative PR out there in the mainstream press but the real problems only start when the money or supply side of things begin to get messy. The great ‘white-lady dream’ of any junkie is an unlimited supply; anyone who’s been using for a while and had to deal with a few periods of enforced detoxification will tell you that if only they could manage to get the supply-and-demand cycle right, they wouldn’t have any problems in life. Most junkies can function reasonably well in the real world if they have low-level jobs and little ambition. And the others are better off staying home with Mum.

  Johnnie had his problems, as any individual does, but he also had a pregnant wife and a mortgage on a house around the corner. He had respectable friends who supported him, and us, in the business, and his refusal to engage with the numbers of the operation was only going to last for so long. Pretty soon we cut the crossover day so that the routine became one three-day week followed by a four-day week, and we got to never seeing each other. He took control when he was rostered on and I did so when I was on. And that included doing the paperwork, which was increasingly becoming a fantasyland of its own.

  One particular low point at the Pasta Man came about as I was standing behind the fresh pasta counter. The noodles were displayed in attractive handmade wooden trays with golden semolina sprinkled over the various shapes to keep it soft. It was a display worthy of a David Jones food hall. And as I waited for an old girl to make her pasta selection, it became obvious she was stuck looking at me, like I presented some sort of barrier she couldn’t overcome in order to indicate which pasta she wanted to purchase.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll worry about it today,’ she said, like she loved the pasta but I was the fucking problem. And then she just walked out.

  So I turned to cop a look at myself in the mirror and saw what she saw. Here was a young guy with several cold sores around his mouth, skinny around the chops, and then there was the hair . . . Terry from next door had taken to doing my hair for a tickle, which is about half a shot, and he did it after closing time so we wouldn’t be bothered while we got smashed and talked shit. No one wants to be the centre of attention when they’re demonstrably off-chops—either cutting hair or getting their hair cut—and the thing is, he was probably a little more fucked up than either of us realised and the colour job, which was meant to be blue-black, had turned a little multicultural. There were shades and patches happening that would have got a first-year apprentice sacked, but at the time we didn’t notice; we were both talking it up, we were rock-and-fucking-roll.

  But later, in the Pasta Man, I had one of those rare and scary moments of insight, which went something like, this is not going to end well. So I immediately turned away from my reflection and denied what I had just seen. But my insight was strong; Old Testament commands came booming forth and I didn’t want to listen to any of it but the words were erupting inside my mind and echoing around the room.

  You don’t look so good, friend.

  You’re broke, friend.

  You’re ugly and you stink.

  You have really fucked this up and in about five minutes everyone is going to find out.

  So I did what any self-respecting drug addict would have done and hung up the optimistically titled and jauntily fonted back in five minutes sign and hit the streets looking for a deal. And of course things are not inclined to go well for the desperate junkie. A more prudent, more seasoned campaigner might have whispered caution or wise words at this point, but I didn’t give a fuck, and upon seeing Paddy at the train station I greeted him like he was my long-lost brother or old mate from primary school and he was like, be cool, man, but I wasn’t cool; I was fucking desperate.

  Because Paddy was a grade-one cunt he wanted to go on with the whole best-mate scenario for the benefit of the locals, who were constantly on the phone to the cops about him, reporting his every little move. Well, now he was going to show them all who was fucking boss.

  ‘You need what, Jimmy?’ Paddy asked, dumbstruck, as if in all the years he’d been in his line of work he’d never heard of such an outrageous request. He motioned me to sit down beside him on an old bench carved with graffiti.

  ‘I can’t do tick, maaaate. You know thaaaat.’

  And he was sorry for me. He was genuinely fucking concerned, and you could hear it in his voice. If you listened really hard.

  ‘I’m just across the road, Paddy. You know me, mate. You know I’m good for it.’

  ‘Maaaate, I wish I could. I really fucking doooo.’ Paddy went on one of those epic round-the-world-with-multiple-fucking-stopovers nose scratches. He missed his snog eight or nine times until eventually I lifted his wasted wrist to his face for him, more out of concern for what other people were thinking about me at this point than any particular care I had for his unscratched itch. And Paddy, who was so wonderfully and riotously stoned, so gloriously in the sun, on the nod, turned to look at me as I lifted his hand to his face and ended up getting one of his own fingers in his eye.

  ‘What are you fucking doing?’ Paddy yelled, standing up, making a scene.

  ‘Sorry, mate. Fuck, are you all right?’

  ‘No, I’m not all right, you fucking cunt. You took my eye out.’

  ‘Paddy, show me, man. Show me your eye.’

  ‘Fucking get away from me, you prick. You know I don’t do tick. Don’t come over here begging and crawling like some fucking tip-rat. I run a respectable business over here.’ He walked away, holding his eye and shaking his head, like he couldn’t believe what some people would do to get on.

  The Newtown train station was a busy place. People were looking at me, obviously wondering what I’d done to upset Paddy. Paddy was a man who didn’t do emotion. He stalked; he didn’t chat and he didn’t quibble. Paddy was the street hustler for the bad, mad and evil Chris, who I had now upset by proxy. And that wasn’t good. Nothing was good. So I went to step two of what any self-respecting junkie who can’t get on does, and jumped on a train to Kings Cross.

  Up at the Cross I felt instantly better. Kings Cross is a place where it’s okay to let it all hang out. And people do. Everywhere. It was just what I needed. There was only one major problem and that was I only had five dollars. Which didn’t make me unique. There were dozens of people up and down the main street looking to get on without any money. But as I stepped onto the main drag on that particular sunny morning, I convin
ced myself I was the most desperate of them all.

  I crossed the street, dodging traffic and scanning the crew, trying to make eye contact with one of the working girls who was dealing. And when our eyes met, there was the usual almost imperceptible nod, which indicated the shop was open. She played her part by turning away from me and walking in the opposite direction as I strolled up behind her. And as I fell into step with her, she took a balloon-covered cap from her mouth and held it out behind her. My part of the deal was to press a crisp fifty into her upturned palm . . . But I didn’t do that: I pushed a folded five-dollar note into her fist, grabbed the cap, and ran.

  ‘Hey!’ she yelled.

  And she continued to yell as I raced away. It was almost as if she thought I was unaware of the fact that I’d just ripped her off; as if I might have somehow mixed up all the notes in my pocket and pressed the purple one into her hand rather than the greenback. But there was no mistaking of notes. I’d just scammed her.

  I was approaching my mid-twenties by then and I can only surmise that the human body is a very forgiving machine. That or I was just incredibly scared, because I was not just a cheetah but the Cheetah. I didn’t live very far from Kings Cross and I could have stopped off at home, put the shot away, then caught a cab back to work using some loose change. Instead, I ran a couple of kilometres, until I was able to jump on a bus that was heading straight to Newtown, and then sat down rolling the greasy stolen cap between my sticky fingers.

  And while my heart was pumping more blood through its valves than it had since high school, I was crippled with what might be called an over-responsible fever to get back to the shop and get it opened. The thing I felt most strongly in the madness of that . . . madness, was the shame of abandoning the Pasta Man. My sole ambition, now that I had a deal in my pocket, was to get back inside the familiarity of its Interview-pasted walls and serve the customers who needed fresh pasta for their dinner; serve the workers who needed lunch from the bain-marie; and serve the people to whom I owed a lot of money and considerable goodwill.