High Season Read online

  I hurried back into the shop and bolted the door shut behind me so that I could shoot up. I determined I would throw out the food in the bain-marie, get a pot of water on the stove for some fresh pasta, and maybe buy some flowers. I reached for the checked chef’s cap and put it on my head, wiped my face down with some Wettex and then bit the balloon casing from the cap and poured the white powder into a dessert spoon. I sucked up fifty mils of water with a syringe, squirted it back into the spoon, stirred the powder and the water together with the butt of the syringe and drew it back up into the needle through a cigarette filter. I popped a vein, which were frankly fucking pumping after my mid-morning run, then put the stolen deal away.

  As the smack flooded through my veins, I felt both intense relief and had a vision of how the shop was going to look in about twenty minutes, after I’d cooked off some new dishes, got some sweet music playing and bought those happy flowers.

  When I woke up it was dark. My face was deeply grooved from lying on the cigarette packet and spoon. Outside, cars were tearing along King Street on their way home, and inside I was more alone than I had ever been.

  14

  Vinnie has sacked Scotty on three separate occasions over the last few years and today could well be number four if Scotty doesn’t manage to contact him and let him know that Paris is in for lunch. And by sack I mean, ‘Fuck off and don’t come back.’ And after each such occasion, Scotty has gone and got another job and moved on with his life. Then Vinnie employs a new maître d’ and after about five minutes realises that no one else is quite like Scotty. The same problem always recurs for Vinnie—and always after a short period of time: the new maître d’ begins thinking they actually run things out on the floor. This might be the job description of a maître d’ in other restaurants, but at Rae’s it is just seen as so much arrogance. And in Vinnie’s eyes, arrogance is very unbecoming in a waiter. And maybe Scotty’s not the best maître d’ in the world, maybe he even pisses some customers off, but he does possess the rare skill of being able to put up with Vinnie’s illogical ways of dealing with the world. And that unique quality means that he has become something of a hero at Rae’s.

  The money the maître d’ gets paid in wages and tips is good; sometimes at Rae’s it’s even great, since the hotel occasionally attracts those super-rich folks for whom tipping can become a game of one-upmanship. Waiters go home and pray for those people to sit down at a table in their section. Literally, on their knees, prayers before bed. I’ve seen it. And maybe in Scotty’s case he was doing something else while he was on his knees, but as I’ve always said to the guy, ‘It’s because you can do two things at once that Vinnie loves you, mate.’

  During the high season Scotty’s tips can total well over a thousand dollars a week. After you factor in his pitiful wages, he can almost afford to rent somewhere in town where, after a bruising day at the office, he can run a hot shower, shine his shoes and get ready to do it all over again. That’s Scotty’s dream for next year anyway, a place in town. Until then he’s happy enough driving the fifty kilometres to work each day.

  ‘Push those desserts out, Jesse,’ I say as I slop water over the stainless-steel wall behind the stove.

  ‘Yes, Chef,’ Jesse replies, clapping twice and calling, ‘Service!’

  ‘Those fucking waves are calling me, you hear?’

  ‘You heading out, Chef?’ Soda asks.

  ‘You’re damn right I’m heading out, Sodapop. There’s a trimming two-foot swell out there with a space in the line-up just for me,’ I tell him.

  ‘I’ve got to go do a couple things before service tonight, Chef.’ Jesse tries it on, like now I’m worried.

  ‘Do not fuck with me tonight, Jesse. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes, Chef,’ Jesse answers.

  ‘Seriously, though, we’re close, you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes, Chef,’ Jesse repeats.

  And really, if I had any dignity left I wouldn’t ask him where he’s going or what he’s doing but I don’t and I ask him.

  ‘What do you have to do in town, Jesse?’

  And the boys stop what they’re doing, just for a beat, and turn to catch my back soaping up the wall.

  ‘Just got to see a man about a dog,’ Jesse replies, like it’s none of my fucking business.

  And that’s when I stop scrubbing and turn toward the boys.

  ‘See a man about a dog . . . You know my dog is the biggest and angriest dog of them all, don’t you, Jesse?’

  ‘Yes, Chef!’ Jesse laughs. ‘I’ll be back for service, Chef.’

  ‘He’s not a little puppy dog that you take for a walk and follow behind picking up his doggy-do-do. He’s a big fierce dog who eats little kiddies and small cows.’

  ‘Yes, Chef!’ Jesse yells, and claps again. ‘Service!’

  ‘We’re booked out again tonight, yeah? There’s work to be done,’ I remind him.

  ‘Yes, Chef.’ Jesse meets my eye. ‘I won’t be long, Chef. I’ve just got to go into town and then I’ll be straight back to box my section.’

  ‘Okay. Sounds like a plan. You coming for a surf, Soda?’

  ‘Nah, Chef. I’ll probably just head into town with Jesse.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say as I return to my cleaning. I’m nervous now. I know the boys are up to something.

  And then, like a siren sounding, Sammy the barman gives the call we’ve all been waiting for.

  ‘Vinnie’s in the house!’

  15

  Bruce, my friend from the Bondi Hotel days, was working with me again at the Pasta Man. He was a few years older than me, and one of those guys who always seemed to be at the party. He was a right-place-right-time kind of guy. But he wasn’t into narcotics; he was more a champagne and bong man. And when he suggested a road trip back up the highway to our home state of Queensland, he did so because he was worried about my drug use. I think he felt that if I could get back in touch with something innocent, like Queensland or home, I might be able to arrest my self-destructive ways and actually make something good out of the opportunity that the Pasta Man represented. And the idea of the tropics was appealing. I had written off my last misadventure into Kings Cross as a silly mistake, a youthful misadventure.

  I had lost my licence on three separate occasions as a drunken young apprentice chef, so I left it to Bruce to hire the car. Which turned into a nightmare anyway because between us we didn’t have a credit card with any credit left on it, which meant I had to stump up a cash deposit. Obviously the seven hundred dollars required to rent the car wasn’t hanging around in petty cash at this point, so I did my friends in Brisbane a favour and offered to transport some smack up to the Sunshine State if they were prepared to pay upfront. Amazing really, the optimism of junkies. No worries, mate; sounds like a plan. And the thing is, my ‘friends’ had recently robbed a bank in the manner of some idiots from a two-dollar weekly they’d picked up at Video Ezy, and got busted. They were hungry for something to numb the pain of an impending prison sentence and, because they had been staying home with Mum, were able to come up with the money.

  Getting busted on the freeway between Gosford and Sydney at two in the morning in the middle of winter for driving unlicensed and being fifty kilometres over the speed limit was not good. And what added heavily to that badness was the fact that I also had to dump the heroin out the window as we pulled the car over to talk to the police. This left me with some personal supply in the boot, which for a while there looked as if I was going to get busted for as well. The coppers, having established I’d made their night with on-the-spot fines, got to searching everything in the boot. I had seven deals in a film canister in my toiletry bag and it was the strangest sensation watching them as they poked through toothbrushes and aftershave, squeezed out toothpaste and tipped out pills . . . but never popped the lid off the little black film canister.

  The thirty-kilometre ride back to Gosford in the police car was long and uncomfortable. And what made it worse was that, because
the cops didn’t find what they were looking for, they weren’t interested in giving me a lift back up the highway to where they’d busted me. Bruce was a patient sort of guy and not one to act on instinct, meaning it would never occur to him to actually drive into Gosford and pick me up; rather he would sit there, in the middle of winter, wondering what the fuck he was doing on a drug-running trip to Queensland with someone who was clearly not on the up and up. Nor did the taxi driver have much sympathy. He insisted on getting paid before we left Gosford.

  Brisbane didn’t go well. The boys who’d paid for the smack were, to put it mildly, really looking forward to seeing me. When I explained to them that I’d been busted and had to dump their gear out the window, well, they understood it in a general sense but were nonetheless unimpressed. It was a hot and sticky few days, everyone hanging out and being quite nasty to each other. I’d put away the seven deals which were left in the film canister during the remainder of the car trip with Bruce, which meant I’d slept well in the car but now, in Brisbane, where winter doesn’t visit with any real meaning, it was obvious a holiday in the tropics had not been a good idea.

  I decided pretty quick that I never liked Brisbane anyway and in no time flat I was back wondering why I’d left my comfy rort in Newtown. Until I recalled that when I got back, it was time to start paying the Italians.

  Johnnie could see the numbers crunching uncomfortably into something like hard work and on my first day back in Newtown we had a round-table meeting where he pretty much told me what he thought of both the business and me. Which was a load off for him. And then he gave me back his key to the shop, patted me on the head, and wished me all the best.

  In three short months the business had come full circle. I was back doing seven days a week and was once more in dialogue with Doug and the Italians. In some ways that was good. It meant that I had to get my shit together and talk business. Of course they wanted to see the books, which was something I kept deferring, because the fantasyland I had created there was a Darklands—an inspired homily to the Jesus and Mary Chain album. And here’s the thing about the Jesus and Mary Chain, my favourite band at the time: my friends in Brisbane, having got busted for the bank robbery and then disappointed by me, were still keen to do a deal. In fact they were sending someone down—a friend—who wanted to get on in a pretty big way and they were wondering if I could organise it. This was good; it was cream, which was something I was always keen to be covered in. And in what turned out to be good fortune, the Jesus and Mary Chain were playing around the corner at the Enmore Theatre on the night we agreed to do the deal—and I had tickets. What became apparent, though, was that the person the Brisbane boys had sent down to do the deal was a cop and he’d organised for about six of his undercover mates to have dinner at the Pasta Man on the night of the deal. Given how desperate I was for the cream, though, I thought I still might be able to outsmart the police and walk away with the folding.

  I had known something wasn’t right when the group of six booked a table. No one booked tables at the Pasta Man, it wasn’t that kind of place. And the more they insisted on booking, the more suspicious I got. And when our ‘friend’ from Brisbane arrived and started showing off his gun, which was a police issue .38, I was just about convinced that in order to lessen their impending prison lag my mates from Brisbane had decided to cut a deal with the cops by throwing me to the lions. And I understood they were upset; they were down a couple of grand on the deal from a few weeks ago and they weren’t the type of boys cut out to do time—but who is before you’re the one that has to do it? The thing is, I really, really, really needed some money.

  It took a fucking crowbar and then some to get the undercover cops out of the place before the mad, bad and evil Chris was prepared to do the deal. He wanted all the doors locked, the lights turned down and the punters outside. And given I had tickets to JMC, I used that as my excuse to get everyone out the door. Really, I don’t know what they were thinking, six big burly blokes in Kmart suits and bad haircuts: they would have looked weird in here on any day of the week but tonight, alone in the cafe, en masse . . . well, it made me believe I might just get away with it.

  Obviously when the detectives realised they were locked out of the deal they had to make a decision as to whether to send in the ‘friend’ from Brisbane. Thankfully they went ahead on what I can only imagine was an information-gathering mission. Their cash still went kerching so I didn’t mind—and the concert, forget about it, those Scottish boys rocked.

  A few weeks is a long time for a junkie down on his luck. And in the few weeks that followed my windfall from the federal police, I went to some places I don’t really care to remember. Even during the worst of it, though, I was still obsessed with a couple of elements of hospitality. The first thing were my knives; their sharpness became paramount to me, the process of keeping them sharp a sort of stoned compulsion. The other obsession I had at that time was, not surprisingly, the fresh pasta. I became intrigued and then captivated by the various attributes of fresh pasta and the different techniques of cooking it. I was convinced that the al dente thing was actually an urban myth—some advertising campaign that had persuaded enough people that they knew something about pasta, where in fact what was happening was that a lot of people were getting indigestion from uncooked glutens.

  I came to believe then, and have spoken to a lot of people since who should know about these things, that if you are going to make a dough and roll your pasta out with your wooden pin and work it between your fingers, you’ll want to cook it off to al dente. And this means that in order to keep the fresh pasta alive and together, you don’t want to overcook it, you want that tiny bit of texture when it comes time to eat it. If, on the other hand, you are using dried pasta or machine-made fresh pasta, you want to cook the shit out of it. And what I mean by that is if the pasta you’re using can stand being boiled for a couple of minutes beyond al dente without falling apart, cook it to that degree and see if I’m wrong. It is important to capture some of the starch on the pasta. Do not rinse the cooked pasta. Simply scoop it out of the boiling water with tongs or a large steel spider (like a stainless-steel web), which allows the water to flood off the pasta as you transfer it to a bowl or pan. It’s at this point that you oil and season the starchy pasta with salt and pepper, citrus zest, various herbs or whatever a particular dish calls for. Too many chefs try to get all the flavour into the sauce of a pasta dish rather than onto the pasta itself. Really, the sauce that accompanies pasta should be simple and tasty, not something that overpowers or dominates the beautifully seasoned linguine or fettuccine or tortellini.

  Despite the sharpness of my knives and tastiness of pasta, my other problems wouldn’t go away, and after some particularly harsh commentary in regards to my efforts at the accounting side of things, Doug and I decided to go our separate ways. I paid for the pasta a couple of times but what became apparent given the business model I had set in train—the one which saw me require a gram of smack a day in order to function—was that the investors in the business never were going to see a return on their capital.

  When I handed in the keys I left unpaid bills and overdue rent. I left the place a mess and walked away. I had a heroin habit that was now so far inside me—into the very knots and fibre of my being—that I was a slave to it. There was nothing else that mattered to me other than where my next shot of smack was coming from, and I left the Pasta Man without a backward glance or thought for anyone else. And since I now had no money or income stream, I did what any loser down on his luck does: I phoned home.

  16

  My mother had found another Prince Charming and been saved. She really didn’t want me ruining the scene either. She was comfortably ensconced in Woollahra real estate, out by the pool on sunny days and off shopping on the expense account when the weather turned inclement. She was genuinely happy and truly believed that this was the real deal; her and hubby couldn’t be happier and it was simply a matter of enjoying the ever-after bit
.

  While the mood was so positive I thought it best to act decisively and ticked the latest Charlie up for a seriously large motorbike and a place to stay up north. It wasn’t an entirely cynical move; I was so far gone on the smack and so emotionally and physically fucked after the Pasta Man that I was determined to clean up my act. Charlie had a hundred-acre block of flat, barren land west of Toowoomba that was worth about a hundred dollars and he said I was welcome to pitch a tent out there in order to go through whatever I needed to go through. He even smiled when he suggested that no one would bother me.

  Tara is a ghost town and I stayed a while. I got straight and my hair grew out into its natural colour for the first time in years. I was pleased to be clean; I wasn’t drinking alcohol or smoking weed, only going into town every few weeks to pick up some fresh supplies. The block of land presented a harsh landscape. The trees were gnarly and mean and struggled to maintain the appearance of growth in a setting that was littered with decay. I pitched a tent in one of the few shady spots and my biggest challenge quickly became keeping the bush mice away so that the snakes didn’t make my campsite their permanent home. I was on their level, sleeping on a blanket inside an Yves Klein blue two-man tent. I was a surface creature, an animal attached to the earth. All around me was dust and hot, pressing nature. And although culture had forged meaning into this landscape too, I felt part of something larger and stronger than the ephemera of culture’s way. So much so that after a few months I began to feel semi-normal again and convinced myself that hell, as they say, was other people rather than a world of my own making.

  I saved some of my government cheques, got the motorbike serviced and began to consider heading back into town. And town this time would be Brisbane. There was no way I going back to Sydney: too many bad memories, too many blazing bridges. Brisbane . . . Even the sound of the name put me to sleep. It sounded safe and warm, a cosy place where a burnt-out kid might start again. And besides, I knew some good people there.