The problems got more intense at the Barracks as the new owners became increasingly obsessed with cost cutting. I don't know how many geniuses I've met along the way in hospitality who think that by saving a few bucks here and a few bucks there, by pulling some from over this and under that, that the business starts to edge down. And when it starts to edge down they become more obsessed with paperwork and costs and chefs' hours and they lose sight of why they bought into hospitality in the first place. Everyone has to be creative about food and labour costs, but when the whole focus becomes the representation of the business rather than the business itself, particularly if it's hospitality, it falls to shit. Paperwork in restaurants is overrated. And I can hear all the college-trained executive hotel chefs spitting out their warm tea but really, paperwork is for the pixies; it's got nothing to do with cooking and I don't like to see people dressed up in chef's clobber sitting behind a desk in front of a mountain of paperwork. I figure that as head chef, if you can't do all the shop's paperwork in fifteen minutes at the end of the day you may as well call yourself a manager or an accountant or something else less kind. Hospitality is about pleasure and the human body, about the universal need to eat, drink and sleep. It's not about facts and figures and numbers and costs. Put the energy into a new menu, cleaning the chairs and baking the bread, and leave the paperwork to the pinheads.
Tuesday was the busiest night at the Barracks until the new owners killed it. They thought we weren't making enough margin on the night so they pulled the special, which was basically a two-for-one deal on the pasta. And maybe we weren't making a fortune on Tuesdays, but we were making something and, most importantly, we were turning over vast quantities of everything just after the weekend. And weekends are where every joint makes its moneyâother than the business lunch modelâand you don't have to be Marco Pierre White to open on Friday and Saturday nights and do a few covers. But given that we knew we had Tuesday night to clear out the
mise en place
, we could prep the shit out of everything before the weekend, confident that should we not have a massive Friday and Saturday, we could clear it out on Tuesday.
Of course once the Tuesday night thing was dead they jacked the prices up for the rest of the week. It was like watching Thomas the Tank Engine leave the rails. Every decision the new owners took obviously made sense in the office, but they failed to treat the punters who came and ate and drank and paid our bills as people with the capacity to make decisions. It was as if all the projections they made were somehow the truth of things and people were simply going to conform to their business plans. But that didn't happen and pretty soon things were too quiet for a line of three chefs and then too quiet for a line of two and not long after that it was me and Stanus the kitchen hand. And she was a good old girl, more kitchen porter than kitchen hand, which meant she could function as a very reliable prep chef. The problem was that the new owners had pretty much squeezed the fun out of the joint and the more that happened the more the punters stopped coming and the more time I had to indulge in my less productive habits. And it was just as well I had the time because it took far too much of that resource to get anything like stoned in Brisbane. Every time I got ripped off or skimmed or sold ninety percent glucose that some of the locals thought was the dope . . . I could hear Sydney calling.
Although there's a lot of years between me at the Barracks then and me at Rae's on Watego's today, before I left the Barracks I ate at a joint called Faces which was doing good business. It was here that I met a much younger Vinnie Rae. This was his first restaurant and had all the hallmarks of what would become his recipe for success. First of all the place was pumping; it was sexy, expensive and covered in glory. People who worked for him were doing a hundred hours a week and getting paid for forty; the food looked great on what were expensive plates and for me, it was an introduction to fine dining. And everything made sense except the wages. I just couldn't figure out how I'd cope going back to what was an apprentice chef wage after tasting the pay cheques of a head chef. I had hundreds of dollars a week spare as a head chef to do what I wanted with. While I chose to believe that I didn't have to use the quantities of drugs I had been for the last few years, really, the choice about those things had already been made. I wasn't about to sacrifice five hundred a week to learn how to make a better-quality jus. No, it was the nightlife for me, baby: I was cursed with that neon gene.
Leaving the Barracks and Brisbane wasn't a difficult choice in the end. There was a night there, right at the end of things, when after hanging around the hotel and getting completely smashed, I projectile vomited into a group of friends without bothering to get out of my chair. Which is difficult PR for anyone to spin. It was a vomit that took me, as well as my friends, by surprise. Smack makes everyone vomit, it's just par for the course, but lately I'd been getting very tired of having to run off to the toilets and dry-retch so I had fallen into the habit of simply bending down or turning away from people and sort of heaving into my sleeve before turning back to the table of friends or pretty girls with
what the fuck are you looking at? eyes
. How bad could it be? If I hadn't eaten for a while or had been dry-retching for a few hours prior, I figured it was a pretty safe bet that nothing was going to come up this time and I could save myself the inconvenience of having to walk to the bathrooms. How I got it so very wrong on that particular night is still a mystery to me. Even more unfortunate was that, in my attempts to try out new things, I figured that if I didn't actually turn away from people any more, the heaving action would be less noticeable. As a technique, I still don't write it off completely, but I can also categorically state that there is no sure way of knowing whether you're going to have a dry run or actually spew up about four litres of Italian
mise en place
.
People were growing tired of me in Brisbane and that was something I was both embarrassed about and unfamiliar with. I was used to being quite popular and, generally speaking, close to the centre of things. During the last few months, though, people had started to treat me with disdain. I was in my mid-twenties and that fact alone seemed to forgive a lot of illicit behaviour, but there was also little doubt that my drug intake was being perceived by others as something that was running the show rather being on the periphery of things, like it was for them. And, sadly, all the time I had spent out west on the block of land getting straight, getting to know myself and get the fuck over Newtown had disappeared from my short-term memory. It was like it had never happened and my heroin habit had picked up from where I'd left it in Sydney. And it was pissed off with me for leaving it behind. It had grown lonely and weird during my absence and now it was demanding an ever-larger speaking part. Such demands were expensive and difficult to please given the quality of the local dope.
I found myself up to old tricks with the cash register and late with the rent. I found myself selling the car I'd managed to buy and watching in mild disbelief as I hocked my guitar. Again. And I also found that despite the extra money I was earning as head chef, it was, as the song goes, never enough. Like a lot of other losers I'd met, I heard myself constantly talking about how the problem was the supply side of things, how if I could just get the supply-and-demand cycle right, everything else would be peaches and cream. The more I listened to myself acting like that and talking like that, the easier it was to accept the logic that once a junkie always a junkie. And it wasn't like it was something in the drug, some incomprehensible element of heroin that meant I was unable to stop using for any length of time; it was more that I told myself I simply preferred being a junkie. I was no longer able to locate the necessary motivation to actively want to be anything else. The irony was that being a junkie required a great deal of commitment; it required energy, enthusiasm, ambition and an enormous amount of self-will. It was like each day I awoke with a vital mission. And while there were plenty of days I didn't want to go on that mission, days I wanted the mission to self-destruct, it never did: it just got harder and harder, the scams more daring and dangerous, the potential for everything to go wrong closer to the surface.
On the morning after my unfortunate vomit, I sensed that it would be in my best interests to put some distance between myself and the people I called friends, a little breathing space that smelt of clean air and fresh opportunity rather than public bar carpet. Obviously I still had my perceptive faculties about me and, after collecting a few weeks' holiday pay and sending flowers to various ports, I bought a bus ticket to Sydney.
It wasn't hard at the time to write the whole place off and the people too as I boarded a bus out of Brisbane. Sydney! Yeah, baby, I was coming back and this time, well, I'd straighten up first and get some cash together but then I was going straight to the top. I figured I could be covered in glory with about six months of genuine effort and hard work. I even started to lower my tolerance before I left and had begun exercising. I was confident I had sufficient skills now as a chef to fit into any number of kitchen situations. The hardest choice I had in regards to work was whether to join a large brigade in a fine-dining joint as a chef de partieâmaybe grill section or larderâor work as a head chef in a small place where the glory was negligible but the money was great.
I bought all the Sydney newspapers before I left town and scoured the positions vacant. There were many opportunities for an ambitious young chef. And I probably would have done very well in any number of the advertised positions if I had followed that plan.
After a particularly taxing journey on the overnight bus, I figured I might rip up to Kings Cross and get a seven am pick-me-up before heading over to Balmain, where I had organised to crash with my brother and his young family. Seven am is what's known colloquially around Kings Cross as Desperate Hour, when the lowest of the low and the ugliest of the ugly vie with each other to be the very lowest and/or ugliest. It's actually good sport if you manage to get comfortably stoned and a ringside seat at one of the early openers. Failing thatâwhich is to say if you're out among it trying to score or cut a dealâwell, you're fair game, my son.
While a part of me still felt ashamed about my vomiting session at the Barracks in far-off Brisbane, here in Kings Cross I was a veritable cleanskin. Until I got ripped off and found myself more in the thick of things, and much sooner too, than I might have imagined. What began with the reasonably simple idea that I deserved a little self-medicated relief after a too-long night on a too-crowded bus quickly turned into a welcome home that made my Brisbane sojourn look like a time of moral fortitude and prudent restraint. In fact, what became apparent by about quarter past eight was that it was only the unavailability of what might reasonably be called heroin that meant I was able to hold things together for as long as I had in Brisbane.
At lunchtime I knocked on the door of my brother's house. He had kindly agreed to let me crash in his garage until I got myself sorted, and getting sorted was something I was overly optimistic about now that I was partially stoned. Like a lot of junkies, I had fallen into that cliché of optimism about what I was going to doâtomorrow. It was a circle of desiring various things from life, then being sated with drugs rather than the original things that I desired. And it was a narrative that seemed to provide the script for my addictive ways: each shot both ending the desperate nature of my desire and diminishing the chance of ever being able to realise anything other than using more drugs.
As Paris and her entourage get up from the table to leave Rae's, there's a general scattering of waiters, scraping of chairs and turning of heads from staff and other lunch guests. The colour and movement of Paris leaving the building seems to deserve one last stare from the punters who did, after all, share lunch with the girls.
Vinnie remains stubbornly turned away from the fracas. One of the security guys returns to take up his position near the kitchen doorway and the other security guy crosses his arms at the entrance to the restaurant. The handsome young bookmaker who is a star of the social pages and who organised the outing with Paris today pays Scotty for lunch with a crisp pile of hundred-dollar bills.
âHow was the fish?' I ask Mr Security.
âExcellent, Chef,' he replies and gives me two thumbs up. âBusy in here today.'
âIt's New Year's Day, you clown, of course we're fucking busy,' says Jesse, his voice dripping with contempt.
âFucking Jesse . . .' I say, shaking my head.
âReally?' The security guy plays along with Jesse, looking at his watch like Dumbo the Clown.
But Jesse's response is exactly why this guy is standing at the kitchen doorway rather than at the restaurant entrance with the other security guy. He's seen it all before, and while it is a little disconcerting to have a very large man basically obstruct my kitchen staff from going about their businessâshould they need to leave the kitchenâI figure he's been found out before by more than one smart-arse young chef.
âGlad you enjoyed your lunch,' I tell him.
âYeah, it was the best feed I've had in the last few days,' he says nonchalantly, looking around at Mr Bookmaker who, after paying Scotty, has been bailed up by a punter in the restaurant who seems to semi-know him.
âSee you next time, sportsman.' The security guy winks at Jesse as he walks off to rescue Paris and the girls. They are trapped for a minute at the top of the stairs while the bookmaker tries to deal with his new best friend, which means they are standing right next to Vinnie, who has done his best to avoid contact with the whole crew up until this point.