The kitchen was busy, though the food was basic. This was not a Weight Watchers club; there were some very fucking large people around the hotel who had a penchant for large slabs of beef with buckets of vegetables and sauce. Food costs were out the window. The focus was on keeping the blood sugar levels of very imposing men at a level whereby they considered me friendly. What the fuck did I know? I was a kid from Central Queensland who, while capable of taking a swing, was much happier beneath the umbrella of existing arrangements. They let me know what they liked and how they liked it and I did my best to provide. It was a simple arrangement really, and I'm pleased to say I got to call some of these people my friends. And my dealers.
Anyone who tells you that the experience of being high on heroin is no good either hasn't tried it or is just getting clean and wishes they didn't have to. Heroin, particularly in the early stages of your first addiction, is one of life's great pleasures. If you survive. Many don't. We've all lost friends from the needle and spoon, and I'm not intending to endorse the drug but simply describe how it was for me. And if the story starts well, the ending's a whole other thing.
JD was one of the smaller Pacific Islanders, and it was JD who suggested I might like to try some smack. I said why not and handed over the thirty bucks, and he was back in a few minutes with some packeted syringes and a foil of smack. I watched as he poured the powder into a spoonâwhich we had plenty of in the kitchenâsquirted in some water, mixed it up with the butt of a syringe then sucked it up through a cigarette butt filter into the plastic barrel. He carefully pointed out the exact quantity, squirted half back into the spoon, and pushed the needle into a vein on his forearm. He was very business-like, JD, pulling the fit out of his arm then throwing it into the kitchen bin before repeating the exercise for me with a fresh pick. Frankly I was stunned he could perform such tasks given what was happening to the pupils of his eyes. But JD didn't seem to notice, sort of coughing a couple times while he indicated I should squeeze my bicep and pump my hand in order to get a vein. The sight of such pristine blood pipes got him more animated than anything else that happened that day, and quick as the Red Cross, JD pushed the fit into the fattest vein on my arm, drew back some blood, and plunged the white lady home.
The sensation of my heart pumping heroin through my bloodstream was profound. Prior to that moment, life as I understood it could be depicted as a series of random sketches that formed a clumsy whole. Now it had all come together in the most warmly felt of ways, like hollandaise sauce. The sunlight was not simply light, but a matter of hues, shades and heat. My limbs, with their niggling pains and clumsiness, became coordinated. My mind was aware but not critical; accepting, peaceful . . . relaxed. And after the pinging rush, there was no confusion or anxiety; no physical pain or nagging voice in my head drawing my attention to ridiculous details. And it was perhaps this quieting of my racing mind that brought me the most relief. It hit me that it was okay to let go occasionally, all right to kick back and let things slide. Until that shot of smack, life had been a survival course, full of unexpected plot points, hair-raising bends and curves, unforeseen sniper attacks. It was wearying. I was ready for a little
I don't give a fuck
time. And as I lolled back onto a milk crate and stared in wonder at the magic of a slowly revolving ceiling fan, I reasoned that if being loved could ever feel half as good as this, then I had never been loved.
On one level, the next eight or nine years were pretty repetitive. And while it's true that nothing's as sweet as the first time, not all of it was bad either. There are plenty of junkies who have used more dope than I've spilt; it's just that everyone's different about these things. What I had no problems with was the culture of being an addict. I seemed to slide on in there like I was born to the role. And maybe I was.
During my time at the Bondi, other than learning how to use heroin and various other cocktails of drink and drugs, I also learnt how to cook a steak. And let's be clear about this: steak here is beef. It's not pork or lamb or chicken or duck or fish. Steak comes from cows and the best beef for eating is Angus. And I'm not into discussing this with any real openness to other ways of knowing beef; far too many chefs and backyard barbeque cooks think they know a lot about beef and, to put it bluntly, they don't. Cooking beef is one of the most underrated skills a chef might acquire. How hard can it be? Let me tell you, cooking steaks, particularly the thick eye fillet or tenderloin, how the customer orders it is quite an art. And the reason for this is that every steak is different. There is no such thing as a perfectly timed steak and I know plenty of restaurants that buy portion-controlled tender cuts to try to get around the difficulty of inconsistent portions of meat, but they aren't worth the premium.
Cooking steak is a feel thing; you've got to develop a sense of touch around the flesh of animals that becomes finetuned, accustomed to degrees of cooking. A good chef âknows' when a fillet steak is medium well or medium rare or just on medium and they âknow' because they develop a sense of touch. By squeezing a steak while it cooks, a chef can develop an appreciation of what stage of cooking the meat is at. There's no quick and easy way to get to the point of consistently âknowing', you just have to develop the skill.
One of the best ways to teach a chef how to cook a steak is to put it on the menu as a sliced dish. For instance the dish might read,
Sliced Angus tenderloin with yam puree and shitake mushroom jus.
Now the reason the tenderloin is sliced is because the chef, which in this case is me, is training an apprentice to cook steak. I want Jesse, Choc or Soda, or whoever it is in the next joint, to gain confidence in their ability to cook steaks by seeing and analysing the inside of every steak they prepare. So after they've seasoned the lump of beef with salt flakes and white pepper, and seared all the surfaces of the steak in their cast-iron pan, the fillet goes onto a clean tray and into the oven. Here's the other thing: every oven is different. Doesn't matter if Chef Pete puts it in for two minutes and Chef Jane says three and a half and Sous-Chef Donny goes six . . . Every steak and every oven is different, and the only way to get a steak medium rare, as the customer ordered it, is to be able to pinch the steak between your thumb and forefinger and know it's got a while longer in the oven or it's done. And done means it's ready to be rested. The steak needs to be transferred to your protein tray in a place where it is going to stop, or very quickly slow, cooking. It needs to be rested so that the blood can congeal or drain from the piece of meat before it gets plated up.
But before I let the apprentice slice the fillet, generally into three thick slices at a nice angle, we look at the steak, we touch the steak, we talk about the steak and watch as the blood soaks into the tea towel which sits on the protein tray. We slice the fillet and all agree that this is a perfectly cooked medium-rare fillet of beef and we discuss what it felt like when it came out of the ovenâwhose breast or bicep or thumb it most reminds them of. We do this because it's important to try to remember that touch. The steak is hot when it comes out of the oven and it always looks more cooked than it is because we've seared it until the flesh has caramelised but the touch . . . cooking steak to order is all about the touch.
After I'd been at the Bondi Hotel for some time, it occurred to me that my twenty-first birthday was fast approaching. It also struck me that despite the irrefutability of time passing, I felt for the most part that I was in some kind of holding pattern. Don't get me wrong, I was happy there; it was a warm and cosy space. I was also in some kind of prime-of-life, object-of-desire phase, and the girls I was hanging out with didn't mind me stoned; in fact, they seemed to like it.
I was sharing a flat up the road from the hotel in Bennett Street. It was a nice top-floor apartment that some boys from Canberra had rented and they were happy for me to pay an equal share of the expenses and crash in the sunroom. The view was all apartment building rooftops and Bondi skyline. None of the boys in the flat were attached to partners in any serious way, and other than Paul, our resident gay nurse, we all worked at the hotel. Sean had the bottle shop five days a week, Damian pulled beers in the rooftop beer garden and Bruce . . . I don't know what Bruce did, he just turned up for work. Basically we lived like kings. And despite the boys getting a little worried about my drug use after a year or so, my twenty-first acted as a catalyst for us all to pool our collective resources and organise a blast.
We decked the flat out in trippy fluorescent-tape wall patterns and ultra-long-bongs. The bathtub was overflowing with the best the bottle shop had to offer and we scored a veritable smorgasbord of drugs through our friends at the hotelâall of whom decided they weren't going to miss out on the action and turned up on the night. The flat was so crowded at one point that people literally couldn't move. Such was the interest in the party that I bumped into several undercover cops, a large variety of junkies from various surrounding suburbs and three different girlfriends from two different states. The Saints, the Smiths, the Velvet Underground, New Order's first album, Yello, the Pixies, Alien Sex Fiend, Johnny Cash and the Pogues . . . all were there in spirit if not in person, and I got so blissfully stoned with so many different people thatâdespite not really being able to focus on how Angela could actually be here from Brisbane while Marie from Paddington was wrapped under my right arm and Gayle from the hotel was giving me grief every time she caught sight of meâthe night was a raging, police shut-down, music-ripping success. Except for some random bacteria that found its way into a syringe and blew up my groin in a way that was very far from normal. I didn't notice it until the morning after, and thankfully Paul had the good sense to get me to hospital, where I spent the next four days in a ward being lectured on how close I'd come to forsaking my capacity to father children.
Ward 4D was a window through which reality threatened to shine too brightly upon my youthful, hazy, drug-addicted ways. I did wake up to some things: I realised that, despite lying to the admissions doctors, I had become a self-injecting, poly-drug user; and I was drinking an amount of alcohol which sounded like a wild exaggeration when I admitted it to others. Yet I wasn't ready to consider giving up or cutting down on any of it. I'm sure I promised everyone that I would but, really, most of my so-called problems seemed like very distant concerns.
When I did get back to work, I started to pick up some shifts as a glassie after my shifts in the kitchen. Money was tight; I was young and the extra hours picking up empty schooner glasses off punters' tables didn't bother me. I figured I was going to be hanging around the place after work anyway, playing pool, smoking joints and drinking, I might as well be earning while I did so. Then I scored a solo shift in the drive-through and the thing about that wasâand you have to remember this was pre-CCTV and pre-mobile phones, pre-internet and EFTPOSâbeing surrounded by an endless supply of bottles and cases of alcohol and cartons of cigarettes and a cash register which I was responsible for . . . well, it brought about a short sojourn out of the kitchen and into the world of being a drive-through attendant.
To be fair to Jesse, his parking run-in with the police was not completely unexpected. Parking at Watego's Beach during summer is a nightmare. And the particular skill set that finding a park entails deserves special mention. I know lots of places get busy over summer or winter or whatever the particular high season of that place is, but Watego'sâa tiny suburb tucked in beneath the lighthouse on the most easterly point of Australiaâis another thing altogether. We're on the very tip of things and while the vast majority of cars don't veer left off the road that leads up to the lighthouse in order to roll down into Watego's, those with the money or the longboards or the parking skills do, and enter what is a very particular kind of paradise.
Watego's is made up of about a hundred houses. All of them cost at least a few million dollars and some of them considerably more. It's not an ostentatious suburb to look at; in fact you hardly notice the houses for the blue-green sea, the dolphins, casuarinas and pandanus trees. The local council has graciously installed a couple of free barbeques beneath timber huts right on the beachfront and these are a great option for peopleâin winter. Winter is a great time to visit Watego's and Byron Bay generally. You can move around easily, park anywhere you want and fire up as many free barbeques as you like. Have all three barbeques for yourself if you like.
But I guess that's like going to the Snowy Mountains in summerâit's strictly for the bushwalkers. And I know bushwalkers are people too, but they usually prefer pushbikes to cars and strange amalgams of hydrated vegetable matter over a restaurant meal.
I swung left off Lighthouse Road this morning on my way to work and attempted to roll down the hill to Rae's; it was a fucking traffic snarl at nine o'clock in the morning! âDon't you people have anything better to do?' I was yelling out my window. And of course they don't. They're all on holidays and are all determined to mark out their patch of sand on Watego's Beach. There will have been âsitters' assigned to the barbeques by seven in the morning; no doubt for a child's birthday party or a fiftieth wedding anniversary or some random backpacker gathering.
As I crawled down the hill to Marine Parade I was greeted by about thirty vehicles backed up waiting for a park close to the beach. Anyone who walks up from the beach, even if they're only going for a shower, has sixty pairs of greedy eyes on them, tracking their every move.
To add pressure to proceedings, my wife Alice texted me a second picture of our two young boys fighting with each other. There was no message to accompany the image; she was relying on my ability to join the dots. After fifteen years together we can read each other's shorthand. This picture was designed to remind me that if I didn't work a million hours a week I would be home on New Year's Day helping her with the kids; at least to the extent that they would be hitting me rather than each other. Alice knows she can turn my car around with one softly spoken word; turn it around and have it never head back this way again. But right now, in the middle of this particular high season, we're both content to keep taking cheap shots at each other to alleviate the stress. There's a point where it isn't fun any more and people can get hurt, but for the moment we're just letting off a little steam.