High Season (11 page)

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.

My first trip back into town was more fraught than I'd imagined it would be. Considering that I'd left Sydney in a blaze of pain, I wasn't concerned about things like having a licence to ride the Honda 750 I was on; I wasn't worried about the out-of-date registration label or the outstanding warrants I had from my Gosford trip gone wrong. I had underestimated what being back in a city meant. Every police car and red light, every bottle shop and happy family, crowded in on me to the point where I got shaky, vulnerable, and I didn't like it.

My first joint sliced the edge off things nicely. I hooked back up with Angela and caught up with some old friends. I took to hanging out in the local hotel and shooting pool and staying calm. The idea of not using any drugs at all hadn't occurred to me. I was convinced that my problem was heroin and as long as I stayed away from injecting that, everything else would work out fine. My levels of anxiety convinced me that I couldn't stay in town permanently, however, and I spent the next few months riding back and forth between the block of land and Brisbane. And I didn't get lonely for months. It was strange how far a sense of shame or disappointment will keep a person from wanting contact with others. I knew I had blown a great opportunity at the Pasta Man; blown it badly. After a few tastes of Brisbane, though, I was starting to feel the need for company and other people more often. I began to think that what I was looking for out on the property, being alone with nature, was in fact an illusion. It started to feel like what I was doing was running away and what I really needed to do was back myself in the city by getting another job in a kitchen somewhere and making a proper go of things.

17

Sammy has a neat row of coffee cups and petits fours lined up along the bar for Paris and the girls. And as Vinnie bounds up the stairs with his girlfriend Jackie, he looks a little bedraggled, a little like he's been interrupted from a particularly sweet dream in order to attend an emergency.

Scotty guides Jackie to a table as Vinnie makes a beeline for the kitchen.

‘You guys know what you're doing?' Vinnie asks from his command position in the bar.

‘Yes, Chef,' I reply in a fashion that indicates I don't want to piss him off any more than he obviously is. Now is not the time to be a smart-arse with Vinnie: that's just what he's looking for, someone to unload on for being a wise guy when he should have known better.

‘What the fuck is Paris Hilton doing in my restaurant?' he asks, shaking his head and lighting a cigarette.

‘No one books any more, Vinnie. It's a disgrace,' I say.

‘Fucking kitchen's a mess, mate. What are you blokes doing?'

‘We're onto it, Vinnie. We're going to scrub down now and get ready for dinner. We're booked out again tonight,' I tell him.

‘Of course we're fucking booked out, Jimmy. It's New Year's Day, you clown. It's the only time we ever make any money. It's costing me a fortune just to keep the doors of this place open.' Vinnie launches into what's become a familiar refrain.

‘Scotty,' Vinnie calls out to the maître d', who has just returned from seating Jackie and delivering the coffees to Paris's table. ‘Don't bother ringing me when my friends turn up, mate. I don't own the fucking place or anything.'

Scotty has been rehearsing his next lines for a couple of hours now. And Vinnie is aware of that and is keen to disrupt Scotty's thought patterns in order to gain an early advantage so that he can justify laying the blame where everyone knows it's going to end up anyway.

‘Don't tell me my phone was off either, you could've called Jackie or GT or anyone else to let me know I had friends dropping in for lunch. I hope you've looked after everyone, mate. If I go out there and hear anything other than that I'm a genius and they want to move into my hotel permanently, I'll fucking sack you, all right?'