The List of Unspeakable Torments (Part 1)

Traci Moffat's Something More

(no relation to Alan Moffat, winner, Bathurst 1000 1973 & 1977)

Writing certain things on certain bits of paper. That's mostly what the bureaucracy is about. Writing bit of paper about things you couldn't humanly care less about and then diligently passing it on to people who cared even less than you did. They then pass it on to someone else that you don't know of and naturally couldn't care less about. Sometimes it would come back with comments like - rubric? what's that mean? Rephrase. Or a post-it note instruction to replace a colon with a semi-colon, demonstrating that their knowledge of grammar comes directly out of their own large colon. Good one, Spirellli.

But in the end it all ends up either shredded and surreptitiously carried away in black plastic bins at night or put in bar-coded white files archived in a storage unit in some industrial estate surrounded by cheap residential housing where people eat bucketfuls of KFC convinced that you can't beat that taste. Pointless? Pretty much. Amazingly I'm told that its now less pointless than it used to be, and here I am stupidly thinking that something pretty much had some sort of inherent relevance or just didn't, much like Catholicism, male nipples, frozen pizza and hippies. How on earth could this have ever been more pointless?

But it just wasn't working for me today. I'd gone to the well and it was dry. Not only dry but full of scorpions, and not just those ordinary scorpions, angry scorpions. Angry, defiant fundamentalist scorpions, intent on bloody jihad. OK, that's probably overstating it. It wasn't the normal distractions of the open plan office. Sure, someone was graphically reporting to someone how her incontinent dad had shat on the new carpet, again. Yesterday in all seriousness they'd advised their pregnant friend to think about getting the obstetrician to organise liposuction for immediately after the delivery. You might as well Cheryl. They're going be down there anyway. Urgh, colleagues. Can't live with them, can't sink a rust pitchfork into their necks. Not legally at least. Unable to start resolved to make a list.

I'd once worked for a forgettable and thankfully brief period in the non-profit sector. The place had started as an advocacy group for women in vocational training - marshalling teenage girls into plumbing jobs and motor mechanic apprenticeships they they had no interested in and didn't care for. That sort of self righteous thing. They'd started small and through determined effort and careful strategy managed to stay that way, despite having dropped the chick thing to quaify for richer funding pickings. It was a weird place full of little secret rules. One was that you were under a daily obligation to begin every single day re-capping in minute detail every single thing that'd happened in the hours since you'd last seen them (or in fact might have happened). This included, but was not limited to, last night's dinner, conversations, visitors, children, the ABC, cardigans, hair, the shocking government, shoes, and impotent husbands that refused to listen. And if anyone happened to have a shopping bag of any description there had to be a ritual of show and tell, and naturally yet more talking. Even a fucking Safeway bag. You had no option. Even if it was a single tin of damn tuna. You were forces to waste at least an hour of your remaining life talking about tuna or tuna related topics, which would inevitably lead on to last night's dinner, conversations, visitors, children, the ABC, cardigans, hair, the shocking government, shoes, and impotent husbands that refused to listen. The place had still pretty much carried its old lefty women's rights attitude on its sleeve. So, there'd you'd be, the only male sitting at a meeting of the board of management where other women who didn't actually work there would naturally bang on about last night's dinner, conversations, visitors, children, the ABC, cardigans, hair, the shocking government, shoes, and impotent husbands that refused to listen, and occasionally they'd throw up any number of self congratulatory comments. They'd say things like behind every successful man is a woman, and behind every successful woman is a list. And how they'd all guffaw, chins a-wobbling, as if it was the funniest joke ever told. I'd smile, pretending to be in on all of it. Secretly I felt like chucking most of the time.

Anyway, the list. It was meant to be a list of the Top Ten most personally annoying and aggravating things. No real surprise in that. In a world so jam-packed with justifiably hateful things I though it might help to isolate the worst and put them in priority order. Then, perhaps, I could concentrate on these, make them manageable. I've made similar lists. I'd once made a list of my previous sexual encounters while pretending to listen to some bloodless insect drone on endlessly about some sort of legislation. I'd been given the choice of that or a seminar on Workplace Diversity. If drinking a litre of petrol had been the third option I would have gladly opted for that. A least it looked like I was taking notes. The guy next to me was whistling through his bulbous nose asleep. It's a depressing list both in terms of quantity and quality. A short lived flurry that coincided with my worst nihilist period and then almost nothing. Little more than what's known in common Australian parlance as a handful of lame, passionless sympathy roots.

Some of the entries are just places since I'd forgotten the unfortunate girl's name or been too drunk to have ever known - the Prison View Hotel, Middle Footscray Station, the Discount Camping and Motor Home Show, Coburg Wholesale Bulk Cheese Factory, Ashton's Family Circus. Others are more cryptic, based simply on scant details dredged from long distant memory (Panda, Carpet Girl, Racoon Armpits, Spastic Eye, Pancakes, Rover). Allegedly one poor girl had once complained to her friend after I'd tried some fumbling drunken move that she'd rather a dose of viral pneumonia than sleep with that moronic Tourettes' affected dickhead. And to think it was my essays that got her through Marxist Theory in fourth year. But who was I to argue. Anyone stupid enough to think they can trade an undergraduate understanding of dialectical materialism for a head-job is a moronic, Tourette affected dickhead. ASSHOLE. ASSHOLE.

No, but seriously my Top Ten started with one entry. What is it about the country that it's always associated with any number of virtues, purity and god fearing goodness? The simple, uncomplicated life where you get up in the clean crisp fresh air and with a strong arm and stout heart begin your honest day's work in bright sunshine, the chorus of morning birdsong in the trees, the warm, life-giving earth under your fingernails. It's about being one with nature, working with the land, the cycle of life, and being part of god's plan. It's about honouring the pioneering ancestors, respecting your parents, saving yourself for marriage, toiling without a harsh word or complaint for your family. It's about being part of a community, about stoically enduring floods and drought, being the first to volunteer, and fighting raging bushfires with your bare hands. It's about treating your neighbour like your brother, about stepping up to help the weak and vulnerable, about defending your country without the slightest hesitation or fear or question, about being solid, having pride and never letting yourself down, and never letting your mates down. For fucks sake its all about having a heart as big as Phar Laps', cheering the Don with a cold VB in your hand, the spirit of ANZAC, Bob bloody Menzies, and each and everyday sinking to the hard wooden floor and on your bony knees unashamedly crying out thanks to almighty god for all your blessings and most of all for Australia - the greatest country in the world.

The more I thought about it the less I couldn't think of any other entry as potentially hateful as the country. I've lived there can speak with some authority. And we're not talking about those little quaint villages nestled in green hills with antique shops in the day tour 'tea and scones' belt two hours out of metropolitan Melbourne. No siree. I'm taking of a hot, dry place where the stinking corpses of rotting, fly-blown kangaroos adorn the road and a municipal town sign peppered by the shot-gun pellets of bored, listless youth. A monochrome town bleached by the crushing relentless sun with sad abandoned shops, broken fences and pissed aboriginals camped under the struggling Eucalypt trees. A home to a millions flies where no tourist in their right mind has ever been. And to be honest, it's not the place itself. Even a scrubby desert or a dank backwater can usually lay claim to some particular charm. But, without question, what makes the country such an awful place is the people that live it - county people.

Country people. I once spent some time in Maroopna, just outside Shepparton in the Victorian fruit district. It called itself 'Fruit Salad City' and I was on the run from real estate agents that were hunting me down like the Yule Bruner character from WestWorld. I ended up on a farm planning to sweat out some fast cash and anonymously head back to the city. I was staying in the single men's quarters, basically just tin Nissan huts with beds made from galvanised pipe and chicken wire. You'd queue for breakfast each morning and they' slap a chop dripping with fat into a chipped enamel bowl and had it to you. For lunch you got two greasy chops in your bowl. Dinner, naturally, was three rank oily chops, but with sauce. The pickers were a pretty rough crew and although there was nothing obvious to single me out it instantaneously clear to everyone I wasn't one of the tribe. It wasn't long before the tribe came a-calling.

It was late one afternoon. I was sitting in the door step trying to digest my three-hundredth fatty chop for the week, reading. One of the guys just came over and brazenly kicked my hand sending by book flying almost into the paddock. A couple of others let out a nervous giggle. It was one of those moments, like in prison where you have to step up now or pay the price for the rest of your time. I chickened out. I did however collect my book, went into my hut and in a small act of defiance, continued reading. Basically they were personally affronted by the fact that I was reading something that wasn't titled Pregnant Jugs 2, The Best of Fuck City Cum Dumps, or 1001 Vaginas. It's not as I was reading Heidegger for godsake. In fact I think it was Peter Benchley's Jaws without a cover and missing the first couple of pages that I'd picked up from a charity shop that stank of old people, pee and boiled sprouts. Chances are every one of those guys is now living lives of abject misery. That's consolation enough for me.

Perhaps country people are not dumb. But I have been told stories. One about a young farmer that discovered an old wrecked Model T Ford in some ditch and having dragged it out with his tractor, decided to restore this historical piece of rural farm machinery to its former glory. He proceeded to work on it day and night, sparing no expense, and unveiled the polished and gleaming end result to much applaud from friends and family. Until someone asked how he proposed to get it out of the lounge room. It's not an isolated incident. Another independent source once recalled how some country genius sent off for a one man helicopter kit and had successfully assembled the impressive machine, again, in the lounge room. But that's all anecdotal. You'd have to do an empirical study. There could be a PhD topic in it. The purpose of this dissertation is to precisely determine just how stupid country people are. Perhaps then it's more a question of narrowness.

A friend of mine once travelled to Mildura in the far north west of the state with his new girlfriend to meet her parents, a pretty urbane, friendly sort I knew from school. He wore a lot of black and listened to Joy Division. We'd smoke joints and watch art house films. Now, Mildura's famous for many things, including probably the very worse rural TV on record. Every evening Sunraysia TV presented the Stock Market Report where for one hour some startled guy dressed like a carnie in a cheap checked suit would come on. He had huge sideburns and a brylcreamed come-over, and would stare down at a sheet of paper the whole time studiously reading out the daily prices for fat sows, yearlings and wool in a flat monotone voice. He'd end it by suddenly looking up and in a relieved voice say and that was the stockmarket report for Tuesday the 14th of June as if he was reading out your Miranda rights.

Worst still were the live STV commercials from local traders. At 3.00pm every Thursday there'd be Joyce, from Joyce's Cosy Country Crafts in a red gingham apron and Coke bottle glasses (she was clearly blind as a bat). She'd proudly show off her knitted tea cosies, dried flower arrangements and various bits of crafty rubbish. Ladies, here are these marvellous gift ideas. Aren't they lovely? Just in today at Joyce's Cosy Country Crafts, 15 Langtree Avenue Mildura. And you've got all your pretty colours. Here you've gottya greens. You've gottya yellows and youse even gottya blues. And the cameraman would very, very, very slowly pan across each of the terrible tatty items, the image all shaky from the symptoms of the cameraman's alcohol withdrawal. You'd be there as a kid, your life barely begun and you'd look around astounded by the fact that with the whole world of potential and possibility lying endlessly in front of you, there you are, alone, watching Joyce shuffling around bumping into the cheap sets. You'd end up thinking Joycie, at least you will never, ever realise just how fundamentally offensive you are. Too harsh? Probably, but the anger would have subsided by the time the guard-tower hit the ground in the opening scenes of F-Troop.

Anyway, my friend came back with a shiner. He'd gone to the Mildura Working Man's Club that once had the title of having the longest bar in the world for nothing more than a quiet drink. Some of the local heroes had taken him out back and given him a belting. Why? Because he was wearing pointy black shoes. For fucks sake, it was the 80s, we were all wearing pointy black shoes. He never went back. If you're planning a trip to the country, make a note - only pack books with pictures and round toed shoes only thanks.

Perhaps this narrowness is best evidenced by the degree of self obsession exhibited by our country cousins. Who on earth spends more time and energy thinking about and taking about themselves then country people? There are entire programs on TV and radio devoted exclusively to rural life with a seemingly endless stream of country people, one after the other eulogising about how great the country is and how great they all are. So deep and ingrained is their self love that normal words often fail and they can only express it lyrically through home made, tearingly god awful, rhyming bush poetry. And if they're not inducing your bile with their own sickly sentimental poems full of down to earth, home spun wisdom, they're braying homage to those champions of tedious bush literature, Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson who truth be told were little more than talentless, opportunistic, bi-polar, wife beating, alcoholic miscreants. And if its not poetry, it'll be some sort of never ending, pointless old country 'yarn' that is neither funny nor remotely interesting to any living sole apart (from other country people), usually spun by some smart lackey, dirty bearded old country 'character', (re: coot) sitting there milky-eyed in the front bar of the otherwise deserted Dimboola Hotel, half tanked on port and cokes. And when they've exhausted every single opportunity for self aggrandisement, they'll then move on to their second favourite topic - complaining.

Who complains more than country people? OK the English perhaps. But still the do whinge a lot and like the poms they have their favourite topics. Above all else, they love criticising the Government. To them, it's the number one scourge all time, the source of almost all evils. Bureaucrats with noses firmly in the tough sucking the life blood out of the bush through taxes. Kow-towing to the Europeans, the Americans, and the Chinese, signing dodgy trade deals that sell out the bush. In bed with their mates, the foreclosing banks. Giving any number of hand outs to the dirty blacks. The Government. Funding the arts wankers. Sympathising with the AIDS spreading poofters. Listening to the deluded environmentalists. Supporting immoral single mothers and the bone idle dole bludgers. Worst of all cranking the flood gates open to the tsunami of Asian migrants who aren't Christian, can't speak Australian and god forbid, don't have Australian values. There was a TV story recently about a young rural tackle and bait shop proprietor who so incensed by customers with poor English that he banned them. He'd fashioned a homemade sign from some cardboard and had proudly and defiantly displayed it in the front window. It read...If you cant speak english then dont arsk for service. It may as well have read...Owned and operated by a slow talking, dim witted, xenophobic, gun totting, red neck dickhead. Moron. I hope he goes broke.

So there you have. As uncharitable as it is, that's the first entry to the List of Unspeakable Torments.

The Rigatoni Brothers

Right to Left - Mario 'The Collar" Rigatoni, Luigi Rigatoni, Carlo "PipeSucker"Rigatoni and Shane Rigatoni. Concreters from Niddrie.

I, Dishwasher

People watch those chefs on telly and think how much fun cooking is. How creative. But those of us that have occupied that strange netherworld of commercial kitchens know the reality. As a former dishwasher of several years standing and not insubstantial notoriety, I've lived the reality and still bear the physical and emotional scars.

Some myths about restaurants are easily dismissed. For starters, no-one in their right mind could honestly think that female chefs actually tend to have big inviting brown eyes, great tits, wear spotless black cashmere turtleneck sweaters and moan while they mix ingredients. In fact the last one I worked with had the physique of a stunted fifty year old diesel train driver who would occasionally grunt in what we only guessed was Croatian. Personally I don't mind watching boring Delia Smith, with her boring English commentary explaining how to whip up boring English baked things with the view of her boring English garden through the kitchen window of her boring English house. One of my friends once said of Delia, that woman''s rod up her arse has got a rod up its arse. But I disagree. She might look like a Laura Ashley rabbit stunned by headlights but for mine she's a true subversive.

My theory is that people like Gordon Ramsey because they believe him, and I think that they believe him because every now he says "fuck". We never swanned around talking in cliches and catch phrases. We swore a lot. There's no boundary to profanity in a real kitchen. You might be there quietly working your way chopping through a sack of unions, minding your own business, when you'd hear a chef slam down their knife and loudly threaten a badly turned out terrine. Oh you. Oh you cunt. Oh you fucking cunt. You fucking cunty fucking cunt I'm going cut your fucking cunty head off, right here. I'm going to fucking cut your fucking cunty head off and fucking fuck your fucking throat hole. I'm going to fucking fuck your fucking cunty throat hole till you FUCKING CHOKE. You hear that you FUCK. Till you FUCKING CHOKE, you fucking cunty fucking fuck. It wouldn't make sense. They'd be shouting at a terrine, be shaking a threatening fist at the mildly deformed thing slightly quivering in the middle of a plate, as if it would make some sort of difference. Now, you won't hear that on Jamie Oliver. Actually when said with the right accent, French for example, it's pretty funny. And you'd know you're in a real kitchen when three hours later the Head Chef barks out an order for one lamb, two fish, green salad and a cunty terrine.

The other rubbish about cooking is that it is special, intricately associated with the very notion of celebration, and therefore worthy of being celebrated in its own right. Really? Valentine's Day was the single busiest day of the year for us. We'd get in early and organise the floor into as may tables for two as we could. It was the only time of the year when the whole place would be booked out. The couples would start to roll in early - the guys would be decked out in smart casual ie checked shirts and grey vinyl shoes and the women typically overdressed. It was clear that it was their one big night for many. Invariably, within an hour the husband would be staring blankly over his wife's left shoulder and she'd be staring over his right in the other another direction. Thirty odd tables and they'd be a pervading, crippling, awkward, stilted silence. Every now and then the guy might try to break the deadlock but would usually blurt out some banality about spare tyres, or cutting the lawn or whatever which only served to highlight the ordinariness of their lives and their relationships. In less then an hour they'd have ordered, eaten and left. It happened very single year, precisely the same. It was also the single obvious stupidity that we didn't take a cruel and roaring delight in. In fact the tangible sadness made you want to go out the back and chuck. Yes, lets all celebrate.

But in my view the biggest myth is that the cooking process relies on any number of higher order cognitive abilities. I vividly remember once during a break opening the door to a filthy bathroom out the back of the restaurant only to find Marco, the second chef at the time, on the toilet with trousers around his ankles and a colander in his lap, shelling peas, mid grunt. And smoking a 'roll your own' cigarette. He looked at me with his three day growth and bloodshot eyes, barely surprised. I just looked at him blankly, shut the door and made a mental note to avoid staff meals for the night. But in my own experience nothing dispels this preconception more than the crushing truth of Saturday shopping tours.

Shopping Tours were bus trips that on every Saturday efficiently delivered any number of variously overweight, large arsed, track suited women called Cheryl or Leigh-Anne, or Susan-Lee, or Kylie-Anne from the outer metro wastelands to inner city factory outlets where they scuttled about to save five dollars on perfume that reeked like fly spray, elasticised pants, nasty Chinese made lingerie and general stuff that normal people in their right mind wouldn't buy retail or otherwise. During a particular period of psychotic depression the restaurant owner had chased down one of the buses in his car, literally forcing them to pull over and bribed the organiser with a sizable kick-back to come to the restaurant for lunch. And come they did, in their hundreds, red faced and perspiring, totting in with their little plastic bags, chirping about their bargains. Actually, I didn't mind them. They were alright and good for the restaurant. Joe would be smiling behind the bar, watching the ladies sit down, lighting up their Holiday and Horizon cigarettes signalling the beginning of yet another Saturday circus of swill.

The Shopping Tour Grande Luncheon started with our special garlic bread, a chop-smacking favourite of this particular social milieu. I made the garlic bread. I'd use the left over bread and on slow nights there were lots. I would make a bucket of spread from five or six kilos of catering margarine and whatever garlic I could pilfer when the chefs where looking the other way. Think DeNiro in chequered pants waving a large knife in your face. "What? You want garlic? Is that what you want? Is that it? Garlic? You want garlic for the fucking garlic bread? Is that it? Garlic? You want fucking garlic for the fucking, garlic fucking bread?" Truth be told I would've used garlic flavouring if it'd been invented since every second ingredient in that kitchen was booster of some type. Huge tins of it, from China, pork booster, chicken booster, seafood booster, beef booster. And what wasn't booster was usually'extender'. Of course, where possible we'd use both together, booster AND extender. Anyway, I'd coat slices with the paste and then dust them with catering parmesan cheese that sank like dead baby feet. The cheese was my idea. I'd fill massive black plastic sacks and they'd go into the deep freezer and sit there for months. Then, when a customer had been stupid enough to order it, we'd throw a couple of pieces under the grill to simultaneously defrost and toast. It was likely that the garlic bread we used for the tours had been in cryogenic deep freeze for a year. More than once I had to quickly put all of the bags next to the bins, pretending they were rubbish on rumour that a council inspector was on the way. That's why we used garbage bags.

Next was the main course. Only one choice was ever available to the depressingly young, cottage cheese thighed suburban matrons, the somewhat confusingly titled Pollo Schnitzel con Mediterranean Vegetables. Polio Chicken we called it. Apt since any connection between it and disease wouldn't have surprised any of us. We'd make these the night before. We'd order in a hundred or so boiler chicken legs, legs only mind you, cheap from a Asian supplier Joe had found in Kangaroo Flat just outside Bendigo. We'd bone these out and then hammer each one on wooden chopping blocks until they were huge and almost see-through. Then we'd cut them into anywhere from two to four separate portions, put each though a diluted egg wash and add a thick coat of bread crumbs. The crumbs we used were made from left over bread we got from other restaurants. There was one up the road that we regularly went to when we needed a spare pot, or whatever. They gave us their left over bread like they were donating to a charity for the homeless. There was actually just enough meat on those terrible things to keep the crumbs together. Then we'd partially cook them in batches of twenty at a time in the industrial deep fryer, in oil that I had regularly and unsuccessfully pleaded with Joe to let me change. We'd then re-deep-fry them in the late morning just before serving. Polio Chicken. The vegetables were just diced carrot, catering brand frozen peas and sometimes zucchini. I never worked out what was Mediterranean about peas and carrots.

The highlight, well for us rather than the customers, was dessert. Our special Chocolate Mousse. I'm surprised it wasn't called Buddino Chocolato Speciale. We'd also do these the night before. We used cans of catering mousse, so cheap that they didn''t even had a label, just some blurry blue machine printing. Perhaps they were ex-military. Joe never confessed as to where he had got his hands on them but we had a shed full. They indicated that they each can made forty separate portions. But we'd worked out that the longer you mixed it the more portions you could actually get. It became a regular challenge. We'd start the industrial mixer first thing at the start of the evening shift and we'd beat that muck incessantly for hour after countless hour. During service we'd smile at the very thought and every mention of that mixer happily thumping away in the corner. Occasionally the Head Chef would crank the speed up to unprecedented levels and we'd know that we were pushing physical limits and a record attempt was in the offering. After service, the apprentices would pipe the highly aerated goop into glasses that had frosted in the cool room and top them off with a button of fresh artificial cream out of a can. We'd get progress reports..fifty, seventy, ninety� ...and towards the end the whole kitchen would surround the apprentice piping out the last one. We'd piss ourselves laughing every time. I think the record stood at 120 portions per can. They actually didn't look that bad, that whipped air smeared with fake chocolate flavouring.

I'd often throw on a pair of black pants to help serve. Not because we were short of front of house staff or because I needed the extra hours but because you were guaranteed hard core laughs. This involved a terrible game where each waiter would attempt to present not just a professional demeanour, but a completely unfeasible, extreme caricature, as if you were working a five star fine dining room, and the most important part was to maintain an absolutely fixed, frozen smile. We'd practice our individual smiles before starting. What killed us was that those dear girls just loved it, the whole thing, the plastic tablecloths, the terrible, terrible food and the deranged waiters. You'd spot one of them with their huge face smeared with garlic margarine, actual drops on her chin, and you'd walk up, and deftly inquire whether madam would care for an additional napkin, mentioning that you'd be delighted to be of any other assistance should they need it.

How they'd giggle and gush. I'd be there handing out the mousse� and they'd say things like 'I really don't think I should' and you'd be thinking, judging by fact that you're carrying around an arse the size of a VW Beetle of course you definitely shouldn't - but you'd just try to hold that smile. Without fail they'd declare it to be the very best they'd ever tasted, nodding to each other cheerily. Others want to meet the chef to personally thank him. Others would want the damn recipe. So you'd try to play along, holding your breath, grinding your teeth and stomping your feet to hold back the tears. Look, just between us two, really its pretty complicated, not to mention very time consuming. And I don't think you can just buy the ingredients in the shops you know. Anyway, the chef would just kill me. But usually, you'd lose it, first the smile, then the lot and have to run out back in order to re-gain your composure, leaving the others to explain to the suddenly worried ladies. If it was one of the guys, I liked to bend close to the table and whisper empathetically that his boyfriend had just left him, and then wink. Shopping tour service is still the only time I have actually urinated in my own pants.

But there then came a particular time, after the chaos of Christmas. I'd pulled so many consequent twelve and fourteen hour shifts that I'd lost track of the days. The kitchen was running on auto-pilot, kept humming by caffeine and nicotine. I was sitting on the stairs out the back, in my filthy dishwashing jeans and apron, towels in the back pocket, drinking a mug with six shots of espresso and chain smoking cigarettes, squinting at the bright light of the afternoon. Alcoholics call it a moment of clarity. It's not a bad analogy. I'd almost fully succumbed, surrendered to that unholy place. My degree had been long finished. I'd changed houses at least four times. I'd recycled girlfriends. Abandoned family. Lost friends. I had atrophied, basically declined as a normal, functioning person. The kitchen was like some terrible, acne scarred, tart with bad teeth that you didn't tell your friends about but tore at you when she wasn't around. I'd never been able to explain it. Was it that daily rush of adrenalin? Was it the sense of belonging to a brotherhood of fucked up misfits? Was it having a front of house that operated like a causal sex vending machine? I don't really know. But Head Chef had offered me a fast track apprenticeship that would lock me in, permanently. Deep down I knew it was fundamentally wrong. But it was hard to accept. Perhaps at an embarrassingly advanced age it was time to grow up. Within weeks I'd left and was deferring the issue by wandering pointlessly around South East Asia. Within a year the place had closed, the staff migrating to other various other restaurants.

Of course, you look back with a fair whack of nostalgia. It's unavoidable. It was the right decision. Still, you soemtimes wonder. Now I'm surrounded by some of the most lifeless and indefensibly pointless people that I'd ever had the misfortune to set eyes on. Truth be told it's a thinly disguised sheltered workshop constructed from equal parts gold medal arse kissing,
tepid mediocrity and bowel clenching fear. My dentist recently reported that I have been grinding my teeth together in my sleep. Its frustrating and my own fault. The worst thing is that days and months might pass and I seriously won't be able to remember laughing. There is no-one around me that will ever shell peas in the dunny. Once I tried to explain about the chocolate mousse and no-one understood. No-one is ever going to make up a song called Grandma was a Cocksucking Gunslinger.

One day I will open up a small cafe of my own.