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.