High Season (7 page)

My heroin habit had become more concentrated after my stint in hospital. I let the late-night partying slide and slipped into the daylight gig of being a drive-through attendant. JD did the business of scoring for me, which kept the supply side of things comfortably mysterious. It just seemed a matter of convenience that he dropped by at the same time each morning and laid a deal on me. I was enjoying my time out of the kitchen. Life seemed easier, less dirty and hot, more colour and movement. And my time in the drive-through, while not profitable for the hotel, allowed me to reflect on what it meant to be a chef. And that reflection was brought about partly because everyone around the hotel still referred me as ‘Chef'; it was like the job of cooking had named me and no matter how much I might want to fuck with my identity, people seemed to know me better than I knew myself: like,
of course you're a chef Jimmy, that's what you were always going to be—and what's wrong with that?

After my meeting at the hotel with Big Jim I was feeling particularly low and decided to go see my mother. No biggie, give her a call and catch up, maybe tick her up for some cash and family news. As soon as I rang, though, I knew it was a mistake. Her first line was something like . . .

‘You're never gonna guess what's happened to me!'

And naturally she wasn't interested in hearing anything from me except, ‘What's happened to you, Mumma?' As if she couldn't actually conceive that I would be anything less than fascinated by what was going on in her life. Which was the same old story: some rich client had fallen for her and was going to take her away from all this.

The capacity of my mother and some other women I've known to lay themselves down at the foot of some romantic dream of Prince Charming riding up and carrying them away—well, fuck me if it's not the most amazing thing. And it's like the dream never ended for my mother; like she was always and forever just some little girl biding her time and one day . . . one day
he
was going to crash through that door and carry her away. And of course at the brothel, they did that seven nights of the week.

So I trotted up to Bondi Junction, where she'd suggested we meet—just for a minute, mind, and no scenes, please. I sat down with the ladies to morning tea. Annie, the madam of the joint, was all professional sweetness and light. ‘Hello, darling, how are you?'

The others joined in.

‘Look girls, a famous young chef.'

‘Keep your hands off, ladies, I saw him first.'

I have to admit, I was a sucker for it. And let's be clear: this was no teenage junkie ho club; this was in the ‘top class' category of working ladies—and if you could get past the multiple oxymorons and sheer theatricality of the place, well . . . maybe you were never meant to do that anyway. It was instantly clear to me that problems did not exist here; this was a space of dreams and fantasy, a perfect world where a man could take a scotch on ice at the bar and nibble on some cashews while a bevy of scantily clad and adoring females satisfied his every need. A gentle shoulder massage, a giggle at his every word—truly, life had never been quite this grand.

But of course no one wants to see their mother at this point in the story.

‘I'm not here for the candy, ladies.'

Giggle, giggle.

‘I just need a little cash and to check up on my mum.' Soothing massage.

‘Back up now, girls. Give a man some breathing space.'

And with a departing scrape of fingernails on skin and a flicking of hair, they did. In this darkened room with its warm soft lights and faint piano, the temperature set to make you want to loosen your tie, every man was king as long as he paid. And really, that's the deal. What you're paying for in places like that is not really the sex; obviously that's the money shot, but the reason some places charge a hundred dollars an hour and others, like this one, five hundred, rests with their capacity to make a man feel like a king. In this world, the man is an all-powerful, all-knowing, wise and wonderful provider and expert lover. And there's no shortage of just-rich-enough cabbies prepared to pay for that illusion.

There was something about my mother that was not cut out to survive in the everyday world. And while it hurt me to see the way she deluded herself with impossibly romantic notions, I got so used to seeing her broken that I found I couldn't be angry with her after a while. I just came to accept that she probably wasn't going to change that much and, if I wanted to spend time with her at all, I would have to accept her the way she was.

My mother had six children and she loved us all. I was her second-born son and I was always close to her when I was a kid. I was fourteen years old when my parents divorced. It didn't particularly bother me when she ended up working as a hooker. It was more like the culmination of who she was rather than a desperate decision. If anything, it was something of a miracle that she'd managed to raise six kids at all.

Organising my first job for me at Oliver's in Townsville was her way of setting me up for the future. And she was serious about it. She didn't want me to fail: she was always talking me up and pushing me into things. But she was never so much a mother as someone to confide in. And while those conversations were becoming less frequent the older I got, there was nothing I wouldn't have done to make the world a better place for her. Fortunately, she felt the same way about me, and on this particular visit to the brothel she gave me a pile of cash.

When Annie and the other girls caught on that there wasn't going to be any great scene between my mother and me—that after a catch-up on family gossip and a few drinks we would simply go our separate ways—they let slip their various masks and alter egos and for a time became who they really were. No one was kidding themselves that life was perfect or that any one of us had woken up as kids and dreamt that this was the life we were going to lead, but the need for everyone to bullshit everyone else wasn't an issue.

The wind tunnel that is Bondi Junction seemed a little more bitter than usual that day as I walked away from the brothel and back towards the train station. I wondered at the time how it was all going to end. How was it possible that, after a few years of working at the Bondi Hotel, all I had to show for myself was a fistful of cash from my mother and a very demanding heroin addiction? I fantasised about drug runs to Thailand and dealing smack or growing pot and then, instead of doing anything so sensible, I raced down the escalator and jumped aboard a train to Kings Cross.

9

It was my mother who suggested I try a place in Balmain called Sorrentino's. She knew someone who knew something and I caught a bus across the harbour and liked what I saw. Balmain has more hotels per capita than just about anywhere else on earth.

The sun shone differently in Balmain: like it was outback rather than coastal, tree change rather than sea change. There was plenty of money around but it wasn't uptight—more creative than
Rich Dad, Poor Dad
. You could bump into semi-retired rock stars, film directors or painter-dash-sculptors who might sell pots for five grand rather than fifty cents at the Saturday market. In the late eighties it had that lazy, everyone's-a-home-owner kind of feel, which was nice given that I wasn't old enough to care I wasn't one of them. It never occurred to me that I should save any money or invest or indeed do anything other than work just hard enough to meet my most pressing needs.

The job at Sorrentino's was cold larder, which wasn't glamorous, but I was happy enough without the pressure of being in front of the stove. I was actually determined to clean up my act and get a proper job again, a job in a big enough kitchen where I could learn some shit and fit in with a crew. And the crew at Sorrentino's were great but old. This was general Italian food rather than regional cuisine; a trattoria rather than fine dining. But it was busy and well liked and had been there for a long time, so it had that lived-in feel which I always like in a place. If a restaurant's too new I struggle to trust it somehow, as if they haven't worked out who they are yet. This joint was under no illusions.

I worked with two head chefs during my time at Sorrentino's. They were both good cooks and painted a picture for me about what was possible in a future of some kind. These guys were journeymen; they'd been cooking forever and were able, after negotiating what seemed like a huge salary, to walk into the kitchen and start work and by dinner time have everyone singing their praises. These guys weren't experimenting and they weren't surprised by a ‘compliments to the chef'; they were playing a familiar tune which had worked in the last place they cooked or maybe it was a couple of places ago. They knew what their strengths were and how much they were worth. And both of them showed me a few tricks without finding the need to turn into any great mentor.

Doug, the owner of Sorrentino's, was better to me than he had to be. I don't know if he'd been told about any personal problems I was struggling with or if it was just in his nature, but as an owner he seemed to have complete faith that I would and could succeed as a chef. He didn't let me near anything I was likely to rip off and wouldn't tolerate me coming in late. This was fine by me. I needed the weekly wage just to stay afloat. Life aboard the gravy train had ended after Bondi.

My biggest problem was that when I got straight or even semi-straight, I entered into some sort of reality I wasn't prepared for. At times life seemed illogically hard and physically painful even. Muscle aches and pains, stiff joints and lethargy . . . Sometimes I'd look at myself in the mirror and go,
dude, you are a young man, what the fuck is the problem here?
And because I never got straight long enough to properly detox, and because I never managed to give everything up, just swapping the witch for the bitch, it seemed only logical that I would end up self-medicating with heroin again whereupon, like magic, I would feel ‘normal'. But because I'd left Bondi and JD behind, I had to score for myself, and that meant catching a bus or a train up to Kings Cross and dealing with the street hustlers. Which I didn't really mind, it's just that it took a few hours to do that from Balmain and Doug wasn't the sort of boss who liked to give me a whole lot of time off. So my drug using at that point became an every-few-days affair. On those days I didn't go up to the Golden Mile, I simply smoked some grass and got smashed on cheap wine and good whisky.

Then, one day, Doug offered me the deal of a lifetime.

Doug was a businessman, he wasn't a cook, and he only really acted at being a host. This is not to say he didn't enjoy it. Shit, I think he was having the time of his life. He'd bought the restaurant as a very going concern and was able to hang about the place doing deals with suppliers, hiring and firing staff, and generally keeping on top of the paperwork while he sucked back the
vino rosso
and called for more cheese. And he did it well. But he was always looking to expand and even franchise the restaurant concept—which is never a good idea. Outside of fast food, I don't think franchising works. I know some place, somewhere, will prove me wrong, but I probably wouldn't rate the joint anyway.

So Doug did what every ambitious restaurateur does and took on some partners. The Italians, as they became known, were a couple of entrepreneurs who had imported all the necessary machinery from Italy to make commercial quantities of fresh pasta. And they were good, hard-working Italian boys rather than dreamers or mafioso. They already had some successful fresh pasta ‘huts' in shopping centres and the plan was to bring a trattoria dining experience—like Sorrentino's—into the fresh pasta ‘huts' and generally take it all to the next level. So they opened in some pretty exposed public places, and soon the Balmain version of things got rubbed with the Circular Quay version of things, which brought the whole experience of dining at ‘a' Sorrentino's down to the lowest level. It wasn't like you could have one flagship restaurant that was somehow superior to the others; people ate at or saw the other version of things and that's what they started to equate with Sorrentino's.

The thing about the pasta machine of the Italians was that it was capable of pumping out a lot more pasta than they were able to sell. They'd opened a place in King Street, Newtown, which in the mid-eighties was a particularly grungy part of what was predominantly a university suburb in the inner west of Sydney, and the shop went belly up. The fit-out was good—they had put in quality equipment and signed a long lease—but after about six months they were losing so much money they decided they were better off with the place closed. So they offered it to me.

Basically the deal was that I walk into the joint, open it up under whatever name I wanted, pay the rent, and they would give me a three-month supply of as much fresh pasta and sauces as I needed. The rent was next to nothing; it was a bargain. I could see right away that the problem with the place was that the branding was too conservative for its location. It was out of place in what was a lowbrow, drug-fuelled, rock-and-roll neighbourhood. It was a hundred metres up the road from the Sandringham Hotel, which at the time was one of the premier performing spaces for alternative music. It was a hip part of town before it got hip . . . but you could feel it coming. The problem was that not enough people were walking down the street at the right time of day—but if you were twenty-two and had your ear to the ground, you could hear the traffic coming. And I jumped at the chance.

10

It's not unusual for chefs to use a whole lot of drugs, drink like alcoholics and smoke a pack a day. Commercial kitchens are the last bastions of
I don't give a fuck
when it comes to the random, hedonistic consumption of legal and illegal intoxicants. And because chefs work so many hours over such a broad sweep of the week, particularly during times when others are letting their hair down, most chefs see it as their responsibility to roster on having a few beverages or joints or lines during work hours. And I'm fine with that; I don't do it myself any more, but I'm hardly in a position to instruct others not to. Which is just as well because Choc, who Vinnie spoke to me about earlier in the day, has disappeared for longer than his requested two-minute piss-break.