Dallas-Morning-News-ladlitter

Actually, it wasn’t yesterday but I’ve been dying to use that song title from the Rolling Stones 1967 album Between The Buttons to head up a post. This is about interesting experiences on a few occasions where I’ve been out recently. At night. And why I always feel I’m at the mercy of the naked city whenever I do.

Episode One:
I’ve arranged to go out for a drink on a Friday night with a former colleague, Paul. We both need a night out. At Newmarket’s The Quiet Man. It’s one of those fake Irish pubs, with a warm, friendly atmosphere, and named after a sentimental John Ford film set in a Hollywood faux-Ireland, so there’s a layer or two of irony attached to it.

Populated without being crowded, an acoustic duo plays unobtrusively in the corner. We have a look and a listen and I go to the bar. On the way back, I see this big beefy bloke, maybe early to mid-20s, and with facial features as if designed by the NRL Footy Show, sitting in a booth with a couple of friends and they’re trying to get him to stop punching the wall. Or at least stop punching it so hard.

Clearly someone to give a wide berth to. I tell Paul to keep his eyes peeled for the plaster pugilist. A couple more rounds and I’m waiting at the bar again when someone comes up beside me. It’s the big beefy bloke, still looking a little affected by his earlier anger-management issues. Fuck. I can be a bit of a magnet for these types.

“G’day mate I’m Steve how’s it goin’?”
“Hi Steve. Pleased to meet you, I’m Lad.” Wary without trying to appear wary.
“Geez I fuckin’ love this pub y’know. Good to get out on a Friday night and get pissed in.”
“Yeah, it’s alright isn’t it? Couple of drinks, bit of music, a few people.”
“Few wankers though. I kicked the shit out of a fuckin’ homeless cunt just down from here last week. Reckoned the two buck coin I chucked at him was a bit stingy. Fuckin’ ungrateful cunt. He fuckin’ deserved it.”

Often with these sorts of pricks there’s an inherent challenge to disagree with their scumbag attitudes. You find yourself with a tenuous grip on the tiger’s tail. But he seems to accept my non-committal single-nod Mmm as some kind of endorsement and I let him. Then he insists on buying me a drink, because he reckons I look a bit like a sometime in the future fucking homeless cunt myself. I know this is a fishing expedition, but I take it as a half-matey you-old-bastard-type insult and manage to grin and disentangle myself from him and return to where Paul and I are sitting.

“You looked to have handled that pretty well,” Paul says.
“Yeah. Managed to avoid putting him on an action footing, but he wasn’t pushing hard.”
“What would you have done if he was?”
“Well, and this is only a theory mind you, but with fucking arseholes like him, and there’re plenty around worse than him too, there’s a point where you realize they just want to hit you, and there’s no way to placate them. Anything you say they use to wind themselves up further. So when you feel you’re almost at the point of no return, get in first, I reckon. Start with a quick uppercut into the very soft bit just under the sternum. They’ll be winded by that and it might be all you need to do, but if you’re not confident about hitting the right spot, a couple of straight jabs right into their Adam’s apple should make them lose interest.”
“Shit, have a listen to Mr Fucking Natural-Born Killer here. Hahaha! Can’t understand why you’re not in Special Forces.”
“Now, you know perfectly well that we covert op types can neither confirm nor deny.”

Thankfully, Steve found other people at the pub to earbash (I hope that’s all he ended up doing) and we were left to chat and drink too-many Black Russians unmolested.


Episode Two:
This time it was a regular monthly get-together of old schoolmates. Usually referred to as “the boyos”, for no good reason other than it gives us a chance to put on a piss-weak Welsh accent. I don’t get to go along all that often anymore, but this time I’m keen as mustard to make an effort. It’s in Preston, in a Chinese restaurant near the market.

After picking up a nearby mate, I’m waiting to turn right into Cramer St from Gilbert Rd. The lights change to green but I’m not in a hurry, so there’s a beat before I ease my foot off the brake. And just as well. Because as I do that, some kind of hoon-mobile comes streaking through the intersection to my right, doing what my companion and I estimate to be between 80-100kmph. We also estimate that if I’d taken off a little more quickly we might just have made the 7:30 news update as a diverting tsk-tsk item about two middle-aged blokes being killed in a horror smash. So far so good.

At the restaurant, one of the boyos is a regular and keen to order on our behalf so we let him concoct a set menu that is pretty good. Some of the guys are a bit dubious but I trust his judgment and we are vindicated. The meal is excellent if a little pricey, and we have a fun night catching up with good friends.

We get out of the restaurant at about 11:30 and walk over to where I’m parked in the market. We get in. Over to my right, a police car cruises up to a nightclub entrance about 50m away when I see a car being driven at speed from in front and to the left heading straight for us. This bloke is howling across the car park, swerving between cars parked in marked bays. Just as I start bracing myself for a significant impact he manages to yank the wheel over and flies past us leaving just a few inches to spare. We both say “Let’s get the fuck out of here” together.

Of course, we remember to link our little fingers for luck. We figure we’re going to need it if we’re to have an incident-free trip home.

Episode Three:
Collingwood have easily beaten Essendon in the annual ANZAC Day match at the MCG, but back at a mate’s cozy place in Richmond afterwards, a few drinks and a few more joints take the edge off a terrible result for the Bombers.

I start heading home around midnight. Richmond West station is down the end of the street and I just need to hop on a train to Flinders St Station and then change there for another that will take me home to Flemington. But I’m disoriented, and catch an outbound train by mistake. I realize this when the next station is Collingwood.

No worries, I’ll get out at the next station, walk around to the city-bound platform and everything will be just tickety-boo. At Victoria Park, there are teenage kids saying goodbye to some mates and they’re good-naturedly rubbishing each other across the platforms.

A couple enters the platform opposite me. She’s tall and thin with long lank hair and he’s short and agitated, wearing a tracksuit and baseball cap. He walks quickly up and down the platform tapping on the walls, seats and signs with something and then jumps down on the tracks opposite the kids. They go quiet.

“Give me a fuckin’ cigarette. No, two,” he tells them. He’s wound up. The kids hand over the cigarettes. Hmmm, I think. A nasty piece of work. He turns to go back over to the platform opposite but then stops and looks directly at me, where I’m leaning against the station wall. It’s about this time I notice that he’s carrying a knife.

Fuck. I push off from the wall and walk out to the edge of the platform, so I can have a go at kicking his head off if he tries to climb up. He’s still looking at me, but it’s just a pause and he returns to the other side and he and his girlfriend leave the station. I go back to the wall, and turn so I can see anyone coming up the entrance ramp, just in case he’s decided to pay me a follow-up visit, but my train arrives and I’m on it and away.

Every night, there are four million stories in the naked city. I'm just paranoid enough to see it that way too.

“You need to see the manager,” the waiter told me, raising his eyebrows and shrugging to show me it was out of his hands.
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary. All I’ve asked is for you to bring me one of the stubbies I handed over to you earlier. Just bring one of them with you when you come back please.”
“You go see the manager.”

I had absolutely no fucking idea why I would need to talk to the manager but I was given the distinct impression that it was because I’d done something wrong, and it had something to do with my asking for one of the stubbies. Maybe they’d lost them and the manager was going to apologise and offer me some other bottles of beer. That was about as much as I could come up with and judged it pretty unlikely as soon as it occurred to me.

No, it looked like I was going to be hassled. And I was a bit irritated by that prospect as I dragged myself up from my seat and walked through an arch to where the manager was standing behind a bar. I’d already heard from the colleague who organized the night out that this manager had a long and proud history of rubbing people up the wrong way. He was thirtieish; smooth of skin and hair; and ginger-fair in that northern Italian way. Southern Italians reckon northern Italians are all up themselves. I’m not sure if that’s one of the great truths, but this bloke might have had his own colonoscopy footage playing over and over in his mind.

Like the waiter, he looked like he wanted to impose himself on the ambience. And he was going to do that by being a pain in the arse. And I picked up that he thought I was not the kind of customer he really wanted in his restaurant. So he and the waiter probably felt some kind of entitlement about treating our group like shit. I wanted to help him understand that the unpleasant customer he was dealing with was entirely his own creation.

“The waiter told me I had to come and see you to get one of my stubbies.”
“Well, there’s a problem with the stubbies you’ve brought into the restaurant. We are BYO, but wine only.”
“Really. That sounds like a very uncommon arrangement.” This is a few years ago now, probably 1998, when this sort of drink-specific BYO, now widespread, was still very much in its infancy. “There’d be quite a few of your patrons caught out by that, I’d imagine.”
“No, not at all. It’s printed on all of our menus.”
“Menus that aren’t sighted till after everyone’s sat down. I said g’day and went off to get some beer. This is the first time that’s ever been something to be hassled over. What’s the reasoning behind the restriction?”
“People come in, and I’m sure you can imagine, they have eskies loaded up with beer and it’s not the sort of dining experience we want for this restaurant.”
“My dining experience has been getting hassled for bringing in six stubbies. Of light beer. You’ve created a problem where there wasn’t one.”
“You’ll find most of the restaurants in Lygon St are now BYO wine only.”
“I don’t go to Lygon St much anymore. Too many people who just want to give you a hard time. I’ll grab those stubbies thanks. All of them. I don’t want to have to ask your waiter to bring me one and have to go through this all over again.”
“Do you intend to drink them here?”
“Yeah I do. And I don’t expect to be persecuted for it either.”

He handed them over and the rest of the evening was spent pleasantly. We’d finished the main course by this time and didn’t need to have as much contact with the waiter and didn’t see the manager again.

One wit back at the table referred to my stubbies as the Carlton Six. The next day, I was to hear a view of the evening and the incident that seemed to come from a strange parallel universe.

Update: Well, not really an update, but does anyone know how to make my sidebar appear at the side of my posts and not all the way down the bottom? If there are any kind souls out there who can help, I'd really appreciate it. And feel free to patronize me for my stupidity.

*I’m kidding myself that I get a whole heap of hits from beyond this fatal shore and so feel it necessary to give some background to this three-post series. Humour me.
Lygon St is the main thoroughfare in a restaurant-entertainment precinct in Carlton, an inner-Melbourne suburb. Historically, Carlton has always retained its essential cosmopolitan feel through many influxes and evolutions. Probably the most significant of these influxes was that of large numbers of post-war Italian immigrants. They settled and soon opened shops and restaurants to cater for this immigrant market.
Added to this is Lygon St’s proximity to Melbourne University, which means that the area has always had what Paul McCartney might call a “studenty” feel. The bohemian element in Carlton and its neighbouring inner suburbs were very keen on the fine but relatively inexpensive cuisine available there. And as with all such things, word spreads, the mainstream catches up after a few years, and so do the prices. Urban Geography 101.

**“Lygon St Limbo” was a refrain from a song about Carlton by 70’s Melbourne band Skyhooks. The title of this post is a play on that.

I never go to Italian restaurants by choice. It’s always someone else’s idea. It wasn’t always like this, but after a while, you just don’t want to encourage them by going back. Having access to top-class Italian cuisine at home via TLOML’s excellent cooking, and the odd passable effort myself, means a meal at an Italian restaurant has always felt a little like a busman’s holiday anyway.

But there are other reasons: I’ve never felt like I’ve been treated like shit at any Thai; Indian; Mexican; Balinese; Spanish; Turkish; Greek; Lebanese; or French restaurant. Or pub bistro for that matter. Not as a matter of deliberate policy, anyway. But at Italian restaurants, things have been a little different.

Now, I think I’d better qualify my position before anyone gets the wrong idea. My wife’s father was Italian. My longest and deepest friendships are with blokes of Italian descent. I love Italy, its language, its culture, its history and its people. But there is an international stereotype, ie Italians are great in the restaurant trade, that needs debunking; - you know, like Australians are laconic, easy-going and always get behind the underdog. And you can expect a future post on THAT load of codswallop too.

But back to Lygon St. There are restaurants on Lygon St’s east side in converted terrace houses. With waiters out the front touting. You’d reckon a good restaurant wouldn’t need to lower itself to this sort of shit, especially since these blokes have about as much savoir faire as the ones you used to see outside porno cinemas. But it seems to be something of a tradition.

You walk past. They ask if you’re interested in coming in. You say no thanks, or some other polite form of refusal, probably because you’ve already eaten at a decent restaurant, but they have to dish out smart-arse remarks or abuse, sotto voce. Sometimes not so sotto, either. It’s a pretty unpleasant and unnecessary gauntlet to be running, coming from a restaurant of all establishments.

Anyway, here’s a case to better illustrate the total experience: about ten years ago, I went to a work night out at a café-restaurant in a lane off Lygon St. One of our colleagues knew the manager, was a frequent diner there, and recommended it.

And because you’ll often see sickening obsequiousness in Italian restaurants whenever the staff are welcoming someone they know, or a celebrity of any magnitude, or a party that includes one or more attractive women, I thought having two out of those three was bound to give us some protection from the usual off-hand arrogance that I’ve experienced. This time, I thought we might be the recipients of some fawning, instead of observing it in stark contrast to the treatment I've come to expect.

All of which probably made my expectations for a good night out unrealistically high.

After arriving and saying a few hellos, I headed down to a nearby bottle shop to get a half a dozen stubbies of light beer.

When I got back, the waiter was ready to take our order. Some dithered over their choices, as people do. The waiter was impatient, abrupt and sarcastic. He responded to some orders by repeating the choice back to the person face thrust forward, lips in a protruding pursed O and eyes bulging out as if he couldn’t believe the person had finally made up their mind. I couldn’t wait for the arsehole to fuck off. But just before he finally did, he reached over and grabbed my stubbies, sighing histrionically.
The meals were okay I suppose, and offered much nostalgia for any former stamp collectors among us. In terms of the size of the portions, I mean. And during the courses, this waiter was asked politely, when we could get his attention, for the sorts of things that waiters are always asked for during a restaurant meal: you know, more garlic bread; another bottle of wine etc.

And each time he was called, he stopped dead in his tracks on his way somewhere else with raised eyebrows and eyes rolling skyward like it was a big hassle for him. And then he kept making a fuss about the huge favour he was doing everyone each time he returned with something. And we were one of only three occupied tables in the whole fucking joint.

But as big a pain in the arse as he was, we managed to shrug off his idiosyncrasies. It was going to take more than this hunk of shit to spoil a good night out, we reasoned.

And more was exactly what I got when I asked him if I could please have another of my stubbies.