High Season

by Jim Hearn

  ‘Yeah, not too bad,’ he replied.

  ‘Nearly there now,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ replied Benny, with a faraway look in his eyes. ‘Not far now.’

  28

  Benny and I caught the bus up from Lismore to Nimbin and headed straight to Grandma’s Farm, a small home-stay on the fringes of town. After lugging our now more modest collection of possessions into a communal sleeping area, we caught up with a few locals I’d come to know over the preceding years and then got smashed on the local weed.

  Nimbin marijuana is famous the world over for being a particularly smooth, strong bush weed. If you weren’t a complete blow-in, the locals would look after you. There was no police station in Nimbin back then, the hotel still operated as a hotel rather than the backpackers’ hostel it has become, and there were no tourist buses flooding the streets each day with fresh loads of young people from around the world, all doing the east coast of Australia. I’m not saying it was better or worse, just that it was different. It was quiet. Life was very slow. You might get twenty people in the Rainbow Cafe playing acoustic guitar and smoking some weed, but it just seemed like the thing everyone did rather than being something which drew a crowd of onlookers.

  After a few days in town getting over the epic road trip that had delivered Benny and me to Nimbin, I hooked up with a very obliging girl who owned a Holden station wagon and we decided, on a stoner’s whim, to head into Byron Bay for a night of debauched pleasure.

  On a personal level, I wasn’t travelling well. Since getting to Nimbin I’d been completely shit-faced on weed and booze and it wasn’t long before any plans Benny and I might have had about getting our act together seemed as distant as ever. Plus, I was still hanging out from the smack, which by now had become such a regular physical sensation that I wasn’t sure how I’d feel if I ever got completely free of opiates. Hanging out simply became a balancing act that I mediated each day to the best of my ability with whatever resources were at hand.

  I don’t remember much of what happened that night in Byron Bay. I know I got completely smashed and woke up in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar house in the main street at about five am. That was early for me, but I hated waking up somewhere completely strange so, after raiding the fridge, I set out for Nimbin.

  Nimbin is about fifty kilometres from Byron Bay and I knew it wouldn’t be easy getting one lift straight there, but I thought I’d be able to hitch-hike maybe three or four lifts and be home by breakfast. Five hours after setting out, however, walking all the while, I ended up just west of Bangalow and saw the signs for a drug rehab. I know some people might say, ‘What are the chances of that happening?’ And I can only say, not great. But that’s what happened. And even more importantly, I walked into the joint and asked some questions.

  What surprised me most about the person at the rehab clinic was how much they seemed to genuinely care about what I was going to do next. They asked me a whole series of questions and basically got my drug history down over the next hour. Then they laid out a plan for me: the first step required going to see someone for a referral to a detox unit, the second going to that detox for a week, after which I could hang out in rehab for anything up to six months.

  It sounded like a good plan to me. Autumn was morphing into winter and I was riddled with lice from sleeping rough in Nimbin. I was also hungry most of the time because I couldn’t get my shit together sufficiently to cook anything, and every time I did I just felt like more of a loser given what had happened to my glittering dreams of a career as a chef. A few months in rehab looked like a five-star option. Log fires were burning in the four separate rehab houses as well as the community hall, and because they only took up to twenty-four people at a time there seemed to be a lot of space for people to wander about and get themselves sorted. Obviously I still had absolutely no idea what a person did in rehab or detox, or what was required of someone once admitted, but it looked like a better deal than the one I had going on.

  When I finally got back to Nimbin and told Benny what my plans were, he was a little put out. Though he agreed it would be the best thing for me to do, it meant his life was about to become considerably more difficult. He would have to work out for himself what to do next and where to go. And I’m sorry to say things didn’t go too well for Benny. Not long after I checked into Nimbin Hospital and spent a week detoxing, he made his way up to Queensland where, a year or so later, he crossed over that line between madness and whatever sanity is, and when he did he couldn’t find his way back. He developed a crushing case of schizophrenia and things continued to deteriorate for him until eventually he found his way to a rehab which, like the one I went to, was a ‘total abstinence’ model. After they took him off his schizophrenia medication he went and jumped off a bridge.

  For me, though, that time in Nimbin became a turning point as I finally got straight and managed to claw back something of a life. The total-abstinence model isn’t for everyone, though. It didn’t suit Benny, and in fact probably helped bring about his demise. There’s no easy, one-size-fits-all cure for drug addiction or mental illness. Really, we know very little about the mind and its inner workings, though specialists in these fields have made huge advances in treating mental illness and addiction pharmacologically, and to turn away from those advances to pursue some abstinence, moral-fortitude model rarely works.

  Interestingly, the word ‘hospitality’ derives from the same word as ‘hospital’. The Latin hospes, or host, is also the root word for hotel and hostel. And what was interesting about that as I lay in a hospital bed in Nimbin was that it was difficult not to be aware of how similar hospitals and hotels are in the way they both deal with the human body. They both provide beds, food, drink and a sense of being looked after.

  What illustrated this point most clearly for me was that on each of the seven nights I was in Nimbin Hospital someone would invariably wake us all up (there were only about twelve beds in the place) by banging on the locked front door of the old Queenslander and screaming out in pain. On my first night there, I thought something terrible must have happened—a car crash, a knife fight, or something like that. But the matron simply stomped to the locked door and yelled back at ‘Eric’ to piss off back to his snake pit and die there, and if he didn’t go away she’d call ‘John’. It was made clear to me over the following nights and days that hospitality is of enormous value to certain people at certain times in their lives. Indeed, while hospitality might be thought of as fulfilling the most basic of needs, true hospitality is a rare and precious commodity when a person has no obvious means of acquiring food, drink or shelter.

  The first rule I learnt at rehab was that everyone had to let go of their various fronts and work identities in order to make contact with the real person inside them. And this applied to everyone. If you were a rock star, you were to refrain from playing the guitar or bursting into song. And if Mr or Mrs Rock Star couldn’t resist the urge to sing in the shower, well then, that was a bust and they had to discuss how an inability to modify their behaviour in a safe environment like rehab might translate in the real world, where alcohol and drugs are available on every street corner. Each such bust was used as a starting point to build an awareness around patterns of behaviour. And that awareness was encouraged and discussed and built upon by both the individual and others in the community in order to lead people to an understanding about what their particular issues and triggers were in regards to being an addict. In this brave new world, drugs were simply a symptom of other, unresolved issues.

  It wasn’t just rock stars that needed to desist from banging the drum; bus drivers were not allowed to drive buses, surfers to surf, photographers to take pictures or hairdressers to cut hair. But they seemed to make an exception if you were a chef. In that case, you were encouraged to disappear into the community kitchen and do what you could with the stale adzuki beans and, on one particular day, Jerry. Jerry was the former rehab pet lamb that Stacey had become obsessed with. It seemed
the idea of Jerry lying vacuum-packed at the bottom of the Tuckerbox freezer was something of an issue for Stacey, who was not really coping with Jerry’s demise or life generally. And pretty soon the narrative of Stacey and her relationship to food became a topic that morphed into a theme that evolved into an issue that everyone talked about endlessly. Life in rehab was complex. Some days it took everything you had just to keep up.

  The other thing I learnt pretty early on was that total abstinence meant no drugs or alcohol. Seems obvious, I know, but at the time I thought I might be able to convince the good folks at the rehab facility that my problem was no so much pot and alcohol as heroin. However, after confessing to smoking my last few spliffs up at the rehab’s water tower, the community organised a meeting and decided to send me off for another week of detox.

  I was to learn that this wasn’t an uncommon phenomenon; junkies—or addicts, as everyone is known in rehab—are prone to not doing as they are advised and often find themselves doing multiple circuits of detox and rehab units, generally falling over just before the finish line. Not surprisingly, people who are given to taking lots of drugs and drinking too much alcohol seem to have a predisposition to failing at the total abstinence model of ‘recovery’. When your whole identity has been wrapped up with the secret life of drug addiction, the idea of becoming a teetotaller isn’t very appealing.

  Obviously not everyone who goes to rehab is going to stay off the drugs when they get out. And often it’s the painfully perfectionist recovering addict, the one who turns getting clean into a competition based on hours, days, weeks and months, that, come check-out time, finds themselves inexplicably heading back up to the Cross for a fresh look at Desperate Hour. And I can relate to that. But after cottoning on to what total abstinence actually entailed, and what would be required of me in order to spend a few months in rehab, I decided I would play the game for a while. Other than that, I promised myself nothing.

  What playing the game meant was that I would make drugs and alcohol my number-one problem in life, even though I felt they were actually lower down the list of my so-called problems. While it may have seemed obvious to others that drugs were in fact my number-one problem, it wasn’t that obvious to me at the time. I knew I had issues with smack, I drank like a fish and smoked like a V8, but when I was called upon to describe what an addict looked like, my image was always of someone older and more beat up than me. I pictured someone who’d done a lot of jail time and was covered in tatts—as opposed to the few pieces of amateur body art I had going on. An addict was always someone further along the path to complete and utter fucked-up-ness than me. I could point out other addicts—fuck me, look at that poor bastard over there, of course he’s an addict. That woman who has turned up once too often on the streets at sunset, she’s definitely an addict—and from the look of her a prostitute too. But me? I was just a young bloke down on his luck. All chefs used drugs, I’d reason. And I’d never used as much as him or her or them.

  And yet, saying, ‘Fuck it, I’ll please these Johnnies in here and take this shit seriously for a while’—primarily because I had nowhere else to live—enabled me to get a few months’ clean time during which I actually began to feel like a semi-normal human being again. I started to slow down a little; my thoughts ceased to be quite so mad and frenetic; the crazy voices in my head thinned out and a more realistic set of thoughts started to emerge. It wasn’t super-pleasant at times but it wasn’t as bad or as ‘deep’ as I thought it was going to be. Really, the rest of it, including whatever emotional catharses I might have had, whatever talking to counsellors I did about various things I might have done or were done to me, was small beer in relation to getting off the drugs.

  I wouldn’t have thought this was the case prior to going into rehab but the simple step of treating drugs and alcohol as my number-one problem, rather than any of the other shit, allowed any problems I might have had, or thought I had, to slowly sort themselves out. Life came back to me; it wasn’t like I had to figure everything out, I just got caught up in the slipstream of things. And I can’t really describe the sensation of living without any drugs floating around my system other than to suggest . . . it was like being a kid again, but different.

  After the three months I spent working in the rehab community kitchen on no pay and little thanks, I was glad to be heading back to Sydney. There were three of us who got our tickets to leave on the same day and we all headed back to the city on the overnight bus. The rehab had a halfway house in Surry Hills where we could stay for a few months until we got our shit together and moved back into life proper. In many ways, the halfway house was the acid test. Most people don’t handle the transition to city life at all well after being in rehab for several months. The sheer pace and energy of the city can overwhelm the good intentions of the vast majority of cleanskins.

  I’m not sure if there’s any formula about these things, it seems to just depend on the person and their capacity to adapt back to life without drugs. Some of our bunch died, some carved out fortunes and some just poked along either back on the gear or in a new job somewhere. A big problem after being clean for a few months—and some people had done nine months in rehab rather than my more modest three—was that people’s tolerance for their particular drug of choice was right back down. But even more weird than that was, after a sustained break from using, it only took a very short time for tolerance levels to get back up to where they’d been previously.

  The idea that a person can get clean and then slowly start using again, spending a few pleasurable months or years getting back to the point of madness, just doesn’t happen. Based on personal experience and watching others, it takes about a week to get right back to wherever your last rabbit left you. And after a week of using again, it’s as if you never left the scene. You might have a few new stories to share with your junkie mates about the freaks in rehab, but the gap between stopping using and starting using is like a weird dream: like it never happened at all.

  29

  There’s a palpable tension in the kitchen at Rae’s that no one wants to talk about.

  Jesse’s modus operandi over the last little while has been to piss everyone off with lax behaviour and then try to amend the situation. Each time he repents, the other chefs allow themselves to believe that he’s finally left his bullshit ways behind and turned a corner on whatever the fuck is bothering him.

  The main reason everyone is still sticking by him is because for the two years prior to this Jesse was a pretty reliable guy. The old Jesse might have gone too hard one night and had a blow-out, but he’d spring back and be careful to leave sufficient space between this and his next fall from grace. The new Jesse has been crashing and burning every other day, only to pull himself together at the last minute and save himself from complete humiliation.

  But lately, instead of going for a five-minute cigarette break he’s been going out for much longer, and this time he’s been gone for over twenty minutes. It’s infuriating for the other chefs in the kitchen and it’s giving me the shits. Maybe it’s because Carla is in the house and I know how much she wants a permanent job on the line, or maybe I’m just beyond caring about Jesse’s problems any more, but I resolve that I’ll let him go at the end of service. Having a few weeks or months off will allow him to resolve whatever is going on and provide him with the opportunity to start again somewhere new and different. The idea of a fresh start for Jesse is about as close as I can get to the idea of giving him another chance.

  I got plenty of fresh starts when I was his age. And while it’s always difficult being sacked or let go or laid off, it wasn’t the end of me. In fact, sometimes it was the best thing that could have happened because it forced me to look at how my life was going. There were very few times I was happy with the picture that painted but, still, I got through and Jesse was going to have to find a way to get through as well.

  I’ll look after him by writing a decent reference. Good references count for a lot in hospitality beca
use chefs, more often than not, don’t stay in a job long enough to warrant the head chef writing them a reference. Chefs like Jesse tend to walk when the pressure, or the crew, or the girls—and the girls are the worst of it—get too much to bear. And walking after service on a particularly bad day may just involve a chef getting his knives together, collecting his bag from wherever it is, and disappearing. More often than not you see these chefs again, either down at the pub or in another kitchen somewhere. The hospitality industry is like that if you stick around long enough. And it’s not hard for that sort of behaviour to become a habit, particularly if you’ve managed to collect a couple of decent written references along the way. The chefs who walk out of a joint after a few weeks or months, leaving everyone behind to pick up the pieces as a result of their hasty departure, never mention their previous walk-outs to the head chef in the new place. And even the most Teflon of kitchen cowboys can manage to get a decent pile of references together to at least create the impression they’re a team player.

  ‘Do you think I upset Jesse by talking about his father?’ Carla asks, clearly worried.

  ‘Even if you did, Carla, it doesn’t excuse this bullshit. Can you start full time tomorrow?’ I ask.

  ‘On the line?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It might even be tonight. Is everyone okay to clean the place up if Jesse doesn’t come back in tonight?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, fuck, Chef,’ Soda says.

  ‘I’m right,’ responds Choc, who is completely over being shunted around different sections of the kitchen due to Jesse’s recent lack of focus.

  And even though I’m seriously thinking about leaving Rae’s myself, I can’t not deal with the Jesse situation. In fact, in many ways, I think my reticence to deal with Jesse’s fucked-up behaviour is the reason I’ve convinced myself to slip out the door in a couple of weeks. And it’s the wrong way to be thinking. Nothing good ever happened for me by pretending a situation was better than it was.