Detours

by Tim Rogers

  For the next five hours until the show I sat nursing a beer and listening to tunes or the ramblings of locals, or I checked in with the Dodgers to make sure their bunk beds upstairs were satisfactory and they weren’t wanting for anything. Three hours to showtime I went for a walk to clear my head. I passed by families and couples in restaurants and there was a familiar winsomeness brewing; I couldn’t help thinking how different this all could have been – having a family around me cracking pappadums, or eating tacos with my partner and not checking the time every ten minutes, or seeing a movie with my kid. And as I do a couple hundred nights a year, I shook out the encroaching sadness with the words: ‘Fuck that, we got a show to play.’

  And the show was a loud, sweaty, glorious mess. The sound engineer spent more time fixing a beer-can holder to my microphone stand than attending to the placement of actual microphones, and the gig ended with Jack swinging from the small overhead lighting rig and Mick somewhere out among the sixty or so bemused punters in the crowd. It was then that my shoulders dropped and there was a deep feeling of calm. ‘Don’t shoot me, I’m only the guitar player.’

  With this band there was no lengthy history – no shows gone wrong, no heckling for old songs or condescending faces at the bar from the dozen record labels that have dumped us – it was just noise and kinetics, action and reaction.

  The next day I coached a footy side made up of local musos in a charity game against the local music press and radio. The sun was out, the game was spirited and sufficiently farcical to entertain a crowd of twelve hundred, and, as I tried to remember the names of two hundred faces I met during the day, the patrons of Reclink, the charity we raised money for, were full of thanks.

  Post game, I spotted the Dodgers stretched out on the terraced area surrounding the oval and we walked the three kilometres back to the Grace. There were loose plans for a meal together and a shindig at the swanky hotel Jack and his girlfriend had booked after she flew in the night before, but it had been a long social day and after we hugged and shouted affections and new in-jokes to each other, I peeled off and sat alone in a Greek restaurant on Rundle Street. It has an eggplant dish that blew my tiny mind once before so I spent an hour savouring it once again with a bottle of house red. The weekend had been a whirlwind, and having a chance to sit and look out a window at others out for an early Sunday night dinner in the city was perfect. There was no gig tonight but the day spent with other, younger musicians preoccupied with their next trip up the highway, their next show, had given me a little avuncular glow. The eggplant dish, my Chilean waiter conspiratorially told me, was nicknamed ‘The Wonder’.

  We returned to Nhill just after two the next day. The song playing in my car as our convoy pulled up to Lola’s Garage was saxophonist Lester Young’s ‘These Foolish Things’. When Pee Wee Russell’s clarinet solo began its precious sixteen bars, I looked around and, not for the first time, pondered the incongruity of this music that’s so American set against the landscape of country Victoria, which became perfectly congruent with their slow, romantic swayings.

  Once inside Lola’s, the Dodgers picked up a few bodyshirts and jackets while Tanya blasted a great mix of high lonesome country tunes on the stereo. Mick bought a ceramic pot to replace the one much treasured by his wife that he had broken, and I grabbed a fistful of cartoonish tea towels from smaller towns all over the country, celebrating lawn bowls clubs and tourist attractions, to adorn my bare kitchen at home. Tanya mentioned a ‘family’ outdoor festival in town next summer that her sister booked entertainment for and we readily made ourselves available, but warned her that our music may scare little kids.

  And then she pulled out the purple suede Cuban-heeled boots from behind the counter to whoops and hollers. They were a little scuffed but announced themselves as exceptional stage-wear for a forty-something guitarist playing in a rock’n’roll band. They fit, of course, like a goddamn glove.

  The air was still as I wound up the tour tales, as if I’d stunned space between us at the bar. I was reminded of being nine and quoting the entire script of the film Stir Crazy to exasperated parents looking for escape exits like on a crashing aircraft. Though I’d noticed Jim, Andy and JVG drawn to their phones and the opening and closing of the side door, they were still mildly attentive. They’re good mates and had been as patient as could be expected.

  In relief at the apparent termination of my story, JVG asked after Mick, well-schooled in the art of taut, humorous storytelling but who had peeled off home to hang out with his two teenage sons. JVG then declared: ‘Well, as mid-life crises go, at least you two have picked a rock band and not a sports car and twenty-year-old girlfriends.’

  From my plastic bag I pulled out my new boots and brandished them like a trophy, ‘Mid-life crisis?’ I scoffed. ‘These are a mid-life crisis!’

  The Hurricane

  When the cheque lands somewhere near our carafe

  Let’s leave the bores to argue ’bout details

  Edward Albee would suggest that finances are a test

  When the cocktails hang us on a nail

  I call her The Hurricane.

  After an early drinking session together – before we had kissed or been anything but exuberant and batty around each other – when I was left with a hangover obvious to all at work, which prompted the question, ‘Geez, what the hell did you get up to?’, I could only respond that I’d been hit by The Hurricane.

  She lives alone and may not have a large social circle, but she can hear the cork being released from a bottle of dry white wine from a hundred paces and is blessed with a superhuman stamina when drinking – unassisted by the drugs that I once employed to keep me entertaining into the morning hours. She is possessed of an engine, fuelled by an engagement with this world that may not be because of a compassion for its people but because of their absurdity. Though she has empathy and is kind, when any situation presents itself as if scripted by Dr Seuss, she explodes in a deep wholesome laugh that I want to be surrounded by for the rest of my days. She’s The Hurricane.

  She’s been a waitress for most of her adult life, and for the last decade or so has worked at a restaurant four minutes away from my little apartment. The place is loved by locals for its rich Italian-influenced food and its generous, buoyant staff. In a suburb that is losing small businesses to franchises more popular with the barely dressed young European backpackers – who roam the streets looking for cheap feeds and long happy hours, and who, a friend (quoting Oscar Wilde) says, ‘Know the price of everything but the value of nothing’ – The Hurricane’s restaurant and bar are a warm refuge for locals. The main dining area is small with a dozen tables ready to be configured to seat an end-of-year staff party or a couple’s first date. The most coveted positions are by the front window, looking out onto the bustling main drag. The low lighting at night offers passers-by a view of hushed conviviality, though once you step inside on any given night the place is abuzz: enthusiastic appraisals of creamy pasta dishes and whoops of laughter often triggered by a wait staff as cheeky as they are efficient. With the room tightly packed, the waiters, usually three on the floor, need to weave and side-step through the room with deft elegance to avoid calamity. It’s like some petite ballet as choreographed by Chaplin: maintaining a small smile while balancing three full dinner plates on one arm, swooping just centimetres over the heads of freshly juiced patrons.

  I’ve long held the belief that it’s impossible for me to have a friendship with someone who hasn’t been in the service industry, and if I’m in the company of someone who is dismissive of a waiter, well, they ain’t my kinda company. And more likely a fucking wanker. I was a waiter for many years in restaurants of no great repute but still found the demands of the job so great that most nights I’d be bathed in sweat by early evening through sheer terror. The speed and memory required was a source of great anxiety. But to execute these tasks with charm and wit? The Hurricane has a litany of retorts ready for difficult customers, but my favourite is one of t
he less incendiary. If a patron who has hitherto been haughty asks, ‘Well, what do you suggest?’, she will lean down and, with a soft smile, reply, ‘I suggest you read the menu.’

  On a stool in the softly lit bar – which feels more like a speakeasy, separated from the restaurant by an open kitchen – I can rest my elbows on the wooden benchtop and observe what goes on in the restaurant. To see it all without hearing it adds another layer of theatricality to what can already appear directed. It’s like a silent film and, although the soundtrack in the bar is more often than not pop tunes from the 1980s, in my head there is barrelhouse piano, or a piano accordion, accompanying all the colour and movement. It combines until my heart slows to a rate that welcomes daydreams and poesy.

  For six or seven years before properly meeting The Hurricane I’d been coming to the bar, less frequently to the restaurant, sometimes in company, but more often than not alone to write on the back of bills and other scraps of paper or to chat frivolously with the barkeep of the night while supping beer and a whiskey, until a bell inside my head urged me to leave before I became a bore, or the bar became too populated with other bores. When I wasn’t occupied by talking with barman Patsy about which member was our favourite from Bananarama or appraising the career of Australian pop singer Colette, I would play word games with the labels of liquor bottles behind the counter, reconfiguring drink names to rebrand them as body parts or acronyms for bawdy behaviour. Pernod is Perhaps Every Rectum Needs One Daily, and Smirnoff is the verb for removing one’s ejaculate off a stomach.

  Going to bars alone is a simple pleasure and instinctive to me, maybe because of my work and the need to be away from others while gleaning the character of a new town. Most times these days I’ll bring a book to read as there’s no guarantee I’ll be interested in anything I am trying to write – and fuelling my brain with fiction or facts while dulling it with drink seems a worthwhile exchange.

  So I’d been a regular for years yet hadn’t exchanged much more than pleasantries with The Hurricane. Her manner at work is that of the saucy head nurse at a mobile surgical army hospital. Not flirtatious but sexy, and more than capable of inflaming or dousing a situation with sass and charm. She is beautiful: tall and elegant, a wild Irish rose. Full lips and high cheekbones, lightly freckled nose and scandalously blue eyes that are as kind and loving as they are mischievous. Her thick, dark hair when tied in a ponytail falls between her shoulder blades. She’s silver at the temples. This feature is often commented on, mostly by women of a similar age, as if she didn’t colour her hair in defiance when really it’s to give her a few extra hours every month to devote to something far more pleasurable.

  Even if I had fallen for her straightaway, I did a damn good job of keeping every lascivious thought in check. She commanded my respect more than anything. She ran a tight ship, but with grace, and I was only another customer. I couldn’t use my work as an introduction because she obviously didn’t care about it. So we trundled on, The Hurricane and I, in our little M*A*S*H unit: she the head nurse, me the wounded foot soldier. I would have loved desperately to have the hair and jaw of Alan Alda, but as each night wore on and my posture slackened I was always just another patient. Never Hawkeye.

  I wasn’t looking to be in a relationship or even to hook up with a casual sex partner. I had enough drinking friends and was content to spend my nights alone, after wearying of the taverns for my early evening writing sessions. From above, my trail may have formed a figure eight or more appropriately a question mark, as the final leg of the journey was often a mystery.

  I wasn’t without libido, but talking to anyone with intent other than amusement or absurdity filled me with inertia. From time to time I worried a little that I was becoming a curmudgeon, but I could reassure myself that I genuinely felt empathy and love for my fellow humans, I just didn’t wanna be any part of it. If I saw someone in distress or pain, I’d be at their side. I would smile at strangers even if I knew it wasn’t going to be reciprocated and tried to project an air of levity even when I felt I was weighed down as if my pockets were full of mud: inky black and dredged from the canals that flanked our little suburb. The weight wasn’t a depression, of that I was pretty sure. Even if it had the stink of one.

  One night I stuck around the restaurant bar later than usual, following a job I was doing for a cable television station. The production company was run by people I had known for years through other shows; one in particular had a high live music component, a factor sorely absent on television in the country then and now. They were patient and generous with me, enough to overlook my lack of experience and give me a shot at writing scripts and do some time on camera for this show, a music variety program, which was an hour long and shot in a lush cabaret setting inside a theatre only ten minutes’ walk from my apartment. We shot six programs over three weeks through the derelict cheek of Melbourne winter. Though the pressure to have scripts written for introducing and interviewing up to six guest performers a night and then perform it all to a live audience with the bravura of professionals left us all sapped, we’d wind on over to the bar after taping to have a few drinks, compare notes and soothe our reflexes.

  That particular night, as my thoughts began to turn a lovely shade of indigo, I became aware it was just myself and the director of the show left propping up the bar, with The Hurricane drying glasses behind it.

  She knew the director, as the restaurant was a favourite with both his family and the production company, so we slipped into a triangular exchange of tired but elastic chatter. The talk between hospitality allies after a long shift is similar to the way performers and crew bang on after wrapping for the night. There’s a bounce to the conversation and any diversions in theme are accepted, as tired bodies and minds are looking for lightness after the tension of the previous hours. If someone who has been out to dinner after finishing their working day at 5 pm joins in, uninvited and on the yak, it can feel as intrusive an interruption as a parent walking in unannounced on a teenage slumber party. There is an unspoken code that no-one ‘holds the floor’ for too long and that delivery is not theatrical, at least until everyone has sufficiently wound down.

  The Hurricane had a rich voice and what I could only guess was some sort of theatre background and that night she revealed that she often got asked what ‘else’ she did when not waitressing. The assumption being that waiting can only be a temporary or part-time profession while you’re working on something better.

  Having watched her work the floor night by night I could understand why she would find it an insulting question. A good waiter can turn a dull table on its head, expedite tentative beginnings for a romantic couple on a first date, transform the dullest of work Christmas parties into wild free-for-alls that will be office gossip for years to come. They wield considerable power if they choose to. I’d only been a waiter for five years to put myself through university and, though the degree was a failure, my experiences on the floor remain strong memories, at least the ones that weren’t sullied by anxiety attacks and subsequent firings.

  It’s an opportunity to perform, I guess. And even if our little after-hours drink was off the clock and we weren’t her ‘customers’ at that hour, there was still an element of performance in the way The Hurricane dealt with us two. She straightened her stance and tilted her head backward slightly, like an art teacher in appraisal with pursed lips and heavy eyelids – but it was only the visual accompaniment to a waggish retort. She talked of customers both fond and foul, but never dismissed them as without hope, merely as lacking humour or tact. I came to learn that her raison d’être was ‘Err on the side of kindness’, which I needed to hear. I feared her a little.

  In the hours we had spent progressing from beer to healthy doses of whiskey and Baileys, the bar was cleaned, the blinds drawn, and the tables brought from the al fresco areas back into the restaurant, but still I hadn’t learned anything of her life, really, apart from work. But she did tell me where she lived. In an apartment one block
from mine. A different street, but the fact we lived so close to each other and had not crossed paths, at least in the daylight, intrigued me. I felt compelled to talk to her with the ease and cheek I’d use with a friend I’ve known for decades, but I reined myself in as the little mysteries of her romantic status and preferences were yet to be uncovered. I was holding my gaze with hers too long to go unnoticed, though, and all that I was sublimating forced me to be too theatrical, breaking the second unwritten law of a knock-off drinking session. But it was just the three of us, the doors were closed and, fuck it, I was utterly charmed. Then the director nodded to me, indicating we were possibly stretching The Hurricane’s patience, and so we fumbled enough cash to pay for our sins and show our appreciation, bade flourishing goodnights and stepped out into the great prankster that is a Melbourne winter’s night.

  It only took the first slap of bitter cold to my cheeks to wake me up and send me back inside. With only one foot in the door to show I had not abandoned all tact, I asked with all the diction I could muster: ‘Could I now begin to flirt with you for the rest of my life?’

  With just enough of a pause to indicate she took me half-seriously, she replied, smiling so her eyes began to twinkle: ‘Knock yourself out, but I won’t tell you how old I am until the fifth date.’

  The clouds were brewing and the winds gathering. I reckon I skipped home.