Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  There is no such thing as the perfect crime, but there are the perfect conditions for crime, and the Rising Damp made it easy for a small but perfectly formed kingdom of vice to flourish. Let me put it delicately: those a certain way inclined were able to entertain their upwardly mobile aspirations without sober application to self-betterment.

  Less delicately: it bred lowlifes like a petrie dish breeds bacteria. It was just a matter of time before the badness got the upper hand and overran the place, chasing out anything good that might keep it in check. A fiefdom of squalor was born.

  And through it all we kept smiling and serving pots of beer to the upwardly mobile clientele, most of whom didn’t have to resort to larceny to fatten their offset cheque accounts.

  I might have casually mentioned, just in passing, without a trace of bitterness, that George and his buddies bought the joint for a song. An absolute fucking song. It was the Lotto win every hospo worker dreams about, but there was more to it than dumb luck. It was an educated guess. See, Bubbles and his cohorts didn’t renovate the place. That happened under the watch of their predecessors, two successful and therefore very wealthy merchant bankers who’d decided to take the lease on a smelly old pub on a promising corner. They took the risk. They pulled a rabbit out of a hat. They conjured a success story out of green vinyl and neglect. They were rewarded with a place that heaved with customers, seven days a week. So why did they sell it for next to nothing to Bubbles and Co?

  George had owned plenty of businesses before. Bars. Restaurants. Cafes. Pubs. He was a man keenly aware of how the system worked, and his sixth sense was calibrated finely enough to realise there was something shifty going on.

  And indeed he was correct. The something shifty went by the name of the Jamaica fund. The Jamaica fund was the invention of the small group of managers put in charge of the Star by the merchant bankers. It made sense. That’s what you do in corporate-land. Delegate, delegate, delegate. If you lack the time or expertise yourself, you pay someone lower down the food chain to do the work for you. Unfortunately it doesn’t exactly work like that in restaurant-land. Not unless your manager is a devout Episcopalian who fully expects eternal hellfire as punishment for stealing. Actually, not even then.

  The Jamaica fund was the byword for a massive operation that stuck a fat syringe into the Star’s femoral artery and methodically bled the place dry. It was an absurdly simple scam. Don’t ring up that table’s bill for $300. Don’t ring up those six glasses of fizz. Put it towards the Jamaica fund. It was a conspiracy between three or four guys—none of whom ever made it to Jamaica, as far as I’m aware—but even those without their fingers in the till felt the glow of its largesse. The Jamaica fund’s philanthropic program kindly sponsored all sorts of free eating and drinking for off-duty staff.

  So why didn’t the merchant banker owners twig? Because they were utterly clueless. Lambs to the slaughter. And let’s face it: they deserved to be fleeced if trust was their primary management tactic. The sooner they were chewed up and spat out the better, although in their defence, a busy business doesn’t necessarily mean a profitable business. If wage costs are too high and food costs have blown, you can be the busiest joint in the country and still not be making enough money to buy a six-pack and a couple of pizzas. That was the misapprehension they were labouring under. ‘It’s a tough business,’ they must have muttered to each other every time they were appraised of the week’s financials.

  But that didn’t explain what was going on here. And George sensed it. And he and his buddies swooped and took the place off the hands of two disillusioned merchant bankers who, by that time, were simply grateful for release and rushed off to the safety of securitised debt structures.

  Even so, George made some inexplicable decisions. He kept the chef, which demonstrates the persuasive power of Damien calling him Boss. Fox, meet Henhouse. We hope you’re comfortable here. And please show the chickens some respect.

  Even in the genre of fleeting, transitory occupations—BASE-jumping instructor; nuclear disaster first-responder—waitering is a stand-out performer. In this profession, sticking in the same job for a year is considered seriously long-term. Veteran status. The transience of the workforce means it’s ridiculously easy to fabricate a history. Not just a work history. A personal history. In the old days you had to disappear to Alice Springs or Darwin to escape the ignominy of an affair gone wrong, suspicions of embezzlement, a bizarre incident involving a dog and a piece of garden hose. Now you just have to move to a different restaurant in a different suburb and start spinning anew your outlandish tales of personal glory.

  Reinvention. Stick that at the top of your list of the good things about being a waiter. For a profession with almost pathological amounts of socialising, it’s uncannily often that you look up and think, ‘Who are these people, really?’

  One of the Star’s barmen was called Sam. Because that was his name. Or was it? Sam was the prototype for the international man of mystery. Which was exactly how he liked it. I have a theory that at a particularly impressionable teen phase someone close to him floated the concept that the obtuse man gets more chicks. Something as relatively straightforward as ‘How are you, Sam?’ would get a response like ‘Well, my darling, the sky is blue.’ Sam was a bull of a man, his heft held together by high-elastane black cotton and hair gel. If I were in a gang fight, I would want Sam by my side. If I wanted my car to disappear and be discovered burnt out in an industrial wasteland for the insurance money, Sam was my man. Sam was the kind of guy you wanted with you, not against you. One night he threw lighter fluid on one of the more eccentric waiters who wore a pince-nez perched on his nose and his dead grandmother’s teeth around his neck. Sam set him on fire simply because he was bored. But then this big, burly, semi-frightening individual was found in the men’s weeping like a child. It was cancer, he said. Inoperable. He was dying. And he promptly left work to die. Only he was seen many times thereafter looking fit and well at another restaurant across town. There was all sorts of shit going on with Sam, but cancer was not one of them.

  Even George. Who the hell was he? He certainly wasn’t the kind of guy you could conveniently pigeonhole. The restaurant industry is about people. George actively disliked people. He was the Anti-Owner. A real professional will be a glad-handler, a bon vivant who likes to press the flesh, say all the appropriately flattering things to the regulars: ‘You look great! Have you lost weight?’; ‘How about those Doggies?’; ‘So you’re looking to buy a new car? I know a guy who knows a guy who can get a great deal for you.’ George was often seen ducking out the back when regulars walked in, so he didn’t have to greet them. He wasn’t exactly a great role model of the service industry.

  You could get the make of the man from the people he employed. Take his right-hand guys. Jimmy and Johnny. Johnny and Jimmy. As desperate a couple of no-hope, drug-fucked career hoods as you’ll ever find. The crime doesn’t pay poster boys. Jimmy boasted one of the longest rap sheets in the state. Not the big-ticket items, though. None of your really ugly stuff like murder and rape. He’d lived a full and well-rounded life of petty crime, vandalism, minor assault (overlooking that nasty incident with the finger and the band saw) and thievery, with quite a few drugs charges seasoning the mix. Possession, not dealing. One look at Jimmy and his big galumphing frame—the human answer to Tigger—and you knew he wasn’t exactly drug kingpin material. The smartest thing about him was that he knew it, too. If he’d tried to get into the big league, he would have consumed all his own product and eventually been shot in the head by a guy named Pablo. He was better off scabbing along on welfare payments and his Star cash, supplemented with the pawned proceeds of his break-and-enters. He was a well-known figure at the Magistrates Court. Every time he fronted up for a date with justice, the beak, whichever one was hearing his case, would say witheringly, ‘And so we meet again, Mr Johnson,’ and send him down for another three months or six months or a year. It didn’t seem to worry Jimmy too much. It was
the only life he knew, and he was living it with joie de vivre. One time I was driving along terrified that I was about to make news headlines as the victim of a vicious road rage attack but it turned out to be only Jimmy, pinballing lane changes and sideswiping traffic so he could wave hello from his beaten-up old ute.

  Poor old Jimmy. He was the producer, director and star of his own one-man comedy show. ‘My teacher said I couldn’t stick at anything, but I bloody well showed her!’ he’d say with his big sloppy grin. ‘My life’s a credit to perseverance!’

  Jim had a flat in one of the council towers. He had a long-running feud with the Aboriginal family who lived in the flat below. When he hit the meth pipe hard, he became paranoid that they were getting him back for his latest effort—smearing shit on their front door, or stealing their kids’ bikes—by slowly jacking up the floor. Jimmy spent whole nights shooting up speed, plagued by visions of the linoleum moving where his neighbours were pushing it up with broomsticks. In retaliation he’d hammer the floor and scream to keep them awake. ‘They’ve done it again,’ he’d bellow, arriving two hours late for work after pulling a few cones to calm down off the speed, his face flushed as red as his hair. ‘They’ve been doing it all night, all fucking night! They’re pushing my fucking floor up! I can hear them down there’—pause to look side to side as if a family of four adults and six children had followed him to work and were now huddled unseen behind the fire extinguisher—‘they’re whispering about me.’

  In the increasingly rare times Jimmy was out of the big house, he was the Star’s handyman. It was a loose arrangement. He turned up when he wasn’t drunk or drug-ified or sleeping off either of the above, always clutching the classic junkie’s accessory of a plastic shopping bag with a 2-litre bottle of Coke and a dozen chocolate bars. By George’s inestimable logic, Jimmy was cheap. It didn’t matter that he was also crap. George’s big fault: he loved a bargain, and if that bargain came in human form, all the better. He also put Jim to use renovating his own house, on the Star’s money. The project remains ongoing.

  If Jimmy was slapstick, Johnny was horror. Grizzled feline horror. I don’t know what crimes he committed so that most of his adult life was spent in jail. I don’t want to know. Johnny was the mythical apparition lurking down a dark alleyway. The stuff of nightmares.

  He and Jim were professional acquaintances who often teamed up for burgs. They’d hit ten houses a night, a strike team relieving the inner suburbs of its computers, cameras and spare cash. Quandary: when Jimmy and Johnny are planning another round of—their words—‘late-night shopping’ and ask your address so your own place doesn’t get hit, do you: a) tell them; b) lie; or c) change the subject, then cancel all your night-time shifts for the foreseeable future?

  Johnny wasn’t often out of the clink, but when he was there was always a place for him at the Star’s sink. First time I met him was when I sat down for staff meals next to the dish pig station. ‘Taste good?’ he asked with his gravelly hnar hnar snigger. ‘How about I taste you?’ He was sexually adaptable, too, thanks in part to his lengthy time in the pen. More than one male waiter came screaming out of the kitchen with Johnny in hot pursuit, dick in hand, bellowing, ‘Get on the end of this!’

  He was certainly entrepreneurial, old Johnny. He got a loan that was meant to help ex-prisoners get back on their feet and spent his few grand on a high-tech pipe cutter. Cool Hand Luke minus the cool, he generated a healthy cash flow by making off with parking meters. He managed to upgrade his shitty old Ford Falcon, too. One day he turned up in the latest model, a shiny blue number with mag wheels. He’d simply switched the plates over. Some poor sucker went outside one morning to drive his new car to work and found Johnny’s beaten-up rust-bucket with their own shiny plates attached. The cheeky bastard.

  Somehow Johnny got his hands on a Tazer. This was when they’d just been introduced to Australia and all the shock jocks were riding a wave of concern about them falling into the wrong hands. And there’s Johnny, in the alleyway, gleefully zapping away at neighbourhood cats and rubbish bins. Hnar hnar. A week later, there’s a report about a woman who had been unpacking her shopping from her car. She was Tazered and robbed. It made the nightly news. All her shopping, her handbag, her mobile phone. Not half a kilometre from the Star. What a coincidence.

  Employing human specimens like Jimmy and Johnny showed that George didn’t expect to completely staunch the outgoing flow of cash and goods he inherited along with the business. That was never his aim. It would have been too much like hard work, for starters, but there was also a philosophical basis to his apathy. He was no people-person but he was a practical man, and thirty years in the trade had taught him a crude relativism. He never came right out and said it, of course, but you could make an educated guess he’d lit upon roughly 5 or 10 per cent as the magical figure the business could afford to lose. The micro-manager breed of owner goes on a rampage if their business is out twenty bucks over a whole night’s trade. (And that would probably be to their detriment. So much angst. They’d get a stomach ulcer. Have a coronary. Let it go.) George, on the other hand, practised the Tao of staff pilfering.

  * * *

  JACOB

  An old guy passed out in the middle of dinner. One of his sons knelt beside him while we waited for the ambos, but his wife and other kids carried on as if nothing was wrong. It was a really expensive restaurant, and they weren’t going to miss out.

  * * *

  Occasionally it was brought to his attention that someone was stealing. Usually he’d simply shrug as if to say, ‘And why are you telling me this? Why are you wasting my time? Do I look like I can be bothered to sit down with the accused and get to the bottom of the matter, then go looking for a replacement staff member who will no doubt rob me as well? If you need me, I’ll be in the office looking at Asian porn.’ It set the baseline. Too much theft is wrong but a little theft is okay. That was how it worked in his head, so that was how it should work in others’ heads. But did it? Let’s see.

  HOW TO RIP OFF THE BOSS: A BASIC FIELD GUIDE

  Let’s start with some ground rules. The three golden tenets of restaurant thieving:

  1. Where possible, balance the till.

  2. If not possible, confuse the issue.

  3. Don’t go often, but when you do go, go hard.1

  Stashing money under the till

  The classic move. As old school as the Rat Pack at a Frank Sinatra concert in Vegas. Unsophisticated, risky, and the preferred method of seven in ten waiters. It’s quite simple. All you do is fail to ring up drinks while keeping a mental tally of how much cash can be taken. Don’t be an idiot and stash it as you go. Twenty bucks here, forty bucks there. Each time you put that cash somewhere it’s not supposed to be, you’re exposing yourself, so keep it to one swift hit. However. The till will be over if you get stopped in the moment. Just say someone comes in with a request for three margaritas. Off you go, mix mix mix, shake shake shake. Now where were you? Was it $80 you were up to or $100? Only do what you can keep track of mentally. Of course, if someone honest finds your stash of cash under the till, it’s bye-bye. In most places, anyway. At the Star, George simply shrugged and poured himself another glass of red wine when told that one of his long-term barmen was found with an unexplained $400 under the till tray. With an attitude like that, he deserved everything he got.

  Voids

  The void is a step up from the till-stash. A table or a bunch of drinks has gone through the system as normal, but after you take payment, void the docket and pocket the cash. The problem, as ever, is explaining the void chit to a zealous manager or owner. Always have an explanation. The table ordered but then they walked out because they’re allergic to Mariah Carey. They got a call to say the babysitter was on fire. You’re a smarty-pants, you’ll figure something out.

  Credit card fraud

  File under ‘hardcore’. Void a docket and refund the money onto your own credit card. Worth doing once for a special occasion (Is it your d
ad’s birthday? Buy him something nice!), but do it for long enough and the bank will eventually realise what’s going on and you’ll be saying hello to the boys in blue. The soft version of this method is to put your own charges on customers’ credit cards—small charges they might not notice. Who checks their bank statements anyway? Maybe you ought to.

  Stealing stock

  Everyone steals stock. Damien never bought steak, but that didn’t mean his family was iron-deficient. One Christmas break he was sprung with his car parked in the alleyway while he stuffed it with all sorts of goodies. He’d even put a roof rack on especially for the occasion. His sous chef buddy was up on the top floor, handing boxes of reserve wine down through the window. And Bill the floor manager. He’d leave each night carrying a box. Just leftovers from staff meals, he’d claim, but it would be so heavy with bottles of wine, cheese, even toothpicks and toilet paper that he’d be staggering under the weight.

  Undercounting the till

  There is a thing called the float. The float is a prescribed amount of money of prescribed denominations left in the till overnight for the next day’s shift to pick up and start using. The big question is, will they count it again or take it on trust that what you say is there is actually there? It’s a game of chicken. Bear in mind that most people are in a bad mood at the start of a shift and usually willing to take shortcuts.

  The phantom bottle

  A bartenders’ favourite. Bring in your own bottle of spirits, serve it to customers all night, take the money. A great little earner. I’ve heard of a guy selling his own mineral water. In some busy bars the phantom till has even been known to make an appearance. Respect.