I'm Brian. I'm an American, but don't hold that against me. Before I walked 2,200 miles to get here to Maine, I lived in Perth, Australia for a year. In August of 2007, this really happened:

I had been working at Tonic Café part time for several months and was starting to have trouble making ends meet.  This was no surprise- the longer you live in a place, the more accoutrements you gather and the more bills you will find yourself paying.  So when a friend got hired at the much buzzed, newly opening Speaker’s Cafe she recommended me to the owner/chef Mark Speaker.

Mark was a rather fruity Pom (Brit) who fit the stereotype of a restaurateur. A former soldier with a surly mop of hair, he was outgoing and chatty to a fault (in the opinion of this introvert), he embraced people as if a conversation with him was all a person could want in their day.  He used words like “lovely” and “splendid” to describe his brouillades and tapenades.  He treated his customers like long lost friends; he treated his dishwasher like a piece of shit.

It may be my fault, because I believed him when he said the dishwashing machine would be installed when the kitchen renovations were complete.   That’s right, I signed up to wash dishes in a restaurant with no dishwashing machine.  Whether I’m just gullible or these wily Aussies have incredible powers of persuasion I can’t say.  First I walk into the ocean with just one flipper, and then I walk into a professional kitchen with no dishwashing machine.  Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice, shame on you Australia.  Fool me a third and fourth time, and you have yourself an entertaining travelogue series in The Cud, so do stay tuned…

I digress.  Speaker’s took off right out of the gate, and business was booming.  Perth is a food-couture city, and this little lounge was attracting all the right people.  Politicians, Olympic athletes and food reviewers placed their orders here on a regular basis.  This was great for Mark’s business, but I didn’t give a fuck about Mark’s business.  As far as I was concerned, this was a two-fold problem for me: 1) There was no wall between the front and back of the house, so we worked in full view of the customers, and 2) Most of the employees hated each other.  We spent a fair amount of time in whisper-shout arguments, using all manner of body language and kitchen equipment to eclipse the views of the precious customers.  But more on that next month.

I had the one friend on site that had recommended me for the job, and I got along fine with Frenchie the cook.  He was from France.  Everyone else was an adversary as the natural pecking order was worked out.  One particular girl, though, a barista named Jane, didn’t bother with any of this.  She seemed content to just do her job and chat with whoever was willing, and she was pleasant enough in the process.  She was a bit plain, but she was stylish in a way that defied you to label it. You could find her in a denim skirt with combat boots one day, then dress pants with a blouse and a scarf the next.  When Frenchie organized a night out for everyone and Jane offered me a ride, I thought she was just being her kind self, since I had no car. 
   
When she arrived to pick me up, I was a shocked. Her wardrobe menagerie also made room for black leather boots and a cobalt silk dress that followed the shape of a surprisingly curvaceous body.  Handbag, hair, eye shadow- this girl was dressed to impress.  I was taken by surprise, and it wouldn’t be the only time that night.  Things got a little crazy. She was such a Big Lebowski fan that my White Russian wasn’t empty all night long.  On our drive from Freo back to Scarborough she told me about the places she had traveled, and that she would be heading overseas again in just a month.  “Dear diary: Jackpot!”  Everybody wants a little action before they leave town. 

She had moved back in with her parents because she was leaving soon, so as we pulled up to my house, I was running scenarios in my head, trying to figure out how to get her into the house despite the fact that a four year old kid slept in the room next to mine (to refresh your memory, I had rented a room from a co-worker at Tonic Café, and she was a single mom.)  But, like I said, it was a night full of surprises.  We didn’t even need to go in the house, the passenger seat worked just fine.  The funniest part is that the driveway only had room for one car, so we were actually parked over the sidewalk.  The windows didn’t get so steamy that I couldn’t smile and nod at the guy who walked past!

Over the next couple of weeks I laid on my charm nice and thick because I wanted to keep things between us as adventurous as they had started.  We would make any ridiculous reason to meet, because of course it was just a thinly veiled excuse to continue our tour of the various beach parking lots up and down the coast from Scarboro.  All the while we continued working together without a problem, because, if you asked me, she was leaving soon.  If you asked her the same question, however, you’d apparently have received a different answer, so imagine my surprise when she “postponed” her travel plans and decided to stick around Speaker’s- and me. 

And so my simmering dislike for my coworkers at Speaker’s came closer to a boil with her around.  Suddenly she wanted to make plans at work, she wanted to wait for me at the end of the shift (the dishie’s are always the last one out of the restaurant), and she was stopping by on her days off- with friends.  What was supposed to be a quick fling was now coming back to bite me in the ass, and not the fun kind of ass biting I first had in mind for this girl.  It’s impossible to say if the awkward tension between her and I is what pushed the atmosphere in the kitchen past the tipping point, but we soon reached a fever pitch, and all broke into song. 

But we’ll look at that in more detail next time.