The End for Now

        I feel kind of bad writing this. I'm trying to be as honest as I can, but still in my mind the possibility of Stuart reading it seems like the start of a painful conversation. Someone once said to me, “no one wants to be told who they really are.”, and okay I don't want to sit here and pretend I'm in possession of some mystical insight that can cut through people's perceptions of themselves down to that bare, painful truth. I'm just some fucking guy who worked at a place.
        But I do have pity for Stuart though, and at minimum, I think he has more pride than to be okay with that, I'm sure he doesn't want my worthless pity.
        On my last day – the day before I flew out to Europe, which I stupidly agreed to work a week beforehand knowing I'd need the money – I called Stu to confirm that he'd be coming in early so I could go home and pack my life up. He gave me the usual, “a couple hours”, which I knowingly doubled and added to the current time - “I probably won't be in by then I've gotta head off,” I started, about to launch into my, “thanks for everything...” speech.
        He held me up though, and surprised me saying he'd try to get in earlier because he wanted to talk to me: “...some people have told me you think I've been picking on you.”
        “What? Nah man, not at all, we're cool. Absolutely, we're fine man, you've been great.” If anything, I'd been picking on him. I called him silly names like Stooman, and The Big Chief whenever he came in, and making fun of his lateness and drinking at every opportunity. For the most part though, we got on fine.
        “...well I still wanted to talk to you. I just figured... I'm 43... you're 26...” where's he going with this? “...I thought we should sit down and chat because I can probably give you some good advice. On life and everything.”

        I do often wonder if there was anything more I could have done. Harry once messaged me at night presumably after an evening working with Stu and a few wines after work, with the simple message:
        “I think Stu is going to kill himself.”
        Now I don't think Stu is going to kill himself, but I can totally see why Harry would think that, and I'd be lying if I said I've not considered the possibility. What would I do if that happened? How would it make me feel? Other than the obvious sadness, would I be left thinking maybe I could have done something?
        George had stepped in out of nowhere to try and lend a hand in rebuilding this man's business, and Andrew was doing the same by bringing his experience to a place that by no means deserved it. I was doing Stu no favours by working at Backstreet, I was just doing a job for money. And I'm not his mate, although we were friendly, but there's a human instinct to help someone when you see them struggling, failing. Some people have to be allowed to fail though, right? You can't play Guardian Angel to every injured foal you come across in the forest, spending all your own precious energy – you'll get eaten as well. Is that right? Or is that a neo-liberal cop-out? I honestly can't decide whether being a part of a society means taking some sort of responsibility for this person, or if you're allowed – and even encouraged as a necessarily selfish actor – to take what's there to take and washing your hands of it.

        And of course I'm being dramatic, I know it's not my responsibility, what am I gonna do, work for free? Fuck no.
        The story is ongoing. Rhys got back from his trip in Asia a few days before I left and we passed the baton, shared some good belly-laughs at Stu's expense, and then I was out. Apparently the place is on the market and potential buyers are coming through every day looking at it. I can't imagine the new levels of stress that's bringing to Stuart's frazzled heart. Actually I can, and am right now. Still laughing.
        If I hear anything I'll let you know, but for now I think we're done here. The most likely outcome right now is that Stu manages to sell Backstreet for many times less than what he paid for it, keeps his house and family, doesn't have to declare bankruptcy, and manages to edge his way back into the mortgage brokering profession for long enough to ensure his retirement in 20 years or so. In an ideal world he is also, by whim of biology, allowed to keep his ponytail. His Dad would clear his debt, and after a period of tumultuous upheaval, his kids grow up and stop hating him. I'm rooting for you Stuart.
        On the day that Rhys came back, my second last day, and the last we'd be working together, I poured us a shot each of the Woodfords Reserve 17 Year Old Rye Whiskey and we drank together at midday, “To Backstreet.”

Fraying at the Edges

        I always wonder when I see a homeless person on the street, who are the people in that person's life and where are they? What has happened to them that caused the people they know to leave, or made them unwilling to help? Each of us are born into the world with opportunities, some of us have more, some have less, but very few people have none – and I'm not talking about those people right now because I can't fix that problem and it's depressing stop it stop making me sad I'M SORRY!
        Whether you're born with shitloads of opportunities in life, or if you only really have one, the place you end up when you use them all up is the same – it's on the street, staring at nothing.
        What I'm trying to say is some people fuck up all the time and don't end up homeless because they get more chances than other people. Some people fumble through life fucking up pretty much everything but never hit rock bottom because there's always someone there to catch them. It must be very scary to be one of those people though, and see that pattern emerging in your life, and start to wonder fearfully just how many chances you have left.

        I believe Stuart felt that fear every day.

        When Rhys left for Asia, Backstreet started falling apart. I'd been there under a month and was left doing things Rhys had been doing for two years, all while hiring and training two new staff. I had no idea where to start.
        Rhys had told me that if Stu had a go at me for not doing anything to just throw him under the bus – “Oh what? Rhys never told me about that?” – a version of the “I dunno?!” defence passed on by my high school soccer coach after U-turning our school bus over a road full of construction workers one Sunday afternoon in Adelaide. “If you ever get in trouble in life, boys...”, he'd shouted back to us as a construction worker screamed fury after him, “... you don't know! Plead IGNORANCE! I DUNNO! Hahahahaha!!”
        There was A LOT stuff in Backstreet that I didn't know, or maybe just hadn't listened to, because I'm dumb. I get distracted.

        I was busy trying to learn the ins and outs of running a cafe day-to-day, but while I was finding my feet in that regard, Tynique's coffee was losing us a lot of customers. I hoped she'd get better, but after three weeks, business was slowing, and it hadn't been great to begin with. Stuart's “love notes” – as they were affectionately referred to by Andrew and Harry in the kitchen – to me in the diary every day were getting longer and more unhinged, and every night I'd go over the highlights: “Someone needs to mop the stairs.”
        “The ice machine door has been broken.”
        “Why aren't the different types of teaspoons in two different containers?”
        “Did you clean the dishwasher?”
        “Why did you buy sugar from Coles it's too expensive you should have told me, I could've got some from Costco.”
        “The reason I don't restock the bar after I work is because I'm doing heaps of other stuff.”
        “Who broke the handle on this mug?”
        “Tynique left the extraction fan overnight and it's going to cost me heaps in electricity.”
        “I told you never buy anything from Coles! NEVER!”
        “The wine bottles need to be evenly spaced on the shelves.”
        “Why do my kids hate me?” – Rhys and I used to joke that Stu's kids hating him was the ever-present straw threatening to break the back of the proverbial camel, sending Stu spiraling into a breakdown. One afternoon Stu took me outside for a chat and started nervously going into the specifics of the trouble he and his business were in. His Dad had been putting money in to prop the place up, but after a year had pulled the plug and wanted the money paid back somehow, and then there was the break in, “and Tynique has absolutely done my head in here... and then I'm dealing with my own fuckup of a kid...” It was just ongoing for him. Bad luck, and bad choices.
        That week a pair of solicitors came in just before dinner and served Stu with a notice to pay $36,000 in unpaid rent. They apparently wanted $8000 on the spot or they were going to close the doors then and there! Stu somehow managed to strike a deal with them, because they left and the next day sent a legal-type document by registered post saying that he needed to pay within 14 days or face closure. That eased my nerves because at that point my flight to leave the country was 13 days away, so my income was safe. I knew for a fact that Stu did not have any of that rent money.
        That weekend I called Stu to find out when he was coming in with the meat we needed to cook for a downstairs function at lunch time, I asked him if I could get a precise ETA so we could start making the preparations and he started screaming, “LOOK I'M COMING! ALRIGHT?!! I'LL GET THERE WHEN I GET THERE OKAY?! I AM NOT IN A GOOD PLACE RIGHT NOW!!!”
        His voice on the phone distorted into crackles, I quickly apologised and hung up.

Click here to read the next part - The End for Now

Stuart's Hand-Made Chopping Board

        In the mornings at Backstreet I would normally get in to open the shop between 6:25 and 6:32 after riding my bike ten minutes through some cold. May and June 2017 was one of the chillier spells I've encountered in Melbourne, the mornings were brisk and clean, opening up into sunshine most days by around ten.
        I'd lock my bike out the front of the shop, throw my jackets on the bar, turn the lights on, run the hot water tap while running the first shots through the coffee machine – filling the mop bucket once the water had heated up – mop the floors, and some days the stairs, and then start taking the furniture outside. The tables were uncommonly heavy – cast iron (I'm guessing, I'm not a guy who knows these things but cast iron sounds about right) bottoms that I'd be careful to pick up while bending my knees, remembering the warnings of some guy I worked with at a supermarket in 2008: “Don't fuck your back up mate, once you fuck your back up, it's fucked up forever.”
        Shaffu the chef would normally arrive while I was doing the furniture, and the Chinese paper delivery guy would ride up on his bike with the same cheery, “Morning!”, then I'd mop the rest of the floor, turn the till on, count the money, dial the coffee in, and serve the first coffee of the day to Rach – large extra-hot flat white with no froth – who would sit outside for twentyish minutes smoking and reading a book.

        The cafe across the road was always busier than us right from the off. Sometimes we wouldn't have more than ten customers all the way from open at 7am until the brealfast rush at 9, meanwhile across the road their cosy little spot would be steadily busy. I went in there for a bottle of wine once with Harry the Assistant Chef and Avery, and it was great, the waitress described the Riesling as “oily”, which I didn't understand, and so was very impressed by.
        Our regulars were very loyal, almost all came every day like clockwork: the family of teenage kids (girl 15, boy 17, girl 19) getting 2x Large Latte, Large Soy Latte, Long Black; two older parents and adult daughter – 2x Latte, Strongish Latte; two younger parents with toddler – 2x Flat White, Babychino; Angela – Latte, Pain aux Chocolat; Leo – Latte, then another Latte. I find it soothing to remember the rhythm. Ruth – Hot Latte; Ivan – Long Black; Rach2 – Soy Latte, Food, another Soy Latte; Cass and Kim, 2x Hot Skinny Latte, Seeded Toast w Jam, another 2x Hot Skinny Latte; Jarred, Christie & their toddler Millie – 2x Long Mac, 1 w sugar, Pain aux Chocolat, Hash Stack, Babychino w 2 layers of Chocolate, also known by Millie as “The Surprise”.
        Backstreet is in the middle of Fitzroy, just off Brunswick St which is ground zero for hipster culture in the hipster capital of Australia. The people who live in Fitzroy are mostly white, middle class, towards the back end of middle age, well educated, and all like nice things. Backstreet was trying to be for them, while also being for the trendy young style-pilgrims to the area, and somehow for families too. It was trying to be everything, and so became nothing.

        Sometime in the morning when the boredom started to creep in, I'd open the communications book and re-read whatever message Stu had scrawled in there the night before. The notes were written in handwriting ranging from slightly rushed to heavy and maniacal, during his mysterious cleaning/drinking sessions that started when the dinner service chef and waitress left and stretched out until who knows what hour in the morning. I once got a message from him at 6am apologising for a particularly lengthy note that morning which covered an entire A4 page – that means he was still there, or had just left, at SIX IN THE MORNING! He'd been in the shop by himself for – at a conservative estimate – five hours. Doing what? Who knows. It's enough to drive a person insane, other signs were not positive.
        One evening I got a message reading:
        “Hi, just wondering about the wooden board that was on the wine shelf on the corner?? Where has it gone??”
        What he was referring to was a small wooden chopping board that I'd found resting on the wine racks above the kitchen pass while cleaning said racks, as per instructions from the previous night's scrawlings. I took everything off the racks, and when Andrew, the head chef, saw the chopping board, he excitedly asked what it was and whether he could have it, because the kitchen was always running low on chopping boards which they used to display muffins on. Andrew was great, he was an old school hospitality head who had been working as a chef around 25 years, in and out of countless restaurants, hotels, cafes, and everything else in Melbourne. He possessed a very special ability to stay positive and laugh at the awful conditions we worked in every day – the food shortages, Stuart's teetering mental state and heavy drinking, the lack of business. When Andrew would come in at 3pm on weekdays I'd tell him everything that had gone wrong that day and watch him through the window into the kitchen, his bald, white head scrunched up with laughter, dancing like a maniac – “WELCOME TO THE FUCKIN' CIRCUS MATE! HAHAHAHAHA!!!”
        So I gave Andrew the chopping board that day.
        When I got Stu's text, I replied:
        “I gave it to the kitchen when I was cleaning. Andrew knows”
        Half an hour later:
        “Found it. Where would I find the hand written tag that was attached with string written by the guy who hand made it??”
        100% that tag was gone, Andrew probably put it in the bin before washing the board when I gave it to him. I didn't reply.

        On Saturday morning Andrew was a little worried: “Mate you didn't say anything else to Stuart did you?!”
        “I didn't reply to the second text nah. Why, what'd he say?”
       “Mate he fucken' lost it! Stompin around the place, 'SOMEONE'S GONNA LOSE THEIR FUCKEN' JOB OVER THIS!'”
       “He said 'Someone's gonna lose their job over this!'?!”, I couldn't believe it, and for a second I was slightly worried – is this how it ends? My kingdom for a chopping board?!
       “Mate he punched the counter! Hahahaha!!.. I think he'd had a bit to drink...”, Andrew had this way of laughing joyously one second, and then immediately switching gears to bring the tone back to serious reflection. His voice went down in a worried, affectionate decrescendo.
       “He brings in a new bottle of vodka most nights and drinks wine as well.”, I offered. Working with Rhys had me in the habit of noticing the amount of vodka left in the bottle on the spirits shelf. Rhys would point to it every day as an indicator of what to expect from Stu when he came to work that evening – the lower the level, the later and more stressed the Big Dog would be when he made it in.

       Stu asked me about the board that night, and I repeated what I'd told him in the message and nothing more. We never discussed it after that, although he did mention another similar incident four or five times involving a small, black brush that he'd “customized” to clean the coffee grinder – I found it one day and believing it to be trash, threw it in the bin. I only found out later that what I perceived as a dirty mangled mess of bristles was actually the result of careful customization, and I never told Stu that I'd thrown it in the bin. I know the unresolved mystery drove him crazy – I'm laughing even now as I think about it.

Click here to read the next part - Fraying at the Edges

Hiring and Firing

        I'd never hired anyone before working at Backstreet. I'd never even been a manager, although Stu maintained, whenever I told him he should be paying me more, that I wasn't “really a manager, more of a supervisor”, so you could argue the title still eludes me. Whenever I told friends I was “managing a cafe”, they'd laugh at me, and they were right to.

        A couple weeks in George told me to hire a floor staff for weekends and a full time barista to replace Rhys when he left for Asia. I hired Avery for the floor position because she was from California and said in her cover letter that she needed a job, “because I really like the guy I'm seeing and if I can't find a job I'll have to leave the city. So if you give me a job you'll be helping true love!”
        Then I hired Tynique because I met her at my local Banh Mi (Vietnamese Baguette) shop and she'd heard of the rap group Odd Future. She said she'd made coffee for 6 months at the sandwich place and our coffee wasn't that great so I thought she'd pick it up quickly.
        I noticed from Day 2 that her voice was unbelievably loud.

        It was brutal when I fired her. I made my mind up on a Thursday afternoon when this one family that came in every single day sent her coffees back twice and hinted that they were close to going elsewhere. I've honestly never been more embarrassed in my life, I couldn't look them in the eyes, it was horrible. I had to keep Tynique on for the rest of the weekend though or else I'd have had to stay there from open to close every day and I Just. Didn't. Want to. – ! I put shoutouts for new baristas on a few Facebook groups and started taking trials when she wasn't there. Like a spy. Or a coward.
        From the moment I decided in my head that I was going to have to fire her, I just didn't want to be around her. I'm sure I was a very shitty person in those three or four days, and I was also conscious of her attempts to buddy-up to me, sensing as she must have that something was wrong – I can feel myself becoming self-conscious as I discuss this. Do I seem arrogant? She definitely was being extra-nice to me, I'm sure she was trying to save her job. I recognized it because I've done it before, it made me pity her, which is awful. Being someone's boss has made me realise I'm very uncomfortable in positions of power. The central fallacy I can't seem to shake is that holding power over someone makes you better than them. “I don't feel like I'm better than these people I've hired, so why should I be their boss?” – but being someone's boss doesn't mean you're better than them, it just means you're their boss. Somehow that's hard for me to wrap my head around.
        I wish I could have told her straight away, but that would have been shooting myself in the foot – might have left then and there and I couldn't afford to let that happen. Either way she was going to be hurt: she'd had her Mum come in one day, and the lovely lady sat at the bar and ate lunch while chatting to us. She was a cake designer.
        On the Sunday I had Tynique close while I left just after lunch to go do a show. She said she needed to be gone by five, and I had one more barista to trial for her position, so I told Tynique to leave at five if she had to, and told the trial to meet me there at 5:30. When I arrived the girl I was trialling said something about running into Tynique when she got there. I'd been a little worried about exactly that – an awkward, sitcom-style crossing of paths – but I ignored it and went on with the trial. After half an hour the shop's landline phone rang, I answered and it was Tynique, she was angry. I walked outside and told her that we were going to have to let her go because her coffee wasn't good enough. She said she felt “really angry and disrespected”, before telling me she was going to go to Fair Work and file a complaint.

        In June 2014, five weeks before I was due to fly away from Melbourne to move to London, I got a text from the new owners of Moth to a Flame where I'd been making coffee four days a week for the past few months. They told me business had been slow since they'd taken over and they couldn't afford to keep me on, so I was fired. I went in an hour later to pick up my last pay in an envelope and could barely hold back tears, I was moving overseas in five weeks, I'd been counting on that money coming in. They'd been paying me in cash and so in one last desperate, scrambling attempt to keep my job I threatened to go to fair work and tell them I'd not been paid any superannuation. The manager, Tito – who was a fucking legend – got angry: “You don't do it like this. I thought I could meet you here and we could shake hands, and you try to pull this shit!”
        Three years later Tynique was pulling the same “shit” on me. I didn't get angry though, I wish I could say I was that quick on the return, but I wasn't. If I remember correctly, I parried her away with an authoritative, “Dooon't... no don't do-o-on't do that!... noooooo.. whaatt?”

        Turns out she had no claim. She was employed on a casual basis, and had been there three weeks – you can't claim unfair dismissal on that. I should have probably known that – seems like managerial information really, maybe Stu was right and I really was just a supervisor dressed up in a man costume. But I was also the best that Backstreet had, because as the old saying goes, if you pay peanuts, you get dumbcunts.
        And that's what I found when trialling people to replace Tynique. It wasn't so much an issue of the pay, which was fine, the issue was selling people on the idea of actually working in this place. I can't lie to someone and tell them it's all going fine when I'm taking multiple calls from people every day saying my boss owes them money – and I mean MONEY! The main selling point of the job to prospective staff was the gaping opportunities for slacking off, but people who are serious about making good coffee usually don't want a job with those kind of opportunities, they want somewhere challenging where they can learn and grow and be challenged in a fun but professional environment with strong, like-minded people focussed on a... BLEURGH. All of that crap – but not me, baby!

        I ended up hiring a friend of one of the guys from the bottle shop around the corner who came in with her resume right when all seemed lost. Tynique sent Avery a message calling Backstreet a “hell hole”, and hoping she'd “make it out” – cartoonishly melodramatic, and laugh we did, but I understand the sentiment.
        She never gave her key back, and after a week of not responding to my messages asking for it, I snapped and called her “pathetic”. Not one of my great victories.

        And so the beast limped onward.

Click here to read the next part - Stuart's Hand-Made Chopping Board

The Incident: As Told By Leo

        The guy who got me into Backstreet, just to reiterate, was George. I was working at a cafe in the city called Hash from December to March and George would come in with his wife a few times a week to get a single origin latte. His wife would get the same but weaker. They were quiet at first, but I broke them down with my raging fist of charisma (that's how charisma works, like a battering ram or a heavy steel drill) until by the end of my short stint at Hash we'd shared like, probably three conversations. I hated the manager at Hash and he hated me, so I was surprised when a few weeks after our “Parting of Ways” he messaged me – confusingly in all caps and from an unknown number – saying to “CALL GEORGE THINK HE WANTS TO OFFER YOU A JOB”.
        George was also a regular at Backstreet, he lived upstairs in the apartments above the cafe and came down every day with his laptop to drink lattes and work as a financial consultant... or something. A financial something, which evidently he did quite well at because he drove a Jag and could always afford plenty of Old Spice. He spoke in a calm, extremely quiet voice, which I assume was at least partially calculated to convey an air of strength, like a constant reassurance that Everything is Under Control.

        When George explained the position to me that first afternoon when I walked the forty minutes to Backstreet from my house, he told me that he was helping Stu out with his finances as a favour to a friend. It was made clear from the start that the business was not in good shape, and George said his only wish was to get the place making money so he could, “just sit back and enjoy the coffee.”
        He was doing all the staff rosters, controlling the social media presence, and designing new menus etc. as well as pushing ideas like Pizza & Pasta Sundays to try and bring in more customers. The Instagram struggled, the Pizza & Pasta never happened, and every now and then due to a lack of staff, George could be found in the kitchen.

        One morning Leo came into the cafe with an even grander opening flourish than usual, looping Wallis the Dog's lead around the leg of one of the bar stools before gleefully turning to me with a barely-suppressed smile: “So! Taco! Did you hear what happened last night!”
        Leo belonged in the theatre.
        For the next twenty minutes Leo fed me details of the previous night's dinner service one by one. A group of six had come in, apparently having booked the private downstairs room for dinner weeks ago, but the booking hadn't been written down in the right place, so no one knew, and nothing was ready. The table wasn't set, the food hadn't been bought to make the menu they'd requested. Nothing.
        “And WHO – can you tell me?! – was in the kitchen, Taco?!”
        “George and Stuart.” [laughter]
        “That's RIGHT! And are George and Stuart qualified to cater for a function of this kind, Taco?”
        [out-of-the-nose-laughter] “...no.”
        “No they are NOT!”, Leo's eyes were alive with joy, laughing.

        Immediately Ginette – the regular waitress most weekday evenings – offered the group free drinks as she told them there would be a wait while the room was set up. They were led down and it was explained that they would have to order off the regular menu as the chef had called in sick. Commonplace industry lies.
        “They were down there for two hours!” Leo struck a note of disbelief. “And you should have seen some of this food they were being served... one of them ordered their steak well done WELL. Big Mistake! I've never seen anything like it, curled up like a piece of leather, and served on a plate by itself WITH NO SIDES ! Oh Taco!”
        Apparently When they'd sent one of the dishes back because it was cold, more free drinks were taken down, but Ginette finally reported back upstairs saying the guests were sitting in cold silence with their coats on not speaking. She refused to go back down because it was too embarrassing, Leo giggled at the bar drinking wine.

        After hitting me with all the main points of the story he started jumping about the chronology trying to wring out every last bit of schadenfreude: “...Taco, I tell you now, I've never seen anything so funny in all my life as the look of sheer terror on Stu's face when those people walked through the door!”
        “...and when they went downstairs, he opened the book to find their booking, and then he started PUNCHING THE BENCH!! – 'WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME ABOUT THE BOOKING!?' – like a MAN POSESSED I tell you!”
        “And when they all came upstairs to leave, the woman in the dress stopped in front of the till and said, 'surely we're not paying for the food, it was awful!', and Ginette said 'Well of course not.'... and then the woman says, '...well and as you said, the drinks were free, so we're done.' And they walked out!!”

        Over two hours, six awful meals, and a bunch of free drinks later, and they left without paying a cent.

        When I questioned Stu that night about the steak he said, “Steaks aren't meant to be cooked well done!” So from what I can gather he turned it into a piece of footwear as a kind of punishment to them for calling such an abomination into existence. George adamantly defended his chicken spatchcock, reviewing his effort as “Primo”, before cooking some for me to sample as proof during the quiet afternoon;
        “You try that and tell me it's not on the mark. That's exactly what I cooked them last night mate.” Whether the chicken was good or not seemed to be a matter of semantics when the undeniable fact was that the customers left without paying, but fair play to George, his chicken was pretty good.

        Leo's greatest joy came from explaining to people that there was no danger of a bad review because if anyone from the group thought to post the details of their evening on the internet, the truth would be so absurdly terrible that no one reading would believe it.
        I was upset with George for a time, I thought it was arrogant of him on some level to think he was fit to step into the kitchen and cook restaurant-level food with no training. My assumption there was that it was an active decision on his part, as if he intentionally put off hiring another chef and decided to jump in himself to save money. I soon discovered that persuading quality staff to come and work in the hospitality equivalent of a burning treehouse is much more difficult than putting an ad in the window. In the coming weeks I was tasked with hiring a new full time barista, and in selling the job to people I had to search myself for my own reasons for staying at Backstreet.
        “Why AM I still here? Can I persuade others to join up for the same reasons?” Turns out not everyone likes their life to be stupid.

Click here to read the next part - Hiring and Firing

The Legend of Tim

        A little history on the place would be a good starting point. Leo was a daily regular in backstreet, he was definitely my favourite of the bunch of old cooks who linger around the counter every day – dude loves to gossip. He'd evidently spent a lot of time sitting at the end of the bar with his dog Wallis tied up at his feet, talking to whoever stood in front of him. I loved to prod him for stories.

        The place was initially owned by a guy who I never met, his name was Tim. Backstreet was his second venture after a wildly successful cafe called Birdman, which, as Leo grandly proclaimed, was one of the first places that kicked off “that” Gertrude St hipster-revival a few hundred metres back towards the city. When you start delving into local history, the locals, revelling in their role as historical gatekeepers, tend to over-contextualise.
        Tim was, “the best waiter you've ever seen!”, declared Leo. He was graceful, dancing through tables with plates up his arm, seemingly stuck there like a beautiful porcelain skin-growth – oh Tim! Half man, half crockery. He opened Backstreet as the logical next step after building his first place from nothing, and Backstreet, Leo said, was, “Tim's Baby.”
        Tim was an architect, and “frightfully intelligent”, but, Leo added, “with absolutely no moral compass.” He designed the whole interior to be reminiscent of Japanese paper walls, but with the furniture retaining an old-world European homeliness. The concept for the place was big, hearty meals. Lots of meat – steak, sausages. Leo claimed to be among those who warned Tim that these kinds of dishes weren't what people in trendy Fitzroy were looking for. “We'll see.” said Tim.
        “...and yes, we did see.” Leo shook his head with a chuckle. Told ya.

        When Backstreet opened, Tim had taken his head chef and floor manager out of Birdman and put them into the new venue, taking them out of the place they were comfortable and succeeding, and dropping them into something new against their will. Backstreet wasn't an instant success, and Birdman started to suffer without the people who had initially made it great. Money became tight. Tim decided to cash out and sell after his head chef quit in a rage – he later admitted to Leo that moving his staff into the new business was the worst decision of his professional life.
        Failure made Tim desperate; he needed a successful sale to make it out comfortably so he started fixing the books, doing things like running up the tills with his personal credit card to make it look like the place was making more money than it was. Rhys had told me that when Tim was in charge the wine list was always exciting and new, because Tim would burn bridges with every wine supplier, leaving bills unpaid for months. When the suppliers came in to collect, Tim would cheerfully write them a cheque on the spot, which would reliably bounce, leading the suppliers to return angrier, to more empty promises.

        This was the mess that, almost two years ago, Stuart walked into. From the rough timeline I've pieced together from various conversations with him, he spent the major part of his 20s managing rough scum-bars in shitty parts of Melbourne, then driving garbage trucks, and finally something to do with mortgages. He bought Backstreet off of Tim, who not only made the business look more profitable than it was, but fudged over a few of integral details like how the rent was set to double as soon as the business changed hands due to a bit of fine-print in the contract with the building's owners. Tim trusted Stu to not look too carefully into those details and, whether through Stu's carelessness or Tim's meticulous deceit, the sale went through.
        I remember laughing with Rhys until we were both red in the face about how Tim had raised everyone's hourly wages when he sold the place to Stuart, saying that's how much they'd always been paid. I guess Tim liked the people who worked for him, and wanted them to be paid well, as long as it wasn't ever coming out of his own pocket. “Oh it was awesome!”, Rhys struggled to hold back laughter, as he always did when telling a story, “I loved Tim for it until three weeks after he left and I still hadn't been paid for the last weeks he was here... he owed me $1800!”

        I don't know whether that ruthless scumbaggery is just what it takes to make it in the business of hospitality, but by the sounds of it that's how Tim managed. He now runs a restaurant in his hometown of Albury on the Victoria/NSW border – it's the restaurant inside the new multi-million dollar cultural centre. He beat out almost fifty other potential operators for the contract to run it, apparently pulling some hometown strings including having the committee in charge of awarding the contract in to Backstreet for multiple lunches and dinners while he was dressing the place up to be sold. He was a charismatic man, so the legend goes.
        No one from Backstreet has ever seen this new restaurant. Rhys almost went up with a group of guys to fetch his $1800, but was saved the trip when Tim finally came through with the money. Stu has claimed he's set on having some people head up there to “teach that man a lesson”, but I think that's just the vodka talking. If I ever find myself up that way I hope to make it in, ask for Tim, and tell him this story. From what I've been told I bet he'd find it hilarious.

PS: My Mum (oh god I'm pathetic) reckons I should change the names in this to keep Stu and the venue anonymous. I like how the names ring, and I can't think of a good replacement for Stuart that shortens to a nice single-syllable in the same way. I think I'm being a princess and I'll be able to think of plenty when I'm being sued, but on the other hand everything I've said here is true. What do you guys think? Comment on facebook.com/ajtaco with any thoughts.

Click here to read the next part - The Incident: As Told By Leo

Stuart and the Burglary

        I started working at Backstreet a couple months ago after being effectively headhunted by George – a regular at a cafe I'd been fired from earlier in the year. George liked my coffee and after a confusing series of upper-case texts from my old boss, I came to understand that George was offering me a full time barista role at a place listed on Google under the wretched name, 'Backstreet Bar & Grill'. I went in that afternoon, made a coffee for the owner, and while he shook my hand his mid-life ponytail emphatically shook with him. His name was Stuart, and his cafe is completely fucked.

        After the first week Rhys, the Kiwi guy who was training me, told me that I'd be working almost entirely by myself in the days and that the owner only came in at night to do the dinner service. After the second week I realised the place was so quiet I could sit down and read in the afternoons while I waited for customers to trickle in. The third week I was there I walked in to work on Saturday morning and the first thing I heard was Rhys' call from behind the counter, “No cash payments, only card – we've been robbed.”
        Rhys had come in that morning to open the shop and found the front door already ajar. He'd gone behind the counter and grabbed one of the heavy steel handles from the coffee machine to use as a bludgeon in case the burglar was still... “at large”? Do I say “at large” here? Gosh, that'd be fun wouldn't it?... Rhys went downstairs clutching the handle and told me he'd honestly thought Stuart might be laying unconscious after an altercation. He wasn't, but the safe in the cupboard was bashed open, the money gone, and the till had been jimmied open too. They'd left the gold coins though, which Rhys made a point of saying he thought was nice.

        Rhys had called Stu, who didn't pick up, so he called Harry the assistant chef, who told him to call the police, who came in and dusted for prints, threw together a report, and left just as the customers started to trickle in. I arrived a few hours later with breakfast just kicking off and we did the day like nothing had happened. Stu didn't wake up to Rhys' messages until 2:30 in the afternoon. He didn't come in until 6pm, like always, and when he did come in – and this part still kills me... When Stuart arrived at 6pm to his business which had been burgled the night before, he didn't call the police, or the insurance people, or go watch the security footage, or talk to the guard for the building. He didn't even get angry or flip out and start crying.
        When Stuart came in at 6pm, he took the bent metal casing off of the front of his till, put it on the bar, and with a few customers still sitting in the cafe as the sun went down over Fitzroy, Stuart pulled out a hammer, and started beating the metal casing back into shape. BANG BANG BANG!! BANG!! BANG BANG!
        “Stu what are you...”
        BANG BANGBANG!!
        “...Stu... that's not gonna bring your money back.”
        BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!!
        After the beating the metal casing never fit back on the till, if anything he made it worse.

        Rhys went away to Asia at the end of May and I was left to run the cafe by myself. Stu would come in at 6pm Wednesday-Saturday and do the dinner service, but Wednesday to Sunday from 7am-6pm I was, as Rhys put it, the Big Dog. I hired a few people, fired one, then hired another, ordered stock, and dealt with angry suppliers who hadn't been paid, all the while slowly realising the full extent of Stu's financial fuckedness (read “fuck-ed-ness”, thankyou). His business was HAEMORRHAGING money. Like... fuck, I was paying for fruit and veggies with cash out of the till, while fending off calls from the gas company, meat suppliers, milk suppliers – everyone... “Sure man I can pay half of that invoice from a month ago right now, can the other half wait until next week? But can you also please give me some soy milk today please because we're going to run out in about twenty minutes. Thankyou, I really appreciate it.”
        I learned to be more polite and humble than I've ever been in my life, for fear that if I slipped up just once and turned one of these people against me, I'd have to tell every customer who walked into the shop for the next two days that hey I'm terribly sorry but we don't have bacon because I don't know if you've noticed but we aren't actually a cafe in the STRICTEST sense of the word, more an embarrassing joke with umbrellas. And a broken safe... oh yeah, THE SAFE IS STILL IN THE CUPBOARD, BROKEN, ALMOST TWO MONTHS AFTER THE ROBBERY!!

        Fuuuuuucckkk...

        But Stu is not a bad guy, and he's not even a bad boss. He is a bad business owner, and the fact that his business is going down the tubes is no one's fault but his own, but I can't hold that against him. While he is directly responsible for his failure, it doesn't necessarily follow that he deserves it's consequences. The guy's got a family – a wife and some kids. A wife who he once said, from inside a jittering cloud of cigarette smoke, he is lucky hasn't left him; “she's a good woman, so she's stayed.”
        This story feels over, to be honest, because I've left, which is a very selfish thing to say, but it's the truth. The suspense for me was in seeing whether the business could hold long enough for me to get paid up until the week I left, and now that that's happened, for me, the conclusion has been reached. But Stu is still trapped back in that place. He needs to sell it to have any hope of saving his house, which he told me he has gone from owning outright to having mortgaged for almost the full value – all of that money is gone.

        I guess what I'm trying to figure out here is whether it's possible for me to justify the amount of joy I've gotten out of working at Backstreet, and in standing by as a witness to some Last-Days-of-Rome type mayhem as this man's life crumbled around me. “I've never laughed harder in my life than I do every day, at Stuart.” That's what I used to say before Rhys left, when we would regularly fall to the floor laughing red-faced at our boss' attempts to turn his sinking ship around.

        We laughed and laughed and laughed, now here's the justification.

Click here to read the next part - The Legend of Tim