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
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