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