When next he looked up, he saw that the Café crowd had thinned out, only the diehard lunatic fringe clinging to the corners. And the ghosts from the past also lingered, as if loathe to leave this site of strange attraction. One of them was write large, almost larger than life itself, Maria, Vitto’s ancient sister, lying stretched out snoring upon the grungy, padded bench behind the tables, her varicose legs elevated and her crabby soul tranquillized by her afternoon siesta.
The wimps always fled at her arrival for she humored no bludgers or broken-arsed substance abusers, but Arthur wasn’t scared of her, to him she was just another outre King’s Cross character, champing at the bit in her own God’s Waiting Room. She was a post-world war Italian immigrant who had elevated herself to shopkeeper status by sheer hard-work; nicknamed Il Duce’s Widow by the cynical café crew, she kept a candle eternally burning behind the counter to ward off the Evil Eye, only it had the opposite effect and troubles rained down on the Family like biblical plagues.
The
Café of No Return had gone through many upheavals and permutations in its
fifty-year history and none greater than when Vitto took on its ownership out
of desperation for a job. Old Joe Polenta had put the business up for sale
before his death but there were no takers as Vitto’s manic, gay personality was
the business, get rid of him and the place was a morgue. The dump got closed
for a few months when Joe sacked Vitto, who then slaved at his sister’s Cafe on
Oxford Street before they let him go, too old to cut the mustard, he couldn’t
run up and down the stairs, and he was bereft of a reason for living, like a
queen evicted from her throne-room.
Joe begged Vitto to come back and bring the customers with him, then he died of bowel cancer, poor thing and the cafe was on the edge. Biting his tongue, with Maria’s aid, he put his Randwick flat
up as collateral, took out a mortgage and bought the Poison Chalice Café,
continuing to run it as a shrine to wannabe (mon)stars and hang-out parlor for
the mad at heart. Except he wasn’t such a great businessman, and innumerable
sales of bad coffee and cheap spaghetti couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments.
Then his sister lost the lease on her Oddbods Café in Paddington and decided to
join the business on the Cross with Vitto, giving herself a last gasp at life
and helping him run a tighter, tougher ship as if she were Captain Bligh in
drag.
Arthur’s
fondest memory of Maria was the night long ago when he took a prospective
boyfriend named Jason to her Oddbods Café to have dinner with Vitto and her.
He’d been courting Jason for months, having first glimpsed his exotic beauty in
the hippie countryside haven of Nimbin and had sleazily invited him to stay at
his pad in Sydney whenever he was in town. The luscious, tall guy actually
turned up and the weekend held great sexual promise as Jason had hinted he was
ready for his first big homo fling and Arthur was drooling, looking into his marvelous
eyes where he sat between Vitto and Maria. The food was flung before them by a
faggy Italian waiter who took one look at Jason and went into a tizz of
unbridled lust. He fussed around the six-foot hunky guy, splashing spaghetti
everywhere, whispering zealously, lasciviously into the spunk’s ear, much to
Arthur’s annoyance. Then he rushed off and, before Arthur could comment, Jason
left the table, disappearing to the dungeons below, to go to the toilet Arthur
surmised.
Maria
and Vitto prattled on about the trains always being late, and half an hour
dragged by, with no sign of Jason or the waiter, while Arthur writhed with
frustration in his chair. Finally Jason materialized and breathlessly took his
seat, the fag waiter slinking in his wake, a satisfied smirk on his weary face.
Arthur then dragged a sordid tale of woe from an evidently mentally challenged
Jason. The waiter had promised him bales of marijuana if he would meet him in
the toilets and when he got there the silly poof had thrown himself on his
knees and tearfully begged to take Jason’s long, thin cock in his mouth. Jason
said he resisted at first but then the crazed homo had promised to buy him a
car, give him money, anything, if only he could suck him off.
Jason
claimed he’d refused but half an hour is a long time for a knock-back and just
long enough for a blowjob and Arthur knew the yob was dumb enough to fall for
the wiles of any loquacious poof. “He’s not going to get you a fucking car no
matter what you do for him and I bet you did plenty! And here’s another piece
of advice. You can fuck off, dumb arse!” snarled Arthur, quite turned off now
that he had a fool to contend with. Arthur went on to complain to Maria about
the outrageous rudeness of her waiter cracking onto his dinner companion.
“He’s
not your boyfriend, is he?” she croaked. “Not yet but I had high hopes,” whined
Arthur. “So, then he’s free to do what he wants,” was her wizened reply. And
forever after, every time Arthur looked at her craggy face, he thought of the
Witch with the crock of shit at the End of the Rainbow Café.
For seven years Maria rode gunshot at the Deadwood Café where the perennial posse of haggard
dope dealers slunk about the area, insinuating themselves into every crack and
croaking their pathetic come-ons, any drug available at every five paces. They
were strung along Roslyn Street like wheedling penitents at a lepers’ fair,
tirelessly loitering outside the Café, and they couldn’t be gotten rid of,
cockroach spray and Maria’s curses only excited them. They squeezed into the
Café at nights, unremarkable amongst the crowd of freaks, disguised by the
cloud of pot-smoke that filled the Shoe-box premises, the deals unnoticed in
the roar of conversation and music crashing from the jukebox. Maria was smart
enough to know what was going on and tolerated them, as long as it didn’t
create too much of a hubbub and no hard drugs went down.
There
was one dickhead named Mimmo who bragged he was boss of the whole scene. He was
an over the hill coke-head and gambler, and sold enough pot to be able to
gamble a thousand dollars away every day on the horses and pokies. Maria let
him carry on, favoring him perhaps because he was a fellow Italian and somewhat
handsome, in a ragged kind of way. She tried not to rock the boat too much, the
Café had to attract customers, she and Vitto worked tirelessly to provide a club for
the deadbeat pothead philosophers to improve their art of bullshitting.
In
Arthur’s way of magical thinking the Café was like a secret Rosicrucian club where
he could meet fellow travelers and discuss the history of knowledge, the
veracity of Art and the pitfalls of Existence, where the key to Nature could
fall from any stranger at any moment. He imagined Roslyn Street had been named
after Roslyn Chapel in Scotland, the Hermeticist’s Lodge that incorporated the
history of the world’s various religious metaphysics into its design. Indeed, a
“Rose Line” or magnetic leyline possibly ran the length of the street. He thought
a major clue was the streets close proximity to King’s Cross, a symbol resonant
of the Knights of the Holy Temple. For at least a hundred years Occult groups
like the Order of the Golden Dawn had gathered in the area and famous witches
like Roslyn Norton had made the place home, as if it was some prehistoric pagan
hotspot.
 |
| Roslyn Norton. |
The local library stocked books of the most arcane and mysterious sort, for they had to cater to the thirsty celebrants swarming the neighborhood. It was by tracking the popularity of certain esoteric texts displayed like lures at the library that Arthur surmised he was not alone in his search for the Holy Grail, and that quite possibly it lay somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the Black Widow Café. That’s why he put up with Maria’s cranky shit and all the little humiliations the dickhead throng ladled out, for he had a higher purpose for being there and no halfwit fame-whore was going to deter him from drinking at the Fount.
Arthur
felt embarrassed and stressed that the Café had pot-dealers milling about as it
meant Vitto was open to trouble from the greasy arm of the law. For much of the
time the police took bribes and all the cafes in the street did a roaring trade
in marijuana, particularly the Amsterdam Café across the road from Vitto’s
Crackpot Café . Every gronk and his drover’s dog made their way to the
Amsterdam, clouds of ganjha smoke wafted out onto the street and sent the busy
little blowflies buzzing, so the area became notoriously hot and featured as an
ongoing scandal in the Sunday yellow press. No matter how many times they
busted the joint, the Amsterdam’s wily entrepreneur found another backpacker-sucker
to run the risk and sell little baggies with every cup of coffee. The Pigs put
surveillance cameras up on all the corners, even inside Vitto’s House of Hate Café,
and did periodic swoops to round up all the sleazy suspects, but there was an
army of zombies rising from the gutters to get a piece of the non-action to
support their bad habits and nothing could deter them.
Twice
they’d even dragged poor old Vitto off to King’s Cross Police Dungeons on the
charge of running a disorderly house and selling drugs, he who had never smoked
a joint or sold a drug in his life. Oh that such a hardworking immigrant
shopkeeper could sink so low! They showed him videos wherein he could be seen
pointing out the secret camera to his customers, proof he was a conniving,
law-breaking scumbag. Arthur jokingly looked on the old queen as if he was some
creaky Genet-like crim, an underground drug czar bringing in donkey-trains
loaded down with hashish, him on the lead donkey cracking a long whip. Roslyn
Street was becoming too hot for cool cats like Arthur.
He recalled the obstacle course of contretemps he had run through for the sake of hanging out in the café, the money he’d spent there, the loyalty he’d given, standing by Vitto no matter the disaster. Such as when the local electricity station had blown up and the whole area had been plunged into darkness for a week, he’d sat with Vitto in the cold wet dark with only a candle for comfort. Or when he’d been dragged off to the cop-shop, waiting patiently for his return to commiserate and curse the demonizing of the wonder herb, marijuana. And going to the movies with him every week for twenty-one years, ignoring the embarrassment of Vitto screaming and calling out at the slightest piece of cinematic violence.
He recalled the obstacle course of contretemps he had run through for the sake of hanging out in the café, the money he’d spent there, the loyalty he’d given, standing by Vitto no matter the disaster. Such as when the local electricity station had blown up and the whole area had been plunged into darkness for a week, he’d sat with Vitto in the cold wet dark with only a candle for comfort. Or when he’d been dragged off to the cop-shop, waiting patiently for his return to commiserate and curse the demonizing of the wonder herb, marijuana. And going to the movies with him every week for twenty-one years, ignoring the embarrassment of Vitto screaming and calling out at the slightest piece of cinematic violence.
He was particularly pained to remember that time he was nearly criminalized just for being a loyal patron of the Cafe de Sade. There he was, blissfully drinking his café latte, listening to Mimmo crap on with a lot of coke-fueled nonsense, trying to impress two good-looking Swedish back-packer girls, recounting everything that was wonderful about himself. The girls laughed in his face because the arse was out of his baggy jeans and he looked like a bum. Arthur decided to put up one of his posters and as he did so Mimmo asked if his name was on it, considering how popular he was. Arthur pointed at a word and said, ‘Yep, there’s your name right there in clear print, DICKHEAD!” Mimmo muttered into his scraggy beard while the blond Venuses giggled. Then Arthur made the mistake of sitting next to the guy. All was jolly for seven minutes with a few more wisecracks slung in Mimmo’s face and everyone sniggering, him being so dumb he thought they were compliments.
Suddenly
the Café Inferno was surrounded by squads of Police, plain-clothes and
uniformed, they blocked off the street and wrestled through the doorway, they
had a search warrant and the deviant crowd was frozen to their seats. The Pig
posse oink-oinked and shuffled about, poking their grubby fingers into private
places, peeping into any likely stash-hole, ruining the Café’s carefree
ambience totally. Arthur glanced down at his backpack on the seat beside him
and eyeballed a strange paper-bag lying on top of it that wasn’t there a few
minutes ago. He didn’t have to be a genius to realize it was Mimmo’s dope stash
and the bastard was trying to palm it off on him. The Pigs were distracted
combing through the morass of junk in the Café and Arthur snatched up the bag
and threw it on the floor by Mimmo’s feet.
As
the Pigs got closer in their search Mimmo spotted the bag at his feet and with
a grimace kicked it over to Arthur’s side of the table. Arthur snarled and
kicked it back. The Pigs were snorting down their necks as Mimmo did the quick
shuffle and kicked the bag back again, like it was a fun game of miniature
football. Arthur glared menacingly at him, and mouthed the words “Fuck you,
cunt!” as he gave the paper bag such a kick it flew up between Mimmo’s legs and
he couldn’t surreptitiously dislodge it. He squirmed and wriggled like a
pathetic belly dancer and when the bag fell to the floor his feet scrabbled in
a blur trying to get the incriminating object away from him and back to Arthur.
Except one of the pigs had noticed the squirming and saw the bag fly from
between the bastard’s legs. The Cop stomped over to them and picked the bag up.
He asked Arthur if it was his and Arthur stated calmly that he’d never seen it
before. He was asked to empty his pockets and all he had was the price of his
cup of coffee.
The Oinker then turned to Mimmo who blustered on and on about
his innocence but on turning out his pockets was found to have a stack of
notes, all twenties and fives coupled lovingly together, twenty-five dollars
being the cost of a tiny bag of marijuana. Mimmo’s face went red as he was
arrested, with the Swedish backpacker girls less than impressed, while Arthur
was given his freedom and told to leave the premises. He pushed his way through
the crowd of Pigs, furious at his near-fame-up, glancing back to see old Vitto
being frisked, humiliated, reduced to sordid criminality as he was also led
away.
When
Arthur went back the next day Mimmo was out on bail and bragging how easily he
could evade the Cops. He had the nerve to sit next to Arthur like they were
best mates, keeping up the bluff of the jolly banter, dumb as an ox. Arthur
lost his cool, accused Mimmo of trying to frame him and gave him a shove. Mimmo
tried the macho stance and demanded Arthur face him out on the street, which
was what Arthur was rearing to do, grabbing Mimmo by the collar and dragging
him out of the Café and then giving him a couple of bitch slaps across the
face. Mimmo went down like the proverbial wet paper-bag, squealing and begging
for mercy. Arthur replied with his favorite move, he spun the sad-sack on his
heels and gave him a kick in the arse, the six-foot arsehole running off up
Roslyn Street bewailing his pathetic existence. Arthur didn’t consider himself
such a tough nut, he was just so angry he could’ve torn the creep’s ears off.
Still
fuming he re-entered the Chasing the Dragon Café, glaring at Maria who blithely
returned his gaze as if the sorry saga had nothing to do with her bad choice of
Italian buddies. Then this little twit called Rodney piped up, “Gee Arthur, Mimmo’s
customers won’t be too happy with you, chasing him off like that!” Rodney was
this short, blond gay clone who worked as a male prostitute but would garble on
to anyone, regardless of the topic of conversation, that just because he sucked
cocks for a living didn’t mean he was gay, (like anybody cared.) He was well
known for having schizo flip-outs and had once accused Arthur of being a creep
and ogling innocent little him seductively, and Arthur had been waiting for the
right moment of bad mood to get him.
He
snarled “Keep your mouth shut, you little cocksucker!” Rodney spluttered and
moaned “I’m not a cocksucker, I’m not a cocksucker!” “Yep, that’s all you are,
a dirty little cocksucking cocksucker!” persisted Arthur, dying to slam him in
the teeth. But the little jerk wouldn’t take the bait, infamous for breaking a
woman’s nose in one of his attempts at hetero normalcy, chicken-shit when it
came to a stoush with the boys.
Maria
and Vitto had taken up knitting to fill their empty hours and they continued
clacking away with the needles like Madame La Farge and crony witnessing the
action at the guillotine. The cruelly indifferent faces at the Café Sans
Culottes sorely tried Arthur’s patience and, sneering, he put on his backpack
and stormed out onto the street. Looking back through the window he saw a smug
grin on Rodney’s cloned face as if he’d triumphed in a battle of wills and this
infuriated Arthur so much he caught Rodney’s insipid gaze and continuously
mouthed the word “cocksucker”, crooking his finger, beckoning the little shit
to come outside.
Finally
the turkey rushed out, able to withstand the challenge to his manhood no
longer. Rodney was half Arthur’s age but the same size and weight, thus Arthur
felt no fear at taking him on, except in his temper he’d forgotten to take his
backpack off and was somewhat encumbered. As Rodney came at him screaming “I’m
not a cocksucker!” Arthur gave him his standard swift Wing Chun kick to the
guts, which surprised him and he stopped dead, realizing Arthur was no push-over.
Then his pseudo-machismo got the better of him and he stepped forward again,
throwing a punch that only grazed Arthur’s head, Arthur socking him in the jaw
in return, the damn backpack hampering his movements and he knew that the fight
was going to be a tough haul. Rodney paused again, looking for a way out, as
the brawl was descending into a low-down, hair-pulling, bitch-fight tumble to
the gutters. Vitto must have heard the squalling for he stuck his head out the
door and shrieked for them to stop their childish antics. This was the excuse
Rodney was looking for and he backed off, Arthur also satisfied he’d encouraged
the little dead-shit to keep his dirty gob shut in future.
Maria
knitted on, non-committal, just part of the theatrics at the Blood and Gutters
Café and she’d seen it all. Though it wasn’t long before she herself lost her
wig when an Algerian pot-dealer wouldn’t leave the premises at her command,
calling her an old cunt. She hit him over the head with a plastic bottle of
mineral water and still he wouldn’t go, and in frustration she ran weeping from
the Café and flung herself upon a bench across the road, having what looked
like a heart attack. All the deadbeats charged after her and crowded around,
fussing over her as if she was the matriarch of a powerful Mafia clan. Arthur
watched the scene from the café’s window, a group of men gathered around the
old woman under a street lamp, her writhing about, kicking her legs and waving
her arms, the men seemed to be trying to hold her down, one even looked like he
was between her legs, giving her the old heave-ho. “Nogod! What on earth is
going on over there,” he wondered.
Vitto
asked him to go over and see if she was alright and as he approached the bench,
lit like a diorama from the streetlight above, with several men tugging on her
legs and arms, he got the terrible idea he was witnessing a gang-bang in
progress. He pushed his way through the crowd and looked down upon her, using
his nurses radar to scan her in seven seconds and see that she was just
hyperventilating. She looked up into his eyes and knew he was there to give
succor if she needed it and relaxed a little. No heart attack, no stroke or
breathing problem, just anxiety. Mimmo was there ogling the action and Arthur
asked him to get her up and help here to her apartment nearby, she couldn’t lie
out in the cold all night with a mob of
deviants blubbering over her.
All
the poor dear's bats came home to roost a few days later when her dear friend,
Mimmo, robbed the Café of all its earnings and fled to Nowheresville. Then the
candle she had left burning in her apartment, to ward off the ever-threatening
Evil Eye, set fire to the curtains and burnt the whole joint down, including
the sixty thousand dollars she’d stashed for years under her mattress, never
having trusted banks. Trying to squeeze out just a bit more life for herself
she became a permanent fixture at the Café Undesirable, grumping vitriol at
anyone who cast their shadow upon her, castigating the desperate lunatics and humoring
the toothless lapdogs who dared cross the thresh-hold. But Arthur liked her, she was quite a
character, very staunch and forthright, a hard-worker who didn’t suffer fools
gladly. He remained loyal to the café and fearless, no matter how many punches
in the face, insults to his sexuality or threats from the cops he got,
outliving any imbroglio, more lost than most but kind of at home, twenty-one
years an acolyte at that Mecca for Misfits.
Eventually
all that hard work did her in, her legs gave out on her, she got embolisms that
scoured her creaky old body and she died at St. Vincents in the early
‘Noughties. Arthur was glad he got to kiss her goodbye on her deathbed,
gratified to know she liked him in return. Vitto was inconsolable, she was his
last staunch connection to the old world familia that Italians dote upon. She
had a big funeral at the Catholic Church down Roslyn Street presided over by
Father Syn, all a bit mind-boggling in its metaphors. Peter the violinist
played Ave Maria from the choir-loft and her niece, Tina, stood up and declared
she’d made a promise to the dying Maria: that she’d look after her brother,
Vitto, till the end. Thankfully she and Lorenzo have lived up to their bargain,
moving him in with them and looking after him well as he’s terrified to live
and die alone.
In
the middle of the funeral service an old Italian widow in black kept trying to
stand up but those on either side of her kept pulling her back down, they struggled
back and forth for much of the ceremony but finally the old girl broke free and
got to her feet. She loudly wailed, “We loved you Maria but you sure were a
bitch!” It reminded Arthur of a scene from a classic Italian movie melodrama starring Anna Magnani. All of the congregation went into shock, Vitto stared at the floor in
embarrassment, everyone pretended they didn’t hear it and the prayers carried
on. Arthur found out later she was Maria’s sister-in-law, the husband had died
many years previously, apparently a wastrel, Maria doing the ghastly Catholic
thing and leaving him, bringing up her kids on her own.
The
other of her sons, Joe, was a biker, in a motor-bike club and he, with Lorenzo and
members of the biker gang, carried the coffin out to the hearse, all of them dressed
in black leather jackets with wild club insignia across their backs; it was a
colorful and fitting escort for Maria on her last journey, from Café Purgatory
to the Pearly Gates. And Arthur continued to hang in there amidst Purgatory’s
flames, ignoring the mob of ghosts clinging to the door posts, but he was like a budgie with its wings singed, trapped in a rusty cage,
he longed to fly free.
If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB
address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up
anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India
of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.
