The Pink Pussycat - as cryptic a name as I could think of to drop at the next student party - was not the only source of income, little as it was, including tips. Melbourne Airport was arguably an even better conversation starter ( what, you fly planes? - people always think the obvious) but the work here was even more mundane than pouring a ‘taste’ (a charade that even then was embarrassingly outdated) of Yalumba Carte d’Or riesling or McWilliams Shiraz Cabernet into the glass of the male half of a dining couple so that, after making a method acting impression of a furrow-browed, purse-lipped judge at Mundus Vini, he would decide whether they would drink it or not. Indeed, the airport job - money is obviously tight in this anonymous early 1980s Carltonian mise en scène - involved little more than bussing Budget rental cars from their terminal drop-off point to a depot back in the endless sun-parched acres of tarmac in the backblocks of Tullamarine, where I cleared their overflowing ...
The pub - hotel - mentioned in the previous post was, of course, Poynton’s Carlton Club, on the corner of Grattan and Cardigan, opposite the Royal Women's Hospital. The Carlton Club was three short blocks from the small terrace house, whitewashed brick in the fashion of the Greeks (the owner was Con, a barman at the Continental Hotel in Lonsdale Street, to whom I paid the rent), in which we lived for five Arcadian years (an Arcadia chequered by the stop-start linear domesticities of child-raising; the eternal nightmare-producing (even now) failure to complete a degree; and the death, late one night , of an older sibling, announced at the door by a couple of dark blue uniforms whose lines and colouration and stance and timing told me all I needed to know. Nine minutes walk, slightly downhill; across Elgin, Faraday, and Grattan. The hotel’s Cardigan Street side had a separate door with a 1950s backlit and illustrated sign over it: Pink Pussy Cat Bistro , the cartooni...