My first job in Melbourne I was a waiter for a hospitality agency. Or rather, a ‘food and beverage attendant’. One evening I took a tram into the city, clean shaven and dressed in a white shirt and black tie like I was off to an award ceremony for Best Funeral.
I arrived at the venue, where inside were tables set out in long rows and adorned with precisely placed silverware. Nervous young waiters in outfits matching my own stood in one corner whilst the managers of the catering company, identifiable by their sharp, tight suits moved swiftly around the room like sharks. I took up a position in the school of waiters, next to a woman who told me someone had already been sent home for mistaking an early-arriving attendee of the event for one of the organisers and asking her where the toilet was. Once one of the managers had caught wind of this he had glided over to the waiter and, in shark terms, clamped his jaws around the victim’s abdomen and thrashed him about until his entrails spilled onto the freshly hoovered carpet.
With guests now steadily streaming in, another manager delivered a short, stern brief to what he obviously considered to be a feckless band of airheads. Scanning the pathetic ranks, his gaze fell on a woman wearing a blouse with an open collar and no tie. Everyone else wore a tie, everyone else had a shirt buttoned up to the neck, and everyone looked down solemnly in unison to pray for her soul.
“Where is your tie? Why is you shirt open?!” came the obvious questions, followed by a murmured, uncertain apology and a few more obvious questions with the obvious purpose of prolonging the public shaming. His eyes searched frantically for an answer to this conundrum, unable to lose any more staff, and found me.
Dismissing the others with a barking instruction to wait in the kitchen, he pulled the woman and I alongside each other and told us to switch shirts.
I can’t say that I remember vocalising anything, but I’m certain my eyes clearly communicated a panicked “what?”, for he quickly shot back at me with “just try it will you? She’s tall it’ll probably fit you.”
And so, guided into a small, windowless room and with backs to each other, we undressed and swapped clothing. The sleeves of the blouse barely went over my forearms and I could only button it half way to my chest before the fabric stretched at my sides to the point of tearing.
We turned around to face one another as if in a duel; her looking quite calm and happy now in a shirt that neatly buttoned all the way up to her neck, and me looking like I was about to start a shift in a fetish bar.
Often Gone 