The Story of Gigi

I'm a very strong believer in the idea that God gives you the rope with which you hang yourself. My life in general has been a testament to this, but one particular experience stands out head and shoulders above the rest. The story of Gigi.

    I met Gigi through a curious series of events involving a Frenchman and a Vietnamese woman, a Mazda RX-7 from the 80s, a few Neo-Nazis, and no small quantity of Nitrous Oxide in the village of Clinton BC. The first time I saw her was at the Frenchman's birthday in Amman. It was a surprise party which I didn't expect to be invited to, at a person's house who I'd never met before, with people I'd never heard of. By virtue of Jordanian timing, although I was about 20 minutes late I was one of the first people there, which gave me ample time to meet both Gigi and the host.

    Following the arrival of the rest of the guests, a few beers,and a round of Drinking Jenga I was forced to conclude three things. The first was that Gigi was cute, the second was that she probably liked me, the third was that she was almost certainly a virgin.

    It strikes me as the case that virgins above the age of 25 give off a certain aura, not unlike that of a shelter dog. A curious combination of please, please touch me, and never ever come close to me. I tend to choose the latter for both as my fucks-given meter is rarely anywhere near full enough for  either commitment. Keeping with that spirit, although a  small part of me was tempted to play ball with my balls, the greater part decided it was a bad idea to be so ballsy, so I didn't take her phone number.

    It was a few months later when saw her next. It was at a farewell party for the Frenchman and Vietnamese woman, as they were leaving Jordan. As is customary for me at these events, I spent most of the time telling extremely off-colour jokes, getting embarrassingly wasted, and making poor decisions. One of those poor decisions was taking her number, all while so drunk that I fumbled my phone, dropping it on the floor as she eagerly saved her digits. The clarity of sobriety clashed with the crassness of drunkenness over the following months as I texted and ghosted her a couple of times. Inside you there are two wolves, and one of them is almost certainly retarded.

    Months abortive texting went nowhere and before I knew it, New Years Eve had come along. One of my resolutions was to stop being stupid about women. To make better choices and actually try going on a few dates, especially with women who seemed interested in me. By that logic I decided to stop being a bastard and ghost her properly. I am ashamed to admit that a substantial reason for this choice was her use of the dancing woman emoji, which I consider the mark of a weak constitution and mental disturbance.

    Further months passed and loneliness grew, but I considered that I had done quite enough to this poor woman, and should probably focus on other avenues in life. With that focus I gained a certain mindset, and a rather unhealthier grindset. There's a point in life where the usefulness of desire puts itself at the forefront of one's thinking, and that selfsame desire provides both the push for living life on your own terms, as well as the drive for accomplishment.

    It was with that primacy of desire that I began to lose touch with myself, and with why exactly I was living life on my own term, and what particularly that life consisted of. As everybody knows, self-reflection of this type is basically a direct expressway to depression and I began to feel like even the things which I was supposed to enjoy were fundamentally misery inducing. This led to the customary self-destruction, extreme drinking, and chain-smoking, which itself prompted me to have long think about my life and how it had been going. With this thinking I realized that I had managed to forget that I loved the things that I was doing. I wasn't doing these things out of desire to have them, or build skills, or show off, but out of love for the thing itself. If I didn't have love, or at least appreciation for these things, then why was I devoting my time, portions of my life, to accomplishing them? Whether it be my work, social life, family, or artistic expression. What was I but a vessel for love of the world, expressed and explored in the form of my personality?

    I also concurrently managed to acquire a rather large stock of mushrooms of the variety which don't taste great, but provide a person with a certain enhanced sense of personal fulfillment. These had nothing to do with the above, I promise.

    The stock was larger than what I could reasonably consume on my own without risking a permanent case of being-kinda-weird, so I decided to make them into chocolates for easier...transport. Walking around with a bag of dried mushrooms tends to be a poor idea under the best of circumstances. One day while visiting my mother she informed me that she had dinner plans and I reasoned that I'd have the apartment to myself, and it would therefore be the perfect opportunity to infuse some chocolates with some mind-enhancers. She's got a nice kitchen, I have no regrets. Except for one. Well, maybe two.

    In the interest of experimentation I decided to have 1/3 of a chocolate, which turned out to be far, far stronger than I had anticipated. Also, it turned out that my mother having dinner plans did not mean she was going out for dinner. A subtle difference which speaks volumes, and meant that I had to get the fuck out of there as soon as possible before the guests arrived.

    My mother arrived before I had managed to abscond and took her time laughing at my misfortune. It struck me then that teenagers get kicked out of their moms' houses when they're fucked up, but adults kick themselves out. Although my dad's place was a short walk away I was fully aware that any conversation with him was not going to end in my favour, and so I had to find myself a different escape route. Luckily, I've surrounded myself with people who are great and true, and I was picked up by a friend who let me ride the rest of the wave at his place.

    The next day I got a surprise text from Gigi in the evening inviting me to have a drink with her group at their usual haunt. With the clarity provided to me by my recent epiphany, I decided to go over there and check it out. There was nothing wrong with spending time with interesting people, and there was no reason to run away from cute girls or shelter dogs.
 
    On an unrelated note, it had also been a very, very long time since I had seen a titty, and titties are nice.

    I immediately noticed upon arriving that this woman was eating me with her eyes. Every time I happened to look at her, she was already looking at me. She was also still really cute, maybe even cuter than when I had seen her last. The night was pleasant and the company was appreciated. Who doesn't like being oogled ever once in a while anyways?

    It was with that in mind that I decided to stop being an asshole and send her a message in a couple of days. The delay seemed to be reasonable as firstly, I didn't want to seem too eager and secondly, her group was heading to a farm the following day for a good time which I suspected was going to be made substantially better by the six chocolates I had provided them with.

    A few days later I sent two messages; one to Gigi asking her out for a coffee, and another to the host from earlier on in the story who had become a friend of mine, asking him how the day at the farm had gone.

    He responded almost immediately, thanking me profusely for the experience and raving about its intensity and how good of a time everybody had, stressing that I had helped no less than four people lose their virginities that day. At first I was elated. Truly, I was embodying the spirit of free love and helping people feel, and share, that love. Immediately afterwards I had a sinking feeling as I put two and two together

    God not only gave me the rope with which I hung myself, He had me weave it myself.

    That evening Gigi replied politely,but quite firmly, that we would only see each other in group settings, which basically translates to "you played yourself."

Kalatastrophe

Following the loss of confidence engendered by the end of a five-year long relationship, I delved deep into the only reasonable course of action; I watched a fuck-ton of anime. One of the many Japanese cartoons I consumed during this depressing era was the anime Food Wars.

For the uninitiated, Food Wars is an anime about cooking food that is so ridiculously amazing it causes spontaneous nudity. I'm not kidding, it's real. Look it up.

During this period I had been cooking quite a lot as I was in the midst of grad-school and, resultantly, extremely broke. My roommate and I had struck a deal, buy most of the food and I will cook for us both. It's quite amazing what the raw stress of being responsible for another person's nutrition can do to your cooking ability. Especially when the other person is an over six foot, 120 kilogram behemoth.

This all led to a pot of beef stew I made which I lovingly called "Drunken Beef Stew," both because the ingredients resembled a cocktail and because I was hammered while making it. It was awesome. In my ego trip I phoned my father, informing him that I was now an ultimate chef with ultimate skill, and could defeat his beef stew. Spurred by the anime-logic of Food Wars we arranged to make both beef stews and compete with a few judges. We set a date for the competition and left it at that. I then called my friend Ringo to gloat. He, quite unexpectedly, asked to compete with us. Somehow we cut my dad out of the equation and scheduled a competition for the next Tuesday when I was back in Amman, about a month later.

We got a few friends together to act as judges, randomly chose the theme of Spaghetti and Meatballs, and competed. I won for the first and only time.

A close friend of ours, Hike then asked to join/was roped in. Over the next 3 months or so each of us would choose a random theme out of a vase and have a mini-competition; a competition that would range from levering forks off the table, to a backgammon tournament, to guessing the next song on shuffle. The winner would choose the theme for that week from the three options, then we would compete, usually with completely new recipes that had never been tried before. Themes ranged from "local ingredients international forms," to "Only Cans," to "3 JD," to "Chicken Sandwich," to "Summer." It was great fun and I strongly recommend it. Your cooking will improve, as will your understanding of your friends.

On that note, aside from the things that I knew about Ringo and Hike already (that they were good guys, great fun, enjoyed sexually harassing each other...etc.), I got a bit more insight into their personalities. Both were true perfectionists, Hike was meticulous in his presentation and his food, Ringo was insane about technique and did not know how to work normal human hours (one time he spent two days making Creme Fraiche) (he did not sleep) (.)(.) (haha, boobies). Hike was also prone to slight bouts of extreme hysteria wherein he would either start to make what I can only describe as noises, or go totally nonverbal.This happened rarely and usually in the kitchen, which isn't mot much of an issue when it's a fun funky activity.

My father, cut out of the competition, had slowly begun seething with the type of resentment usually known only to Olympic silver medalists. It also didn't help that we were raiding his spices and fucking up his kitchen. Thus, he stretched his fingers, twiddled them like Wile-E-Coyote and created a cunning plan. He had a house that he was trying to sell out in the Jordanian gentrified countryside, and suggested to me that we turn it into a restaurant. I refused outright, having become accustomed to his Machiavellian schemes. Ringo was not quite so experienced or strong so my dad approached him next. Ringo suggested it to me, and in front of Ringo's sweet ass I will agree to anything. We both expected Hike to be the hard sell as he had an actual job, but he agreed outright, much to my dismay.

There is something to be said about the unique type of confidence enjoyed by people who've never done the thing they're about to do, sort of like a sheep trying to fly. Also like a sheep trying to fly, it usually ends messily. We had assumed it would be a simple process of putting in about 2500 JOD (including a contribution from a silent partner), finding used chairs and tables, then testing recipes for a month. Those expectations were dashed when we discovered that our water smelled of sulfur. They
were further dashed when we realized that any quantity of chairs and tables in our price range would have to be purchased from a refugee camp and refinished by hand, since we couldn't afford to get someone to do it for us. Also, any cookware and electronics we could afford were somewhere between second-hand and fifth-hand and were therefore about as reliable and sturdy as a pair of cardboard shoes. Also, our water was not hooked up to the government and came out of a well. Actually, does it count as a well if it is two collapsed plastic tanks in a hole in the ground? 

Slowly, we all became accustomed to a new set of roles. Hike became a managerial mastermind, which is to say a nag and a pain in my ass, but one that is sorely necessary. Ringo became an expert in haggling and simply finding shit for cheap. Did you know you can get a pasta machine for 4 JOD? Well, you can't, but Ringo can. I became a clean-machine-supreme. I can clean like a motherfucker.

Our initial time-frame was one month. It took us three weeks to fix the chairs, fix the water, discover that the sink had been, for some reason, fixed with a plastic bottle-cap, ignore the sink, and get the space ready in a general sense. By this point, we had gone from an ambitious a-la carte menu to an equally ambitious set menu. Soup, followed by salad, followed by an appetizer, followed by a main, and lastly, dessert. With about a week of actual recipe testing under our belt, we decided to have a soft-opening for friends and family.

The interesting thing about working 12-16 hour days of demanding labour, is the way that certain things can slip your mind. For example, are you aware that beef stew requires beef stock? Also, are you aware that good  beef stock takes about six hours to make? I'm sure that we were, but somehow in the days leading up to our very first service we sort of put that thought to the side. The night before our first service a certain nagging reality resurfaced, we were not prepared. And it wasn't just the beef stock, a whole set of pre-prep work was simply not done in favour of other stuff that seemed more important at the time. It was at this point, with our opening looming over us like the ready and willing tea-bag of a  douche on Halo, that we discovered that at least one of us would have to sleep at the restaurant.

Without sleep Hike is under the threat of spontaneously turning into a pack of irate hyenas, I needed to be at least slightly fresh since I was to be the Front of House, which left Ringo (who also happened to volunteer). I arrived home at 2:00 AM and was not really capable of sleep. I got back to the restaurant at 8:30 to find Ringo asleep on the couch we had put into our indoor smokerey.

Quickly about our indoor smokerey, also referred to as "the chill room." My caveat for opening the restaurant is that we had to have at least one room inside which could be smoked in. This led to the chill-room; a 3x4 white walled room with doodles on the wall, an ashtray, two beach chairs, and the chairs that were too ugly or nonfunctional to be put into the restaurant. It also has a big, comfy, leather couch that is weirdly good at retaining smells. Basically, it's a jail-cell for shitty chairs that has a subtle, yet powerful, odor of cigarettes.

When I chanced upon Ringo there was an additional smell in the chill-room; pure and complete human exhaustion. The smell of a person in the airport who's on the wrong end of a 36 hour journey. Not sweat, mind you, but the of acrid smell of genuine misery. On, and in, the funky leather couch. I let him be.

When Ringo awoke, I told him to go and take a shower, then continued working and waited for Hike to arrive. Once all three of us were there we, with a total of seven hours of sleep between us, we started doing more pre-prep work for the service that was about 5 hours away. I also, quite insanely, decided that this would be a good time to draw a giant fox with human hands on the wall, as well as attempt to write the menu on A4 paper as calligraphy. As soon as I finished being artsy, still not wearing my fancy waiter attire, our guests began arriving.

We had 13 chairs, and there were 13 people coming in, for  our very first service. The kitchen was not clean. Some of the food was not cooked. The salad was still deconstructed. Dishes were everywhere, as were utensils. It was at this point that my grandfather, who had not been in a restaurant in over five years, walked in. I wanted to die.

I began to stall for time, I had luckily just acquired my Master's diploma and am a bullshitter without equal, which is to say I managed to buy us 15 minutes and succeeded in  diverting them from the jankier parts of my humble establishment; including, but not limited to, an "office room" which had nothing in it but sheet metal and a mattress, the aforementioned smokerey, and our almost certainly unhygienic water source. All good things, however, must come to an end. It is simply not possible to stall beyond a certain amount of time without being obvious. Stuff had to start coming out. It was at this point that Hike, usually clean, handsome, precise, and in-control of himself burned himself by full-handing a sheet pan of puff pastry straight out of the oven. In a true Tom-and- Jerry moment he jumped some 2 meters into the air, stuck  his fingers in his mouth, and spontaneously transformed into a pack of irate hyenas. Now completely impossible to talk to, responding to all verbal stimuli with growls and nips, Hike announced, "I'm quitting after this service."

Food started coming out and it was well received, to the pleasant shock of all assembled. My aunt walked into the kitchen (separated from the dining room by gypsum board in true ghetto fashion) and witnessed a verbal fight between Ringo and Hike which commenced without any sound whatsoever, like a TV on mute. As food was eaten, utensils were returned, and as utensils were returned, I required more utensils. This was an issue because the kitchen was currently exposed to the type of tension and mess usually reserved for the homes of people about to go into the witness protection program.

To make matters rather worse, the kitchen sink which had been rigged into some form of functionality using a bottle cap began to overflow from the bottom, filling the kitchen with soapy, beefy-smelling water. Also, the water ran out. We managed to stall for a moment and used a black plastic pipe we found in a field to refill the well from a nearby water tank which we had for emergencies. I told you it was kind of unhygienic.

Just as the main courses were about to go out, with all of our tables and chairs occupied, with knives and forks as easily located as the Holy Grail, without any time to breathe or, more importantly, smoke a cigarette, the rest of our guests arrived. It occurred to me then that maybe I had died and gone to hell.

There was nowhere to put the guests in the dining room, there were simply no chairs and no tables. There remained one room in the general area which had chairs; the smokerey. In the time from seeing the headlights of the arriving cars to the guests' entrance into the restaurant, the room had been cleaned, including a weirdly large amount of soil. Don't ask me how I did it, I can clean like a motherfucker.

We apologized profusely and sat them in our presently least disgusting space, and continued serving the party of 13 that was my mother's side of the family. Eventually, they had eaten, chilled and began to ask questions, at which point I told my mother, "I would take it as a huge personal favour if you could collect the family and leave."

The second party was far less eventful. Two of them, Ringo's cousins, agreed to come back later leaving about seven people. Those, we fed quite easily as we had streamlined the menu during our silent-movie-arguments. Ringo, while frying an appetizer, had a complete arthritis attack and collapsed on the ground like a hefty, carelessly discarded, jizz sock. I have Hike a pep talk and he reverted to human form. It was at this point that I asked Hike to take over Front of House duties for moment while I went outside for a smoke. It was then that we discovered that while the party of seven had brought wine with them, one of their party was a devout Muslim who had just eaten our main, which had been stewed in red wine for 24 hours. Fortunately, I was outside smoking and could afford to leave the damage control to Hike. The woman was very understanding and so it went smoothly, by the end we were joking with each other.

After the end of service, Hike, Ringo, and I drank the rest of the cooking wine, smoked a few cigarettes, and discovered that our main was really, really delicious.

At no point had the chefs believed that the food was actually good, despite my informing them. This suggested something truly horrifying, that we were pretty good at this and needed to keep going. Which we did for a few months until my dad sold the house and kicked us out with a week's notice.

C'est la vie, or as the French put it: shit happens.