Diamonds, Dreams & Kindred Magic - remembering my Picasso tribe

The Management Cast:

David Dranchuk: the mastermind behind the whole affair. Aesthetically, he was a cross between Mr. Bean and Jeff Goldblum, except shorter and, you know, Anglican. A devout fan of Leonard Cohen, he would perpetually sing his idol’s songs while drifting through the kitchen and restaurant and overseeing the real-time manifestation of his world-changing vision.

The competent staff that had been hired to execute his dream frequently contained their exasperation out of respect. “Everything’s good David!” the Chef would reiterate assuredly, for instance, before giving him a gentle but obvious prod out of the kitchen. David was quirky and kindly, and must’ve been a great outreach worker with the kids when his beat was the street.

No one could deny his dedication, the scope of which trumped all of his many social idiosyncrasies. For instance, one time, someone had spray painted the words “Jesus Saves” on a wooden construction site barrier near the restaurant, and he sprayed “Mohammed Invests” underneath (a notion decidedly absent from any of the Church of England’s accepted dogma. The rare occasion when humour meets religion is always so refreshing).

The widely acknowledged “founder” of Picasso Café though he was, David was never above necessary, menial day-to-day tasks, and his insistence to remain involved and available on the ground and in our working space drove us nuts. Deep down, though, whether we knew it or not, I think we all respected him. In the summer he could often be found in front of the restaurant, in the sunlight and on the busy midday Broadway corridor, vacuuming the sidewalk and singing “Everybody knows, everybody knows, that's how it goes, everybody knows… ”

Nathan Hyam: the Master Chef tasked with training the crew of Kitchen Program students at Picasso Café (affectionately referred to by those of us in the program as “the convicts,” since the vast majority of them had been in jail at some prior point in their lives. With equal affection and based on the same ratio formula, the floor staff were known as “the prostitutes.”)

To look at him, Nathan was a healthy blend of Colonel Sanders, Chef Gordon Ramsey, and Richard Dreyfuss (two parts Red Seal Culinary Master, one part hot-headed New Yorker). You know how Chef Ramsay tends to explode instantaneously into a Mach-7 rage over the possibility that a Crème Brule might take thirteen seconds longer than it should to arrive at the holy destination of the patron’s table, as if the critical import of the matter could be likened to a vital, still-beating organ being transported for a life-saving transplant operation that is underway right now and the recipient will die Right Now if you don’t get your shit together and get it served RIGHT. NOW.

I can’t say I had many direct dealings with Nathan, since he wasn’t my instructor, but I do recall hearing his raised voice more than occasionally over countless similar culinary calamities, and after my stint at Picasso Café and the upwards of 10 years I spent in the food service industry afterwards, I’m inclined to conclude that Red Seal Chefs are an empirically histrionic bunch.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Nathan recalls his time at Picasso Café thusly: “after a grueling two years starting the Picasso Café restaurant training program, my wife and I were both ready for a sabbatical.” Stress will do that to you, Nathan. That I know for sure.

The Dining Program Dream Team

Lynn: was (and remains) a vivacious blend of Leslie Ann Warren and Mary Poppins (Leslie’s charming sex appeal and Mary’s matriarchic leanings), with a touch of Martha Stewart’s skill for culinary and artistic finery. What better blend of ingredients for our fine dining service guru?

Having learned the food service ropes in the notorious party town that was pre-90’s Whistler, BC, she was razor-sharp smart, ambitious, vibrant, and a thoroughly perfect teacher and mentor for the motley crew of budding fine-dining servers Picasso Café would groom for the world.

A single mama herself, Lynn quickly fell into the role of resident Mama Bear for a core handful of students at Picasso Café, and at one point it almost seemed like you couldn’t graduate from the Dining Room program if you didn’t end up living in her basement for a while. With her boundless passion for quality over quantity, and equal parts style and substance, it was impossible to not know that Lynn’s nurturing love was genuine. She was (and remains) the absolute best Mama Bear of them all.

Jo: if Lynn was our Mama Bear, Jo was our Auntie Bear: unassuming, kind and always there with a ready ear to hear our woes and a shoulder upon which we could cry. Jo was (and remains) an ever-cool contemporary manifestation of “blues singer in disguise.” A girly-girl Janis Joplin, perpetually relaxed and draped in vintage style, and packing a Masters degree in literature underneath all that vocal talent and bluesy soul.

Jo’s skills in formal food service and bartending, coupled with her personal appreciation for good smoke, good drink and good eats, made her an equally perfect instructor and mentor for our motley crew. It was a rather serious bonus that she could sing well, and that her repertoire extended beyond Leonard Cohen (although no one could deny that David's daily renditions of Cohen's songbook were heartfelt, if not tone-challenged). Jo was (and remains) the absolute best Auntie Bear of them all.

Lynn and Jo rented a house together at the time, so for those of us who did land in their basement for a while, we ended up sharing a degree of genuine camaraderie most of us had never experienced before: safe, honest, unabusive, and thoroughly joyful, inescapable human dramas aside.

While this degree of personal connection between teachers and students is generally frowned upon in conventional school settings, it can be argued that genuine personal connection is not only perfect, but essential within the context of working with marginalized adults whose primary barriers are extreme social stigma and profoundly impaired trust.

Jo and Lynn were criticized for the personal relationships they formed with us, and within the first three years, both were ultimately let go from Picasso Café. Speaking for myself, it’s been more than 25 years and I remain in touch with both Lynn and Jo to this day. Their guidance and mentorship, and the friendships we formed, forever changed – and probably saved – my life.

I had never experienced the sense of having a real “family” before Picasso Café. I thought I did, with the people I knew on the street, but I’ve since learned that a real family has genuine connections of the heart, rather than simply situational or geographic commonalities. A real family is human beings who genuinely care about you, even when you’re at your worst. It was Lynn and Jo who first gave me that. I am and will always be forever grateful.

~~~

The Original Fine Dining Service Diamonds in the Rough:

Brenda – short, big and tough as nails, with the physical stature of Chris Farley and the strength and presence of both Cagney and Lacey, Brenda was pure “old-school street.” Her expressions and behaviour showed obvious signs of a hard life and she epitomized the kind of person you totally wanted to have on your side. Or, perhaps more accurately, the kind of person on whose good side you definitely wanted to remain.

With a timeless 70’s wave in the short, blond hair that framed her round face and blue eyes, she had a no-nonsense temperament and an obvious but unspoken capacity for serious physical shit-kicking-in-the-name-of-survival-if-necessary.  We bonded over a shared appreciation for smoking pot, and I came to be able to always count on her for almost “sisterly” advice. (As I’d experienced with many of the older people I knew from the street, there was always a cautionary tone taken with me. A baseline “don’t go where I’ve gone or do what I’ve done” sentimentality. I would always forget that they were all a lot older than me; looking back, I suspect it was probably impossible for them to ever forget how young I was.)

Brenda was the first person I ever knew who referred to her husband as “the Old Man,” and with equal nonchalance, to herself as his “Old Lady.” (At the time, these labels seriously blew my tender adolescent mind. Elderly terms used as terms of endearment? No way!) If you could earn her trust and respect, she proved to be a caring and loyal friend. She didn’t say a lot, but when she did speak, you damn well listened, and it was always worth hearing what she had to say.

I remember she had a pit-bull she adored, and she was a perfect Alpha Mama. “A dog’s behaviour reflects their owner’s care,” she’d say. Brenda trained that pit-bull so masterfully that he would move only with her direct eye-contact and permission, and take food only with her specific command, and only from her left – not right – hand. They also say you can tell a lot about a person by the kind of dog they have. I remember Brenda as kind of pit-bull herself: representative of a breed largely stigmatized and feared as a result of external appearances, but when cared for and loved well, thoroughly loving and as harmless as kittens.

Darcy – tall and bordering-on-unhealthy-skinny, she was an aesthetic cacophony of 80’s-esque wrappings: all tight-fitting acid-wash jeans with neon half-tops and bangle bracelets, and heavy blue powder and thick black liner around her eyes. With Farah Fawcett features, spandex-worthy posturing and hair big enough for a warehouse’s inventory of coiffing products, Darcy pushed her own sex appeal as fervently as a revival preacher pushes salvation: earnestly and urgently.

Where Brenda’s survival tactics came through a quiet, calculating Sumo-like sensibility, Darcy’s was loud, brash and frenetic. An in-your-face incessant hustle, with an endless verbal stream to match her boundless amphetamine energy. Forever currying favours, Darcy was fast-talking and very clearly “in it to win it.” Shamelessly unapologetic about her self-admitted “gold-digging” means, she was the first person I ever heard say, “Yeah – he is my Sugar Daddy! So what?”

I remember one weekend she was taken by one of her suitors to West Edmonton Mall for a sickeningly gluttonous shopping spree, and for the next two weeks she went on and on and on about the gobs of money he spent on her, the extensive inventory of clothes and shoes and things she bought, and the general 5-Star VIP lifestyle she’d been able to experience: the first-class plane tickets and luxury hotels, Jacuzzis and limos and champagne and steak. I could tell that she was judged harshly by everyone around her, but at the same time, I always thought there was something rather admirable about the honesty in all of it: she fucked him/them, he/they gave her money and/or stuff.

I can’t really imagine the situational dramas she must have been juggling, particularly given the vast space between the realities that qualified her for placement at Picasso Café and the “Rich and Famous” lifestyle she sought through targeted suitors/clients, the least of which being the denial she maintained about her cocaine addiction (obvious even to a dumbass teenager like me).

She didn’t last too long at Picasso Café (she got kicked out of the program after staff found her injecting in the bathroom), but I will never forget her all the same. And even now I pray no harm came to her.

After all, we’re all only ever the fucked up beings that we are, trying to find our own peace of mind in a precarious world, doing the best we can with what we know and where we’re at.

Mikey – he entered the program when Darcy left, and I noticed him immediately. With his long, dark hair, crystal blue eyes and a lean, hard-muscled, masculine build, Mikey could have been a Calvin Klein underwear model were it not for the extensive scarring throughout his body. A large dog had bitten him in the face when he was very young, and there was a thick scar running from the bottom of his chin to just above his top lip. As well, years of physical abuse from his father (who used to hit him with tire chains on a regular basis), followed by years of self-medication through intravenous drug use left the rest of his body quite covered with marks and scars – a constellation of pain and hardship woven through the cells of his skin. I never noticed, myself. He had beautiful eyes, an awesome sense of humour, and a magnetic, sexually-driven charm that I found irresistible.

In hindsight, it’s probably not surprising that Mikey and I ended up in a relationship together (like, within days of his joining the program). We went for a coffee after work one night and I walked him home. Suffice it to say, a 10km walk together on a cold Autumn night was a perfect courtship and we remained bound at the hips (literally and figuratively) for nearly three years.

Bless his heart, Mikey stayed with me even after I learned I was pregnant with another guy’s child. (You know that comedic hospital room scene where the mother and her newborn baby are in the bed and one of the two guys in the room says to the Social Worker “I’m the father” and the other one says “I’m the boyfriend”? Yeah, I do too, minus the soundtrack.)

Our relationship was genuine: the connection was deep and very real, despite being largely based in sex and the emotional arrested development we shared. Prior to Picasso Café, Mikey had been sexually exploited as a child, and so by the time we met his sexual extroversion was highly amped. With my core belief that I was good only for sex, and my own history of sexual abuse and ultimately gaining approval from others by performing sexually, our chemistry in this regard was rather a perfect.

When we were together, neither of us felt shameful about our pasts (or our at-the-time present), and this made for a truly honest relationship, regardless of how young and generally inexperienced we were regarding anything unrelated to premature sex, abuse, neglect, general dysfunction, or any of the combined effects thereof.

Mikey asked me to marry him when I was about seven months pregnant, and I’d said yes. He got down on his knee to propose, with a ring and everything. It was truly romantic, and my acceptance was heartfelt and genuine.  The world was ours, we knew what we wanted together, and we were going after it with everything we had, individually and together.

He was there in the hospital when our daughter Beth was born, and he delivered her with the same fierce love and connection as any devoted father. It was an amazing, life altering experience we shared together, and our love for each other was only deepened by it.

After her birth, however, things got rocky between us as fate came to rear its ugly head.  I was coping with unimagined new stressors as I tried to implement motherhood responsibilities into my life with no skills or knowledge whatsoever, and virtually no guidance or effective support. My foster parent prohibited me and Beth from seeing Mikey, and the reduction of our previously inseparable contact to once a week or less was a strain that was literally unbearable for us.  It came out later that a measure of sabotage was occurring on my foster parent's part, but that is a whole other story.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Mikey and I weren’t able to sustain our relationship through the situational challenges we were contending with and our relationship ended within a year of Beth’s birth.  We both wanted and needed each other quite desperately, but the mandated separation between us led to Mikey's attentions naturally straying. My own sleep deprivation and stressors aside, I ended up resentful and just wasn’t able to cope.  Neither of us had the words for what was actually happening, because for all of our a-grade adulting we were still just a couple of teenagers with severe attachment/ abandonment issues dealing with emotionally difficult situations that were stratospherically beyond our years.

Ultimately, Mikey needed to leave town and I needed to try to go to school and prepare for being "aged out" of foster care.  We lost track of each other in the end... I was devastated and felt profoundly betrayed and hurt by him at the time, but looking back, I can’t blame Mikey or bear him any ill will.

What would any man do, let alone a 19 year-old coping not only with the overwhelming prospects of step-parenthood, but also with the severe impacts of cocaine addiction, childhood abuse and sexual exploitation?

I love him always for staying with me as long as he did. I suppose we both held onto each other as long as we could.

(*see footnote)

Kelly-Girl – nicknamed thusly to distinguish her from the male “Kelly” in our group (we were nothing if not breathtakingly original when it came to moniker-based solutions), she was softer than Brenda and Darcy, in both presence and appearance. By some miracle, the life she’d lived hadn’t hardened her.

With Vivian Leigh features and the fairest alabaster skin I’d ever seen, Kelly-Girl carried herself with soft spoken, gentle grace. Dark brown eyes looking ever upward from her always lowered face, she kept her long, curly, dark hair pulled forward over her shoulders and almost wrapped around her neck like a scarf.

If you looked closely, you could see that her hair and stance concealed a thick, jagged scar that ran the length of her neck, right underneath her chin. She’d been working one night in an apartment building one block south of Thurlow and Davie, in the West End of Vancouver. The John had tried to slit her throat. He missed her jugular and she was able to knock him unconscious with something and get away. It was about three in the morning, and stark naked, screaming and covered in her own blood, she ran up Thurlow street to St. Paul’s hospital (by the grace of God only two blocks away) and she was able to get immediate medical attention.

As I’ve discovered is common with street-level sex workers, Kelly-Girl recounted her horrific near-death tale as nonchalantly as a mild-mannered receptionist engaging in water-cooler banter. I remember she even smiled as she recalled the kindness of the hospital personnel who’d helped her.

I never heard what happened to the John – if there were charges or legal aftermaths (not always a guarantee when sex workers are the victims). It’s been 25 years since I worked with her, but to this day, every single time I cross that intersection, or am in the Starbucks there getting my extra-hot Earl Grey Tea Latte with sugar-free vanilla and low-fat milk, I see Kelly-Girl run by in my permanent, faded silent film vision of her: the street is empty and dark and damp with rain; her eyes and face are contorted with abject terror; her wide-open mouth pours a boundless silent scream up into the black sky as blood gushes out of the gaping slit in her neck, a red waterfall thick as paint flowing down the front of her beautiful, slender, poplar white body.

Kelly-Girl haunts me, and I am forever blessed by what I learned from her: we don’t need to let undeserved suffering harden us.

Kelly-Boy: a handsome aesthetic cross between Mark Wahlberg and Brad Pitt, with the perpetually studious mind and countenance of an Einstein or Huxley, Kelly-Boy was (and remains) the penultimate introvert: quiet, irreverently droll, and packing an intense current of Mensa-worthy philosophic brilliance underneath an ever-reserved humility.

At 18 years of age, he was the next-youngest in our group when the program started, and he was the first person I ever met who shared my deep-rooted inclination to use humour to cope with profound pain and loss – the kind of humour often judged by the outside world as extremely offensive and/or macabre.

What I’ve learned since is that Kelly-Boy and I are not alone in this regard. If you’re ever deeply alarmed at the offensive morbidity of a joke, chances are you’ve crossed paths with someone who has chosen to wrap truly inexpressible suffering with any available opportunity for laughter. Inevitable offensiveness aside, there are undeniably worse choices that could be made.

Consider all the people in the world, spirits poisoned by resentment and vengeful entitlement, choosing to invest in contributing to the suffering of others. From a hate-based slur to a punch in the face to a murder conspiracy to an international war contract, an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.

The tribe to which Kelly-Boy and I belong would rather invest in an admittedly dark, deeply twisted sense of humour than pay forward into the world any pain and/or injustice we’ve lived through.

Our first written test at Picasso Café included the basic bartending question “What is the difference between a Caesar and a Bloody Mary?” Kelly-Boy, straight-faced and with nary a smirk, read his answer out loud to the class: “Well, Caesar died. Mary only had a flesh wound.” At which point my heart was permanently bonded to his in unbreakable kindred spirit. He is and will forever and always be my Dear Brother Kelly-Boy.

~~~

I was a student in the Dining Program at Picasso Café from the spring of 1988 (a few months before my 16th  birthday) until January 1990 (a couple of months after my 17th birthday).  It’s where I spent the majority of my waking time during my first pregnancy, and where my first lifelong relationships began. I cannot imagine having been anywhere else in the world for that part of my life.

Picasso Café was my first experience of genuine family (the verb, not the noun). These were the people I spent my days with, week in, week out – the damaged, addicted, well-meaning, stressed out, shy, ambitious, benevolent, manipulative, beautiful, hilarious and generally fucked up motley beings that we all were, each trying to find our own peace of mind in a precarious world. Doing the best we could with what we knew and where we were at, learning the ins and outs of life through the slinging of fine service with eats and drinks, and laughing and respecting and caring for each other every inch of every uncertain path along the way.

Such was the very real and truly inimitable magic of that first round of students and staff at Picasso Café.  An exclusive history only we can ever share.

I remain profoundly blessed to have been a part of it.

~~~

(* there is actually a rather epic fairy tale ending to my story with Mikey, that occurred five years after I wrote this piece.  Check it out here.)

(RIP Lawrence  - in January 2018 I was deeply saddened to learn of his passing. I wished dearly we could have met one last time.  I was grateful to have been able to share a message with him via FB on his birthday in 2015. 🖤 )