Holiday Interlude - Tacos, Farewell, we hardly knew ye

My Facebook page is pretty much an irrelevance to my life these days. I'm sure the Farmville addicts and the people debating whether the new M.I.A album is rubbish or not have a wonderful time, but I've got valuable things to do. Sure most of them involve fantasy Basketball games, but there's no doubt that the novelty of finding old school friends and finding none of them invented a new formula of Coke and made millions has worn off. However, on a rainy Irvine day, it was worth enrichening the pockets of Zuckerberg a little bit just to click on and find out that Tacos had closed. It's a strange thing when you find out sad news from home delivered in a sort of Arial font typed as an update - coldly and without explanation or further analysis by someone who's profile picture is them wearing a silly hat and drinking from a beer bong. And because the person who typed it is likely to be asleep or sitting a pub somewhere in said silly hat and...Tacos Closed? That was it. No more words. No explanation. Was there a ! or an OMG on the end of that sentence? I'm guessing yes, since that's very much the style of this updater. Never short of an OMG. Tacos, for those who don't speak Hobartian, was the somewhat magical Hobart restaurant down in Salamanca famous for serving gigantic fishbowl margaritas and...well I'm sure they sold food as well, Tacos and wedges or something. Essentially, it was the starting point for many hens nights, bucks nights and works nights out where people would hi 5ive each other all week about what a massive night they would have, only for 1ne of the people to imbibe far too much and have to be carried home vomiting in funny maragita based colors and muttering about how they were fine. And now, it was gone, and no one had the grace to forewarn me. I tried to talk to my auntie about it, but she was watching 1ne of her programs, 1ne of those 1nes where embittered minor celebrities try and cook some crockenbush and learn a dance routine while eating a scorpion in a jungle house while running through a field of electric daggers and being given marks out of 10en by Amanda Holdan. How could she understand...I replied to this Facebook death notice but I had to wait, wait until Australia woke up from it's slumber...just alone, mourning a part of Hobart lost to time (and probably the Austrians...probably turn it into Schnitzels version 2...)...

We started most of those 2002 nights, the weekend 1nes, at Irish Murphys, before they accquired some of the worst bouncers in human history, all thick necks and swagger like the extras from some horrendous low budget rap video. We would only venture into Tacos on special occasions. Special mostly meant someone insisted in having tea first. Special doesn't have the same meaning in Hobart. It can easily apply to some1ne is just wearing different shoes. I got my first ever hangover from a Tacos Maragita, a piercing screamer that stabbed me in the head and then came back for my wallet to make sure the job was done. I spent the following morning in a writers course writing extremely angry poems about death and hatred that everyone seemed to love. I think they were a bit disappointed the week after when I turned up with my novel filled with pop culture references and a plot twist that was oblique and obscure but made perfect sense to me. I like to think someone said "What happened to all the death" but I think I made that up. I also used to use it as a sort of reference point for taxi drivers if I had to ring 1ne up. Sometimes it's easy just to say the simplest word possible, not just when you are drunk, but to taxi control operators in general. Try piercing through a combination of radio crackle, tired ears and drunken stumbling vowels and say "I'm just outside the Victoria Tavern"...easier just to yell the word "TACOS!" and hang up the phone. Always worked. The 1ne time it didn't work, sadly, some1ne had the same idea. A man in a checked shirt had worked the same system, and he was above me in the social rankings. He had won a meat-tray at a different pub. His logic in a quickly settled disputed was that he needed to get home quicker than me to freeze the meat, and the taxi driver agreed and I had to wait in the cold for another 4ty5ive minutes just to get home. I was dreading some other inescapable piece of Hobart logic would mean some1ne else got a taxi ahead of me...maybe more checks on the shirt, or more knowledge of the best way past a traffic problem in Glenorchy. Suffice to say, to avoid further problems, I started just yelling "MURES" into confused taxi co-ordinators...

One of our nights had been planned for a long time. It was a flurry of e-mails, and youthful high spirits. Especially from me, who had emerged from the horrendous triangle of friendless years, and was now out and about. I was like Jay Z for a while, I ran this town, if by running a town you mean being able to co-ordinate 12elve people into a pub at an agreed time and getting them to have a socially acceptable night out, and doing it by e-mail. Yes, I certainly ran that town. As it unsurprisingly did before it became Hobarts most god awful pub, Irish Murphys was rocking, a band played aggressively in the corner - well, as aggressively as you can play Train and Maroon 5ive covers - and we were in the middle of the social vibe, dispensing japes to all and sundry. We accumulated an entourage of hangers on that night, and decided to go to Tacos to continue to revelry. It was hardly bacchanalia of course - I don't think you could soundtrack bacchanalia with covers of Drops Of Jupiter while a girl called Sharon talks about how everything is "frigged up" for 1ne thing - but it was a fantastic evening. People hooked up who are still together for all I know, and the band even came over to drink with us. We had an entire corner of the pub to our own party. As far I can tell, we never made it to the comedian set - why risk a night of being told the differences between men and women when you can sit and enjoy each other company and celebrate youthful stupidity? It was only on the way to Tacos that our now expanded group heard a suspiciously ominous thump and yelp. Someone had fallen over in the gutter and was now clutching 1/2 a high heel and a plethora of our attention...we had no idea who she was at all, we were confused, we were hungry and within sight of Tacos, I mean it was just right there, so we could probably do a runner if we wanted...

Her name was Alison. She was the height of a WNBA starting centre, which was handy if we wanted pickles from the top shelf, but bad for those lumbered with supporting her as she walked. She had straight black hair, thick red lipstick, and a pout that could stop a clock. She was knowlegable, intelligent, and drunk as a skunk. She had theories on George Bush that would make that same clock get up in a confused fog and call a taxi. She also worked in government, that much we all knew, dealing with traffic and traffic infringements - my joke about that being a fine job not getting a laugh. See, fine, fine...ah forget it. No one quite knew who she was a friend of a friend of, so no one knew who's responsibility it was to pick her up when she fell over. I was far more empathetic than I am now, but even I was growing weary and impatient of her stumbling, which I now realise is uncharitable, of course, but back then I had things to do...well I had nothing to do really, but the wedges looked good. We shuffled around in the fading daylight trying to work out who would take responsibility for her. She kicked over a chair in Tacos and that still didn't make anyone get up to help. The Tacos staff didn't seem to want to help - anytime we tried to catch their eye to get them to ring a taxi, they would disappear into the distance or find an unseen stain to clean up with Windex and a cloth from the Harold Holt era. I presume they had knew Alison, and were glad to palm her off, like an old CD to Cash Converters, onto some unsuspecting strangers. Eventually, after an hour of weaning Alison off the Maragitas and the nicotine and enduring a sort of life crisis discussion that seemed straight from the set of Dr Phil, Alison was able to attract the attention of Tacos staff, a lifeboat coming in to save her from the sea of self pity and doubt and Guinness up to the gills. However, all the training in customer support couldn't prepare our young badge wearing friend from the moment Alison looked deep into his eyes, said "no one gets me", and left, in a achingly poignant swish of denim and grace, like the final stanza of some semi-tragic poem...lucky she left when she did, it would have been less poetic 20ty seconds later, when someone fired up the Mariachi tape over the PA system...

Sometime later, a Facebook message pops up. It says "Tacos Closed! I know!" - I'm not sure how to debate this point, or what it all means, so I close the lap top, and read a book for several hours...goodbye Tacos...lest we forget...you are now closed...and I know...