Darlinghurst Road (11 page)

The Cross has a way of wearing you out. All
of my adult life had been spent surrounded by sex and drugs...
violence and death. It was time to leave. Not a break, not a
vacation. It was time to walk away from the life and close the door
for good.

I started thinking about when I ran away from
home and the traveling that I did. With that in mind, I made a
decision that I wanted to see some more of Australia and breathe
some country air. I wandered around the country for a couple of
years, taking a job for two or three months, building up some cash
then hitting the road again. I had a ball learning about life,
about myself and about the Australia that most people in the city
never really see.

Charlie

I had never been to Western Australia and
decided to do the trip. I hit the road taking the long way around.
Starting in Sydney, down to Melbourne then across to Adelaide and
finally, the long straight run to Perth. I spent a few days
renewing my acquaintance with some favorite parts of Melbourne then
after a lazy morning, headed out of town. Driving out through the
suburbs, it hit me that I probably should grab a late lunch before
going too far. The little fish and chip shop caught my eye so in I
went.

Have you ever had one of those moments in
life that when, looking back, you cannot figure out why you just
didn't turn around and walk away? It was a dirty little place. The
owner was a dirty old Greek with a three day growth and looked like
he had just woke up after sleeping for a week in his clothes. I
ordered anyway and the greasy meal ended mostly in the trash.

Later that night, I started feeling really
sick. By the time that I started coming down through the Adelaide
Hills, I knew that I was in trouble and there was no doubt in my
mind that I had been poisoned from that filthy cafe back in
Melbourne. Doubled over with pain, I managed to find a hospital in
Adelaide and staggered into the Emergency Room.

After some poking and swearing on my part, a
nurse came back in with a clipboard: “sign this if you wouldn't
mind.” She was polite enough and so was I for the most part until
she explained to me that it was a consent form for an operation.
When I refused, the Doctor came back.

There are some people in the medical
profession that have the gift of an excellent bedside manner;
kindly, patient and well versed in the art of putting a sick person
at ease. The gentleman before me with the beard and bad attitude
was not one of them. “Okay, here's the situation, your appendix
needs to come out, if we don't operate and it bursts, there's a
pretty good chance that you'll die, this needs to be done soon so
just sign the damn form and let's get going here huh.” Another
round of pain hit me about then so I signed his damn form.

The operation was over, I was still alive and
feeling like I'd been hit by a train. Doctor Hasty made an
appearance later in the day and he was still full of attitude
“feeling okay? Glad we got it, I'd say you had about fifteen
minutes before I may not have been able to save you, you shouldn't
have piddled about so long.” I was too sore to argue with him. “You
can go tomorrow, what's the home situation?” I told him that there
wasn't one and that I was just passing through. It was a long
weekend and he was worried about me driving he said so he asked me
to stay for a few more days “just in case.” I had nowhere else to
go apart from the road so I agreed.

That night, they put someone in the bed
beside me and I dozed off. A few hours later I hear a voice “hey
mate, got a smoke?” He was a short, red-headed guy with a real dry
sense of humor and we hit it off right away. “Charlie” he said by
way of introduction, “I'm an alcoholic, they brought me in from the
park because I was having alcoholic seizures, you?” As I got to
know him, I found out that he actually did live in the park and he
explained that the hospital was now his second home.

Charlie had drank away everything that ever
mattered to him, his wife, his three children, his own family and
now as the insanity of alcoholism threatened to take his life, he
was past caring. It was an honest discussion, he told me about his
frequent visits to the alcoholism ward and when I asked him how
long he thought he could keep it up, Charlie went all quiet and
very thoughtfully said “well, when you get to the stage of
institutions mate, you don't have a lot of drinking left in you
that's for sure.”

We shared that room for a few more days,
talked about everything imaginable to pass the time as the dreary
routine of the ward went on around us. On the Tuesday, I hit the
road and Charlie and his bottle went back to the city park. A few
years later, I ran into Charlie again in a Sydney department store.
He had moved to Sydney to be near his family and I was shocked by
the changes; sober, healthy and walking through a mall with one of
his kids. Charlie had found the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous and
it had saved his life.

Sam And The Guy With The
Towel

After the west, I went to visit Tasmania then
returned to the mainland, spent some time in Melbourne and started
to review my options. Feeling a little bored with life, I started
thinking seriously about going overseas for the first time. I
couldn't decide to go or stay but one thing was for sure: either
way, I needed a job and I needed some cash.

The want ads in the paper didn't impress me
and this old dog was not in the mood for learning any new tricks so
I called someone in Sydney that I knew had a few contacts in
Melbourne. One call led to the next and finally, someone's friend
had another friend who needed a driver and that was how I met
Sam.

Sam ran a small escort agency and was looking
for someone to drive his girls around. It was easy work for pretty
good money but it did come with a degree of bullshit on occasion.
Typically, escorts handle their own money and the driver just
drives but Sam had a different routine. My instructions were that
the girl would go into the house or hotel room, negotiate the rate
for her time and then come back out to me. I was to hold the cash
supposedly for the safety of the girl but I'm more inclined to
believe that it was the girl that he didn't trust. When she handed
me the money, she would also tell me how long and my job was to
watch the clock. If it was an hour session then on the hour, if she
didn't come out, I was to knock on the door. Sam's orders were that
the girl answered the door one hundred percent of the time. If the
client wanted more time as would sometimes happen, we'd start the
process all over again. That was the signal though, if the client
answered the door then it meant trouble inside the room. I asked
Sam how he wanted me to handle that and he replied “they are all
told that they must answer the door so if they don't then they
can't, there's a baseball bat in the trunk, kick the fucking door
down and get her out.”

Thankfully, it didn't come to that there were
a few minor incidents just the same. I gave a knock on a house door
and the client answered. The guy stood there in a towel, looked at
me and said “yes.” My years in The Cross had taught me to be a real
fast judge of character, I had the vibe that this guy was
potentially a threat so I took it slowly. “I'm a driver, I'm here
to pick up the girl, is she ready?”

“No, she's busy, she said come back in an
hour.”

“Mate, with all due respect, I need her to
tell me that so can you go get her please.”

“We're in the middle of something, you need
to come back later.”

There was trouble brewing, I could feel it, I
looked at the guy again with new eyes and I didn’t like what I saw.
Standing at the door wearing nothing but a towel, he didn't look
like much of a fighter, but still, you never know. He was about six
foot, pretty solid at a second glance and most importantly, on his
own turf. I was a driver not a bouncer and this was an argument
that I really didn't want to have. I hardened up a little, “Mate,
I'm not sure that you understand what's going on here, I don't want
to interrupt whatever you have going on but I have a job to do so I
really do need to talk to the girl for a moment, it's a safety
thing, I'm sure you can understand.”

“She's safe, she'll come out when she's
ready, I'm going back in now, you'll just have to wait.”

This was turning into a nightmare, I thought
of the baseball bat in the trunk. I had no intention of making a
bad situation worse by assaulting the guy or possibly worse, so I
called Sam. It took less than ten minutes for him to get there. We
walked up to the door and knocked again. Towel guy answered, Sam
pulled out a Glock automatic hand gun, hit him in the face with the
pistol as soon as he opened the door, pushed him inside and as the
guy reeled sideways from the blow, Sam started yelling “where's my
girl, where's my fucking girl?” She was in the bedroom, tied up and
gagged bondage style.

The three of us walked out together and Sam
asked her if she was hurt. She nodded, started to cry and Sam saw
red. I was told to put her in the car and take her back to the
office. Sam went to his own trunk, I saw the bat in his hand as he
marched back to the house as if on a mission and I knew exactly
what he was going to do. I drove back to St. Kilda with a sobbing
girl in the back and the image in my mind of a psycho boss beating
up some guy in a towel.

My decision was made. I needed some sanity,
something different, something real and I needed out of this fucked
up world of sex, dramas and bullshit. My old thoughts about a trip
overseas started to surface again but this time, I went for it. I
had a friend who lived in America and that became my destination. I
made some reservations, the travel agent sold me on a side trip to
Japan as well and the next thing I knew, I was on a plane headed
overseas.

My welcome to Japan was very polite but I
don't mind saying that it scared the pants off me. I cleared
immigration, breezed through Customs and as I walked through the
terminal, I was approached by two very official looking types. They
were Customs agents and I'm not sure why but I had attracted their
attention but it was before 9/11 so I would imagine that it was
probably drugs. A guy traveling alone, very little luggage and a
ticket paid in cash probably checked every box on their list.

At an American airport these days, I probably
would have been surrounded by heavily armed security police and a
dog or two but this was Osaka, not New York. Unarmed and very
polite, they led me to a small room and asked me to take off one
shoe, checked my passport and carry-on bag then apologized in very
slow, Japanese accented English. For one, brief, terrifying moment,
I pictured myself in a Japanese prison spending the next twenty
years protesting my innocence.

I chose a business hotel because of the price
and the magical promise of an all-you-can-eat breakfast. As I
walked in to the dining room that morning, my eyes surveyed the
buffet tables and my stomach smiled. After being seated, I made my
way to the food and took a closer look. Sushi, sushi, sushi and
more sushi; piles of the stuff. Now I like Japanese food but for
breakfast, I was thinking more bacon, eggs and toast. Almost
crying, I found a small table down the end with the token western
food for the occasional lost tourist. There we're only two choices
and they were not good. In a container filled with oily hot water,
six very pathetic looking hot dogs were floating, on the other side
lay a small portion of what looked to be a strange, scrambled egg
mix of some description. I left them there for the next victim and
picked my way through a sushi breakfast.

Thumper

My plane touched down in Chicago and I was in
America. For an Australian, America is not really a foreign
country, well, at least it wasn't to me. Both countries share a
similar cultural heritage in that our ancestors came across from
England, we speak the same language, have similar views on a lot of
things and generally, get along pretty well. I have to say though,
that some things took some getting used to but the transition went
smoothly. I spent some time doing a little minor exploring of
America then crossed over the border for a look at the land of the
Maple leaf.

It was a cold winter's day in Canada, gloomy,
the snow was falling and I was bored. As every gambler knows, Lady
Luck can be fickle but when she's in your corner, boy is it nice!
Australians tend to be an adventurous breed and there's an old
expression that an Aussie will bet on two flies crawling up a wall.
Personally, I'm not a big gambler and usually limit myself to the
occasional Lotto ticket. With that said, I do occasionally like the
atmosphere of a casino. It's nice to be able to relax, enjoy a meal
and then spend some time trying to beat the odds.

Video Poker is my preferred casino game. It's
basically a slot machine that instead of reels, uses cards to play
a hand of poker with you. On this wintry day, I found myself at a
Canadian casino and started to unwind; playing my game and enjoying
a cup of their free coffee. A few chairs away, a guy sat down and
started playing a machine with an angry thump on the button. He
kept looking over at me and it reached the stage where it was
starting to get a little uncomfortable.

The waitress came to refill my coffee and I
made a comment to her about the thumper. She smiled and said “he
comes in every day and always plays the machine that you're
playing, some of these guys are funny about that sort of thing,
maybe he's trying to give you the evil eye so you'll move.”

For some reason, this guy was annoying me
with his aggressive stares and although, unlike him, I didn't care
which one of the thousands of machines I played, so my heels dug in
and I wasn't about to move! I played for a while and he kept
looking over. He was getting angry, putting in bill after bill and
clearly losing on the machine that he was playing but still I sat
there, slowly playing and if I have to be honest, enjoying his
actions more than my machine. It slowly dawned on me that I had a
problem, my friend on the other machine was not the only one who
was losing; all I had in my pocket was a hundred and now, it was
almost gone.