Darlinghurst Road (4 page)

My attacker ran off as soon as he threw the
bottle and left me standing there. The fumes hit me like a hammer
and my head began to swoon. Luckily, the effect passed quickly but
I ended up with a massive headache. It was in some ways, an
education about the product that I was selling because the first
thing that came to my mind after my head cleared was “man, these
guys actually pay for this shit!”

Sarah

Sarah preferred to work the quieter area near
the fountain at the end of Darlinghurst Road. She claimed that it
attracted a more distinguished clientele than the strip and perhaps
she was right but the degree of difference to my mind, was minimal
at best. A bohemian at heart, she reminded me a little of Sunny in
that she had a carefree, almost whimsical attitude to her job and
life around The Cross in general.

I started work at seven and would be stuck in
the place until seven the next morning so part of my routine was a
walk to work. My place at the time was just off Victoria Street so
the Darlinghurst Road strip was my main thoroughfare five nights a
week. On weekends, I would prefer to walk the opposite way if I was
going out and invariably ran into Sarah. Sometimes, we would grab a
drink at the pub on the corner and other times, if the night was
mild, we would find ourselves on a park bench just chatting.

Sarah was not a user so thankfully, she
didn't have that constant desperation to get back out on the street
as addicts usually do. We kept in touch when she made the move to
change her life and some years later in Adelaide, we renewed our
friendship.

Sarah made a decision that she had nothing in
her past to hide and lives a life where she is completely honest
with those around her including her husband. They are a great
couple and she is a courageous woman that deserves all the
happiness in life that she can get.

Danielle

Danielle would have won a prize in anybody's
beauty contest and her story can be very simply told. On the street
at sixteen, pregnant by seventeen and dead from a heroin overdose
before her eighteenth birthday.

I first saw her hanging around the area near
the Coke sign at the end of William Street then a few nights later,
she had migrated down to my neck of the woods on Oxford Street.
Danielle stood out and I wasn't really sure why but there was
something about her that just kind of made you take notice.

It was only a matter of time before she
turned up at the Palace and she did. She seemed like a nice kid but
she was trying to work so I ran her off. Later that week she turned
up again but she was with a client and he was renting the room so I
let it slide. I always went easy on policy under those
circumstances, to me it was not soliciting because the client had
already been picked up outside the premises. Anyway, all hair
splitting aside, on my shift late at night, my interpretation of
the no soliciting policy was always that a hooker was far safer in
one of our rooms than in a back alley on her own.

Danielle must have agreed because she became
a regular visitor. I explained my take on the policy still meant no
actual soliciting inside and to her credit, she always respected
that. It wasn't long before I could see the changes in her and
those first signs of heroin use automatically put me on my guard
because addiction meant that she could no longer be trusted. Not
long after that, I noticed that Danielle was pregnant.

She started showing early and the craving for
heroin meant that she had no choice but to continue working. In her
sixth month, Danielle lost her baby and when they released her from
the hospital, that night she was back at work and in one of my
rooms with a client. When the client left, I noticed that Danielle
remained.

I gave her a few minutes in case she needed
time to clean up then wandered downstairs to make sure that she was
okay. She wasn't. Danielle was bleeding a little and was more
embarrassed than in urgent need of medical care but worse than
that, she was in tears. I sat there, held her close, my arms giving
her the comfort that she needed while she wept for her baby and for
herself. A month later when I hadn't seen her for a while, I asked
around and found out that she had overdosed. I hate drugs, all
drugs but God I hate heroin.

Collin

Collin was a wall boy who had been used and
abused over the years to the point where he no longer cared. I
would guess that he was probably around eighteen or so, he was at
least that I would say but then, it can be hard to tell sometimes
in that environment. Just like the female prostitutes, the younger
wall boys will try to look and act a little older so as not to
attract attention from the police while the older ones try to look
younger because the earning capacity for both genders has a
tendency to taper off with age.

Ironically, the need for money to buy drugs
usually increases as they get older, increasing the stress in their
lives resulting in even more drug use to escape it. To earn that
money, they take more risks, do things and go with people that they
might have avoided when they were younger. It's a terrible,
devastating cycle that repeats itself nightly in red light areas
like Kings Cross. The cycle has no middle ground, no option for old
age, they either escape somehow or die, anything else is pure
luck.

It was like the old story of a broken record
with Collin, he just wouldn't get the message of no soliciting on
the premises. I caught him in the act of stealing, other staff had
caught him using drugs. I'm not sure if it was true or not but one
of the regulars suggested that he was HIV positive and that sealed
his fate. I warned him off, Trevor threatened him yet still he hung
around and kept trying to sneak back in.

Eventually, the upper management decided that
a male prostitute with HIV working on the premises was more of a
legal risk than they wanted to take. In their opinion, a more
direct kind of action was the only way to get his attention and so
they called in the dogs. They picked him up loitering around
outside the store, drove him out to Bondi Beach, broke his legs and
left him there.

I never saw much of Collin after that but
when I did, he seemed too scared to talk to me because of where I
worked. Months later, it was a rough winter's night and the cold
rain was pouring down. The weather had kept the customers at home
so I stood in the doorway just killing some time and watching the
rain. It was a Tuesday, around four in the morning and with the
exception of the Palace, pretty much everything was closed. I saw a
pitiful figure huddled in another doorway a few doors down and it
was Collin, soaked to the skin and shivering from the cold.

“Hey, Collin, come in here mate, you'll die
of pneumonia out there.”

“I can't, I'm not allowed.”

“It's okay mate, come on in, it's too cold
out here.”

“I can't, you know I'm not allowed so why
would you ask me, leave me alone!”

I just shook my head and didn't push the
issue because I could see that he was more terrified than angry.
Collin walks like he has some sort of leg deformity because of what
they did to him and his legs look a little bowed when he stands.
The lesson was a cruel but effective one that he will carry with
him for the rest of his life, however long or short that might be.
It was a very high price to pay for being little more than a pain
in the ass.

Big Kev

Kevin was a big Irishman with a temper and a
thirst to match. I knew Kevin fairly well from when I worked at
Mandys. He had worked there briefly as a bouncer before moving on
to a better paying job at a strip club. The club had recently
closed, he was back working for a brothel and none too happy about
it. Kevin was one of small group of us who regularly sank a few
beers together at a pub on Darlinghurst Road. We all worked nights
at various establishments around The Cross and it was good to
unwind after the typically long night of bullshit.

Kevin had been working as a bouncer for most
of his life. When it came to a fight, Kevin wasn't much for style
but for a big man, he was surprisingly light on his feet. His other
advantage, if you could call it that, was that Kevin had a lot of
weight behind him and sometimes, that could intimidate an opponent
enough for him to back down before it even started.

Kevin and I were walking down William Street
one night; he lived down that way and I was headed into the city.
We had just left the pub after a few ales and Kevin ducked into an
alley to relieve himself. I was talking to a girl I knew that was
working the corner when a few buildings down, two men were starting
to get aggressive with another hooker.

Frightened, she looked at me, I looked at
them, started to walk over and the fun began. I wasn’t feeling all
that brave but I knew that Kevin wouldn’t be too far behind. One of
them came over to me and started mouthing off about how I should
mind my own business, his buddy joined in and all I could think of
was “Jesus Kev, how long do you need to take a leak?” The guy with
the mouth pushed me, the hooker stepped back and right on cue, four
hundred pounds of bad tempered Irishman came out of the alley
zipping his fly. It took him a second to realize what was going on
but when he did, he ran up and hit the guy so hard that he knocked
him out cold with one punch. When he turned to deal with number
two, the friend was running down the road towards the city. I guess
he didn't feel like sticking around to deal with Kevin's second
punch. I can't say I blame the guy!

Tui

A native of New Zealand, Tui (pronounced
to-ee) left her home town of Timaru in search of adventure. She
landed in Sydney as almost everybody does then spent a year
traveling around the east coast of Australia. Tui found herself
drawn back to the bright lights of Sydney where she found
employment at the Pleasure Palace. She worked the day shift at the
Darlinghurst Road store where Trevor had his office and could keep
a watchful eye on her. Tui was our only female employee and
performed really well in what could at times, be a pretty rough
job.

Tui had a keen sense of humor and once she
settled in, the practical jokes began. There was the one where
every day for nearly two weeks, she gave a single flower to Trevor
and had him completely convinced that it came from a secret
admirer. Another time Tui had a regular customer that she had a
rapport with and when he came in to buy his weekly porn, she
switched the labels on a VHS tape and sent him home with a copy of
Bambi.

Given that she was a good looking woman who
worked in a sex shop, it was inevitable that men would think that
she was easy and try to pick her up; after all, it was Kings Cross.
Tui had a guy get real persistent one day and he started hanging
around after her shift. He just wouldn't take no for an answer. One
day he followed her home and it was starting to give her the
creeps. She asked me for advice and I recruited my old mate Kevin
to the cause.

The guy turned up as usual and followed her
home again. He followed her and we followed them. The stalker
followed her up the stairs this time and as she closed the door, he
pushed his way in. Kevin moved quickly and it was over in a few
seconds.

The neighbors must have heard the noise
because after Kevin had finished with him, the police turned up.
Tui told them the story and as the ambulance guys carried off the
would be rapist, he tried to sit up, pointed at Kevin and started
yelling “he hit me, he assaulted me and I want him arrested!” The
police put down a slightly different version in their report and
all was right in the old Palace world again.

Peter

Another one of my friends who also drank at
the same pub on Darlinghurst Road was Peter. Just about every time
I saw him, he would be sporting a black eye, split lip or various
other facial bruises. For a guy who always said that didn't like to
fight, he certainly seemed to get hit a lot!

Peter worked at a strip club across the
street from the pub and as seedy strip joints go, it was one of the
worst. I'm not exactly sure what he did there but from what I could
gather, he was pretty much employed as a forty year old errand boy.
In that role, he performed general duties such as cleaning toilets,
picking up glasses and running out to buy cigarettes for the
strippers. One thing he definitely was not and that was a bouncer,
yet Peter always had tales of getting himself into trouble with one
of the customers.

I offered to get him a job cleaning at the
Palace but he refused “I get to go to work every night and be
surrounded by naked women, can you beat that?” I admitted that I
couldn't but then I don't get into fights every day of the week
either and even if I did, The Pleasure Palace had a big Lebanese
bouncer that considered it a part of his job to actually protect
the people who work there!

I could never work out why Peter stayed in
that job. Maybe it was the naked women after all because, for some
reason, he seemed to put up with a lot of crap over there but then
I guess it was his decision to make.

Duncan

Another regular drinker at our local watering
hole was a Scotsman by the name of Duncan. To pay his bills, Duncan
drove a taxi around the inner city and was a real tough character.
In a previous life, he had been a Special Forces soldier and was
one of those men who didn't put up with nonsense from anybody.
Driving a taxi around the back streets of Kings Cross late at
night, Duncan was always good for a funny story.

A guy hailed his cab in the early hours of
the morning, as he got in, the guy pulled out a knife and told
Duncan that it was a robbery. What happened next, he swore was
true. In classic Hollywood style, Duncan pulled out a .38 that he
kept handy, smiled and shook his head. In a kind of reverse
robbery, Duncan told the guy to hand over his own wallet. Shocked,
the would be robber watched in horror as Duncan took the cash out
of his wallet and threw it back to him. “Thanks, it's been a quiet
night”