Darlinghurst Road Read online

  In spite of his seriousness, Trevor could have a funny side. We had the Fire Marshall come through for an inspection one day. Trevor and I followed him around the dimly lit club as he checked for violations. Theoretically, smoking was not permitted in the building under the fire code but in practice, it was something virtually impossible to police unless you had someone walking around constantly. The Fire Marshall stopped, pointed his flashlight at a pile of cigarette butts on the floor then turned to us and suggested that he was considering a fine because of the smoking that was clearly going on. Trevor went on the defensive.

  “Did you see anyone smoking? I don't think you can do that unless you actually see someone smoking can you?”

  “There's nobody in here is there but no, I don't have to because the evidence is right there on the floor!”

  “What evidence?”

  “The cigarette butts all over the floor, look!”

  “Maybe we're seeing two different things because all I see is evidence of our complying with the law.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The cigarettes butts are clear evidence that my employees are doing their jobs. As I understand the code, if the signs are up, as they are, it's not actually an offense for us to have someone light a cigarette because we can't control what an individual does but it is an offense for us not to tell them to put it out when we see it. You might be able to give them a ticket if they lit up in front of you, I don't know, but all we can do is to ask them to put it out, the butts are here because my staff caught them smoking and asked them to extinguish their cigarette which they did, on the floor, that makes us in compliance, correct?”

  “I guess, but these are all smoked down, look.”

  “Well, my employees can't be everywhere at once, that would be unreasonable, I may have to fight this one.”

  The Fire Marshall gave up because he wasn't going to win. Sometimes you have to pick your battles and I could tell from the glint in Trevor's eye that he was enjoying himself. Trevor confessed to me later that his real intention was to distract the Marshall from a broken Exit sign further down, a more serious offense.

  The Flying Bottle

  Amyl Nitrate is a relatively innocuous drug better known on the street as Rush or Poppers. It's a pungent liquid, sold in small bottles and very popular in certain sections of the gay community. The general idea is that when it is inhaled, it dilates the blood vessels giving a light headed feeling and supposedly, it also relaxes the muscles and enhances orgasm; the effect is very temporary. Although it is still a restricted substance in Australia, it is considered by the police to be relatively harmless and thus, is sold openly in sex shops around The Cross. Amyl can be touchy in storage and needs to be kept refrigerated so the Palace had a small bar refrigerator behind the counter for that purpose. It was a popular item, especially on weekends and I sold plenty of it but it was not something that I would ever personally think of using.

  I had my first direct experience of how Amyl Nitrate affects the body when I tossed a drunk out of the club one night and he turned on me. After a minor scuffle, I walked the guy outside and as I turned around to go back in, he called out to me. I saw the bottle in his hand but it didn't register quick enough. He threw the bottle at me, I jumped back but not far enough and the bottle hit ground, breaking right in front of me. Amyl is meant to be sniffed in small doses and here I was, inhaling the best part of a full bottle.

  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 b
uy 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 w
ith 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”

  The guy started to say something but Duncan turned deadly serious and cut him off with his thick Scottish accent “listen laddie, games are over, get out of my fucking cab before I drive you out somewhere quiet and break your fucking back!” The terrified robber ran away and to back up the story, Duncan took a switchblade out of his pocket to show us “like me new knife?” He laughed, “have another beer boys, it's on him!”

  Georgina

  Georgina was named after the Georgina River that begins at Lake Nash near Mount Isa in Queensland and ends at Bourke in western New South Wales. The river flows near the small town where she grew up and it must have inspired her parents in a way that these things sometimes do. I know the area around her town and it is indeed a beautiful part of the world. An industrial accident took the life of her father and by fourteen, she had also lost her mother as a result of Cancer.