Darlinghurst Road Page 4

  The only other family she had was an Aunt and Uncle in Brisbane and that is where she went next. She wasn't there long before the sexual abuse started and her uncle became an object of fear. A few weeks before her fifteenth birthday, Georgina ran away and headed to where so many runaways go: the bright lights of Sydney. The next and last stop on the journey is usually Kings Cross and that was where she ended up after a few nights of sleeping on the street.

  Prostitution came next, so many men... so many men taking her body that she sold for so little on so many endless nights. Somehow, and she was never quite sure how, but somehow, Georgina managed avoid the drugs that can so easily be obtained and offer the illusion of escape. In my observation, that always seemed to be the key to the exit door; the drugs were the spider that trapped them in a web that they could never seem to unwind. Without the drugs to hold her there, Georgina stepped out of the life at the age of twenty-four and never looked back.

  I haven't seen her for a while but the last time that I did, she was looking well. Georgina works with children now and lives in an outer Brisbane suburb where nobody knows a thing about her past. We had dinner together like two old friends and promised to keep in touch but as so often happens, we never did. I'm sure that I reminded her of a part of her life that she would rather forget but I can't say that I blame her. Georgina made it, she understood the importance of looking forward not back.

  Damian

  Damian worked at the Palace and must have smoked his weight in weed every week. By choice, Damian worked the day shift primarily because he didn't function all that well after dark. He seemed reasonably immune to the effects of marijuana in much the same way as a heavy drinker might be to alcohol.

  Damian would take frequent breaks and smoke the stuff all day like some people smoke cigarettes but by the time the sun went down, it would start to be obvious that he was well on his way to being stoned senseless and it would be time for him to retreat from the outside world. One morning he came in to work early, a habit that I would have been glad to see him start because I had severe doubts as to whether Damian owned an alarm clock.

  The next face through the door was a character called John, a flamboyant hairdresser turned heroin addicted drug dealer. John knew that he wasn't welcome on my shift so he took a quick look then disappeared back out to the street. Damian excused himself, followed him out and returned a few minutes later with a bulge under his shirt. He came behind the counter, squatted down on the floor and shoved the contents of his shirt into his backpack. It was a pound of marijuana and as I counted down my register, I thought “that should keep him going for a while!”

  Snowy’s Retirement Plan

  Snowy acquired his nickname not from the color of his hair but from the color of his merchandise. For nearly twenty years, Snowy had sold cocaine and anything else that he could get his hands on. A little man in the very big world of drugs, he nonetheless became quite prosperous. That was fortunate because Snowy certainly liked to live the good life. After a particularly good year, Snowy decided to retire from the stress of drug dealing but looking over his finances, he realized that he although he had made a lot of money over the years, he had spent just as much. That was when it first dawned on him that he would probably need some sort of retirement plan given that the alternative was to spend the rest of his life doing what he had been doing for most of his life already.

  Some men commit a crime because they are smart and feel that they can get away with it, other men commit the same crime because they are desperate and feel that they have no choice, still other men are either just plain greedy or they do it for reasons beyond the comprehension of ordinary men. Snowy fell into the latter category. After two decades of successful criminal activity; well known to the police, arrested twice but never convicted, Snowy embarked on a course of action that defied logic.

  Avoiding his normal purchasing channels, Snowy somehow made contact with a criminal group in America and arranged a deal to import a huge quantity of cocaine. Most people would keep quiet about something like that but not Snowy. Apparently he was quite proud of his retirement plan and word got around fast.

  The police became interested and Snowy was placed under surveillance about the same time as he found out that his former supplier wanted to talk to him. When he went to the meeting, the supplier made it clear that what he was doing was unacceptable and demanded to be cut in on the deal. Snowy went back to his apartment in Potts Point, called around on his tapped phone and tried to secure the services of a hit man.

  The police were now paying real close attention to Snowy. Things being as they are in the crooked world of drug commerce, the same information found its way back to the supplier who was not impressed that Snowy was trying to have him killed. Detectives on the case decided to set up a sting and a meeting was scheduled with an undercover cop posing as a hit man. When Snowy paid the guy, the detectives slapped on the handcuffs.

  Snowy sat in jail while his lawyer worked hard to get him out on bail. The application was successful and Snowy was free. Two things happened after that in very close succession. After talking to the lawyer and finding out that he was probably facing a long time in prison, the wheels started turning in his mind. To add to his mental burden, within hours of his release, Snowy heard a whisper that his old supplier was taking the threat to his life very personally and had returned the favor by putting a contract out on him. Snowy hit the panic button, he ran. The police found him before his supplier did and Snowy, to the best of my knowledge, is still alive but doing a long stretch in prison.

  Paula

  I first met Paula after the death of Cathy. She was a plain clothes Police Officer who came calling as a follow up a few weeks later and wanted the guided tour. Official policy was that if the Police wanted to do a walk through then we should allow it but in reality, this was something that never happened. Her partner balked at the idea and made an excuse to stay behind. I walked her through the club then downstairs to the coin booths, expecting her to be at least a little shocked but she didn't appear to be. We came back into the store and her bored partner had his back to us studying the cover of an adult movie. The poor guy turned about twenty shades of red when Paula said in a loud voice “hey, shouldn't be looking at those, you know they're illegal right?”

  After that visit, Paula would pop in periodically and she always seemed genuinely concerned for the welfare of those she met. We got along well and the conversations we had were often long ones.

  I was glad for her presence on one occasion when two men came into the store with trouble in mind. They had both been drinking and I told them no admission to the club until they sobered up. Drunks were a problem upstairs, they generated complaints and may turn into a liability if they injured themselves or others. One guy decided to protest my decision by slamming a fist down hard onto the glass counter. It didn't break so in his frustration, he walked over to a display and started throwing some of the stock around.

  I yelled at him to stop and his friend decided to join in the party by threatening to hit me. This all happened very quickly and Paula, who had been standing by at first to let me handle it, responded to the threat by confronting them. “Police Officer, you guys need to leave now.” One guy made a move to attack Paula but she moved a lot quicker and shot a long blast of pepper spray directly into his face. The guy was on the ground, covering his face and screaming. A second later, Paula had drawn her gun, pointed it straight at the second guy and yelled “On the ground NOW!” As he slowly complied, his bladder let go and the dark, embarrassing stain crept across his pants. It was hard to feel sorry for the guy given his earlier behavior.

  When the paramedics had finished washing the eyes of his friend, both men were arrested and I started to put the store back together. After she did whatever she needed to do outside with the other cops, Paula came back in, shook her head and said “I don't know how you do this job late at night, I'd be so scared.”

  Russell

  I hate t
o say it but there are some people in this life who need to be contained in some way. Russell spent a few years in the Navy before they figured out that he was not the kind of sailor who brings honor to their uniform. In a friendly South East Asian country, Russell spent his shore leave beating up and raping a local prostitute. The Navy, who was not impressed with his behavior, rescued him from the local authorities, threw him in the brig for a while and then dishonorably discharged him.

  At a loose end after the service and not being the type to work in an office, Russell went to another impoverished Asian country where he partnered with an old Navy buddy to start a business.

  The business was a bar. A word used loosely as he explained it to me because the building consisted of a small bar like structure downstairs that measured only a few feet across to comply with some local law but the real business went on in the rooms upstairs where the prostitutes worked. Russell killed a man in a fight and after making the appropriate bribes, managed to avoid spending time in a local jail. The police made it plain that it was time to leave before he got into trouble again, so Russell let his partner buy him out and with the proceeds, bought a plane ticket back to Australia.

  Kings Cross is the natural home for people like Russell and before too long, he had established himself as the owner of an Asian brothel. For the girls, it was not a very safe place to work but typically, he only hired young illegal immigrants that he could stand over and in that way, he could protect himself from the repercussions of his violent behavior. There was nothing nice about Russell, he was a rapist, a killer and a total bastard.

  Russell was a bully but he was a tough one and performed most of own security work at the brothel. That was to be his undoing. Another fight, another violent death and nobody interested in taking his bribes this time.

  Russell was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison and personally, I think that was a very good decision because, as I said, some people just need to be contained.

  Tommy The Frequent Flyer

  Tommy was a bank robber. It was not the sort of occupation that you could list on a tax return but nonetheless, Tommy did indeed rob banks for a living. I found out by accident and kept it quiet; it's not the kind of thing one spreads around about someone especially in areas like Kings Cross where discretion certainly is the better part of valor.

  Tommy was a thinker and his method centered on his theory that the armed robbery of a bank is a crime the police will take seriously. Therefore, if you hold up a bank the police will come looking for you and with enough effort, they will most likely find you. However, they can only find you if you are there to be found and Tommy always made sure that he was not!

  In practice, that meant Tommy had a policy of never walking into a bank in Sydney for any reason. This was not something that he had just started and over time, Tommy had set up a small network of hiding places in every Australian state where he kept a gun and anything else that he may need. When he was short of money, Tommy would plan out where he wanted to hit, fly out of Sydney, do two bank robberies in another state and then catch a return flight the same day.

  Tommy only did a trip every now and then so it could be several years before he returned to that state again. It was a good plan and it seemed to work for Tommy but for me, I'll stick to making deposits. I always figured that there were better ways of leaving town than in the back of a police car.

  Diane And Her Cheeks Of Red

  The store may have been located in the gay district but it was far from being exclusively gay. Female hookers were part of the furniture and on weekends, the sex shop had the allure of seedy naughtiness for straight couples. One Saturday night, a couple came in. They purchased a vibrator, a movie and a couple of other goodies then went downstairs to the coin booth area for a look around. My sale completed, I stepped out to a warm Saturday evening then stood in the doorway, getting some air between customers and talking bullshit with our big Lebanese bouncer.

  The couple were suburban middle class and appeared to be on their way home after a night on the town. Because of the clubs and the city night life, Oxford Street on a Saturday night is packed with people. I was taking in this scenery when the couple walked past us and out on to the busy street. She was holding the plastic shopping bag that I had given her, he was smiling as they strolled out the door arm in arm. Thousands of people out that night in a city of millions and as the odds would have it, at the exact moment of exiting the Pleasure Palace came the loudest female voice: “DIANE? DIANE, IS THAT YOU?”

  It must have been because Diane turned around and her face registered the most acute case of embarrassment that I had seen in quite some time. It was another couple and they all stood there chatting for a few minutes, right in front of the door. All the time that she was talking, Diane's friend kept making shy glances at the store and then at the plastic shopping bag. My guess is that poor Diane had a little gossip spread about her that week. I'm always amazed at that you know, pornography is a multi-billion dollar business but nobody ever seems to watch it!

  Moh And The Arabic Writing

  Moh was our bouncer and had a permanent bewildered look on his face whenever he was working. The Pleasure Palace was long way from his birthplace of Lebanon and somehow, I think the old place with all its sin, was a bit of a culture shock. Moh worked the door on Friday and Saturday nights, more for show in winter but during the summer months, I worked him pretty hard. The warmer weather around The Cross typically brought with it increased alcohol consumption. If they behaved, they were welcome but if the alcohol made them aggressive, then Moh was there to sort them out.

  It was terrible job for him especially in the early hours of the morning. Meth was just starting to appear and unlike a lot of drugs, the come down from meth tends to be very hard. Mix that with sex, alcohol and other aggressive people, you end up with trouble. Moh had some of his own front teeth knocked out and he returned the favor to many other men on many other occasions. I used to joke with him that perhaps he should contact a dentist and see if he could be paid a commission for all the patients that he sent along.

  I thought that he was going to do me one day. Moh was standing in the doorway reading his Arabic language newspaper. I was feeling curious so I asked him:

  “Is that Arabic Moh, just curious.”

  “Yes, Arabic.”

  “So you're Muslim then.”

  “Muslim, do I look like Muslim? Why you think I Muslim?”

  “I didn't mean to insult you or anything Moh, if I did, I'm sorry.”

  “Not just Muslim in Lebanon, plenty of Christian, my family Christian, people think only Muslim in Lebanon.”

  Moh went on and on about the history of Lebanon and he was pretty fired up. I apologized some more and he settled down. I must have pushed some sort of cultural button but I'm glad he didn't take it as personally as I thought he did at first. Trevor wasn't paying me enough money to have all that dental work done.

  Mario

  Mario had an rather dubious Italian accent and haunted the entrance to the Kings Cross subway station. From there, he sold his cheap watches and fake jewelry. Watching Mario work was like fascinating to say the least. Some salesmen use a silver tongue to sell their products, Mario used intimidation; straight up, old fashioned intimidation. Basically, Mario was a mugger but perhaps one small step up in that he gave them something in return even if it was only worth a dollar or two. His targets were usually tourists or a drunk husband on the way home after a night on the tiles.

  When he first started, Mario used a small card table to display his wares but after few problems with police and needing to escape quicker, Mario lost the table and started to just open up his jacket or pull stuff out of his pocket like some guy in an old movie. He would stand over them, threaten them and give them the impression that he would hit them if they didn’t comply. “How much? Forget about the money, I'm not asking you for any fucking money, don't insult me like that, here look, this is nice isn't it, take it home to the
wife, maybe she'll fuck you if you take her this huh, I'll give you a deal, don't tell me you got no money, show me, show me your wallet, don't fuck with me now, look you got fifty dollars in there, this chain is worth two hundred but I'm only going to charge you fifty, here take the chain for your wife, get you some of that pussy huh, why you still here? Fuck off.”

  Katrina

  It's a small world sometimes and for a guy who didn't spend a whole lot of time in school, the odds against bumping in to somebody that I went to school with were fairly high. Katrina and I were in the same class when we were about ten. A decade later, she was a hooker and I was renting a room to a hooker; go figure.

  After work, I caught up with her and we went for a drink. Apparently, she had been working for an escort agency in Melbourne but decided to head up to Sydney after breaking up with her boyfriend. I remembered her well even though we were only young and it was good to catch up. Katrina's father worked for a radio station and knew my father from some other job that they were both on so because of that we had seen each a few times out of school.

  It was her first night in town and she was working to make hotel money. I offered her a roof and she accepted. Katrina stayed at my place for a few weeks and worked a corner to make some money before drifting on to who knows where. I never saw her around The Cross again so perhaps she went back to Melbourne. It really can be a small world sometimes.

  Samantha And Daniel

  It was tiny, I was awkward, it cried and I wanted to hand it back before I made a mistake that might hurt it somehow. The “It” was Samantha's baby. She had asked me to look after him while she worked and I told her no way. Monday was the start of my weekend, I'm walking out the door with my laundry and at the top of the stairs stood Samantha, baby and accessories. “Shit Samantha, I told you no, I can't do it.”