Darlinghurst Road Page 6

  It was a perfect scheme, the cops had no interest in him apart from the nuisance factor because he wasn't doing anything more illegal than the local garden center. The customers were long gone and by the time they discovered the deception, they were on an interstate train and had no way of turning back around even if they wanted to.

  Every time I think of Roger, I have this vision in my head of a pimply European backpacker, looking out the window, counting the minutes until the train pulled out and he could get high. Getting up, finding the restroom, sitting on the toilet then puffing away like there's no tomorrow. What's that old saying again: Caveat emptor!

  Alina

  Alina was Russian, her English was poor but improving and she was on the run from an abusive husband. It was a marriage of convenience: Australian residency in exchange for marital duties but the cooking, cleaning and sex quickly became beating, torture and rape. Not content with simply using her for himself, Alina's husband forced her to work as a prostitute. He dropped her off on the corner of Darlinghurst Road and told her “Kings Cross, this is where the whores stand.”

  When the right moment came, she made her escape and having few other options, Alina instinctively ran to the place where she felt safe: a Russian Orthodox Church in the Eastern suburbs not far from where she lived with her husband. They were not really sure what to do with her and somewhere along the line of inter-church networking, Alina ended up under the wing of Sister Mary Kathleen in Surry Hills.

  Katie nursed her for a while at the half way house and when she was sufficiently recovered enough to venture out on her own, Katie found her a job as a housekeeper in a big hotel and then went to work herself, sending the Police after Alina's husband.

  He was arrested but made bail and it wasn't long before he tracked Alina down to the half way house. Katie was not worried about the threats he made to her personally, it was not the first time that she had been called an interfering bitch but she was concerned for Alina. Always ready to use whatever resources she could muster, Katie approached me about taking her in for a few weeks until the trial. “He's going away, no doubt about it but not if he finds her, she's scared and so am I, she needs to be somewhere that he'll never find her.” Katie fixed a stern look on me and demanded “say yes!”

  Alina arrived with her bags and stood nervously while Katie made us all coffee. I wasn't much better but had to smile when Katie said “well, better get to know each other because it'll be a long night otherwise!” Katie had us talking in no time and the weeks flew by. It took just over three months for the court to decide the case against her husband and Alina was the perfect house guest for every minute of that time.

  When she left, the place seemed kind of empty for a while and I sure did miss her cooking; there was stuff in spice bottles left in the pantry that I couldn't pronounce let alone know how to use. Alina also made a kind of frozen lemon vodka shot that was very different and really good. In the refrigerator, there was a cold bottle of Russian vodka that she had left behind and believe me, I certainly did find a use for that!

  Sid The Salesman

  If you had an interest in buying the Sydney Harbour Bridge or some real estate on the moon then Sid was your man. In a previous life, he had worked in the public relations department of a major Australian airline. An ambitious man and wanting to better himself, Sid eventually decided that the freelance bullshit business was more profitable and branched out on his own.

  The first time that I met him, he was holding court in the bar of a Kings Cross hotel, relieving some tourists of their holiday dollars. Sid was more than your garden variety con-man; he was an artist who had mastered the soft magic of the fairy-tale and could weave a story around a total lie with an artistry that had to be seen to be believed.

  Sid sold me a television once, a nice new one, still in the box. When I took it home and set it up, engraved on the back was a number and the words “Royal Australian Navy.” When I asked him, Sid confessed that he was adding to his income by helping a young sailor at a nearby naval base to dispose of some surplus electronic equipment. It was Sid's opinion, that it was actually a patriotic act because he was simply saving the Australian tax-payer the expense and inconvenience of having to dispose of the stuff when it was old and worn out. The boxes were of course, full of brand new merchandise but Sid countered that he was thinking more of the longer term and that I shouldn't be so short-sighted. Psst... wanna buy a bridge?

  George

  George described himself as a recovering alcoholic. Over the course of his drinking years, George had lost everything, sobered up then in a very courageous effort, clawed it back again. When I met George, he was sober, retired and living for the next round of golf.

  It had been well over twenty five years since he had touched a drink but he kept the memories of his alcoholism very close just in case. George left school early and went to work for a major department store. Over the course of twenty odd years, George married, had children and kept climbing the company ladder until he reached the point of General Manager.

  George told me the story of how he went to work one morning and there was the Vice President of the company sitting behind George's big desk, going through his files and giving him an angry look “What the hell are you doing here, I fired you yesterday”. George had no recollection of being fired or much of that day at all; he stepped out on the street, cursing his boss, the company and everyone else who must be to blame for his troubles.

  His wife had left him the year before and the job was all he had apart from the booze. Now that it too was gone, he fell into a deep despair; he had drunk away everything that he ever cared about but still he couldn’t stop. In the end, as the insanity circled, George had fallen so far that he became unemployed and unemployable, drunk, homeless and derelict, spending his nights down in the filthy canals of the Port.

  Eventually George discovered AA and as he sobered up, George took stock of his life and decided to be proactive. When he tried to talk things over with his wife, she wanted nothing to do with him. Half joking, he once said “I figured that if she didn't like me when I was drinking and if she didn't like me when I was sober, then maybe, she just didn't like me!” George moved on with his life just as she had and turned his attention to employment.

  A stubborn man, it rankled his newly regained pride that he had left his old job under such a cloud and retail was basically all that he had ever known so George did something that very few men in his position would do: he went back to the man who fired him, explained his situation and asked him for a job. They hired him back as a clerk in the Menswear Department not as a punishment but because they couldn't trust him. Every employee knew who he was and George went into that job every day just the same for reasons known only to him. They never promoted him beyond that position and George retired as a clerk.

  Rose

  Each night the inner city streets around Kings Cross would be filled with tragedy. When I was younger, these same streets were filled with the same sad stories but I was far less aware. As I grew older, I could see their value as fellow human beings and it mattered to me. I was less inclined to be the hard company man that I was before.

  Rose was an older Aboriginal woman, probably late fifties, a widow who had lost her home when she lost her husband. What happened after that, I don't really know but I do know that by the time that I met her she was sad, homeless and addicted to heroin.

  Rose would walk the streets collecting change from strangers and would bring it in for me to cash out for bills. I often said no when the homeless would bring in coins because I'd end up with a drawer full of change but I had a soft spot for Rose so I'd make an exception. It took me a while to figure out that she was doing some small time dealing while she was walking around but I guess that I shouldn't have been surprised. It's a hard addiction to sustain without a constant source of money and the bigger dealers work the users like the users work the streets.

  Danny

  Danny was a veteran wall bo
y who had been selling himself to strangers for over ten years. He was twenty-three when I met him and a hard drug user. In the trade of male prostitution around The Cross, Danny was over the hill and for all his adult life, Kings Cross was the only home that he knew. Fast running out of options to make his living and more importantly, to pay for his drugs, Danny fell in with an older man that was heavily involved in the drug trade. They did some business together and were soon seen as partners.

  Danny came by the store one night after a long absence and boasted to me about being a big time dealer. To him, I guess it was a mark of status after so long at the bottom of the pile and I could understand that. As is often the way with that sort of life, Danny's success in the drug business was short lived. Danny's partner did a runner one day with someone else's drugs and when they couldn't find him, they went after the soft target that was Danny. I saw his picture in the paper a few weeks later; his body had washed up on a Sydney beach, badly beaten and shot in the head execution style. A violent ending to a sad life and a story too often told around The Cross.

  Gary

  Sometimes really smart people do some exceedingly dumb things. Gary was a chemist and he worked for a big pharmaceutical company. Standing six feet seven and built like the proverbial brick shit-house, Gary was a very unlikely transvestite. Dressing up outrageously with his friends and hitting the gay nightclubs was his way of letting off steam. It was more a just bit of weekend fun for him than a lifestyle but his fun included sniffing Ethyl Chloride for a high.

  Like most adult shops, we sold over-priced aerosol cans of the stuff with generic labeling like “video head cleaner.” If you wanted to know the chemical properties, the toxicity and just about anything else then Gary could tell you all about it but just like a doctor or nurse who uses drugs, still he did it. He came in with a friend one weekend, after a few minutes chatting, Gary bought a can and put it in his pocket. I served another customer and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the hand reach across my counter. As the other customer left, Gary picked up a cloth that I had been cleaning a glass counter top with.

  I knew, I just knew exactly what he was going to do and I moved quickly to stop him but was too late. By the time I came out from behind the counter, Gary had sprayed the rag and taken a very large sniff. Reflexes kicked in and I stepped back just as he fainted. Flat on his back, dress up around his waist, this six foot seven drag queen looked up at me and with an embarrassed look said: “shit.”

  Max

  Max was an old time Private Eye straight out of a cheap detective novel. Some guys talk about it but Max had done it and had plenty of battle scars to prove it. When I met him, Max was all but retired and trying to live the quiet life although that must have been hard for a guy with over fifty years of working the streets of Sydney. He still had his Private Investigator's license and would occasionally do a job for old friends or a good cause. It was never actually said but I did get the impression that Max had also made his share of enemies over the years because, even in retirement, he kept a low profile and a loaded Walther handgun never too far away.

  Early in his career, Max learnt a lesson that he would never forget “never and I mean never take a client with you on a job no matter what.” It was the late nineteen fifties, Max was still pretty green and had just opened his own one man detective agency.

  Divorce cases were common because, unlike now, there was no such thing as no-fault divorce and Private Detectives where often hired to obtain evidence of infidelity. As Max explained it, in practical terms that meant tracking down the cheating party, catching them in the act and snapping a photograph. More often than not, this was done at a cheap hotel and it had to be done quickly. It meant listening at the door, waiting for the right moment then kicking the door in, taking a picture of the startled couple and then getting the hell out real fast. The latter was important because once the guy recovered from his shock and realized that the detective had the only copy of the evidence, there was a possibility that he may try to recover it. The job was about collecting evidence not confronting anyone and sometimes, for the cheater, there was a lot at stake if that photo made it into court.

  The client was a young woman and she sobbed all the way through the interview. Max had to stop asking questions to console her and when he accepted the job, she begged to go with him. He told her no but she just kept on crying and said that she had to see it with her own eyes before she could accept it. As the tears flowed, Max started to break down. If he had been a man of more experience, then he may have stood his ground but he did not want to deny her the closure that she seemed so desperately to need.

  Max tracked down the husband and his girlfriend to a small hotel in the city then called his client. She arrived, they went upstairs, Max readied his camera, waited for his moment then kicked opened the door. As Max snapped the picture, the wife ran past him screaming, pulled a knife out of her purse and stabbed the other woman to death. The police couldn't figure out if she actually intended to murder the girlfriend or whether it was the sight of the naked woman in bed with her husband that sent her off so, they gave her the benefit of the doubt and charged her with manslaughter instead of murder. Max nearly lost his Detective License and came close to being arrested himself. After that, he never made the same mistake again. It cost one woman everything and destroyed the life of another but still, it was a terrible mistake that came from inexperience and one to be learned from. We all make errors in judgment from time to time and Max had long ago accepted that but I could tell from the way that his eyes glazed a little when he told me the story that it still haunted him forty something years later.

  Sophie

  Sophie once worked in an office but her real passion was art and it was something that she surrounded herself with. A visit to her small apartment was like a trip to an art gallery; colorful books everywhere, reproductions of famous paintings on the wall, art materials and her own work scattered throughout the apartment. The office job was enough to support her art habit but it certainly wasn't enough to provide for her other, more secret habit of gambling. Sophie spent a lot of time in the Sydney Casino and most of that time was spent on a slot machine chasing her losses. The gambling ate away her life, Sophie needed another source of income and she turned to prostitution.

  As hookers go, Sophie was unusual. She was educated, had no interest in drugs and started in the life very late. Most girls start selling their body in their teens, Sophie was in her late twenties before she turned her first trick. She worked as an escort for a few years then somehow, managed to kick the gambling demon off her back and started her own agency.

  Within months, the Kings Cross protection boys came knocking on her door with their hand out but she wanted no part of the criminal side. Sophie took that as her cue to leave The Cross and all its dramas, relocating to the relative peace of the suburbs, where she could operate in a more up-market setting.

  The last time that I saw her, she was still operating her escort agency and doing very nicely. Sophie lives very close to a famous Sydney beach, in a beautiful apartment surrounded by her art. It was all she ever wanted.

  Tonia

  Americans have been drinking coffee with their donuts forever but Australia really didn't discover coffee until the nineties. I'm sure that will spark a debate but, it's true. Let me clarify that statement, coffee has been in Australian homes and probably the morning beverage of choice for a half dozen generations but it was almost always the instant variety. A coffee maker can be purchased at any chain store in America for peanuts, up until the last few generations, most Australians wouldn't know how to work one, let alone where to buy the contraption.

  When I first started working around The Cross, coffee, when you could find it, sat around in stale pots and was sold mainly as a hangover remedy on Saturday mornings. In the city itself, it wasn't too hard to find little Italian restaurants that had espresso machines and they often made a decent cup but you had to go looking for it. The average Australian cou
ld probably identify a cappuccino but that would be the extent of their coffee knowledge. In the nineties, the new generations in Sydney embraced coffee with a passion. The word barista entered the vocabulary and the culture to the extent that there are now types of coffee readily obtainable in Sydney that are unheard of in other parts of the world. It's nice to have variety but for old guys like me, all I want is a cup from that stale old pot that I remember so well but it's impossible to find in modern day Sydney... Rest In Peace.

  Tonia referred to herself as a White Russian. I'm not sure if that term is still in use but she was one of those rare people who could pull off aristocratic without being pretentious. Always well dressed, smart, classy and ruthless when you crossed her, Tonia ran a small boutique drug business out of her coffee shop in Paddington.

  Tonia stayed away from harder drugs like heroin, small quantities of marijuana in its many varieties formed the bulk of her trade and her market was mainly the hedonistic, well heeled gay men who had moved into the surrounding streets.

  Tonia's marijuana menu was like one I imagine that you may see in Amsterdam: a smorgasbord of different lung candy for the trendy pot smoker. A well known rumor was that a new cop in town had once decided to raid the coffee shop but was prevented by his superior because the senior officer didn't want to upset his daughter who shopped there. I imagine that story is just street fiction but you get the picture; the coffee shop was a popular place.