Darlinghurst Road (6 page)

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.”

“I'm stuck, if I don't work tonight then he
doesn't eat tomorrow, I'm broke, there's no fucking maternity leave
on the street you know, help me out will you.”

I did. The baby was a little boy called
Daniel and that child intimidated me more than any man that I had
ever met. I was an only child so my experience of babies was zero,
a bottle was what beer came in and a diaper was a foreign concept
that I was not all that eager to become acquainted with. Daniel
cried as babies do and when he did, the only way to shut him up was
to hold him. I slept when he did and I don't mind saying that by
the morning, the little fella had kind of grown on me.

Samantha rolled up later in the morning with
coffee, food and stories about her clients that made me laugh.
Don't judge her, the first chance she had to straighten out her
life, Samantha took it and ran. Daniel had a rough start in life
but he had a mother who loved him and who was determined to see
that her son grew up in a different world, far away from the
exploitive streets of Kings Cross.

Anne

The guitar that she played was covered in
stickers; a colorful, overlapping mixture of humor, politics and
save the whales. Anne sang and strummed her heart out as the
passers-by threw coins in her case. She became a regular around The
Cross, mostly playing around the entrance to the Subway until she
started to get tired of being hassled by every guy who walked past
her. At my suggestion, she carried her guitar to Oxford Street and
set up shop a few doors down from The Palace.

Anne was the eternal hippie; intelligent yet
vague, a belief that life was for living yet somehow feeling
restricted by it. The combined product of a strict small town
upbringing and the teenage rebellion that followed, Anne drifted
around for a few years before discovering the bohemian's haven of
Kings Cross.

Drugs were the passport to another world for
Anne, a chemical world that she could escape to when her mind began
to take her to other places she didn't want it to go. Anne was
running from something in her past that seemed unidentified even to
her and there were times when she appeared to be almost frightened
of her own mind. She had an expression to describe the feeling that
she would sometimes have: “it's like goose bumps on my brain.”

I heard her guitar just about every night for
nearly six months and then she just vanished. The streets of Kings
Cross are like a revolving door: they come... and they go.

Jason’s Mother

She came in looking for her son. The photo
that she showed me was of a teenage boy in a sports uniform of some
type “it was taken in March, he's fourteen, his name is Jason. The
Police said that runaways sometimes come to this area, please, have
you seen him?”

I hadn't. I made a point of looking at the
photo a second time so that she wouldn't think that I was brushing
her off because it seemed to me that she deserved that. We talked a
little and Jason's mother was a nervous wreck just running on
adrenalin. I suggested that she try looking around The Wall area
after the sun went down and perhaps a few other places further
down. She promised to let me know if she found him and then wrote
down her number and left to continue her quest.

I don't know the sequel to the story, if
Jason was hanging around The Cross and working as a prostitute,
then in all probability, I would have eventually seen him but I
don't recall that I did. Jason's Mother never did come back but
other mothers were there to replace her. Jason's photo was not the
first one I had seen under those circumstances and it certainly
wasn't the last. There's a sadness to seeing the picture of a
missing child and your heart can't help but go out to the parent
showing it to you. I hope Jason found his way home.

The Girl

A couple came in looking for their daughter,
the conversation was an old one for me, a photo, a story and broken
hearted mother looking for her child. The father was quiet,
consoling his wife as she spoke.

Around a week later, I saw the girl walking
down Roslyn Street. I'm not a Social Worker and I've never
pretended to be but still, there's no excuse for not being decent
in this life so I went over and spoke to her. I told her where I
worked and about the visit from her parents. The girl broke down,
sobbing uncontrollably and I was kind of at a loss as to what to do
next. As fortune would have it, Samantha was working the corner on
Darlinghurst Road, saw me and came across. We took the girl to a
cafe close by and calmed her down with a hamburger and some
friendship.

When she recovered, the story came out. She
ran away because her father was sexually abusing her. The problem
was, that in her mind it was a clean break and that she was
determined not to go back home but she also wanted desperately to
see her mother. I left her in Samantha's capable hands and she took
the girl to a Social Worker that she knew.

The moral is that you just never know and had
those parents found that girl first, it might have meant more
abuse. I don’t envy the Social Workers and the people who have to
make those decisions because it must be so difficult to remain
objective; to know when to interfere and when to not.

Katie

Like the woman herself, her dress was always
casual, feminine but modest and with the exception of a small gold
cross, there was nothing to indicate that she was in any way
religious. The only habit that I could see was the way that she
played with her right earring when she was distracted or lost in
thought but there was no doubt about it: Katie was a nun, the real
McCoy.

Sister Mary Kathleen had never known
privilege but she had certainly known hardship. Katie's mother was
a prostitute who worked the streets of St. Kilda in Melbourne, her
father was presumably a client; name and details, unknown. At the
age of fourteen, her mother sent her out on the street to follow in
her footsteps and for a year, Katie's body bought the drugs that
her mother so desperately craved.

She calls it her miracle and perhaps it was,
a man walked towards her, she made her approach and he picked her
up. Instead of taking her to his bed like she expected, he took her
to his church; his name was Father John and he was a Catholic
Priest.

Something clicked, they sat and talked for
hours until Katie found the courage to examine her life and see it
from her own perspective instead of her mothers. Father John
arranged for her to stay with an elderly parishioner and between
them, they gently weaned Katie away from the life. The years that
followed bought peace and belonging to a life that had never known
it.

It was a decision made deep within her, a
calling so strongly felt that she found it impossible to ignore.
Katie applied to a religious order, holding nothing back about her
past and submitting herself to the rigorous process of assessment
that preceded her acceptance. When she took her final vows, Katie
described a peace, a sense of purpose; Katie knew what she needed
to do and where her God wanted her to be.

Katie worked out of a small house in a side
street of Surry Hills that I believe belonged to the church and
served as some sort of halfway house for prostitutes that had been
released from prison. I'm not sure what the organization was or
what she actually did there but I do know that Katie was probably
not the most orthodox Nun in the world. The first time that I met
her, she walked into the Pleasure Palace and without any
introductions started to describe a woman in her twenties.