Darlinghurst Road (9 page)

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 could 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.

Robert

Robert was an old wall boy who had made good.
I knew him from the Palace and I had kicked him out on more
occasions than I could remember. Robert managed to escape The Cross
and now here he was, back again. This time was different. He was
working in an all night cafe on Oxford Street and I would see him
just about every shift when I bought my late night food.

Even if drugs are not a factor, it can be
extremely difficult for a kid to get out of prostitution because
it's all they have ever known. Almost every single person they have
ever met has tried to use them in one way or another so they find
it hard to trust. The main factor though, is that society itself
makes the transition difficult. Think about it: to get a job you
need an address, proper identification and some sort of verifiable
background be it school or work. As adults functioning in society,
we take all that for granted but think for a moment about someone
who has not been part of that society since they were a child!
Robert was one kid who made it out of the quicksand of Kings Cross
to become a successful adult. A nice guy and a story with a happy
ending.

David And Victor

David and Victor were regular customers. They
were two buddies who hung out with each other and both were
characters in their own right but when you put them together: could
really make you laugh. David was a temperamental chef who had
served a two year prison sentence for using a knife in a way not
taught in cooking school. A bar fight turned nasty and David won
the fight but lost his freedom as a result.

Victor spent years working as a teacher then
changed professional hats in his forties, went to law school and
started a small practice. Victor lived in a house that he inherited
from his parents. It was an older home on a large block and right
next door was a very expensive, very exclusive private girl's
school. Over the years, the school had expanded and had gradually
taken over the block.

Victor was the last holdout, he refused to
sell at any price and to him, it was nothing but a game. He fought
a few legal battles, stood his ground and had some fun at the
expense of his wealthy neighbors. Victor confided to me that he
actually didn't care and would secretly like to move but he refused
to give them the satisfaction of pushing him out of his family
home. The mental image that he painted always made me laugh. The
house was surrounded like a moat by a school full of noisy teenage
girls and here was this old gay lawyer just sitting on his porch in
the late afternoons as though it was all just perfectly normal.

Rachel

Prostitution is all about money and usually
most of that money ends up in the pocket of someone else; pimp,
brothel owner, escort agency or drug dealer. In all my years of
dealing with prostitution, I have only ever met one woman who was
in it for the sex. “I'm a nympho or something, must be, I like sex,
I can't help it, it's how I'm wired but why go to work all day for
peanuts then hit a bar at night, get picked up by some guy and give
it away for free when he probably would have paid for it.” With
that logic to guide her, Rachel quit her job in retail and moved to
Kings Cross.

Rachel lived in my building off Victoria
Street, we were good friends and she was a great neighbor. She
rented a small room near Earl Place for work purposes so in that
way, her private life was her own. Rachel was a late starter in the
business and was not a drug user so she could afford to be a little
more discerning about her clientele. Still, it was the streets of
Kings Cross that she was working and the men cruising for sex after
a few drinks were not what you would call the crème de la crème of
clients.

Up market escort work was not an option for
Rachel. The agencies tend to hire the girl next door type and that
was not Rachel; a mother would probably have a heart attack if a
son brought her home. She was nice to look at but not a model,
Rachel had a number of tattoos including a few that kind of jumped
out at you, she dressed for comfort and was a woman with a big
personality that could on occasion be loud.

Rachel was in some ways, what you would call
an old soul. If you took the time to look past the tattoos and the
brashness, a whole new person would be revealed: A well read, deep
thinker who could intelligently debate everything from politics to
poetry. Rachel and I had some great conversations that were a
million miles away from our mutual work lives of sex, drugs and
debauchery. It was refreshing and it was fun.

Alistair

If you’ve ever seen the English actor Richard
Harris then you can easily picture Alistair. Probably late sixties
I would imagine but then the booze is often not kind in the way it
that gives the illusion of a later age. His clothes were usually
tailored, quality tailored, you could see that even with an
untrained eye like mine. Like their owner, his clothes were showing
their age and though his dress was always impeccable, he was more
often than not very badly disheveled; more Sydney gutter than
London Saville Row.

Tall, cultured and always drunk, Alistair
spoke with an upper class English accent and had a manner about him
that would conjure up images of a courtlier day. Victor, who knew
him well, said that Alistair was an English school master who
apparently, had once taught at Oxford before the alcohol destroyed
his career. Whatever the story was, Alistair ended up in Sydney,
permanently inebriated and a regular customer of the Pleasure
Palace.

Occasionally a customer would ask to leave
something behind the counter before going upstairs to the darkness
of the club; usually wallets and other personal property. They
figured that their gear was safer with the staff than a quick
fingered wall boy! Alistair handed me a plastic grocery bag and
headed for the stairs “look after that will you... good man.”

I had already buzzed the door to let him in
and he was gone by the time I looked in the bag. It was a half
eaten rotisserie chicken, the bag was all greasy and I wondered
what the hell he wanted me to do with it! That was the first time
and I let it go but it soon became a habit so I told him no more.
Alistair's other problem was that he would try to smuggle in
booze.

Glass whiskey bottles in a dark club that had
a no alcohol policy was both unsafe and illegal so it had to stop.
I caught him a few times then the sly old bastard started to get
clever by using smaller bottles hidden in various places. It became
a game for him but it wasn't for me so eventually I stopped him
from going upstairs and he wasn't very happy.

Lucy

Lucy worked behind the bar in an Irish pub
just off William Street. She was sixteen when her family emigrated
and when Lucy spoke, it was with a gentle Irish lilt that
transported you to another place and you could almost picture the
rolling hills of her homeland. Lucy was a warm person who fitted in
perfectly yet seemed almost out of place in the job that she had
chosen. There was a quality, I guess you might call it class, that
could be seen from across the room.

Good men, at some point in their lives, often
spend time thinking about how a woman can be attracted to the so
called bad boy. It baffles them to see her with him. Often drunk or
wasted to the point of embarrassment, he treats her with contempt
yet she clings like a vine to a tree. I don't think that I'm good
nor am I particularly bad in spite of the life that I have lived
but I am a good judge of character and I knew from our first
meeting that Rodney was not to be trusted.

Rodney had a slight Irish accent and his
people were originally from Belfast but from what I understood, his
childhood memories had faded fast to the point where Northern
Ireland was all but forgotten. This was a man with very few things
in his character to redeem him. Rodney drank the alcohol that Lucy
paid for then returned her generosity with insults and
humiliation.

As time went on, Lucy ending up working the
streets of Kings Cross and the man who sent her out to do it every
night, sat back and enjoyed the profits that her body provided. In
the space of a few short years, the combination of drugs,
prostitution and beatings had ravaged her face and body to the
point where a doctor would have been hard pressed to tell you her
age. It took a few minutes of conversation to place her, the Irish
lilt had become a voice that was cracked and dry. The Lucy that I
once knew, would never be again and there was a real sadness in
that.

Stewart

Stewart was the nephew of a leading Sydney
bookmaker who was a real big player in the racing game. When he
left school, Stewart went to work for his Uncle who began to teach
him the fine art of setting the odds. After serving his
apprenticeship plus a few more years for good measure, Stewart
decided to branch out on his own. Those plans came to a sudden end
when his uncle was caught fixing a race and was warned off the
course for life. The racing scandal was a big news story at the
time, Stewart shared a last name with his uncle and that name was
not all that common. Stewart stuck around for a while and then
drifted to The Cross for want of something better to do.

Racing was all he knew so I guess it was
natural that Stewart would turn to making an illegal book when the
time came to make money. His office was the pub and Stewart had
learned his trade from one of the best. The bets were small and
manageable, everybody in the pub knew Stewart the bookie, life was
going well again.

They call it the race that stops a nation.
The Melbourne Cup is a world famous Australian horse race that has
been run on the first Tuesday in November every year since the late
eighteen hundreds and the amount of money wagered on this one
particular race is staggering. This is a race beloved by ordinary
Australians, armchair jockeys who might only have a bet once a
year.

It's also a race that professional gamblers
and knowledgeable amateurs stay away from because the field is so
tight that it can be almost impossible to pick with any certainty.
Betting on a horse race is not like buying a lottery ticket, each
ball from the lottery machine has an equal chance of coming out but
not so a horse. There are so many factors to consider and in any
race, there is always one or two horses that have a far greater
chance of winning than the others but in a world class event like
The Melbourne Cup, the small odds paid are often not worth the
trouble of studying the form. It's a big money race but a little
guy's race and the bets are usually small; there's just a lot of
them.

There's always the exception to the rule and
Stewart was approached by the son of a well known organized crime
figure. The plan was to launder some dirty money by making a few
legal bets interstate then recycling the winnings back into one of
their more legitimate businesses. Unlike America, proceeds from
gambling in Australia are not taxable as income so to be able to
say “I won it on the horses” and back it up with receipts can be a
very effective way of money laundering. These were big bets and he
wanted Stewart's expert advice. The number I heard was in the
millions and it was probably right.