Darlinghurst Road (8 page)

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 boy 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.