I had only been working there for about two weeks when the manager let me go. Her reasoning was that business was just too slow. ‘Last to start, first to go’ was how she put it, but I think that she, like others, questioned the veracity of my being eighteen. I felt for the first time the heaviness of the industry. Everyone was frightened of the police. Brothels were being busted every night. Some girls even suspected other working girls of being undercover police.
I didn’t want to do it any more. If I got busted my mother would be called in because I was only sixteen. I began looking at my life—I was doing well with my dancing and Gala Records were happy with me. They often went out of their way to find me modelling jobs and on occasion stunt work in TV. But these charity jobs were few and far between and I needed to start earning real dollars. Many of the girls I knew were getting out of Queensland all together, for places with more liberal laws. It was a prostitute exodus.
I had to follow the work, so I decided to pack up all my lingerie and dance gear and head to Sydney. I did have back up plans; Gala had their headquarters in Sydney so I was put in touch with the national manager who agreed to give me work. I also had my Dad and brother Dieter in Sydney now, so I wouldn’t be completely friendless if all else failed.
Trolling for Witnesses
A sister-in-sin who had moved to Sydney, Tracy, got in touch with me. It was great to be able to talk openly again. She was two years older than me, and we got on famously. I was intrigued at how long she must have been in the industry, as her contacts seemed to go way back. We had a bit in common, she had been brought up in the right suburbs, taught to drink from the right glass, even to use the right fork, but this was where the similarity ended. She hated the entire middle-class respectability that I longed for. Tracy had a one-year-old child, who lived with his father’s parents. Tracy’s ex was doing a brief stint in jail for armed robbery. But, as Tracy liked to boast, ‘he only drove the getaway car, he wasn’t the one holding the gun’. Tracy was most definitely the black sheep of her family. All of her sisters were educated and her mum was a Martha Stewart wannabe, while all six foot six of her dad was pure military. It did infuriate me that she didn’t appreciate how good she had it.
Tracy knew this guy, Tony, who owned a brothel called La Belle Femme. Tony was nothing like I expected, but still a pleasant surprise and a change from the ballsy women I had been toiling under previously. He kept staring at me and I could see he was torn between the obvious fact that I was underage and my potential to earn him copious amounts of money. He gave Tracy and me some shifts and we made him and ourselves a small fortune; well, compared to what we had been earning. Mind you, we had no real competition—most of the other girls were old and on heavy drugs. They were what I call ‘hookers’: they had been doing it for years but were no further ahead in life. Tracy and I must have seemed like a breath of fresh air to all the clients to accidentally fall on our doorstep.
Brothels tend to be hierarchical in the big cities and La Belle Femme was definitely the Target of brothels. It was one step above Kmart, but a far cry from Myer, and David Jones was nowhere in sight. I was so naive that I assumed the other working girls there must have also had night jobs, which is why they spent half their waking hours falling asleep. They would slowly arouse when the doorbell chimed. Little did I know that they were heroin users. Every seedy parlour also had at least one or two Asian workers who didn’t speak a word of English. Once again my naiveté brought me to the conclusion that they were over here learning English or trying to make some money to send home to their families. I later noticed that every day, the Asian woman who worked at La Belle Femme would be driven to work, walked to the front door, and collected on the dark side of a double shift by a very large Asian woman, who would very quickly commandeer her prized pay packet.
The fact that the Asian girls would take risks for a few extra dollars made them unpopular with the local girls. The theory goes that if one girl offered a client a service that is potentially risky, she was placing all the other girls at risk. For example, if a girl offered a client ‘natural French’ (head job with no condom), that client would come in the next week, select one of the locals and expect the same service, and if we refused he might get all bent out of shape and aggressive. Or worse still, infect us with a disease he’d contracted from a previous encounter. This was a regular problem, not just for health risks but also for girls having to return money to clients after they had taken up a considerable amount of our time.