My boss Spiro was married. He drank a lot and was a heavy drug user. The Cross was full of forty-year-old men who didn’t seem to do anything. They all drove expensive cars, had ostentatious jewellery and plenty of cash.
There were three clubs in total owned by Joe and Jim. Like everyone else in high positions in the Cross, they were Greek. The clubs were leased to Nico and Spiro, and Joe kept control of the largest club. There were two other clubs on the strip also owned by Greeks, which were always perceived as the competition. In fact, if you ever went to work for the Pink Pussycat no one would ever speak to you again.
The bouncers all had police records, and most of the managers were family of the owners. Joe and Jim both liked me. Jim was always in Greece and Joe was the one who looked after the clubs. He was the one everyone feared, yet at the same time aspired to be like. He looked every bit the cliché of a pimp. He carried a gold-encrusted walking stick. God knows, he needed something to keep up his large frame that was draped in gold chains, bracelets and rings. He was always surrounded by at least four henchmen. Joe would sit and talk to me and I learnt he had respect for me because I didn’t take drugs and, as far as he knew, wasn’t renting myself out.
Spiro was always coming on to me, after all, I was the only girl in the Cross who didn’t come with a price tag. To bite my cherry would have been a definite feather in his cap. I couldn’t tell anyone that he was chasing after me because no one would believe me. One particular night, I truly believed that he was going to rape me because of my continued rejections of him, so I finally told Joe. Joe stormed over to Spiro and threatened him with death if he touched me again.
Within a week I was informed that they were moving me out of Spiro’s club and over to Nico’s. They told me to consider it a promotion. I was still to be the door girl, but I was no longer in charge of buzzing the pros or paying the strippers. Instead I was to man the door—and still keep track of the doormen’s earnings—from the kiosk, which I now owned the lease on. I had to keep it stocked with chips, soft drink, pies and sausage rolls, and confectionery. In return I could keep all the profit I made.
Nico was nothing like the rest of the Greeks in the Cross and was genuinely a nice guy. He was about thirty years old, unmarried with no children, but engaged to one of the sex workers at Joe’s club. He didn’t gamble, he didn’t abuse the girls, he always showed compassion. He defiantly didn’t fit in but he was a welcome reprieve from all the bravado and gangster types.
Around this time, Joe introduced me to one of his nephews, Marc. He was very handsome, with black wavy hair and piercing blue eyes. We began dating because Joe wanted to see us together. All of a sudden the doormen stopped barking at me and the girls offered to make me coffee instead of demanding that I make it for them. The strippers stopped hassling for things they knew I wasn’t allowed to grant them, like advances on pay, extra gigs, and shorter sets. I had become untouchable.
The pecking order at the Cross was very serious. Joe and Jim were akin to God, immediately followed by any direct relative of either of them, which included Marc. Even their right-hand men came before Nico and Spiro, then came Nico and Spiro and Nico’s and Spiro’s relatives and henchmen. The man who sold coffee ranked higher than the strippers and pros. Scraping the bottom of the barrel were the doormen.
Thanks to my contrived set up with Marc, I was now socialising with all the important people of Kings Cross but never understood what any of them did for a living. They just seemed to sit around all night drinking coffee and playing scratchies. Whatever they did it must have paid well, because they all drove Porches, Jaguars and Mercedes.
There were a lot of illegal activities going on in the clubs that I wasn’t aware of straight away. One of my jobs was to pay the police. Every second night I drew four stars at the top of the page and paid the police $200. I never asked questions and they never spoke to me.
I was selling alcohol illegally to people watching the show, but I didn’t see it that way – I was simply told to run a grocery errand and I did it. After all, this is what I was trained to do on my first night by the doorman and Spiro’s right-hand man, Frank.
A guy named Steve walked in one night demanding to see Spiro about getting his old job back. He was a real sleaze and had just got out of prison on a drug charge. Because there was no hourly rate for the doormen, why should Spiro say no? So Steve donned the tie and commenced work. The other men resented his presence and the additional competition; he was showy, loud and not Greek.