Breakfast finished at about two thirty that afternoon. We laughed, we cried, but best of all I made some firm decisions. I was going to walk away from the Cross and the sex industry entirely.
By five that afternoon, thanks to Tony, I had a job at a bar-n-grill, taking orders and cleaning. I obviously didn’t have to sit an interview, not with a black eye and a broken nose. It was a handshake favour to Tony—for that favour I would be paid six dollars something an hour. But I didn’t care, I felt normal again, and clean.
12
Murder in the Cross
It took me all of two weeks to realise that I couldn’t survive on $140 a week, in the absence of Gala gigs. So I supplemented my income by dancing at the major nightclubs. Some gigs expected me to take my top off but they paid $100 a night. Within weeks I had recruited about six girls and started taking bookings for choreographed sets as I had in Queensland. Once again, this was all thanks to Tony and his connections. I kept my job during the day even though it was infringing on my ability to sleep. Cleaning tables kept me grounded.
I had one last living remnant of the Cross that I had yet to rid myself of, my flatmate, Sonja. I had to get away from her. As much as I loved her she was very involved in the Cross’s culture. She had quit her job at the bank, begun dating a doorman and was now drug dependent, though thankfully she avoided the needles.
For my seventeenth birthday a group of us went out to celebrate. There was Jimmy, Wayne, Stephan, George, John, Sonja and myself. We had been friends for about six months. Every night that I had worked at the Cross we would meet in Stephan’s restaurant at eleven o’clock; we called this our dinner break. Wayne was the head chef, Jimmy was a pimp and I don’t really know what the other guys did for a living but I can guess.
Jimmy was the most interesting of them all and secretly I had a bit of a crush on him, but his choice of occupation stopped me from acting on that impulse. Mind you, he already had his own harem and why wouldn’t he, he was a dream to look at. He was a blonder version of George Michael, with a splash of James Dean attitude. All the girls who worked for him thought Jimmy was their one and only. He made us laugh because he was such a sexist pig—to him, all his ladies were whores. If one of them turned up at the restaurant wanting to speak to him he would become irate.
‘What the fuck are you doing here? Nobody here wants to pay for it. If I wanted to talk to you I would have come and found you, now fuck off.’
‘But, Jim, I want to go home, I’m cold and tired, can I borrow some money for a taxi?’
‘Do I look like a fucking ATM machine, am I your fucking father? It’s only eleven thirty, you have at least four hours left to work, it’s not as if your job’s hard, most of the time you’re on your back. Now if you want money, go and fucking earn some!’
When he returned to the table it took him about five minutes to get out of his pimp character. I never really asked anyone what it was that Jimmy provided to be given the title pimp, questions were never a wise move. But I know that the girls Jimmy worked did not work from any of the clubs that I worked from. They were definitely street girls who offered their wares up and down the strip, which usually meant that they had at one time been kicked out of Joe’s or Jim’s establishments.
Jimmy believed if the girls were stupid enough to give him half their money for no apparent reason, why should he argue? Amazingly, these girls seemed to respond positively to his rough love. They would bring him money, or coffee, on demand, they never spoke back to him and, worst of all, never seemed offended by his abuse.