‘Oh, so now the police need my help? Why didn’t you call me back on Monday or even Tuesday, just to see if I was all right? Why aren’t I entitled to use triple 0 or more specifically the ordinary police that work on Fridays after four thirty pm? I pay tax too you know!’
‘Yes, yes, yes, you’re right, we’re sorry, so when can you come in and give a statement, so we can catch this perv?’ All this was said with the enthusiasm and sincerity of the voice on any bank’s call waiting message.
‘This prick isn’t a perv, he’s a fucking rapist! I’ll be there in half an hour.’
I spent three hours there making a statement. Thanks to my information, they were able to track his initial phone call to a major car dealership, where he worked. As well, the licence gave the police his residential address. He was charged, not with attempted rape but assault—because of course you can’t rape a hooker—on six women. None of us was invited to give evidence or attend court. However, I did learn from the vice squad when I phoned them that he was given a six-month suspended sentence.
I stopped paying tax from that moment on.
43
Tax Man
‘The tax man’ was a four-letter word in the industry, the general consensus being that we received no police support, we were on the fringes of society in a semi-legal profession, so why should we pay a cent to a government that didn’t protect us? It was believed that the vice squad was nothing more than an agent for the tax department.
Many a girl had fallen foul of the tax man only to be given a bill with no explanation as to how that particular sum was reached. The tax man was like a yeti or an urban myth. To us, no one had seen him therefore he couldn’t be described with any clarity; no one knew how he worked, or what powers he possessed yet we were all petrified of him, but most thought they could outsmart him. Thus the dance began. Girls told stories about houses being staked out and anonymous-looking men counting the number of gentlemen that came and went from the address. Therefore girls believed it was better to work from an apartment where the tax man couldn’t accurately count the number of guests you received. Paranoid girls contended that this ever vigilant ogre would watch the personal section of the newspaper and monitor each time your phone number appeared. While this may sound paranoid and delusional, it was all too true. There was indeed a special tax branch set up to monitor working girls.
In order to combat the invisible tax man, girls prepared viable stories to answer questions in the event of an audit. The belief was that if your number was advertised on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday it went without saying that you were clearly working that day and thus should have an income to declare. However the question remains: Who was the phone registered to? Who was the venue leased to? Whose bodgie name appeared in the advertisement?
Ads placed in the paper changed weekly, as did names, phone numbers, suburbs and descriptions. Most girls had two or three phone numbers—one on a permanent plan and another throwaway number—names, and descriptions at any one time. The permanent number you reserved for your regular clients so they could always reach you.
This approach to advertising served a second purpose, since many clients wanted to shop around. They wanted to shag a different girl each week, so by scouring the ads and noting a new ad, the belief was that they’d get to see someone completely different. Upon arrival, they quickly realised they’d already met this girl, but they were there so what the hell. Less attractive girls tended to use that trick all the time.
Many of the girls would only work from executive apartments rented by the week, or hotel rooms booked under a false name and paid for by cash. This way there was never any way of asserting that such-and-such was working that day and was visited by fifteen clients. To me, this seemed an awful lot of trouble and running around and not at all cost effective.