PARLOR DAZE ......(part one)

The road is long
With many a winding turns
That leads us to who knows where
Who knows where

But I'm strong

What factors choose us to make decisions that will affect the rest of our lives?  For me it was a combination of things which occurred during the early months of 1985.

My illness had cost me not only my job, but also my self esteem and my shield of invulnerability.  Being told that you have an incurable disease at the age of 22 is not something that is easy to come to terms with.  Luckily I didn't have to but the prolonged illness which lasted over 2 months left me feeling weak and vulnerable.


My relationship with Bill was starting to fall apart.  His main faults were vanity and selfishness. His extreme optimism and self confidence led me to question my own social skills.  Being sick and weak added to these feelings of insecurity.  My biggest problem was feeding my now out of proportion drug habit.  On a reduced income, Bill would often stay out after work, smoking with friends, while I stayed at home feeling wretched and physically having marijuana withdrawals if I didn't get to smoke at least once a day.

Bill also started a new hobby, ceramic arts.  This would be the death knell of our relationship.  The first week he was in the beginners group learning how to throw pots, the second week he had advanced to the 'professional' group, and by the end of one month he was creating ceramic tableware collections for 2 shops in Paddington.  Any chance of re-starting our clothes making stall was well and truly gone.  It had been Bill's flair for design and skill at printing which had really been the success behind our clothing range.  My dressmaking skills and design talent were rudimentary and our clothing sold on Bill's design appeal.  I had realized that early on in our venture, but while it worked and was fun I wasn't upset.

His friends also were not my friends, but rather people I socialized with and who tolerated me because of Bill.  I felt inadequate with my lack of skills and profession.  His friend's were all up and coming designers, wealthy Eastern Suburbs socialites, actors and artists.  My few friends were all outer suburban refugees, desperate to identify with a happening trend but without the skills or abilities to do more than dress up.

 While I was walking once a week 4 km up and down Sydney's hilly terrain to get a box of weekly groceries from a charity organization and then walking back again, Bill would be out with friends getting stoned and I was sure seeing another boy who he occasionally  would have at our apartment when I returned.  Always with other friends but after a few visits I could sense the closeness between them.

My ultimate reason for choosing the path I did was my desperate addiction which was now costing me $20 a day.  I had to be stoned from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed.  My friend from the diet company was returning to Queensland and offered me her two part time positions.  One was at a cake shop just off Darlinghurst Rd in Kings Cross, the other was cleaning jobs for 3 different elderly ladies living in either Kings Cross or Elizabeth Bay, which were all really, combined with Rushcutters Bay, part of the same big suburb.

The cake shop was fun and brought me back to my earlier days of working the streets.  I worked Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights from 4pm until 9pm, alone, and got paid $20 per shift.  On top of that I managed to always 'under-ring' the cash register by at least $10 each night, plus take home a litre of milk, a loaf of bread and cakes and pies to munch out on when I got home.

The bonus was that between 8 and 9pm the street girls would start their shifts.  Most were young girls already trapped into the world of pimps and heroin.  Many evenings when they started they had no money to buy food.  I was happy for them to pay later, or even better, for them to give me a handful of pills or some grass in payment.  Looking after the girls meant that I kept their pimps happy and whenever there was brewing trouble in the shop, usual in the Cross on a Friday or Saturday night, I wouldn't have to wait more than a few minutes before car doors started opening and the shop filled with big, scary pimps ready to sort out any trouble.  The bosses thought I was wonderful as I had managed to go for 2 months without being robbed.

The cleaning jobs were easy and enjoyable.  4 little rich old ladies who needed company rather than cleaning.  I would spend two hours chatting and doing limited cleaning as the places were spotless anyway.  Only the bathrooms and window cleaning were beyond them so I did that first before pottering around tidying and vacuuming generally propped up by lots of gin & tonic and chatter from the ladies.

With my government subsidy for sickness benefits I was earning about $180 per week.  $70 of which was my half of the rent...it wasn't enough to pay the bills and get stoned daily.  I only got through because of the extra drugs I exchanged for cakes and pies.

My decision to go back into prostitution came easily.  This was the only job I could do stoned.  This was the only job I had any real skill for, and this was the only job which would guarantee my lifestyle.  I didn't want to work the streets again so decided to try a parlour.  

I clearly remember the day I went for the interview.  It was raining and I stood for 30 minutes under a viaduct about 50 metres from the address.  Was I too old?  Would they want my look?  Could I really do this again?

I eventually summoned up the courage to enter and was immediately met by the owner, Graham.  I recognized him instantly.  He had starred in a really bad TV soap opera in the early 70's which I remembered distinctly.  He had played the part of the local butch thug.  The fact that I recognized him and that one of the drag queens recognized me from my Adelaide days got me the job.  He didn't even ask me any really personal questions.  He just advised me to 'tone down' my look for the clients.  'Be more boyish', were his exact words.

I was to start the next afternoon, Sunday, and work from 4pm till midnight.  The next stage of my life was about to spiral out of control, though I didn't see any of it until it was too late.

THE DAZE OF OUR LIVES.....

Those were they days my friend
We'd thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance for ever and a day.....

For most of us our early 20's are possibly the best time of our lives.  Old enough to do whatever we want and young enough to not have to take responsibility for our actions.

The two years I spent with Bill were definitely the best days of my life.  We met at Patch's nightclub, the most popular gay club on Sydney's Oxford St at the time.

Bill was my age, blonde haired, blue eyed and gorgeous.  He was a wonderfully optimistic person who filled the room with laughter wherever he went.  We were the perfect couple.  We had similar backgrounds, worked in the same industry and shared the same tastes for life.

By the time he moved in with me I had my apartment decorated in a totally original Retro 1950's style.  All the furniture was signature piece and mostly bought from an amazing second hand shop on Flinders St in Darlinghurst. Kidney shaped coffee tables, a Dunlop 1959 modular lounge, polka dot lamp stands, teak Scandinavian bookshelves....

Bill brought little furniture as he had been living in shared accommodation but within a few weeks had transformed the apartment with his amazing eye for art and design.  He even made weekly still art displays out of unusual vegetables.

 He worked nights in a restaurant while I worked days.  On his two nights off our apartment would be filled with friends. Both of us were great cooks and enjoyed giving dinner parties.  Everyone getting stoned, listening to the latest music and then eating amazing dinners cooked by Bill or myself.

He finished work around 11pm and didn't get home until midnight.  Most nights I would catch a few hours sleep then wake up to eat dinner with him, get stoned and have great sex.  From day one the sex was amazing and even after we eventually broke up we continued having sex at least once a week for nearly 3 months.

On the weekends we would invite friends over mid morning.  Get stoned as usual and end up in Rushcutter's Bay Park having a late afternoon picnic with lavish pies and cakes made by Bill and myself before he went to work around 4pm.

Saturday nights I would meet him at Patches after spending the first few hours of the evening at The Exchange Hotel with my friends.  The Exchange had taken the place of Stranded and was the in place to be seen.  Being a hotel though it was only allowed to stay open until midnight so Patches was the next venue and straight across the road on Oxford St.  There were a variety of gay bars at that time but they were all very stereo-typed.

The Midnight Shift was for leather queens, Capriccios was for Asians and 'Rice Queens', The Oxford was for dirty old men and drug dealers but Patches was open for all and the best place to be.  Unlike Mark, Bill was as adventurous as I was with drugs and we took as many as we could.  Pills, speed, cocaine, LSD.  Either bought or gifts from friends, we never said no.

I was still doing clients once or twice a week, although Bill never knew.  I had to be careful as so many of our friends lived around the area that it would have been easy for me to be seen.  I would hang out at the Bottom's up Bar or the Bourbon and Beefsteak on Darlinghurst Rd, Kings Cross and buy a drink.  Generally it didn't take long before some old man would hit up on me and for $30 or $40 I would meet them at their hotel or apartment.  I didn't want to be seen in their company walking by any of our friends.

Bill was very artistic and when he saw my ability at making clothes he got the idea for us to start making and selling clothes at Paddington Markets.  We were both still working our normal jobs but managed to come up with a few simple designs and try them out.  At first I bought the materials for the clothes but then Bill put his abilities in design to work and started creating amazing prints which he would silk screen onto white cotton. 

Our clothes and designs were a big success but came at a high cost.  We put in lots of hours to have our collection ready every Saturday and most Friday nights I would stay up all night sewing to get things finished before heading to the market to set up the stall at 7am. On top of that we were either stoned or speeding most of the time and still going out on Saturday and Sunday nights.

Any money we made went straight back into buying materials and the small profits we made we spent on drugs and partying.  If we had been serious and sensible we could have gone a long way.  Every week we would sell most of our stock.  One of our regular buyers were a Rock Group called Mental As Anything who were a big chart phenomena at the time.  We even had our clothes, with me modelling featured in a Japanese youth culture magazine.

Being seen and mixing with the new wave of designers beginning to make their mark on the Australian fashion scene was a buzz and we were invited out to many parties,fashion shows and celebrity gatherings.

After a year of this I suddenly became unwell.  I wasn't sick but had completely run out of energy.  Within a few weeks I was finding it impossible to even walk the short uphill walk to Kings Cross Station without stopping to rest 3 or 4 times on the way.  My work was suffering and my boss sent me home one day, or rather told me to go to the hospital and have a check up.

This was the early days of the AIDS epidemic and little was known about it but a lot was feared about it.  I went to St Vincent's Hospital where they immediately decided I was a likely candidate for AIDS and took blood tests.  Afterwards they even sent me to a counselor to discuss the realities of being HIV positive.   I was shattered.  23 years old and being told that I had the deadly virus that was sweeping the gay world....before they even had the blood test results back.

After a 10 day nightmare of worry, not working and being stoned constantly to help me cope the results came back.  Apparently they could find nothing wrong with me!  It would be years later when I was correctly diagnosed as being a 'moderate anemic' which was possibly the cause of my sickness.

Or maybe I had contracted the infection and somehow managed to fight it off.  Years later I would go through the reality of living with someone with AIDS and even though we had unprotected sex both before and after he was diagnosed, and I had various exposure to his bodily fluids during his illness I remained uninfected.

My boss had rung me after a month and told me they could no longer keep my position open.  I was receiving sickness benefits from the government and also working a few nights a week in a bakery in Kings Cross for cash in hand.  I wasn't earning much but it was enough to get by on.  The biggest impact was that we could no longer afford to keep ourselves in drugs and I certainly was so hooked by this stage that any day without getting stoned was worse than being sick.

Eventually a mutual friend of ours, an older gay guy took me in hand.  He told me to pack my bags for the weekend and come and stay with him.  He fed me home made chicken soup into which he chopped whole bunches of parsley and which I ate 3 or 4 times a day.  He grew his own dope and allowed me to have 3 joints a day.  After 3 days of this treatment I woke up on Monday morning and felt 100% cured.  Another week and I was back to my normal self....

With our lack of income we had to give up the Market stall, which I hadn't been able to do during the 6 weeks I was ill and had no extra cash to start up again.


Now I had to find a job.  My solution would change my life in ways I never could have imagined.

DEATHLY DAZE.....(part 1).

Baby cried the day the circus came to town
Cause she didn't want parades just passing by her.
She painted on a smile and took up with some clown
and danced without a net upon the wire....

I'm like a cat with nine lives I've come to believe.  I have had so many close brushes with death that I sometimes can't believe it myself.

By now you will have surmised my character.  Risk taker, hedonist, loner, attention seeker and desperately wanting acceptance and recognition.  Conflicting characters all within the person that was me.

I left suburbia to join the parade.  I lived each day at a time with no thought for more than the next weekend.  The smile I painted on was the drugs and partying and the wire was the lifestyle I was living.

Even though I met my new boyfriend only a week after Mark moved out it would be two months of 'real' dating before he moved in with me.  In that time I worked days at the Diet Shop and 3 or 4 evenings a week I would head back to Fitzroy Gardens to prostitute myself.

In the two years since I had first worked the streets inflation had hit.  I could now get $30 or $40 from a client.  True there were cheaper workers around, but they were mostly heroin addicts or the fabulous Rowena...she was a Maori drag queen who used to stand outside of Coles Supermarket on Darlinghurst Rd and operate like a true spruiker, 'Blow job $5. $5 Blow job' was her catch phrase.

Years later I would work with her in a legitimate job and even though I realised that I had met her before it wasn't until I heard her say '$5' that I remembered who she was and where I knew her from.

By now I was what the Americans would call a 'total stoner'.  What had started as an occasional joint in the evening and on weekends had now become a 24 hour habit.  I would wake in the morning and have a session, work through the day half stoned, come home and have another session, work the Gardens and then return home to get stoned again.  It was costing me around $60 a week.

One evening, thankfully after I had just walked out of the Gazebo Hotel after seeing a client, I ran into two of my old flatmates in the street.  Even though we hadn't parted on the best of terms we were all happy to see each other and they invited me out to celebrate my old boyfriends birthday the following evening.

We had a fabulous night.  Starting at their new flat, getting stoned and dropping pills.  Then it was on to a trendy restaurant in East Sydney where we ate, drank and had a totally fabulous evening.  One of our freinds had LSD trips and after dinner we decided to all take one and head home.....

In the middle of Darlinghurst Rd I realised I needed to buy cigarettes and literally jumped out of the taxi while it was still moving, promising to meet back at my friends as soon as possible.  Totally off my face, with the LSD starting to kick in at 1am in the morning I realise that all the shops are closed.
It was a Monday night and even most of the clubs were closed.

I decided to go upstairs to Les Girls and use their cigarette vending machine.   Next door to Les Girls was a Greek coffee shop which was open so I went in to buy cigarettes there.  I was a menthol smoker and they didn't have any menthol.  As I'm walking out one of the owners who was sitting with a group of friends asked me what I was after.   He was all smiles and told me to come with him and he had menthol cigarettes back at his apartment.

Silly me.  I follow and we get to his apartment.  True to his word he had a cupboard with boxes of cigarettes and a big bag of marijuana which he offered to smoke with me.  Happy that I had ciggies and the offer of some free smoke I accepted.

I didn't object when he asked me to give him a blow job, but halfway through the door opened and his 4 friends came stumbling in.  Realising that I was in another situation and likely to get raped by 4 old, fat drunk men, I thought quickly.  I told them I needed to go the toilet and once inside saw my escape route.  A small sliding window.  Before I could even open it they were banging on the door and trying to get in.  I managed to convince them that I was doing number 2's to give me some time.

I squeezed myself through the tiny window and climbed out onto the balcony.  7 floors up and the only escape is through the sliding doors and back into the apartment.  Not where I wanted to be! By now the banging on the door was getting louder and more impatient.  Without hesitation I climbed over the railing and slid down so my hands were now holding onto the concrete floor edge.  Below me was another balcony with a rail, but about half a metre below my dangling feet.  I somehow managed to swing inwards as I took the plunge and just cleared the railing and landed on the below balcony, hitting my head badly against the rail as I landed.

(middle building between the yellow apts and blue apts).

Dazed, tripping and scared as hell my next piece of luck was that the balcony doors on this apartment were not locked.  I slid them open and headed towards the front door.  The elderly owner who I had obviously awoken didn't even have time to say anything as I rushed passed him and out through his front door.....

I didn't go back to my friends, but back home.  I had the cigarettes and grass at home.  I just wanted to isolate and finish my trip in the safety of my self and my home, which for some 'trippy' reason I decided to clean from top to bottom for the next 4 hours.

My second brush with death was to come a year or so later in my own apartment.  I had just been to Adelaide with a friend for 4 days.  We had driven there and back. A 1500 km trip each way and my friend lived on the western edge of the city.  He asked me if I wouldn't mind getting a taxi home from his place as he was too exhausted to drive through the city and back.

No problem, but as my friend had made me leave my marijuana at his house before we left (he was afraid we would get caught at the checking stations where you have to declare and dispose of any fruits or vegetables due to pest control) I smoked a big fat joint before leaving.

Arriving home very tired and very stoned I was surprised when no one answered the buzzer.  10 minutes of trying and still no answer.  I knew my boyfriend was home, so I buzzed a neighbour who let me in the front door.  Once inside it was obvious why no one had answered the buzzer.  My boyfreind was having a party and the music was blasting through the building.

No amount of knocking made them hear me.  So I decided to go around the back and use the wooden fire escape which led directly to our back door.  We had never used the fire escape and had only occasionally sat outside on the wooden landing.  Obviously no one else had used it for a long time either.

As I'm climbing up the last flight of wooden stairs (3 floors above ground level) the steps start to break under my feet.  I managed to grab hold of the railing as the last two steps completely gave way under me and crashed to the ground.  Once again I'm dangling in mid air, clinging on desperately and almost too exhausted to pull myself up onto the landing, but I did it.

I can see  my boyfriend though the kitchen window, I can hear the music, I'm waving my arms and shouting and all to no avail.  Finally I realize the only thing to do is get back down and go to a pay phone and try and call them.  To get down I had to climb down the outside of the fire escape, shimmying down the rough wooden poles, getting splinters in my hands, occasionally slipping just a little too quickly, but eventually managed to get there.

I haven't mentioned before, but ever since my childhood I have had a terrible fear of heights and still do to this day.

A week or so later, my boyfriend and I awoke one morning and realised that the 'boom box' from our bedside table was missing along with the $10 note which for some reason we had also left on the table.  My boyfriend had come home late and drunk the night before and managed to leave not only the downstairs building door open but also our apartment door.....

Nothing else was taken thankfully. The only trace of the robber was a large hole on our fire escape landing where the poor thing had obviously fallen through.  3 floors below on the concrete was a radiating circle of broken radio, one shoe and a large amount of blood.