by Geena Leigh
•
As the driver took me back I focused on the fact that the first one was out of the way and I had already earned some money. Thank goodness for the half bottle of pre-mixed Jim Beam and coke I’d brought along in my handbag—drinking it now helped to numb me. So, this was how it felt to be a prostitute. I didn’t feel especially different; I didn’t feel that my life had really changed. I did feel a little repulsed. I had a secret now, and there was no turning back.
At the start I wasn’t very experienced at sex, apart from having had it plenty of times with Brett. Initially I wasn’t very confident; however, after a few clients it was all the same, really, so I just repeated my routine—undress slowly, rub my breasts on their cock, give them a little blow job and then lie down. If the guys wanted something else, they’d ask for it; and, if I felt like it, I complied. If I didn’t get any directions, I just stuck to my routine. Most of the men were low maintenance and were just happy to get laid missionary style.
I soon learned that John was a very popular name in this part of the city and that saying a few key sexy words at the right moment would get the whole thing over and done with relatively quickly. No-one coached me on what to do or what to say—I just got fed up with guys fucking me for a long period of time and wanted to get it over as soon as possible, so I began to improvise with a repertoire of dirty talk and other moves. Through trial and error I found that, ‘Oh yes, fuck me harder! Fuck me harder!’, ‘I want to feel your cum inside me now!’, in addition to faking an orgasm and squeezing their balls, was the quickest way to get it done.
For the first few months I wasn’t asked to do any out-of-the-ordinary stuff; when I did, it depended on the guy and how I felt that evening. If the guy was nice and relatively gentle and I was feeling a little playful, I would try something new. When I received an unusual request, the guy would tell me what to do and guide me until he began to moan; then I just kept doing it the same way until he came. It was basically learning on the job. It was a sink-or-swim situation and I learned to swim very well.
That first night (and later) there was a lot of time waiting around for clients to show up, which was frustrating. There wasn’t much else to do, except to read through the pile of old Cleo magazines. As it got later it got busier, and then I didn’t have to time to think about what I was doing—I just did it. At the end of the night we all lined up at reception and collected our pay. Even without heels, I towered over most of the women. I soon learned that tall, slim, young, pretty women were instantly hated in brothels. I couldn’t have cared less what the women thought of me, though. The men and their wallets were all I was interested in. The first night I was paid $635, which was more money than I had ever earned in one week, let alone in one night.
I worked until 3 a.m. that morning and then Charlene drove me back to my mother’s place. Mum was asleep when I got in. I slipped into my pyjamas as images of the evening whirled around in my mind. I remembered a couple of the clients’ faces, and how rough one of them was as he took me from behind. All the young guy with the broad shoulders had wanted to do was to lick my pussy for about forty minutes. It’s possible I fell asleep while he was doing it—not because he didn’t have good technique, but it was just that I wasn’t used to being up all night and all morning at that stage. Also, I didn’t realise that I could have charged extra for that, dammit! It wasn’t until I overheard some of the girls chatting that I learned we could (secretly) charge extra for almost anything. I felt a little shocked that it was me who actually did those things. It didn’t feel like me at the time, and as I lay in bed I did my best to push the images out of my mind.
Mum had already left for work when I woke up later in the day. She called me to check on how I was. I told her everything went well, and I was fine.
Eventually I went home. I was nervous about seeing Brett, but I was glad I had money and was going to leave him. He was sitting on the back stairs cleaning out his bong when I told him what I’d done.
‘You slept with five guys?!’
‘Here’s the money I owe you,’ I replied, handing him $120. He couldn’t have been that disgusted, because he took the money.
‘I’m going to go back tonight—I want to earn enough money to travel.’
He sat there in shock, a look of disgust on his face. It was clear that he didn’t want me anymore, and I didn’t want him either. I packed up as many of my belongings as I could carry and took the bus back to my mother’s place, where I stayed for a couple of weeks until I got bond money for a new flat. We were on good terms and became much like flatmates, coming and going from the mobile home.
The next night the driver took me on an out-call to a house in Paddington. The guy was out of his mind on drugs. Drugs often give a man the perception that they are the king of sex; their bodies, however, cannot perform. Some drugs give men a hard-on for hours and they can’t come; but other drugs make their cocks stay flaccid, and those jobs are hard work, emotionally and physically.
John became increasingly angry that he couldn’t accomplish the task and time was up. He blamed me for his ineptitude (which is common for drug-crazed clients). In his fury he hurled a glass lamp at my head. I froze. Thank goodness his aim was off. It smashed violently into shards on the wall beside me. As he turned to refill his whisky I grabbed my clothes and ran out of the house. He swore at me from the balcony as I ran down the main road, naked (except for my shiny black stilettos), clutching my clothes and my faux Chanel cherry-red handbag. When I was certain that he wasn’t following me, I hid behind a tree in someone’s yard and phoned for the driver to pick me up. I got dressed while I waited for the car to arrive.
The next few nights at the brothel were relatively uneventful. I easily adapted to the routine of sleeping during the day and working all night. I was pleased to have some money coming in and started to save most of it. I didn’t realise at the time how high the price was that I would eventually have to pay in exchange for improving my finances. I started to feel different to my friends. I noticed that we had less in common now, and I started to distance myself from them. There were plenty of people at work who I could talk to and relate to better. I didn’t have to hide anything from them. We sat around, chatted, and shared jokes about the clients. We had a certain amount of understanding and acceptance of one another. I liked the feeling that I belonged.
We called the lengthy drug-related jobs ‘Party Jobs’, because everyone would get high and party (have sex, drink and talk nonsense) for hours. Guys would come to the brothel and ask, ‘Do you like to party?’, which meant they were looking for a girl (or girls) to take drugs with. The party jobs would bring in a good income for the night, but the ensuing downtime would counterbalance that. The comedown—the loss of income from not working the next couple of nights because I was too sad and too fucked up—was not worth one big party night. It could really hurt my regular overall weekly wage. But if it was a quiet night and there was an opportunity for a party job, I’d usually take it—and usually end up regretting it.
8
Heroin, age 19
I was eighteen when I moved into a new share house in Bardon. My flatmates and I mostly spent our days lazing about smoking pot. It seemed that drugs were rampant in Brisbane, or maybe it was only among the people I knew. My flatmates thought I was giving massages when I was out working at the decrepit brothel a few nights a week. I drank beer and wine the other days, mostly trying to forget what I’d just done. I worked that sordid routine for about a year.
Although I wasn’t using, I started to drive the local heroin dealer, Tim, around to his clients because he’d broken his leg and couldn’t drive. I’d bought a car because I loved to drive and listen to music. Not having a car made me feel too dependent on other people, and controlled. I’d pick up Tim, take him to his supplier’s place and then we’d make a number of drop-offs around the inner suburbs of Brisbane before going back to his place. He was a good businessman. Offering a heroin home-delivery service, like a pizza
, meant that he’d tapped into a niche market of lazy teens.
One Tuesday afternoon when we were out driving, a police car pulled me over. Tim was a lanky, slow-talking guy with dreadlocked hair; my hair at this time was dark with a few vivid blonde streaks. We looked suspicious. The officer checked my licence and asked what we were doing. With my best poker face, I told him that we’d just been to get some lunch and now we were heading home. The back seat was littered with McDonald’s cheeseburger wrappers, so it was a plausible explanation. The officer eventually seemed satisfied and handed my licence back to me, before walking off to his car.
As I flicked on the indicator to pull out into the street, I noticed that Tim was laughing. He began reeling from out of his leg cast a roll of cling-wrap that contained dozens of one-gram bags of China White heroin, like a magician pulling colourful silk handkerchiefs out of his sleeve. The reality of what we were doing suddenly hit me. The amount he had on him would have been classified as trafficking, the penalty being 3 to 25 years in prison.
I cautiously pulled away from the kerb and meticulously obeyed the speed limit and every road sign all the way back to his place. After that, I didn’t want to drive him again and told him that my car was in the garage. Thankfully, his foot had healed by the time my car was ‘fixed’ and he didn’t need me to drive him around any longer.
Whenever I had dropped him off at home, there had always been a crowd of highly strung people anxiously pacing around his yard. Tim had always asked me to come inside for a free ‘taste’. I had declined every time; but, for some reason, despite my concern after the incident with the police, one day I agreed. After that I ended up going to Tim’s every night after work. He would inject it into me so I didn’t have to see the blood.
There would usually be about eight of us sitting around. The ritual of mixing it up and the smell of the alcohol swab brushing against my skin made me feel nauseous every time. Everyone got their hits according to who was the most addicted. Tim always went first. When he lifted his head after the initial rush, he would mix some more in a spoon, dropping in a filter that was a teeny piece torn from a cigarette butt. He would let the lighter flame sizzle underneath for a moment and then draw it up in a syringe for me. Someone else would place a rubber tube tourniquet around my arm; Tim would pierce my skin and a swirl of blood would be sucked up into the syringe. Looking at the blood made my head dizzy, so I always looked away. After he’d squeezed the heroin into my arm, the rubber tubing would be released.
The first few times I almost threw up and it was a bit of a blur. But even feeling sick and having a blurry mind was better than having memories of the clients and sex acts. After a few more times, as the heroin went into my arm, the world would dissolve around me and a satisfying warmth would dance within me for hours.
When Tim was too out of it to do it for me and just sat there nodding up against the wall, I learned how to mix it up and inject myself. Sometimes I would just go over there and pick it up, take it home and do it on my own. On my days off, I still went around to Tim’s to buy it and the usual group would be sitting around shooting up before, one by one, they nodded off.
On one occasion a noise aroused me out of my stupor and I saw one of my friends thrashing her limbs on the floor. Then she lay still on the carpet. Crawling down the hallway to her still body, I revived her right there on the hallway floor. A volunteer from St John Ambulance had come to my old school once and we’d learned how to bandage up each other’s broken arms, set a splint on someone’s leg after a snake bite and how to revive people with CPR. The images and training instantly came to my mind: I tilted her head back, pressed on her stomach and blew short deep breaths into her airway. The others stirred and one of the guys tried to insist that we call an ambulance, but everyone was too scared to do that because they feared the police would get involved. I was angry at them for being so selfish and uncaring. I continued to breathe into her mouth until she began to cough; then she propped herself up against the wall and wearily wiped away dribble from her mouth. She sat in a state of shock for some time.
The commotion snapped everyone out of their trances. Tim was annoyed that she had just cost him his high, so he mixed up another hit. I justified having another hit on the same grounds. It was then I understood that, if anyone in the group happened to ‘drop’ the same way she did, an ambulance would not be called and there was no guarantee that they would be revived. We knew the risk, but we all still kept coming over. Maybe that was just part of being young and feeling invincible, or maybe I was in so much pain that dropping may have been a nice release out of this nightmare.
As my time at the brothel stretched out, the crazed drugged-out guy who’d hurled the lamp at me played on my mind. After a while, I didn’t want to do out-calls anymore. I never knew who was going to be in the house when I turned up; there could have been ten guys hiding in the next room, for all I knew. It was also a waste of time driving forty minutes each way for a job. I could have done three jobs in the same amount of time if I had stayed in-house. But the receptionist said that everyone had to do out-calls if they wanted to work there. I didn’t know of any other brothels to go to but I had seen a couple of prostitutes walking up and down the street when the driver had taken me to an out-call, so I decided to try working on the street. I worked shifts at the brothel, so I didn’t have to officially quit my job there—I just didn’t show up for my next shift. I figured that at least on the street I would meet the guy first and it would be my choice if I wanted to see him or not.
The next night I caught a taxi back into the Valley and wandered down Brunswick Street until I found a moderately lit corner next to a laneway. I imagined that I’d end up arguing with another woman for the corner like I’d seen in movies—‘Keep walking, bitch, this is my corner!’ But that didn’t happen. The few women who hovered around further up the street kept to themselves.
My main customers were taxi drivers—they must have told each other about the new girl on the corner of Bowen and Brunswick Streets via their CBs and I ended up having my legs up in the back seat, or giving blow jobs as I leaned over from the passenger seat in seven or eight Black & White taxis each night. I set my own prices and totally low-balled myself. The jobs only lasted a few minutes each time, so I thought I had to charge less than a full hour. But I still came home with around $400. For about two hours’ work, I figured it was good money. I didn’t have to stay and work a long shift, and I could come and go as I pleased. And I had to admit that the danger—such as when a guy walked past on his way to the city to meet his friends and I ended up giving him a blow job in the laneway—gave me a thrill.
After a few more nights of a mostly taxi-driver clientele, a black car pulled up beside me. I didn’t see the two men in it until I’d already leaned my head in the open window. One guy asked, ‘How’s business?’
‘What business?’ I asked. ‘I’m waiting for the bus.’ It was a bus stop, even though it was common knowledge that no buses ran past 4 p.m. on that route.
‘Place your bag on the vehicle!’
They got out and one of the undercover officers rummaged through my handbag, pulling out a fistful of Ansell blue and white condoms, plus some blue lube sachets. He chuckled as he showed my stuff to the other cop. I tried to stay calm as my heart raced; I was terrified of getting a criminal record for prostitution, but the cops seemed satisfied and drove off without even asking my name. I decided to call it quits for the night and vowed to stay off the streets.
As I wandered back up the Valley I noticed a few doorways with red lights out the front. I walked up a steep staircase and found myself in a different brothel. I asked for work and started about seven minutes later. It was much more comfortable than the street: hot showers, beds, a TV and food deliveries. I felt like I’d gained a certain amount of credibility in the hooker world now because I’d worked on the streets. It made me sound tough.
I began working five nights a week and, after every shift, I’d take a taxi to Tim�
��s place to score. We would shoot up together at 5 or 6 a.m. The drug would take the pain and memories away. All the horrible things I’d done that night were temporarily forgotten. My tolerance was low, so it wasn’t an expensive habit. Shooting up drugs became routine and even dull. It also made me feel like a loser to need it so much.
After a few months of living like this I was beyond miserable. Every time the group sat around to mix up their hits I would look at them with loathing. No-one was real. No-one was happy. Everyone was only there for themselves. I knew I had to get out of there.
•
Mum and Aiden dropped me off at the airport. They were excited that I was travelling, and I was too. Travelling to London is a typical twenty-something Australian rite of passage. My air ticket was a desperate attempt to get away from the heroin and all the people that went along with it. I didn’t know how long the cash I had with me would last, so, alongside my regular clothes, I packed my ‘hooker heels’, dress, make-up and wig.
9
Taking hooking international, age 19
My first couple of weeks in London were uncomfortable. Maybe it was the jetlag or maybe it was the withdrawal from heroin that kept me lying in bed. I tried to forget about the drugs and friends I used to have and tried to focus on a new beginning. When I felt better I explored some of the city’s sights and found it funny that London really did have a Pall Mall and Northumberland Avenue, just like in Monopoly. I got in touch with my older brother, who was still living in London. He’d married a West Indian woman and started his own family. It was nice to get to know them. After converting all my Aussie dollars to pounds and paying my bond and rent for the teeny bedsit in advance, I needed to find work soon.
I flicked through the Daily Mail to look for work. It was 1992 and the English tabloids were publishing cover-to-cover stories about the secretly taped phone conversation in which Prince Charles told Camilla Parker-Bowles that he wished he were a tampon so he could stay inside her all the time. I giggled at that as I flicked to the back of the paper and came across an ad for employment reading ‘Female Masseurs Wanted. No experience needed. Camden’.