Snake Dancing

by Roberta Sykes

  I immediately mailed the clipping to Mum. I knew such a small item of New South Wales news would never make it into the Townsville Daily Bulletin, and she would be unlikely to find out otherwise. She had lost all contact with her son, James. Strangely, while Mum responded to the little note I included, she didn’t mention that she’d received the clipping. What grief she felt, she bore in silence.

  I continued to meet with my two Canadian friends. Buddy was excited at the prospect that his wife, Brunie, would soon join him, although I noticed that his friend, Jimmy, did not seem as pleased. Perhaps he regarded her arrival as a dampener to their mateship and running around together. We three had met for breakfast at a tiny cafe in a sidestreet in the Cross and, after ordering, Jimmy walked around the corner to buy a newspaper. When he returned he was deeply distressed and told us, and everyone else within earshot, that President Kennedy had been shot.

  Although not a close follower of politics at the time, either here or overseas, I knew who President Kennedy was. Buddy, Jimmy and I had talked about the wind of change that we felt his youthful presence in the White House signalled. We were all thunder-struck, and spent the next few days huddled together, supporting each other through the shock, because the safety of everyone in the entire world now seemed to be under threat. This experience gave us a common bond, and we remained friends for several years.

  I had met a wide variety of people by living and working in Kings Cross: business people, crooks, sharks, gamblers, hoons, standover merchants, as well as poets, painters and artists. Rosslyn Norton, or Rowie as she was called, was a Kings Cross identity who was commonly considered to be a witch. I didn’t meet her—she once sent me a gift of a dead toad in a shoebox and had stood outside the window of my first-floor flat in the night, yelling out that she loved me. After that I made sure I never met her.

  Despite my work in the entertainment industry where the demands are for laughs and smiles, I remained a very serious person. Between shows I sat in the dressing rooms, reading books and doing my Australasian Post crossword puzzles, to which I was virtually addicted, while the other performers circulated amongst the patrons, encouraging them to buy expensive drinks and sometimes arranging to meet them after the show. From time to time unknown fans sent champagne and imported boxes of chocolates backstage to me via the waiters. At first I sent them back, but the other women became cross, telling me that women with any class at all do not refuse expensive gifts. My ways, I must confess, did not endear me to some of the other performers, who often jibed me, saying I was dull, even though I gave them my gifts of champagne because I didn’t drink.

  After work, while others dressed glamorously and went off to nightclubs, I put on my tights, long jerkin and flat dancing shoes and went down to the Sound Lounge. There, from about midnight, I held impromptu dance classes for prostitutes who had just finished work. It was not unusual for me to put in three or four hours of near solid dancing, pausing to sip orange juice or to run to the women’s toilet when it was reported to me that one of my ‘charges’ had passed out there from taking amphetamines. Once Adrian Keefe, the sound operator, passed out from drugs and I employed my nursing skills to help him too.

  My time at the Sound Lounge was spent helping the girls of the night feel better about their own bodies, after they had been abusing them all evening. I would encourage everyone to get up and move rhythmically to reach a state of exhaustion, after which, I thought, we could all go home and have a peaceful sleep without the need for any form of sedation.

  Eventually the petty jealousies amongst some of the other performers at one of the clubs I worked in festered. I found some of my costumes shredded with a razor in the dressing room on the night before I was to audition for a new job. I found cigarettes dropped into cold drinks which I had left in my cubicle, and once the word ‘Nigger’ was written in lipstick on my makeup mirror. No one would own up to writing it or to seeing anyone else do it.

  I left the clubs and went to an agent to find work. This meant carrying my costumes, snake box and music with me to a new venue each night, and not everywhere provided the luxury of a dressing room. At some venues I found that performers had to prepare for their act in the ladies’ rooms shared by the patrons, and it was often difficult to secure my purse or valuables in those places. The work was not steady, and I was staggered to learn that some agents dole out jobs on the basis of which of their clients gives them the most expensive gifts. The irregularity of shows and the very moderate fees we were paid often barely covered rent, food and the few pounds’ remittance I tried to send my mother, without the whole operation being contingent upon my showering agents with presents.

  The regular exercise of dancing had contributed to my physical growth and general look and feeling of good health. Since Russel’s birth I had grown three inches taller and, for the first time in my life, weighed in at more than seven stone. The switch from being a club employee to working through an agent, however, had a negative effect on me as I began to worry and skip meals in an effort to meet my commitments. Mum wrote that I wasn’t to panic if I sometimes couldn’t send any money—she said there was always enough in her house to feed one small child—but the feeling of responsibility rested heavily upon me.

  Then I fell ill. I had been moving around, seeking always cheaper but still clean accommodation in an effort to make do, and at the time of falling ill I lived in a private hotel in Potts Point. As well as security, these quarters had the added advantage of having a switchboard to take messages for me from my agent, relieving me of the need to pay for a phone. But I had to bundle my snakes into the wardrobe twice a week when the housemaid came to clean the room and change the linen.

  When the illness didn’t pass, I went to see a doctor. After he examined me and found nothing physically wrong to cause such distress and lethargy, he began to ask questions about my life and state of mind. Instead of answering him, much to his astonishment I burst into tears.

  ‘I want you to see a specialist,’ he told me when my grief had subsided, and he wrote out a referral. A few days later I took a bus into the city to find the Macquarie Street address he had carefully written on the envelope. I was dismayed when I reached the building to find the specialist’s name on a brass plaque with ‘Psychiatrist’ stamped under it. I was sure I had some physical complaint, some parasite perhaps which had invaded my intestines, so to find that the doctor had sent me off to a shrink greatly disturbed me.

  Still, as I had found it an effort to reach the surgery I decided I shouldn’t waste the trip. After I had registered my attendance with the receptionist, I asked to use the ladies’ room. In the privacy of the cubicle I carefully opened the referral letter and prepared to leave if its contents alarmed me. Instead, the few lines contained a request for the doctor to talk with me as the referring doctor suspected I had deep concerns, the nature of which he personally had been unable to determine.

  The psychiatrist was a man of middle age, or so it appeared to me at the time. His dark hair showed wisps of grey although his face seemed youthful. After making a few preliminary notes on his pad, he turned his full attention to me and began to ask some very general questions. What did I do for a living? Was I in touch with my parents? Then he asked if I was happy. His question seemed so terrible that I was completely unable to answer. After a few moments of silence I felt tears welling up in my eyes and to my great embarrassment I began to weep quietly. I could not stop the tears flowing down my face. He got up and snibbed the lock on his door, came back and put what he may have hoped was a reassuring hand on my shoulder. I flinched.

  He took his cue from my reaction and went back behind his desk; the distance and barrier made me feel a bit safer. In a sort of shorthand I told him I had been the victim of a crime in which a large number of men had raped and tried to kill me, and that there had been many court cases. His eyes opened wide, though not in disbelief, and he was obviously aghast by what I was saying.

  Eventually he said that he didn’t think
he could help me, that I didn’t need and possibly couldn’t afford psychiatric help, and that I would find that time would prove to be the greatest healer. I went home feeling quite stunned, suspecting that perhaps I was so crazy that even a psychiatrist couldn’t help me. I lived through the next few days in a haze, so filled with self-doubt I could barely function.

  I was more than a little surprised when, about a week later, the psychiatrist sent me a message asking me to phone him. When I did so his receptionist put me through to him immediately. He asked if I would like to meet him for a coffee. I was wary and agreed to meet him, but not for coffee. I was so suspicious of any sort of personal attention from a male that, away from the surgery, I would only speak with the psychiatrist in broad daylight and in a public place outdoors. We set up a meeting for an early afternoon at a bench in Rushcutters Bay Park. He brought bottles of cool drink. I brought one of my snakes.

  Altogether we met about five or six times. It was evident that what I had told him about myself at his surgery had deeply disturbed him and he was concerned that I may have felt fobbed off by him. In his role as ‘friend’, he thought we could just meet occassionally to chat about my life and what progress I might be making. He kept encouraging me to ‘get back into life’ and made suggestions about how I could do this. He was concerned about the huge gulf and contradiction between my career as an entertainer—apparently social, outgoing, gregarious—and the enormously isolated and pained soul I became off-stage.

  Coincidentally, several other things of importance happened around this time. I was walking up the hill along Bayswater Road one day when I noticed a dress store, but it only had two frocks in it. One was stunning, and I peeped around the door to look at it more closely. A quite young and extremely handsome blond man sat behind the counter, sewing sequins onto some shiny fabric, and we started to talk. He told me he was Dutch and that his partner, also European, had gone overseas to visit his parents. This was his shop and in it he tailored very special and expensive outfits for wealthy women and prostitutes in the area. He was taken with my exotic looks, he said after a while, and wished to make me a dress, for free, to complement my style. I had been given a lot of guff from some of the entertainers with whom I had worked. They had tried to erode my self-confidence by telling me that I was ‘unladylike’, didn’t do my hair properly, didn’t wear enough makeup, and so on. So I was absolutely thrilled to hear this man who had such obvious dress sense and charm tell me otherwise.

  We became friends and began to spend a lot of time together, laying about on the beach and meeting up with his friends for cocktails at the Quarterdeck Bar. He made me several items of beautiful clothing—fancy dresses and day frocks—always inspired by particular locations we visited. When I had a work engagement some of his friends, many of whom were employed in theatrical and other flamboyant professions, spent time making up my face and generally turning me out to look eye-catching.

  We would often go to his tastefully decorated apartment, which was in a luxury block of units, and several times I stayed overnight. He missed his partner, he told me, and welcomed my company. We made up exotic recipes, he was an excellent cook, and listened to music and laughed a lot. He delighted in trying out new ideas and clothing on me. In his large and modern bathroom we took bubble baths together, and later we would both put on some of the glamorous nightwear he owned, and he’d hold me gently when we went to sleep.

  This sexually non-threatening and emotionally rewarding relationship with a man went a long way, I feel, towards allowing me to reconsider the position of men in society and in my life. My psychiatrist friend encouraged me in this friendship, telling me that, although it didn’t really fall into a ‘normal’ relationship between a man and a woman, the security and joy that it brought me was definitely very healthy and a step in the right direction.

  Otherwise, my relationships with men remained dismal. I sought care, encouragement and emotional support, while the men I met were in a seemingly constant search for sex. Through my work I came into contact with a wide variety of men from all walks of life, and those exceptions who were not on the hunt were few and far between.

  Kings Cross was a hub, a place where people who lived in the suburbs came to have a good time, even if they only made such an excursion once or twice a year to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries or promotions. The streets teemed with people all night, and the dregs and stayers—women in bedraggled evening dresses and camp guys in women’s clothes and five o’clock shadows, as well as straight men in a variety of guises—could always be seen limping home at dawn while street-sweepers and milkmen made their early morning rounds.

  Cross-titutes, as people who lived in, rather than visited, the Cross used to call themselves, were also a very mixed bag. The area seemed to beckon to all manner of eccentrics, the rich and the poor, and Kings Cross garrets attracted artists, writers and others who wished to live close to the city and in the company of hopefully like-minded people.

  I was walking into an expensive and popular nightclub in Darlinghurst Road one night to meet friends when I saw a short, swarthy and well-dressed man standing alone against a wall. He seemed to glower at me as I passed. When I joined my friends they remarked that they had watched him staring at me, and that I had better be on alert. His name was Abe Saffron. I had heard of his almost legendary reputation as a crime boss and owner of illegal gambling houses, as well as tales told by some of the entertainers about his brutal treatment of women. One woman had told me that she was his short-term ‘girlfriend’, ‘the girlfriend you have when your real girlfriend is pregnant’ she’d said. When Saffron discovered that she had been seen with some other man he had stood by while his thugs smacked her around so seriously that she had to be hospitalised. I strained in my chair to take a look at him. It was wise, I thought, to know what people look like if you want to avoid them.

  Not too long after that I was hired to perform in a small club in the southern suburbs on a Friday night. After completing the work, I packed up and went to collect my pay. The manager told me to go to a table in the back where ‘a man will pay you’. This area of the club was poorly lit, in fact it was downright gloomy, and only by peering could I see a figure sitting alone at one of the tables. I was right up at the table before I realised the man was Abe Saffron. A crisp white envelope lay on the table between us, my pay. Mr Saffron nudged the envelope towards me, but as I reached for it, he lay his hand over it. I wished I was still wearing my snake, but I’d returned it to its box after the show and, with my costume bag, it was on the floor near the dressing-room door. Mr Saffron, however, couldn’t have been more charming.

  ‘I’d like to invite you to a party,’ he said. His mouth was smiling but the geniality didn’t reach his eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I’m expected somewhere else as soon as I finish here,’ I replied.

  ‘The party’s tomorrow night.’ The smile didn’t leave his face. I could feel panic rise in my heart, and I was glad the room was dark enough for him not to see my alarm. I was lost for a rejoinder.

  From his pocket he took a square of paper on which was written an address. He put the piece of paper on top of my pay envelope. I reached across and picked them both up, watching him watching me, feeling the tension like predator and prey. I had heard talk of his ‘parties’ and they didn’t sound like somewhere I’d want to go, but I didn’t feel I could say anything. His tone was more like an order than an invitation.

  ‘Where are you going now? I’ll give you a lift,’ he said, and this time I was quick.

  ‘My boyfriend is waiting for me in a car outside.’

  ‘Well, I’ll see you tomorrow night then. Goodnight.’

  There was no boyfriend waiting for me, and I picked up my things and left by the back entrance. I ran down the stairs and into a dark suburban street, then around the block and back onto the main street. I thought it was too much of a risk to try to flag a cab there, still too close to the club, so I sat on my snake box in the dark aro
und the corner from the highway and waited for an hour or so to pass, sweating about what I should do. As I didn’t know the area I had no option but to stay where I was until I felt sufficient time had elapsed to make it safe for me to hail a taxi. I took Jezebel, my snake, out of her box and let her wind herself around me—just in case.

  The following Tuesday I rang my agent to inquire about bookings, however, I was met with a strained silence at her end. ‘Anything the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘Can you come in?’ she replied.

  Work for individual entertainers was often difficult to obtain. Clubs rang, wanting ‘an act’, ‘a singer’, ‘a comedian’. Only rarely did they specify any particular act, so if agents asked you to stand on your head, most entertainers would try to oblige. And so it was that I found myself in her office, watching her flutter through sheafs of paper as she prepared herself to offload her problem.

  ‘I don’t know who you’ve offended or what you’ve done,’ she at last said, ‘but it’s unlikely you’ll get much work in this town now.’

  ‘What?’ I spluttered. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, let me put it this way. I can’t give you any work.’

  I reeled out onto the street and was dazzled by the brightness of the sunshine. Such a perfect looking day for something this bizarre to happen, I thought. I crossed Oxford Street and wandered into Hyde Park, needing a few minutes to comprehend this sudden news. So this was my ‘punishment’ for not turning up at Abe Saffron’s party, I realised, and was angry. For Mr Saffron or whichever of his henchmen had called the agent, the action meant nothing at all. Like swatting a mosquito, they would probably never think about it again. But for me, it was monumental, a demonstration of the power of money and influence over the destiny of a tiny nobody just minding her own business, trying to stay alive and earn enough to keep herself and her son.