The Fence-Painting Fortnight of Destiny: A memoir

by Meshel Laurie

  A guy in a polo-neck sweater said the painting belonged to Adrian, who’d ducked out for lunch. He didn’t know how much Adrian wanted for it and would have to wait until he got back.

  I am one of the great impulse shoppers, so I was a bit miffed at not being able to make my exciting purchase right then and there, but off I went exploring, with doubt creeping ever forward in my mind. I cut short my walk and went back to the painting to see if it really was as good as I’d remembered it. It was. I was standing there when the gallery door opened and a skinny young man in a duffel coat and fingerless gloves crept self-consciously inside.

  ‘That’s Adrian,’ I thought to myself, without a word of a lie, and indeed it was. I bought the painting from him that day, although I agreed to let it hang there for the duration of his exhibition. I then followed that quiet, unassuming young man around that old bank for the next three weeks without his so much as raising an eyebrow in my direction. Finally I caught wind of an exhibition he and the other artists were attending one Friday night in St Kilda and decided it would be the time and place to make my move.

  I was feeling bold, although heaven knows why. I’d never had a boyfriend before, just a few ‘friends with benefits’, and my sexual experience was minimal by anyone’s standards. I’d been hanging out with an older woman who was a real sex bomb, and under her tutelage I’d managed to seduce an older comedian, but it had ended terribly when a frenemy from Brisbane had flown in and bedded him too. I wasn’t in love with him or anything, but it had really given me the shits and made me feel a lot less sophisticated and sex bomby all of a sudden.

  Instead I thought I was in love with a terrible junkie I knew, and felt I was getting encouraging signals every now and then. I even thought it was a good idea to dabble in heroin to prove how perfect we could be together—sad but true I’m afraid. There was plenty of it about at the time, and the St Kilda using circle was very welcoming. He left for a few months overseas, during which I pined and then joined the acting program in Brunswick. I was still awaiting his return while stalking Adrian, but with less and less longing, not to mention heroin.

  By the time that Friday night rolled around I was a woman on a mission. My flat had been full of women all afternoon prepping it and me for the night ahead. My friend Lyndal and our mutual friend Wil Anderson offered to escort me to the event so I wouldn’t have to walk in alone. At some stage I would place myself by Adrian’s side, and my escorts would slip out and leave me to it. That was the plan.

  Incredibly, it actually worked. Lyndal and Wil did slip out of the party, and I insinuated myself into Adrian’s small circle of friends. A small group of us left later to walk along Acland Street and around to the Prince of Wales Hotel. All of a sudden, as his two friends walked on ahead, Adrian, who hadn’t given me a single inkling that he’d even noticed I was there, grabbed my hand. I looked at him in shock, at which point he put his finger to his lips and silently shooshed me. He stepped backwards in big pantomime steps and pointed in the direction of my flat, which I’d subtly pointed out on our way past. So he had noticed my moves over the preceding weeks, after all.

  Neither of us spent much time in the old bank in Brunswick after that. He moved into my flat formally about two weeks after that first night, and within two months we’d decided to get married. As my phone had been cut off, I called my parents from a kebab shop on Sydney Road to tell them the news. They hadn’t heard from me in months, and they’d never heard of Adrian at all, so I’m sure it was a surprising phone call all round.

  That December we were married in a friend’s garden in Seddon, Melbourne. My father borrowed the best car he had access to, which was a Fairlane belonging to a mate of his, and drove the whole family plus my brother’s best friend Mocko down for the wedding. They could only stay a couple of days because it was just before Christmas—a very busy time for taxi drivers. I knew it was a massive financial stress to lay on them with such short notice. If I’m really honest, I hoped they wouldn’t be able to come, because I’d put so much work into being a different person I was worried it would evaporate if I saw them. As far as I knew my father didn’t even like me, and was probably much happier without me in his life. I didn’t think either of us would be particularly keen for a reunion.

  The entire budget for my wedding was $2000, including the dress, which I bought on sale at Myer for a hundred bucks. Friends did things for the wedding instead of giving gifts. Peter Milne for instance, who’d taken those stunning black-and-whites of Melbourne comedians in the ’90s that hung in the Gershwin Room in The Espy, took our wedding pictures for free. Our friends cooked and arranged flowers and all that stuff and it was beautiful.

  Just as I was starting to worry that Adrian might’ve changed his mind about marrying someone he hardly knew, he arrived with his Uncle Ollie and his cousin Akean. I’d never met either of them, and they were a little embarrassed because they were running late—and because the groom they were delivering was blind drunk. I was so overcome with the reality of what we were about to do that I was just glad he was there.

  I hadn’t even been to a wedding since I was a tiny kid, and many of the friends gathered in the garden had tried to talk me out of it. A couple of frenemies in attendance had decided I was only marrying Adrian because he was the first man who’d ever said he loved me. That one hurt a lot, partly because he really was the first man to say that, but also because I knew how proud they would’ve been of themselves for figuring it out. All of those things were whirring through my mind when a knock on the bedroom door told me it was time for me to walk out into the garden and get married. As I approached the back door of the house I saw my father standing on the other side, and wondered what he was doing there.

  I hadn’t asked him to give me away. It had never come up in conversation and I just assumed I’d walk towards Adrian alone, but there he was, waiting for me. I stopped for a minute, panicked and looked at my girlfriends for help. ‘You’ve got to let him do it,’ the beautiful older sex bomb commanded through gritted teeth. ‘You’ve just got to.’

  So, for the first time since I was about ten, I held out my hand for my Dad and he took it. Together we walked towards Adrian, who was grinning at me like the hilarious drunk spunk he was. When our celebrant Audrey asked Adrian if he took me to be his wife, he simply yelled ‘Woo-hoo!’ and fist-pumped the air like Homer Simpson.

  We were happily married for a very long time after that, across three states, through the ups and downs of showbiz, through sickness, health and unpredictable fortunes. I don’t know what makes a couple inseparable, galvanised against the stresses and pressures of life, but I knew we had it that day in the garden, against all advice and evidence, and I hadn’t a single concern about committing myself in marriage, at 23, to a guy I’d known six months almost to the day.

  THINGS I LEARNT FROM

  PROSTITUTES

  After four whole years on the Melbourne comedy scene, I was not yet a superstar. I wasn’t even an exciting young prospect anymore. Others were wearing that badge by then, and I was jealous as hell of them. The comedy grapevine carried infuriating stories of other people’s successes. This one had been picked up by Token, that one was auditioning for a TV pilot, another was pulling all-nighters on Triple J. I was backstage in grimy pubs, bitching about the lack of talent of those lucky bastards and the outrageous injustice of it all. With no meteoric rise to fame on the horizon, and an increasingly hostile welfare system threatening to take all sorts of measures to get Adrian and I off the dole, I contemplated the unthinkable—to start possibly entertaining the idea of considering getting a job.

  Before I took the courageous step of applying for any positions, or even actively looking around for anything, I canvassed my friends and acquaintances in the hope that I’d be spared full immersion into the ‘straight world’ of early mornings and staff meetings. I actually impressed myself with how successful that approach proved to be.

  Not long after I arrived in Melbourne in 1994, I�
��d become friendly with a lesbian couple who lived in the flat upstairs. Andy and Jackie turned out to be colourful characters—chronic junkies with friends in all sorts of low places. Many’s the night I sat upstairs listening to stories strung around names like Gangitano and Gatto. Stories that sounded far-fetched to me at the time, but went on to win Logies when dramatised as Underbelly some years later.

  Andy jagged a job on reception at a brothel in Port Melbourne. She said she’d heard about it via ‘the jungle drums’ (Andy always had a natty turn of phrase). The great news was that they needed another receptionist and I had an interview if I wanted it. Thus began the steepest learning curve of my life.

  Adrian went absolutely ballistic when I told him. I must admit, I had delivered the news pretty insensitively because I was so excited about making money, but I didn’t expect him to freak out, or to suspect me of impropriety!

  He walked around the flat, shaking his head and chain smoking, screaming questions like, ‘Will you be wearing lingerie? Will you have to watch??’

  The receptionists were required to wear black pants and a black top actually. The girls would never have tolerated a sexy receptionist, and no, I would not be required to watch.

  The positive I took from Adrian’s crazy questions and assumptions was that he had obviously never been inside a brothel in his life. I laughed his panic off, really—such was my confidence in his eventual capitulation to any whimsy I might indulge myself with. In the end it was a phone call to his brother Gav that calmed Adrian’s nerves. I don’t know how he does it, but Gav is often called upon still to counsel Adrian when all else has failed.

  In many ways, prostitutes do fit the stereotypes. Most of them are drug-addicted and damaged, pathetic and desperate, manipulative and malicious. Hookers with hearts of gold are infrequently found—but to be fair, few humans are one-dimensionally wonderful. Prostitutes, like the rest of us, are multifaceted and moody, capable of great generosity and unspeakable unkindness.

  In the end though, prostitutes are just women. (Some were actually born men, but whether they’ve undergone gone full surgical gender reassignment, or are just blokes in drag, they are always referred to within the industry as ‘girls’.)

  They are women who for some reason, through some chain of events, have come to feel as though they have nothing left to give but that which their mama gave them. Many are mothers themselves, of course. They are daughters, wives, neighbours, friends, and like the rest of us, struggle with the demands of being all of those things. Prostitution provides its own demands, naturally, but try explaining that to a prostitute! They see it as the only thing that stands between them and oblivion, and the only thing they can truly rely on. Where else can a single mum with no education, no family and a raging drug habit make enough money in three shifts a week to support it all? Honestly, I still think there must be a better way, and a way that’s not so painful that one needs a raging drug habit just to get through it—but the world would be a very dull place if we all thought the same way, wouldn’t it?

  The only place in the world most of them can sit without secrets is the brothel’s ‘girls’ room’, which is like a staff room, but with more nipples and hidden heroin. They are generally windowless rooms, reeking of cheap perfume, the walls adorned with stern notes from management about skipping shifts and stealing towels, but they’re homely.

  The girls’ room accommodates women from their teens through to their sixties and the dynamics are fairly predictable. The younger girls turn the place upside down within moments of arrival. Clothes and make-up are strewn, music is turned up and bitchy cliques are formed. I’ve seen a head rammed into a locker over a lost G-string. It can get pretty hectic. These girls will score a lot of bookings in their youth, but will blow almost every dollar they make on useless crap and bad boyfriends.

  Those in their late twenties and early thirties are all about the cash. They’re at the intersection where their looks are headed south, driving their fear and greed levels through the mouldy, dripping ceiling. They are bitterly aware of every booking they lose to a younger girl. They talk endlessly and condescendingly about getting out of the industry, they pick dates and deadlines to do so, but they mostly just change their names and move to other brothels. This is also the age group in which the proper junkie begins to emerge. A teenager who finds it easier to cope with prostitution with a little bit of gear on board can be enslaved to it a couple of years later, having to do three or four times as many clients to cover the expense.

  Prostitutes in their forties probably aren’t going to make much money, so those still working by then tend to fall into two categories: the Sunday day-shift mum and the hardest of hard-core junkies. These two women are poles apart.

  The Sunday day-shift mum will mother everyone. She’ll bring treats she’s baked herself, she’ll tidy endlessly and she can be trusted with the phone when the receptionist needs a wee. She’ll have a handful of regular clients, old guys from around the neighbourhood, who know she’s only there on Sundays. She may spend the shift hand-stitching her daughter’s netball skirt between bookings. She’s never going to see another thousand-dollar day, but she’s happy just to supplement her Centrelink payments.

  The hard-core junkie is the beast of the brothel. She is consumed with a daily desperation that knows no respite or conscience. Quite simply, she must walk out the door with a certain amount of money, and as the night wears on, she thinks of more and more sinister methods of finding it. She is ravaged by her lifestyle, so the bookings don’t come easily. She’ll quietly offer all sorts of ‘services’ to the men who come through the door—services that would make the younger ones squeal like the silly girls they are. She watches the clock obsessively, and as it winds on she starts to see the rest of us as opportunities. If we’re lucky she’ll manage to rob a client, or walk out and pull a street job and rob him. If we’re unlucky it’ll be one of us. The most remarkable episode on my watch was when a girl went through the entire process of packing up her stuff, saying her goodbyes and leaving at 3.30 a.m., only to sneak back in and stand behind a curtain in one of the work rooms until the rest of us left at 6 a.m. She then walked back into the reception area and tore the door off the cupboard containing the cash box. The entire episode was captured on a hidden camera, installed by management to entrap a light-fingered receptionist. Quite the den of thieves, that particular place in Caulfield, run by the loveliest lady in the business—a former working girl herself, who really tried to help and empower the girls. She never gave up on them, but I’m afraid I did.

  Girls in their fifties and beyond tend to take on a pretty mellow tone. The junkies are no more, either dead, or toothless zombies working the shadows of the streets. Prostitutes over 50 have often raised and educated clans of children while various dads, new dads and uncles have blown in promising the world, then blown back out again. Those children, with families and lives of their own, have no idea what their mother really sacrificed to make it all happen. These ladies will work a few day shifts a week, as they have nothing to go home for, and don’t even seem bothered if they get a booking or not. They just like being with the girls, in the girls’ room, having a laugh and drinking the free tea. These are the ones you love, so you try with all your might to persuade strange men to have sex with them. Funny old world, isn’t it?

  From my perspective as a receptionist, the girls’ room is where it all happened. The events taking place upstairs in 30, 45 and 60-minute increments were abstract. They were rarely spoken of downstairs, and in my memory the endless parade of men is totally faceless and unremarkable. For me it was all about the wisdom of the girls’ room, which honestly was a surprisingly philosophical environment, although the girls would be the first to scoff at the suggestion. Taking up the world’s oldest profession, identifying oneself as a ‘prostitute’, and all the consequences of that leads most girls to plumb the depths of their own souls and psyches, and in my experience their formidable insights run the gamut from hilarious t
o harrowing.

  It was generally in the girls’ room that I learnt things from prostitutes, and I learnt something from every one of them.

  The first brothel I ever stepped foot in was a transsexual parlour in Bay Street, Port Melbourne. The first real-life prostitute I ever met was a nineteen-year-old boy in a bedazzled G-string. I was sitting in reception awaiting my interview with the owner, a vague little sparrow with a voice like a tin whistle called Felicia. As Felicia pottered around the tiny room preparing herself, out strolled the ever-curious Katrina.

  Katrina was over six feet tall and lanky as hell, with strong, long limbs and a curly mop of blonde hair that fell out in chunks because she bleached and permed it herself in the girls’ room sink. She had full lips, but overdrew them with lipstick until they were visible from the moon. She balanced the lips with spectacular ‘drag eyes’. Now that I think about it, the application of drag eyes was the first thing I learnt from prostitutes, and it was Katrina who gave me my first make-up lesson that very night, though it was far from my last.

  Katrina was definitely the embodiment of the young prostitute. She made quite a bit of money, despite her lack of resemblance to an actual lady. Her clients were generally considered ‘poofters’ by the more feminine trannies, who prided themselves on their ‘straight’ clientele. In any case there was certainly a market for Katrina and she did pretty well. Naturally she spent all her money on useless crap and her idiot boyfriend Tom, who was such an idiot he was in jail, and a lot of the crap she spent her money on was for him. Calvin Klein undies, Gucci aftershave, just the usual necessities for prison life—but true love never did run smooth, and many tears were shed for the love of Tom.