Hunting the Famous The Sex Shop Era

Image from Google Search courtesy Sydney Morning Herald

Back in the sex shop, on some days, if there weren't any customers, I would sit on the steps out the front of the shop and gaze mournfully at the normal world passing by on Oxford Street; the young business executives in their flash cars, smiles plastered across their healthy, happy faces.

The grimy, dark pavement took up more and more of my field of vision.

“A nice guy in a hostile universe,” was how I thought of my predicament, the swirling thoughts barely keeping insanity at bay.

I tried to do the right thing. I tried to keep true to some creative ideal, to be a decent person. To celebrate, promote, live the ideals of social justice. But just beyond my peripheral vision was an evil drift of dark grays and malicious spirits, always ready to sweep consciousness away. The only thing that kept the voices at bay was alcohol; and lots of it.

“Nice guy, pity he drinks so much,” came one of the comments cutting through, but it was too late to be saved. I knew my destiny was a sad and dangerous one. I knew no human could survive this level of stress for long. I knew that here, at the bottom of the mercury seas, life would be short and flickering, an intelligence dying long before it had a chance to flower.

There was no way out, of that I had been convinced for a very long time. They might as well have been a different species, those young happy people driving by on Oxford Street, for all the chance I had of being like them.

I sucked on a cigarette, which even then was becoming unfashionable, and cared no longer what I looked like or what happened.

All I could think of on a daily basis was how to get enough money to relieve the pain.

I continued to drown myself in the crowds each evening, seeking the click which went off in my head somewhere between two and three in the early morning bars – for I knew that from then on I would remember nothing, forget, at last, everything.

Already, in my late twenties, older than I had ever wanted or expected to be, these days I was no longer waking up in the beds of total strangers whenever I went out. No longer having a mutual laugh with whoever’s bed I was in before stumbling into the shattering light of some suburb I had never heard of.

These were the days when I found myself sitting on the outskirts watching everybody else couple in the joys of transitory love. And often enough watching the sunrise across the harbour from the roof of my favorite apartment block; watching through their kitchen windows other people getting ready for their working days, observing with curiosity their normal, well-adjusted lives and morning routines.

I still spent a lot of time on bar stools watching tides of people wash in and out. Everything I had run on for decades had stopped working. No amount of alcohol could drown the pain any more. I had no idea where to go or what to do next. Summer sadness replaced summer love, and the respect people had once shown for my writing talents fell away.

There was no way back. Time and again I dreamt of the death that awaited me in Belmore Park, where so many others of the city’s alcoholics had died, located only a short distance from the newspaper offices where I spent so many years of my working life. I dreamt of the Mission Beat man approaching with his usual cup of hot tea and a kind word for those sleeping rough, but this time round there would be no response. My spirit was already climbing up the sides of the surrounding skyscrapers, free at last, returning to juvenile dreams when I floated high above the suburbs, convinced I could fly, the world a future full of hope, excitement and yet unrealized dreams.

One day after I had been awake for ten days I decided it would be a good idea to take a couple of tabs of LSD and go out to a gay sauna.

With a towel wrapped around me, I could hear every rustle of every single rat within a five mile radius.

I could hear the sad gasps through the thin partitions as the desperate climaxed together.

Water dripped everywhere.

A thin, sad, already diseased man paraded in the communal shower, the dark blotches of Kaposi Sarcoma, one of the first and most obvious signs of AIDS, already prominent. Never say die, his sad eyes said, but die he would and soon enough.

When I got to the sex shop the next morning I was not functioning well.

I unlocked the grill and ran up the steep stairs to turn off the alarm in the requisite 30 seconds.

As I did so, I jumped in fright as a man appeared directly behind me.

He apologised for startling me and said he was just on his way to the airport to go back to his home in New Guinea and wanted a dildo, could I recommend one?

Having never used any such thing I simply had no idea and said so. I was so far gone I could barely see my way through the red gloom to the counter.

Sex shops are usually dark and shabby. The owners find if they try and renovate them the sales go down. People want to feel dirty.

The man fussed and fiddled over which dildo he wanted, finally picking some enormous black thing.

Beyond the beyond, I had to get him to help me work the card machine as he paid for it.

Charmed by my apparent dizzy incompetence he happily obliged and said he was sorry he had to rush off to the airport.

The man cheerfully waved the giant dildo in the air as he left, declaring, “I’ll think of you when I use it.”

Of course, as always, there was a schizophrenic side to the sex shop era; and in fact parts of life were actually going quite well.

One of my more regular sleeping buddies was very excited by the idea I was now working in a sex shop; and would often come around for some entertainment. He loved the risqué nature of making out between customers in the flimsy booths and labyrinths at the back of the shop.

“Very therapeutic,” was the way I always described our physical relationship.

As for the endless magazine articles I was writing at the time; well at least they kept on coming. And sooner or later, the magazines kept on paying.

It was also in the dissolving months after Martin that I took to attending and recording an event called Writers In The Park, held at the Harold Park Hotel in Glebe, opposite the greyhound race course.

Thus it was that I got to know, at least in a passing way, many of the era’s contemporary writers; some of them successful, many not. In Australia very few authors actually make a living wage from writing.

A particular figure on the other side of the law, the less said about him the better, thought nothing of buying me a video camera; and each week I would record the events at the Harold Park in full; from the open section where anyone could read at the beginning and end of each evening to our many special guests.

“Sleep, sleep, sleep,” went one poet one night, when the entire room burst into laughter at the sight of me having nodded off on top of the video recorder.

After a protracted dispute over who actually owned the tapes, I sold them to the NSW State Library for a reasonable sum.

I also ended up writing the Introduction for a book called Writers In The Park, which of course like any effort by a collective took months of debate, prevarication and confusion.

My friendship with David Malouf, Australia’s most second highly regarded living writer before Patrick White died, helped me to score him as one of the most prestigious guests Writers in the Park had ever had. His appearance amongst the ragbag collection of aspiring poets and obscure academic authors added to the prestige of the often struggling enterprise.

Oddly, it was while living in London that I met David.

At first he was just another in the queue of authors I was interviewing in an attempt to cobble together a living.

While I particularly loved his book An Imaginary Life, which tells the story of the Roman poet Ovid during exile, Malouf had just written a novel more in the Australian vein called Harland’s Half Acre.

Malouf had a house in Italy, and there was talk of Martin and I coming to visit, but it never happened.

Nonetheless we struck up a friendship which extended over many years.

David was ever the gentleman, the courteous, erudite scholar, as much an academic as an author. He was perfectly at home in the Great Hall of Sydney University, where as a reporter I was once sent to cover his address to that year’s graduates, all about the promise of The Great World, to quote the title of one of his books, and the bright futures the students faced, a lifetime of learning.

We shook each other’s hands affably afterwards, but by then we had known each other a long time.

He was always very supportive of my efforts to write, including the novel I churned out in London based around my experiences in Kings Cross as a young man.

I gave it to him to read; and he made various suggestions; but with so much else going on at the time I never did rewrite the book which had taken so much effort.

I guess like most young authors, I just wanted to be told I was brilliant, the book was a masterpiece and to whistle on to the best seller lists.

While our London interview was formal enough, David told me where he lived in Sydney and although I lost the address, by dint of knocking on a couple of doors soon tracked him down.

There weren't too many authors of his stature living in Sydney’s inner-Western suburb of Chippendale.

When your own life is not going well, association with the famous gives you some sort of boost, credibility or affirmation; and our friendship certainly spanned some of these periods.

So much that had seemed like promise had turned to ashes.

People were starting to die of AIDS.

The wild lifestyles my friends and companions had lived as young men turned out, much to our surprise, to be unsustainable. The grandeur of the artistic paths we all thought we were embarked upon and the fame, money and applause that would automatically follow never eventuated.

I was now in my thirties and the relationship which had spanned the years from 24 to 33 was nothing but a memory; or sometimes a clash. I tried to run Martin over in my car one day. On another occasion I slammed the door after visiting him at a house he was sharing with a mutual friend so hard I broke a Chinese antique umbrella stand worth some thousands of dollars. Then again, a few months after we separated we ran into each other at a party; and I promptly dragged him off into a spare bedroom where we remembered the fun we had once had together.

Time cures many things. Decades later, our lives having taken very different courses, but we both remembered the times we shared together with great fondness. Part of this is no doubt euphoric recall, to which I am particularly prone, part of it the fact that while in our youth life and love seems boundless, in fact there are very few people in our lives who we truly love, who truly change the course of our thinking and our emotional life.

I took to popping by David Malouf’s house unannounced whenever I was in the Chippendale area, or after I started work in the nearby offices of the Sydney Morning Herald, sometimes more frequently.

There was something sacred about the peace of his house; something I aspired to. Partly it was the feeling that great artistic works, pure in their beauty and intensity, were being created in his study upstairs.

And as well, I suppose it was all the books that lined his bookshelves and which he appeared to have actually read. The immensely erudite essays Malouf would write for learned journals in between his books showed off his broad ranging education. And on top of all this enviable cultural air, Malouf  was one of those people who had finely developed the art of conversation.

He was entertaining company and a perfect host.

Being a journalist concerned with the daily mayhem of the suburbs and the broader world, I sometimes wondered why David’s books, as beautifully crafted as they were, had so little contemporary resonance.

One of his quotes about being a writer explained it thus: "I totally reject the idea of being representative in any way. This whole idea of role models. It's a terrible idea. I don't like the idea of being some kind of representative consciousness of the country. You do what you do, the way you do it, out of a kind of necessity. I can't see how that would be useful to anyone else.”

David Malouf certainly didn’t see it as his role to champion any causes, except for that of Australian literary and the imaginary life. He was close to some of the senior figures of the political left but largely apolitical in his public pronouncements.

Our spasmodic friendship spanned the years but eventually petered out as our lives took different courses.

“You’re very versatile,” he once commented when I climbed into bed with him one afternoon.

I was going out with a woman Cara MacDougal at the time. She was acting as my champion and supporter in getting me onto the staff of The Sydney Morning Herald. At the time her support made all the difference.

By the time I did actually arrive, through a ragged series of events in the post-Martin era, on the doorsteps, or loading docks, of The Sydney Morning Herald I didn't, in my heart of hearts, actually believe my determination to live by the typewriter would succeed.

But Cara, who was working as a housing officer for people on welfare, helped fuel me up with enough social justice stories to attract attention.

At the time I was taking my own photographs, pictures of single mothers who had just been evicted from their homes, their children’s possessions strewn down the narrow concrete walks of their bleak apartment blocks.

Somehow, out of sheer persistence and the kindness of strangers, I began getting stories published in the city’s finest newspaper; and to score reporting shifts.

Although I had spent several months perfecting the art of the downward spiral, in my first approaches to the SMH I used an old and often successful line, “I’ve just got back from overseas and I’m looking for work”.

Just as in former years when an editor on the Review section of The Australian Financial Review had taken a liking to me and painstakingly taught me how to write for newspapers, so this time round one of the editors of the Saturday feature section of The Sydney Morning Herald, a reformed alcoholic, also went out of his way to help.

Something connected between us.

Whatever the reason, this man, Thomas Liddle, after giving me a string of demanding feature assignments, took it on himself to recommend me to the editors. I would never have gotten the job without him.

And thus I began to do my first casual news reporting shifts.

In those days, when you were out in the news cars, the journalist was expected to be the boss and the driver and photographer to follow your lead.

These days there is no greater offence you can commit than to refer to “my photographer”.

I still remember the first time I had to radio into the news desk.

I didn’t know which button to press on the microphone; and my inexperience was painfully obvious.

My amateurishness and embarrassment didn’t last.

It was my preparedness to work Sundays that finally threw me into the mainstream.

After all, at that stage of my life, disoriented and sad following separation, there weren’t any squabbling children or longing boyfriends at home, no picnics with friends. My arms were bruised and the flat mates barely tolerating my behaviour. I had won and lost so many times, I already felt old.

I didn’t much care how I spent the days.

Sooner or later the paper’s hierarchy noticed that I kept getting a run on Mondays, the paper wasn't getting sued and the stories weren't too badly written.

My first front page would never normally have made it to Page Zed, much less the front. For months, poverty stricken and attempting to stabilise my life, I had kept up the casual shifts.

In those days, prior to so much advertising drifting to the internet, there were always a lot of news pages to fill and a scrabbling desperation to get enough stories for the next day. In a city the size of Sydney, there wasn’t always that much going on.

“There's a register for women in unorthodox jobs,” the chief-of-staff said. “Their funding has run out and they're whinging for more. These people always want more taxpayer’s money, they can't possibly stand on their own two feet.

“Anyway, we're desperate for picture stories tomorrow, see what you can get. Try and find some cute young woman carpenter, covered in saw dust, or a mechanic, grease streaking her face, dribbling down her breasts. Just make sure they're cute, we don't want some bull dyke.”

So I headed off to the meeting in inner-city Surrey Hills with Steve Christo, the most foul-mouthed of all the SMH photographers. Like an early Chef Ramsey, he found it impossible to utter a sentence without using the “f” word.

Soon enough we found ourselves sitting in the middle of a room jam packed full of often rather butch looking women; we were virtually the only men. I tried to feel comfortable, nothing to it, I'm a progressive kind of guy, go girls, all of that. I had done women's studies at university in the seventies. I thought of myself as a SNAG, a sensitive, new age guy, at the cutting edge of gender transformation.

There was, in that crowded room in the mid-1980s, nowhere to sit. The air was full of the self-righteous anger of 300 or more women crammed into a tiny space. Eventually they cleared a spot for us, we were after all The Sydney Morning Herald, and we sat cross-legged on the floor; completely surrounded.

We were late, as the SMH of those days almost invariably was, a sense of the urgency of news yet to overtake the venerable institution, and a woman was up the front pounding on about the injustice of the government's failure to continue to fund their directory of women in un-orthodox jobs. This was being portrayed as not just a slight against all working women, but yet another blow by a patriarchy determined to keep the sisters in the kitchen.

The 1980s was the peak of male-bashing feminism, of serious debate about whether all men were rapists and bashers, whether lipstick was self-repression, of women's collectives, power suits and committed separatists, of whether true feminist liberation could be achieved without the elimination of all men from women’s lives.

"There's no f’n picture here," Steve whispered, loud enough for a dozen of the sisterhood to overhear. "Just look at them. None of them make a f’n picture mate. I'm out of here. I'm going to find something else.”"I've got to stay and listen," I whispered back.

"Well I don't, I'm f’n gone," Steve said, standing up and elbowing his way through the crowd of hostile women.

I sat there, very uncomfortably, knowing full well the women around me had heard every last word Steve had said.

As representatives of The Sydney Morning Herald we were one of their few chances to put any pressure at all on the government and to thereby save their project. They had to bide their tongues.

On and on the speakers went. In those days, before my head had cleared, I took copious notes on everything, the colour of the walls, everything that was said, spontaneous thoughts on the atmosphere. I was always afraid I would forget something important. Hadn't black spots begun to spread in the brain?

By the time I got back to the office that day I had interviewed a woman carpenter, plumber and electrician as well as the organisers. I wrote up the story on the antiquated computer system, made it as interesting as possible, assuming as my fingers rattled across the keyboard that the story would never get a run.

It might have been important to the people involved, but a directory of women in unorthodox jobs wasn't earth shattering. Journalists are always being targeted by groups whose funding has run out; noble cause after noble cause.

Next day the story was on the front page, my very first front page story.

It was the picture that did it. I learnt forever the value of a good photograph in dragging a story onto the front; or higher in the "book" as the sections are known. In fact this is a principle that applies well to The Sydney Morning Herald; but not to The Australian, where the story is seen as all important and the photograph as secondary.

But that day a large photograph, run wide and deep, of a drop dead gorgeous young woman, maybe 23, adorned the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald.

She was carrying a ladder, with the Opera House in the background, her white overalls stained delicately with paint. The upper flaps of her overalls were just loose enough to provoke the imagination of males around the city. “Can I help you carry that?” a hundred thousand voices asked as their minds licked off the delicate traces of labor, the glorious smell of sweat.

I never got a thank you from the organisers of the Women in Unorthodox Jobs Directory. But later that same day the Chief of Staff leant across the desk and shook my hand. “Congratulations,” he said.“You've got the job.”

I was a full time journalist on the best paper in the country, not just someone doing casual shifts. It was the proudest day of my life.

And how celebrated The Sydney Morning Herald was in those days!

In its power, status and tight hold on the city's imagination, the paper was a revered institution without peer. Just getting a letter onto the letters page of The Sydney Morning Herald was a major feat.

It’s hard to imagine now, when newspapers are no longer admired as bastions of truth representing the highest ideals of the community, just how admired the SMH was.

Sydney back then was in world terms a tiny city of little more than two million people in a far off place, in a country of barely 15 million people. At the top end of the market Sydney was basically a one newspaper town – and now I worked for it.