Free Darlinghurst Road by T.C. Doust

his boss,
the company and everyone else who must be to blame for his
troubles.
    His wife had left him the year before and the
job was all he had apart from the booze. Now that it too was gone,
he fell into a deep despair; he had drunk away everything that he
ever cared about but still he couldn’t stop. In the end, as the
insanity circled, George had fallen so far that he became
unemployed and unemployable, drunk, homeless and derelict, spending
his nights down in the filthy canals of the Port.
    Eventually George discovered AA and as he
sobered up, George took stock of his life and decided to be
proactive. When he tried to talk things over with his wife, she
wanted nothing to do with him. Half joking, he once said “I figured
that if she didn't like me when I was drinking and if she didn't
like me when I was sober, then maybe, she just didn't like me!”
George moved on with his life just as she had and turned his
attention to employment.
    A stubborn man, it rankled his newly regained
pride that he had left his old job under such a cloud and retail
was basically all that he had ever known so George did something
that very few men in his position would do: he went back to the man
who fired him, explained his situation and asked him for a job.
They hired him back as a clerk in the Menswear Department not as a
punishment but because they couldn't trust him. Every employee knew
who he was and George went into that job every day just the same
for reasons known only to him. They never promoted him beyond that
position and George retired as a clerk.
     
    Rose
    Each night the inner city streets around
Kings Cross would be filled with tragedy. When I was younger, these
same streets were filled with the same sad stories but I was far
less aware. As I grew older, I could see their value as fellow
human beings and it mattered to me. I was less inclined to be the
hard company man that I was before.
    Rose was an older Aboriginal woman, probably
late fifties, a widow who had lost her home when she lost her
husband. What happened after that, I don't really know but I do
know that by the time that I met her she was sad, homeless and
addicted to heroin.
    Rose would walk the streets collecting change
from strangers and would bring it in for me to cash out for bills.
I often said no when the homeless would bring in coins because I'd
end up with a drawer full of change but I had a soft spot for Rose
so I'd make an exception. It took me a while to figure out that she
was doing some small time dealing while she was walking around but
I guess that I shouldn't have been surprised. It's a hard addiction
to sustain without a constant source of money and the bigger
dealers work the users like the users work the streets.
     
    Danny
    Danny was a veteran wall boy who had been
selling himself to strangers for over ten years. He was
twenty-three when I met him and a hard drug user. In the trade of
male prostitution around The Cross, Danny was over the hill and for
all his adult life, Kings Cross was the only home that he knew.
Fast running out of options to make his living and more
importantly, to pay for his drugs, Danny fell in with an older man
that was heavily involved in the drug trade. They did some business
together and were soon seen as partners.
    Danny came by the store one night after a
long absence and boasted to me about being a big time dealer. To
him, I guess it was a mark of status after so long at the bottom of
the pile and I could understand that. As is often the way with that
sort of life, Danny's success in the drug business was short lived.
Danny's partner did a runner one day with someone else's drugs and
when they couldn't find him, they went after the soft target that
was Danny. I saw his picture in the paper a few weeks later; his
body had washed up on a Sydney beach, badly beaten and shot in the
head execution style. A violent ending to a sad life and a story
too often told around The Cross.
     
    Gary
    Sometimes really smart people