Working in King’s Cross
In my last few weeks before I head off from Sydney, I am doing everything in my power to make as much money as I can to help me fund my travels. That means selling everything I own (though it really isn’t much to start with to be honest), freelancing like a monster and taking little odds and ends jobs – which means picking up jobs in King’s Cross.
King’s Cross is like the Sydney Circus. It’s an area of the city where all the late night clubs (which now have imposed 1:30 a.m. lockouts and last calls by 3 a.m., which is an absolute joke for a city), strip joints and backpackers either trying to make a buck or stumbling through the streets are located. Granted, there are loads of Sydneysiders who make their way here as well, so it isn’t that it’s super touristy. It’s just a mental house of all forms of living – the drugged, the drunk, the sober, the poor, the rich – everything.
My friend and I worked the Cross last night getting paid 20 dollars an hour to promote a club (please don’t hold it against me), which I found myself dreading as the hours ticked away and my brain turned to putty after an entire afternoon spent doing math (or as Aussies say maths) to work out my budget for traveling.
Working in the Cross actually turned out to be an absurdly entertaining night and in its own stupid way was fun.
It didn’t take more than five minutes of us working in the Cross before we saw someone getting arrested. There are plenty of cops walking through, some with dogs, some are part of the riot squad – it really has earned itself such a bad reputation for violence that it just seemed overrun with law enforcement.
A police dog was scurrying through the crowds to detect drugs, and I watched as he attacked a guy’s crotch, tail wagging and nose getting right up in there. (I still have to write my story about how when I arrived back in Sydney, a police dog sniffed and started barking at my bags when I was trying to go through customs. Let’s just say I didn’t give the immigration officials the right answers because I was certain he was asking me trick questions. Maybe that was what flagged my visa application…)
Anyway, aside from watching a drug bust, the amount of characters out and about were entertaining. Those most commonly asked questions of the night from drunken sweet talkers were:
1. Is your number on this flyer?
2. Will you be there? I’m only going if you’ll be there.
The girls either go nuts with excitement like you’re doling out money and not flyers or look like they have sticks up their asses and pass right by me like I was begging for money. They’re pretty much all half naked and a good amount of them were dressed like they have no true and good friends to tell them that they looked terrible.
The guys are a very different story. Most of them were – by my definition – meatheads/brolic and definitely had nicer waxed eyebrows than I do. (That’s probably because I don’t wax mine.) They get very close and their alcohol-drenched breath rains down on you. They get quite touchy, too, and when they’re British and they’re drunk their words like are just slush (at least to me). They all like to tell you how beautiful you are, give incredibly weird and outright perverted looks that still have my friend and I laughing, and well, some of them are drunk enough to try to kiss you not just once or twice but three times and then maybe come back around the corner to ask you for your number since plan A didn’t work.
Last night, a guy came up to me while I was handing out flyers, and he had remnants of chocolate chip cookies all over his face and caught up in his wiry, pre-pubscent looking beard. In his arm was a family-size bag of Coles (an Aussie supermarket) cookies that he cradled like a newborn.
“Reckon I could go in with my biscuits?” he asked me.
“Obviously. Everyone loves biscuits.”
“Good, ’cause I don’t go anywhere without my fuckin’ biscuits….” I deciphered this through his mouthful of cookies (re: biscuits). “Want a biscuit?”
I also had someone tell me they would love to have sex with me…on stage. This person was a girl.
I had multiple people ask me for drugs, or “eckies (I don’t know how it is spelled)” as it’s called in the UK. One guy was relentless in trying to light his cigarette with the flyers I was holding. That got annoying real fast.
Another guy decided to help my friend promote the club by taking flyers and yelling out to everyone it was a fiver ($5) to get in, which was terribly false. And some girl then decided to give my friend a rose as a proclamation of her love.
I watched as the cops would look girls up and down. One girl walked by in a skin tight blue dress with her boobs pushed up to her chin, but she also looked like she was about 20.
“Oi,” the one cop hollered to his colleague who was only about 3 meters away from him. “The girl in the blue. I am in love.” This was no where near a whisper, but I don’t think he cared.
He was at least in his late 40s.
One kid stopped and talked to me for quite a bit, and he seemed surprisingly sober without looking like he had some help from drugs. He asked me what I was doing in Sydney, and I told him I was a journalist.
“Right – okay then, so if you want to make good money, don’t become a journalist?”
Lesson learned.
Bt whatever. I walked away with money that will pay for my hostels or at least a week’s worth of living and food in Indonesia.
I got my mind on my money and my money on my mind.