The Pleasure Chest.
In sunny 1995 I worked in a place called The Pleasure Chest in Kings Cross, Sydney. It was billed as an adult entertainment centre, and consisted of a sex shop, porn cinema- that was a gay cruising area, complete with glory holes-, booths that you could put a dollar into to be shown five minutes of porn, other booths that had a small bed with a plastic mattress where you could watch an entire film chosen from the shop for ten dollars and some rooms upstairs that you could rent for thirty minutes for five dollars. These rooms were meant to be for the girls on the street to take their tricks to, but were also the local shooting gallery.

My job consisted of going out for the coffees and beers, delivering boxes of poppers, porn and dildos to other outlets in the city, mopping up the odd bit of piss and knocking on the doors of the rooms upstairs when the half hour was up, then going in with a pair of barbecue tongs to dump the needles and condoms in the bin and occasionally change the sheets.

It was a strange unbelievably seedy place, and a real eye opener for a nineteen year old green behind the ears boy from the west country.

Anyway, on to the story. I was sitting upstairs one day enjoying a sneaky bifter when a girl came out of one of the rooms and asked for an ambulance. I followed her into the room, and saw a bloke laying on the bed, he was white as sheet with blue lips, taking fast short shallow breaths. I ran downstairs and told my boss to call an ambulance as there's a bloke upstairs ODing badly. My reply, 'We don't want the hassle, drag him down the back stairs and dump him in the street.' So, I of course went outside and called an ambulance. As I was walking back to the shop I saw two policemen stood nearby so I also told them what was going on, and suggested they might want to make sure the ambulance could pull up on the busy street. They instead asked me to take them to the sick bloke. I obliged; took them upstairs showed them the bloke, and got the fuck out of dodge never to return.

Quite why my boss thought I would drag near dead men downstairs to dump them in a back alley for six dollars an hour cash in hand I will never know.

To the weirdos and freaks of Kings Cross, I salute you. You live in a world of scum and villainy I find difficult to understand.
( The Awful Puppy Bakery is still bored, Wed 13 Jul 2011, 4:53, 4 replies)

wow.
actually none of this really suprises me. Kings cross on a Saturday night is by far the seediest and most genuinely scary places I've been to.
(augsav forgot about B3ta, Wed 13 Jul 2011, 8:38, closed)

^

( Wet-chinned bag shanker Cannot parse Wogan, Wed 13 Jul 2011, 11:09, closed)

That's pretty fucking grim.
Well done on retaining basic human decency in the midst of pretty fucking grimness.
( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Wed 13 Jul 2011, 10:07, closed)

Bloody hell
*clicks* for possibly the dodgiest thing on here!
( the pink chicken sniffer sniffs pink chickens., Wed 13 Jul 2011, 12:56, closed)