Taxi Stand

My first encounter with the Taxi Club in Sydney on the Drag odyssey in 2001. I'm sure it gave Jo back home some amusement to get the lowdown on the place,- Jo, Still in Sydney, and getting up to allsorts. I thought I’d tell you a bit about the Taxi Club. I’ve been there a few times, - it’s just off Taylor Square by the Hotel, at the top of Oxford Street. It was told to me as the place where the Aseatic “trannies” hang out, and where drag-queens go after hours. Well, you know me, I had to go and find out. It’s one of those clubs which never closes and really gets going late, like after midnight. It’s in the Grosvenor, which is this dead ordinary-looking hotel, and I wandered up there one damp warm night while Mardi Gras was still about to happen – the usual party dress, go-girl blonde look with a touch of Asian make-up. It’s also one of those clubs which makes you pretend you’re a member (we’ve all been to them) so you sign in on this little form in duplicate. Once you’re up the stairs you find this place full of poker machines and you think that’s all it’s about, a few punters pressing buttons with a glassy look in their eyes and a side room like a canteen with drinkers talking. After I got myself the usual Southern Comfort I did try playing one of the machines but you know how easily bored I am. Once my dollar’s worth was over, that was it. Luckily the place starts to make sense when you get talking to people. Even if that person is a very pissed older man who asks, “Do you fuck?” before falling off his stool and knocking another feller off his. Well, he was out on his ear. Jo, Australia is amazing – as soon as you’re drunk they refuse to serve you and once you show signs of being wasted they send you on your way (hasn’t happened to me yet, but give it time…!). Anyway the first time I went to the Taxi I just sat for a while looking very Bar Girl and Floozie and men just joined me. First it was shy older Graham, then Mark who was a quirky and funny blue-collar-type drinking “Caucasians” (White Russians), then John, a rather dapper queen working in the city, and you’ve hardly had time to hitch your skirt up and they’ve got into this really intense political discussion and there’s you having to keep them all sweet and not take sides. God, Jo, I know how those geisha earn their money now, and I don’t think I could do it full-time. Mark comes to the Taxi Club because it’s cheap and late and he can relax and talk to people like me, he says. I forgot to say that all the while the Asian girls are wandering around, sitting to talk to men or just talking amongst themselves. Some of them are pretty, some quite tarty but they’re all femme in a casual I’ll-live-My-Life sort of way. I mainly ran across them in the toilets where we get chatting about the beach, the weather, Sydney, London, years of mainly party fun as a trannie in the city, and so on. We don’t talk about operations, breast implants, lipstick (much) or what men want. If we’re in the Taxi Club that goes without saying. And the later it gets more people turn up, like Carmelo, with whom you might service his sex-addiction (and there isn’t much in Carmelo’s brain beyond that, and that includes conversation) down a stair-well on one of the back-alleys or when you realize he’s too whatever to be a wild-man, back in the hotel. Carmelo is Italian/Oz and sticks like chewy once he’s got you in his sights. But then Michelle may turn up, and she’s a U.K. drag-queen traveling around Australia with a friend and she tells you she’s a “lesbian” which is tough in the Taxi Club. But then the drunken dialect-man turns up in his fedora hat and tells Michelle she must come from Hull (which is true) or one of its suburbs like Wigan (which is not!), then knocks over my drink. I try to get a photo but they won’t allow pictures in the Taxi. And so on and so on, until you go home. Another time it was Carmelo again fresh from watching strippers in a club in Marrickville and bringing with him two other Marrickville types, Dave an excavator driver and Norman. Norman is short, chunky and a truck-driver, from the Cook Islands, on a few hours break from driving everywhere around New South Wales. He sings Maori chants in a really strong voice and country songs like “West Virginia” and tells you about the houses he earns, and the hotel in the Cook Islands he has, and his family of 23, and how much money he’s got but doesn’t have time to spend. Then Darren comes over in the same gear he wore for the Mardi Gras Parade which is basically 7-inch heel thigh-boots and sequinned top, and somehow he gets drawn into the talk and offered drinks (you get offered lots in the Taxi and you take all you can get) and when I’m in the toilet he comes after me to tell me Norman was asking how much it would cost him for me to go home with him. “I’d go for $500”, says Darren, “He’s so ugly!” And he wanders off and I avoid Norman’s clutches, though the $500 would have been useful, if he’d gone with it. Anyway Carmelo’s staring again…. On Fridays and Saturdays they have a disco in the upstairs club at the Taxi, after the karaoke is over and those old-type couples who hang around clubs like the Taxi have wandered out and Rex, who’s got family problems but won’t talk about them and says, “This is a desperate place, - without it how would you drag-queens survive?”, has gone off to his problems. Then my ally and alibi against Carmelo is Frank who is sexy, a dancer and ex-stripper who says, “I was in a relationship where it wasn’t appropriate, but the relationship ended so now I’m re-assessing the situation”. In the disco he dances a lot and well, mainly with the sexier Asian girls. There’s a lot of them now, as well as a few Sydney trannies, one with a moustache. The Asian girls are not all glammed up and they aren’t all working or talking to men but they’re dancing like it was their night out and shifting their hips and filling the dance-floor and getting all the attention which is only fair, it’s their hang-out year-in, year-out, except when they get to go to London and decide they like Frenchmen but Australian men are best. So I let them get on with it. Except there’s Brad, who down from the North Coast on building firm business and in the Taxi Club for the first time, plain-spoken, honest and shy, actually, and he takes you back to the Sheraton On The Park where the deluxe room has the view of a stairwell and the champagne in the fridge is actually the usual mini-bar spirits, but he gets into the complimentary dressing gown and lies on the bed and between getting on with it with you and exclaiming about your fabulous sexy looks tells you about his girl-friend and messing about with the neighbour’s son who’s all dressed up in his sister’s stuff, and what he has been doing with his dog, and what he’s like to do with you and a big stallion. Afterwards he’s too exhausted to call that cab he promised you, so you’re out on the street at God knows what time looking for a ride home.. Jo, now you know. Blame it on the Taxi Club. Send me your news, Love Mandy