Bangs and Flashes
By: Nick Irving
Tags: Sex Work, Gender, Sex, Memoir

The red light of the brothel in Waterloo Lane cuts through the visual noise of the city even more keenly than the floodlights that illuminate the door next to it. I can see it every time I step out onto my balcony, regardless of the time of day. One of my favourite activities when working from home is to take a spell leaning on the balustrade and watch the perfectly normal errands of daily urban life interact with this door.

Sex work is so taboo that it had never really occurred to me that sex workers and their management need postmen and couriers (why would they get mail and parcels?). Yesterday I watched a man in high-vis eat his lunch from a tuckerbox, sitting on the corrugated iron roof between the airconditioning units he was there to repair. The banality of it all jars so completely with the furtiveness of the men who scurry to the door through the glare of the lamps. The safety of the pool of light serves only to highlight the implicit presence of the dark and urgent attentions of men whose lust has broken the bounds of the contract.

Like all good boundaries, the walls of brothels simultaneously conceal and give shape to the activities that go on within them. Invisibility is key to discretion; the windows are blacked out and the front door bricked up. This ironically makes the brothel stand out as somehow different, abberant. The entryway is in a paved laneway that recalls Collingwood’s industrial past, but the tide of gentrification that transformed my apartment building from a decrepit brewery into a tower of bourgeois shoeboxes infested by aspiring millennials also exposed the brothel to a collective gaze that is far more intense than the floodlights over the entryway.

2018 was my first New Year’s Eve in Melbourne. The pull of my old networks in Sydney is usually too strong to avoid on that night of all nights. The balcony faces east, away from the fireworks, so we watched them on the television while standing on the balcony, waving sparklers, letting off those little gunpowder-powered streamer poppers, and blowing party horns. The fireworks, obscured by the building, washed the walls of the other apartment blocks near us in red and yellow and blue, illuminating the revellers crowding their balconies in waves of colour.

It was a stark reminder of the sublime and beautiful silliness of New Years’ Eve. Here we are, the subjects of an advanced technocratic culture that prides itself on reason and risk management, delighting like children in the spectacle of a fire in the sky that we made ourselves. This noisy and noisome offering — which evades the normal cost/benefit analysis of capitalism in a way seemingly nothing else can — sulphurously marks the endless journey of our fragile cosmic home around a deadly fusion engine in the sky. It reminds us how fleeting and foolish we all are, and we greet it every year with faces upraised and grins of savage joy.

At about ten minutes to twelve, three women in flimsy garments issued giggling from the brothel door, running on bare toes across the flagstones to the junction of Waterloo Lane and Rokeby Street, joining the disparate crowd on the balconies in appreciation of the speckled display above. Over the next few minutes, three more joined them. Perhaps because to be in the street in ones’ underwear, to have already broken the boundary of the taboo, was empowering, we could hear their excited chatter from several floors up. It merged seamlessly with the hubbub of the balconies. I guess we must have stood out to them like they did to us, aimed as we were at the audience rather than the show. Maybe we were just closer. For whatever reason, we wished each other Happy New Year at the top of our lungs, and we were close enough to see the grins on each others’ faces.

The bangs and flashes subsided and people started to return to their shoeboxes. The laneways below us started to return to murky shadow. The six women in the street scrabbled back along Waterloo Lane with the same dainty barefoot gait as before. Just before she disappeared through the door, the last one pulled her top down and granted us a brief viewing of her naked chest, accompanied by a small whoop of delight.

I still don’t quite know what to make of that moment. I am fascinated by the different languages at play there. It seemed to be produced by the fact that New Year’s Eve makes everyone temporarily out of place, and temporarily breaks down the walls that separate us all. It was such a joyous exposure, and it helped to create a fragile and beautiful moment of connection between strangers. But it wasn’t erotic, nor was it transactional, even if it was produced by the transactional erotic logic of her situation in a brothel only moments before. To understand one’s body as something vauable enough to command remuneration for its exposure is an alien experience to me, but oddly enough the fleeting connection fostered by the flashing didn’t feel alien at all. Exposure free from the logic of the market and the profit motive can also signal trust, perhaps.

I don’t often believe in ‘humanity’ — as if there’s one unbroken community that includes all of us, sundered only by greed or fear. I think that flattening out our differences in the name of equality runs the risk of eliding diversity. We all end up poorer in that case. But I am still delighted, two weeks later, by the way that the pop and crackle of fire in the sky and the flashes of light pushing back the darkness brought us all together in a small and fleeting — but nourishing— moment of solidarity.