Content note: sex work, drug addiction, sexual harassment, violence, and murder.
When I returned to New Zealand after living in Canada, I learned that Susan had been murdered. Her naked body had been found propped against a fence in an empty lot, only a few hundred metres from where I had last spoken to her. I had met her when working a temporary job in Christchurch. I left the job after six months, but I have vivid memories from that time.
The job
In the first half of 2004, I moved to Christchurch while looking for a job as a chemist in Canada. I wanted to play a lot of hockey, so I looked for work that would fit around it. I ended up on the graveyard shift at Shell Townhall, a petrol station in the middle of Christchurch’s red-light district and directly across from a hotel where rooms were reportedly sub-rented by the hour.
I had been hired by a man who had somehow built a business out of finding people to work at Shell petrol stations in Christchurch. During training with a group of other would-be Shell petrol station workers, he kept warning me that my job would be different.
He would explain things, but always follow up with, “But Ryan’s job is … a little different.”
He explained that my customers would mostly be prostitutes, pimps, customers of prostitutes, people slowing down to look at the prostitutes, and the occasional drunk person stopping for a pie on the way home.
He was not wrong.
The first customer I met was a prostitute called Tequila. That was not her real name; she did not like revealing her real name publicly. She was sitting behind the counter, waiting for a creepy customer to disappear before she left because she was worried he might be dangerous. The man working the shift before me introduced us.
She called me “newbie,” since I was the new guy. The name stuck long after I had started working there. A year later, I saw her in Christchurch at about ten in the morning, just finishing her shift on a street corner. She saw me and shouted, “HEY NEWBIE!” across the street, then called me over. Having a prostitute call you “newbie” in public was an interesting experience. I assumed anyone overhearing it thought I was a different kind of newbie!
Tequila was always surrounded by a group of young boys. They seemed to enjoy being associated with her, and she was rarely alone. She didn’t need a security guard, as she always had plenty of friends around her. She definitely stood out in the industry there, as she was a very strong-minded woman with a fun personality.
The rest of my first night went exactly as the trainer had predicted. One customer came in, looked at me, and asked, “You are new, would you like to see my anus?”
I declined. He pulled down his pants, spread his cheeks and showed me anyway. I told him to leave, aggressively enough that he decided it was better to go before I threw him out.
On another night, I saw a naked prostitute running and screaming down the road. I wanted to call the police, but several prostitutes and pimps were in the shop and they were extremely opposed to involving the police in anything. It turned out that a customer with a knife was chasing her. The police did arrive, although I suspected they had little interest in dealing with problems connected to the prostitution industry.
I had to repeatedly tell off another colourful street worker whose street name was Candy for doing jobs on the petrol station forecourt. She was tall, had giant boofy blonde hair, and dressed like a caricature of a prostitute. I remember one of her customers came in to the petrol station with a smile on his face afterwards and I cursed at him and told him to piss off. He laughed and said I was just jealous that he’d picked up a hot girl in town while I was stuck working and watching him get some action. I just pointed out that I knew Candy well, and told him to tell her to stop doing jobs on my damned forecourt right in front of customers. He didn’t realise I knew she was a prostitute. This kinda floored me, as out of all the street workers, she was the most obvious. Even her name was straight out of some Hollywood movie.
Prostitution had recently become legal in Christchurch. The women I spoke to were angry about the change. They said that their customers had dried up because many men liked the fact that prostitution had been taboo. Once it was no longer taboo, some of them lost interest. The media was full of stories of underage sex workers. I asked many of the prostitutes about this, and they said that this was a complete fabrication by the media, as any underage workers would be beaten up immediately by other prostitutes, as they would be stealing their customers. I had no way to confirm that, but the prostitutes I talked to about it were convinced that the media were simply making up stories to fit their narrative.
People around the station
Most of the prostitutes were affected by drugs, typically crystal meth, which was commonly called “P” in New Zealand.
I became friendly with one particular prostitute, who came into the shop every night for a Sunny Days steak-and-cheese pie. I asked her why she had chosen her occupation. She said she had once been heavily addicted to drugs, but was now on a methadone program and was proud of the life she had built. She worked four days a week, for about an hour a night, and said that was enough to afford a large house, all the modern conveniences she wanted, and money left over.
We started talking about how many customers she could see in an hour. She said perhaps ten, if they were lined up, although getting them to the meeting point was the difficult part. She claimed she could have sex with a man in under sixty seconds and leave him happy. I didn’t believe her, so she offered to prove it. If she managed it, I would give her a free steak-and-cheese pie.
She said she would have the customer park behind the petrol station. About thirty minutes later, she returned and told me to get my timer ready. She removed all of her clothing aside from her miniskirt, had me call out “1 2 3 GO!”, and then sprinted around the back of the station. Fifty seconds later, she came back with $80 in her hand and a smile on her face. I gave her the pie.
Pimps vs security guards
Although prostitution was legal, pimping was not. The men people referred to as pimps generally described themselves as security guards for the prostitutes. Some of them were actually pimps, while others were literally just working as security guards. Some were interesting to talk to, but they were people you probably should not mess with, and many were very clearly not good people.
One had a shaved head and a swastika tattooed on the side of it. He was proud of it and insisted that he was not a pimp but a security guard who was very good at his job. The women he worked for did not agree. They were mostly annoyed that he kept asking them for free sex.
One day he came in excited because he believed a prostitute had agreed to give him free sex without a condom in exchange for working security. When I told her how excited he was, she laughed and said he owed her a lot of money and was going to pay it back by working for her. She had no intention of giving him what he expected. After his shift, she went home, and he was furious.
He disappeared for a few months. When he returned, he said the police had gotten him into trouble for nothing. His version of events was that he had kicked in the window of a guitar shop to steal guitars, and then the police had tried to start a fight with him. He claimed he had beaten them all up. I suspect that if he had actually beaten the police up, he would have been in prison for longer. He was probably trying to make himself sound like the tough guy.
I had also heard that the man who held my job before me had been beaten in the storeroom by a neo-Nazi security guard. I suspected it was the same person, but I was not about to ask him. He made it very clear that he hated Asian people. My boss said I was safe because I was not Asian. I stopped using the storeroom anyway, which annoyed my boss who insisted it was perfectly safe for me to be back there at night. I don’t regret following my intuition back then.
I met one man who claimed to be helping his girlfriend. They were both addicted to crystal meth, something he admitted was probably not the best idea. He was proud of his job looking after her at night and of being in a relationship with a prostitute. When I questioned that, he looked at me as if I were crazy. He said a prostitute was obviously the best person to be in a relationship with because prostitutes were the professionals of sex. He looked angry when I suggested this was a strange attitude, so I backed off. He liked beating people up, and I did not want to become one of his victims. His girlfriend was friendly, and their addiction seemed to be under better control than some of the others. When people were too far into their addictions, it was difficult to have a conversation with them.
A very bad idea
I also had a conversation with him about how he had stolen safes from shops. He said it was a great way to make money. I pointed out that it would be pretty hard to steal the safe from our service station because it was bolted to the floor. He said, “No, it won’t be,” but I insisted. He pushed back, saying that was unlikely, so I said, “Come take a look.”
I thought I should actually check before letting him see it. While he was still outside my view, I reached down and lifted the safe. It came straight off the floor. I then backtracked and told him that showing him the safe was actually a really bad idea. I pointed out the camera above me and said I might get in trouble for letting customers behind the counter. It was a stupid thing to demonstrate to someone I knew was a thief. I had almost shown him where the safe was and how easy it was to steal. I was still amazed that the safe was left full of cash sitting there without securing it properly.
Susan
Some of the stories were not funny at all.
Susan was a very kind young woman who often came in between jobs. She told me she had moved from Auckland to Christchurch to attend university and wanted to prove what she was capable of. She told me she hadn’t heard from her family in a long time, which she seemed quite sad about.
She told me that she had started taking drugs at university to help with her grades. At first, they helped, but later, they seemed to make it worse. She began prostituting herself while at university as she thought that more drugs would help and she didn’t have the money to pay for them otherwise. Next thing, she said she had to drop out of university because she was failing. She planned to just take a semester off, but was really sad that it had been multiple years and she still hadn’t made it back to complete her degree.
At the time, she was living with her drug dealer. She was afraid of him and wanted to leave.
That was when I met a retired taxi driver who liked driving around at night to see what was happening in the area. He seemed friendly enough. When I asked why he was always in the area, he said he was worried about the prostitutes and liked to make sure they were okay. That seemed odd, but he was retired and I guess he had nothing better to do with his time.
He told me that Susan was in a terrible situation and that he was trying to help her. A few days later, he said she had been staying at his place to get away from her drug dealer. It seemed odd to me, but he insisted that he genuinely wanted to help.
I was too naive to understand what was happening. When I spoke to Susan, she was terrified. She had left the drug dealer’s house, but still had to return there sometimes. I said that the taxi driver’s place must be better, but she said she did not know which situation was worse.
She told me that he made her sleep in his bed, slept naked, and sometimes pulled her underwear off while she was asleep. She began going to bed fully clothed, which he disliked. He also gave her free rides but would take her the wrong way, expose himself, and refuse to take her where she wanted to go unless she performed sex acts.
The other prostitutes called him creepy and wanted nothing to do with him. Susan also told me that he had a large chest freezer, but that she was too afraid to open it because she feared it might contain the bodies of prostitutes. That was a fear, not something I knew to be true.
I told her she should leave his house. She said she had nowhere else to go. All of her money was going towards drugs, and she could not afford rent. I felt sorry for her, but I did not know how to help.
Leaving Christchurch
After six months, I left Christchurch and moved to Calgary. My life in Canada was much less crazy.
When I returned to New Zealand, I found out that Susan had been murdered. News reports referred to her as “Ritalin Sue.” I had always thought she was addicted to morphine, but in retrospect I may have misunderstood what she had been taking.
A photograph taken of her by a security cam just before her death, is exactly how I remember her. She was wearing the clothes she wore for work, the clothes she often wore when she came into the petrol station to say hello, sit between jobs, or get something to eat before continuing her night.
That is how I remember Susan: not as the name used in the news, and not only as the frightened young woman trapped between a drug dealer and a man who claimed to be helping her, but as someone who had once come to Christchurch hoping to go to university and build a different life. She was the kindest person I had met on that job. Others I met were super interesting; most of them were complete arseholes I hope to never see again. Unfortunately, the nicest person I met was the one who met the worst fate.