Priapic, mad, nostalgic, King said in court, ‘They used to love having sex with me . . . I mean, it’s weird, I know, it’s kind of difficult to explain to people, why would a young girl have sex with an old man? I mean, goddammit, I don’t think I would if I was a young girl, but . . .’
7
King’s central defence was that he didn’t know the girls were under the legal age of 18 when he paid them for sex. It wasn’t an argument that went very far.
The cross-examination was fairly routine — except for one moment when prosecutor June Jelas lost her patience, and squashed King like a bug.
She asked him, ‘The reality is you weren’t asking these girls their age, were you?’
King said, ‘You’re out of your mind. Of course I was. It never occurred to me these poor girls could be labelled as prostitutes; what did concern me was the fact that if someone came around searching the place and found girls under 18, I’m going to bloody jail. I come first in this whole situation. I’m no use to anybody if I’m in jail, I’m trying to help a whole bunch of people here and what — I’m going to be disappeared — Jesus, woman—’
Jelas interrupted, ‘Yeah, that’s right, Mr King. You come first, because your first need seems to be having sex with young girls, that’s your big need, isn’t it?’
King said, ‘Look, that’s insulting to me, but it’s more insulting to these girls. They’re not the kind of girls that you can take advantage of.’
Jelas said, ‘But that’s exactly what you were doing, wasn’t it? You know many of them have no home to go, you know most of them have zero money, and here you are saying, “Have sex with me and I’ll give you money.”’
‘No, no . . .’
‘They’re your personal prostitutes, aren’t they?’
‘What happens when you build up a relationship is that they—’
Jelas interrupted, ‘What sort of relationship, Mr King? Let’s talk about it. What sort of relationship? It’s only a sexual relationship.’
King raved, ‘They’re my family, they’re in my care, this idea that somehow I’ve turned this place into a massage parlour where I turn up and have sex with them — it’s bizarre.
‘They may get additional money. I’m more likely to buy someone a cellphone if we’re having an intimate relationship than someone who’s, you know, just getting their basic survival allowance. They get $20 a week minimum. They get $5 every time they come to the door. They need to be able to catch a bus, they’ve got to go home, if they’ve got a home to go to.
‘They’ve got to have money to buy food, if I’m not cooking for them. I try and cook for them cos it saves me money. I’ve got a deep-fryer now. I just throw chips and sausages in there and they love it. I used to melt cheese on things, I could melt cheese on leftover food, cardboard, polyurethane, anything, and they seem to love it . . .’
8
You can view the School of Architecture conference centre at Auckland University as a monument to a sleazebag, or assess it as an attractive example of late-modern design. ‘It’s an illustrious start to someone’s career,’ said Paul Litterick, a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture, who made many and varied approving noises as he conducted a tour of King’s one and only building.
It nestles below the curves of the so-called ‘banana building’ of the school’s design block. A courtyard, with two stately oaks, marks it off as School of Architecture territory, an enclosed space, cloistered. Inside, Litterick liked the light, the spaces, the playful features. There was a spiral staircase winding towards a glass turret, or ‘crystal tower’, as King’s former KRTA colleague Denys Oldham had called it. Litterick noted the use of different textures (fair-faced concrete, smoked glass), and said, ‘The design is very much of its time, but it’s adapted remarkably well.’
Everywhere, King’s hand, his vision, his brief promise. What happened? What madness and collapse brought him to the hell he made for himself inside the house on the hill? A pleasant 10-minute stroll separated the School of Architecture conference centre from his Constitution Hill townhouse; one building had paid for the other, where he created his true masterpiece.
Police photos reveal a house that was no longer a house. King deconstructed it. It was a tip, a cavern — ‘It was kind of a dark place,’ one girl remembered in court. An entire wall in the lounge was covered in tagging. Six generations of tags, of street names, of hearts and arrows and shout-outs, in felt and pen and pencil, the whole monstrous thing like a giant, genuinely shocking canvas, an artwork more savage and primal than anything dreamed up by painter John Reynolds, the espresso sipper of Ponsonby who wisely avoided King all those years at gallery openings. The couch with the stuffing coming out of it, the tarpaulins and mattresses in the back yard — it was so extreme, more genuinely anarchic than anything recorded by the punk bands King was drawn to in the 1970s. It was a lair, with King as its white worm, gorging on child sex. He had no use for civilisation. He was an outsider, a stately ruin. He was Kurtz who had travelled too far into a heart of darkness. He was probably happy. He had company. Girls knew to visit. They arrived in waves. They smoked his pot and scoffed his cheese on toast, they got on their hands and knees, they had somewhere to sleep. ‘Brats,’ he called them in court, indulgently, with something resembling love.
Chapter 7
A naked male riding his bike:
