Chopper Unchopped (196 page)

We walked back to the hotel and dozed a bit before room service brought up our breakfast. Warm ham, warm bacon, warm snags, warm tomato, warm eggs, toast and hot coffee. The coffee was good. The food wasn’t as good as a Pentridge Prison breakfast on Christmas Day. Especially when I took all the sausages one time. Ha, ha.

All in all, the bloody Meridien needs to lower its prices and lift its game. Also I am told a writer isn’t a real writer till he gets to slag off at least one five-star hotel and restaurant. I couldn’t even be bothered to pinch the towels.

We returned to Tasmania and, as far as I am concerned I won’t leave the island again unless money is involved, and lots of it.

Postscript to the Polish screw from Pentridge. Monique was a bloody nice kid, a little on the wild side and just a touch crazy but, as I remember, so were you. And no, mate, in case you’re wondering, everything in this story is true. I did not plonk your daughter, I maintained my gentleman status at all times. You were kind to me in there, mate, and many years later I returned the favour. We’re even — via con Dios Amigo.

DON’T ever go shopping with your wife. I needed some new underpants. I’m now tipping the scales at a dainty eighteen stone. I waited outside the store trying to act debonair and Mary-Ann selected several pair of extra extra large jockey type underpants.

The sales girl and her various saleslady friends gathered as well as lady shoppers and held the offending garments up for inspection. Other ladies came over and inspected the underwear then Mary-Ann called me over. I had to walk through a small army of smiling girls, mothers, shoppers and sales ladies while the jumbo mansize lingerie was held up against my embarrassed person for further inspection. Ladies, girls, onlookers came from everywhere. Chopper Read was buying underpants. This was a must see moment.

‘These ones are nice,’ said one lady, holding a pair of gentleman’s bikini briefs up against me.

A small girl had run off to get some boxer shorts. Should I take the Bonds Jockeys or the Calvin Klein, as underpants were thrust at me and held up against me by various interested ladies.

I just want a couple of sets of underpants,’ I said. ‘Big ones.’ I was so embarrassed I would have bought anything to get out of there.

I turned and walked out, waiting in the street outside. Mary-Ann followed along having purchased two pairs of jumbo jockey shorts that could have doubled as circus tents. ‘Don’t take me shopping with you again,’ I said. ‘In future just get me big underpants, socks and t-shirts.’

I could not believe what she had just put me through. And I thought prison was bad.

OUR dog Little Bill went missing a while ago. Mary-Ann was in tears of great panic and concern. You would have thought he was one of the Beaumonts.

We drove all over the farm looking for Little Bill, then we went back home and while I continued to look Mary-Ann rang some psychic hotline and they told her the dog was down the main road a good mile from the house, so down we went. No little Bill to be seen.

By this time Mary-Ann was beside herself, and home we went again. Mary-Ann made another phone call while I went walking around yelling, ‘Billy, Billy’. I was taking the scientific approach.

The psychic told her the dog would be found within half an hour near water so I went down to the dam yelling ‘Billy, Billy’ and thinking about drowning a psychic who charge about ten bucks a second to talk shit.

Then Mary-Ann yelled out ‘I found him’. The dog had been locked in the cupboard and was found standing in a puddle of his own piss. ‘The psychic lady said he’d be found near water’ said Mary-Ann. And they call me a mentally-ill crim.

I tell this yarn while making no remark whatsoever re the mental health of either my darling wife or the lady psychic. I have to sneak away to write my book either late at night or early morning as living on a farm with farm duties and animals demanding attention, not to mention a wife who as sure as God made little green apples will call me after about ten minutes to attend to something or the other.

She once called me away from my writing to come and see the way Poop Foot our cat was sitting. Do all great writers have to put up with this? No wonder Hemingway topped himself. At least he had a double barrel shotgun to do it with.

THE parting of the ways has finally come for me and my dear old dad. I love my dad and I always will but his state of mind can no longer be tolerated.

‘What that bastard needs, son, is a shot in the skull.’ These are the words of fatherly advice I was always given in relation to any person that fell foul of my father and for a gunman fresh out of prison living with a father who actively encourages his son to take up arms against enemies real or imagined is not a mentally, emotionally or physically healthy state of affairs.

I am just about to become a dad myself as I write, so I spend more and more time thinking about it. I cannot promise to be the perfect father, but I know I will never encourage my boy to become a one-man urban army.

I have my ‘unborn’ son to consider. Little Charlie. When I told my dad of the news of Mary-Ann’s pregnancy he rang the local newspaper. You see, my dad calls me ‘Chopper’, and sees himself as the father of a notorious Melbourne gunman. This is his status, this is how he sees himself. I no longer see myself as a notorious Melbourne gunman criminal or anything. I have retired, but my father cannot see it. Most fathers would be distressed that their only son turned out to be a gunnie, but my dad wears it as a badge of honour.

I am now a bloke that used to be a once was. I am trying my best to be something different and having a dad who won’t let go of the old me can only end in grief. I am a farmer now, a middle aged, fat farmer — and I like it. I’m the fat bloke in the white t-shirt, as the lady in the pub so correctly put it. But to my dad I will always be the gunnie, Chopper Read. I have grown up but he won’t, which is a bit of a worry when you’re in your seventies.

I haven’t spoken to my father in well over six months. He has contacted everyone from the Minister of Police to Dave the Jew trying to get them to make me contact him.

I haven’t seen Dave the Jew for the same reason. I love Dave and I always will but Dave only wants me to return to Melbourne and take up arms against enemies real and imagined.

Both Dad and Dave want me to live the legend, but I no longer wish to live that life. I did my twenty three years in prison. Dave the Jew should have been beside me, but I kept my mouth shut. All bills paid, Dave, and you too, dad.

I’m sorry, pop, but I’ve got my own little family to think about now. Chopper Read has left the stage and is just sitting in a chicken shed playing cards with Elvis. No guns allowed.

TWO young film makers, Frank Mirowski and Jason Carter, want to do a documentary on me, interviewed by Miss Nude Australia Alison Downes as per usual. I was pissed and told a heap of lies, but it’s all good footage I’m sure.

Now they want me to do a keep fit exercise video with ‘Candy’ Alison doing all the workout stuff wearing next to nothing while I sit by eating a pizza, hold the anchovies. Sounds good to me.

I took ‘Candy’ Alison along with me to meet a media type person at the Wrest Point Casino. She was all teeth, tits and legs, but a bit nervous.

‘What will I say to him?’ asked Alison.

‘Tell him that you have never met a guy you couldn’t deep throat,’ I replied.

Alison nodded in a serious manner.

I was kidding. I meant it was a joke, a laugh, I was having a giggle, not a gargle. Alison walks up shakes his hand and tells him right out that she has never met a guy she couldn’t deep throat.

The article was never printed in the national magazine. I wonder why. But the editor still rings me to ask after Alison’s well being. Some people can take a joke, some people can’t and some people shouldn’t be joked with at all. So much for Australian men’s magazines. And they say people buy them for the articles.

Now, Alison was just joking, for underneath it all she is quite prim and proper. The editor of the major men’s magazine turns out to be a politically correct pansy. I mean the bloke nearly wet his pants with embarrassment … or something like that.

‘Was it something I said?’ asked Alison as I sent her home in a taxi. She really is quite innocent … if you say that about a girl who spends her working days in G-string sticking her bottom in other people’s business.

ONE of my problems in writing a book at home is that I often find my wife Mary-Ann in an ill mood. Pregnant women are a beautiful thing, but you could get whip-lash trying to keep up with the mood swings.

Sadly, when she should be concentrating on sleeping and getting bigger with our unborn son she decides to become a part-time literary critic.

I find that Mary-Ann has tip-toed in to have a sneaky read of what I have just written. This is not good. I have written some fairly hurtful things about various murderers, police, psychopaths and some who are all three (sorry, Denis), and have never had anything to worry about until I saw the look on my wife’s face after she (without invitation) had a speed read through the manuscript.

Naturally, any comedy relating to my wife or mention of another female in sexual or comic tones is greeted with a certain frost. ‘What’s wrong, bubby?’ I ask in a pathetic attempt to suck-up. ‘Nothing,’ is the cool reply through clenched teeth. I then look and sure enough my pad and pen have been slightly moved.

‘Have you been reading my book?’ I ask.

‘No, why would I want to read it,’ comes an ice-like reply.

I’ve come to realise that a married man takes his life in his hands page by page when writing a book at home. It’s not easy work. Try it if you don’t believe me. No wonder some authors go to garrets to punch out a good yarn — or they’d be punching on with their wives.

It ain’t easy to write a best seller with the missus looking over the shoulder after she’s done the washing up.

My books have always been written taking the mood of others into consideration with each and every story involving a certain personal risk. There’s the risk of offending either the person you are writing about or the person reading it. Oh well, play on. But just think about the sacrifices I make so that you can have a chuckle.

I CREATED a storm with my first book
Chopper: From the Inside
(you didn’t know I could write in italics, did, you?) I told a lot of hard-to-believe true yarns and told stories about a lot of hard-to-believe real life people. A lot of the men I named in my first book never lived to read my second — so, too, with the third and again with the fourth.

There are still a lot of blokes I’d love to write about, but only after they are dead. Playing with words to avoid a lawsuit isn’t my cup of tea, but I’m sure everyone I want to die will die in time. Don’t ask me why.

As I sit and write this a large black spider walks across the table. It’s been raining outside. The spiders around here come inside when the weather gets bad. We even get spider webs inside the car. I moved a few books and so on and got up to kill it, but it vanished among my papers. My war with spiders started in prison, but I’ve now given up, so if they leave me alone I’ll leave them alone. This is my new philosophy on hairy, disgusting, dangerous creatures, including former prison mates.

I hope this particular spider moves along as I recognise him as a venomous dangerous type bastard. It’s quite unnerving so I will put my pen down and move along hoping that tomorrow he too has moved along via con dios. I’ll make a deal, he doesn’t try to bite me and I won’t try to bite him. Seems fair to me.

I killed the spider. He walked right across the page. Ghandi may have shooed him away, but bugger that. I don’t wear a turban and I don’t drink my own piss in the morning.

I did not want to write about the joys of living with a pregnant woman as any man reading this who has had to live with a pregnant woman knows they get sick in the morning and we feel sick for the rest of the day. It is a delight indeed. The mood swings from happiness to tears.

I can cope with the ‘don’t come near me, it’s all your fault that I’m fat and getting fatter,’ and the ‘I hate you, get out of the house,’ the fits of rage and jealousy, temper, then the need to move furniture, the need to spend money on this, that and the other, the mental and emotional spin outs and flip outs, the fear and panic fits, then the love and happiness, then the taking every word you say apart and asking you what you really meant, then the what if the baby is born deaf, blind, deformed, dead? The SIDS, cot death, horror stories told to her by every woman who ever gave birth.

In between there is a lot of normality and love, but when the mood swings hit they hit like Frankie Waghorn, but with less warning. Pregnant ladies are, to say the least, unpredictable.

Even with cyclones there is normally a warning. Birds chirp before the rain, the sirens go off before the bombs drop, police sometimes say ‘drop the gun’ before they shoot you, although in Melbourne they mostly say it after. But when a woman is up the duff there is no warning when the wind is about to change.

One minute they are trying to lift something ten men would have trouble with, next minute they are lounged in a chair asking you to clean out the bird cage because she simply can’t move.

Then there’s the sleeping — or lack of it — and the getting up twenty times a night to go to the toilet. One minute life is dull and boring, next minute we are going out too much. It’s a seesaw roller coaster ride of pure emotion.

You can imagine I have learnt how to deal with the mentally unwell and violent types in prison but nothing prepares you for the pregnant woman.

I’ve got nothing to wear, she says suddenly, so new clothes bought and three weeks later there’s complaints of only having the same clothes to wear. Then she’s offering me something to eat, and taking offence when I say no. The point being that if I eat then she can eat too.

Living with a pregnant woman? It has to be said it’s like living with a sometimes friendly mental patient.

Of course, when this is read after the baby arrives all will be denied but I’ve spoken to other men who have lived with the Great Pregnant Emotional Monster and all the stories are basically the same. I’ve listed only a few, the list of mental and emotional mood swings is psychologically unbelievable.

I love you, I hate you, what do you want for breakfast, get out of the house and never come back, do you think a blue or red rug for the hallway, all within an hour of getting out of bed. Then the day begins.

Holy shit, I will no doubt regret writing this but I believe it needs to be said.

Pregnancy involves hard labour for more than one person believe me, and I’ve done a bit of hard labour over the years.

WE HAVE a septic tank toilet system at our place. One bathroom, two toilets, all very posh. But when it rains the toilets back up and I have to go out and remove the lid of the tank and start to bucket it out. Top job.

Someone uses a lot of toilet paper is all I can say. However, everything in married life is the man’s fault so I get the blame for that as well. In the morning, I must light the fire in the kitchen for the cats, let the dog out and unlock and feed the chooks and chainsaw the wood, and hope you don’t get it the wrong way around.

Then the one who walks on water will get up at around 9am, and say good morning with a big smile, ask have the cats been fed, (yes) the budgies and canary fed (yes), and has Little Bill had morning walk, poo, piddle and breakfast? Yes again.

Then she will walk past the washing machine and shake hands with herself and start it up to celebrate.

Thus another day in paradise begins. Bloody wood cutting followed by emptying out a septic tank? Good morning to you too. And I fought to get out of jail for this.

I NOW have to wear glasses. The years of writing books in my cell in the dark by the light of the television have come back to haunt me. So now I’m the fat, middle-aged, alcoholic chicken farmer with glasses.

I’m also having driving lessons with the RAC. My driving instructor is Sharon Figg and she tells me I drive a car like a man trying to leave the scene of a crime. Ha ha.

I have to get my licence so as to drive ‘she who walks on water’ into hospital and bring her home with our baby son, so it’s quite serious. I’ve never bothered with a driving licence previously. I always found that when I jumped in a car carrying a large handgun the driver seemed happy to take me where I wanted to go.

I’ve lit the fire and collected the eggs. Life looks beautiful on a farm in the morning and as ‘she who walks on water’ snoozes I have a private moment of reflection. It is 6am.

What an arsehole, vicious, cold blooded, savage, cruel, sadistic, psychopathic, gun happy, mental case I was years ago. And they were my good points. I ran on pure high octane ego but as I stand in the chook shed with my eggs and Gladys and the girls looking up at me as if to say look at the good job we did, I don’t hate a living thing.

I HAD a dream the other night that Leearna, the barmaid at the Richmond Arms, was mowing my lawn. I looked out the window and there was half the bloody hotel having a party at my place. It’s these stupid nicotine patches that make me dream. I haven’t had a smoke in eight weeks and right now I could smoke this biro.

These dreams keep returning. I don’t know what it is with Leearna and my lawn mower but sure enough she was out there again last night.

I took the editor of
Ralph
magazine to a club for a drink and a feed and among other things got him to stick Natasha Downes, Alison’s sister, in as Barmaid of the Month on page 131 of the April issue, 1999. OK, it may not be an Order of Australia, but it’s a start. Mark Dapin, the editor of the magazine, had a good night out at my expense — free food, free booze and Shane Farmer turned the whole club on for the bloke.

I don’t know what else he got, because I left before he did, but the bloke had a good time. If you were the editor of a national men’s magazine at a lap dancing club with the owner doing his best to make you happy I reckon you’d have a good time, too. Then again I could be wrong. I should have taken Mark Dapin to the Richmond Arms. Leearna would have made a much better barmaid of the month. She’s my favourite barmaid, anyway. Anyone who visits you in your dreams and mows your lawn gets my vote. Next time, Leearna, what about painting the house?

I did Natasha Downes a big favour by asking Mark Dapin to stick her in as barmaid of the month and she hasn’t had the good manners to show up in any of my dreams let alone mow my bloody lawn.

I am again digressing from the point. I have decided to make my own video. I will call it ‘A Man and his Chainsaw’. I will begin tomorrow. As the reader will recall, I recently bought a timber lease from my father-in-law. Trees and plenty of ’em and all mine to cut down.

They may have taken my guns but the buggers won’t get my chainsaw. And I have completed the appropriate course in Risdon Prison, so I am an expert.

Now I think I might smoke a nicotine patch. Yummy.

MY old friend Frankie Waghorn wrote me a letter. He’s doing a life sentence in prison up Beechworth way for the murder of that rat Johnny Turner. I still believe Frank didn’t do it. He may have helped dispose of the mortal remains and steam clean the carpet, but that’s only because Frankie was always house proud. Whoever imagined you could get life for a little spring cleaning? I don’t believe for a moment Frank actually stabbed the little turd.

I never liked ‘The Beeper’ Johnny Turner, I never liked his old two-bob gangster uncle, Joey Turner, either — Jackie Twist’s offsider. Killing any member of that wombat crew comes under the heading of a community service.

I don’t hear much from old jail associates. Craig Minogue the Russell Street bomber don’t write to me no more and Julian Knight, the Hoddle Street massacre man, don’t write either.

I skip to the letter box every day but no mail from the mentally ill to the reformed mentally ill. I guess no-one is much interested in the doings of a fat chicken farmer these days. Friendship is a funny business.

Most of my old friends are dead or in prison doing life and the new ones you make, well it’s just not the same. I’m still in touch with Joe Ditrola in South Australia and I’ve still got some good Albanian friends. If I rang Joe tomorrow and said, Joe get on a plane and go and shoot whoever, it would be done. But why would an author want someone killed?

Friendship these days is bullshit. It’s all good time stuff. You can’t find hard time friends. I’ve still got hard time friends but they are growing fewer and fewer. On one hand I’m no longer part of the world I came from so I’ve had to say adios amigos to those blokes as their friendship means me going back to help fight their wars, real and imagined.

I’m a very torn man where friendship is concerned and I end up a ripped man when I go to the pub. I came from a world where you killed for your friends and they killed for you and now I’m in a new world mixing with people and calling people my friends knowing that if Mad Charlie came back to life tomorrow he’d spit on them and say: ‘Chopper, what’s going on?’

So now I guess I’m just a friendly person mixing with friendly people but in my heart I know that the people I smile at today wouldn’t have got within three hundred yards of me ten years ago so I’m a man very, very much alone and without close friends in a world full of people saying ‘how you going Chopper?’

Then I get the Chopper Read friends. These are the people who have read my books and have gotten friendly with me. I’ve had to knock a few of them on the head because their wives all wanted to do the business, which was a pity because the husbands weren’t bad blokes at all.

I mean you invite people into your home or into your life under the heading of friendship and the husband gets pissed and tells you he’s your best fucking mate and the wife gets pissed and wants you to shag her and when you tell the mad bastards to piss off they accuse you of being a snob.

The more I see of people the more I like my dog. There are a couple of stories I could tell relating to wives of really good blokes but if I named them or didn’t alter a few key points the blokes in question would be doing jail time for kicking shit out of the mad cows.