Chopper Unchopped (63 page)

I swore then that I would not act as a bait for an ambush in a street battle ever again. Which I didn’t – until I got talked into doing the same thing against a gang of long haired Mods from Reservoir another time. Maybe they were right at school when they said I was a slow learner.

My crew was waiting in a car park near the Reservoir police station. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon, and believe it or not, the cop shop was shut, either that or the police had been out on the tear on Saturday and were sleeping it off while on duty.

It was my job to tease and taunt this gang of long-haired Mods who hung around the Reservoir railway station. I started with the tried and true line of witticisms, which involved their mothers, sisters and girlfriends having unsavory relationships with German Shepherd dogs and off-duty policeman, but it was to no avail.

These long hairs would not take the bait. It was only when I began tossing stones at them, one of which hit one of their lady friends right in the face, that we got some action. It certainly broke the ice. They all ran off after me and I headed off to the car park as was arranged. When I got there, you guessed it, I was left high and dry again.

This time it was a practical joke. My so-called mates had cleared off in the name of good humor. I could not see the joke at the time. I was pissing blood for a week because of the kicking I got. Is it any wonder I grew up so bitter and twisted? Even today I still believe to leave a mate posted is the greatest dog act of all.

In fact, the only time I ever saw the stooge act work properly was when the Thomastown, Keon Park, Lalor and Reservoir boys teamed up to fight the Crevelli Street boys from Preston. We used three 14-year-olds as bait and we ambushed the Crevelli Street mob outside the Preston Town Hall.

The fight went from the Town Hall and ended up in the car park of the Preston railway station, then onto the station itself. I was 14 and armed with a cricket bat. Someone yanked it out of my hands and used it on me. Being belted with your own cricket bat is quite humiliating. I ended up with blood in my lungs, and was coughing up and pissing blood for some time. I also had a busted nose, bloodshot eyes, ringing in my ears and fuzzy vision, which lasted about a month. But we all thought we had won the fight, even though one kid from Keon Park had his eyeball pulled out and another two blokes from Reservoir got stabbed in the guts and the groin with broken beer bottles. And a kid from Lalor broke his leg when he jumped off the train on the way home.

It was a great afternoon out.

There was about 60 of us and 20 of them. So for once, the odds were on our side. You always needed three to one odds to fight Crevelli Street, in my opinion.

I lived at 4 Marcia Street, Thomastown, across the road from the Goodyear tyre factory, when we first moved to Thomastown in the late 1950s. At that time there were still farms in the area. A farmer used to herd his cows up the dirt road out the front. It was all dirt roads, open drains and outside dunnies. It wasn’t until the 1960s that we got sewerage and push button toilets, and then we thought we were really posh.

I went to Thomastown East State School and Lalor High, and I never won a single fight. Bashing me up was the school hobby. In fact, I think it was on the curriculum. Even if I couldn’t win, I always came back for more. They would flog me at school and then wait outside my house for me as I walked home, and then I would get another giant touch up. But when duty called, I was a Thomastown boy, and I would side with the very boys who would beat me at school. At least it was a change, being beaten up by strangers instead of the blokes you knew.

I would never shirk my civic duty when it came to gang fights and street battles. There was a joke going around at the time that while the other gang was bashing me, my side could make good its escape. That was because I never surrendered. I couldn’t fight, but I didn’t give up.

The one thing that helped me in all these fights was that I was born with an incredibly hard head. I have now found to my cost that the older you get, the less damage you can afford to the old skull. But as a young bloke, I had a head like a mallet. As a kid I would go swimming at the Preston Pool. I remember once diving into the deep end with my hands by my side. Okay, it’s not exactly an Olympic diving event, but it was pretty impressive to the bucks in Preston back then. I would just run up and take a flying nose dive into the pool. One time I tried it and my head banged against the skull of another kid in the pool. It felt like an explosion. I jumped out of the pool and looked back to see some poor kid, face down in the water with blood pouring out of a huge wound in his head. Look on the bright side, I thought. At least there’s no sharks in the pool.

Other people rushed to the rescue and pulled him out. He was about 16 and I was 13 at the time. I walked quickly to the dressing rooms, got changed and left the area. But as I was going, I saw the ambulance arrive to cart the kid off to hospital. I don’t know what happened to him. All I know is that his head gave way, and mine didn’t. It’s been the story of my life.

I remember when I was expelled from Lalor High and went to a school in Preston, by way of welcome some kid stabbed me in the neck with a compass, and I hit him over the head with the edge of my steel ruler. He ran screaming from the classroom with blood pissing from a half inch gash in his head. Never mind me, who was sitting in a desk with a hole in the right side of my neck. He could have killed me.

At least the kid stuck solid, and even though he was taken to hospital, he didn’t tell the teachers how his head was opened up.

On the way home, I was nursing my neck wound and wondering if moving schools was a good idea, when I was confronted by the bloke’s mates.

I always lead with my head and this time was no exception. They held me by the arms and kicked me in the face, neck and eyes, and left me like a bag of shit in the street.

I was back at school the next day, but by now I was starting to get a little smarter. I got each one of the pricks with the perfect sneak go. I waited for each one to be on his own and then got them with a rounders bat.

I then went home, content, even though my head looked like a busted watermelon – but they were waiting for me and I got another head kicking. When I finally dragged myself home, I was flogged for fighting.

Yeah, life was great when I was a kid.

At school, my head was used as a football. I was brave, but stupid. I had courage, but no strategy But I was prepared to learn. By the time I was 15, I had been on the losing end of several hundred schoolyard punch ups, gang wars and street fights, plus a good number of sound thrashings at home. By that age I was a seasoned campaigner in matters of violence. I had the experience of a 30-year-old nightclub bouncer.

All of a sudden the wheel started to turn. I started to win fights. Then I met Cowboy Johnny, Dave the Jew and Terry the Tank and formed a gang of my own. Instead of being the victim and punching bag, I was the general of my own army. And what an army it was. The Cowboy looked like death, and fought like the Grim Reaper, The Jew was a kill-crazy, head-banging psychopath, even at that age, and Terry the Tank was a jolly giant, who could punch a German Shepherd dog to death, and once did, to prove a point.

I was leading the mentally ill, but in my own way I was the worst of them all. I had the smiling face of a young angel, and a heart so full of tears that there was no room for the blood to flow. I was emotionally and mentally twisted. As a young guy I was cruel, cold and totally without human mercy, feeling or compassion.

I didn’t feel hate. I was just emotionally numb. All I had was my own sense of right and wrong. I saw everything only in terms of battles and strategies. I lived to spill the blood of my enemies, and there were plenty of them.

I am almost gentle and overflowing with human kindness when I look at myself now, compared with what I was. From the age of 15, I was a cruel, cold-blooded, twisted, smiling, sadistic arsehole, and backed up by my crew of young crazies, inflicted as much damage as I possibly could to as many other gang members as I could find.

I was also a young egomaniac on a power trip fed by a blood lust. Let’s be honest, as a young bloke I was a sick piece of work. I started to see myself as God-like and all others as sub-human. I mean, my crew thought I was a genius, so I thought I must be.

Let’s face it, I was as nutty as a fruit cake. Thank God, I’m all better now.

Ha ha, ha.

I SEE myself as the typical Aussie male. Sure, I may be covered in tattoos, have no ears, have a criminal record you can’t jump over and torture drug dealers for profit and pleasure, but I personally see those as minor cosmetic differences.

Underneath it all, I am just like the next bloke. I like a laugh, a drink, shooting scumbags and, most of all, when I am on the outside, I like a bet.

I made a bit of a mess of it at the Launceston Casino, winning heaps and then going mad and losing it all, and about 10 times more. I loved it there, but I have never been any good with money and I would lose thousands a night.

I was arrested by Tasmania’s finest over the Sid Collins rubbish on the way home from the casino. One of my great regrets is that they didn’t arrest me on the way there. That way, at least, I would have been left with a few bucks in my pocket.

If it’s not casinos then it is the track which attracts me for a little punt. In the old days it didn’t matter. Lose at the track and I’d go out and grab a drug dealer to get a bit more play money. It kept money circulating and was good for the economy. But when you decide to retire in windswept Tassie, give up head hunting and live off the pittance from books and the dole, then the high life is over.

But as a respected author and crime figure, I needed to continue to associate with riff-raff (purely for literary research purposes, you understand) and it was during this that I started to punt again, and in a big way. In fact, I am a sucker for any clown who comes up to me and tells me he has a sure thing.

A few of the boys in Launceston used to go down to the greyhound track called ‘White City’. Me and Mad Micky would go down with some others and most times we would lose. But we would have a good time and it was a great laugh.

Young Trent Anthony had his trainer’s ticket and we got to know a lot of the main figures at the track — bookies, trainers and punters. In the end I invested in a greyhound with Trent and his grandfather. I was then talked into buying two more. We were going famously and then others at the track told me that sometimes there was such an item as a sure thing and when it arrived, I would be told in advance and could get in on the giggle. It would be a dead cert, a sure winner, wink, wink. I won’t name the parties involved because that wouldn’t be nice, but it was a crew of about nine, and a greyhound that was famous for losing. We will call it ‘Speedy’ although that is not its real name.

The syndicate managed to rake up $15,000, of which $4000 was mine. It was to be the plunge of the century, in Tassie at least. We covered six bookies and got up to 50 to 1.

As had been predicted, the favorite got scratched that night. Shortly before the race, the fourth on the card, was due to start, someone smelled a rat and Speedy went from rank outsider to even money.

But it didn’t worry us, we were already on. I was told Speedy would win and the owner-trainer would probably lose his trainer’s licence, as the game would or could be found out, but that he was in deep financial trouble and was prepared to pay the price for one big win. He stood to make $50,000 for the win, enough to make it worthwhile for him. For me, the big win would have set me up. OK, it wasn’t the Fine Cotton affair, but it wasn’t bad for Launceston.

Speedy was a brindle bitch, and a big one. Even though she was like lightning at trials, she always lost on the night in races because she was timid, meek and very nervous. On the night in question she was given a little backyard medical treatment, so I was led to believe. This would stop the problems of fear.

I never put any money on myself with the bookies, but I ended up holding all the tickets. Off they went like greased lightening, and for three quarters of the race I thought Speedy was going to get up. She was in front by about two metres, and I was already counting my winnings in my head. Then, for no reason at all, she went arse up and fell over, sending about three others running into her.

The rest of the dogs just charged on regardless with some 7-4 on, flea-bitten, cat-chasing thing winning. I thought the whole race should have been declared a non-event. But I would hardly say to the stewards: ‘Hey, we had a boat race going on in the fourth, could we declare it a non-race?’

We lost the lot. Needless to say, I was most upset. Two weeks later, I went to visit the numbskull who owned Speedy and I shot the dog in front of him, and made him write me a cheque for $4000 to repay my loss.

The cheque didn’t bounce. Neither did the dog. The fact that the guy had the money to pay me back indicated he wasn’t as broke as he had made out, so I am still suspicious about what he was up to. I love animals, but greyhounds aren’t pets, they are business, and there is no place in this wide world for a slow greyhound, let alone a frightened one with a drug problem which insists on trying to do back flips in the middle of a race when it is leading and has my money on its skinny back. I’ve heard people call racing dogs ‘rats on stilts’ and now I know why.

This was the second time I got cross at a Tassie race meeting.

The other time was when Mike Alexander, the owner of one of the world’s great pubs, the Clarendon Arms Hotel in Evandale, along with his girlfriend, Michelle, took me and Sid ‘never tell a lie’ Collins to a race meeting in Devonport.

Mike owns a small string of race horses, or more like a string of pet food ponies, if you ask me, and one was running this day.

Every tip Mike gave me was a non event. I had a bookie giving me a few tips too. Bad move, why would a bookie tip you into a winner? He would be drummed off the course for breaking the bookies code of never giving a sucker an even break.

In the end, I put a roll of dough on Mike Alexander’s horse and, needless to say, lost the lot.

I went back after the race, hoping to shoot the bloody animal in the head, but there were too many people around. Mike is a good bloke and a top publican, but he is a worse punter than me. The bloke couldn’t pick his nose. He had some good wins, but like me, he is a hopeless punter and we go to the track to commit suicide, not to win.