Chopper Unchopped (212 page)

I CAN’T sleep. I live on a diet of Melbourne Bitter beer, XANAX anti-panic tablets, Panadeine Forte, pain killers and sleeping pills, yet I can’t get to sleep until 3 o’clock every morning.

I’m up as early as 6.30 chopping wood, chain sawing, feeding the chooks, feeding my birds, my two cats and two dogs – Little Bill, my Jack Russell, and Patsy Cline, a.k.a. Patsy Crime, my Staffordshire bull terrier-heeler cross. Patsy has turned out to be a formidable guard dog and very protective of home and family.

We had to shoot more than 60 of the chooks and pen the pure breeds up. My brother-in-law, Jan Blyton (no relations to Enid) and Shane Farmer did the dirty deed with a .22 rifle and a .410 shotgun. Naturally, I didn’t take part. Not only have I a well-documented dislike of bloodshed, my application to have my firearm prohibition order was still being considered by Police Commissioner Richard McCreadie and the firearm registry office. I will haunt them until it’s lifted.

I got a phone call from New York from former Detective Inspector ‘Rocket’ Rod Porter over an upcoming story in
Ralph
magazine. He didn’t wish to hurt my feelings and
Ralph
magazine was giving me the right of reply. I don’t wish to hurt him. It is funny how throughout all our past history, not all of it good, we have remained friends. Former Detective Sergeant Steve ‘Dirty Larry’ Curnow was with him. How they got visas to get into anywhere other than Sing Sing is beyond me.

They wouldn’t tell me their business but, in jest, asked if I knew anyone in New York. Only a guy named Tommy Caprice, but when I told him to go to an address in Little Italy, Mulberry Street, Rod said, it ‘sounds like something out of a Mafia movie’. He wasn’t far wrong but, as always, people generally think I’m pulling their leg.

I also know a guy in New Jersey and the Central Bronx district – old school friends from Thomastown state school. All Italian and all connected up to their back teeth. But what would I know, I’m just a chicken farmer with no firearm licence and international crime connections.

THE underworld murder rate has dropped off in Melbourne. I rang a few people and complained that my tenth book depended on at least three to four more good hits.

‘Oh, great, Chopper. I’ll just run out the fucking door now and kill a few more just so you can write another book. And when they make a movie about it they can leave me out of that one too!’ was the reaction of one old friend. He was quite offended that he was left out of the
Chopper
movie. In fact, he wanted to staple gun Michael Gudinski’s top lip to his nose he was so pissed off. It’s all a bit funny, two of the biggest professional hitmen in Australia are now so offended that they got left out of the
Chopper
movie. So offended they are on strike – in protest they aren’t going to kill any more people. Now, there is a unique form of protest. The whole thing is quite insane.

Hitmen with hurt feelings who have agreed not to kill certain people because they know I’d only write about it, and they want to punish me. Well, it’s working. I needed their hits to be a big hit. It’s quite frustrating, as my books do depend on bullets and big tits, as I am sure any literary reviewer could tell you. The big tits I can get, but hitmen going on strike for artistic reasons! If you made a movie about that or tried to tell that story and get anyone to believe it, you’d be out of luck. So I feel safe in repeating it because you’re just not going to believe it anyway.

That’s the magic of my writing. They say little or any of it is believed, yet it’s read by many. You figure it out. I can’t.

AN artist called Suzanne Soul came down with a lady photographer to draw me and take about a thousand photos to help her prepare to paint me for the Archibald Prize art competition. Suzanne is 4’10” tall in the old money and a cute little weapon when she isn’t doing ladies’ hair dressing. It was all a bit surreal – if only I knew what that meant.

We met out on my farm, her and her photographer Jody Hutchinson. The wind was blowing and a sort of this isn’t happening madness set in. The wind has that effect on me. It’s the same with horses – spooks them and makes them do wild things.

I’m weatherbeaten and weary at the sight of little cuties but my brother-in-law Jan Blyton and my wife’s cousin Warwick Golding couldn’t help but notice that Suzanne was not totally ugly.

I’m a bit jaded in this area and also realise that a 46-year-old, out of shape middle-aged man with his lovely wife and baby son six metres away places me right out of the game.

It’s a bloody pity other fellows my age don’t wake up to reality. That’s all I can say. No names mentioned, no pack drill, as my dear old dad would say. It wouldn’t matter if Miss Head Job 1999 walked through the door. I’ve got this been there, done that a thousand times attitude. All I want is to get with the program. Do the business, whatever the business is, unless it is funny business, and piss off. No offence, but I don’t attempt to re-live some second sexual childhood, dancing about like a two-year-old with his dick in his hand and his foot in his mouth – or the other way around if you are double-jointed.

Nevertheless, embarrassments aside, Suzanne was ultra-professional and I suspect if she don’t win the Archibald, she will one day be recognised as an artist of some note. But what would I know, I’m just an interesting model with no ears, a criminal record as long as your arm, not to mention something else as long as your arm.

Speaking of lovelies, Shelley Hamilton-Smith and her yummy little mate got photographed for that award winning publication
100% Home Girls
men’s magazine, as I arranged to have done for them. They were surprised when I told them I wanted no favour in return. They had been victims of this no-one does anything for anyone without wanting something in return business. It left the two young ladies somewhat puzzled when they came across a true gentleman like my goodself. A little like Professor Henry Higgins, not to be confused with that scallywag, Buck Higgins.

I’m due to take part in a BBC documentary on gambling. They want to talk to me about the insane game of Russian Roulette, which I used to play with the Albanians and Vietnamese in Footscray in 1987. I have to go to Melbourne for the day and I’m not happy.

I’ve become agoraphobic beyond the farm and Richmond, Tasmania. This means that I get concerned and uneasy when I leave my home patch.

It’s a little like a lot of farmers who are down here. They suffer from their own form of agoraphobia. They are frightened of agriculture, so they don’t do much of it. I don’t even like going to Hobart once or twice a week and I dread leaving the state of Tasmania. No fear involved, but I keep thinking the plane will crash one day and with my luck I’ll be in the fucking thing. That’s not fear – that’s mindless paranoia.

But planes never crash, do they? And a fear of flying is only mindless stupidity, isn’t it? Totally baseless, mindless nonsense, stupid paranoia.

Planes never fall out of the sky or run into mountains or tall buildings. It’s all in the mind. Take another pill, you paranoid bastard. Hypochondriacs never get sick and paranoid people never die.

I met a bloke who was always paranoid that he was going to be murdered, so I shot him. I met another bloke who always thought someone would set him up. Now he’s doing twenty years. I met a copper who was always worried he couldn’t pay his mortgage, so he joined the drug squad, and that solved all his problems – for a while. I think he’s got a few headaches just now.

The graveyards only take fit and healthy young people with not a care or fear in the world. Yeah, pig’s arse.

The BBC doesn’t pay for interviews. Oh dearie me, no. They said they would fly me to Melbourne and back again, plus buy me a lovely lunch.

I wanted to tell them that they sell food in Tassie, too; I might get them to fly here. Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and I can meet them at the airport. I’ve reached the stage where I don’t need any extra publicity. There is no thrill in not being paid to do an interview and being asked to go out of my way to do it.

This is the song they all sing and I’m turning tone deaf. Has a ring to it these days that I can no longer hear. Let Mohammed come to the fucking mountain – with his cheque book. Or, better still, US dollars.

Why should I be asked to go to the time and effort and my own personal expense, so that some team of pricks that I don’t even know can make money? Oh, but it’s good publicity.

Yeah, Chopper Read really needs to get his fucking photo taken yet again. I mean, I wake up in the morning and say to myself, ‘Gee, I wish I could get my photo taken or someone to put a bit more shit on me in a newspaper or magazine article.’ I need that. Or be asked to take part in another ‘no money for me’ film or documentary and then to be made to look like a raving mental case after the editing.

People cut out all the nice bits and leave in all the bad bits. Come to think of it, that’s what I did with a cut-throat razor and a tied-up drug dealer.

The media pussies always say, ‘Don’t worry, Chopper, we won’t be doing a hatchet job on you.’ No, of course not. Media people no longer use hatchets; they use large, sharp knives that they plunge deep into your back after they wave you goodbye.

So that’s that, I’ve just talked myself out of going to Melbourne for the BBC documentary. Let the cheap bastards come here and pay me nothing. Travelling over to Melbourne for nothing except the promise of a free lunch is starting to make no sense whatsoever. The BBC comes all the way from London, then they want me to fly to Melbourne to meet them. Pig’s arse.

Next topic.

Every writer reaches a point when there is nothing left to say. I reached this point after my first book and said only a little more in the next eight books following the first.

I’ve had writer’s block and tackle, especially tackle. (It’s well-known that women go for novelists because of their writer’s tackle). I thought I had something to say in this book, but I’ve realised yet again my mind has wandered away on its own and gotten totally lost.

It’s hard to hold the memory cells together with Charlie running around the place with a pot trying to hit the cat on the head and the two dogs fighting outside which has forced one of the stray fowls to jump up through the open kitchen window. This has forced Charlie to chase the fowl and the cat to jump up on the kitchen table while I’m trying to write this.

Did Hemingway have to put up with this? Maybe he did and that’s why he topped himself with his favourite shotgun. Personally, I would find that a little too messy for the next-of-kin.

Now, I know why I could put a book together so quickly in prison. I had nothing else to do except write (and bash people). I rang my dad and he spent 20 minutes talking to me about bowel movements. I have learned that old people do that.

This is an STD phone call and he hasn’t talked about anything else in a 20-minute conversation.

LIFE for me has taken some odd twists and turns. I’m publicly hated and privately loved. It is thought to be politically correct to publicly condemn me as a criminal who profits from crime yet privately say nothing when I donate large sums of money to a children’s cancer charity.

I will try to give you one example of one of the many odd contributions that goes to make up the fabric of my life today. My friend – Tasmanian nightclub king, Shane Farmer, is also an ALP backroom boy, as the expression goes. My other mate, Charles ‘Charlie T’ Touber, is a music and rock and roll major event concert promoter. They form probably the most powerful double act in the Tasmanian hotel and nightclub industry.

Charles Touber once ran for the Senate on the ALP ticket and is also a local Labor Party behind the scenes operator, which comes in useful. 

Shane Farmer is big, loud and brash with the personality of an out-of-control chainsaw. Charles Touber is a doctor of political science, a quietly spoken gentleman, a deep thinker, a serious sort of chap with a sense of comedy not unlike a Monty Python undertaker.

In business, Charlie T is the velvet glove that Shane Farmer fills with a concrete fist. Farmer has all the diplomatic skills of a Nazi soap salesman spruiking for business outside a Jewish bathhouse but his big mouth is only beaten by his big heart, thus meaning his good points outweigh his bad points.

Charles Touber, on the other hand, is as smooth as silk, a gentleman with a great deal of polish and personal charm. Meaning that if I was to suffer a flashback and do a toe-cut job on either man, I would have selected Charlie T first.

Farmer is as smooth as a barbed wire fence. He would rather die than part with a penny. Touber would tell you where the money is, then tell you that Farmer has the combination to the safe. All in all, they are two tough nuts I’d rather have on side, as trying to crack the bastards would be a fucking nightmare.

Well, they are my mates and each in their own way as complex as the writer of this story. Although, thank goodness, they don’t have the same criminal record.

I’m someone that people from normal society try to avoid. No-one really wants to be publicly linked to me. I’m like a shadow no-one really wants behind them, not publicly at any rate. But privately, I find myself courted by many and various people.

Many people come to me and want to chat but they are not overjoyed when they see a camera pointing in our direction after dark at a private function.

Such was the case at the exclusive premiere, private invitation, no cameras allowed opening of the Wild West Sports Saloon at 251 Liverpool Street, Hobart. I found myself, through no fault of my own, mixing with half the political and old money business heavyweights in Hobart town.

My rumoured involvement with Shane Farmer in the Men’s Gallery Strip club in Hobart had reached the stage where the more I denied it the more people believed it.

This rumour naturally followed on to the Wild West Sports Saloon, which also includes a second club upstairs – The Viper Room. I found myself in the company of the Hon. Paul Lennon MHA, the Deputy Premier of Tasmania. Richard McCreadie, the Tasmanian Commissioner of Police, was also meant to attend. His son Scott McCreadie works for Shane and Charles at the club, which is also a good thing, as it’s sometimes hard for young people to gain useful employment in Tassie. But back to Scott’s father, the police commissioner … I’m told that if he did attend it was only after my camera and myself went home.