Chopper Unchopped (242 page)

It’s like heaven and hell and I am lost in my own indulgence. When I am running around on the outside, even though my heart may belong to one lady, I can’t help sampling whatever’s on offer.

I also realise that the axe can fall on me at any moment and the “eat, drink and be merry – for tomorrow I die” mentality takes hold.’

‘I FIND this, in its way, quite sad. Some of my best mates are women. Sure, I may have plonked a few of them along the way, but they are essentially good mates. They have remained rock solid when a few of the so-called tough guys of the underworld have caved in as soon as the cops have said “boo”.’

‘AFTER a lifetime of study, I have come up with what I believe to be a rock-solid doctrine on the vexing topic of female of the species, and it would be selfish of me not to share it. I see all females without exception as suffering from a mental and emotional psychosis that I call “the schizophrenic condition”.

It isn’t their fault; it’s just the way it is. They tend to be insecure, afraid, puzzled, confused, worried, concerned, ill at ease and lacking self-esteem and self-confidence. Not only that, they are dizzy, scatty, flighty, totally withdrawn from reality and tend to totally distort reality. And loving, hateful, possessive, jealous, greedy, generous, dreamers and fantasy merchants living in a world of romantic imagination … they have a list of mental and emotional disorders a mile long all on the boil.

Add the sex and the motherhood urge to this and you have a totally neurotic, obsessive, anxious, head-banging, raving, ranting nut case of the highest and most dangerous order.

In other words, the classic schizophrenic condition. We are talking about human beings who undergo twelve separate mood swings every twelve hours.’

‘THEY can get through childbirth and then whine about a stubbed toe. They seem to hate silence unless they are mad and then they decide not to talk to you for decades.

They can’t read a map, have no sense of direction but always insist on telling you when they think you are going the wrong way.

Don’t tell them they look sexy and they sulk. Tell them they’ve got great tits and they reckon you treat them as a sex object.

Mind you, I hope you don’t think that my attitude toward females means that I hate women. I love them. They are beautiful, magical and fascinating creatures and it’s just that I view both male and females as suffering from two forms of mental and emotional psychosis.

In a sense, I see all men as killers and all women as whores. Not all men are physical killers, of course. Only a small percentage of the male population will actually kill, but all men carry a very strong killer instinct within them.

And of course not all women are whores, but the whore instinct is within every woman. We all know in our hearts that this is true, no matter how much we may deny it. In fact, denying the unpleasant truth to ourselves is all part of the general insanity that goes to make up the human condition.’

‘THE imagination of every female secretly longs for the knight in shining armour to ride up on his snow-white charger and dry her tears, sweep her off her feet and gallop off into the sunset.’

Men are putty in a woman’s hands. They all want to impress, first their mothers, then their teachers and then girlfriends and wives.

They climb mountains, sail across seas and even shoot drug dealers so that some sheila somewhere will say “well done”. When a footballer wins the Brownlow, the player thanks his blonde wife or girlfriend. For what? Did she feed him one in the goal-square? Who knows, maybe she did.

I have secretly always believed that in the battle of the sexes the female has always had the ability to play the male like a fine violin.’

‘IF bastards and bad men are so hated, why do good men love to read about them?’

‘SOME may think the pen is mightier than the sword, but don’t take either to a gun fight.’

‘I HAVE written a book and people seem to think I walk about all day in a smoking jacket stuffed full of cash and live on champagne and caviar. In fact, people think I have become a millionaire through writing. Let me tell you I made more money with a blowtorch than a ballpoint. And I didn’t get too much out of the crime world either.’

‘THERE is the elite class – killer poets like my good self who can write, fight, bite, light, smite and, when need be, say goodnight.’

‘WHILE I was inside, I got mail by the truckload. Much of it is nice, but some is rather puzzling.

I have heard from literary critics and lounge chair intellectuals telling me that my books have no real message. Well, first of all, the only literary critic I really care about is the cash register, and when it stops ringing, I will know I have hit a false note.

As far as intellectuals are concerned, an intellectual is someone who spends all his time giving other people the answers to questions he didn’t understand in the first place. They go through life dreaming up new ways to fix problems that they themselves created.

I never went out to write a book that had a special message.

If you played it backwards on your record player, it wouldn’t tell you what really happened to Elvis.’

‘I WISH I could debate my literary efforts with other respected and well-known authors over a sherry and Greek dip. Instead, I am sure that if I met most of the people who have read my work I would have to ask them to stop weaving their baskets before we could discuss their views on my writing.’

‘WHEN I write the truth, I am faced with verbal bullets from my critics and real ones from my enemies. Words are like magic stardust to be thrown into the eyes of men to confuse and inform at the same time.

The pen is mightier than the sword, but in fairness to the sword, great things have been done by men and swords. But without the pen, the actions of the sword would not be remembered beyond one generation.’

‘SHE (first wife Mary-Ann) 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-barrelled shotgun to do it with.’

‘FACT is stranger than fiction – sometimes so strange that it is downright hard to believe – they shout and laugh at reality, or maybe truth is a bit humdrum and ordinary for them. The fiction writer can turn a bullet in the guts into an epic thriller, whereas in reality, a slug in the guts is not worth more than a page.

An act of violence, whether broken glass in the neck, or a bullet in a body, is over in the blink of an eye, and to write about it should not take more than a page or so. That is why I will never be accepted as a proper writer by other writers.

I tell it how it is … bang, bang, and no bullshit, then on to the next story. I have been there, I have done it and for mine you cannot turn a ten-second stabbing into a ten-chapter epic.

Not unless you are a fiction writer, that is. And I’m a fighter, not a writer. I know about verbals not verbs. Guns, not grammar.’

‘IF the authorities tried to stop some government-subsidised, black T-shirt wearing, academic trendy of questionable sexuality from writing some boring 60-page book about the mating habits of Tibetan yaks, the civil libertarians would be protesting in the streets.

But because the author is a Good Ol’ Boy with no ears, who is popular with the public, and therefore not seen as trendy, then no-one has lifted a finger.’

‘POSH people love gangsters.’

‘THE truth is that all I ever wanted to do was write a cook book. I was going to call it: How to Kill Them in the Kitchen. But Mick Gatto beat me to it. I could dedicate it to Andrew Veniamin, who got a case of terminal indigestion.’

‘PREGNANT women are a beautiful thing, but you could get whiplash 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 KNOW I have finally made it as a top-class writer after all these years. Like Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde, I have been declared bankrupt. In the old days, I knew ten drug dealers who could have helped me out once I showed them a little bit of blowtorch persuasion. Sometimes I regret going straight but you can’t get blood from a stone-killer.’

So my writing upsets the toffs, the politicians and the cops,

But when ya jump on the horse, ya flog her till she drops,

And I guess now I will have to call it quits,

It’s hard yakka brother, and I must say it’s giving me the shits

I’ve written about mugs and molls and ladies of easy persuasion,

About the poets of old, and the cultural yank invasion,

I’ve written about the pros and cons of every bloomin’ thing,

Knocked up songs no man will ever sing,

And every word’s been done with just a touch of comic malice,

And all from my little cell in the old Pink Palace.

But the time has come to turn it up, ’cos it’s messing up my mind,

And as my old dad used to say, ‘Stop it son, or you’ll go blind’,

So this is it, I swear to God, and of that I am quite certain,

I’ve written down my last verse, reached my final curtain,

It’s time to toss my pen and paper in the fire.

But you and me both know that I’m a shocking liar,

And it’s easy to see if you look at me,

And all the times I’ve been busted,

That when I say I’ll walk away
…

You know I can’t be trusted.

‘I didn’t get these scars in a fight over the sushi tray at a crime writers’ conference, and the claw hammer hole in my head didn’t come from a dispute with the scone lady over the strawberry jam.’

‘I always feel uncomfortable when anyone asks me for my autograph. I’m not a rock star; I’m a crook who wrote a book, and the psychology of wanting an autograph from me is wanting it for its novelty freak value.’

‘I’VE dug a few graves in my time. But I have never made a man dig his own. There’s no need to go that far – it would be plain bad manners.’

‘I SWALLOWED my own top teeth myself years ago. They bloody nearly killed me going down and it was an uncomfortable experience getting them out the other end. So the message to all you kiddies is, brush after meals so that you don’t end up with false teeth. Otherwise it can hurt both ends.’

‘I AM without a shadow of a doubt the fastest eater in captivity, bar maybe the odd polar bear in a zoo somewhere.

I can shovel down steak, eggs, sausages, mushrooms and mixed vegies and sweets in under three minutes with total propriety. I have perfect manners. I eat like Prince Charles would if he was on Angel Dust.’

‘I LOVE all types of food, although at times I’m a little wary of your Chinese tucker. You would be, too, if you knew which crims used to be shipped off to a certain dim sim factory where they went on the missing list. It happened so often it became the norm, if you know what I mean. Now I have been close to many members of the criminal fraternity, but not close enough to eat them with soy sauce and fried rice. I know life can be sweet and sour, but that is ridiculous.’

ON Japanese food. ‘They give you raw fish, no chips, no knife and fork and charge you 30 bucks for the privilege. And they call me a criminal.’

‘WE made Reggie eat his own fox terrier. But it wasn’t all bad. We had garlic salt, cooking oil, salt and pepper, plus American mustard. After all, we weren’t savages.’

‘WILLIE Thompson sold lollipops when he was shot dead, Michael Marshall did a roaring trade in hotdogs when he was popped off, Mark Moran made pies and sausage rolls when he was a pastry chef and Normie Lee had a dim sim factory before police shot him dead – proving once and for all that junk food is a killer. Bring on meat and three veg. Yummy.’

‘ON my daily walks to the prison hospital from the remand yard to get my vitamin tablet I found, much to my delight, seven big, fat snails, bloody big buggers. Anyone who has been to jail knows that all prisoners become first-class scroungers and learn that anything they can find to use they will grab with both hands.

Now the sight of seven snails was too great a temptation to me. I scooped the blighters up and asked one of the screws to boil up some water for me.

I placed the snails in the water and let them soak for about ten minutes. I then got some more boiling water and gave them another ten minutes. That seemed to slow them down, in a manner of speaking. They were easy then to pop out of their shells. I got hold of some silver paper, some salt, pepper, garlic powder and a spoonful of butter. I didn’t have a French cookbook, so I had to do the best I could.

In prison, nouvelle cuisine is anything cooked by a first-year apprentice cook. I got the recently deceased snails, minus their shells, and wrapped them in the silver paper, with the salt, pepper, butter and garlic powder. I placed the lot on the grill under the big toaster in the remand yard dining room. I felt I was getting the hang of the French cooking. In fact, with my experience with meat cleavers I thought that when I got out of jail I would go into the culinary business.

I was confident, perhaps too confident, about my cooking skills. The little buggers finally had their revenge. I had plenty of time to think about my mistakes as I was sitting on the toilet.

I know about severe stomach pains, having been stabbed in the guts once or twice, and let me tell you, the snails were tougher than a steak knife attack.

I was shivering and shaking and thought I was at death’s door. I have suffered bad cases of Bombay Bottom, at the hands of Mad Dog’s curried vegies in Pentridge and Slim Minogue’s chilli powder delights, but that pales into nothing compared with the revenge of the killer snails.

It was then I learned a very important lesson about cooking the more exotic dishes. If one insists on eating garlic snails, one should always know that the snails themselves have not gobbled a gutful of snail bait. The little green pellets turned out to be snail poison and the buggers I had been eating were the gung-ho survivors of more chemicals than Chernobyl.’

‘AS a cook my mum would have made a great steam cleaner. Everything I ate was either steamed or boiled.’

‘I KNEW a copper once who said his wife was a dirty, lazy bitch. He said: “I came home after a night on the squirt, had a piss in the sink and there were the dishes from breakfast still sitting there”.’

‘I BELIEVE that men should not be allowed to assist in the preparation of any food for health reasons.

Now, men don’t like to talk about it, but they all have one thing in common when it comes to the kitchen: they all end up pissing in the sink. There is not a man living who has not at one time or another pissed in the sink.’

HE (Brian Murphy – legendary hard-nosed detective) was raised a strict Catholic and it is said is more frightened of an angry priest than a hundred angry crims. He only has to see a priest or a nun half a mile away and he takes his bloody hat off.’