Chopper Unchopped (29 page)

ONE of my favorite songs is
The Great Pretender
by The Platters. As far as emotions and emotional matters are concerned, I guess I do pretend to a great extent.

Not many people will believe this, particularly those that I have bashed, or had their feet warmed with the gas blowtorch, but I don’t feel hate. I just don’t know what it feels like. I mean, I can pretend to hate, but the most I can feel is to be a little cross with someone.

Love is another emotion I can’t really understand, or truly feel. While I say that I love this one or that one, it isn’t an emotion that truly touches my soul.

‘Love’ and ‘hate’ are words I simply use, because they are words that I have been taught to use like lots of others. My violence, even taking a life, has nothing to do with hate. Business is business and that is what it is for me.

Love? Well, I love Margaret and I love my dog, the famous Mr Nibbles. I love my dear old dad and I have loved various friends, but it is an emotion I can’t come to terms with. I guess if I trust someone, then I love that person, and I trust dear little Margaret most of all.

The doctors have called my feelings in relation to love psychopathic, but I don’t know so much about that. Doctors seem to have a tag or a label for us all.

I do know that I pretend to have feelings and emotions that other people seem to have. For example, I have no real sense of fear, not because I am truly brave, but I simply can’t see the danger. Fear is just a word to me. Hunger and thirst I can feel, but hate and love I can only imagine.

I can get an angry feeling when someone has offended against me and a warm kind of feeling toward a person who has shown me warmth and kindness. I think many people are confused about love.

I never loved or felt love for my mother. After all, I was in a home as a baby, and if you haven’t felt that emotion as a child, it is a bit late to try and develop it, or grow it, in later life.

I know that little Margaret loves me, and I know that I can trust her, but I know that I am a bit of an emotional mystery to her, as I am to myself. Feelings are things that I have to pretend to feel in order to be seen as normal by other, so-called normal people.

When I kill someone, I feel nothing except ‘I hope no-one is watching’, and that isn’t an emotion, it is a concern. In other circumstances, I feel lust. But that isn’t an emotion; it is a physical feeling.

I think I am a very empty person inside as I don’t seem to be able to feel all these normal things that others say they feel. I can really like someone or something, or I can really dislike someone or something, but that is a little different to hate and love.

Once in the 1970s during one of my many battles my dad was threatened by my enemies. The threat was worse than death; it was that they would put him in a wheelchair.

I seriously considered killing my own dad and burying his body. I had two reasons. I didn’t want my enemies to have a victory over me and also I felt I could do it quickly and painlessly, thus saving the old fellow any suffering. I guess in a way that is a kind of love, isn’t it?

I still use the words love and hate, but that is because I can’t find other words to express what I am feeling. I am a pretender. Trust is the most important thing to have, and if I can say to myself that I trust a person, then, in my own way, I love that person.

The whole emotional question is a bloody confusing mystery to me. The older I get, the less I feel inside about anything or anyone. I know some fantastic people, who I trust and who are loyal to me and who I would kill for without a blink of an eye. I have enemies who will be my enemies until either they or I die.

But true love and hate, what is it all about? I really don’t know. These are matters I don’t think about much, because when I do I get confused. As you can see, psychopaths aren’t meant to feel anything. But as you can see, I feel a great many things. My only problem is that I don’t know what I am feeling.

Well, dear reader, that is a small insight into the inner mind and heart of Mark Brandon Read, leaving you with the question: is he the sanest man in the world, or mad as a hatter? Personally, I have no idea. After all, what’s mad and what’s sane? Life is like a merry-go-round, so instead of asking what and why, we should just enjoy the ride, because thinking too much can strain the brain.

Questioning every element of life is man’s greatest curse. So much for the heavy-thinking Chopper. For goodness sake, pass the Panadol, I have a headache. Mark Brandon Read, the thinking man’s psychopath.

Some men ask why. Some ask why not. I say, bugger it all, who gives a shit. Play on, the umpy hasn’t blown the whistle.

Yet.

WHILE I have never tried to blame anyone for the way my life has gone. I have always skipped over my childhood and the horrors of my early days.

Many crooks lie on their shrink’s couch and cry about their past. They love to blame others for what they have become.

I am the first to say that I am what I am. But I would be stupid to suggest that my past did not help contribute to what I have become.

My childhood helped for the attitudes and opinions that I now hold. So, without pointing the finger of blame, I will say that I am, in part, a product of my past. We are all victims of what we have been through.

So, to all the parents of the world, remember you may be responsible for moulding the next great world leader, or the next mass killer. Be careful, it is in your hands.

A child’s mother and father can be the salvation or destruction of the youngster. The American mass murderer David ‘Son of Sam’ Berkowitz, had such a lovely mother. And, yes, so did Chopper Read. When a child is driven to thoughts of killing his mother, he may grow up to kill his brother many times over.

MY little sister Debbie wrote to tell me that I am not welcome in her home because I am a sinner and a murderer. Thank goodness that’s all she was worried about … I thought it may have been because I had poor table manners.

Religion has been the curse of our family for generations, and Debbie has inherited her share, and mine too, from our strict Seventh Day Adventist mother. But what these ‘true believers’ forget is that more people have died and have been murdered in the name of religion than anything else. Even Jesus Christ was murdered, nailed to the cross, because of religion.

Nothing much hurts me, but to be called a murderer by my own sister and to be barred from her home hits pretty hard. I will never be able to see my young niece and nephews. That hurts me more than I can say.

I have never considered myself a murderer. I’ve put a few bastards off, but so what. Since when has swatting flies been murder?

People must know that taking a human life is a contradiction. If you kill 10 men you are a bloody murderer, but if you kill 10,000 you are a politician. That is Irish logic if I have ever heard it.

POPULARITY seems to be the pot of gold many people spend their whole lives searching for. I have never bothered to try and look for popularity. Being hated, being unpopular, is safer ground. If you seek popularity, you will generally fail, ending up a pathetic figure of scorn and ridicule. You can even destroy yourself in the process. But men who are hated can actually gain a following of loyal admirers, while some who seek popularity end up being disliked and hated. These are people who won’t stand up for what they believe in, but act only to be liked by others. People end up seeing through them.

It is a confusing psychological topic. It is strange because I have received mail from people who reckon I’m great, because I’m the biggest arsehole they have ever heard of. So you figure it out.

I KNOW that in reading what I have written people could become confused, because they don’t understand the rules under which I live. That is perfectly understandable, because there aren’t any. There is no real black and white, no 100 per cent right and wrong. Good and evil can be very confusing. Everything in life, including most people, is built on contradictions.

I haven’t written a book to get people to understand Mark Brandon Read. I mean, who really cares? The book is a look inside a dirty world most of you have never seen, will never see and wouldn’t want to see close-up.

Maybe it is a little bit of peek-a-boo into my mind and heart. If it is, then it is only a brief glimpse. But people should also look at themselves. Everyone interprets what is right and wrong, good and evil in their own way.

The criminal and the honest man have fought each other since the beginning of time. Some say that good always wins but evil is not truly beaten. Does one side need the other. Does one man need the other? I sometime wonder myself.

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

People love to watch movies about bad guys. They are fascinated by the other side. Is it a mirror of themselves? This is certainly heavy thinking. I must stop it before I get a headache.

We are all in search of the Holy Grail, the ultimate truth, the meaning of life. If God came down to earth and we all sat at his feet and asked. ‘Lord, tell us the answer.’ he would say, ‘Piss off, I’m trying to find where I came from.’

So why bother searching. Don’t worry, be happy. It is a good story, so read it, and don’t worry about what makes the author tick.

After all I don’t know. Why should you?

I KNOW I am hated in the criminal world, and seen by many criminals as some kind of psychotic monster, a freak.

I have never been accepted as a member of the mainstream criminal culture, nor would I want to be. I have always been considered to some kind of vulture, a shark in a tank filled with guppies. A mental case psychopath who doesn’t follow their rules, but makes them up as he goes along.

I am, or was, a headhunter, and a lot of what they say is true. But to the criminal world, that is what I will always remain. I am rejected by them through fear and that is the way I want it.

But the straight world is filled with square heads who are frightened of me. They have no idea how to talk to me and few, if any of them, have any idea how to approach me or treat me. And few, if any, relish the idea of mixing with me socially. So I am an outcast from both worlds. I am not welcome on either side of the fence. I am left in limbo, a creature from neither world. I am neither wanted nor trusted.

I have friends in the criminal world and friends who are honest, but most of the people who have stuck with me are social outcasts like myself.

It is little wonder that even though I have given crime away, I always have to be on guard. I am ill at ease, and can never really relax. I guess that is my lot in life. I am my own creation, and now I have to wear it.

It is difficult to live, knowing that most people see you as a freak, but that is the way it is.

One thing I want to make very clear, as a criminal I am in a class that is no threat whatsoever to Mr and Mrs Average. The normal honest person has nothing to fear from me. Chopper Read won’t break into your home, he won’t pinch your TV, video or purse. He won’t rape your daughter, wife, sister or granny. He won’t pinch your car, rob your bank, milk bar or bottle shop.

No, I am not in an area of crime which would personally touch the lives of the ordinary individual. I am not even in an area of crime that will touch the ordinary criminal. I am, or was, in a league alone, working is a specialized area of crime that the ordinary type of criminal only comes into contact with in his worst nightmares. I must say that I no longer even enter that world. I am out of it, and no longer a threat to anybody.

Admittedly, I am still a violent person — but only if pushed. And the normal straight person will not push me, so where is the threat?

I was the rattle snake that ate the spiders and left the wood ducks and rabbits alone.

In Australia I am seen as a bloody monster but in Northern Ireland they have been doing it for years.

I AM aware that a great many people have a love-hate relationship when my name is mentioned. Some love me, bless their twisted hearts, and a great many more hate me.

But the fact remains, that in the criminal history of Australia, 100 years from now, three names will stand out as unique characters: Ned Kelly, Squizzy Taylor, and that mad bastard with no ears. Chopper Read.

When Mark Brandon Read is dead he will still be the topic of bar room conversation long alter the names of his enemies are long forgotten. In a world as ego-driven as the criminal scene, that is no small boast. As possibly the biggest ego maniac in the underworld, I think that is quite funny.

If everyone who hates me was to buy a copy of this book, I could die a wealthy man. If that isn’t the last laugh, then I don’t know what is.

TO quote the Irish comedian, Dave Allen, ‘As I was going up the stair, I met a man who was not there, he was not there again today, I wish that man would go away.’

I am constantly meeting men who are not there, I guess all men at times show one face in public and another face in private. Weak men pretend to be strong, cowards pretend to be brave, losers pretend to be winners, perverts pretend to be normal, mad men pretend to be sane, criminals pretend to be honest, and liars pretend to be truthful.

Junkies pretend that they don’t have a problem and whores pretend to be good girls. For better or for worse most people have two sides, the side they show and the side they hide.

But there are other people where what you see is what you get. Funny, isn’t it, that the up-front person is generally criticised. I’ve never been two faced. If I had two faces, I’d certainly wear the other one. At least then I would have a pair of ears.