Chopper Unchopped (48 page)

It was not a good look. The comedy of the fight had taken a sad and distressing turn.

Al Plonko, feeling he had won some major and worthy victory, began to get a little bit lippy. Meanwhile, prison officers came from everywhere to see what had happened. There was so many of them there at one point it looked like a union meeting. Eventually Clarkey was bundled on to a stretcher and taken to hospital. Big Frank Jones, a jolly joker by nature, was not happy and ordered that Al Plonko be taken around the corner to the punishment division, N Division.

As quick as it had started, the drama was over. After a comfortable night in the Royal Hobart Hospital, Kevin ‘The Drunk’ was also sent to N Division to recover.

This is May in Tassie and the winter comes early. In N Division there is no central heating. The moral of the story is don’t get sat on your arse and have a fit at Risdon.

What a fiasco.

WHILE inside I have got mail by the truck load. 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, although I believe that my life, when viewed from a safe distance, does have several messages, such as don’t cut your ears off and never be friendly with Sid Collins.

But, regardless of that, people write to me complaining that after several readings of my first two books, they felt they had to contact me to raise several points regarding my attitude to this or that. For goodness sake, I am in the bin doing a monster stretch for something I didn’t do and these people want some academic discussion. They must be kidding.

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’.

A PSYCHOLOGICAL point that I am forced to ponder is really more of a question for which I know I will never find the answer. Why is it that when I am in jail and locked up like a rat in a trap, and totally unable to take advantage of any romantic situation offered to me, that I manage to pull more pussy than a Chinese restaurant? Yet, when I am free and at large, girls of loose morals bite holes in screen doors trying to get away from me.

I mean, all the good luck I have with girls seems to find me when I am in jail. I get it all when I am behind bars rather than when I have one, if you get the drift. If there is a God, then he has a twisted sense of humor. That’s why there are women banging on the gates trying to get in to visit me, others ringing the prison crying over the phone pleading to talk to me, and others writing me pornographic love letters. But when I am on the outside, things change. If I was standing in a room full of nymphomaniacs, I could swing a cat and not hit a soul.

They seem to be waiting in the wings for the news that I am in jail — and then they attack me with outrageous offers of pleasure and pain that would make the silver gun rapist blush. Mad Micky said to me that I’ll die a lonely man with a thousand chicks I’ve never met, crying at my funeral.

Of the several hundred love letters I have got in jail, I have developed a good filing system. You may remember that while in jail I have to go without a private secretary. The letters from old, ugly or fat chicks go in the bin. Cruel, you may think. Well, put it this way, if you are silly enough to write a love letter with a photo included to a self-confessed arsehole, then you better make sure you are good looking, or it’s straight into the old round filing cabinet.

I have replied to some letters, and write to a small fistful of outrageously good-looking young ladies. Just because I’ve got no ears, doesn’t mean I’ve got no taste.

John Le Carre once wrote that some people simply elbow their way into a novel and sit there till the writer finds them a place. There is one young lady who did this to me. She didn’t set out to elbow her way into my book, but she ended up elbowing her way into my life. She has been writing to me for a year. She sends me short stories: strange, weird, freaky, fairytales that sweep the reader off in an X-rated version of Disneyland. She has a fertile imagination and a scallywag sense of humor. Next to Dorothy L. Sayers, this little honey has become my favorite female writer.

Lady bar room story tellers are rare and her stories always have a slightly naughty twist to them which appeals to a man behind bars. Her name is Tauree and she is a bloody good chick, so while I may slag off at most of them, girls like Tauree are the exception.

Another good and loyal friend is Mary-Ann from the Tax Department. I told her if I get out I wouldn’t mind taxing the pants off her. I think I won her with the line, ‘Have you ever stuck your tongue in an ear that wasn’t there’. Goodness, I am a suave devil.

It’s quite amazing. Here I sit with a no-eared toothless head that even a mother wouldn’t love and I’ve got the screws of Risdon shooing the sheilas away with a stick. God’s idea of a practical joke? I can’t figure it out.

ONE day back in May I was called up to the Governor’s office. I certainly don’t like these visits as they are rarely purely social. When I am walking to the office I always wonder what I have done wrong. It is silly really. Here I am worrying like a schoolboy on his way to the headmaster’s office, when there is precious little they can do to me. The courts have already done their worst – throwing away the key, so to speak, by giving me the Governor’s Pleasure sentence, which means my release date is the 12th of never, if my appeal fails. (Editors’ note: Read’s appeal did subsequently fail.)

Anyway, Chief Prison Officer Frank Jones and Senior Prison Officer K.D. Salter, the boss of the Prison Officers’ Cricket Club, were also in attendance, with Deputy Governor Graham Harris at the helm.

I stepped into the room and gave Governor Harris a snappy salute, as inmates at the Pink Palace are required to do. I waited in trepidation for the bollocking I thought I’d get for some perceived misdeed. But what followed left me quite shaken.

The conversation was most friendly and civil. I would even describe it as warm, with the Deputy Governor even breaking out in a smile. I kid you not, the man actually smiled. I saw his teeth and everything. I nearly fell over. There was even a hint of laughter. While there was no suggestion that the tea and scones were on their way, it certainly turned out a pleasant chat.

I found it hard to believe there was no catch, as it is my painful experience that jail governors are at their worst when they are smiling. I have noted on my psychological travels that some of the strangest beasts in the world are prison governors. They are a race on their own.

I walked out of the headmaster’s office most confused. I had misjudged the nature and temperament of the dear Deputy Governor. Had my previous evaluation of the man’s character been flawed? Could Graham Harris be hiding a sense of humor that had escaped me on previous meetings? Jail governors are a never-ending psychological puzzle, that I am yet to understand after about 18 years of careful observation.

The screws in any jail are always a strange mix of the plain weird, the soldier of fortune type, bible bashers, drunks and the classic Aussie bar-room story tellers.

One in Risdon who is a classic story teller and yarn spinner is Dave Oakley, the man who doesn’t like snakes. He is a tough old boy who does his job well, but because he has a good sense of humor, he gets on well with the inmates. He has a heart of gold and a dry wit which can double me up in fits of laughter.

There are other prison officers here who like to think they are heavy thinkers. One of them loves to sit down with me and have huge psychological debates about the pros and cons of the inner workings of the human mind. He has locked me into some debates which have left me in dire need of a Panadol and a good lie down.

He likes to climb inside your head and pick, pick, pick at your brain. My method is more likely to creep up behind you and go whack, whack, whack with an ice-pick,

Having lurched out of huge, deep and exhausting mental debates I sometimes run into a Mormon prison officer who wants a big rave about God. Sometimes I don’t know whether this is a jail or a big pink debating society. All in all the prison officers in Risdon are not a bad lot. Screws and coppers seem to be cut from the same cloth, mentally and emotionally. Most have got a good sense of humor. It can be a valuable weapon. A screw without a sense of humor won’t last long.

Now, I love a visit and the other day two detectives from Melbourne popped in for a chat. It was a pity they had come over to investigate a bit of trivia. The poor chaps had been assigned to check out some flapdoodle about a prisoner who committed suicide in Pentridge some years ago.

Sean Downie was the bloke who hanged himself and the investigation at least gave the two Melbourne detectives the excuse to get away from the dusty corridors of St Kilda Rd and get over Bass Strait on a day trip.

It was all due to the anti-nuclear fruitcake, John Dixon-Jenkins, and the teacup revolutionary, Jeff Lapidos, from the Prisoners’ Ratbag Reform Action Faction. These two men seem convinced that Downie was murdered. No, young Sean had the bad manners to decide to take early parole while in the cell next to mine, and I have been left to live with the wild rumors that I helped him on his way, or that I am covering up for corrupt prison officers who may have been involved in his death.

The reason for the conspiracy theory related to my bored and wicked mind, and Dixon-Jenkins’s paranoia. After we bade a fond farewell to Downie, John got his cell – the death cell, as he called it. John has always been a paranoid believer in conspiracy theories and would not sit still for the suicide theory. He demanded that I tell him the ‘truth’ on the matter, so naturally I decided to give him both barrels.

I told John that the taxi driver Sean Downie had murdered was a high-ranking member of the Masonic Lodge and that Downie was strung up and set on fire by a Masonic death squad operating in the ranks of the prison staff at Pentridge.

John Dixon-Jenkins, a bright and sincere man, not known for his sense of humor, reeled back in horror. You see, I have a tattoo on my right forearm that reads ‘Brethren Black Chapter, Antient charge v1.4’ and another tattoo on my left forearm that reads ‘Sublime sons of Hiram Abriff’. Perhaps that’s why John always felt that I had some sort of affiliation with the Masonic Lodge.

Of course, my whole story was pure rollicking rubbish, but John was horrified, and for a time believed he was on some sort of Masonic hit list. To tell the truth, in all the excitement, I forgot to tell John that I was pulling his leg, and the poor mad bugger has been screaming blue murder ever since. All I can say to John is that it is all rubbish. But even so, he’d better mind how he goes or the Freemasons will get him.

The truth was that Downie was a young crook who came into Pentridge charged with the murder of a cab driver. They put him in the top security space station, Jika Jika, in 1987.

He didn’t like the place and freaked right out. He wasn’t the only one. Only months later five prisoners, including my former best mate, Jimmy Loughnan, started a fire which killed them all and led to the closing of the electronic zoo. So you can see that, in 1987, Jika Jika was not the place to be if you were a little unsettled in the brain box department. They put Sean in Unit Two next to me and he flipped right out and took his own life. Big deal. That was not unusual in jail at the time, but the funny thing was that Downie was not going to leave anything to chance.

He set fire to his cell, the mattress, sheets, blankets and newspapers, then hanged himself. I suppose he did it in that order – it would have been a little difficult the other way around.

Just as well he didn’t take rat poison and shoot himself as well, or those with suspicious minds would get really excited. I might add that the smoke from the fire almost killed us. The inconsiderate blighter didn’t even think of the hole in the ozone layer when he decided to jump off the perch.

Of course, some people considered it odd that some prison staff had visited Downie shortly before he decided on the Viking funeral. I was called to the inquest but I couldn’t shed any light on the matter. How could I? I couldn’t see anything for the bloody smoke. Any rate, I was asleep during the whole sordid event. Years of experience have taught me that it is best to sleep when people are hanging themselves. Some inmates always believed it was murder. Downie was a psycho so it could have been anything. It is none of my business, but the nickname for suicide in jail is early parole, and for what it’s worth I believe that Downie simply took early parole.

Even though I told the coroner I knew nothing about the Downie affair, there were some unkind people who suggested that I magically appeared in Sean’s cell, and gave him the big helping hand.

Need I tell the fair minded reader that this is, as you would imagine, foul gossip and slander of the highest order. There have been suggestions that there was some bad blood between Downie and me. Nonsense. We were not blood brothers and we had no plans to share a cottage by the sea together after our release, but we were not enemies.

It seems if I have the misfortune to have my cell next to a depressed pyromaniac with a neck rash, people think I have killed him. The gossips will wag their unkind tongues.

All I can say is to my knowledge there was no foul play involved. When it comes to death, whether it be murder or suicide, the three wise monkeys had the right idea: see nothing, hear nothing and, most importantly, say nothing.

As I said, I was asleep at the time.