Chopper Unchopped (57 page)

Tracy was a top looking babe when she had her looks and health, all legs and tits – and false teeth, which is not always a disadvantage in her line of work. She had a crazy sense of humor and a loving nature and was a very sexy woman. She could also fight like a thrashing machine and had a mountain of guts. Dennis Allen once put a gun in her mouth, and she just pulled the barrel out and said: ‘Come on, Den. You know that’s not what you want to put in my mouth’. Dennis roared laughing. Another time Peter Allen couldn’t get the TV to work and Tracy said: ‘Hit it with your gun, Peter. That’s what you do with everything else’. She got away with murder, playing on a sharp mind, a quick tongue and a lot of rat cunning.

When I stated in the first book that my relationship with Tracy was not sexual, that was a tiny white lie for little Margaret’s benefit. I have to admit that when Tracy visited me on contact visits she would swagger up to me, wish me a happy birthday — then proceed to blow the candle out. But it was more an act of Christian kindness and fellowship than anything else, or otherwise I guess I was just an innocent victim of sexual abuse. Ha ha.

Seriously, Tracy was smart and funny and sexy and I thought the world of her – but the heroin kidnapped her. In the end I gave her a choice: the heroin or our friendship. But she wanted both. It broke my heart, but I couldn’t handle a junkie. It was totally impossible. It still makes me cry inside.

I still feel sad when I think about Tracy. The heroin won and I lost, and you wonder why I don’t like smack dealers. In my mind she will always be a doll — but the junkie’s needle broke the doll. Under my heart I have the words tattooed: ‘Rest in peace, Tracy Glenda’. I had that tattooed when I said goodbye to Tracy, because in my heart I felt the heroin had killed the girl I knew.

I GUESS it’s true to say that I’ve always had a fascination with strippers – not prostitutes who turn on a strip act five minutes before they turn it on for a gang bang, but the real professional strippers and exotic dancers. I’ve mentioned before that when I was a young lout, a gang of us went to see a famous American stripper, Alexandra the Great 48. It was a sight I will never forget.

She was wild. Only a short lady – about five foot two –but in high heels she looked magic. Long black hair and a fantastic body. She was a real professional tease — dancing into the crowd, sitting on men’s knees, pushing the faces of others between her 48-inch monsters. I sat there watching with my eyes wide open, and my mouth open, and she danced over and bent forward and put her tongue in my mouth. I was embarrassed and shocked. I was only a teenage kid, and no-one had ever put their tongue in my mouth before. Yuck. ‘Bloody hell,’ I thought.

It wasn’t the last time I saw Alexandra. She caused a riot when she put on a strip act in Pentridge in the very early ‘70s. She had agreed to strip only to her G-string, but she went further, and the screws had to close down the show. She pulled the same stunt in Western Australia when she put on a show in Fremantle Prison. She was a sight I will never forget … the first stripper I’d ever seen and the best by far. She was in her 40s then. I heard she went back to America and married a 17-year-old sailor. She must be an old girl now. I’ll never forget her.

Since then I’ve seen a truckload of so-called strippers, most of them gang bang toss-ups pretending to be Gypsy Rose Lee before they do their come-one, come-all Linda Lovelace impersonation. Some of them were glamorous and magic looking, but in the end a dirty girl is a dirty girl. But the genuine, purebred professional stripper and exotic dancer is a wild sight. Probably one of the best I ever saw was a lady named ‘Little Egypt’. She was a tall, statuesque professional dancer who was described as an Arabic girl, although I think she was really half Greek and half Egyptian, a reject from a ballet academy because she was too big in the chest.

I went to see her when I was 18 years old. She danced to the Elvis Presley song ‘Little Egypt’ and my old comrade in arms Cowboy Johnny Harris fell in love and so did I. I thought: ‘What a totally insane-looking woman’. The Cowboy and I were front-row regulars from then on at her shows. In her high heels she was at least two inches taller than me, and she had a proud and aloof manner, which should have warned any amorous types in the crowd that it was strictly no touching the merchandise. I saw her pick up an empty glass, break it and open up a guy’s face one night after he tried to bite her on the bum. The bouncers dragged the offender out and gave him a sound kicking for his trouble, so the bloke probably wished he’d stayed home that night and taught the budgie to talk instead. But he wasn’t the first or the last mug to fall foul of Little Egypt, who was also called the ‘Queen of Slice and Dice’ because she was so handy with a broken bottle or glass, and would open up your face in flash. But she was fantastic.

I saw Little Egypt many years later selling behind a stall at the Victoria Market. She was a tall, large woman with giant bosoms and even bigger hips — a big mama, but still with a beautiful face like an Egyptian princess. I said: ‘Did you used to be a dancer?’ She said: ‘A hundred years and five children ago. Yeah’.

‘Little Egypt?’ I said.

‘It’s Mrs Little Egypt now,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me … now I look like the bloody pyramids.’ But she was flattered that I should remember her. How could I forget. She was a living fantasy when I was a young man.

Oh, well. One more shattered memory. Ha ha.

PEOPLE on the outside must wonder what really goes on in jail. I must say that all in all there was very little homosexuality in the Victorian prison system. Once in a while you’d get these rampant poofs running through the place, and in the 1970s we had the drag queens in Pentridge – Vicky Litty, Maxine de Barry, Elly May, Wendy McDonald and the rest of the Pentridge Les Girls troupe. But in H Division, where I was, there was none of this decadence. And the AIDS panic later turned a lot of jail-house queers straight. But A Division has seen a few famous love stories. There have been some ‘Sugar Plum Fairies’ dancing their way through that place, believe me. Personally, I find it most distasteful and I enjoy bashing these types as they are a bloody health hazard in a prison and should be stamped out for that reason, if nothing else.

In Geelong Prison in 1984 there was this young bloke who looked like a girl. He was a honey-blond, green-eyed bum boy who worked for a camp escort service on the outside. He was also a mad junkie with a bad habit. The odd thing was that he was married to a young Chinese chick and they had a little baby. The Chinese wife also worked in a massage parlor and the young husband’s mum and dad looked after the baby.

I’ll call the young guy Danny. Well, Danny boy had to pay for his drugs in jail, and the only way he could do that was by selling his mouth and his bum. Now, he used two to four $50 caps of heroin per day and so he was flat out dropping the soap in the shower to pay his way. It was bloody disgusting, but that was the way he paid his bills. None of this had anything to do with me until Danny boy got himself into real debt, and was a certainty to get himself stabbed. He approached me like a frightened puppy – or should I say ‘pussy’ – and asked if I’d be willing to speak to people to ask them not to hurt him. In return he offered me his ‘services’. I told him he was out of luck, but that I would speak to the people concerned and ask them not to stab him ‘too hard’. Ha ha. I laughed and walked away.

Danny boy didn’t get stabbed, although he did get bashed pretty badly. About two days after his bashing, his China doll wife came into the prison to see me on a special contact visit on a week day when it was pretty empty. She asked me to help her husband. She had her own drug habit to look after, plus all sorts of money and other troubles, so we worked out a deal. She came to see me once a week on a special contact visit and the screws would turn a blind eye to how friendly she was with me, which was very friendly indeed. Meanwhile, of course, no-one got violent with her husband. In jail terms, it was strictly business. And why not? They were only animals, the pair of them. Half the jail was up the husband, so it was only fair that I got the wife. Why should I get left out?

There’s a last bit to this story that I consider the height of good humor. One old screw who kept guard on the contact visits spoke to me about the China doll and I told her to ‘put a smile on his face’ as well. The poor silly old bastard fell in love with the whore and the only way to keep things nice and tidy was to tell her to put an end to the special visits.

Should I feel ashamed? Why? The husband was a sick animal. The wife was a sick slut. Junkies like that are sub-human, pathetic scum. It’s sad, but true.

I had the run of Geelong Prison. Frankie Waghorn and I ran the place. But I didn’t win any popularity points when I put a virtual overnight stop to homosexual activity in the place – on pain of death – after viewing a TV documentary on AIDS. About a month later, the jail authorities sent me back to Pentridge. Very suspicious.

P.S. Danny boy contracted AIDS in 1990 and was sent to the K Division AIDS unit. The China doll is still hawking herself and at last reports is as healthy as a horse. Thank God.

I’M NOT a great one for tattooed ladies, although Karen’s tattoo of me on her back isn’t bad, I must admit. Tracy Warren had my name tattooed on her body – ‘Property of Chopper’. I’ve never really seen it, but I’ve been told about it. Personally I don’t really like tattoos on girls. A good looking chick can wear one or two, I guess, but it just doesn’t appeal to me. There was this whore in Melbourne who picked me up and got me back to a motel room. It was a free ride, so I didn’t mind, but when she got her gear off she had ‘Love me, love my dog’ tattooed on her bum. And just over her pussy were the words ‘Forsake all hope ye who enter here’. Needless to say I didn’t bother getting undressed, and I don’t mind saying that I left without partaking. She wasn’t ugly, believe me. But the sign-writing dampened my passion. I mean, ‘Love me, love my dog’ tattooed on her bum. I bet that young lady had a few stories she could tell. The mind boggles.

MY lawyer, Anita Betts, once asked me in anger: ‘Who is this Renee Brack?’ I said she was a lady who interviewed me for TV – and definitely no dirty girl. I said she was a nice chick ‘and a friend’. I gave Anita a pile of mail written to me by Renee to support my numbnut idea that she was a friend.

Anita sat with her head in her hands and looked at me and said: ‘Men. You do all your thinking below your belt. You wouldn’t know a friend if she bit you on the bum’. I said Renee had never bitten me anywhere, let alone on the bum. ‘Well,’ said Anita, ‘wherever she did bite you, forget it. This woman is not your friend.’ Then she showed me Renee’s statement to the police and said: ‘Little Miss Peaches and Cream Renee Brack is going to be a Crown witness against you’. I said: ‘No, no. She will be okay. She’s on my side’.

‘She’ll be okay, all right,’ yelled Anita. ‘When she gets in the witness box I’ll tear her apart.’

One letter in particular written to me by Renee gave Anita reason to crack a somewhat evil smile. ‘Wait ‘til I toss this at her,’ she said. ‘No, no,’ I protested. ‘I don’t want you to rip it into Renee.’

‘Chopper,’ Anita said. ‘You’re a nice bloke. But when it comes to women like Renee Brack let me do the thinking.’ A week later Anita visited me in Risdon with the ‘Truth’ newspaper under her arm. On the front page was Renee proudly telling one and all that she was to be called as a Crown witness against me.

Margaret had warned me that Renee Brack was trying to climb her own personal ladder at my expense, but as usual I disagreed. Renee continued to write to me, but her letters seemed to take a slight turn, pressing me for info on this, that and the other, and telling me of her ideas for a book of her own, of her hopes to be a writer. She went on about how the interview she did with me had gone to America ‘as I told you it would’ and that when I had told her that the interview with me wouldn’t do her career any harm, I had been right, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could do a second interview. Rah, rah, rah, blah, blah, blah.

Still convinced Renee was a top chick and a friend, I gave her a wrap in my second book — much to her delight. All was well until an article appeared on the front page of ‘Truth’ again, explaining that Chopper was in love with a beautiful TV reporter named Renee Brack, and quoting her as saying that I was bombarding her with mail. I was made to look like a lovesick mental case.

My so-called friendship with Renee Brack had turned into the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Anita came in to see me with the article. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘what do you think of your girlfriend, now? She is not your friend, Mark. She is a TV reporter, and you’re Chopper Read.’

I said: ‘What do you mean?’ She said: ‘Mark, you poor simple soul, in the world of television it’s self, self, self. There is no friendship.’ And she said a few other things which we won’t repeat here. At last the penny dropped. The article in the ‘Woman’s Day’ where Renee explained she was not terribly comfortable with the attention and did not enjoy the idea of being the pin-up girl for some guy in prison, made it clear to me. As always, Anita and my faithful girlfriend Margaret were right and I was wrong.

That wonderful little article in ‘Woman’s Day’ claiming Renee was my ‘pin-up girl’ caused Margaret to really spit the dummy with me. When Renee had been in Launceston I didn’t come home on the Saturday night and Margaret suspected that I had been up to no good, and furthermore, she suspected that the no good I was up to was Renee Brack.

My pleas of ‘not guilty’ fell on deaf ears and the various stories that followed in the newspapers and magazines quoting Renee and hinting that I was sweet on her were the last straw for Margaret in a haystack full of past bugger-ups on my part. So Margaret went her own way.

In spite of Renee’s continued letters to me I accepted the fact that I had been in serious error to believe that I had a friend in Renee. Another article in the Australian ‘Penthouse’ called ‘Chopper’s World’ written by Renee Brack simply proved to me that she seemed to be basing her career on the fact that she had once interviewed a man with no ears … turning a bowl of porridge into a six course meal, if you get my meaning.