Chopper Unchopped (82 page)

AS I sit in my cell writing this on a bitter cold Sunday morning my hands are a mixture of dead numb and pins and needles. It is so cold in my cell you could hang meat in it, but it is warmer in the cell than outside.

It is quite beautiful when I come out of the cell in the morning. It is dark dawn and the cloud, or fog, hangs heavy just above the roof cage of the prison yard, and as I look at the hills that surround the prison it is as if the clouds or fog have cut them in half.

It is a very surreal, yet quite beautiful sight. I will never grow tired of casting my eyes towards the tree-covered hills around this place. It is a lovely view and the hills look so close that I could reach out and touch them. I can even see the fire tracks and walking paths that wind their way through between the trees.

If someone walked up these hills and stood and waved we could see them quite clearly and wave back. Every night or afternoon as I walk back with the rest of B yard, from our mess room to our cells for the night, I cast my eyes over these tree-covered hills. It is a wonderful sight for a bloke in prison.

The trouble is most of the guys here have come from the logging industry. They look at the trees and you can nearly hear the chainsaws start up in their heads.

In Pentridge the best view available to me on a good day was the bloody Kodak factory, about a mile away across some paddocks.

This jail has an almost make believe feel to it. It is a Clayton’s prison – the jail you’re in when you’re not really in jail. Or a pixie prison from a tall tales nursery rhyme. I wake up every morning with the feeling that none of it is real.

It is a very petty, silly little place, yet very cosy and comfy and relaxed, like the sort of jail you’d send your old granny to. The fact that they take themselves so seriously is all part of its totally ridiculous comic magic.

I feel as if I’m the prisoner of a Monty Python joke in a Dennis Potter movie, especially once a week when the farmer’s daughter comes in to visit me. The thought of Chopper and the posh farmer’s daughter has created some scallywag comedy around the prison.

One of the prison staff joked with me the other day, ‘Hey Chopper, how much do you love this girl?’ and Bucky yelled out from behind me, ‘Thirty grand an acre, that’s how much.’

Everyone laughed, but it was a bit hurtful, even though I found myself joining in the comedy of it all. What am I going to do with Mary-Ann when I get out of this place – if I ever get out? I don’t want to lose her, but I don’t want to cause her unhappiness either.

When you’re in jail and a woman starts to visit you she has a captive audience and the poor bugger behind bars comes to depend on her visits and a love develops, and when the prisoner gets out of jail he feels a deep obligation to repay this debt of love and loyalty.

It’s a case of ‘I stuck with you when you were in jail, now you make my dream come true’. It is like befriending a wounded wild animal in a cage and over a period of time the animal teaches himself or learns to trust you, rely on you, count on you, depend on you, and love you. Then one day the cage is gone and the animal is free.

This is what happened with me and Margaret. I went from a prison of bluestone walls and iron bars into a prison of mental and emotional guilt, caused by a deep sense of obligation to repay love and loyalty. I used to stand on the back steps of our place in Launceston, which was full of thousands of dollars’ worth of domestic household bullshit that women love so much and I’d say, ‘Margaret, I love you, but I’m telling you right now I’m not happy inside my own heart’.

I don’t want to be mentally and emotionally kidnapped while I’m in jail and walk free of one prison only to be taken into another of pots and pans, washing machines, fridges and freezers, microwave ovens, double beds and doonas, lounge suites and new carpets, drapes and knick knacks on the wall, with some nagging female giving me hell for not coming home on time for my din dins, and wanting to grab her bloody handbag and come with me every time I head for the door.

‘Where are you going? Where have you been? What are you doing? What have you done?’ This is the nightmare women put you in.

You don’t want to lose them but you don’t want to become their bloomin’ prisoner either. Bucky asked me what would I do if I got out and was on my own? My answer was that if I had my own way I’d get out and live in my mate’s pub, write books to pay the bills, bang the tail off every dirty girl I could get my hands on, gamble my guts out and drink myself to death. I mean, really, is that too much to ask?

And if things don’t work out with me and Mary-Ann when I get out of this shit, that’s exactly what I will do. Just live in a pub by the sea, write books and be on my own. Maybe Damian Bugg QC could come over for a holiday.

Mind you, Mary-Ann is clever. She knows all this and tells me she won’t let it happen. Time will tell. It seems that not only is the jail I’m in surreal, but my whole life is becoming more and more dreamlike. And the more that life crashes in on me the more that room in a pub by the sea sounds good to me. Write a couple more books before I die, pouring Irish whisky down my neck as I go, spinning out on the roulette wheel and pulling on a few hot little blondes along the way before I climb quietly into my coffin.

Bugger what you think, it sounds great to me.

BY May down here it’s winter as far as I am concerned. Mary-Ann sent me in some special ‘Made in New Zealand’ long underwear that they wear down at the South Pole and I sleep in the bloody things under seven blankets. I’m writing this with my overcoat on and with one glove on my left hand, and the hand I’m using to write with is nearly frozen.

It gets below freezing level in these cells at night. They have an electric heater bolted into the wall of every cell and we get three hours of heating per night which really means that the heater comes on in four and five minute bursts over a three-hour period and one five minute burst at about 5.30 in the morning.

Thank God the laundry where I work is warm. Eddy the head, the boss of the laundry, put me in charge of this big industrial size ironing machine and I feed damp pillowcases into it all day long with three blokes at the other end folding the bloody things up. The old ironing machine punches out some heat.

They put all the ratbags down the laundry and it’s meant to be the worst job in the place, but I love it. In winter it’s the only place to be. It even has its own showers.

When I got here there was talk of making me the new jail barber. But the Governor knocked that idea on the head so instead they gave the job to Micky bloody Chatters.

Micky is a top bloke and my friend, but he is the last bloke any sane person would want to see placed in charge of scissors. Let me tell you, if Micky walked into a shearing shed, the sheep would go on strike.

If a bloke came into Risdon charged with poisoning 100 people they would put him in charge of the kitchen.

I’m still getting into trouble over the contents of my mail. They had a go at me last week for making mention of staff members by name in my letters. To call the Governor or any of the various deputies or staff members by name is forbidden, which means that when I write to Mary-Ann I am unable to use the name of her own sister, since Mary-Ann’s sister took a job here as an education officer and actually sits on the bloody classification committee. Imagine me marrying into the classo board. God help us all!

Half the staff seems to be related, half the inmates seem to be related and a good quarter of both sides seem to be related to each other … and I will probably be called up to the Governor’s office for writing this. I’ve never encountered a situation like it before.

I’ve been in this jail about two years so far, and I haven’t put a foot wrong. I haven’t said a word out of place to a single soul. I am in reality a model prisoner, yet I am still looked upon as some sort of freak and viewed with suspicion and paranoia.

I’m so polite to the buggers it’s almost sickening, and the more I smile the less they trust me and when I frown they trust me even less. Oh well, they can pay full price for the new book when it comes out.

As I write this the wind has turned funny and the night rain is blowing against my cell window and door. It’s a strange sort of night. I know I’ve mentioned the word ‘surreal’ before but it really is. All I’m waiting for is for the Governor and a dozen or so of the prison staff to break out in song and dance and the Dennis Potter movie would be complete.

As I stand in the prison laundry all day long feeding damp pillowcases into the hot rollers of the ironing machine, I find myself spinning out into daydream land, or returning to the mental and emotional safety of the sentimental memories of my past. It’s like
The Singing Detective
.

At night-time in my sleep I escape the prison walls into the world of my dreams and during the daylight hours my mind dances or flutters between the cold reality of my situation and the surreal non-reality of my daydreams. I travel back in my mind’s eye to my childhood and teenage years.

Now that I’m nearing my 40th year my daydreams never sweep me away to the fantasy of the future, but to the best and sweetest times of my past. And despite the horrors of my past life, there have been some sweet and wonderful moments.

My mind is caught up in reliving a past adventure or a sentimental memory, but in jail it is like a fantasy. Was I really there? Did I really do that? Was that person real? The past is like a fantasy as it is only a dream in your mind. The future is also only a dream. The only thing that is real is now, and now is always so boring, or so it seems.

Instead, we wonder what tomorrow will bring and while we await that adventure we recall with sentimental longing the magic of yesterday. The present, then, is only a boring waiting room between yesterday and tomorrow. For me, in jail, tomorrow brings nothing and so I look back to yesterday.

Memories … of my father cracking his hard-boiled eggs on my head as we sat together on the back steps. Memories of myself and the rest of the little school kids marching around the playground to the tune of
Click Go The Shears
at Thomastown State School. Memories of myself as a nine-year-old boy and the local gang of kids chipping in with all our pennies and halfpennies to come up with the princely sum of one shilling in order to bribe the mentally retarded girl who lived down the road to undo her shirt and show us her big tits.

We would stand there in true boyish wonder at the sight of it, or them, reaching up to feel if they were real.

Then afterwards we would con the poor girl with the big tits into buying a shilling’s worth of hot chips with salt and vinegar for us all. In the early 1960s a shilling’s worth of chips would feed a small army.

As I stand there feeding the damp pillowcases into the hot rollers of the ironing machine my mind springs out into the memories of past insanities and magic adventures. Past sexual adventures that I thought little of at the time, yet have haunted my mind ever since my return to jail to drive me just that touch more insane than I already am.

Some women, once met, cast a spell on you and the memory of them haunts you till the grave, and I’ve met many such women in my time. Yes, my body is in prison but my mind is sailing in the wind. Thank God.

WHEN the breakfast, lunch or tea bell rings, we all stand on parade, and after our names are called out we have a ten-minute wait in line before we march off in a disorderly fashion to get our food.

It is on the muster line that some of the best comic remarks and conversations are to be had and heard. Although silence is meant to be maintained, it rarely, if ever, is.

It was there that I learned, to my horror, that the only two people on the whole muster who had ever heard of or seen the great movie classic
Cool Hand Luke
, starring Paul Newman, was myself and a Melbourne crook called Harry the Greek.

Paul Newman played the role of Lucas Jackson in the movie, which has influenced a generation of scallywags, crooks, knockabouts and tearaways.

It is an all-time classic and tells you about jail life. When Luke Jackson’s mother dies he comes back into the chain gang barracks, picks up his old banjo and with tears in his eyes sings this song: ‘I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I’ve got my plastic Jesus sitting on the dashboard of my car, dressed in colors pink and pleasant, glows in the dark ’coz it’s iridescent, take it with you when you travel far. Get yourself a sweet madonna, dressed in rhinestone, sitting on a pedestal of abalone shell, goin’ on ninety but I ain’t scary, coz I know I got the Virgin Mary assuring me that I won’t go to hell.’

All right, it may be true that as a singer Paul Newman makes a great salad dressing, but to anyone who has done time, it means something. If they’ve seen it, that is.

I’ve got the first verse of that song tattooed on my lower back and I guess it’s safe to say that it is my favorite movie of all time. I will have to speak to the bloke who gets the videos for the prison and get him to lift his game. Anyone who hasn’t seen that old classic should hang his head. There was the great scene where Luke tried to eat a huge amount of boiled eggs for a bet. These health conscious days, if they made a remake they’d cut that scene because of cholesterol levels. The new flick would have a rough, tough crim gobbling down tofu or lentil burgers.

The number of young blokes who have not only never read the works of the great Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson, but haven’t even heard of them, is quite sad and amazing. These aren’t fresh off the boat Vietnamese, these are fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth generation Aussie kids – Tasmanians whose family heritage goes back to the early convict days.

I mean these are fair dinkum ‘she’ll be sweet mate’ bloody Aussies, and they’ve never heard of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Some of the young crims here think culture is something you make yogurt with. They believe they can learn about Asian history by watching
Ninja Turtles
. They think Henry Lawson bowled for Australia, and Banjo Paterson’s is a theatre restaurant in Adelaide.