Chopper Unchopped (84 page)

I mean, us poor old Chinese Irishmen don’t get any free goodies, so why should they?

I better go now. I feel like a pint of Guinness and some fried rice.

I HAVE been carrying on a lengthy debate for some time now with a lady friend of mine, Margaret Hamilton. She is the Margaret in my life I never mentioned before. She is a mother of three and a good friend of mine and Robert Lochrie.

The debate is why I have never been, or allowed myself to be the father of children. A totally outrageous thought, if you ask me. Yet female friends of mine insist that I would make a wonderful dad. The debate has gone on and on with me losing ground and big Margaret's arguments holding fast.

I then got a phone call from Anita and she told me that the High Court rejected my leave to appeal. So that is that, a perfect argument for why I've never been a dad.

My life is a never-ending nightmare. I wouldn't want to be a part-time father. The idea of my kids coming to see me in jail would be too cruel to everybody. I have chosen my life, I am what I am, but how could I inflict it on children?

As for my little mate Tauree (whose last name is Cleaver, a name that somewhat amuses me considering my name), she'd make a good getting-out-of-jail present … except that by then we both could have grey hair, glasses, false teeth, hearing aids and walking sticks! But it was a happy thought while it lasted. Mary-Ann of course is in tears and in all honesty if I had a tear to cry I'd be bawling my eyes out now. How long is a piece of string? Well, that's how long I will have to do in jail, held at the Governor's Pleasure.

It is so hard to live with no light at the end of the tunnel. So now I will set about petitioning the Governor of the state of Tasmania. I'll petition him so much he will have nightmares about me. He'll get so much mail I will become a life patron to Aussie Post.

IN the past any shooting matter where the victim lived, it was a simple Magistrates' Court matter and a two-year sentence, but in Tassie it is the twelfth of never and for the only one I did not do.

This has to be the sins of my past come back to get me. So Damian Bugg and Sid have finally beat me. Or have they?

The sad part to all this is that it will probably finish my old Dad. I doubt that he will live long enough for me to ever see him again, face to face as a free man. Anita Betts told me that Mr David Porter put up a sterling effort, as I'm sure he did. Tauree once wrote to me, ‘Chopper, do you think they held your books against you?' and went on to say that she thought that if my name was not Chopper Read I would have won my court case in the beginning.

Out of the mouths of babes many true things are said and I have all the time in the world to wonder about that particular line of thought. Meanwhile, I'm still smiling away like the joker gone mad.

It may not be justice, but I guess it is a bitter and twisted form of poetic justice. Oh well. They got me for the wrong crime but I'm no cleanskin.

SPEAKING of Dad, he is getting sicker and stranger by the month, and I feel powerless to help him in here.

The last time I saw him was when Micky Marlow brought him down to see me. These days I cannot tell him a thing for fear he stands in the street and blabs it to the neighbors and passers-by.

It is very sad for me to read his letters these days as I can no longer understand a word he is on about. It is a strange feeling; he is alive but I've lost him. I can see him clearly in my memory, but when he visited me last he was a faded shadow of the man I knew and, mentally, he was no longer my father.

Dad was always a funny piece of work. In 1977 when we were living together in Rockley Road, South Yarra, I would get ready to go out at night. While I would shower and shave Dad would lay all my clothes out for me after he ironed and pressed everything.

I would dress and put on my overcoat, a beautiful old black box Chester overcoat, and then I'd say to Dad, ‘Where is my shotgun?' and he would run off and come back with my sawn-off 12-gauge shotgun. I would say ‘ammo', and he'd say, ‘Bird shot or SGs?' and he would come back with half a dozen assorted shells. I would say, ‘Where is my cut-throat razor?' and off he would go to fetch my razor and I'd yell out, ‘My pliers as well', and he would yell back, ‘Will you need your knuckle buster?' He always called the knuckle duster the ‘buster'. Anyway, this comedy would go on until I was fully armed.

Then, as I was ready to leave, I would give Dad a kiss on the cheek and a hug and he would pat me on the back and say, ‘Okay son, you can't be too careful in your line of business. Don't get into any trouble.' Ha ha. There I am going out the door at midnight with enough cold steel and firepower to fight off a small invading army and my old Dad is telling me not to get into any trouble.

I remember after I shot a crook called Johnny in 1977, I accidentally left the spent cartridge near the scene of the crime and I got my dad to drive me back to look for it. Lucky for me I found it. I ended up getting two years' jail over that at a later date, and my dad gave me a lecture all the way home in the car. ‘You should have taken his head off, son. Bloody shooting these bums in the legs is no good. You are not running a public charity.' To which I'd be saying, ‘Yes Dad, no Dad, I'm sorry Dad.'

‘You bloody knucklehead,' he would call me. Now he cannot even recall the event. It is a sad and terrible thing to watch someone you love fade away. Micky Marlow pops in to see Dad now and again. Dad relates stories of being spied on by neighbors and police and plots and plans afoot aimed at him by the forces of evil, all of it somehow relating to me. If the handle comes off the teacup then it's a case of sabotage by unseen enemies. I receive letters of violent outrage from him ranting and raving at me over things that make no sense to me at all. Then at other times he writes to me in his old loving manner.

Stuck in here I do worry about the old fellow and his wellbeing. Years ago while Dad was making us a cup of Milo in the kitchen, me and Dave the Jew sat in the lounge room cleaning a pump action shotgun, and Dave said in a whisper, ‘Your dad isn't making Milo again, is he? He nearly killed me with the last cup he made.'

Dad was putting laxatives into Dave's Milo. He would stand there and force Dave to drink the Milo. Dave the Jew loved my dad, but Dave always felt that my old Dad was madder than he was. Ha ha.

Dave now lives alone with his old Dad and I know he hopes that when our fathers pass away that the two of us will live together. My greatest fear is that my dad will pass away while I'm in jail.

I'VE just spent nearly half an hour rolling around my cell floor laughing my head off. It is heartwarming to hear that the boys from the old neighborhood are still rocking and rolling. I have just heard the Victorian Police swept up nine of them in a drug operation.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer group of clowns. Two of them have quite decent priors, The ‘Leopard' and The Greek. Oh well, you can't put bow ties on billy goats. Those numb nuts insist on getting around with the bloody Greek and then wonder why they come undone. The Greek's idea of keeping a secret is to tell 1000 prostitutes everything he knows and then pray to God that they will all keep their mouths shut.

But the big shock in all of this is The ‘Leopard'. I was always of the personal belief that he would never see the inside of a prison. Some unkind people have suggested to me that he is in fact the drug boss I wrote about in my first book. Well, I'm afraid that I will have to adopt the same attitude and policy as the American navy, and neither confirm nor deny.

The last time I saw ‘Leopard' we had our photo taken together at a party at The Greek's place. Mad Charlie took the photo. Gonzo was there. Neville the Albanian, Jungle Jim, Mad Archie, Big Mick, Black Boris, Scottish Steve, various Italian gentlemen and Shane Goodfellow.

‘Leopard' arrived with a small army of bodyguards and hangers-on. Half the people at the party either wanted to shoot the other half or were plotting to do so. We had kidnapped a stripper and cage dancer from Bojangles, a beautiful little Greek girl named Nicole, who has stuck loyal to me ever since I saved her from being raped.

She's a beautiful little chick and a good kid. I started to play Russian roulette and the party soon broke up. We ended up at the Chevron with little Nicole doing a strip on top of the grand piano. Who said we were not cultured?

In the piano bar a small fight broke out and we ended up outside the nightclub. Guns were produced and shots fired. No-one was hurt. We were all too drunk to hit the side of a barn with a shovel of wheat. I gave my gun to Nicole to hold for me and went to the airport and flew back to Tassie. Enough fun for one night. Harmless male bonding, I call it.

I always liked ‘Leopard', even though he was involved in an area of crime that I loathed. He had brains, and in a strange way I had a sneaking regard for his thinking ability.

I knew that maybe one day I'd kill him, or maybe he would have me killed, but in spite of all that I always found him to be a likeable fellow. He was one Mr Big who made a profession of acting like a Mr Small, but he was ten times bigger than even his friends and business colleagues could ever imagine.

He was a highly skilled tactician and criminal puppet master. Rumors over the past 12 months, even longer, have been getting about that the Greek and the ‘Leopard' have both been kidnapped by the heroin and speed needle.

I can't vouch for the truth of that but it would explain how ‘Leopard' got arrested and his mixing in such low-rent business circles. In 1987 he could have bought or sold every crook in the western suburbs out of petty cash.

Oh well, what can you say? You can't expect people to pull their socks up if they are only wearing thongs. Ha ha.

WITHIN weeks of the release of my third book the letters of outrage from female readers started to flood in. I sincerely hope a competent secretary is locked up in Risdon soon to help me answer all this mail.

The letters ask how dare I be unfaithful to little Margaret, how dare I refer to girls as a penny a truck load, how dare I accuse prostitutes of being incapable of love, how dare I say this and how dare I say that.

They say Chopper Read is a woman hater and that they hope I lose my appeal, that I'm an animal, insane, have no regard for the feelings of any women, and so on.

The point is that my feelings towards women are the same as my feelings towards men. I've met some fantastic ones and I've found some diamonds in my life, but in general they are a steaming great shower of shit that I wouldn't piss on. As a rule, if the female of the species did not provide a sexual advantage, the male of the species wouldn't even engage the buggers in conversation.

Call me old-fashioned.

The trouble is if I was to write sweet-tasting lies the stupid buggers would lap it up and love it, but tell the truth and they will hate you forever. I've got a small army of friends, both male and female, and as long as I'm sweet with the people I love and who love me then what the rest of the human race thinks is of no importance.

People buy my books at $12.95 a pop, the same price as a counter lunch and two pots of beer, and feel that they know me well enough to judge me. They take pen in hand and proceed to pour out their personal venom and critical judgment of my life. The mad buggers certainly ask a lot for their $12.95.

Speaking of the diamonds among my women friends, I got a wonderful letter from little Margaret. In it she made a touching comment that I thought I'd share with you. She said, ‘Would you believe that I do stupid things like going down to the South Melbourne beach when I'm feeling down? I sit there and I look over the horizon and I can see you waving at me and I then feel good that I had that moment with you. I'm an old sook aren't I?'

She went on to say she will love me until the day she dies and continue to love me after that. I'm afraid her letter brought a slight dampness to the eye. Old Billy ‘The Texan' Longley was reading the poem I wrote for little Margaret out to her over the phone, as he had my third book before she could get a copy. He broke into a sob halfway through the poem and had to hang up. It must be the crying season.

Anita Betts hasn't even come into see me yet as she is so upset and tearful. Mary-Ann is having a crying fit, Karen the White Dove is in tears. Nicole Sutorius and Big Margaret Hamilton were on the phone to the jail crying and letters of tears and sympathy are coming in fast; not a dry eye in the house.

AFTER a lifetime of study, I have come up with what I believe to be a rock solid doctrine on the vexing topic of the 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.

A bit like members of the Democrats.

Yep, they have a list of mental and emotional disorders a mile long, all on the boil. Add the sex and motherhood urge to this and you have a totally neurotic, obsessional, 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 12 separate mood swings every 12 hours.

Most men are basically suffering from what I call the ‘psychopathic condition'. And if you walk into the day room of any mental hospital in any country you'll find one psychopath standing in the middle of the room surrounded by a dozen schizophrenics hanging on his every word. This is why men can attract and control women.

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

Every schizophrenic basically wants to burst into tears and bury himself in the strong protecting arms of a friend. Of the two, men do the laughing, women do the crying. The psychopath is given to laughter in the face of any and all situations. The schizophrenic is given to tears. All females also suffer from what I call the ‘Mills and Boon' nightmare that all women long for and all men laugh at.

To control the mental and emotional being of the classic schizophrenic you must capture their imagination. Paint them a picture and show them the picture and tell them it's theirs.

In handling the schizophrenic condition you must humor it, flatter it, amuse it, and baffle it with bullshit. You must treat it as you would a playful, wilful, crying, spoilt, little child and lower your own intelligence to the same wavelength.

The game played between men and women is akin to the role of doctor and patient. How true is that rough old Aussie saying ‘that if they never had a snatch we wouldn't even talk to the bastards'.

Mind you, I hope you don't think that my attitude towards 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 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.

If you mentally and emotionally tickle a man in the right or wrong place, depending on how you view it, he will kill. Tickle a women in the right place and she will whore her arse to the Devil, and love it as she hates herself doing it.

Homosexual people are the reverse. The homosexual man has the whore instinct within him and the lesbian woman has the killer instinct within her, making the lesbian woman possibly the most mentally and emotionally dangerous of all human creatures … a schizophrenic psychopath. Mind boggling.

I've said that the schizophrenic condition is a classic female condition. In my opinion most male schizophrenics are either homosexual or bisexual and the ones who are neither homosexual or bisexual are not suffering from the classic schizophrenic condition but from a simple paranoid psychosis and an over-active imagination incorrectly treated by the guesswork warriors of medical science.

Of course, most people would rather dismiss me as a ranting mental case than admit that what I'm saying has an alarming ring of truth to it.

The psychopath condition of the male will fade and grow weak with age but never quite vanish. The schizophrenic condition of the female will remain strong within her until she is 25 to 30 years of age then fade and vanish with her looks.

This is probably one of the main reasons why I've never allowed myself to father children. How could I in all consciousness leave my son or daughter alone in the same room with a schizophrenic? Bad enough having a psychopath for a father without the added insult of a schizophrenic for a mother. Ha ha.

Let's face it. When we were all little kids we looked at our mums and dads and we all thought the same thing: ‘Jesus Christ, look at these bastards, they are off their heads.' Ha ha.

Don't let this make you think that my conduct towards women in general is anything less than totally correct. As far as women are concerned I live according to my dear old Dad's wise words of wisdom: ‘Son, never hit them with a clenched fist and always wipe the neck of the bottle before offering them a drink'.

I HAVE often been accused ‘in jest' of attracting a particular sort of female in the form of the so-called dumb molls, bimbos, the pouting pussy brigade, the stupid cupids, the big, dumb blondes with no brains but all tits and legs. I, on the other hand, have always been very suspicious of the so-called dumb, pouting sexpot. And in spite of making sarcastic, backhand comic remarks about the lack of grey matter between the ears of your average female, 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.

I have had a tiptruck load of money removed from my pockets over the years by your so-called ‘doodle-shaking dumb bimbo'. Please excuse my use of the American slang word ‘bimbo', but the Aussie land equivalent of the bimbo is the word ‘moll', and it is a tad bit crude. In my opinion there is no such thing as a dumb blonde or a bimbo. They all play act and are expert in polishing the male ego. I've known some very, very intelligent ladies who specialised in play acting this Marilyn Monroe routine all the way to the bank.

I remember a yarn I heard years ago on this topic. A very famous homosexual movie director in Hollywood told Frank Sinatra that in his opinion Marilyn Monroe was the dumbest bimbo in Hollywood. Sinatra was supposed to have turned to him and with a smile said, ‘Ten million bucks in the bank and she's sucking off the Kennedys two at a time. Brother, you should be so dumb.'

Yes, we constantly put shit on them while they walk to the bank with our money. There is absolutely no such thing as a dumb woman, because as soon as a bloke hangs his pants over the end of the bed he leaves his brains in his back pocket, and even though I know this the little buggers get me every time. God bless them. Well, let's just say they used to get me. It took me from my teenage years to nearly 40 years of age to snap out of it.

Now that the little buggers are young enough to be my daughters I can see them coming a mile away. And while every crim in the jail is getting his heart broken by every little doodle shaker in town, I've got Mary-Ann.

There is an old saying, if you're going to get married then marry the girl just like the girl who married dear old Dad. But oh no. What do we do when we are young blokes? We run out and try to find the biggest bangtail bleached blond moll in town and fall in love, and in love, and in love, and from broken heart to broken heart we slowly learn the error of our ways.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that I am totally immune to the hypnotic charms of the ‘wiggle when she walks, giggle when she talks', big-eyed, all tits and legs bimbo. I mean, what man is unless he's a poof? But I am making a gallant effort. Ha ha. At least now I can read their minds and have a sly smile to myself, and while other prisoners are slashing their wrists over the conduct of their wiggling, giggling, doodle-shaking girlfriends, I've got Mary-Ann, a good girl. Meaning that in the end, what counts to me is reliability, not razzle dazzle.

AFTER my appeal failed, Mary-Ann came to visit me and told me she would stand by me. I told her she would only break her heart and that it was an impossible situation, but she told me she loved me and would not walk away.

I spoke to little Margaret on the phone and it was a tearful conversation. In spite of some recent bad temper from her in a letter to me, it was a loving goodbye phone call.

I have had some bad luck in my time but I have also been blessed when it comes to the female of the species. I have known some women who have been blood loyal and have stuck by me, no matter what sort of mess I have landed in.

The topic of my death came up and I blurted out the fact that anything I've got when I die, or any money from the books, film whatever, anything at all that is mine or is owed to me goes to Margaret in the event of my death as she is the sole beneficiary of my last will and testament.

Well, that broke the phone call up into a tearful fit and almost had me going as well. Whether little Margaret and me are together or not, she will most certainly outlive me and it has to go to someone.

What a depressing topic. My dog, Mr Nibbles, was yapping away in the background. All in all it was a sad phone call. Even though we are no longer together and God knows I put her through hell and did not deserve her, I will always love little Margaret in my heart. No-one can forget ten years. Oh well, what more can I say? That's that. I appear to be doomed to spend the greater part of my adult life in prison. It is not a lifestyle I would recommend.

So if there are kids and teenagers who read my books and think my life sounds as though it has been filled with adventures and fun, forget it. Read my books, have a laugh, then throw them away and forget it.

Don't do what I have done, it is a mess and a one way road to disaster. You cannot take on the world, drug bosses, police, gangsters and the courts. If one doesn't get you, one of the others will.

Go straight, young man. It may sound boring but in the long run, it is the way to go.