by Mark Dapin
I noticed a note on the kitchen benchtop, written on pink paper.
Dear Slick,
I’m sorry but I don’t feel we can pretend that we’re together any more. It’s not fair to you or me. We have made mistakes and now I feel we should go our separate ways. I will always cherish the time we had together. You are a good man and I’m sorry if I hurt you but you should know that you hurt me too in other ways. Whatever happened to forgiveness, Slick?
Love, Helen
PS If you look for me, you’ll find me easily enough. But I’d ask you not to come running after me, at least for a while.
I was not going to look for her. I was glad she had gone. I just wished I had left first.
I was going to celebrate with a cup of tea. She had left me the kettle. She had even left the tea bags. Unfortunately, she had taken all the cups. Then I saw two chubby trails of powder, laid diagonally across the mirror like a goodbye kiss.
I snorted her gift with gratitude – even though she had probably sold my TV to buy it – and went out to get coffee and croissants, but I found I didn’t feel hungry or thirsty, and I walked around the cute little police station to the fountain, then I walked around the fountain a couple of times, and I realised it was the best fountain I had ever seen. It roared like a storm in the shower, like a flood racing through a drain. Its bronze pipes, clustered like rifles, perfectly symbolised the Western Desert Campaign. I wished the fountain were bigger, so I could spend longer walking around it, and thinking my thought, which was the best thought I had had since I came to Australia, although I couldn’t fully remember it. Several times on my way around the fountain, I passed the cafe where I had met Mendoza yesterday. Mendoza was a nice old fella, a good bloke really, maybe a bit dodgy in his youth, but who wasn’t? He was a straight-backed military man, who wore his RSL pin on his Armani suit, even though it might spoil the cloth. He could have been in the Western Desert himself, if he hadn’t been in Liverpool. I wondered if there was a Liverpool Fountain somewhere, to commemorate the sacrifices made by the flat-footed, the asthmatic, the short-sighted, the deaf and the gun-shy gangsters without whom the necessary paperwork would never have been completed. I wondered how much kit Mendoza had plundered from the stores, how many soldiers’ lives he’d put at risk, out there in El Alamein.
I marched towards William Street, convinced this was the best morning of my life. I was glad to be rid of Helen, but that was only a small part of it. Why had I never seen the true loveliness of Kings Cross, when there was no one around apart from beautiful single women and a tourist vomiting into a waste bin?
At the Coca-Cola sign – Enjoy Coke – I turned right into William Street and found a huddle of tall men dressed as tall women, and two Aboriginal guys who would have knifed me if I hadn’t looked confident and tough and able to take on any bandy-legged petrol-sniffers with my bare hands and, of course, my snub-nosed derringer. I turned off into Crown, which was quiet until it met Oxford Street, where the road was crowded with cars. Where was everybody going? They were already in paradise.
It seemed as if I had only been tramping for a couple of minutes before I reached Hyde Park, where I stood under a tree and watched for possums, and followed an avenue of giant figs to another fountain, where I started to whistle. I couldn’t remember when I had last whistled.
I was soon in the city, looking up at the statue’s breasts on the roof of the QVB, trying to think if I had ever met a woman with tits like those. The closest I could think of was a hairdresser on the Shankill Road. I never got near her nipples, but Jed told me he nearly chewed them off. I had shared some good times with Jed over the years. He was not a bad bloke. He just couldn’t keep his cock to himself. I would have liked to have a drink with Jed then and there, to tell him I forgave him and that we would always be brothers, but I suddenly felt tired, as if I had been walking for a week.
I decided to take a train from Town Hall back to the Cross, but the gates to the station were closed. I had never seen that before.
A bored security guard watched me push against a lock, then walked over to say, ‘It’s closed, mate.’
‘Why’s that?’ I asked.
‘Because it’s four o’clock in the fucking morning,’ he said.
SIX
[The West End Hotel, Balmain. 20-12-01. 2:07 pm.]
There were five Jewish children at Balmain Boys School in 1930. Now that Mad Dog McCoy is dead, I am the last of them. The others were Maurice ‘the Little Fish’ Bass, Big Stan Callahan and Ernie Katz. Only Katz was known by the name he was born with, and I wouldn’t swear that was his family name, any more than I am convinced that your great-grandfather was a Klein.
In those days Australian children knew their own religion and the religion of all those around them. The Catholics and Protestants had few areas of agreement beyond that the Jews had murdered Jesus. I used to say that the Australians tried to get me to put my hand up for killing Christ, but I had four mates to swear I was somewhere else at the time, and it was the first in a series of goyisher verbals that have dogged me all my life. This was not much of a joke in the 1930s, when the crucifixion was seen as a recent local homicide that still needed to be cleared up. I myself was crucified once, the day before the Easter break. They bound my wrists and ankles to a fence, and splayed me like Christ on the cross, then jabbed a broomstick into my side to help me die more quickly. I remember all of them – the centurions, the legionnaires, the cackling faces in the crowd – with a hatred that burns just as strongly today, and a thirst for revenge that, I fear, has sometimes been channelled in less deserving directions – but, sadly, you can’t kill maggots who are already dead.
The school was divided into gangs based on streets and lanes. The Jews were only loosely regarded as part of the neighbourhood. Although Moshe, Maurice and I lived around the south end of Mullens Street, we would only be called upon to stand alongside the other boys in the event of an invasion from, for example, Rozelle. Otherwise, we were fair game for everyone. As a result, we banded together. It was a measure of our status that each of the gangs had a headquarters in a milk bar, a bandstand or, at worst, an old shed. We Jews met in a stormwater drain. We called it ‘our cave’.
The Australians ran all the rackets at school. They stood over the younger boys and sold shoplifted lollies and cigarettes. The leaders inherited their positions from their elder brothers, so felt no real drive to innovate. The Catholics, in particular, had organisation but no imagination.
I was not a natural leader. All that came later. Maurice was the toughest of us all, an amateur boxer with a love of the gouge and the stamp, the butt and the bite. Big Stan, a short, puny boy – here is an example of the ironic-style nickname we discussed earlier – was the comedian. Moshe was the brains, although he could be vicious when he had to be. Katz was the dreamer, the artist, the holy fool but, without Katz, we would never have had our racket. It started out as a thing between the five of us. We would ask Katz to draw a naked woman, and we’d take the picture into our cave to study. We called this ‘art appreciation’, because Katz often copied famous nudes from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, with the addition of dripping vaginas. We discovered by chance that there was a market for his work when Katz’s schoolbag was upended by Frankie Latimer, a boy who called himself ‘the Hammer of the Jews’. Latimer stole a reclining Venus along with Katz’s pencils, lunch and the bag itself, and passed it around under the desks in the back row of geometry class. At the end of the day he sold it to Peter Curtis for a halfpenny. Maurice was able to repossess the drawing for Katz, but I realised we had a product that we could sell.
Katz spent the next weekend knocking out fifty loose sketches in the ‘Dripping Vagina’ series, and he numbered each one in the corner, which was a touch of class. I took them to school in a folio and sold them at four for a penny. My commission was a halfpenny, or fifty per cent, because I was taking the risk. Maurice was my muscle, with Moshe as back-up, and I paid them out of my share. Big Stan occasion
ally added humorous captions to the drawings, but I am not sure if he got a cut.
The pictures were popular, although the market was soon saturated and most boys’ appetites sated. At this point, demand arose for more explicit material. The boys wanted to see Venus in flagrante. At first, it was difficult for Katz to get this right, since he was working from imagination. He made simple mistakes, such as portraying her in the missionary position, from which no genitals were visible. We had to consult older boys – Maurice had a cousin in the army – who suggested Katz concentrate instead on the doggy position and what now seems to be known as the ‘cowgirl’. It was also Maurice’s cousin who came up with the idea for our most successful line, the ‘Fellatio Series’, and eventually supplied Katz with a copy of an Indian sex manual for inspiration.
Katz’s father ran a greengrocer’s on Darling Street, and Katz’s men had putzes like cucumbers, the women breasts like watermelons. Buttocks were a dimpled peach. His drawings swept the school. If you didn’t own one, you were either a poofter or you had been robbed by Frankie Latimer.
But money – even lunch money – is power. We soon had several pounds in the kitty and were able to pay a young pro from Maurice’s gym to break Frankie Latimer’s jaw in two places. Thus ended the standover career of the Hammer of the Jews, at least until after the war, when he became a detective on the consorting squad.
In order to stay at the top of the market – and by this time we had attracted a small number of inferior competitors – we had to continually innovate. Although we persevered with the generic sketches for the younger boys, a boutique market opened up at the older end of our client base. They wanted the drawings to show women they knew – local identities such as Frida the fishmonger, and famous actresses such as Fay Wray from King Kong – on their knees in front of schoolboys in Balmain uniform. Because these were made to order, we were able to charge a premium price, and we soon captured the aspirational consumer as well as the broader demographic. Then Katz left for Fort Street selective school and we had nothing to sell.
So what did you do?
When I was fourteen, I met a black-haired girl called Rachel. She had a body like one of Katz’s sketches – all grapefruit and melons – but a head like a carthorse. Rachel and I led similar lives. Her family was Russian, her father was a small player in the rag trade, she went to a school where most of the other students were Australian, and she suffered for it every day. We quickly became good friends. We both liked Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith – all the great niggers. At first, of course, she would only let me kiss her, which was difficult enough because of the substantial obstacle presented by her nose. I, too, have a strong and prominent bridge, and we would often clash like fencers in moments of passion.
Our relationship progressed in the traditional way. I paid off her chaperone, and Rachel was soon rubbing my cock outside Cagney in The Mayor of Hell at the Amusu Theatre that she finally played the masterstroke. I was shamefully grateful to Rachel and announced her officially as my girlfriend, so as to ensure regular – if overvigorous – hand relief. I look her home to meet my mother, who embraced her like a daughter, and my father, who eyed her like a whore.
Today I can admit without embarrassment that I found it arduous to coax Rachel to move beyond her pile-driver grip, but that difficult experience honed certain skills that would often come into play later on in my life. It was three months before she would offer me her mouth, and a further fortnight before she could overcome her gag reflex. This is social history, Anthony, do you realise that? This is the unwritten story of the sex life of my generation. Yes, many of the women were technically virgins when they married – although many were not – but every prissy little princess, gentile or Jew, had sucked more sperm than you have drunk warm, flat beer in your cold, hilly homeland. Your own grandmother, Anthony, would have swallowed the seed of soldiers and schoolboys with indiscriminate relish.
While Rachel and your grandmother were sucking, squeezing and blowing like four-stroke engines, I was trying to figure out how to bang them. I had my eye on the gold medal which, in those days, Anthony, was the pirge rather than the tokhes. To my generation – often known as ‘the greatest generation’ or ‘the ANZAC generation’ – entering by the back door was nothing more than a way to keep the hymen intact. To yours – often known as ‘Generation X’ or ‘the slackers’ – it seems like a natural ending to the evening, like brandy and cigars in more well-mannered times.
I met with Rachel’s parents, who invited me to their home for the Shabbos meal. Her father was a dark-eyed, beaked, suspicious man. He questioned me like a cop about my plans for the future. I told him my mother hoped I would become a doctor or a lawyer, but I was thinking about entering my father’s drapery business. I thought that would please him, since he was a draper too, but instead he dismissed me as a person of low ambition.
My father didn’t like me to be away from the house on a Friday night, so he asked Rachel’s parents to our home. Soon I had two angry, overbearing fathers and two fearful, credulous mothers, and a girlfriend who was more like a sister.
Occasionally I was able to entice Rachel into the bedroom I shared with Abie, but Abie would refuse to leave, and I made no further progress towards my goal. Finally I consulted Maurice’s cousin, who advised me to tell Rachel that I loved her, or offer her some money, or both.
I opted for the cheaper option, but Rachel told me that I didn’t love her and I was only trying to compromise her virtue. I said I didn’t want to see her again, because she had questioned my integrity and shown me I was nothing more to her than a source of free cinema tickets and broken my heart.
I didn’t hear from her for a week, then received a note via her erstwhile chaperone suggesting we meet at ‘our cave’. So it was that Rachel and I exchanged our virginities in a stormwater drain, among newspapers, lollypop sticks and a large felt hat with a hole torn through the crown.
I had become a man – and before most of my friends, and even my brother Abie. As the only adult, I became the undisputed leader of our gang and began to feel it inappropriate that I should make my headquarters in a waste pipe, so I rented a shed in a builder’s yard. We drew a curtain over the window and laid a mattress on the floor, and Rachel and I met there after school, while Moshe and the others waited outside, their ears pressed to the door. This satisfied them for a while, but – and this is always the case, Anthony – they soon wanted more. They asked me to leave the curtain open, just a couple of inches, so they could see inside. They took turns in watching Rachel and I together, and also sold time at the window to a few trusted classmates.
Big Stan’s father had bought a camera, with which he was trying to start a business selling photographs of sailors and their sweethearts dressed as stars of stage and screen. The only costume he owned was a gorilla suit, and his idea was that young couples would play the roles of King Kong and Fay Wray, then take away a set of prints to keep alive the golden memory of that day. Unfortunately it’s impossible to gauge the identity of a person in a gorilla suit, unless they take off the head, which, in turn, destroys the illusion of a giant ape. So the pictures tended to look as though the girl was being menaced by an ungainly and anonymous monkey, which was not an image many midshipmen wanted to carry across the oceans.
Since Big Stan’s father’s camera often lay idle in its case, he was able to borrow it one afternoon, press the lens against the window, and – without my knowledge – take a series of photographs of Rachel and I in performance. He developed these in his father’s darkroom and brought them to show us all the next day. They were badly composed and unclear, but I could see the potential for a new product range.
The next time I enticed Rachel to the shed, I made sure we were correctly oriented in relation to the camera and hung a thinner curtain to give Big Stan a better light. Initially we repeated Katz’s early sketching errors, and Big Stan photographed us lying on top of each other like two slices of bread. In the weeks that f
ollowed, Rachel and I had to learn a repertoire of positions before we had any marketable images.
As you might imagine, since my boys were virgins who spent their spare time watching me work my way through Katz’s Kama Sutra, a certain amount of sexual tension developed among us. Moshe, in particular, believed himself to be in love with Rachel, and she with him. He came to think I was using his beloved badly and, rather than discuss the matter with me, the dog rolled over to the girl herself and told her what we had been doing.
It was the first time I was betrayed by a lieutenant, but far from the last. Wise men advise you to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, Anthony, but there is often no need to observe the second tenet as long as you stay true to the first. Your enemies and your friends are the same people on different days. You can’t be deceived by somebody you don’t trust.
Of course, Rachel was far from happy with me – in fact, she tried to kill me with a kitchen knife – and it became clear our relationship had run its course. She demanded the return of her pictures – although they had never belonged to her – or else, she said, her father would shoot me. I knew, however, that her father would shoot her first, so I felt safe enough to offer her a deal. She could have them ‘back’ if she first agreed to do with Moshe, Maurice and Big Stan what she had already done with me. If she refused, I would sell the photographs in our school playground and at her school gates, at three for a shilling. This may have been a hollow threat, since I was not certain I could achieve that price for an untested product, but I was, at last, able to sit as a spectator to Rachel’s contortions while Maurice and Big Stan clumsily lightened their loads. At first, Moshe refused to take part, but when Rachel screamed and cried and swore at him, and said she hated us all, he realised it was the only chance he would ever get.
