by Mark Dapin
My choreographer at the Patton was Ira Brodsky, a true professional and an original thinker in an industry dominated by imitators. We were sitting up in bed one evening, discussing the finer points of cabaret, when she asked me, ‘Jacob, why do men enjoy watching our shows?’
‘My interest is purely professional,’ I assured her, ‘but some of the paying customers may be trying to imagine the dancing girls’ breasts jiggling around in their bras.’
‘So why don’t they take off their bras?’ she said.
That is when I knew I loved Ira too.
At the time it was illegal for women to appear topless on stage, unless they were standing still. (Lord knows what St Augustine would have made of that, although I doubt if the bishop was ever seen near a topless dancing establishment – at least not in his home town.) Even if the performers remained motionless, they had to wear tassels over their nipples, which no doubt further contributed to the disappointment and confusion of young men when they discovered that their bride – or, in your mother’s case, their recent acquaintance – couldn’t be made to double as a windmill or a fan.
I remembered something McCoy had told me about a bordello in the mysterious East where one of the girls was known as ‘the Filipina Picasso’ because of her ability to paint pictures with her nipples – which, I have to say, is how Picasso’s paintings always looked to me anyway. Who can even guess how the Filipina came to discover her talent? I asked her once how she did it – in that same bed in the same room above the Patton – but she was unable to give a coherent reply. She appeared to have unnaturally close control of the various smaller muscles that underpin the pectorals.
I sent McCoy back to the East to track her down. For one year I had a handful of topless and tasselled models standing like statues on the stage, while fully dressed chorus girls danced around them. Then McCoy arrived with Miss Paintbrush Breasts, and she changed the face of entertainment in the Cross. She also changed McCoy, who’d had to marry her to get her out of the country, and convert to Catholicism to marry her. I remember him at the dockside, full of pride, in his double-breasted suit and hula-girl tie, with his bride of Christ on his arm, beaming like a fucking imbecile. He really believed the whore was his wife, a delusion I was forced to dispel by paying her to fuck me, Big Stan and the Little Fish all on the same night. McCoy, understandably, regarded this as grounds for divorce. He re-embraced the faith of his fathers, but nonetheless established the habit of taking brides from the Philippines, which stayed with him all his life.
Where was I? Ah yes, the Patton. We rechristened the Filipina Picasso’s act ‘Tina’s Talking Tits’, and the crowd rushed our doors like we were giving away money, rather than the reverse. Filipina Tina used to take to the stage, and her hands and feet would comply strictly with the letter of the law, while her breasts and nipples would take off on fanciful flights of their own.
Her act was particularly popular with the local jacks, whose task it was to monitor the degree of toplessness practised by dancers. Augustinians to a man, the jacks privately railed against the unjust laws regulating stripping and liquor sales, although truth be told, they made more fucking money out of them than even I did.
The Patton didn’t serve last drinks at six o’clock – it was a nightclub, for Christ’s sake – but I had to pay every jack from Liverpool Street to Cowper Wharf Road to turn a blind eye. I got my late-night liquor allowance from an alternative supply chain made up of our city pubs and a bottle shop on Crown Street that was registered to McCoy’s mother.
If customers ordered their drinks before six, the waiters were legally permitted to serve them all night, and ‘all night’ meant all night at the Patton. People from every level of Sydney society came to eat, drink and be entertained there. I had police chiefs and politicians, actors and boxers, cocksmen and queers. It was where I first got to know men of influence, and came to understand that even the richest and most powerful want the same thing as the lowliest unwashed garbo: half an hour with a girl – or a boy – who moans and squirms and swallows. At first, I let the big jacks and judges fuck the showgirls, but the dancers arced up, so I brought the professionals in.
[Ends.]
NINE
The man sitting next to me smelled of horse piss and dog sweat. As he turned the pages of the Sydney Morning herald he made a sad hissing noise, as if everything that happened in the city made him despair. A red-haired librarian brought me a pile of books from the local studies shelves, including a biography of Jake Mendoza, written by Laurie Block, a crime writer on the Daily Telegraph. I had read it before I interviewed Mendoza for the Jewish Times, but I hadn’t paid much attention to the earliest chapters. I went through them again, to see if there was anything Mendoza had told me that I could check against the record.
Block confirmed his father had been a draper and mercer, based on an interview he had given to People magazine in the 1950s, but his story didn’t properly begin until the war years, when Block confused two details and had Mendoza serving in the army in New Guinea.
McCoy and the Little Fish were mentioned, but only by their assumed names. Block had Mendoza meeting McCoy (described as ‘of Celtic descent’) in the merchant navy, and the Little Fish (‘a former boxer with an undistinguished record’) at the war’s end.
I couldn’t tell if Mendoza was giving me an untold true story or inventing a new and complicated lie. I could confirm only small facts. There was a pogrom in Tetiev in 1919. Rosenblatt was a Tetiev name. There was a steamer called the SS Charon, she did go to Milne Bay in 1944 and she had transported infected livestock in 1923. A man named Solomon Moses had owned a pub in Goulburn in 1841.
It was exciting to be on the edge of a story like this. It made my knees jump around under the table. I smiled and hummed and kissed my teeth as I checked off facts and cross-referenced dates. The whistling man moved away from me, thinking I might be a lunatic. Coming to Australia had been a good idea after all. No, it had been a fantastic idea. Fuck Helen. Fuck Jed too, and fuck the Australian Jewish Times – and the Catholic Weekly, for that matter.
Outside the sun was gleaming, the buskers were singing, the junkies were screaming. I knew it was going to be a great day. I smiled at the tall white waitress at La Fontaine and a huge black customer smiled back: Mendoza’s substitute bodyguard, Natural Science, who was drinking an orange juice with a tower of ice. He waved me over and shook my hand.
‘Make sure Mendoza pays you upfront,’ he said. ‘He’s tighter than a twelve-year-old.’
Natural Science’s voice was deep and warm, and his accent reminded me of home. He wore gold signet rings, a good tooth and a gold chain. He said why didn’t I sit down. Mendoza’s boys could drink on the boss’s tab at La Fontaine, and their custom protected the cafe from all the mysterious things that might otherwise happen to a tourist restaurant, such as a spate of camera thefts, a flood or a fire.
‘But the old man ain’t got nothing like the power he used to have,’ said Natural Science.
‘Back in the day, you could warn people off just by using his name. Now people are scared even to say the names of the Lebs who run the place.’
He called for another orange juice, and a coffee for me.
Natural Science was a freelance and he assumed I was hired muscle like him. He worked for Mendoza or the Lebs, depending on who needed him.
‘They call it “crossing the Golan Heights”,’ he said, ‘but I ain’t interested in politics.’ He rubbed his black knuckles. ‘I’m just fists and feet.’
‘And teeth,’ I said.
‘I don’t want you to get the wrong impression,’ he said. ‘I ain’t a biter. I mean, I will bite, obviously, but I ain’t Mike Tyson. You don’t have to count your ears when you leave the ring with me. I don’t take souvenirs.’ The way he said the word, it sounded like ‘southern ears’, and made me worry about mine.
He drank his second orange juice in a single gulp. His Adam’s apple bobbed like a cue ball.
Natural S
cience said he grew up in Fleet, a few miles from Aldershot. He used to come into town on Saturday afternoons for the football, back when the Shots were still in the fourth division, before we got kicked into the minor leagues for being shit and broke.
‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘I know who you are.’
For a second I had a memory of him at the football, the Black Prince of the East Bank, storming the Cardiff City Soul Crew, waving a builder’s shovel over his head like a kung-fu monk.
‘How the fuck did you get out here?’ I asked him.
He smiled and his gold tooth winked at me.
‘They’ve got special visas for nutters,’ he said.
Two backpacker girls walked by, wearing cut-off jeans that buried into their buttocks, and crop tops that crept to the curve of their breasts.
‘We’ve come a long way, ain’t we?’ said Natural Science.
He pronounced long as ‘lang’, like the Yardie boys do.
Natural Science used to kickbox out of a club in Fleet and practise on the terraces of the East Bank. He worked on building sites and on the door at Fleet Country Club. He had met an Australian girl in a bar in Basingstoke and fallen in love with her voice and her smile and her passport, and when she ran out of money he followed her home to Sydney. They got married in the Botanical Gardens, and Natural Science planned to become the heavyweight boxing champion of Australia. He was amazed to learn that Joe Bugner held the title. He said it was like turning on the TV and finding that Tom Baker was Dr Who. There weren’t many black men in Sydney in the 1990s, and Natural Science tried to make up for the shortfall on his own. He started lying to his wife that he was going training, when he was meeting strippers in the back rooms of Mendoza’s clubs. In the end, he found there was no time to do both, so he gave up his professional career – he had been worried, anyway, that he might kill Joe Bugner – and took a job working club doors, so he could combine fighting with looking after the girls.
His wife put up with it for about a year, then divorced him and tried to have him deported. Mendoza had contacts in the immigration department and managed to get him a visa as a security specialist. It was the same time the old man first hired Dror, and the two of them were supposed to be Mendoza’s personal security, but Mendoza didn’t seem to be in any danger, apart from the threat of Lazarus shooting him by mistake. Natural Science used to think Lazarus was punchy, then he realised he was a retard. Dror was sharp, though, and a nice guy. He could fight if it came to that, but he tried everything else first.
‘I’m like that myself now,’ he said. ‘I got my nutterness cured. That’s why I don’t want you to think I’m a biter.’
He flashed his teeth unnervingly.
He said he used to fight the pikeys when the fair came to Aldershot. ‘The pikeys are biters,’ said Natural Science. ‘It’s the way they get their protein. They didn’t want a brother living in Fleet. Nobody did. Times was different then.’
He looked up sharply. ‘Why’s that bloke staring at you?’
I followed his eyes. There was nobody there.
‘Young geezer,’ said Natural Science. ‘Legged it.’
He rubbed his teeth. ‘There’s no future in biting,’ he said, ‘when every poof and junkie’s got AIDS.’
I asked him what had happened that afternoon with Mendoza.
‘They were arguing in Jew,’ said Natural Science, ‘and when the old man’d had enough, he told me to shoot him. I ain’t a killer, not for nobody’s money, so I took the end off his nose. I ain’t saying it was an act of mercy, but it released the tension.’
He rubbed his own flat nostrils experimentally. ‘The geezer had a big nose anyway.’
A block down the road a prostitute was screaming about her pay. From the back she looked a bit like Helen.
‘I wonder what he’ll do now,’ said Natural Science, ‘without his nose.’
Natural Science was working the door of the Magic Circle Club, which was run by a fringe Lebanese operator. He said I should come down to the club one night and we could take a couple of girls onto the roof.
I started remembering Jed and the things we used to get up to at the Aldershot news and weekend Advertiser when we were nineteen years old and didn’t have a clue. We shagged the secretary, the copy taker and the mail-room girl. Jed even had the tea lady. Afterwards, he said, she had fed him a biscuit.
In those days it didn’t matter that we were after the same girls because there weren’t many women in Aldershot – just mad Paras and quiet Gurkhas and one or two lesbians in the WRAC.
I’d never met anyone like Jed. He lived on speedy Es, coke and complicated pizzas. It’s hard to lose your best friend. Every day something would happen and I’d think, I can’t wait to tell Jed about this. Then I remembered he was a cunt, and if I ever saw him again I’d have to hang him upside down and beat the shit out of him.
Natural Science was on his way to the gym. He invited me to come with him. Mendoza’s boys didn’t have to pay for their workouts either, he said, because they were the gym’s only guarantee that all the treadmills wouldn’t run off by themselves one night and the dumbbells wouldn’t leap into the air and fly through the windows.
I said I needed a bit of time to think – and besides, Natural Science would drill me into the ground. I sat alone with another free coffee and tried to work out what I really felt about everything. It was a relief not to be around Helen any more, but I wondered how I was going to tell my mum that we had split up, when I knew she was hoping Helen would come home pregnant.
I couldn’t feel bad about Leah. You don’t expect to meet a schoolgirl working in a pub, and it’s the bar staff who’re supposed to check your ID, not the other way around. Besides, I liked her. Maybe I should go to the country to find her, although ‘the country’ sounded like a big place.
I’d done the wrong thing to the poor kid in the toilets, though. He hadn’t asked for that. I could’ve sorted him out a bit more gently, but once I’d started on him I couldn’t finish until I’d taken him apart. I was in touch with the undercurrent, dancing to the rhythm of the Cross. As for the metaphor I’d jammed into his mouth, I’d learned in Belfast that guns have their own agenda. They lie in wait to terrify a lairy drunk, or blow the face off a British soldier. That’s the kind of thing guns live for. I knew I should give the derringer back to Lazarus, or drop it into a drain, but I’d already planned to go home and clean it, then buy some ammo.
TEN
[The Bellisimo Restaurant, 32 Orwell Street, Potts Point. 15-02-02. 2:08 pm.]
All women are whores, Anthony: your grandmother, your mother, your sister, the whole lot of them. It may be a pair of silk stockings in a shipping container in 1944, or a diamond ring in the Great Synagogue in 1948, but every moll has her price. I learned this in the merchant navy, prompted by certain experiences recounted by McCoy, but confirmed it beyond question in the years after the war. I first brought whores into the Patton when Ira started complaining she was losing the best of the showgirls to my insistence that they blow the jacks. She said they had no problem fucking me or McCoy, but if I wanted molls who would service any fat-pig copper who stumbled through the door, I needed to pay the going rate. Ira called some friends from Melbourne and we picked them up from Central Station the next day. There were three of them, but two were twins, named Sylvia and Goldie. Their friend, who told me she was Russian, called herself Daryna, which I had to change to ‘Darling’, so the punters could pronounce it.
I interviewed them up the Patton in my office and felt confident to offer them all positions. The Malts heard about it and figured I had set myself up in competition with the whorehouses they ran on Palmer Street. The first thing they did was send around this greasy-quiffed imbecile bodgie, Gozo Joe Stone. He could hardly speak English, and I thought English was the fucking language on Malta. His business proposition – as far as I could understand it – was that I should cut them in on a piece of my takings from the club and the girls, and they wouldn’t burn me out.
I offered him half an hour with Sylvia – out of goodwill, and the fact that she had just come down with a dose – but he was more interested in threatening to kill me.
Let me tell you about Malta, Anthony: in the days before the Ice Age it used to be the land bridge linking Sicily and North Africa, ie, between the Mafia and the Lebs. And the trolls that lived under this bridge were exactly the kind of treacherous low-lifes you’d expect to be born from a marriage of goat-fuckers and camel-humpers. But the Malts in Sydney had a jack in their box, a Sergeant Fred Carol. Rumour had it that he was part Malt, but he was all cunt. He raided the Patton that night, with six boys from the licensing squad and two from the consorting squad, to make sure nobody was consorting with anyone else. They were tough blokes when they were in a mob, and they knocked over a couple of my customers, smashed a few tables just to make a mess.
I was expecting a blue, so I had the Little Fish working the door. It took four jacks to get him on the floor, and they had to almost cave in his skull to keep him still, but once they had knocked him out, they dragged him into the van and took him back to the station, along with all the liquor in the club. The jacks held a party until four o’clock in the morning, according to the Little Fish. He wasn’t wearing a watch, but he thought it was four because the jacks told him they would come down and bash him on the hour every hour.
When I came to bail him out in the morning, every part of his face was bruised, and both his eyes were swollen closed, but he was joking with the jacks as if they had all just come off the footie oval. He was charged with all the usual stuff: assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, carrying a concealed weapon, attempted murder, consorting . . . It all got no-billed in the end.
