by Mark Dapin
For one heaving, sweaty, fleshy fortnight, I worked half the week on Penthouse and the other half on Australian Women’s Forum. AWF was a porn magazine for women, Cosmopolitan with its pants off, and its fingers wobbling between its legs. It was essentially an offshoot of Penthouse, working from the office next door, and edited by former Penthouse writer Corrine MacKay.
AWF ran several pages of ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous’, Forum-style letters detailing readers’ sexual experiences. AWF’s letters were hornier than Penthouse’s because, in their joyfully prosaic detail, they sounded true – although contributors were paid $50 a piece, so most of them probably were not. The issue on which I worked included letters from a middle-aged woman whose married male friends telephoned at night to suggest she fuck herself with cucumbers and other groceries; a 54 sex&money woman sharing the fact that she masturbated; and a woman who found a lover with a small dick who couldn’t get an erection.
AWF had to take certain care with its naked male centrefolds (‘Australia’s Most Studly’) to ensure the magazine was not rated Category 1. Their penises were forbidden to rise above an angle of 45 degrees, which indicated arousal and would have consigned the magazine to a plastic wrap.
I was quite happy working on AWF, but intestinally uncomfortable with Penthouse. I did not have anyone I could talk to about this. Everyone I knew from typesetting had worked on porn, and all my politically inclined friends had gone back to the UK, so I took the desperate step of consulting socialist folk singer Alistair Hullet, the former singer of local Pogues cousins, Roaring Jack. On Sunday afternoons, Hullet and his acoustic guitar played revolutionary ballads at the Sandringham Hotel in Newtown. I used to take a seat at the bar sometimes, and soak in the socialism and smoke. I contacted Hullet through his record company and arranged an interview. He was happy to talk to Penthouse. He rarely got any attention from the media. In fact, he often had to fight for the attention of the dozen or so drinkers at the Sando.
Before I met him, I went for a run around Redfern Park, and dropped my house keys. I searched for them in the grass, but it was like trying to find house keys in a park. I turned up for the interview in running gear, and I looked more like a desperate, sweating junkie than a journalist. Hullet, a generous, trusting person, lent me a pair of trousers and a long-sleeved shirt for my next appointment, and listened impassively as I begged special dispensation to work on Penthouse. He seemed puzzled as to why I should think he possessed spiritual authority on behalf of the international working class. From the tone of his songs, I had assumed he was a member of the Australian political equivalent of the SWP. It turned out he was not. He was just this bloke who sang ‘The Internationale’ once a week in the pub.
In the end, he handed down a judgment. He said it was probably alright to work for the magazine, provided you did not take the photographs. I was ready for that. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I write the captions for the photographs.’ Nothing I could say would make Alistair Hullet damn me to hell, or ask for his trousers back. I did not know if I should be relieved that I had not committed a mortal sin, or disappointed that I had not debased myself sufficiently. I did not know what I was doing at all.
FOUR In which I get punched in the face,
every day for a year
My time in the Penthouse offices was supposed to be a trial for a job as copyeditor. Phil gave the position to David Smiedt instead, perhaps because I was transparently insane, but encouraged me to stay involved with the title. From 1994 to 1997 I was a ‘contributing editor’, a largely ceremonial position that I held in parallel with several other jobs. It meant that I contributed to the editorial, rather than the editing. I wrote tough guy features and the heavily signposted humour, and from 1993–94 I had a column called ‘The Big Bout’, a sorry mixture of both.
I had smoked since I was fifteen, and drank since I was able. I picked up no athletic skills at school, and throughout my teens my only exercise was shoplifting and running away. I had never played any sport. I was thirty when I decided to become a professional boxer.
I had been interested in boxing since I saw Muhammad Ali fight George Foreman on the TV news in 1974. I was impressed by Ali’s ‘rope-a-dope’ innovation of raising his fists in front of his face, leaning on the ropes and absorbing all of Foreman’s punches. Getting punched became one of my preferred fighting techniques from then on, second only to my all-time favourite, running away.
When I was seventeen, I went to a scout hall disco, where I was sitting on a plastic chair slobbering over one member of an entire generation of garrison-town girls named Karen. I felt a leather thud like a football landing on my lap, and glanced down at the face of Roy Martin staring up from my crotch. He was a year older than me, and a novice boxer. I assumed he had somehow slipped and fallen backwards into this position.
‘What’re you fucking looking at?’ he demanded.
I turned back to Karen, and Roy Martin returned to the other end of the scout hall, from where he stared at me all night, hoping to catch me looking at him again. When the disco ended, Karen and I left the scout hut with the aim of standing in the doorway for ages and ages, kissing goodnight.
Roy Martin came up, placed himself in front of me, and asked what I was fucking looking at. Karen said I wasn’t looking at anything, and draped her hand over my eyes to prove it. Roy Martin hit me in the mouth. Instantly, I knew what to do. Like the greatest heavyweight champion the world has ever known, I clenched my fists, covered my face and waited for my opponent to finish punching me. Roy Martin tagged me with a couple of left hooks, drove a right cross straight through my guard, and gave me a black eye.
He must have grown tired of hitting me, because eventually he stopped. At that point, if I had been Muhammad Ali, I would have laughed at him panting after his futile exertion, taunted him in rhyme, chased him across the tarmac, and chopped him down.
Since I was Mark Dapin, I left things at the ‘black eye stage’.
I found somewhere to hide and spent the next twenty minutes unsuccessfully trying to work my fingers inside Karen’s bra, while I waited for my mate Peter Powell to complete a similar but more fruitful attempt on his girlfriend, Mandy.
Powell was a boxer, who was always trying to talk me into training with him, but I figured there was no point in duplicating functions. He could do the fighting and I could perhaps make up the rhyming taunts. With Powell as protection, I walked home through the kind of dark alley that has figured prominently in my life but I have never learned to avoid.
Incredibly, Roy Martin dropped from a lamppost, landed in front of me and asked what was I fucking looking at. He had two mates with him, one of whom was a fair boxer but not as good as Peter Powell. Powell said if they fought me, they would have to fight him as well. Everyone stared at each other except me, who tried hard not to look at anything. Eventually, the others backed down.
I never found out why Roy Martin beat me up. I saw him at a bus stop a week later and asked him, but he didn’t seem to know either.
The Roy Martin incident was my first clash with boxers, although there was a man with a boxer tattoo among the gang that beat me unconscious in Bedworth. I never lost interest in boxing, but it was not until I despised myself that I was willing to put in the effort needed to learn.
Dave Smiedt told me a boxing gym had opened above Joe’s Garage in Kings Cross. Joe’s Garage used to be the Rex Hotel, and I loved the Rex like an ex-girlfriend. It was my local when I first came to Australia, when we lived in the unit behind Kings Cross police station and I thought I had everything I wanted in life. In 1989, it was a pub full of backpackers. Everybody I knew drank there. You could barbecue your own steaks in the bistro, which seemed impossibly exotic. I have never felt so far from home and yet so at home as I did in the Rex, drinking with Chris and Jo and Guy, all of us suntanned, cashed up and working on the other side of the world.
When the pub became Joe’s Garage, the owners planted imitation petrol pumps in the forecourt, to attract t
he kind of people who thought a petrol station might be a suitable venue for a night out. Most of the backpackers had gone, and the few that were left were strangers to me, another generation of Lancashire girls in glittering waistcoats from Chiang Mai markets.
The boxing gym was a big, bare room with half a dozen heavy punching bags hanging like fat men lynched in a line, and a floor-to-ceiling bag quivering between them. A speedball was screwed into the wall, and the ring sat ominous and empty. Most boxing gyms are museums to themselves, papered with layers of posters advertising forgotten fight nights in police boys’ clubs and RSLs. Joe’s gym had no history and no future. The pub was to be demolished within a year.
There were two trainers at Joe’s, an East European who worked with the NSW state amateur team, and Barry Raff, who had a small stable of professionals. Raff was holding the pads for a huge, sweating heavyweight called Big Jimmy. Raff was a small, thickset man with a battered face, a black moustache and a tiger’s smile. When Big Jimmy stepped down, I asked Raff if I could have a go.
For a five-dollar training fee, Raff would do anything.
I performed a bit better than I thought I would. Nearly every time Raff showed me a pad I managed to punch it – although not always with the correct hand. Three three-minute rounds exhausted me, sending every 58 sex&money cigarette I had ever smoked flying back into my lungs like darts. I shed sweat like Big Jimmy, in stinging salty rivulets, and when I had finished punching, my knuckles shook like drill bits.
I returned a couple of times a week, and gradually got worse. I started hitting Raff by mistake. Once I even hit myself. Raff let me loose on the heavy bags, which almost snapped my wrists, and the speedball, which I could not hit at all because it moved too quickly. Back on the pads, Raff took everything with good humour. He started to do funny little impersonations of me, as a man with screwed-up eyes and buckteeth, who winds up his fist then runs away from it. Occasionally, he would hop on one leg to demonstrate my footwork.
Moving was my most awkward problem. I am the man who comes strolling around the corner when you are running towards it. I stop a centimetre short of bumping into you. You step to the left to get past me, I step with you. You step to the right, I do the same. All the time I am shaking my head, apologising. In boxing, it helps to move in the opposite direction to your opponent, so as not to be an easy target.
Even though I was crap, my early efforts gave me confidence. I had mixed motivations for wanting to box. I thought I deserved to be hit, hit hard and hit often, to be doubled over and humiliated and brought down onto my back. I wanted to get up and be hit some more, until I could not rise again. I wanted to have myself belted out of me.
I also wanted to purge myself. I thought boxing would turn me into a different person. I did not want to smoke or drink or do any of the things I used to do, any of the things that reminded me of me. When I perspired, I imagined the badness draining out of me, and when I boxed I could not think about what I had done. And finally, if I ever met Roy Martin again – if, for example, he dropped from a gum tree, or jumped out of my fridge – I wanted to be able to knock him down.
In addition, I wanted a column. Todd and Mark had impressed on me that a freelance writer needed a regular earner. I could not write opinion pieces because my opinions were, I thought, conventional and predictable – like most people I was a critical Trotskyist with vague anarcho-pacifist leanings – so I approached Phil with the idea of a column for which I would spend a year in training then fight a professional boxing match. He was guardedly enthusiastic. He asked several times whether I would go through with it. I assured him I would.
He said, ‘It’ll be great. I can just see the picture in the last column: there you are, covered in blood, and the referee’s raising your hand in victory.’ He did not realise I wanted to be flat on the canvas, punished.
I told Raff about my plan. He did not object because he did not believe me. I asked him how good I was, and he became cagey. ‘You’re unorthodox,’ he said. Then, ‘You’re very determined.’ Then, ‘You fucking spit on me all the time.’
The hard men who hung around Joe’s gym watched me flay about with a kind of wonder, as if they had heard a dog talk, or seen a cockroach reading a newspaper. After a couple of months of relentless pestering, Raff agreed to put me in the ring with Brad McClutcheon, a quiet, craggy fighter who reminded me of Peter Powell. McClutcheon had fought professionally four times, and won every match.
Raff wrapped my head in padded headgear, gave me a pair of gloves bigger than my face, and told me to go for it. McClutcheon waited calmly as I rushed up to him and threw wild lefts and swinging rights into thin air. After a while, I worked out that he was not moving, and if I just concentrated I could probably get him. I scraped his gloves with a couple of jabs, he blocked my right, then I tapped him with a rare hook. I started to enjoy myself.
Then McClutcheon hit me back. The difference between McClutcheon punching me and me punching him was a matter of reaction; I had one, McClutcheon didn’t. He looked as if he could have stood in the middle of the ring weathering my attacks for the next week or so, and maybe dip into a bag of chips and watch a video at the same time. Whenever he hit me, however, the force turned my head around so I was facing the opposite wall.
‘Keep looking at him!’ shouted Raff, but how can you keep looking at somebody when every time you do he knocks your chin into line with your shoulderblade?
At the end of the first round, Raff whispered, ‘Hit him with a left hook,’ smiled and patted me as if he were on my side. Then he walked over to Brad’s corner, smiled and patted him. Did he think I could not see him, or something? He was probably telling McClutcheon I was going to hit him with a left hook.
McClutcheon gave me the chance to squeeze in some limp body-punches in the second round, but I quickly collapsed into the ropes and gave up. Boxing tore the breath from my lungs, drove rivets into my biceps and shackled my ankles with iron. It drew a curtain over my intelligence, pumped haze into my brain. There was so much to remember, so very much I needed to do to keep safe. One round was emotionally shattering, two were physically impossible.
Raff instructed me to run in the mornings to build my cardiovascular endurance. I went jogging for a week or so, but then I was too tired to go boxing. I was worried I might leave my fight – which was now only eleven months away – on the road. I abandoned supplementary training and went back to the gym. We worked on body-boxing: a kind of limited sparring in which McClutcheon did not get to punch me in the head. Body boxing went well. I got a couple of punches in, and even managed two or three (okay, two) workable feints.
Raff and McClutcheon were going to the monthly amateur fight night at South Sydney Juniors in Maroubra, so I tagged along. I had never been to amateur boxing. I imagined it was a kind of slapdash affair, with well-meaning but hopeless fighters like myself. It was more like a series of very fit, very fast, very young lads bashing the shit out of each other over very short rounds. Everybody was punching for a knockout, and nobody ever seemed to give ground. Two light heavyweights in particular pounded each other into paste. I would have lasted two seconds, perhaps less. I was glad I was not a light heavyweight.
Raff got hold of some amateur-license application forms, with a list of cut-off weights. I was not a big bloke or a little guy, so I assumed I would fall somewhere in the middle. The last time I stepped on the scales, I weighed 81 kilograms. Middleweight is 71–75 kilograms. So what could I be? There it was, right at the bottom of the list: heavyweight, 81–91 kilograms. I could not believe it. I was supposed to get into the ring with Mike Tyson just because I enjoyed a beer and a burger now and again. I asked Raff how I could possibly be a heavyweight.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘all that piss you drink goes to your legs, and you’ve got a real big arse.’
In the history of boxing, there have been few successful fat, unfit guys who can’t fight. I knew I needed to eat less and exercise more, so I resolved to skip breakfast and lift weigh
ts. Missing my morning meal gave me a headache, so I began to cook dinner late at night, in the hope that some of it would still be hanging around my stomach the next day. Indigestion stole my sleep and made me feel even worse. I got obsessive about my 81 kilograms, asking everyone I knew how much they weighed, and demanding waist measurements from casual acquaintances.
McClutcheon was boxing in one of Raff’s regular promotions at Marrickville Town Hall. One of the early fights spilled into the crowd, but I missed the trouble because I was sitting with D in the Bay Tihn Vietnamese restaurant around the corner, eating myself into a more dangerous weight division.
It turned out to be Brad’s McClutcheon’s big night. He was supposed to be somewhere on the bottom of the bill, hidden in the small print along with the promoter’s permit number, but one of the main preliminary fighters did not show, and Raff reckoned McClutcheon could step up a notch and take on local hero Kon Pappy.
Kon was a wiry, balding Greek-Australian with a grin like the Parthenon. He entered the ring with a cartwheel. McClutcheon – broader, shorter, silent and unsmiling – stepped through the ropes and looked at the canvas.
Kon was a twisty, slippery, oily fighter, never long in one place and extremely difficult to hit. McClutcheon plodded towards him, throwing short, heavy right hands, and Kon would suddenly pop up beside him, or two steps away from him. The fight went the full four rounds, but McClutcheon said he knew he had lost in the second. Kon turned another cartwheel before the referee announced his victory.
McClutcheon seemed unmoved by the experience. He wasn’t hurt, he did not look disappointed, he did not even look tired. The only thing that changed was he started speaking like a sportsman. ‘He was pretty quick,’ McClutcheon told me. ‘He’s got a lot of experience. It was a good experience for me. I feel pretty good.’
Kon came into the changing room and hugged Brad. He was brimming with goodwill towards his former opponent and, indeed, everybody else. ‘Let’s face it,’ said Kon, ‘there’s enough violence in the world. Personally, I don’t want to get hurt and I certainly don’t want to hurt anybody.’
