by Mark Dapin
Oh great.
Kon came around for me at 6.30 am. He had had a flash of inspiration in the early hours that excited him so much he could not go back to sleep. ‘Today, we’re gonna wrestle,’ he said.
I was surprised, but I am surprised by everything at that time of the morning.
Kon used to be an Australian wrestling champion. We went to the gym and grappled a few rounds. It was a bit like dancing with somebody who was struggling to get away, which had been pretty much the case with the women at the dancing class. After the session, I collapsed. My shoulders were burning with the strain of the wrestling.
‘You look like my father’s goat,’ said Kon, surreally. Back in Greece, he explained, this miserable animal had been hung upside down and drained of its blood before it was roasted on a spit.
I felt like his father’s goat.
A couple of days later, we wrestled again. Kon grabbed for my waist, I took hold of him. Kon moved as if to throw me, and I forgot not to resist. I had that old familiar feeling of my skin going one way while my ribcage turned the other. I could almost hear the crack.
At home, D and I boxed and wrestled and danced until we had exhausted each other. I needed to trust her or to hate her to give myself peace, but I could not bring myself to do either. She wanted to get married. I could not see how we could get married when we brawled all the time – in restaurants, in the street, at her mum’s house, in bed. She said getting married would put an end to all the arguments. I felt it would trap me inside them forever.
‘Why can’t we get married?’ she asked.
‘Why did you finish with me when I was in Asia?’ I asked. My hurt never healed. I kept working on it with hot knives, opening it up again, stirring it around.
We went to see a counsellor at Relationships Australia. Her counselling technique seemed to be to ask me about my family then contradict everything I said.
I would say, ‘My dad wasn’t particularly bright.’
She would say, ‘I put it to you that he was.’
I would say, ‘My mum married him because he asked her to, and because he was Jewish.’
The counsellor would reply, ‘I put it to you that those weren’t the reasons.’
I suppose she was trying to strip me of certainty, to help me look at relationships in a new way, but I found it fantastically irritating.
Finally, she said, ‘I want you both to take a piece of paper and write how you vision your future.’
In a very quiet voice, I said, ‘Envision.’
‘What was that?’ she asked.
I did not want to repeat it, but I knew I had to.
‘“Vision” is a noun,’ I said. ‘You can’t ‘vision’ something. I think you mean ‘envision’, which is a verb.’
I think she would have liked to use the rest of the session to counsel D on the best way to leave me – pack a bag and go back to her mother; take out an AVO and evict me from the unit; poison me, chop me up and bury my body parts in a sewage farm – but she pressed on with the exercise.
Five minutes later, I gave her a sheet of blank paper. I could not see any future. Nothing at all.
I went back to my doctor to get a medical for a boxing licence. As part of the check-up, he asked me if I ever had suicidal thoughts.
‘Obviously, I wake up every morning and think about killing myself,’ I said, ‘just like everybody else.’ I really thought that was true. I imagined any rational person would lie in bed, rub their eyes, and think, ‘Well, I can either brew a pot of coffee, read the paper and take the dog for a walk, or I could lie back in the bath and slit my wrists.’ If you did not weigh the amount of pain you were likely to live through that day against the fear of nothingness, how could you even know whether to get dressed? Surely, you would be paralysed.
The doctor sent me to a psychiatrist, who prescribed me some mild antidepressants, which I threw away.
D had a prophet’s proclivity for revelations, and one day she realised she could no longer live with a man to whom she was not married, so we moved out of Redfern but stayed ‘together’. I went to live in Marrickville, where I could train every day with Kon. D took an empty room at a house her mother rented in Glebe.
It is always the same. You wait ten minutes for a cab, and when it finally comes along, two men jump out of the pub and smash it up with baseball bats.
I was trying to get the taxi from Marrickville to D’s place. I had not yet climbed into the cab, and I felt only vaguely guilty as I turned my back and walked away. Marrickville was rough like home was rough, but with more weapons in civilian hands. Everybody Kon introduced me to seemed to have been stabbed.
I was living alone for the first time in my adult life. I had shared a bedroom ever since I turned eighteen, first with Guy, then Jo, then D. I was free to do all those things I had always wanted to do, like sit in the pub on my own. I went out, found a bar and bought a beer. Several days later, I was mysteriously still there. Every night was suddenly Friday night. I went straight from work to the pub, and stayed there until the lights went off – either behind the bar or behind my eyes.
I could not train until my rib healed again. I was worried about my weight – I wanted to fight the lightest possible guy, but that meant I had to be as light as I possibly could. I came up with different ideas about how to diet, like cut out food entirely and only drink white wine, or slash my calorific intake by living on drugs.
Finally, Kon and I started to spar again. Or rather, Kon sparred and I stood in front of him, dressed like a boxer. ‘Sometimes I think you’re planning to tire out the other bloke by letting him hit you until he’s exhausted,’ he said.
Kon jabbed and rolled. I lifted my left and he slipped in under my guard.
‘Are you trying to hit me with your rib?’ he asked.
I gave up drinking.
I arranged lunch with my MA supervisor, Wendy Bacon, in a cafe above Park Street. The meeting took weeks to set up – Wendy was the most breathlessly busy person I had ever met – and I needed to discuss my dissertation.
We started talking about my topic – British Holocaust denier David Irving – when a black guy at the next table shouted, ‘Jew! Jew! Fucking Jew!’
I told Wendy we should move to another restaurant.
‘I’m so sorry about that,’ she said, as if it had been her fault.
I did not think about the screamer until Wendy left. Then I thought, Why didn’t I hit him? Every day I hit people – or tried to – who had done nothing to me. I did not hit him because he was mad, with a demented bellow and golf ball eyes. Not a good enough answer. I did not hit him because I was more interested in talking to Wendy. Not a good enough answer.
I did not hit him because he was black. Not a good enough answer. I didn’t hit him because he was black and mad and I was more interested in talking to Wendy. Maybe, but I walked off wondering, Why didn’t I punch him? Why didn’t I smash him with a chair? Why didn’t I throw boiling water over him? and the more cinematically satisfying, Why didn’t I duck into the sports shop next door, grab a baseball bat, sprint upstairs to the cafe, and smash him across the face with it? Probably because it took me about an hour to even think of it.
I had always imagined losing my professional fight. It was part of my plan that I would finish face-up on the canvas, staring into the nostrils of the referee as he held up about 200 fingers. It would be the humiliation I deserved. Suddenly, however, I started to become a bit more confident. When I began training seriously, it took me 22 seconds to run 100 metres, and a couple of minutes to get my breath back. I could not do three minutes on the pads without collapsing against the ropes like a limp puppet tangled in his own strings. I could not fight to save my life, which was unfortunate because that is what boxing is – fighting to save your life. Eighteen months later, I could run 100 metres in less than 14 seconds and recover immediately. I could box ten rounds before breakfast. I weighed only 75 kilograms, and something had happened to me.
It was
sullenly early in the morning, as usual, and I was training in a church hall when something struck me – and, for once, it wasn’t Kon. Kon and I circled each other. I jabbed, he jabbed. I caught his jab and jabbed back. This last move was a recent addition to my repertoire, a modification of me eating his jab and spitting it out. Then, instead of springing back when Kon came for me, I stayed where I was, moved slightly to the side, and hit him. We worked together in a tight circle, boxing and blocking as if we were following set steps – but we were not.
A choir of angels struck up above me; mysterious, bright light streamed through the stained glass windows; the earth shook. God had allowed me to box, in his house. Everything came together. My feet shuffled. While I mixed it up in close, I remembered what I had learned from the wrestling and did not strain every muscle trying to force Kon to the ground. I stayed balanced and calm, covered up when I was punched, then replied with a couple of combinations of my own. It was amazing.
Days later, I was in McColl’s Gym in Glebe. I warmed up by shadowboxing. I began my cripple’s quickstep, feeling as awkward and graceless as ever, but I could tell my punches were flowing faster and harder. I heard one of the older fighters talking about me: ‘He’s had a couple of fights already,’ he said. Maybe he was taking meaning from context. Perhaps he thought I must be a boxer because I was boxing in a boxing gym, but I thought I had him fooled into thinking I could fight. Maybe I could fool an opponent, as well. Perhaps I really could box.
I could not, though. I went to Tony Mundine’s gym in Eveleigh Street, Redfern, and sparred a couple of novices. I did better than I would have a year before, but if the cops had picked that afternoon to raid Eveleigh Street, I could have been arrested for impersonating a boxer. All my training with Kon had turned me into the world expert at fighting Kon. That was all. As soon as anybody did anything that Kon did not do – such as stand still and trade punches – I was lost. I was knocked down three times in one day.
The funny thing about boxing is that it is just like the movies. It is so gritty and smoky and crooked and tough, it ought to happen in black and white. My big fight was fixed. I didn’t know it, but I should have done.
Six months before, Raff had taken me to a cafe in Kings Cross and told me, ‘You’ll never make a fighter, mate’ – but it’s not difficult to get a professional boxing match, even if you are not a fighter. There is always somebody starting out who wants to get into the ring with a mug who can’t keep his hands up. Footballers, bouncers and ex-cons fill out the under-cards of suburban fight nights. They are fit, tough guys who just don’t have the skills. They meet a boxer, and he treats them like a punching bag. Some trainers manage to make matches like these half a dozen times, and their boys quickly build up records that sound good in the pub. In private, they call their opponents ‘spastics’ and ‘clowns’.
A promoter cannot stack a bill with first-round KOs, so some mismatched fighters get carried. They are allowed to go the distance to pass the time, to fill the evening, to give the punters what they paid for. Essentially, that was what was going to happen to me. Except that I was going to win. A promoter assured me he had found me a ‘spastic’, probably the least experienced man ever to walk on canvas. I found out he had had a couple of fights, and I wondered whether I was being set up to go down. I would not have minded.
After the date was agreed, the promoter promised I would be ‘looked after’. He imagined the fight as a kind of pantomime, a bit like professional wrestling. There would be soft haymakers that stopped short, faces twisted in agony from blows that hardly landed, and my ‘opponent’ had been told he would not get paid if I got hurt.
The idea had some appeal. I was not frightened of being hit, or being hurt, I was scared of looking stupid, like a clown. But how could I sell tickets to my mates, who were all wildly enthusiastic about watching me get my face punched in, when I was not going to get my face punched in at all? I had built up the event into a kind of cleansing ceremony. It would bleach my conscience with its ferocity, sweep out my soul with its violence, leave me transformed and free and ready to start again. Now it was going to be a lie, like everything else. I pulled out.
The hardest thing was ringing Phil and telling him I was not going ahead. The second hardest thing was squaring it with myself. The easiest thing was going back to drinking and smoking.
I thought Phil would never employ me again, but I worked heavily for Penthouse in the next couple of years, interviewing martial artists and other conmen. In the 1990s, Penthouse changed the way it photographed women, taking its cues from the style of porn movie director Andrew Blake. Blake brought a new sophistication to dirty videos. He dressed his female stars in beautiful clothes and expensive-looking jewellery, had them reclining in the back seats of limousines, sipping cocktails, and being delivered to palatial mansions with ubiquitous swimming pools, where they stripped, shaved off all their pubic hair, and had anal sex with handsome, well-built strangers. This was a big change from the early days of video, when they jumped straight into anal sex with ugly, hairy strangers.
It was becoming less socially acceptable to pose for Penthouse and offer such a permanent surrender of gynaecological privacy. Phil missed the days when the chemist’s assistant from Parramatta would take off her clothes and jump in front of the camera for a laugh and an overseas holiday. Now the Pets tended to be strippers or lap-dancers, with bad skin and implants, but Penthouse made them up like porn princesses, in unlikely tiaras and collars of pearls, to make their eventual despoilment seem more complete.
Penthouse’s corporate advertising faded. Letter-writing campaigns by evangelical Christian groups such as the Australian Federation for the Family scared off international companies like Sony. Born-again preachers targeted pornography and, on their instruction, citizens lobbied their MPs, and pensioners complained to their newsagents. Penthouse moved from the front of the shop, where it sat close to the Bulletin, to the back, where it disappeared among imported titles bought by the kilo from the US and the UK, distributed illegally and without classification from Queensland garages and NSW newsagents.
In place of lost corporate advertising, Penthouse accepted dozens of small ads for the new phone sex industry. They started off huddled together at the back of the magazine, but crawled to the front on their hands and knees, with buttocks thrust into the air. The language in the ads was far more explicit than anything to date, even the Forum Letters. Some of it was probably illegal. Phrases such as ‘They used their belts across my bare bottom’, ‘Fill my dirty, filthy mouth with spunk’ and ‘18 y.o. babysitter licked my cunt as it dripped’, were spoken from unconvincing speech bubbles, and ‘Bizarre Sex’ offered confused fantasies such as ‘I’ll shower over your erect cock as my friend shags you with a black rubber dildo’ and ‘Strict lesbian bitches: one spanks you, one teases your cock, one fucks you’.
Penthouse was no longer the kind of magazine you could leave on your coffee table (I had once seen it on a coffee table, albeit in Kalgoorlie, where social mores rarely and barely apply). The veneer of sophistication, always fragile, had been stripped, spanked and tossed aside. First Mark left, then Todd went to Melbourne and took a job running Desktop, a graphic design trade magazine.
The magazine that remained was tired and formulaic. The Pets struck all the same poses, and the readers wrote all the same letters. In the end, there is nowhere different to go with pornography and nothing different to do. As Phil said, ‘What’s new in porn? A fourth fuckable female orifice?’
FIVE In which I become a parasite in
The Picture, and work on a magazine for
parasites at the Australian Financial Review
D and I would never let anything go. We never let anything go. I never let anything go. We fought and fought, bloodied and howling like wounded dogs, tearing away at each other’s personalities, ripping the flesh from our beliefs. D said when I returned from Asia she wanted to make me crawl through broken glass before she’d take me back, and I did, and it
s shards slashed me open and sank into my veins, were pumped around my bloodstream into my heart.
I knew our relationship was not going to work. I was not going to let it. She had abandoned me and called me a liar. I kept on asking why, as if the question had no reasonable answer, when I came to understand there was every reasonable answer. For a start, I had lied to my wife, then I had abandoned D, and gone off around the world with my wife. I was the bad guy. The worst thing you can be is the bad guy, and know it.
D wanted to get married, to feel settled. She wanted to live in a house she could decorate and care for, and know that she would stay there. She wanted to be happy, and she wanted me to be happy, but I did not want to be happy. I could not even imagine being happy. I wanted to win.
There were stranger impulses coalescing, though. Fashion designer Coco Chanel once said of her lover, Paul Iribe, ‘He used to criticize me for not being straightforward . . . Iribe loved me . . . but he wanted to destroy me. He wanted to see me conquered, humiliated, he wanted me to die. He would have felt a profound delight in seeing me entirely dependent on him, poor, reduced to powerlessness, paralyzed in an invalid carriage.’ I sometimes felt a little like that about D. I often felt she felt like that about me.
D was a graduate of a human potential course called the Landmark Forum, a descendant of the 1960s therapy cult Est. Est was founded by Werner Erhard, an encyclopaedia hawker, used car salesman, and defector from scientology. It taught what Erhard once called ‘dogshit existentialism’, a practical, applied existentialism that anybody could understand. At weekend seminars held by Est – and later by Landmark Forum – participants were encouraged to ‘Get It’. ‘It’ was the understanding that the past did not matter, that you could live in the moment, that you need not be limited by your history. You could start again at any time, do everything you dreamed, say who you wanted to be and become that person.
It was an extraordinarily diverse philosophy, drawing from Zen Buddhism, Dianetics and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Landmark Forum taught that all goals were equally valid – and were, in some way, the same. It dragged quotes out of context from revolutionaries and civil rights leaders, isolated them from any idea of political struggle, and reduced them to general motivational mantras. A Sydney photographer associated with the Forum self-published an expensive book of photographs of a swimming pool, and sold signed and numbered copies to his friends. In his dedication, he pointed out that, like Martin Luther King, he had a dream. That was true in so far as it went, but King’s dream was of a fair society and racial equality throughout the US. The photographer’s dream was to self-publish an expensive book of photographs of a swimming pool, and sell signed and numbered copies to his friends.
