by Mark Dapin
In my office, Nick noticed a cover proof bearing the line ‘John Safran vs Ray Martin’. The story was about the way Melbourne comedian Safran and Shane Paxton had ambushed Channel 9 presenter Ray Martin, in retaliation for Martin’s depiction of the Paxton family as dole bludgers on A Current Affair.
Nick asked to read the story, and the week before we went to press, he told me to pull it. What I had to understand, he said, was that PBL was an integrated company. Channel 9 and ACP were two parts of the same family. We had to help each other.
This was the opposite of everything I had been told after the Water Rats fiasco. I said I was incapable of the Confucian ideal of holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously (I had always wanted to say that). I resigned, and asked if there were some way I could be let out of my notice period so I could leave the building immediately. I was angry and sad, but the job was impossible. I thought Channel 9 was sabotaging my magazine at every level (even though, in reality, it simply did not care about me or about Ralph, any more than I cared about Channel 9). Nick asked if it would help me to know that Channel 9 had nothing to with it, and it was his decision alone. I said that made things worse, but only a little. All I could think about was the contempt in which he must hold me.
ACP, however, was now run by John Alexander, widely known as ‘JA’. Alexander had come from Fairfax to be managing director, thwarting once again Nick’s ambition to run the company. I came in the next day to clear my desk, and JA called me to a meeting. I had never met him before, but I was impressed by the way his office shelves were lined with books, as if he were an academic rather than a barbarian. JA had a reputation for dressing people down. I assumed he was going to shout at me. I fantasised about hitting him. He was friendly and courteous, and asked if I would stay on if I were allowed to run the Safran–Martin story. I said of course I would. He told me to run it.
I realised then that I might win the war, and it was a war. With my new military orientation, I began to think of myself as the commander of an elite military unit, always on the front line, permanently under fire. The staff of FHM were encamped in their own trenches, on the other side of no-man’s-land, and soon we were to be sniping at each other over the charred and twisted corpses of men’s magazines that had been caught in the crossfire – the headless body of Max, the immaculately dressed but soulless carcass of GQ, and the sad remains of Australian Playboy, the cashiered doughboy, naked from the waist up.
Although FHM were the enemy, I knew in my heart that they were men just like us, and they had not asked for this war, or known what they were letting themselves in for when they signed up. The real bastards were the generals, who dined out on blood-red wine and almost-raw meat in fashionably minimalist restaurants far from the deafening roar of artillery. I particularly blamed our ANZAC allies, the cowardly and duplicitous New Zealanders. At one point, I thought it might be a good thing if the staff could be persuaded to wear a uniform. And carry weapons. I was moderately well armed. I kept an axe under my desk and a Stanley knife in my drawer for close-in work. I was determined that if two bikers came into my office and demanded money and an apology, I would not go down without a fight. (I was, however, equally determined never to offend any bikers.)
Brad often thought and talked in military metaphors, too. He wanted to surround himself with lieutenants he could trust in a war. He and Nick talked about how they could ‘take over’ Cleo with ‘a few good men’. They thought of Cleo like Castro thought of Cuba; I thought of New Zealand like Hitler thought of Poland.
Unlike Poland, however, New Zealand refused to be invaded. Once it was too late to effect the 1999 audit, I managed to get our quota raised to 12 000 copies, but by then FHM was distributing twice that number. I presume the real reason for ACP NZ’s reluctance to help us was it – like everybody else – got its fingers burned on the early issues, and it saw its function as a publisher first and an international distributor a distant second. It wanted the shelf space in the dairies for its homegrown titles. More than anything else, the New Zealand experience made me want to leave.
I had turned Ralph into a new kind of men’s magazine, an Australian hybrid that did not exist anywhere else in the world. It smiled and sipped a tinnie as it squinted into the sun and, in a cover-driven market, it sold more copies than the competition whoever we put on the front. I had changed the editorial tone, the design and the commercial face of the project, and enjoyed myself more than any man in publishing, but I exhausted myself fighting for things that Ralph should have had in the first place, I wasted energy and creativity and my miniscule store of guile trying to force through changes to decisions that should never have been made, to win conditions that FHM had possessed from the start: a cheerful, inclusive, inoffensive ad campaign; an orientation towards fashion and fragrance advertising; a dedicated, focussed marketing operation; and a New Zealand distribution system that worked for rather than against the magazine. These things were Ralph’s by right, and would have given me that ‘level playing field’ so beloved by fools. Had we also been able to make use of our natural advantage – our supposedly close relationship with Channel 9 – we would have wiped up FHM, and possibly EMAP Australia, too. If we had sunk its flagship, EMAP would have recalled its navy to port. EMAP Australia was allowed to grow into a competitor to ACP only because of the way various sectional interests within the Packer organisation ran according to their own agendas.
I told Brad I had only ever wanted to do the job for a year. I knew we would beat FHM in the 1999 audit (although they would still outsell us in New Zealand) then Carl could take over. ACP gave me a pay rise and persuaded me to stay for a few more months, but the thing I wanted most – control – I could not have. And as long as FHM beat us overall, I felt like my job was only half done.
Like Lenin, I left behind a testament describing the things that needed to change. I nominated our editorial assistant Amanda to carry on my legacy as fashion coordinator, and recommended Ralph take charge of its own marketing budget. Startlingly, these things actually happened – but I was in Mexico by then, drinking Corona and eating tacos.
ELEVEN In which I flee Australia, learn Spanish and seek asylum in Cuba
I did not want to think about men’s magazines for a while. I did not want to speak English. I wanted to hide some place where publishing could not get me, so I fled to Latin America with Claire. We had saved enough money to spend almost a year away, and Brad promised me $600 a month to write assessments of each new issue of Ralph.
There were men’s magazines on the racks in the kiosks in the Mexico City streets – Spanish GQ and Hispanic Maxim – and they called out to me faintly in their own language: ‘Pick me up, hombre. Flick through me, amigo. Mentally redesign my pages, compañero. Take note of my feature articles, hermano. Remember the names of my cover girls.’
I walked on by, pretending not to understand. This was particularly easy, since I did barely understand. Before we left Australia, I had tried to learn Spanish using the Linkword (TM) method, as endorsed by the British stage magician, Paul Daniels. Linkword (TM) teaches you to remember a Spanish word by connecting it with an English word. For instance, the Spanish word for ‘cow’ is vaca, so you imagine a cow vacuuming a field. The Spanish word for ‘goat’ is cabra, so you imagine a cobra attacking a goat. It works well with the names of animals, but I’ve never had a conversation about a goat in any language, and Linkword (TM) is no use for mastering grammar. For that, I turned to Open Learning, the university of TV.
Spanish was taught via a pseudo-soap opera called Destinos, which played on the ABC at about the time goats get up in the morning. Destinos tells the story of Mexican lawyer Raquel Rodriguez, who combs the Spanish-speaking world for a missing person. Raquel is a courageous, independent, fiercely intelligent brunette, and beneath her polished veneer beats a passionate Latin heart. I fell in love with her, and I practised my verb tables with the diligence of the besotted – until she met the blandly handsome Argentine psychologist, Arturo
Iglesias. When she and Arturo shared their first kiss, I lost most of my interest in the show. Armed with an eclectic vocabulary of animal names, legal terms and the language of romance, I arrived in Mexico City uniquely qualified to translate for the defence lawyer in a bestiality case.
One of the first things we had to do was find a laundrette. I knew the words (‘Dónde está la lavandería?’) but not how to pronounce them. Claire and I walked the streets with our dirty laundry, opening the bag and pulling out soiled t-shirts. One old woman examined them closely, smiled and directed us to a market stall that bought second-hand clothes from slum dwellers.
We took a long, long bus ride to San Cristóbal de las Casas, site of the 1994 Zapatista rebellion The locals had turned the Zapatista guerrillas into a tourist attraction. Dozens of market stalls sold cuddly, harmless balaclava-clad Zapatista dolls, often travelling to the revolution in colourful and crowded Zapatista buses.
Claire and I enrolled in Centro Cultural El Puente, where for about $300 we secured fifteen hours a week one-on-one language tuition and seven days bed and board with a local family. We were billeted with Martha. She did not speak to us, and she served our meals with a proud, terse flourish, as if they were delicious Mexican dishes of marinated meat smothered in crisp salsa and served on soft tacos with piquant chilli sauce. In fact, her speciality was the omelette sandwich, a little-known dish comprising two slices of white bread and a flaccid, single-egg tortilla. It tasted like glue, but with more of an overpowering viscosity. We ate her dinners without complaint (we didn’t know how to complain) then went out and bought delicious Mexican dishes of marinated meat smothered in crisp salsa and served on soft tacos with piquant chilli sauce.
My classes at the centre involved intensive conversation with a local tutor, who was fascinated by Australia. His main areas of interest were whether kangaroos actually boxed (in the classic sense of being able to put together combinations including hooks, uppercuts, crosses and jabs) and whether the Tasmanian devil really existed. This latter question puzzles people throughout Latin America, due to the popularity of the cartoon show, Tasmanian Devil. Within two weeks, I could say more about marsupials than I could about cows, or even goats.
From Mérida, Mexico, we flew to Havana, Cuba. Brad had arranged to have my monthly copy of Ralph posted to me wherever I was, but even genial Ralph, the grinning, resourceful Aussie backpacker, could not find his way through the misnamed Cuban ‘postal’ system. Claire and I rented a private room with a nice family, and I continued my recovery from Ralph, pummelling my beer gut with a typically obsessive program of abdominal exercise. I went from performing 50 sit-ups a day to 100, then 500, then 1000, and finally peaked at 2400 sit-ups in thirty-five minutes. My neck locked and the skin scraped away from my coccyx. The pressure on my spine caused by my sloppy technique made me feel like two of my vertebrae had been replaced by boiling ball bearings. I dropped one waist size, and persevered with Spanish.
Our family found us each our own teacher. Mine was Maria, and she was slowly turning white. Her skin was brown, like a beach at sunset, except for an albino thumbprint above her ankle. The light patch was growing, she said. Eventually it would cover her whole body, and then she would die. Cuban doctors are world leaders in the treatment of Maria’s disease – or rather, the treatment of foreigners with the disease. Patients without American dollars are turned away from the medical centre, and Maria’s only dollars were the $3.30 an hour I paid her to teach me Spanish. When she visited the doctors to discuss her condition, she said they laughed at her. Maria felt betrayed in a way I could not at first grasp.
She was an honest citizen in a city of jineteros, or pimps. Tourists walking through the jungle-hot streets of Havana in summer were stopped every few paces by young touts dressed in Fila and Nike sportswear, offering accommodation, directions to a restaurant, or sex. They called, ‘Hello, friend, where you from?’ If you did not answer, they guessed. They followed you, and they kept on guessing until they got it right. Unless you were from Australia, in which case they never got it right. One jinetero tried nineteen nations on me – including the Ukraine and Belarus – before he gave up. The jineteros led you to places there is no reason to go – both private rooms and private restaurants are now legal in Cuba. They earned dollars from selling a service nobody taxes and nobody needs.
Maria was a lecturer in English at Havana University. The revolution in the 1950s brought free education for everyone, and she was grateful to the state for that. Under the pre-Castro dictatorship of Batista, the poor were kept illiterate and indentured. The main English-language textbook for Cuban schools carried a brief description of Australia: ‘As in many other capitalist countries, luxurious urban centres for the bourgeoisie co-exist with poor districts and reservations for the native people.’ The homework question was: ‘Describe one capitalist aspect of Australian society.’
Maria spoke perfect, essayist’s English, unaffected by colloquialism and coinage because she had never been exposed to Hollywood. She taught me in a unit raised by a cooperative that included her husband. Everybody who lived on the block built the block. The materials came from the state, and she appreciated that. She had just had a baby.
It was illegal for Maria to teach privately. I was her first and only pupil. I sweated in her apartment, which had no fan. She offered no refreshments because she had nothing in her fridge. She called me Naranjita (‘Little Orange’) after the soft drink I bought midway through each lesson.
Many Cubans wanted to leave Cuba. The toughest route out was to chance their lives on an overcrowded, undermaintained boat to Florida. The easiest way was to marry a foreigner. Every day I spent in Maria’s unit, studying the poetry of the Cuban patriot José Martí, wedding parties screeched past her window. Bloated, ugly, white men married beautiful, black prostitutes. To Maria, they were symbols of corruption and decay. She did not want a return to capitalism – none of the Cubans I spoke to did. They wanted the society they were promised when Castro declared his revolution socialist in 1961. They wanted a nation where everybody worked together towards common goals.
When she completed her degree, Maria went into the countryside to teach for free for two years, to pay back the cost of her education. More than a decade later, she still lived out of a ration book. Cubans with US dollars – restaurateurs and hoteliers, pimps, prostitutes, conmen and gangsters – could buy anything in Havana. The dollar supermarkets (Cuban supermarkets that only accepted US dollars) were stacked with Johnny Walker whisky and Ferrero Rocher chocolates. Teachers who earn pesos could buy bread and potatoes and pitiful servings of pork.
The day I left Havana, I gave Maria a copy of Marie Claire. I told her life in Australia is not really like the fashion pages: not everybody is rich and lovely. Then I had to explain that it was not like the feature pages, either: not every woman is a sex slave who murders her abusive spouse, or a dominatrix with her own bondage dungeon.
She was thrilled with Marie Claire, and the strange dreams it sells through the pictures and the words.
I asked her why the doctors had laughed at her condition. She said they were not being cruel: ‘They laugh because there is nothing else they can do.’ She told me the good reputation of Cuban medicine is a sham to fool the world that the system works. Cuban medics flew in to help flood victims in Guatemala, and earthquake victims in Turkey, but they would not help her. The treatment for her disease was developed in Havana. It uses substances derived from the human placenta. Maria said: ‘When my daughter was born, I gave my placenta for the research.’ Now they used her placenta to cure wealthy Italians, and they turned Maria away at the door. That was why she felt betrayed.
I took some pictures of Maria’s baby, and promised to keep in touch. Cubans are probably the worst Spanish speakers in the world (apart from me). Half their consonants go missing in their desperate haste to ask if a kangaroo might one day be WBC heavyweight champion, but I left Havana confident I could understand most of what was said.
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nbsp; We flew back to Mérida and travelled south in the heavy heat of the Central American rainy season, fielding queries about Taz and Skippy with jaundiced ease. Ralphs posted from Australia occasionally found me, but often the local courier company modelled itself on the Cuban postal system, and the magazine simply disappeared. When I did receive a copy, I went mad.
I could not bear to read it. There was nothing much wrong with it, but I could see chances for jokes missed; and stories I had rejected creep onto the pages; and film reviews crammed with horrible clichés, each one of which I carefully underlined like a schizophrenic street screamer annotating the Book of Revelations. Carl was doing a good job, but reading it made knives jump into my eyes. I had to stride around and around, with my hands plunged into my pockets, trying to burn off the adrenalin, the thrilling, intoxicating, dangerous feeling of being the editor again – albeit after the fact. I was still an addict.
Natural disasters chased us through Central America like biblical punishments hurled from the heavens by a slighted, vengeful God. There were great floods, hurricanes and a plague of mudslides. We were always, however, one bus ride ahead of the worst conditions: the roads ruined by rock falls, the villages washed away, the reunion tour of seventies soft-rock band Air Supply.
When we reached Costa Rica, we decided to stop running. We deliberately set out to climb an active volcano at night. We were shaking a fist at God, saying, ‘Come on, Beardy, do your worst.’ So he did. He sent us Juan.
Volcán Arenal stands sentinel over the small town of La Fortuna, three hours north of the Costa Rican capital of San José. It has been erupting constantly for thirty years and tourists visit it every clear evening. Juan, our tour guide, arrived in a borrowed four-wheel drive, fifteen minutes late. His half-closed eyes and issued-with-the-driver’s-licence Latin American moustache did not conceal his annoyance at having been called out. Juan was stopped by the police on the approach road to the volcano. He whispered ‘Shit’ several times, which was strange, since he did not speak English. After showing the police his documents, he was allowed to continue, which was also strange, since he was unable to drive.
