by Mark Dapin
The lines are spectacular and mystifying. If they are a signal to UFOs, their text must be something like, ‘We have long arms, big lizards and an enormous monkey. Please bring your own condor because we’re all out.’
Even though our scenic flight was first thing in the morning, we managed to miss the last bus out of Nazca, and were forced to spend a second night in a one-attraction town. We ate spicy barbecued chicken and drank chilled local beer under a starless desert sky, but by the time we reached Chile, I was happy to be back in the First World.
I was in Argentina when I received a message from my mum, asking me to contact my brother urgently. I knew what it was about: a friend had died. I had always felt this friend had lived with a noose around his neck, wandering through the forest of his imagined guilt, searching for a tree to hang himself. I felt old and heavy, with the horrible sadness that comes from knowing there are some conversations you will never have again. My sister’s boyfriend had recently killed himself, and I had been no use to her, and I would be no use to my mate if he was dead, so I did not call.
Another email came, from my aunty, urging me to phone my brother. I thought she had got confused, and wanted me to phone my sister about her boyfriend. I had already done that, so I did not call. My mum got in touch with me a second time, and said it was very important that I should speak to my brother – but she did not know why.
I phoned him from an international call centre in Buenos Aires. I got through on my second attempt. He asked me what the weather was like in Argentina. I asked why he was so urgently concerned. He said there was something he had to tell me. He was moving in with Jo.
I said, ‘What? My ex-wife, Jo?’
He said, ‘Yes.’
I said, ‘What? Moving in with her like flatmates?’
He said, ‘No. Moving in with her like you moved in with her.’
I asked how long he had been seeing her.
‘About a year,’ he said.
Communist painter Yosl Bergner, who had worked a lot in the theatre, said he always imagined the actors carrying on their act after the scenery had been moved away. ‘That’s the feeling I’ve had right through my life,’ he said, ‘that something has moved, and the people still go on doing the act that they have to do.’
Something had moved behind me, and nobody had told me. I had carried on feeling guilty that Jo was lonely, when she was not lonely anymore. I felt suddenly liberated, as if a life sentence had been commuted to time served – minus one year. I was not angry with my brother, I was not upset, but I wished he had let me know. I could have come out of my cell earlier.
Instantly, I lost the constant, low-level tinnitus of shame that buzzed almost sub-audibly in my brain. I gave my brother my blessing and went out for a steak. All the self-indulgent, undermining grieving was finished. Not only did I not have to be the villain anymore, I could now play the victim if the mood took me: my brother and my ex-wife – how could they do this to me?
Brilliant.
TWELVE In which I get tricked into coming
back, and give a few hundred dollars to
Kerry Packer, who must have been a bit
short at the time
Brad never accepted that I had left. I had resigned, cleared my desk, collected my entitlements and crossed the world, but he kept telling me I was taking leave without pay – I just did not realise it. As usual, Brad was right. He could see I was addicted to Ralph, even when I could not.
I had promised I would come back to cover for him if he ever took long service leave and went to Europe. He said he could not go if I was not there to look after his magazines. I did not believe he would go, because he did not like foreign countries. He liked sitting on his sundeck in the summer, with a bottle of chardonnay, and marinated meats grilling on the barbecue. Brad had risen in the company. Nick now published magazines for women and children, whereas Brad had become publisher of the P-mags, and he soon got Ralph too. In addition, he had been given all ACP’s sports titles – a strange selection that included, among others, 1980s-style newspaper Pro Basketball Today, 1970s-style newspaper Rugby League Week, and 1960s-style newspaper Harness Racing Weekly. Each of these publications was like a time capsule, buried at the height of its success, and unchanged since. Brad had also won the motoring titles, which included Wheels, Motor and Four x Four Australia. Brad emailed me in Brazil and said I was going to be editor-in-chief of the group, but I did not want to be editor-in-chief of anything. I was lying on Copacabana beach in Rio, watching the beautiful people strip off for Carnivale, writing a bad novel, and buying ice-cold beer on the street for $1 a can.
Brad sent me another email saying he had finally decided to go to Europe, and would I come home. Claire wanted to come home. I never wanted to come home, have never wanted to come home. I never want to leave the pub, never want to fly back to the airport, never want to stop working, but I had promised Brad, so we came back. He offered us his house while he was away, but before I had left I had bought a tiny one-bedroom unit in Rozelle, which I rented out until we returned.
I imagined I would work at ACP for three months – two weeks with Brad, then ten weeks to cover for his long service. I thought I would earn a publisher’s salary, which I hoped might be enough to keep me for the year. After that, I planned to go back to freelance writing.
When I moved into the unit, Claire did too, bringing in-house several non-core services that – in line with current business thinking – I had out-sourced to specialist providers. These included cooking, which I had contracted to the Larn Thong Thai Restaurant in Rozelle, and washing, which I had entrusted to Laura’s Laundromat in Birchgrove. Before we could cook, however, we had to go shopping. She made a list of things we would ‘definitely need’ to set up a home kitchen. The first item was ‘breadcrumbs’. I did not even know breadcrumbs were considered a food. I thought they were a waste by-product. I have certainly never eaten them. What else were we going to buy? Fish scales? No, coathangers. Coathangers belonged to a non-food category that ‘we might as well get since we’re in the supermarket’. Again, I had no idea you could buy coathangers. I thought they came from the laundrette. Why would you retail something that everyone – even me – has far too many of? We spent nearly $200 on shopping but, puzzlingly, only had enough ingredients to cook three complete meals. When we came home, we put it all in drawers. Even the carrier bags. Every woman I have ever known has furiously hoarded plastic carrier bags, as if there is some imminent danger of a shortage. They don’t cost anything, you get more of them every day, and the amount of storage space they consume is inversely proportional to the minimal joy to be had from owning thousands of wispy little pockets of polythene – but chicks dig them.
I could not find my pen, so I asked if she had seen it.
‘It’s in the rubbish drawer,’ she told me.
The ‘rubbish’ drawer, apparently, was one drawer up from the plastic bag drawer. It was the drawer with my things in it. The rubbish drawer contained a Walkman, a screwdriver, a camera, shoe polish, a hammer and sticky tape. A more fitting name for it might have been the ‘utility drawer’, although my attempts to popularise this title met with stiff resistance.
I told this story to Chriso, and he said, ‘I bet it’s the third drawer down.’ It was. He said, ‘The first drawer’s for cutlery, the second drawer’s for big cutlery, and the third drawer’s for your stuff.’
My old gherkin jars full of small change were moved out of eyesight, replaced by a shelf of cookery books. Worse, I discovered Claire secretly contributing to my pocket-money savings – by adding two-dollar coins. Two-dollar coins did not go in the gherkin jars! Christ, dollar coins only made it in there a couple of years ago. She also filled the cupboards with labour-saving devices such as a juicer, which removed all the drudgery of pouring orange juice from a carton into a glass by breaking down the process into twelve easy steps – select orange, cut orange, juice orange, repeat four times.
My diet subtly improved, while r
emaining largely unchanged. She learned to cook the Larn Thong’s signature salad dishes better than the Larn Thong. As for the laundry, several early joint attempts to iron shirts ended in frustration. This kind of specialist task went back to the professionals.
Brad’s magazines had moved into a new building, Stockland House on Castlereagh Street, opposite the rear entrance to Park Street. It was a newer, cleaner space, but with similarly eccentric elevators. The Department for Women also rented a floor in Castlereagh Street, and the P-mag journalists felt the imaginary scorn of lesbians in their guilty hearts.
I came for my orientation, and discovered Brad had tricked me. He was not taking his long service leave – and, when I thought about it, he had never explicitly said he would. In fact, he was going to the UK, France and Italy for only three weeks, then taking two weeks on his deck to recover with his barbie and chardy.
I was not going to get the massive windfall I had invented for myself, but I was not unhappy to be back at ACP. My mind was bursting under the pressure of nine months worth of unrealised ideas, which had come to me unbidden and long outstayed their welcome. I felt much freer than before, because my brother was with Jo. I had new energy, now that I did not have to divert so much of my fury against myself.
I was not sure what I was going to do, but I felt confident that I could do it.
People and The Picture were hurting. The OFLC’s censors had adopted a bully’s approach to the implementation of their new 1999 guidelines, and ACP had decided to make a political issue of the so-called ‘heal-to-a-single-crease’ issue.
The censors held that an unrestricted newsstand magazine was allowed to feature a woman’s breasts and pubic region, and a man’s limp penis, but every picture now had to be vetted for ‘genital emphasis’ or ‘sexualised nudity containing genitalia’. What this meant in practice was that a soft dick could be shown in all its veiny glory, but if a woman’s inner labia were visible, they had to be airbrushed out. Offending models were given a compulsory clitoridectomy; their genitals were healed to a single crease. This made the P-mags insufficiently pornographic for their readers and, arguably, negated one of the few useful social functions of pornography: the removal of mystery and fear.
The magazines received occasional letters from women worried that their genitals were deformed because they had twice as many labia as the average nude. This gave grounds for another exercise in fake politics, in which the P-mags bizarrely posed as protectors of female body image, and argued that sexist censorship was confusing and distressing the female population. ACP fought the issue to embarrass the censors, who seemed to be taking a harder line against the P-mags than other publications. The P-mags were not allowed to show a even a hint of aureole on their covers, whereas imported magazines such as Wallpaper and ‘artistic’ journals such as Black and White could get away with topless shots. As long as the nipples were not intended for working-class eyes, it appeared to be okay.
Throughout the 1990s, the OFLC had progressively banned from covers most of the terms the P-mags might use to advertise the fact they were smut. Coverlines could not include the words ‘arse’, ‘cunt’ or ‘fuck’, nor ‘horny’, ‘root’ or ‘pubes’. They could not even use ‘nunga’, a neologism invented at Sextra magazine because, although the censors did not know what it meant, they knew what it was supposed to mean.
At the same time, the OFLC was engaged in an idiotic attempt to force Australian Women’s Forum to tone down its readers’ sexual-fantasy letters, which eventually led, in part, to the closure of that magazine. (Helen Vnuk, the last editor of AWF, chronicled the growing militancy of the OFLC in her book, Snatched.)
In several states, the P-mags were labelled Category 1, and sold in plastic bags that left only their logos visible. As the P-mags grew cleaner and more difficult to browse, the internet grew dirtier, cheaper and more accessible. A man with an erection and no imagination was more likely to find gratification from free and uncensored images in cyberspace than from magazines whose neutered models had no nipples on the cover and no vaginas inside.
Sales were falling, and advertising revenue was falling too. The mail-order video boom had bust, and the phone sex ads that replaced the movie ads were being legislated out of existence. Commercial phone sex began as a cottage industry. Women – usually based in Melbourne or the Gold Coast, for some reason – would talk from the comfort of their living rooms while men masturbated from the comfort of theirs. If the woman was out shopping, or having dinner, the man had to call back later.
The technology for 0055 numbers developed in the early 1990s. These numbers often accessed pre-recorded sex talk, but callers could also speak to live girls. Operators charged premium rates – $3.95 per minute – and the itemised calls appeared on the user’s phone bill. Call centres grew up, packed with old women pretending to be young women, fat women pretending to be thin, bored women pretending to be excited, all describing their underwear or how much loved oral sex. The call centres put the home-based lines out of business, because every call was answered. Even if every worker on the premises was busy, the calls electronically cascaded to women elsewhere.
Phone sex was victimless vice, safe prostitution in the age of AIDS, but the industry was heavily criticised by people who had nothing better to do. Independent Senator Brian Harradine said he would only support John Howard’s GST if the government agreed to a new system whereby people who liked to masturbate over the telephone registered themselves as such with the phone company. Only those who had a pin number could use the new service, and the Australian industry collapsed over night. ACP campaigned hard on behalf of its ad clients, even employing a lobbyist, struggling to paint their enterprises as embattled Aussie employers who were providing much-needed jobs for women.
The lines moved offshore, and were run off 0011 numbers from Third World countries. Margins were lower, and some African governments started to refuse to allow profits to be repatriated to Australia. Around the year 2000, the short life of the phone sex industry ended, and the P-mags lost more than 1000 pages of advertising, worth $2 million dollars.
The P-mags business was under pressure everywhere. Opera patron JA was not particularly keen to be associated with pornography, and began to ask rhetorically, ‘Should we get out of this business altogether? Or should we go the whole way, and buy up some brothels?’ He have would like to have sold the P-mags, despite the profits they continued to bring in for the company, but there was nobody with the money, the interest and the expertise to take them over.
The magazines themselves were not what they used to be. Nobody could edit The Picture like Brad, and the P-mags’ inexplicable run of very good writers was over when Paul Toohey left The Picture for The Australian in 1999.
Lastly, there had been a minor scandal inside ACP when it was discovered that more than one hundred subscribers to Practical Parenting, a magazine for young families, had instead been sent the Category 1 Picture Premium, because the magazines shared the same subscription code.
People at ACP talked of the future of the P-mags in terms of ‘managed decline’, which made the success of Ralph all the more important, both for Brad and the company. Carl had put his life into the magazine. He had introduced new writers, and added regular front-section pieces, including the fantastic Yvonne Firmin column, soon to become the most popular page in the magazine. He came up with the top-selling annual ‘Sex & Money’ issue. He had also suffered some terrible luck with covers, culminating in Wonderbra model Sophie Falkiner pulling out of a promised shoot, leaving Carl with nothing but a grainy underwear advertising shot to slap on his May 2000 cover. Ralph’s sales had climbed for a short period after I left, then stalled. I came back during the last weeks of sale of the Sophie Falkiner issue, which sold worse than any issue in the previous twelve months.
Sadly, Ralph’s slide towards the ridiculous had been halted. This was possibly because Carl was not a ridiculous person, whereas I was: there are only so many times you can wake up in a field c
overed in kebab and still retain the dignity and poise that separates human beings from squeaky plastic bath-time toys. Some of the Ralph interviews had sunk back to the level of the street press, following the agenda of the publicist rather than the magazine. For example, Michael Palin was asked whether the reaction to his show differed in the UK and Russia, the answer to which could only have been of possible interest to sociologists conducting comparative studies of audience behaviour. They were words to fill up space. A return to unjournalism was looming. Brad had asked Ash to write a guide to all the islands of the South Pacific, when Ash had only been to two of them. A freelance writer who had never visited Dubai wrote a piece claiming there was no nightlife in the emirate when, in fact, there were more than 300 bars (and I had once pub-crawled them until 3 am).
ACP had abandoned my tactic of releasing the magazine on the same day as FHM, and thus allowed FHM to come out first and win the bulk of the early sales. There were several thousand veteran men’s magazine readers in the market for a new title – the regular buyers of Max and GQ, the bottom and top ends of the scale – and they all seemed to have chosen FHM. I did not even have to look at FHM to see why, I only had to weigh it. It had grown by about 32 pages, whereas Ralph had remained the same size for the same price. Any new reader walking into the newsagent and finding two broadly similar magazines would choose the title that was fifteen per cent thicker.
The other obvious problem remained New Zealand. Ralph did not even send over as many copies as FHM sold (we shipped 15 000 while they were selling 20 000; to sell 20 000, they were probably shipping 30 000). Brad hired me as a consultant, and took me to a meeting with JA and his sidekick, David Gardiner, in which I argued we needed to either secure another distributor in New Zealand, or launch a dedicated New Zealand edition – preferably both. I was told I had not thought enough about the issue, whereas I had actually thought more about it than almost anything else in the world. After the meeting, I wrote them an email saying how ‘distressed’ I was that they had chosen to receive my comments this way. Brad never invited me to another meeting with them, but I was told I could go ahead and try to build a New Zealand edition.
