by Mark Dapin
The readers were fantastically enthusiastic. They could see how hard we had tried, and they knew we had done it for them.
I had one fight left to win, against ACP New Zealand.
I had had a meeting with somebody from ACP New Zealand soon after JA and Gardiner had said I could look into launching over there. I told him exactly what I wanted: that we should run a number of New Zealand change-pages in each issue of Ralph, and pay for the extra content by selling about twenty NZ-based ads. I asked for no staff on the ground apart from an ad manager. I planned to run the editorial from our Sydney office, coordinating with a few NZ-based freelancers.
He agreed to it then did nothing: the preferred course of action of almost everybody in corporate life. I asked him if he could persuade the distributors to take more copies of the Australian editions. He described ‘a distinct lack of enthusiasm’. I asked him to tell me outright he did not want to do a New Zealand edition, but he would not. When rumours spread that FHM was planning to launch its own New Zealand edition, he sent an email saying, ‘I understand our sales director took two ad bookings for Ralph yesterday. I am expecting his business plan by the end of the week.’
We never saw the bookings or the plan.
We decided to launch Ralph New Zealand on our own, with no ads, no additional copy and no help from ACP NZ. We needed somebody on the ground to organise the launch party, however, and when my contact in New Zealand heard we had consulted ACP NZ’s marketing people, he threatened to block them from working with us. I wondered if it might be possible to hire a Maori gang to kill him.
We had persuaded them to take 35 000 copies of the Jemma issue, and they sold 27 888. At 20 per cent, this was too tight a return. The more copies of a magazine that are distributed, the more are sold. An 18 per cent return is considered a sell-out, because it means some outlets will have used up all their stock. I aimed for a 28–30 per cent return. If New Zealand had taken another 5000 copies, they could probably have shifted another 2000. I had run a different cover in New Zealand: the model Nicky Watson, then girlfriend of the owner of the Auckland Warriors. The sale proved that a good local edition, with good local girls, could outsell FHM.
Breaking into the NZ market had proved easier than we thought. There was no preference for English titles. There were no distribution issues. Rival distributor Gordon & Gotch gave us a presentation and offered to put Ralph in all the same New Zealand outlets as FHM, but the company refused.
I became more of a despot and less enlightened. Like Yossarian in Catch 22, I took everything personally. I used to think it was funny when people could not or did not do their jobs. They were sticking up two fingers at a society that wasted them on pointless labour, standing up for the human spirit, refusing to be crushed. Now, I had come to think of them in Brad’s terms, as ‘gibberers’ and ‘oxygen bandits’. I wanted to gather together all the writers who could not write, the publicists who could not publicise, the distributors who could not distribute, the accountants who could not count the money that was really being wasted and I wanted to load them onto cattle trains, send them to camps, and have them turned into something useful, like lampshades or soap. I had become an idiot-Nazi.
I was always on the verge of exploding, permanently in the claws of chicken rage. I was a table-thumper and a door-kicker. The better Ralph performed, the angrier I became. Any small mistake could set me off. I could not speak without swearing. Office life went up a key. Things became more frantic, more physical, as if they were heading to some kind of bloody conclusion. Friendships fractured, flirtations grew more intense. New camps were forming.
Somebody became overexcited one afternoon, cranked up a song he loved on the office stereo, and accidentally spilled some chips. He wanted to turn himself into a human vacuum cleaner, and had Elisabeth lift his legs into the air so he could suck the chips into his face from the carpet. Unfortunately, he kicked her in the head. The same person kicked her in the head when he gave a breakdancing exhibition, and asked her to spin his legs while he balanced on a motorbike helmet. Another time, I found him lying face down on the floor, wriggling and flapping. He was impersonating a Brazilian having sex. When Ivan was looking into an empty cardboard box, Big Ash crash-tackled him, threw him into the box and closed the lid.
Several people came into my office, closed the door and burst into tears. Everybody wanted a pay rise or a promotion or more staff for their department. When he was not locked in a box, Ivan was having horrible phone sex with his girlfriend overseas. Amanda was impossibly busy with the exploding fashion section and Ralph Style. I held no meetings, had no inclination to delegate, came up with almost every feature and front-section idea myself, dictated questions for many of the interviews, wrote the coverlines, worked with Dave on the advertising presentations. Again, I thought I was infallible, multi-talented, God. (Had I not, after all, turned January into February?) I made a few stupid mistakes, but I could do the job in my sleep – and I did. I woke up drawing up the features list in my head, crossing out ad pages in the flat plan.
I thought far too much about New Zealand, and about revenge. I imagined myself under a red flag, clenched fist raised in the air, singing the Internationale over a mass grave of executives. Claire grew bored with hearing about it, then angry. I was not going to murder people, so why did I not just shut up? She hated the way I had become obsessed with Ralph again, saw that New Zealand was the new Marketing, and that I had to have an enemy. She wanted to talk about other things occasionally – such as what was going on in her life – but all I cared about was this one last thing.
I hired a new editor, and let him put together a magazine while I sulked in the corner. I had more New Zealand girls photographed, but every time I heard the name of their country, I detonated with fury. In the end, I had to ban people from saying it in the office, and New Zealand was always referred to as ‘Holland’ or ‘Taiwan’.
We tried to get our New Zealand cover girls publicised through an ACP NZ magazine. One month, we accidentally sent over the pictures several weeks before the edition reached New Zealand. The magazine asked if they could run them immediately, which would be no use to us. I said they could not, they said they would not, then they did.
I kicked away my chair, stormed out of my office and into the boxing room at the Catholic Club on Castlereagh Street. I stood in front of the heavy bag, gave it a face and a name, and I smashed it like a glass. I hit it like I have never hit anything before, a bare-knuckle rip, an unprotected uppercut, a right cross that thrust deep and buckled the leather. I raced around the bag, thumping, laying punch after punch after punch, feinting and fighting, stalking and cornering and tearing the skin from my fists. I punched until both hands bled, until the bag slipped and slithered in my sweat, then I went home, and did not return to work for two days.
I quit again. I was offered a promotion again – this time to associate publisher – but I had already come far enough away from journalism. I was offered more money, but I was on a huge salary already, and I had far more than I could spend. On my last week in the job, I was called in to explain to a new executive ‘the formula’ behind Ralph. I said there was no formula, that it had to keep changing to survive. It must always be exciting and young and fresh, like the nineteen-year-old girls it deified. It had to be stylish and fashionable, to make new celebrities, invent new characters, reflect new trends, borrow new slang. Any attempt to formularise the magazine would calcify it and, ultimately, kill it.
‘I understand that,’ he said, ‘but what is your formula?’
Ralph was on deadline. Despite this, and as if he were deliberately delivering me the last page of a book, the executive suggested I call all my staff to a meeting. They could each bring an object that defined Ralph, choose a picture that looked like Ralph, and suggest words that described the character of the magazine. I refused.
I left Ralph for Antigua, Guatemala, found another Spanish school, studied in another colonial city. When the audit figures came out, I
had them sent to me by email. We had outsold FHM in Australia, they outsold us in New Zealand, but overall we kicked their arses. We spanked them. We thrashed them. We stomped them. We won. I won. Brad won. Kerry Packer won. (James had long since disappeared.) Even Eric the workie won.
There are Ten Immutable Rules of Magazine Publishing. Rule Number Ten is: if two titles are of similar size, printed in similar numbers, and have similar marketing budgets spent in similar ways, The Best Magazine Will Sell the Most Copies.
Penthouse humiliated Playboy because it was more explicit and better written, better at being an upmarket porno. The Picture beat People because it was funnier and more explicit, better at being a downmarket porno. Inside Sport saw off its short-lived competitor, Total Sport, because it was incomparably more sophisticated, and better at being an all-sports review. We beat FHM because we were funnier, sexier and more useful, better at being a men’s lifestyle magazine.
Ralph was voted the MPA Magazine of the Year. At that point, it was the only men’s lifestyle title in the world to beat an international edition of FHM in an established market. I sent a message to ACP New Zealand: ‘On behalf of EMAP Australia, I would like to thank you for all your efforts in ensuring FHM remained the best-selling Australian men’s magazine in New Zealand. Now fuck off.’
EPILOGUE
Three volcanoes watched over Antigua: Agua, Fuego and Acatenango. Molten lava licked the slopes of Fuego, lending the night sky the colours of a prehistoric dawn.
I spent the days brushing up my Spanish at La Puente language school. My first teacher was a fascist, a middle-class supporter of the military’s genocide of the Maya. I traded her in for Bartholome, who was part Maya.
In Spanish, I told Bartholome the story of Ralph. In return, he told me ghost stories about his city. Bartholome had a colour TV and an email address, he liked 80s rock music and wore a World Wrestling Federation t-shirt – but he was the child of peasants; he thought professional wrestling was a sport, and he desperately wanted to believe in spirits.
‘I want to talk to them,’ he told me. ‘I don’t have the capacity, and I don’t know why.’
It was an hours bus ride from Antigua to the ramshackle village of San Andres Itzapa, where the people still revere the old gods, focussing their prayers on the deity-saint Maximon. A dusty row of jumbled stores led from the bus station to Maximon’s chapel. The shops sold a range of Maximon idols, featuring the vaguely Ladino figure in green lounge suits, black formal wear, indigenous patterned fabrics and campy Mexican mariachi costumes. He often had a cigar in his mouth, and usually a magnum of Krug in his hand. He is the only god I had seen who regularly wore spectacles. There were altars to Maximon in the street, adorned with cheap cigarettes, fresh flowers and rough local rum. Some of these altars he shared with Buddha.
Bartholome said Maximon was a Maya who looked after his people in the time of the conquistadors. The newly Christianised Maya told the Spanish he was San (Saint) Simon the apostle. When the priests realised ‘San Simon’ was a composite of the old gods, they declared that praying to Maximon was the same as worshipping Judas Iscariot. For this reason, Guatemala was the only place in the modern world where people pray to Saint Judas.
Maximon’s chapel was a large, worn building lit by tables of burning candles. A life-size Maximon watched over the room from inside a glass cabinet. He looked distinguished in a black suit, yellow shirt and fedora, with a walking cane in his right hand, but his sophisticated image was dented slightly by the Winnie the Pooh beach towel draped across his knees. ‘The last time I came here, he was wearing a Looney Tunes scarf,’ said Bartholome.
Beneath the Maximon figure was a painting of the Virgin Mary; next to it was a plaster statue of Judas Iscariot. Outside in the courtyard, a Mayan priest and priestess burned offerings for affluent-looking Ladinos, while drunks, small children and skeletal dogs wandered listlessly between the fires, and a fat man wearing a mobile phone had his aura cleansed with an egg.
I shot a whole roll of film at San Andres. I photographed Maximon in the shops, at his altars and in his chapel. I used my usual camera, but when I had the film developed, something very strange had occurred: every frame had come out, and they were all in focus. This had never happened before.
To Bartholome, raised on the shameful dishonesties of Guatemalan politics, nothing was what it seemed. A Museum of Typical Costume had opened in Antigua, but Bartholome thought it was a front for a shaman’s practice, because none of the clothing had explanatory labels and there was an altar to Maximon in the back room.
It turned out he was right. The shaman was a sincere, spiritual Maya, who founded the museum to help visitors understand his cosmology. There are twenty nahuales, or guiding spirits, in the Maya world. Each is named for an animal. I have always felt shortchanged by Western astrology – being a Virgo (virgin, hippy-looking) – and by Chinese horoscopes – being a rabbit (sexually active but uncool, hippy-looking). I wanted my animal guide to be a panther, or at least a puma.
The shaman looked me up in his book of birthdays.
‘Your spirit is the conejo.’
Brilliant. A rabbit.
The shaman wanted to know how he could help us. I told him we would like to feel the power of Maximon.
The next few minutes flashed past in a startling cacophony of quickly spoken Spanish. Somehow I ended up with six coloured candles in my hand, crawling under a wooden bar to get inside the altar. The shaman told me not to be afraid if I suddenly felt cold, as that would be just the energy of Maximon.
I lit my candles and balanced them on a log – which sounds easy until you try to do it – while the shaman addressed the sacred flame in Cakchiquel, his Mayan language.
Whatever the spirits told him, he seemed agitated. At one point, he appeared to be arguing with the sacred flame.
He switched between Cakchiquel and Spanish, between addressing Maximon and addressing me. He said to me, ‘You have been hurt very badly by very many people, including a woman, yes?’
Ah, that would be D.
‘There is divine justice,’ he said, solemnly. ‘This is not an easy thing to heal.’
So true.
‘There is no quick way to do this,’ he said. ‘These candles are not sufficient.’
He lit another seven candles for me, and talked to them animatedly.
‘There was a death,’ he said.
Dave. Merv. My dad. My grandad.
‘You are all broken up inside,’ he said. ‘Your life has no meaning. It just goes around in a pointless spiral.’
Steady on, mate.
I must have looked a bit sulky, because he added quickly, ‘It is not me saying this, it is the sacred flame.’
He pointed to the log, where four of my six candles had toppled over. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘Maximon rejects your candles.’
The Shaman booked me in for a full cleansing ceremony one week later, on my Mayan birthday. In the meantime, he told me to ask for pardon from God, my family, my ancestors and my nahual.
On the way home, I went over the conversation with Bartholome, to make sure I understood it properly.
It is easy to confuse the subject with the object in Spanish. According to Bartholome, what the shaman actually said was that I had hurt many people very badly in my life, including a woman, and there was no easy way to make up for this.
When I went to the bathroom, the shaman told him: ‘He has a very bad problem with death.’ In other words, the shaman thought I had come to see him because I had killed somebody.
‘And the woman,’ said Bartholome gleefully, ‘you probably raped her.’
So I had to pray for forgiveness – because I was a murderer and a rapist – to God, my grandad and rabbits.
Before the cleansing, I visited a Mayan astrologer, just in case my Mayan horoscope said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t get cleansed.’
There was a priestess with an office in La Casa de Nahuales (The House of Spirits), who advertised her services making
maps of the soul. She wore long black clothes and a ring on each finger. She said she would be happy to map my soul, but it would cost me $25. This was because it took a long time to map a soul, ‘even though it is easier these days with the computer’.
The computer?
Later, I was eating lunch alone in Frida’s Restaurant and Bar, surrounded by reproductions of Frida Kahlo paintings, when I was approached by an American woman. She asked me a question in English – which I answered in English – before asking me in Spanish whether I spoke English.
At first I ignored her, assuming she was part of the worldwide plague of evangelical Christians who target people sitting on their own, but she quickly told me she was the Jewish wife of a doctor doing aid work in Guatemala.
I had not had a real conversation in English for two weeks, so I told her everything that had been happening.
To my astonishment, she quickly took the shaman’s side, and said I must have killed somebody in another life.
I told her about my nahual.
‘A rabbit,’ she said. She thought for a moment, then asked, ‘What colour is your rabbit?’
Bartholome and I had a long list of offerings to buy for the ceremony. Maximon and the nahuales – because we were going to speak with all of them – wanted cigars and rum, chocolate and sugar, more than 100 candles, and all manner of native plants and herbs.
We spent a morning in the markets, trying to track down cuilcos – which Bartholome had never heard of (‘We’ll just ask for them and see what the señorita gives us’) – from stores run by toothless old women who watched us as if they knew I was a murderer.
Bartholome and I shared a touching bonding moment. I had felt sick for a week, ever since the shaman said Maximon might visit me in a dream.
‘Are you scared?’ asked Bartholome.
