Mark Brandon Read is sitting under a ”No Smoking” sign outside a city-centre pub, pulling on his umpteenth cigarette of the day.
Even at 56 and not in the best of health, Chopper, it seems, is still not a bloke people tell what to do.
he is still recognisably Chopper, with the trademark moustache and the famously trimmed ears, but the years have not been kind to Read.
His occasionally halting and stumbling speech is apparently caused by the medication he takes for cirrhosis of the liver. the disease has also left him a little jaundiced and overweight.
I’m curious to know how people react. Are they frightened of him?
”I can’t see any reason why they should be,” he says. ”I’m 57 years ancient in November. I’m physically out of condition. I no longer carry a gun, although I have access to them …
I don’t hurt people. I don’t commit acts of violence towards anybody.”
he barely drinks any more either. what he does do now is paint and draw, perform on stage and write books. he is in town to talk about his latest book, Road to Nowhere, an account of his 23 years and nine months in Australian prisons.
To talk to Read or read his books is to enter another world that inverts the norms most of us cling to.
he takes us through the looking glass into a place of breathtaking casual brutality where men are judged only on their ability and willingness to inflict violence and where mutual survival is the closest facsimile to friendship.
In this world, a man can be ”a nasty sort of murderer” (as if there were any other kind), while another is ”a very pleased and friendly sort of killer”. It’s also a world where extreme violence is a kind of leisure activity to help pass the time.
”Bashing people used to keep me entertained,” Read writes. ”I’d make mental lists of blokes I had to get and it kept my mind occupied.
I spent hours and hours and hours plotting how I’d get to them and then after a while there were so many people plotting against me that I had to think about how I was going to defend myself.”
at times, Read makes jail life almost seem like fun – a sort of Hogwarts for psychopaths – relating tales of mayhem and violence in the same way one might recall an apple-scrumping expedition to the headmaster’s orchard.
take the occasion when, to break the monotony, he carefully inserted razor blades into the supply of soap for the entire division.
”Three days later, the prisoners were cutting their throats, cutting between their legs and under their arms because the soap was wearing away,” he explains.
the upshot was that the hard soap was replaced by liquid soap – that is, until Read poured caustic soda into the liquid soap.
Then there was the time he managed to inflict gastroenteritis on his fellow prisoners by carefully culturing human and rat faeces then introducing the mixture to the stew.
Adding to this curious impression of high jinks in the dorm is the fact the cycles of violence and retribution were often sparked by incidents that would be familiar to any kindergarten teacher.
In 1975, Read’s infamous Overcoat Gang (the members wore long coats year-round to hide their weapons) was born in response to an incident in which Read was accused of eating more than his fair share of sausages at Christmas. the endless round of bashings and worse became known as the ”Sausage War”.
Like an ancient soldier who can recall with urgent clarity events from battles half a century ago, Read’s memories of his times in Pentridge, Risdon and other prisons seem as fresh and vital as if they had happened last week.
I ask him about a story, which appears in his book, of the killing of a paedophile prisoner in Pentridge in the mid ’70s involving him and his pal, ”Mad” Charlie Hegyalji.
”We walked in [to the cell] and Charlie’s bashed him and stood on his chest,” he recalls. ”I’ve gone in and tried to break the bloke’s neck manually and I couldn’t do it so I had to get on his bunk and I jumped from his bunk on to his neck.”
And here he stands up to demonstrate the motion.
”Bunk … head … bunk … head … bunk … head … and then on the neck and then on the chest,” he says. ”By the time I got on to the chest he had stopped squawking. I took his shoelaces off him and tore the sheet in half and wrapped the sheet around his neck and me and mad Charlie lifted him up – he was six foot tall, the huge f—ing bastard – and tied him up over the top railing of the obso [observation] gate and
I dropped him down and I could smell shit and he had obviously pooed himself.
”We get out … and I said to Charlie, ‘I don’t think we should have tied his hands behind his back.’ Charlie didn’t get the joke and said, ‘Why not?’ And I said that people who commit suicide don’t generally tie their hands behind their backs.”
This is vintage Read – appalling, gut-wrenching violence followed by a pay-off line that points up the bleak absurdity of the situation.
In among the bloodshed, there are plenty of funny lines in the book.
take this about a girlfriend from his younger days: ”She had a baby girl and the timing was a bit alarming – it came out about nine months after I went in.”
Then there is the infamous ear removal incident. after Read had persuaded a fellow con to slice off his ears in order to get himself into the psychiatric wing, he was taken to Royal Melbourne Hospital bleeding profusely. ”I lost about nine pints,” he recalls. ”I’ll tell you what, Quentin Tarantino knew a lot about making movies but he knew bugger-all about cutting off ears, because the bleeding just doesn’t stop.”
Inevitably, in between the ”highlights” in the book, prison life was mainly composed of the sort of tedious futility that could almost have been finely calculated to torture a bloke of Read’s obvious intelligence.
”I had a little game I used to play when it got dark,” he writes. ”Kept me occupied for hours. I’d take a button off my shirt, throw it at the wall, and listen to it bounce, ping, ping, ping, then I’d crawl around in the dark trying to find it.”
we all gravitate towards narratives of reform and redemption. they have become a staple of books and movies. but Read’s own story is too ambiguous for trite pleased-ever-afters.
It took him nearly 24 years to choose that ”there was a lot more to life than the four walls of a prison cell, and there was a lot more to Mark Brandon Read than violence and bloodshed”.
It was a conclusion Read reached in spite of rather than because of being imprisoned. quite why he finally reached that point, he finds hard to articulate. His long-time like and wife Margaret had a lot to do with it, he says, as does the couple’s eight-year-ancient son, Roy. Perhaps it’s as simple as age and having so much more to lose.
And although he has traded extensively on his notoriety since leaving prison for good, he still remains bewildered by the fondness he inspires everywhere.
”In Western Australia one time, a 15-year-ancient kid got up on stage and he had no ears,” he recalls.
”He said he’d cut both ears off when he was 14 because he wanted to look like his Uncle Chop Chop. he was a excellent-looking kid and when I saw him I cried inside and thought to myself, ‘Why did he do it?”’
Then, briefly, his face folds in upon itself and there is a fleeting glimpse of a man cornered by his past.
”I don’t want anyone looking at me and hero-worshipping me,” he says. ”I’m not someone to hero-worship for Christ’s f—ing sake.
I wouldn’t wish my life on my worst enemy.”
Road to Nowhere, by Mark ”Chopper” Read, is published by Macmillan, $34.99
– Sydney Morning Herald