Chop Shop
Australians have been glued to the television for two series of Underbelly, delighting in the underworld hijinks that lead to heinous murders and gratuitous nudity and sex. Sex and violence is the twenty-first century commercial take-home combo (Would you like fries with that?). Heading to a game of indoor cricket last week, I passed a street in Ascot Vale that was closed off by the police, little realising that it was the site of real-life underbelly shenanigans. Tuppence Moran hadn’t realised that he’d ordered the twenty-first century combo with his daily latte.
The media feeding frenzy was to be expected, as the twenty-first century combo rates its surgically enhanced tits off, so the news services naturally wanted a piece of that action. Every columnist worth their weight in sawdust chimed in from their moral high ground, decrying the loss of life but enjoying it all a tad too much. And, in these enlightened times of hearing all sides of the argument, the criminal element got their say. Mick Gatto blamed the media; his thinking must be that criminals wouldn’t kill each other except that it’s publicity money can’t buy. Chopper Read weighed in with a thoughtful commentary about how he told all his friends Tuppence Moran would get killed: ‘and I was right, as I generally am on these matters’.
Fictional killers are the stuff of boyhood dreams: mean-spirited, flinty-eyed, black-hatted cowboys with cold hearts and even colder lines, who I admired and imitated, but never really feared. My love of pretend violence dates back to seeing the bright-red blood of Electra Glide In Blue and A Man Called Horse at the drive-in with my family, on a double bill with Elvis Presley in Clambake. A Man Called Horse wasn’t a hit with me because of its amazing story of an English nobleman living with the Indians; it was because of Richard Harris being hung on meat hooks by his nipples.
‘Aww! Didjaseehisskinstretch?’ screamed my brothers and I from the back seat.
‘Stop it,’ chided my dad. ‘It’s not real.’
Pretend and actual violence have collided twice in my life. The first time was when I was playing an ambidextrous hitman in a mercifully forgotten Perth television movie. The conclusion of the movie had me die after being riddled with bullets; unfortunately, the safety officer had placed the exploding blood pack under the button of my shirt and when it detonated, a shard of the button tore a scratch across my cheek. My professionalism meant that I died appropriately, but, as my character lay fading in a bloody pool, the reality was that I was more concerned about a scratch on my cheek.
The second collision of pretend and actual violence happened recently at a supermarket in North Fitzroy. Waiting at the end of a long queue in the ‘hand-basket only’ line, I realised that some tool had a trolley in the line and was taking ages to unload. The ‘tool’ also had no ears – Chopper Read was doing a spot of shopping. I haven’t read any of the Chopper books and I’ve only seen a bit of the Chopper movie, but the scene I remember involved Chopper being stabbed by a prison inmate and his treating this as though the bloke with the knife had spilt coffee on his best shirt.
The actual intimidation and visceral impact of seeing someone with lug stumps from chopping his own ears off meant that everyone in that queue was thinking the same thing: ‘If he did that to himself, what could he do to me?’. Armed with this pretend and real knowledge of an actual person, I could only conclude that this bloke really has done things that I can’t imagine, and can only deal with if I burst into tears and assume the foetal position.
Not one of the privileged and entitled of the inner north bothered, as they usually would, to huff or indignantly move to another checkout. Chopper then decided to take a few bags out to the car, midway through the checkout process. He could have said, ‘I’ll be back’ and made little bits of wee run down our legs, but still the inner suburban consumers didn’t say a word; they just held their precious offspring close and prayed to their gods that the kids didn’t ask loudly where that man’s ears had gone. When Chopper returned, the checkout chick told him the total and he blinked rapidly with open-mouthed disbelief. ‘How much?’ She told him again and he replied that he hadn’t got many things. ‘Welcome to inner-suburban boutique supermarkets, Chopper,’ I thought, but didn’t dare utter.
Chopper then went out to the car to bring back a few bags of shopping to reduce his bill, so that he could cover it with a bit of the folding at hand, if you know what I mean. Still not a word was spoken in anger, because everybody in that line knew the bloke at the wrong checkout was the real thing; not a tough-looking guy who might cause trouble, but a bloke who’s truly done bad things with the two hands that were now unpacking shopping bags. In the movie version of this scene, maybe I would have offered to pay for his shortfall, or even helped him to the car with his shopping bags, but in real life I, like everyone else in that queue, kept quiet and tried to be invisible until the man with no ears had finished his shopping.
Chopper is on the comedy circuit these days, so I could have struck up a conversation, but I knew how the dialogue of the scene would play out:
‘How did your gig go, Chopper?’ I would ask.
‘I killed, mate,’ Chopper would reply.
I know, Chopper, for real.
Matt Quartermaine is a Melbourne-based writer and comedian. With Matt Parkinson, Tim Smith and Andrew Goodone, he produces ‘The Chat’, a weekly podcast in which four grown men in comfortable chairs spill their guts. Click here to download it for free at iTunes.
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