Mark Brandon Read - Road To Nowhere

All the jails and mental hospitals in the world wouldnt help me, I dont think. Theres nothing much they can do apart from perform a lobotomy or frontalectomy or something. There is nothing they can do to really change my position.

Mark Brandon Read, 1981

Introduction

In my last book, One Thing Led to Another, I told the true story of my life. I talked about where I grew up, my mother the Seventh-day Adventist and my father the gun-mad army veteran. I talked about getting into crime and getting out of it again, and making a new life with my wife Margaret and my son Roy.

While I was being interviewed about that book, a journalist asked me if I had been rehabilitated in prison. He wanted to know if our prison system worked, and he wanted to know if it had worked on me. I didnt know what to tell him, to be honest. When I think about the years I spent in prison, I cant see anything but waste. But those years, as much as anything else, have led me to where I am today.

This book is about my journey through the Australian prison system. Youll have heard a few of these stories before, but not like this. Its a step-by-step history of my twenty-three years behind bars, describing what day-to-day life was really like in jail, what I did to survive and why I will never go back. Its not a nice story. I was not a nice prisoner. I reckon I actually thrived in prison, for about twenty years. But today the thought of going back inside makes my blood run cold. Does that mean I was rehabilitated? Ill leave it up to you to decide.

Mark Brandon Chopper Read

Chapter 1

Turana Boys Home

1970

In 1970, I was living at 225 Williams Road, South Yarra, and life was pretty good. My family had just left Thomastown and moved across town to run an old peoples home. They had sold our family home and bought the lease on the place, thinking theyd make around eighty grand a year taking care of geriatrics big money back in 1970. I had turned fifteen and dropped out of school, done my time in mental hospital and found my way out again. I was a great big kid, and I was just about ready to start causing trouble.

Around that time, a bloke named Robbie Cameron hired me to work as a bouncer at a Prahran nightclub called Mae West, this homosexual club at 12 Oban Street. I knew Robbie because his great-aunt was a resident at our old folks home. He was as camp as Chloe, old Robbie Cameron, but he was alright. He hired me, and hired my mate Johnny too.

Johnny was seven years older than me, but about seven years younger in the brain. God, he was a simpleton. He was like a bloody great kid. He was twenty-two years old when I was fifteen, but he acted like a ten-year-old. We met just walking down the street one day, both heading in the same direction.

Hello, he said.

Yeah, alright, hello, I replied, and off we went.

We were headed for Try Boys Youth Club. If you went down Surrey Road in Prahran, down underneath the railway tracks, there was an old council garbage incinerator, and a milk bar just in front of that. Across the road, right on the intersection, was Try Boys a place to keep the young boys in the neighbourhood occupied. They had wrestling, boxing, weightlifting, basketball, all that sort of thing. They had a big swimming pool out the back, and behind that was a youth home, a halfway house for the boys coming out of Turana Boys Home, where I would end up.

I was at Try Boys every night of the week back then, mucking around with Johnny and learning to box. Wed hang out there of an afternoon then Johnny and me would head off to work at Mae West, starting about ten and working through to three a.m. There were no rules about kids working in bars back in those days, so it didnt matter one bit that I was only fifteen. What mattered was that I was big, and I could handle myself in a fight.

Johnny might have been dumb, but he was tough. He was five nine, and eleven and a half stone, but he boxed as a junior middleweight. He was also born with a venereal disease of some sort, transmitted through the blood from his mum. Babies usually died when their mothers were sick like that, but Johnny made it through. Not that it did him much good. He had shocking skin, Johnny, and my father took pity on him and took him to a Collins Street specialist where they gave him radium treatment to help with his acne. Turns out he wasnt much prettier, even after the treatment; he had terrible puffy eyes, cabbage ears and a permanently broken nose. He looked like a punched-up sack of meat, old Johnny. Terrible-looking character.

My old man always carried on about his own hard life, about how his mother died when he was fourteen and he had to go and work on a farm, but I never once heard him complain about his bad childhood again after he met Johnny. Johnnys mother was a prostitute and when he was only ten or eleven years old, hed have to stand in the laneways and keep an eye out for his mother while she was around the corner getting screwed by sailors. He was brought up by his auntie for a while, and she was a prostitute too. She was an old bag, his auntie.

Johnny also had a couple of uncles, both hunchbacks, who sold newspapers in front of Flinders Street station. They were quite well known. They had rolled shoulders, and carried a big pile of muscle over their necks. A hunchback is a very strong person, very strong arms and a very strong grip. Johnny had a bit of a hunchback look about him. He had an abnormally thick neck and high, lifted shoulders. Freakish to look at, but made for a good bouncer; hed scare the shit out of an army.

Hello, how are you? hed moan. Its time to leave now.

Thats all hed have to say, and people would bloody shit themselves.

I enjoyed being a bouncer. I liked belting people up and kicking them out of the place. They were all homosexuals, so it was like belting up a bunch of old women. It was easy work. We had to smack people around every night, but that kept us entertained. Big gangs of people would try and get into the place, or people would start smacking each other around out the front, and me and Johnny would step in and throw a few punches. All in the line of duty, of course.

It was Johnny who taught me how to fight. He told me to close my eyes and hed start chucking punches at my head.

Just keep punching back, he said, dont worry about what you can see. Youll hit something eventually.

Johnny smacked me around bit and after a while I landed one or two. Soon enough I could open my eyes and just keep swinging away.

Once you lose your fear of being hit, he said, youre ready to fight.

Most people turn their face away when theyre about to get hit because theyre afraid of getting hurt. They try and avoid getting hit. I got used to getting hit, and then I found I quite liked it. I used to put my head right into the punch. Thats why I was always such a good fighter. I truly did not give a shit what they threw at me.

We belted a truckload of strangers at Mae West, and the occasional celebrity. Nice to have a bit of variety, I say. We bashed a bloke called Kenny Myers. That was a bit of a weird one. Kenny ended up committing suicide, and me and my dad had to go and pick up his body. That was my other job, a day job of sorts, helping out my dad with a pile of dead bodies. After they bought the old folks home, my mum couldnt stand having my dad around the place, getting under her feet. My old man thought hed sit around all day, maybe deliver the odd meal to the wrinkly old ladies, maybe do the garden.