No one would be able to get to them there, not if they wanted to remain intact. But I hadn’t known Bernie long enough or well enough to show him that yet, so I said to Snoddy, ‘Maybe in a few months’ time, or when he’s proved himself.’
‘What have I gotta do to prove myself?’ asked Bernie.
‘I’ll let you know when you’ve done it.’
Snoddy said that Bernie was hoping to find out a bit more about the clan.
‘What, me brothers?’
‘Yeah,’ Bernie said. ‘I’ve got to know Snake fairly well; he seems a real bad-tempered bastard.’
‘He is,’ I agreed.
‘What about the others?’ Bernie asked.
‘Well Bull’s a lot harder to set off but he’s so big and strong he can do just as much damage,’ I told him. ‘If you like pig hunting, that’s halfway to gettin’ to know Bull. Shadow’s a lot like meself: pretty quiet most of the time but when you provoke us we can be real nasty. Wack’s another quiet one, but same thing, he could drop you with either hand.’
‘What about Chop?’ Bernie asked. ‘He’s not really your blood brother, is he?’
‘Yes he is, and I wouldn’t let Chop hear you saying otherwise. We picked him up when he got the boot from his own family and him and me and me brothers all did the blood brother bit. Then the day he turned eighteen he changed his name to Mark Campbell. So he’s legally a Campbell and he has Campbell blood running through his veins. If you ever try and tell me he’s not me brother you’re in for a lot of grief.’
Bernie wisely changed the subject. ‘So how’d Snoddy get a Campbell ring?’
‘That’s a lot harder to earn than your patch,’ Snoddy said. ‘And it was probably the proudest moment of me life when I was accepted into the Campbell family.’
‘Yeah, there’s only four other blokes who got ’em besides Snoddy, and that’s Gloves, Dukes, Knuckles and Roach. And it took ’em a long time to earn ’em.’
‘So what does your Mum reckon about you being in the club?’ Bernie asked.
‘When you’ve got the best mum in the world – no, make that the universe – what do you think?’ I said. ‘She supports us in anything we do. Just remember, she brought up fourteen kids mostly by herself. Me old man died pretty young.’
‘I never had a real family until I joined the Campbells,’ said Snoddy. ‘Ever since I got this ring I go to Mum’s birthdays, I go to the sisters’ parties. I belong to two families, which makes me bloody lucky.’ The other family Snoddy was referring to was the club.
Before he headed off, Bernie reminded us that the Bandoleros were throwing a party that Friday night and were going to have a pig on a spit and a stripper. I said I’d be there but it wouldn’t be until late.
PARTY NIGHT came, and most of the Comos were there, along with all the Bandoleros. I was off working when I got a phone call from Bernie telling me to come over; there’d been some trouble.
When I rocked up, Jock had just arrived and was talking to his Strike Force. Bernie pulled me aside and told me that the Strike Force had turned up halfway through the party and Kraut had started throwing his weight around. He’d had a shot at Rua, one of the Bandoleros, then set his sights on Shadow. Bernie said Kraut followed Shadow around the clubhouse, egging him on and making smart remarks. Eventually Shadow approached Bernie and said, ‘Look, I’ve had enough of this cunt. I’m not gunna make any trouble here at the clubhouse, I’m gunna take him down the park.’
‘Fine, we’ll come down and make sure everything’s fair,’ Bernie said.
So Shadow and Kraut went down to the park about four houses along from the clubhouse. It took about ten seconds for Shadow to flatten Kraut. He was out like yesterday’s newspaper, as Bernie put it.
Having heard the full story I walked over to Jock, taking Bernie with me. I got Bernie to tell Jock what had happened. Jock wasn’t satisfied with Bernie’s explanation, but said we’d sort it out on meeting night.
Come meeting night, Kraut declared he wanted Shadow’s colours for one member hitting another. Davo stepped up in Shadow’s defence: ‘If anyone’s colours should be taken it should be yours, Kraut. You offered Shadow out in the first place and Shadow ignored you and tried to walk away. But ya kept following him. Anyone else in the club would have done the same thing.’
Shadow finally spoke up. ‘I don’t want his colours. As far as I’m concerned it all ended in the park.’
That was as far as it went, because next thing Snowy got up and surprised everyone: ‘We’ve got more important business to discuss. We’re going to war.’
The room erupted with everyone wanting to know what club it was.
‘The Gypsy Jokers,’ Snowy said.
‘Whaddya wanna go to war with them for?’ Davo asked.
‘They’ve got the same colours as us,’ Snowy said. ‘Plus they’re moving out of Fairfield and into Parramatta, which is our territory.’
Davo, who was usually pretty quiet in meetings, couldn’t contain his disgust. ‘You’ve gotta be kidding. They’ve been goin’ as long as us and suddenly you decide you wanna go to war with ’em because of their colours? For fuck’s sake, they’re similar, but they’re not the same; they’ve got a maroon strip round the border.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Jock. ‘We’re gunna wipe them out.’
Davo wasn’t going to leave it. We’d all reached our limit with Jock, and Davo wanted to take him on. He continued to challenge Jock, and judging by the look on his face he was about to punch the living shit out of him. I stepped between them to ensure Davo didn’t flatten him. The two were about the same size, but Jock had his Coke-bottle spectacles and Davo was one of the better fighters in the club.
‘Why all of a sudden d’ya wanna wipe them out now?’ Davo continued. ‘Is it just because our club’s the biggest in Sydney?’
‘Yeah,’ Jock said. ‘We’ll prove we’re the toughest club in Australia.’
I could feel my temperature rising, too. ‘We don’t have to prove it,’ I stepped in. ‘We know we are.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Davo, ‘whadda we gotta prove it for? There’s not a single club who comes into the whole of Parramatta any more. War and Peace is the only nightclub in the whole area where you can get a drink at two am, but not one club will go there because they know the Comancheros will stomp ’em. We’re already the toughest club in Australia.’
‘Well I’m the president,’ Jock argued, ‘and you’re only a member.’
‘You’re only president because members put you in the job,’ I warned him. ‘It’ll only take one meeting to vote you out.’
It didn’t worry me provoking Jock. I knew he wouldn’t have a go at me, or Davo for that matter. In fact Jock would’ve been counting on the fact that I would step in and stop Davo from thumping him, because I was the one who’d brought in the rule that one Como couldn’t fight another. But I was as pissed off with him and his war attitude as anyone. And all this in-fighting just wasn’t how a club was supposed to run. Things had been building up long enough. I turned to Jock and let him have it: ‘Look, if this is the way the club’s gunna be run, like a fuckin’ military outfit, and all you and the Strike Force wanna do is go round hitting club after club for no reason, I’ll leave. I’ll get me colours and you can have ’em.’
And with that I walked out of the meeting. Most of the club followed, then Jock and Kraut came out too. I think having seen all the blokes walk out with me, Jock must have realised he was on the verge of losing his club.
‘Look, Caesar, ya can’t leave,’ Jock said.
‘Come on, big fella,’ Kraut joined in. ‘Come back inside. Let’s talk it over.’
‘The only way I’m coming back into that clubhouse is if all this shit about hitting other clubs stops. I’m sick to death of the plastic gangster mentality that a few of this club have got. I’ll be the first to go to war with a club if they hit our brothers. If something happens to one of our old ladies, I’ll be standing right alongside you. But I’
m not gunna hit a club for no good reason.’
‘Well we’re not going to now,’ said Kraut, ‘so let’s go inside and talk about it.’
Mousey put his arm around me. ‘Come on, Caesar. If you leave, I’m leaving, Davo’s leaving, there’ll be no club.’
So we went back inside and the meeting went on. Things were said that I can’t repeat, but it was finally agreed that for the club to go to war it had to be a one hundred per cent vote.
The resolution lifted the members’ spirits. I’d seen the blokes becoming restless over the last couple of years; they didn’t like the drills, they didn’t like some of the prospects that were being rushed through and patched up. But after things came to a head at that meeting, some of the tension eased off. Actually, the next month was pretty good. But it didn’t last.
CHAPTER 9
It was 1983, and I was riding along behind Knuckles. Dukes was in the pack too, plus a couple of others. I don’t know whether Knuckles just got into a daydream or something hit him in the face – because he didn’t have sunnies on – but all of a sudden he swerved and ran straight into the pointy end of a cement lane divider. He went up in the air, the bike went up in the air, and then he came down again, crashing onto the road with the bike landing on top of him.
We pulled the bike off him and got him to Westmead Hospital, where he was operated on straightaway. They put a shunt in his forehead to relieve the pressure inside his fractured skull, his brain had swelled that much. It looked to me like a little garden tap was coming out of his forehead. His body was all banged up, too. It was a pretty bad crash. There were times there when the quacks thought we were going to lose him.
One of our members, Porky, hired a room in intensive care, which they had for friends and relatives, so he could be close to Knuckles in case anything happened. Porky spent the first week more or less living there. As Knuckles clung on, other members started using the room to give Porky a break. Every night there’d be at least fifteen or twenty Comos up in the waiting room outside. We knew that most of us couldn’t get in to see him, but everyone felt that they had to be there anyway. The nurses got used to this big bunch of bikers hanging round. One nurse came up to me and said, ‘You blokes have changed my opinion of bikies. I’ve spent most of my career in intensive care and I’ve never seen a bunch of blokes care so much about another man in my whole life.’
Gradually Knuckles came out of the woods, but he wasn’t the same man. The accident left him with severe headaches, no sense of smell or taste. His memory was shot and he was often disoriented.
The whole club pitched in to get Knuckles back on his feet. He moved in with his brother Dukes while he was still recovering, and Dukes and I took turns to look after him; the accident had caused him to become violent with anyone other than me and Dukes. When he was right to move out on his own again, the club rented a house for him and his old lady, Wendy, filled it with furniture and put on the phone and electricity. Wendy had just had a baby boy, Harley, so her time was taken up with him and they had no money coming in. She would sneak the bills out the window to us – because Knuckles would never have asked for help – and the club would pay them. We looked after our own. Especially his brother Dukes, who couldn’t have loved a brother any more than what he did.
While Knuckles was still in hospital, Jock gave another member, Opey, and me the task of finding a new clubhouse. We’d outgrown the one at Granville, and it was time for something a bit more flash.
Opey rocked up to my place one day and said he’d found a place at Birchgrove. ‘D’ya wanna come down and have a look, see if you reckon it’s a go?’
So I got on my bike and followed him down through inner-western Balmain, into Birchgrove and to the bottom of Louisa Road, which ran down a narrow peninsula jutting into Sydney Harbour. Opey had a key and took me through the place. Soon as I got inside and saw the harbour views, the size of the place, I was rapt. The backyard ran right down to the water and looked straight onto the Harbour Bridge.
‘How much?’ I asked Opey.
‘Three hundred bucks,’ he said, ‘but we can get in and have a coupla weeks free if we sign the lease later in the month.’
‘Take it.’
At the next meeting we told everyone that we’d found the new clubhouse, so members started going down to have a look. Then we started moving the bar and fridges into the place. We had a couple of tables and coin-operated Space Invader machines that we set out on the verandah, which was all encased in glass, so that you could play games or just sit there and look out over the water.
We were still at Granville, just moving things in slowly, when Shadow and Chop rocked up to me before a meeting one night and announced that they were going to bring Jock up on a charge; they wanted his colours.
I couldn’t believe my ears. Whatever they had on him, they obviously reckoned it was enough for immediate expulsion – even for the president.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘He’s been screwing another member’s old lady.’
‘How d’ya know?’
‘We were over at Five Dock this morning and saw
Jock’s truck parked out the front of _____ ’s house,’
Chop said. (I won’t name the member out of respect for him and his family.) ‘We pulled up and as we were walkin’ up to the front door, I looked through the winda
and there was Jock screwing _____ ’s old lady.’ Chop
grabbed Shadow and pulled him over to check it out.
‘He was going to town on her,’ Shadow said. Chop
knocked and _____ ’s old lady came to the door with
Jock standing right beside her. Shadow asked him what he was doing there and Jock said he’d just dropped in
to see _____ . Chop and Shadow just turned round and
left.
‘You’ve got no doubt?’ I asked them.
‘No,’ Chop answered. ‘No doubt whatsoever.’
‘Well you know the rule,’ I told them. ‘If you’re gunna bring someone up and you want their colours, you’ve gotta talk to ’em before the meeting and give ’em a chance to explain.’
‘There’s no way he can explain his way out of this.’
‘Have you told _____ ?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What did he have to say?’
‘He was shattered,’ Chop said. ‘He took off on his bike and we haven’t seen him since.’
‘Is he here?’ Shadow asked.
‘No, and the meeting’s about to start,’ I said. ‘Jock’s not here yet either so you’re probably gunna have to wait till the next meeting to bring him up.’
The meeting started and Jock only turned up halfway through – too late for Shadow and Chop to talk to him.
After the meeting, I called Jock out the back. Shadow and Chop came out and fronted him about what they’d seen. Jock denied it, but Shadow and Chop called him a straight-out liar. I told them to wait there for a minute and went and got Sheepskin, took him out the back. I figured we needed another member there who couldn’t be accused of bias.
‘Shadow,’ I said, ‘tell Sheepskin what you seen.’
Shadow told Sheepskin, and Chop confirmed it. Sheepskin slumped. He turned to Jock: ‘You’re a stupid fuckin’ old fool. You’re gone. You’ve done yer colours.’
I actually felt sort of sorry for Jock at that moment because he had started the club and now, for the sake of a fuck, he knew that come next meeting, he’d be out.
DURING THE following week we finished the move from Granville to Birchgrove, so we were well ensconced in our plush new clubhouse by the time of the next meeting. And it was shaping up to be a doozy.
We had all agreed we wouldn’t tell the other members about Jock screwing another member’s old lady. The member concerned had asked us not to, so out of respect to him we kept it just between Shadow, Chop, Jock, Sheepskin and myself.
Come meeting night, we were all sitting there in anticipation. Chop wanted to make the first issue
on the agenda the taking of Jock’s colours, so when he wasn’t there on time we delayed the meeting for twenty minutes. But in the end he never turned up. Nor did he show up at the next meeting.
Half an hour into the fourth meeting since Shadow and Chop had sprung him, Jock rocked up at Louisa Road with his Strike Force. He strutted in and called everybody together like he had a big announcement. He waited for silence before beginning. ‘I’m splittin’ the club in two.’
We all just looked at him.
‘I’ve started a chapter out west,’ he continued. ‘It’s to be called the west chapter and I’m going to be president. The people in here are called the city chapter and, Caesar, I want you to be president. Whoever wants to come with me can leave now, but there’s one rule in the west chapter, and that is that I have the final vote on everything. Whoever doesn’t like that can stay here with the city chapter.’
‘Fuck off,’ Snoddy replied. ‘Get outta the clubhouse. Anyone who wants to go with Jock, go now.’
‘Yeah,’ said Davo, ‘fuck off, go join his Strike Force.’
I really think Jock expected three-quarters of the club to get up and follow him; he thought he was that special. But just one member, Bear, and one prospect, Bob, got up and went over to join Jock and his Strike Force. Jock looked shocked to see the rest of the thirty-odd blokes stay put.
Before they left, Lard, who was staying at Birchgrove, approached Jock. ‘We’ve got a national run coming up in October. What’s gunna happen there?’
‘Our chapter’s gunna be going to Molong,’ said Jock.
‘Well if the national run is to Molong then that’s where we’ll be, too,’ said Lard. ‘We’re still one club.’
‘Youse can do whatever you want,’ Jock said.
Oh, shit.
CHAPTER 10
Once Jock had left the meeting Snoddy turned to me. ‘So you’re president.’
‘Nah, you can be president,’ I said. ‘You’re the life member. I’m happy with being sergeant.’ I liked the job. I liked being the one out the front of the pack. To me the president’s more of a figurehead; the sergeant is the bloke who really runs the club. He looks after the security, he looks after all the blokes, and I’ve always found that when members have problems – whether it be with their old ladies, financial or anything else – they’ll go to the sergeant first.
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