However, free piss isn’t the be-all and end-all. What’s the point of driving 100km to invariably fill up on Tooheys Red, VB or cheap chardonnay — none of which turns me on all that much — and losing your licence on the way home after putting up with boring wombats getting that far into your ear you need a poultice to get them out?
I’ve been to some good turns and met some nice people. I met NSW Police Minister Ted Pickering at one. He was all right and I had a good mag with him about law and order.
I meant to ask him if he wanted to come back, pull a few cones and get into a bit of Guns’n’Roses, but his minders dragged him away before I got a chance.
I’ve been to turns that had all the atmosphere of a railway station in Siberia. Been ignored to my face by fellow writers, stabbed in the back. And returned the favour with great zeal and gusto.
I’ve been buttonholed for off-the-cuff, in-depth interviews. Some woman journo said to me one night, after about an hour of probing: ‘But what is it you’re trying to say in your book?’ I struck an author’s pose and replied: ‘All I’m trying to say is, if you’ve got $10, these books aren’t a bad read.’
It may not be the quote of the decade, but it got rid of her.
Movie reviews, despite the free piss, can be disastrous, especially if the movie’s a giant snail.
I’ve left theatres where you’d think they just dug a body up from under the floorboards. And you’re in it, suffering the slings and arrows of fellow actors worried about their careers.
You just can’t get drunk, take the money and run, can you?
Record company launches can be a bit off, too. I haven’t been to many — they’re not my bag.
I wouldn’t know an E flat from a Q plunk and getting a mag on with people in the music industry is spooky. You keep thinking you’re talking to a replicant who’s just done a bust on an op-shop.
Forget groupies. Tom Cruise couldn’t get a groupie at a rock party. They’re all waiting for George Michael or Johnny Diesel to come in.
A turn is a turn, though, no matter what. And if someone’s good enough to shout you free drink and some nosh, it’s a bit vulgar to turn up and carry on like they’ve just amputated your leg.
But every now and again you get to the grouse. A ripper turn, drinks on the house, top band, good-looking women, nice folks all round.
Yes, Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, finally shone down on this miserable pile of scrapings from between the toes of beggars.
After two years of columns for this illustrious mag, they figured it was safe to invite me to the 1991 Covergirl Of The Year turn.
Was this a party? Was Dresden an air-raid?
It was in the Arizona Bar in a top hotel in Sydney. ‘The Happening Thang’ played. Frank Vincent, the inflatable sports reporter from the Doug Mulray show, compered and the winner, Kim Rankin, is from the Central Coast. What a combination.
There was no way I was driving back home after this, so I decided to give myself a spoil and book a suite for the night. The CB in Pitt Street, just up from the railway, had a room for a person of my standing. $25 a night. Clean sheets, shower down the hallway, leave your valuables at the desk. When you’re muled-out-drunk, a bed’s just a bed. And I knew when I threw the towel in I’d sleep under a cow pissing.
The turn started at 6.30 and I got there at ten to, meeting Frank Vincent and the editor of People setting things up. On the bar were about 50 pink cocktails of some description, so I thought I’d see how many I could sink in 30 minutes before anyone else got there.
About half-an-hour later the place started to fill up, and 25 strawberry-flavoured tequilas hit me and I could see it was going to be a hoot right from the word go.
Franco Vincenzo got up and did his thing, the editor made a speech, Kim Rankin, looking like $500 million with a smile as wide as the heads, thanked everybody.
The band started. I hit the dance floor with another 10 tequila supernovas under my belt — and didn’t I show those young whippersnappers how to dance?
I don’t quite know how to describe my style. Sort of a white Doctor Huxtable. No matter what, we were all getting into our stride when the band stopped and a bloke rode in on a horse, all lit up, singing ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’.
I’ve never seen a horse like this. It did everything but tell you the joke about the singing telegram. The flashes going off didn’t bother it a bit: I think it thrived on it.
Next up was the rider with a whip, cracking paper from people’s mouths. He was that good I volunteered, but he said my nose blocked the light too much.
We got back into the dancing and drank on till they closed the bar. What can I say? I had a top time. Drank, danced and laughed.
A hard core of pisshead journos and their ilk kicked on to keep drinking somewhere else. But Robert G. Barrett, distinguished author, would never have made a very good tent fighter — I know when I’ve had enough. I staggered back to the Richard Burton suite at the CB and moaned and farted till sun-up.
Did I have a hangover the next day? Yes. The industrial strength, six-Panadeines-at-a-time kind.
Yet I had to hang around Sydney till 4 p.m. So what did I do, just to prove how crooked I was on myself? Went and saw a science fiction movie called Hardware.
It was the lowest and loudest movie I’ve ever wasted $11 on. There’s stuff-all story. It’s like 2000 of the worst video clips you’ve ever seen, welded together with blasts of punishing music. Saddam Hussein and Tony ‘The Nose’ Lambert should be made to sit through this.
But having what was left of my brains scrambled by some horrendous soundtrack was a small price to pay for the night before.
In fact, it was that good I’ve booked the same room for next year.
Along with the happy ones, I get the odd sad letter now and again.
I got one the other week from a woman in Whalan, NSW, from which I’ll quote parts: ‘I’m Rikki Taylor’s mum, you met me when we lived at Bondi. Rikki has only a few months to live. She and her twin sister were diagnosed terminally ill two years ago. Rikki cared for her sister until she died two weeks ago.’
It goes on: ‘We reminisce while I care for her at home until she dies. She speaks fondly of you. I thought you might like to send a message of cheer in your own inimitable way. She reads your column in People each week. Sincerely … ’
I remember Rikki. She was 22, brownish sort of hair and a good sort. She had a tattoo of a mushroom with a little dwarf on her backside and always used to call me a creep. I liked her and thought we had a bit of a good thing going until she eventually gave me the arse for another bloke.
But one day me and Rikki really burnt all the trendies’ and posers’ arses at Tamarama beach in Sydney.
It was summer and I had an old flat right on the water. A mate of mine had a big yacht and told me he’d be sailing past at 2 p.m. one crowded Sunday arvo. When the time came I grabbed Rikki, a pair of fins and a surfmat and, with Rikki on my back, jumped off the point and swam out to the yacht.
We climbed on board and sailed down to Maroubra and back. When we got back to Tamarama, we dived off on the surfmat, caught a wave to the beach then strolled casually back to my flat and had a beer.
The poofs and the posers couldn’t believe it. It made playing backgammon on the sand in your sequined leather G-string look very predictable and dull.
After I’d read the letter from her mum, I sent my old mate Rikki a letter and thanked her once again for giving me the arse. I still like her even if she did call me a creep all the time.
Then you don’t get a letter, you get a phone call from your cousin George: ‘Uncle Artie’s in Bethlehem hospital with cancer of the pancreas.’
Now, I always dedicate books to people. In one I put ‘Ex-painters and dockers and old SP bookies aren’t bad blokes — and neither is my Uncle Artie in Melbourne. This book is dedicated to him.’
Let me tell you about my Uncle Artie and why I flew straight down to see one of the grousest blokes who ever l
ived.
Uncle Art was the Don Corleone of South Melbourne years ago. I was 16 when dad died and Art said come down to Melbourne, he’d take me under his wing.
He’d turned up the SP betting and had a barrow at the South Melbourne markets where I got a job yelling out ‘potatoes, peas, beans, tamaataaaas’. I got to meet all these nefarious characters with names like Noodles, Chopsticks and Hoover — who’d pick up anything.
They wore expensive clothes and beautiful shoes, which they used mainly to kick members of other gangs half to death when they weren’t shooting them. It wasn’t a young surfie’s idea of a good time, so I thanked Uncle Art and legged it back to Sydney.
But it was always a big scene when Uncle Art and Auntie Bonnie would come up to visit the family. I was about 10. They’d book into a good hotel and often take me to the zoo or the pictures and I can remember Art saying, ‘I might take my rod with me.’ I kept expecting us to go fishing, but the kind of rod Art was talking about you’d never see in Paul Kidd’s column.
I can remember going out with Uncle Art to visit Uncle Joe Barrett who owned the Leichhardt Wanderers snooker club, and watching them get measured up for new shoulder holsters by this Italian leather worker. Then they blazed away out in the backyard having a few practice runs.
Another vivid memory was when the family jumped in the FJ and drove down to visit him. As I walked in the front of Art’s house in South Melbourne, I noticed all these holes in the door and more holes and pieces of plaster ripped out of the wall along the corridor.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘I’ve just had the decorators in,’ he replied. At the time, Uncle Art was an official in the Painters and Dockers Union and had misplaced some funds, plus some other chops that had fallen in from somewhere, so — in a show of union solidarity — the P and Ds had driven past the previous night and machine-gunned his house.
Art used to run the SP at the Town Hall Hotel in South Melbourne during and after the war. The cops in town got 30 quid a month and the local cops got a fiver. They’d have 200 punters in the lane with the betting sheets pinned up on the fence.
If by chance some hillbilly cops should appear near the scene, the cockatoos would give Art the drum and all the old sheilas would hide the sheets in their bloomers.
The cops couldn’t get a pinch and no mugs could come up after and say, ‘But I had such-and-such on so-and-so … ’
But could my Uncle Artie pull some beautiful strokes?
During the war he was a brewer with his own boutique label. They used to put the frighteners on some bloke who worked at Corio whisky to sell them a couple of gallons of 100 per cent pure whisky each week. Art would mix this with dry sherry and some boiled currant and methylated spirit brew Auntie Bon mixed up, then he’d flog it to the GIs as Kentucky Suntan Bourbon.
The Yanks couldn’t get enough of it, especially the blacks — which was where Artie got the name.
Uncle Artie wanted to serve his country but being a P and D he was in an essential industry and had a national security card. Unfortunately, he somehow finished up with more national security cards than he needed, so he released some to a few friends — and consequently got arrested by the military police for being such a good bloke.
Art would have spent the war as a guest of His Majesty only Ben Chifley signed his bail slip. Ben could always get set on the nod with Uncle Art, no worries, as they’re apt to say in Melbourne.
Naturally, being a survivor from the painters and dockers wars, Art was invited to the wake for Jack ‘Putty Nose’ Nicholls.
But he’d been out of circulation for a while and said to one of the officials at his table: ‘I’m sorry to hear about Putty Nose. I didn’t even know he was sick. When did he die?’ And the official from the union said, ‘Tomorrow.’
There’s heaps more to Uncle Art than that. Besides, he’s family and I love him, even if he was a bit of an old villain.
I don’t know if many Ps and Ds read this column but if there are any, how about ducking out to Caulfield. Art’s in Bethlehem hospital, and he deserves respect.
People wonder why I take shots at Americans in my column. Am I anti-American? Not really. It’s just that, at times, Seppos are so thick.
They can never tell when you’re joking with them and it’s almost impossible for Yanks to take the piss out of themselves. Maybe they should learn — then they wouldn’t spend millions on analysts and gurus.
Of all those American sheilas who wrote to me, I narrowed the field down to two you could have a joke with — in New York and in Carolina.
I also write to an American photographer who lives in Sarasota, Florida. I met him through another photographer. He’s not a bad bloke and stayed with me when he was out here making a TV doco on Aboriginal cave paintings.
But he was strapped for a sense of humour and we nicknamed him Joyce. Like in Wendy Harmer’s book, It’s A Joke, Joyce.
I still write to him, send him books and that, but no matter what I say, he almost always blows up and drowns me with letters bagging Australia and Australians. Like I said, he’s not a bad bloke, but I just can’t figure him out.
I picked up the Sydney Morning Herald the other week and in someone’s column, rating about three paragraphs, was how Pee Wee Herman got arrested in Sarasota, Florida, for having a three-bags-full in the back of the local pictures. Which was about all it was worth.
Next thing, all these clippings out of US newspapers arrive from Joyce. Pee Wee’s tug in the South Trail Adult Theatre, 6700 Block Street, made headlines in the Sarasota Herald Tribune and just about every other paper in the country.
I couldn’t believe it. If, say, Daryl Somers’ ostrich got nabbed flogging himself in the Avoca Theatre I couldn’t see it making the Central Coast Express.
But in America it’s banner headlines. ‘Pee Wee’s case raised old issue’ howled one. ‘Policing morality’ was another one. ‘It’s a matter of image’ shrieked another.
Punters and celebrities jumped to his defence. ‘They are judging the man without right of due process,’ was blazed above a photo of Bill Cosby.
They’ve got a raging crack problem and the Soviet Union’s going to hell along with Yugoslavia. Pee Wee gets caught pulling his pud and it’s headlines and they rally into the street holding petitions.
That’s Seppos for you.
Naturally, I had to reply to Joyce’s letter. I didn’t quite know how to approach this, so I thought the best thing would be to take the offensive. Joyce had invited me over to his neck of the woods in return for staying at my place while he was out here once. Not after this, though.
What sort of backward, hillbilly joint do you live in, I demanded? Do you mean to tell me that if I go to see In Bed With Madonna or 9½ Weeks and I crack it for a larrikin, I can’t have a three-bagger?
What sort of dump are you running over there? What about MY image? What about if my analyst says it’s good therapy for me to have a nice relaxing J. Arthur Rank at the movies? Do I get persecuted too, like poor Pee Wee? It’s disgraceful. What the %$#@!’s going on?
Besides, I wrote, isn’t it every American’s constitutional right to get around having a wank? You’ve been wanking non-stop for years in your letters and you’ve never been pinched.
Where’s the equality and justice?
I remembered how much Yanks like to turn a dollar and adore celebrity status. So I sent him a few dollars and told him to go buy the seat where Pee Wee got caught with a full hand, going alone.
Yanks dig these sort of things — like the door where John Lennon got shot, Madonna’s corsets, etc.
It could be worth anything at the start of Pee Wee’s trial. I addressed the letter to Joyce so-and-so, Stropisota, Florida, Three Bagging Capital of America — and wished him the best.
Back came the first letter like a Nike missile. When are all we moron Australian sonsofbitches ever going to learn, it said. We copy everything Americans do. We’re jealous because America’s always ahead o
f us. We creep into the USA, soak up as much Americana as possible, then write belittling, disparaging things out of jealousy.
I’m a pinhead, we’re all slushpumps, living in a pitifully barren entertainment scene. We need guidance, we should be nuked. Bleah, bleah, bleah! What did I do wrong?
All I did was sympathise with Pee Wee, agree with Bill Cosby and ask him to save me a seat at the local pictures. Fair dinkum — you’d get more laughs from the Egyptian Book of the Dead than you would out of Joyce’s letters.
Which for some reason brings me to blonde jokes. The latest bunch of offensive, sexist gags to surface in which blonde women are made out to be giggling bimbos.
And where else would you hear these? From that odious, balding gnome who does the breakfast show on 2MMM, Doug Mulray.
Mulray fancied himself as a preacher — the Rev. Dr Doug he called himself. I wonder what religious order he represented — The Church of the Immaculate Flatophile?
‘Lay your hands on the radio my children,’ he said. Yeah … it’d probably just go phhhhhhhtttt! Some deacon. The wrath of Jehovah will surely be upon the head of this blasphemer. Yea, it is written: fart jokes are an abomination and lay off women — especially blondes.
Anyway, when I tuned into the Rev. Dr Doug I was expecting a bit of good old religion. And what did I get? Blonde jokes. On they came — and each as offensive and sexist as the other.
Then I had a thought: ‘I might not be as quick-witted as the ex-Rev. Dr Doug or good enough to be a writer on his show, but I can be just as sexist and repulsive as that little bandersnatch any day.’
And I can write a blonde joke.
So, in the light of recent circumstances, here is my first go at a blonde joke: Why would you rather go to the pictures with Pee Wee Herman than a blonde? Because Pee Wee Herman doesn’t talk during the movie.
Remember that horrible kid at school everyone hated — the class tittle-tat?
So What Do You Reckon? Page 17