King of the Cross

by Mark Dapin

  I saw the episode as a team-building exercise, and it cemented a new loyalty in the gang. Previously, you see, our only bond was in being sinned against – tortured and tormented by the Australian boys – now we had a link forged through sinning. It might surprise you to know, Anthony, that a union of the second kind is very much stronger than the first. If you want to own a man – or a woman – for life, all you need do is first corrupt them.

  What happened to the photographs?

  What do you think, Anthony? I sold them in our school playground and at her school gates. I made five guineas in a week. I became a rich man.

  And Rachel?

  She left the school, obviously. And the family left town. They came originally from Bathurst, and I think they may have gone back there. Although, of course, her father may have put her on a ship to England, where she met your grandfather in a wharfies’ hotel in Wapping.

  How do you think Rachel felt about what you did?

  How would I know? Perhaps it taught her not to trust the wrong people. Perhaps it made her realise her true vocation was as a prostitute. I am responsible only for the deed itself, not for the way she chose to react to it.

  And what does it matter in the long run? We all end up the same way, in a coffin covered in earth like Mad Dog McCoy, who loved her forever but fucked her only once, in a shed in a builder’s yard, in front of his three closest friends.

  [Ends.]

  I didn’t know what had persuaded Mendoza he could trust me with his autobiography, but I was desperate for the money. With Helen gone, I couldn’t keep up the rent on our unit. I was thinking about moving to the backpackers’ next door when the old man called.

  He offered a fee of $60,000, which would be paid over one year in twelve $5000 instalments. Copyright would stay in his hands, and it would be up to him to decide if and when it would be published, but it would not go to the printers until after his death.

  ‘It’s not that I regret what I have done,’ he said, ‘but I’m not going to spend the last of my years back in the fucking Bay, either. As for my family, they will have to bear the shame of knowing where their money came from. My wife of forty-nine years has passed away, my daughter will not even take my name. My son is a clown. For a large part, I blame his mother. She never showed him how to be a man. You might argue this was my fault, because I was an absent father, but perhaps I was away so much because Deborah didn’t know how to keep a man at home – although some would say I am too much man for any one woman.

  ‘That,’ said Mendoza, ‘is for the reader to judge.’

  Mendoza would allow me to record our interviews, but at the end of each sitting he would take away the tape and have it transcribed. I didn’t know who produced the typescripts, but they did a beautiful job. On the afternoon when he told me about his schooldays at Balmain Boys, he gave me wordperfect minutes of our interview for the Jewish Times, right up to the point where I ate the tape. Mendoza had taped it himself, through a microphone under his desk, just as he recorded all his meetings, just as he photographed everything.

  A couple of days after each sitting, Lazarus would come to my apartment with a computer disk containing the text, and a print-out of everything that had been said. Mendoza checked the pages before they went to me but, as far as I could tell, he changed nothing beyond a few spellings, and occasionally deleting the word ‘cunt’ when he’d used it to describe, for example, a crim, a pimp and a judge in the same sentence. He usually replaced it with ‘dog’.

  He liked to give the interviews in the places he talked about on the tape. We held the first in a private room in a Balmain pub that Mendoza had taken over in 1946, although he’d transferred the licence to one of his brothers when he’d begun buying up hotels all around Sydney. When it was over, Lazarus drove us back to the Cross. I walked up to the Hamilton Private Hotel, to see if I could catch Leah before the end of her shift.

  The bar was empty. I asked the barman if Leah was working tonight. He laughed. ‘You won’t see her in here again, mate,’ he said. ‘Turns out she was only fifteen.’

  SEVEN

  [The West End Hotel, Balmain. 10-01-02. 1:55 pm.]

  I know it’s fashionable to blame your parents for everything that has happened to you, but I had a good upbringing and I can’t complain about anything. My father was born in Tetiev, which is now a part of the Ukraine. He came to Australia with my mother in 1919, after the pogrom in which the Jews of Tetiev were robbed, tortured, raped and murdered by drunken Russian mobs. You know something? I piss on their Ukraine. I shit in their Black Sea. They hunted Jews for sport. While the Russians burned my father’s house, stripped him naked and beat him in the street – all the time chanting, ‘Death to the Yids!’ – he didn’t raise a hand against the dogs for fear that they would kill him. The next morning, with the smoke still rising from the ashes of their home, he and my mother gathered my brothers Saul and Abie in their arms and fled that dog-shit country for England. Upon their arrival in Liverpool, they boarded a boat bound for Australia, which they believed to be one of the forty-eight states of the USA. In Tetiev my father was a poor pedlar. In Sydney he became a draper and mercer. You don’t hear those words often now. They live on in the surnames of old rag-trade families, but not among the Yidden. He bought and sold cloth to make clothes. It earned him a living – in the war, it earned him a good living – but never a fortune. He was greedy but not ambitious. He wanted everything but he wouldn’t do what had to be done to get it.

  I remember my father as a tall man, but stooped, as if he were afraid to pull himself up to his full height in case it brought him undue attention. He had a small amount of hair. His hands were wide and thickly veined. His eyes, to a child, always looked surprised.

  My mother haunts my memory as a short, broad woman who stood like a gum tree. In her youth, I am told, she was a beauty, and my father charmed her with his prowess as a wrestler, but my mother’s good looks and my father’s fighting spirit both fled them after the Tetiev pogrom. Like most Jewish boys, I loved my mother deeply, but she could be a cold and distant woman, in the way of her generation. My parents spoke Yiddish in the home, and I grew up understanding the language, but I never had much need to use it until I was banged up in a police cell with Mad Dog McCoy and Big Stan Callahan. All the imbecile goys thought they could fool the jacks with their boys’-home backslang, but we three Yids had a code nobody but our shyster lawyers could break. My father learned English quickly, but always spoke with the accent of Kiev. My mother never embraced new words and new ways and, in her mind, she stayed in Tetiev until she died.

  Our family lived in three rooms above my father’s shop in Mullens Street. My two sisters, Dora and Hannah, slept together, and I shared a bed with my older brothers, Saul – until he left – and Abraham. I remember little about those days, except for rolling in the night into puddles of Abie’s cold piss, and waking in the darkness to see my father pacing the yard, cracking his knuckles, kicking at dirt, waiting for the Cossacks to come.

  My brother Saul was like my father, in both appearance and temperament. He was big but a coward, and his hair was already thinning in his teens. Australian boys loved to flog Saul because, despite his size, he didn’t fight back. When Saul asked for help, my father told him to stop whatever he was doing to aggravate the bullies. There was no point in retaliation, he said. Saul was the only Jew in his year, and what could one Jew do against black hundreds? One afternoon, Saul was hit in the face with a brick, and finally my father took him into the yard with a kit bag filled with rags and trained him to box and wrestle. He taught Abie too. Abie was smaller than Saul – only a little taller than me – but he was born knowing how to look after himself.

  My father never hit Abie or Saul, except when he was showing them how to fight, but he beat me with his hands, with a stick, with a strap and with a poker. He hit me around the legs and the shoulders, and later in the face and head. He said I was wild and rude to my mother and I would surely end up in jail. I’l
l never forget the stupid smirk on his face when the beak suggested he might send me to Long Bay. It was my father’s dream come true, the only accurate prediction he’d ever made.

  My mother often stepped in to save me from my father’s anger, although she would also sometimes stoke his rage. It took me a long time to understand this, Anthony. It was the conundrum of my childhood.

  Since I was flogged at home by adults, it was not particularly onerous to be flogged at school by children. I could hold my own in a one on one, and I could even take on two boys my own size, but they came at the Jews in gangs. I was not easily scared, but it’s a frightening thing to fall to the ground in the centre of a scrum of boys who are trying to kick you in the teeth or the eyes or the balls.

  The day the Australians crucified me, the legionnaires cracked two of my ribs with their broom handle. I told my father what had happened, and he agreed to teach me his secrets.

  We trained together three afternoons a week. My father showed me chokes and holds and locks and throws; left hooks, uppercuts and overhand rights. Although he could box, he preferred to wrestle. It suited his build and his temperament. He knew he could use his weight to bully most men to the ground. We grappled on the grass. He smothered me with his smell: sweat and garlic and scraps of cooked meat trapped between his teeth. Time and again he overpowered me. He crushed me when he pinned me, held me so tightly I almost feared he would force himself inside me. Twice, he choked me unconscious, and he laughed when I came back twitching and throwing my arms into the air. My father took delight in hurting and humiliating me, but those afternoons in the yard were among the happiest of my childhood. He was paying me attention.

  When my father had taught me as much as he could, he sent me to the Police Boys Club where Maurice boxed. I practised for three months, then the trainer put me in the ring with a much smaller boy, and the fucking midget knocked out my front tooth. By the time I was fourteen I didn’t fear a blue, but I didn’t look for them either. My friends were the same. Only Maurice swaggered like a goy.

  My father often quoted the Torah, although he only attended synagogue for bar mitzvahs and weddings. As you may be aware, Anthony, the Lord handed down ten commandments, and my father abided by several of these, at least in part. For example, God mandated that a man should not covet his neighbour’s wife, nor his donkey. My father kept strictly to the latter stipulation, and any man’s mule was safe in his company. Nor did my father ever make idols and bow down to them, or take God’s name in vain. But his preferred commandment was ‘remember the Sabbath and keep it holy’, because it’s among the easiest of the laws to keep, and because he was lazy. Every Friday night we ate together as a family. The first person to be excluded from our Shabbos dinners was Saul, who went against my father’s will and married a Catholic, a daughter of the Inquisition. Ironically, she was to prove Saul’s thumbscrew and torment, an iron maiden who spiked his heart, but she was the first girl who would let him into her pants, so his cock said ‘I do’ on behalf of his blue balls. My father prayed the Kaddish for his firstborn son and behaved as if he were dead. My mother kept in touch with Saul in secret, and visited the grandchildren my father denied.

  My mother hoped I would become a doctor or a dentist or, at the very least, a veterinary surgeon. My father was not interested in my progress at school. He said I hadn’t inherited his brains, and that was that. He was satisfied when I left school at fifteen to join him and Abie in the family business that Saul had abandoned.

  What was the name of your father’s shop?

  Rosenblatt’s. My family’s name was Rosenblatt.

  Why did you change it?

  Yiddisher boxers often fought under ring names so as not to shame their families.

  But you never fought.

  In the ring? No. But nonetheless I brought shame to my family. Moshe, Maurice and Big Stan all left school when I did. The gang stayed together and we found different ways to make money. We chose our new names one night at the Police Boys Club. Maurice, of course, already had a nom de guerre. His father’s was Baser, so he called himself Bass, after Benny Bass, the great Yiddisher fighter who won the world featherweight championship in 1927. For some reason Maurice, who fought as a middleweight, also adopted Bass’s nickname, ‘the Little Fish’, which I always thought insufficiently intimidating for a fighter. Following Maurice’s lead, Moshe, who was born Maizel, named himself McCoy, after Al McCoy, who served as world middleweight champion from 1914 to 1917. ‘Mad Dog’ came later and was, I think, my own addition.

  This raises two points worth mentioning: Al McCoy himself was born Alexander Rudolph, and was Jewish. Maizel is the German word for ‘mule’ and was among the many pejorative surnames names forced on Jewish people by the Austrian Empire. Others included Rindskopf, which means ‘cow’s head’; Nachtkafter, which means ‘night beetle’; and Lumpe, which means ‘crook’, and also Spiegeleier. My intention here is to illustrate the fact that Jewish surnames are fluid and non-traditional. We can choose to name ourselves after beasts and beetles, or heroes and kings. Big Stan opted for Callahan, after Mushy Callahan, the first champion in the light-welterweight division, who was born Vincent Morris Scheer. I borrowed the name of the greatest Jewish fighter of them all, Daniel Mendoza, the bare-knuckle champion of England and the father of scientific boxing.

  At first we only used our ring names among ourselves but, in time, other people began to call us Mendoza, McCoy, Callahan and Bass. We sounded like a law firm, which, in a way, we were.

  You asked me why I changed my name, Anthony. I ask you why you keep yours.

  You said you brought shame on your family.

  In their eyes, yes. Although the disgrace was nothing compared with Saul’s marrying out. In 1940, when I was still working for my father, Mad Dog began trading in car radios, which were then a new product that sold for about twenty pounds. He acquired the radios from rich Jews with big houses and unlocked motor cars. It’s a source of fascination and sadness to me that people only rob their own kind. Look at the Italians: the Mafia’s a protection racket run against other Sicilians. Look at the wogs: whenever there’s a shooting war in south-west Sydney, the Lebs neck the Lebs, the Assyrians knock other Assyrians. Even squareheads keep it in the family. If the wife has her skull caved in, the husband did it. If the kids are drowned, it was the father. If I am betrayed, it’s by my fucking lieutenant. Do you see what I mean?

  Unfortunately, many of the wealthier members of the Jewish community were connected with the legal profession and able to make enquiries that led them back to a humble draper’s in Balmain, from which I was retailing secondhand car radios at ten pounds a pop. Mad Dog was arrested, claimed never to have seen a car, a radio or his own dear mother, and ended up doing three months in Pentridge – he was sent there because he lied to the jacks that his family, the fictitious Yiddisher McCoys, lived in Melbourne. I copped it sweet, and before sentencing, the beak suggested that I might better myself by enlisting in the Citizens’ Military Force. I told him I had already been called up and was ready to report to Victoria Barracks. He gave me six months, all suspended – much to my father’s disappointment – and put me on a two-year bond, since it was my first offence.

  Truth be told, however, it was only my first offence as Jake Mendoza. As Jacob Rosenblatt, I had already been fined once for handling stolen goods.

  I earned a prison sentence as Mendoza and I joined the army as Mendoza. As a man, I have always been Mendoza.

  I had other reasons for wanting to shed my name. I haven’t said much about my mother. You don’t seem particularly interested in women, Anthony. Nor they in you, from what I observe. I, of course, have had the opposite experience. I think perhaps I love women so much because they remind me of my mother, who was both giving and forgiving. My father, on the other hand, was a taker and a curser. He was never faithful. I knew that even as a child, when I watched him flirt with wharfies’ daughters over cotton sheets. He didn’t come into his own until the war, when he
was able to take advantage of the black market and trade rare silks and stockings for God knows what, but he practised his skills in the depression years.

  I remember one day when I was a child, an angry husband came into the shop and tried to hit my father, and I was excited because I knew my father could fight, and I looked forward to seeing the wharfie laid out on the pavement. But my father let him punch him. He just stood there and took it: once, twice, three times, while the man yelled and swore and called my bobe a whore. Unable to raise a reaction, he kicked in the shop window and left. My father said he hoped I had learned a lesson. If he had fought back, he said, the man would have returned with his mates and burned down the shop, abused my mother, speared me on a bayonet, and taken everything.

  In all my life, through all the indignities my father suffered, and they were many, I never knew him hit anyone but me. In summary, he was a bully, a coward, a bludger, a weasel, a black marketeer and a thief. This was the example I had when I was growing up, the father held up to me by my mother as a ‘good man’. Children, like chimps, learn by imitation. I like to think of myself as a self-made man, but the raw materials came from elsewhere. Every low thing I have done, I saw my father do first. So, when you think about it, I certainly wouldn’t have turned out the way I did if he hadn’t been such a low, lying dog.

  [Ends.]

  EIGHT

  [The Bellisimo Restaurant, 32 Orwell Street, Potts Point. 01-02-02. 2:12 pm.]

  What was wrong with that guy? It looked like somebody’d tried to chew his nose off.

  There’s a lesson for you, Anthony. He shouldn’t poke it where it doesn’t belong.

  There’s blood all over this table.

  Observation is your strong suit, only analysis lets you down. Natural Science, please wipe the table clean. Your leftovers are offending our colleague.