by Mark Dapin
What’s he doing here?
He’s a temp from the agency. I’ve given Lazarus the day off.
Agency?
I’m joking, Anthony. Actually, you and Natural Science have a lot in common: you’ve got no sense of humour and you’ll eat whatever I tell you. You can leave now, Natural. Go and sit outside the door and bark at everything that moves.
Now, where was I?
You were going to set the record straight about the war.
I don’t want to say a lot about my service. Much of what we did in Liverpool is still classified.
I thought you were a clerk in the medical corps.
That is what the records show.
Are you saying you weren’t?
I am saying records – especially old records – are not always an accurate reflection of events. Take it from me, Anthony: I invented double bookkeeping. I am saying the war in the Pacific was not fought only on the Kokoda Track.
How close did Japanese forces come to Liverpool?
Don’t fuck with me, Anthony. Don’t bait a baiter, or you’ll end up as shark bait.
How long were you in the army?
Officially? I was called up in 1940, but I feared my father would be unable to operate his drapery business without me, particularly after Saul ran off with the shiksa. My initial application for an exemption from service has, from time to time, been used against me by my enemies, but you must remember that an army needs drapers as much as it needs armourers. You can’t send soldiers off to battle in bowling shirts, Anthony. War is not a game of fucking skittles.
As far as I am concerned, I was an active part of the war from the day I was summoned to Victoria Barracks in 1940 until I was discharged in 1944, there being ‘no suitable vacancy’ in which my services could be employed.
But how long did you actually serve?
Are you listening to me, Anthony? I served the entire length of the war, from 1940 to 1944 – first as a draper, then as a citizen soldier and then, when the army freed me from my patriotic obligations, I enlisted, entirely of my own free will, for six months in the merchant navy.
So how much of the war did you spend as a soldier?
You now seem obsessed with soldiers and armies, Anthony. I wonder why that is. Perhaps it’s because you have never heard the bugle call yourself and proudly marched to war wearing a uniform of cloth supplied by drapers, and kissed the tears from the eyes of your sweetheart as she watched you board the train. The train to Liverpool?
Yes, Anthony. The train to fucking Liverpool. I was called up in 1942 and made a corporal in 1943. Unfortunately my fitness was downgraded from ‘A’ to ‘B’, possibly as a result of anti-Semitism, so I was prevented from serving my country overseas, and discharged in 1944. I returned to Sydney a changed man.
In what ways had you changed?
The army gave me discipline. I can always tell if a man has been in uniform, Anthony. It lends him a dignity that stays with him throughout his life. The army instilled in me the value of regular physical exercise. It taught me how to use a gun. I have kept my old service revolver to this day, both for sentimental and other reasons.
When I left the army I could not mix with men who hadn’t served. They didn’t understand the mindset of a soldier. I missed the camaraderie and the danger, so in 1944 I signed on with the merchant navy, ferrying troops to Milne Bay, where a famous battle had been fought against the Japanese only two years previously.
It was difficult, hazardous work. The Coral Sea was rife with Japanese subs, and shipping was regularly straffed by the Imperial Air Force. Although I worked mainly on the clerical side, I risked my life on countless occasions, simply by stepping on deck of the unpromisingly named SS Charon, which had already played an important part in Australian history, having been the probable source of a famous outbreak of cattle plague in 1923.
Imagine my surprise when who should I meet on board ship but my old friend Mad Dog McCoy, who I hadn’t seen since one week earlier in Woolloomooloo and who had recently got over his loss of Rachel, only ten fucking years previously. McCoy had served in the merchant navy throughout the war and survived countless encounters with dangerous women in the great ports of South-East Asia. By 1944 he ran all the rackets on the Charon, including spirits, stockings and cigarettes, and also took a cut out of introducing new sailors to allegedly clean girls in dockside cat houses where they performed every unlikely trick you’ll ever see in Patpong, and a good many more besides. The beauty of McCoy’s scheme was he earned kickbacks from both sides – the brothel keepers as well as the sailors. In fact, he operated in much the same manner as the financial-planning industry today.
For a brief and slightly humiliating period I worked as McCoy’s lieutenant, but that finished when the war ended in July 1944.
The war ended in 1945.
Some say that, yes. Some say it never ended, that we are still feeling its reverberations today, in our society, in our economy and in the psychology of veterans. But my war ended in July 1944, as did McCoy’s. We signed off the Charon and returned to civvy street or, more accurately, Victoria Street. We took two rooms in a private hotel in the Cross and chased recently widowed skirt while we planned our next move.
It was during this time that I was lucky enough to bump into Phil Jeffs, on one of his infrequent visits to Sydney to set up a baccarat school with the entrepreneur Dick Reilly. Before Jake Mendoza, in the days of the razor gangs, Phil Jeffs ruled East Sydney, but by wartime he was semiretired and living in Ettalong, with a library full of philosophy books and a bed full of whores. Jeffs was a nightclub owner and man about town who invented many of the business ideas I later perfected, including the provision of unsolicited souvenir photography of a hostess and her customer.
Jeffs was a generous man with everything but money. Before he left the Cross he gave me some sound advice: get out of Darlinghurst Road until the troops come home, then come back shooting.
As a digression, Anthony, one pertinent point about Jeffs was his nickname: ‘Phil the Jew’. Bearing in mind that we occupied similar positions in different generations, it might be thought that I would become known as ‘Jacob the Jew’, especially since Jeffs’s contemporaries, such as the drug dealer Harry ‘Jewey’ Newman, and the Riley Street Gang leader Samuel ‘Jewey’ Freeman, were recognised largely by their religion. I like to think that I was instead described as the ‘King of the Cross’ because my success transcended ethnicity and, as such, could be held as an inspiration to second-generation migrants of every race, colour and creed (apart from Malts, wops and the fucking Lebanese). There is also, I suppose, the fact that ‘King of the Jews’ was a title already claimed by a certain fictitious Goy.
So what did you do?
McCoy and I heeded Jeffs’s advice and caught the country train to Goulburn, where McCoy’s mother, a deafening woman but an unlikely landlady, had inherited a pub from her brother, Sam Moses, who had died fighting at Tobruk.
It may surprise you, Anthony, to learn that the New South Wales city of Goulburn, home to the locally famous Big Merino, was once the site of a large and prosperous Jewish community, but that is because you are ignorant in matters of history, as in so much else. In Goulburn in the mid-nineteenth century, six of the eight hotels were run by Jews, including the Moses family’s Railway Inn. A century later, the shul lay in ruins and McCoy’s mother was the last of the Yiddisher hoteliers.
She needed a man to run the pub, and her own husband barely fitted that description, even when he was alive, so she asked McCoy if he would take over the licence.
McCoy was willing but not able, because of the small matter of sixty bottles of black-market whisky with which he was busted on the Charon in 1943, leading to a three-month suspension from the merchant navy and a lifetime ban from holding a liquor licence.
Luckily I was able to step in and offer my services, with McCoy as a silent partner. And what a fucking eye-opener that pub was for me, Anthony. If you scoff at the idea that servicemen fa
ced dangers in Liverpool, you should have been in fucking Goulburn in 1945. Every bar was a dead-set, bare-knuckles-and-boots bloodhouse. McCoy and I got in more blues in the Railway Inn than in the rest of our fucking lives.
When the war officially ended there were imbeciles out in the streets singing ‘Pack up Your Troubles’ and ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. They should have been singing ‘Pack up Your Barrel’ and ‘Roll Out the Trouble’, because these were the days of the six o’clock swill, when a man only had a couple of hours’ drinking to fortify himself for an evening of country cooking and marital sex. Most working squareheads chose to cram a whole night on the piss into the time it took to watch a movie, and tended to get toey when they were chucked out. This was not necessarily the freedom they had fought for in El Alamein and Tobruk.
When Bass was finally demobbed – he’d been all over the world with the AIF in the Silent Seventh – we called him up to Goulburn to help out. The Little Fish didn’t stand for any shit, I can tell you. Fuck me, he was a danger to that town. He cleaned up the pub in a couple of months, put two shearers and three jacks in hospital, and we had to smuggle him back to Sydney in the middle of the night before the locals lynched him like a nigger.
After that I ruled the pub by diplomacy and charm. The first of my diplomatic initiatives was to cease to recognise six o’clock closing, a largely legalistic notion that Mrs Maizel had taken too literally. In deference to the wishes of the remaining members of the local constabulary, I closed the front bar, but kept the back bar open all night to anybody – cockies and jacks alike – who tapped on the window and gave the password.
What was the password?
Whatever they said when they tapped on the window.
Did you have the cops on side?
Obviously a businessman can’t just flout the law and expect to get away scot-free. I paid a weekly consideration to the sergeant and let his men drink on the house. This was a custom I continued throughout my long career in the hospitality industry, and one which has always served me well, along with the practice of only hiring barmaids with big tits.
At the Railway Inn I also learned the importance of an alternative supply chain. The beer we got from the brewery was enough to last until six o’clock on a good night. After six I sold long necks I bought from the pub in Bengonia, which had more beer than drinkers. The Bengonia beer cost a few cents extra and, since I was a secondary customer, sales were recorded in a second set of books.
I liked running a pub. It suited me. I’m a convivial man. I enjoy the company of good, honest country folk. But I was never going to stay in a retarded mong-pen of six-fingered sister-fucking imbeciles like Goulburn for long. I left McCoy in charge and came back to Sydney, where I bought the licence to the West End, just across the road from my father’s old shop – although by this time my father’s business had moved to the city, and his home to Bondi.
In the 1940s it was illegal to own more than one liquor licence. Don’t ask me why. I don’t make the laws, I just break them. That was a joke, Anthony. Smile. As St Augustine said, ‘An unjust law is no law at all.’ As a strict follower of the Augustinian school, I refused to recognise both the draconian regulation that denied a working man a beer after 6 pm, and the unreasonable prohibition that prevented a businessman from expanding his operations. I came to control several more hotels, the management of which I entrusted to Abie, my sister Dora, Big Stan, and certain people of whom nobody can speak ill, including one who was dead at the time he took over the Victoria Hotel in North Sydney.
In 1947 I bought the Patton in Kings Cross, with McCoy and Big Stan’s father as my partners. This was the best decision I ever made, in business or in life. Without the Patton, Jake Mendoza would never have been made King of the Cross. Have you ever loved a place, Anthony? Not a woman or a girl, but a building or a room? I loved the Patton. It was founded by a draper and mercer, Bernie Roth, at the start of the war, and it quickly became the spot the American officers went to meet a good standard of local woman (who, nevertheless, could be bought with a box of chocolates and a pair of nylons). The local boys, in their Dedman victory suits, had no chance against flash rats with sleeve buttons, trouser cuffs and exotic venereal diseases. As a club that catered to Yanks, the Patton needed to show Hollywood class. Even the waiters cleaned their fingernails. Australia had never seen anywhere like the Patton. Until then, the only nightclubs in Sydney were places like Romano’s in Castlereagh where, on a good night, Azzalin the fucking Dazzalin might turn up and sing in Italian. That was never going to cut it with the Yanks, whose brothers and cousins – led by the great General Patton himself – were dying in Sicily to save the whole of Europe from turning into some ridiculous fucking opera set and in whose own country the resident wops were locked up in internment camps. So the GIs made a forward base in the Patton instead.
Unfortunately once the war ended and the Yanks went home – leaving the good standard of women with fraudulent forwarding addresses and bawling, big-mouthed babies – the Patton went to shit. By the time I took it over, the place was rotten with Malts.
Have you ever heard of Malta, Anthony? Imagine the Mediterranean is the belly of Europe, and the Gulf of Gibraltar is its sphincter: Malta is two turds waiting to be passed through the bowel and into the bowl. It’s a great historical irony that the Knights of Malta once fought for control of Jerusalem, but if they went to war against Israel today, Valetta would be wiped off the map in the time it takes to eat a fucking pastizz. And, as it would’ve been in the Mediterranean, so it was in the Cross.
The first thing I did was get the Little Fish to belt the daylights out of a couple of Maltese hoons who had made the club their base, and this started a monumental fucking blue that ended up dragging on for ten years. He flogged a bloke who turned out to be the cousin of someone’s grandfather in Gozo, and the hoon lost an eye. Have you ever come across Gozo, Anthony? It’s an island shaped like a cunt.
The war took something away from the Little Fish, but it gave him something too. After the war, the Little Fish was ready to die, he was just looking for somebody to kill him. So nothing could scare him. He was more afraid of living with what he’d seen than getting his throat cut by the family of some Maltese Moshe Dayan, so he became unstoppable, like a boulder rolling down a mountain, gathering pace until it crashed. If you’d given me four Jews like the Little Fish, I wouldn’t just have been the King of the Cross, Anthony, I would’ve been the King of the Southern Cross. I would’ve run this fucking country, and we wouldn’t have half the problems we have today with the wogs, because we would have massacred their fucking grandfathers.
Despite the fact that we had the most dangerous maniac in Darlinghurst on our side, I heard around the traps that the Malts and the Mafia were laughing at us. ‘The Jews have a hard man called “the Little Fish”,’ they said, and made it sound like he’d named himself after the clitoris. I took Bass aside to see if he would alter his nickname to something more daunting, but still in the spirit of his original idea. I tried to interest him in ‘the Shark’, for instance, or even ‘the Fighting Fish’, because they are tough little buggers, but Bass was determined to stay true to the memory of his hero.
That was the Little Fish for you, and if the biggest problem I’d ever had with an associate was their name, I’d be a happy old man. This business attracts the wrong types, Anthony. It’s a magnet for the disloyal, the erratic and the unreliable. In those days, the Little Fish would never let you down. He wouldn’t know how to let you down. He was a mensch.
But I know what you’re thinking now, Anthony: where was Mendoza greasing his shlong in those days? Surely he had a feast of opportunities as a pioneering nightclub owner and close friend and confidant to the rising stars of cabaret? And, for once in your life, you would be right (I am reminded of the old joke about the stopped clock). These were great days, but also wonderful nights. I was a beneficiary both of my finely honed hiring practices, and what were commonly described as my ‘movie-star good looks�
��. If you look at a picture of me in the 1940s you will see a fit man –
But classed ‘B’ by the army.
Who can account for the quirks of the anti-Semitic mind, Anthony?
As I was saying, you would see a fit man, with broad shoulders and a square jaw, and eyes that a woman could drown in. That face would not have looked out of place on a billboard outside a cinema, or a promotional still for a romantic drama. I had many admirers, Anthony. A gentleman says no more than that. Although I will add that if I had a dollar for every time I had my cock sucked by a showgirl in the immediate postwar years, I would be able to buy the Patton again, three times over. I tell you this purely for the sake of historical accuracy.
As well as my looks and my profession, I had other factors on my side. Many men of my generation had fallen in the war, leaving many women lonely and unfulfilled. I saw it as my duty to my dead comrades to look after the girls they left behind, which is why I was so famously generous to my mistresses. They deserved to be the brides of heroes, Anthony. The least I could give them was a rented unit in Potts Point and a reasonable weekly allowance for perfume and clothes.
Of course, among all my women there was one who stood out from the rest, because: (a) she wouldn’t blow me; and (b) she had a brain for business. This woman was Divora Cohen, soon to become Deborah Mendoza, a Dutch beautician I had first met, ludicrously enough, in Goulburn.
I was in love with her, and she with me. ‘What is love?’ you may ask, Anthony – and I, of all men, should be able to tell you. But I find I can’t put into the words the feelings I had for Deborah. She was never a stranger to me. From the moment we started talking it was as if I had known her all my life. I even knew she wouldn’t blow me. She was well groomed – as you might expect from a woman in her profession – and glamorous, with a kiss curl and an inviting smile. She loved to come with me to the Patton, to mingle with the social set and have her picture in the magazines.
At the Patton, we were multicultural before the word even existed. I had all the races in there, even niggers. We had girls dancing the cancan. We had the stars of tomorrow performing songs and dances from the hit musicals of the day. I made it my policy to hire ex-servicemen wherever possible. I had Katz, who spent much of the war in a Japanese POW camp, doing our sign-writing and stage design. Carpentry was coordinated by Jimmy Reubens, a cabinet maker who had worked with Katz on the Burma Railway. Many of the waiters were former merchant seamen.