Sex & Money Read online

  How I lived, breathed, read,

  wrote, loved, hated, dreamed

  and drank men's magazines

  MARK DAPIN

  A SUE HINES BOOK

  ALLEN & UNWIN

  First published in 2004

  Copyright © Mark Dapin 2004

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  A Sue Hines Book

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Dapin, Mark.

  Sex and money.

  ISBN 1 74114 320 9.

  1. Dapin, Mark. 2. Periodicals - Australia.

  3. Journalists – Australia – Biography. I. Title.

  070.92

  Edited by Jo Jarrah

  Cover & text design by Phil Campbell

  Typesetting by Pauline Haas

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE In which things go very, very wrong

  ONE In which I get tattooed, pierced, beaten up etc

  TWO In which I get a job, dwarfs get thrown and a World War 2 bomber gets found on the moon

  THREE In which I get married, write a Forum Letter and watch a porn video

  FOUR In which I get punched in the face, every day for a year

  FIVE In which I become a parasite in The Picture, and work on a magazine for parasites at the Australian Financial Review

  SIX In which Ralph is called Ralph

  SEVEN In which I become editor of Ralph, and am almost eaten by Kerri-Anne Kennerley

  EIGHT In which Anthony Mundine chases Solomon Haumono who chases the Pleasure Machine, Mimi Macpherson suffers back problems and the Doner eats its own shit

  NINE In which I disrespect the competition – Men’s Health, Max, GQ and FHM – and the censor

  TEN In which I meet Chopper Read and Claudia Schiffer, but the two of them don’t get along, and I discover an English-speaking people just like you or me

  ELEVEN In which I flee Australia, learn Spanish and seek asylum in Cuba

  TWELVE In which I get tricked into coming back, and give a few hundred dollars to Kerry Packer, who must have been a bit short at the time

  THIRTEEN In which Eric does not lose his virginity to Yvonne, but I lose my temper with New Zealand, and jack it in for good

  EPILOGUE

  AFTERWORD

  APPENDIX The Ten Immutable Rules of Magazine Publishing

  PROLOGUE

  In which things go very, very wrong

  March 1988: I woke up in a mouth full of broken teeth, a yawning alleyway glistening with incisors of glass. I had no money, no ID, no jacket, no shoes, no cigarettes, and no idea where I was. My chest ached for a cigarette, I was shivering like a junkie, and I had started drinking whisky so I had to finish drinking whisky, and I had not finished because I was awake, so I had to find more whisky and more cigarettes, and I had to find my way home.

  I rolled to my feet and limped into the road, wearing an Adidas t-shirt, jeans and white socks. Where were my shoes? How could I possibly have lost my shoes? The houses in the street were cramped and mean, and too close together. I could not see any shops, or any place I knew. It was 1 am.

  A knot of men in heavy jackets stood talking in the road. I approached them with a foal’s balance, choosing each footfall with care. I asked them where I was. In eunuch voices, they told me the name of the street. Actually, I wanted to know the name of the city.

  ‘Swansea,’ they said.

  Swansea in Wales. Damn and shit and fuck and damn. I lived in England.

  I hugged my arms to keep warm, rubbing tattoos. I said I did not know what had happened to me, and I needed a cigarette, and I could not get home, and I was looking for somewhere to sleep. They gave me a smoke, lit it for me, then ran away.

  I had been stuck on the streets before, and I knew a night lasts a week. Time winks and slouches, your watch laughs at you. You need to drink to sleep and there is no drink so you do not sleep and the longer you stay awake the more you withdraw, and it would be so easy if somebody just came along with a quarter bottle of Bells or a couple of cans of Tennent’s Super and a pack of Embassy No. 1. Everything would be alright, and it wouldn’t matter about the cold.

  What the hell happened to my shoes?

  I was twenty-five years old and nothing had gone right for so long I had begun to expect mornings like this one, chilly and inexplicable, with their imagined bruisings and strange pains, but I never expected to be in Wales.

  A minibus crowded with police officers was waiting at the end of the road: rows of meat-fat men with buttons for eyes. I decided to turn myself in.

  I leant into the driver’s window and told him I had been drinking in England and woken up in Wales, and I had lost all my money. Was there any chance he could arrest me, as I needed to spend the night in a cell?

  The copper wanted to know if I had committed a crime.

  None that I could remember (although I had, in fact, committed several).

  He told me the deal with the Welsh police was no crime, no arrest.

  Tell that to the striking miners, you bastard. I begged the copper to change his mind. He shook his head. I tried to climb through the window into the cab. Amiably, he swatted me away.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said, ‘we’ll come back here in an hour, and if you still want us to arrest you, we’ll do it then.’

  That seemed fair, but the temperature was quivering around freezing, so I decided to keep warm by walking in a circle. Within minutes, I was lost. How could the coppers arrest me if they could not find me? The logical thing to do was to go and find the coppers. A taxi driver gave me directions to the police station, to which I reported just outside the hour’s grace I felt I had been given.

  I presented myself to the desk sergeant to claim my cell.

  He told me he could not arrest me unless I was a criminal. Suddenly, I realised I was a vagrant – I had no money, no local address and I was drunk. I asked to be incarcerated under the Vagrancy Act. The desk sergeant, a kind and patient man, said I could sleep on the bench where people were waiting to report crimes.

  This was okay for a few minutes, but I could not lie down, and it was too cold and bright and noisy to sleep. I was fixated by the idea of a warm, dark cell, with a mattress, a pillow, a bucket and a blanket.

  Complainants queued at the desk, distracting the sergeant’s attention. I pretended to doze, waiting for my moment. When his back was turned, I sprinted across the room and vaulted the desk, aiming for the corridor which I presumed led to the cells. The sergeant intercepted me and pushed me back over to the other side, yelling, ‘If you don’t fuck off out of here right now, I will fucking arrest you, and you’ll fucking know about it!’

  Back on the street, I tried to think what could have dropped me to this new low in my chaotic, directionless, hollow, vapid, sporadically violent life.

  Oh yeah. Whisky.
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  I could remember sitting with my mate Chris, drinking a bottle of Scotch under a railway bridge. We were on our way to see The Pogues. We were always on our way to see The Pogues, and we were always drinking.

  The plan had been to stay with another mate, JF, in Cardiff, but I did not know if we had ever got there. I assumed I had not managed to reach the concert, and instead had wandered into an alley, taken off my clothes and thrown away my money. Chris, meanwhile, had been kidnapped by aliens.

  I looked down at my socks. The soles had disintegrated. As I trudged off to nowhere, I left footprints of blood.

  In 1988, The Pogues were the best band in the world. Their music was a madman’s howl of Irish folk raped by punk rock and drowned in whisky, piss and beer. When Shane MacGowan, beautiful and repulsive, sang of hurt and loss and drunken sadness, he was talking to me – like The Clash when they recorded their first album, like The Jam when they made ‘Setting Sons’, and like the voices in my head that told me to go out and murder marketing people.

  I am just kidding about the voices.

  I drank in eleven Pogues gigs between 1984 and 1990. The first time, at Warwick University in Coventry, the band was so tight MacGowan could play guitar and sing while lying on his back. The last time, at the Coogee Bay Hotel in Sydney, the best he could do was lie on his back. No matter what song the band played, MacGowan sang the opening stanzas of his bloodshot, pagan hymn, ‘If I Should Fall From Grace With God’.

  He drank vodka offered by the crowd, collapsed, and eventually wandered off stage, leaving the tin whistle player to take over vocals.

  In March 1988, MacGowan only sang ‘If I Should Fall From Grace With God’ when the rest of the band played it. The Pogues could chill a thug to tears with their sublime Christmas hit, ‘Fairytale of New York’, and I was the biggest fuck-up I knew.

  I guessed there must be dosshouses in Swansea where the homeless could get a bed. I asked taxi drivers – the only people on the streets at 2 am – and they directed me to an unmarked terrace in a bleak road in a cruel area a long way from the centre of town.

  I needed somewhere closer. I crammed myself into a piss-stinking phone box, and called the Samaritans, who are supposed to help desperate people over their pre-dawn dread. I explained to the telephone Samaritan that I was lost in Wales, in the middle of the night, without my wallet. I was icy cold, and I was dressed for the beach. I did not understand what had happened to me, I could not even get myself arrested, and I needed to find somewhere to sleep before my feet blackened and froze.

  ‘Yes,’ said the gently stupid voice, ‘but what’s really your problem?’

  You’re my fucking problem now, mate. Are you going to tell me where to sleep, or aren’t you?

  He was not. His speciality was underlying causes, rather than bandaid solutions.

  It took me two hours to find the crash pad. When a tired social worker opened the door, I could have hugged her – but then I could have hugged Hitler, I was so hopelessly, chillingly, teeth-chatteringly cold. I told her my story and she said I could not come in. She ran a ‘dry house’, and I was obviously drunk. She could, however, offer me a cup of tea and a blanket, and allow me to sleep on the step.

  Eventually, she relented. I was to be allowed in the house, but not in the dormitory. I would be permitted to doze on the sofa until 6 am, but I would have to be gone before the ‘skippers’ rose for breakfast. I must not set a bad example to the tramps.

  I had two hours sleep, and woke up to two huge, gaunt, tallow-eyed faces looming over me and muttering. A couple of early-rising Welsh tramps wanted to sit down.

  The morning was still a blurry black as I trekked off to Swansea Railway Station, and I still had no idea what had happened.

  There was no guard on the gate for the first train to Cardiff. I walked straight through and into a carriage, where I sat, shaking. An inspector asked me for my ticket. I stared at him and shook some more. He shrugged and ignored me. This must be how the mentally ill travel, pursuing their illusory errands, ignored by authority, not expected to contribute, barely visible.

  There was a man on duty at Cardiff Station. I walked past him, wordless, quaking. He looked away.

  I knew JF lived in Cardiff, but I did not know where. I shuddered into the taxi office to borrow a phone book. The manager asked if I had had an accident. By this time, I had quite a long story to tell, even though I did not know how I had come to be in Wales. She listened with a mother’s heart. Perhaps she had a son my age who had one day slipped out for a quiet pint and come back three years later with no left leg, ten kinds of sexually transmitted diseases, a tarantula on his shoulder, and a corporal’s rank in the Spanish Foreign Legion.

  When I read out JF’s address, she put me in a cab and had the driver take me there for free.

  I walked into JF’s house to find Chris in bed with my brother. They said it had been a great concert and – surprisingly – I had been there. I had kicked my brother in the stomach, then invited him into the bathroom, where I had demonstrated how to use an axe kick to dislodge a sink from the wall. They were not sure where I had gone after that.

  JF had planned to see The Pogues with us, but had pulled out when he saw the state we were in when we arrived, breathless with beer, with poker-machine eyes; my brother had come up from home as a last-minute substitute.

  Nobody knew anything about my missing clothes.

  Chris suggested I ring the gig venue, the Swansea Mayfair. They were frosty and unhelpful, but they confirmed they had a leather jacket, and some shoes. They asked the size of the shoes I had lost. I asked how many people could possibly have left their shoes at a concert. They told me I would be surprised. I said they were size eight tasselled loafers.

  I took the train back to Swansea, wearing borrowed shoes and socks, with borrowed money in my jeans. The Mayfair was dark, unfamiliar and closed. A gruff worker led me to a room around the back, where my jacket was hanging on a rack, with my wallet, cards and money all inside.

  There had been a misunderstanding about the shoes. The only style they had was size ten, plain slip-on – and they had forgotten to mention there was only one of them.

  A week later, Chris and I were walking to the Brighton Centre, on our way to meet my brother and watch The Pogues. Brighton in Sussex is more than 300 kilometres from South Wales, but a t-shirt seller stopped me in the street and asked how I was feeling after Swansea.

  He said I had a fight with somebody in the audience, and I was pulled off him by two bouncers, who started battering me. They, in turn, were pulled off me by a big guy with spiky blond hair, who picked me up and carried me outside. I remembered his face, above me like the moon, and his voice asking if I was okay.

  The bouncers must have pulled my jacket from my back in the brawl, and a Welsh terrier must have eaten my shoes.

  March 7, 1988, was the last time I drank whisky.

  ONE In which I get tattooed, pierced,

  beaten up etc.

  A couple of questions still puzzle me about the 1980s: (1) What went wrong with my life? (2) What the hell happened to my shoes?

  I am resigned to never learning the answer to (2), but I still struggle with (1).

  I was born in Leeds, England, in 1963, to a working-class, Jewish family on their way up. My dad was a good man, much better than I ever realised, but aside from an enormous reluctance to do anything around the house or garden, I had little in common with him.

  My dad was born in Liverpool, his parents were Russian. He left school at fourteen, unable to read and in love with football.

  My dad’s father first met Jimmy, my mum’s father, when Jimmy led a cabinet-makers’ strike. My Russian grandfather was bussed in from Liverpool to take the strikers’ work. That defined the politics of the two sides of my family. The Dapins were Tories, the Benjamins were socialists. I do not know what kind of a man dad’s father was – he died before I was born – but Jimmy said he liked him.

  Dad did his National Service in
the Royal Corps of Signals, stationed at Sherwood Forest during the Korean War. His discharge papers describe his military conduct as ‘very good’ and say he was ‘of sober habits’. He drank a glass of Drambuie perhaps once a year, and smoked the occasional secret cigarette. I did not love him enough, I never loved anybody enough.

  Dad went to work as a cutter in a tailoring factory, a semi-skilled job he held until he was thirty. He met my mum at a dance, they married and she taught him to read. He then took a job as a greetings-card rep, selling to newsagents and gift shops. When his employer went bankrupt, he turned self-employed and did moderately well. The wardrobes in our house were piled with boxes of samples, labelled ‘18th’, ‘21st’ or, mysteriously, ‘OK acetate’. He branched out into related novelties, such as a 21st-birthday plastic numberplate that read ‘UR21’, and a less popular model to celebrate the first birthday of twins, ‘U2R1’.

  The most important thing in my dad’s life was football. He had been an amateur referee since he gave up playing, but could never take the professional referee’s examination because he could not read the exam paper. The cut-off age for new referees was thirty, so by the time he was literate it was too late. He refereed every Saturday, for sides based in pubs and community clubs, on open fields near Roundhay Park. If he could not referee, he would be a linesman. On Sundays, he officiated over Sunday-league games. He once refereed a game played by blind people, with a bell inside the ball. He loved Grandstand, Match of the Day and Sportsnight with Coleman. He hated Leeds United. This was unfortunate, since we lived in Leeds, and Leeds United was the most glamorous team in the English First Division, and one of the most successful clubs in Europe.

  Dad liked to go to games, but never to the Leeds ground, Elland Road. While Leeds were winning the UEFA Cup (1971), the FA Cup (1972) and finally the first-division championship (1974), we drove together to half-a-dozen dour Yorkshire market towns – Rotherham, Doncaster, the onomatopoeic Grimsby – to watch fourth-division sides play insignificant fixtures, but I did not mind because I loved him, although not enough. My dad had simple ambitions. He wanted a marriage and children, a house and a car, a little love and respect, and enough money.