Chopper Unchopped by Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read Page A

at a time, and we’ll deal with them.
    We were going to deal with them in no uncertain terms, short of death. Anyway, they went away and had a chat about it, Amos Atkinson and Jimmy Loughnan and another bloke. And they came up with the theory that the old Chopper’s gone crazy.
    The next day I stepped into the yard and that was it. Amos Atkinson bailed out of the yard. He had held hostages at the Italian Waiters’ club and demanded my release from H Division, and so still couldn’t go all the way against me. He wouldn’t turn on me, but at the same time he wouldn’t warn me that I was going to be attacked either, so he got out of the yard.
    They really didn’t have the courage to come to me and say: ‘No, we don’t want to be in it’. If they had said: ‘No, we don’t want to be in it’, I would have said ‘all right’, but they thought I was so off my head at the time that they couldn’t reason with me.
    I lost part of my spleen, most of the gall bladder, so many feet of stomach tubing, so many feet of bowel, part of the colon. I got the ice pick in the back of the neck, which nearly severed the spine.
    After the operation I was found on the hospital floor doing pushups. You’ve got to understand that they fill you full of pethidine. The day after I had stitches everywhere, tubes in my nose, in my arm and in my penis, but I was also as high as a kite on pethidine.
    I did do, I think, 30 pushups. I think I re-split the stitches inside my stomach. I did it just to prove that I hadn’t been got at. The reason I tell you this, is that no-one did a day’s jail over the attack. It was declared a case of self-defence and it’s now ancient history.
    I don’t want to say much about Jimmy Loughnan. When I got stabbed in H Division in 1979 I went from an 18-stone giant to a 14 stone weakling overnight.
    The treachery of Jimmy’s actions that day upset my mental wellbeing and I still remember it as if it was yesterday. The stabbing was nothing. Big deal, you get over that, although I never did regain my physical stature. Prior to that I was 18 stone of rock. To think that I was doing 13 years for trying to get Jimmy out of J Ward Ararat. Ah well.
    I saw Jim again in late 1983 when I came up from Jika. I was walking past B Division to go to the clothing store. There was Jimmy, standing in front of B Division. He couldn’t fight, but he wasn’t a coward, so he stood his ground and braced himself for the expected bashing.
    I walked up and kissed him on the cheek and said: ‘Don’t worry Jimmy, I’m not going to hurt you. Your own life will destroy you’.
    He said: ‘Yeah, I know it will’.
    As I walked away he called out to me, ‘It wasn’t personal, Chopper’.
    I kept walking and didn’t turn back. I had tears in my eyes. Why didn’t I kick him into a bleeding jelly? The bloke had been my best friend since 1975. He was my brother. I loved him like a brother. I wasn’t angry and I didn’t hate him; he just broke my heart.
    I saw him once more after that in K Division about two days before the fire. I saw poor Robert Wright the very day before. He said: ‘We’ve got something going Chopper, you’ll love it. It will be good for a laugh’. Poor mad buggers.
    The whole reason I went into the court that day and grabbed Judge Martin was all to do with my friendship with Loughnan. I was trying to get Jimmy out of J Ward Ararat. He was writing to me, pleading with me to get him out. I once promised him in H Division, and I always keep a promise to a friend.
    He had just escaped from jail and broke both his ankles, when he jumped the fence. He was in the yard there, it was raining, he was crying and his feet were blue, and he thought he was going to lose both his feet. He had four, five or six years to go. I said, ‘listen Jim, when I get out, give me about six months, then write to me and then I’ll come and get you’.
    He said, ‘you’ll be out eating pizzas and drinking beer and you won’t want to