75) It Hurtz Not to be a Darling of the Vitto Fan Club.

I first met Vitto in 1979 at Garibaldis Cafe in Darlinghurst when I put on a benefit to get the old Italian man who ran the cafe some money as he was going broke. I enlisted Cabaret Conspiracy with the great drag artists Doris Fish and Jacqueline Hyde as M.C.s and created portraits of Fifi L'Amour and Doris striding out of Kings Cross, the poster depicted above, me pasting 300 copies on the walls of Sydney to advertise the gig. The heavy fleuro colors against a black background enhanced my ribald cartoon and created quite a stir among local artists and within a year the style became ubiquitous in Sydney. I found Vitto drooling over the table where I'd stacked some of the posters, hoping to sell them for one dollar each. (In 2019  they sell for $2000 and more if you can find one). He refused to part with a dollar and I told him to fuck off. That's kind of been the style of our love/hate relationship ever since.

For the forty years since then, I've been watching him as he's sung like a canary given the third degree, to any and every magazine, newspaper and pamphleteer that's shown up to interview him on his favorite subject, himself and the celebrities he's waited upon at the Piccolo. A bad joke on him would be if he mistook who his interlocutor was and his face got printed on shiploads of toilet paper. (Sorry, my humor is black and half the reason Vitto and I fight like cat and dog.) 

The role-call of stars is endless, Marianne Faithful. Jeff Buckley, Geoffrey Rush, Chrissy Amphlet, Penny Arcade, Noah Taylor, Martin Sharp, on and on, to satisfy shallow, celebrity mad Sydney, forgetting all the mere mortals that were regulars and gave him his bread and butter. In forty years of going there nearly every day, I rarely spotted a celebrity, they bought one cup of coffee every six months, hardly enough to pay for the juke box let alone anything else. (Richard Roxburgh is showing up there in the next week or so to be interviewed by the winner of a Peace Prize, he's reprising his "Rake" persona and a jolly good fellow he is for doing it. I'm not that blind to the comings and goings of celebrity!)

Thankfully Vitto never forgets to mention his particular favorites, a gang of friends who did regularly patronise the business to gossip and promote their shows, darlings whom I also love such as Elizabeth Burton, Fifi L'Amour, Jeannie Lewis, Danny Aboud, Ayesha, Paul Capsis and a few others, but in all the years, no matter how many shows I did or support I gave, he absolutely never mentioned me. I'm just one of the faceless nobodies who spent a lot of money there, helped pay his bills and buy his flat in Randwick. It's not that I want my ego stroked, I've had a great life with enough limelight to satisfy me. It just grates on me that stars are the only worthwhile humans in his world.

There was a whole mob of us gathering there over the last fifty years, many of them now dead and their names remembered on the site "Vittorio Bianchi and Friends" in a long list that Terry Johanson started and we've all contributed to. But many of us are still alive and kicking, (or getting our arses kicked) and as I've said, we're nobodies, non-stars and monstars. Tramps, junkies, hookers, sluts, thieves, hustlers, paupers, artists, strippers, dealers, potheads, rockers, pagans, witches, maniacs, the entire crew from "Walk on the Wild Side" and "Desolation Row", fighting, squabbling, philosophising, loving, smoking, fucking, keeping each other company.

Oh, and let's not forget the quiet angels that sat among us but didn't blow their trumpets, yet are the real stars of "society": nurses, carers, teachers, pro bono lawyers, street musicians, single mums, low-paid cleaners, the place was a sanctuary for them to also rest their tired feet and get some attention, from Vitto and us unruly mob, we were company of a sort. The Piccolo was often referred to as "the artists' cafe", sadly 99% of artists don't get famous, they die in penury. Given the "hell's kitchen" nature of Kings Cross for much of the twentieth century, I suppose I should be grateful to never get a mention as a patron of such a disreputable "lifeboat for losers" on "freak-show alley", it would be bad for my artist's non-career. Still, it's the thought that counts. 

(In mid February 2019 I'm sharing a show with Martin Sharp called "My City of Sydney", we've supposedly both dedicated our lives to plastering Sydney's walls with our artworks, otherwise we're opposites, he was born in Sydney into a wealthy family, went to top art school, was famous, heterosexual and his work wonderfully decorative. I was born in Melbourne and am from an extremely poor family, was rejected from art school, am an ignominious nobody, unashamedly queer and my work is political.)

 

 
I'm sad that all those years of pleasure and pain have been wiped, forgotten, ignored by Vitto's selective memory. There was the time when the electric transformer for the area blew and we sat in the gloom with candles barely lighting the dark for four days and nights, a storm raging outside, me and Vitto freezing our arses off, this event forgotten by his celebrity obsession. The few times Vitto got dragged up to Kings Cross police station to be questioned, psychologically tortured by the pigs, accused of selling marijuana, us anxiously waiting outside for him, this never to be mentioned by him, (him selling pot, oh no!) The many times the pigs raided the cafe, locking us in while they searched us all, going over that "hole in the wall" cafe with a fine tooth comb, a pot dealer kicking his deals under the table to land between my legs, me kicking it back, it becoming a deadly soccer match till the cops caught the mug trying to dislodge the baggie from high up in his lap where I'd kicked it. All of this a contretemps to be written out of history

I cried with Vitto when his Clayton's boyfriend, David, took his life-savings and squandered it on a truck which he then crashed and destroyed. He sold the wreck to buy a motorbike, then ran away to Queensland with an Asian girl riding pillion. I hurt for him when a certain drag queen who lived across the road took that same useless boyfriend home and Vitto stood under her bedroom window and wept as the lights in her inner-sanctum were turned on then off. 

I winced with him when a rough-trade Lebanese hunk named Tony slapped him across the face because he wouldn't give him fifty dollars and I was ready to jump upon the bastard and get myself punched out only he ran off. I giggled hysterically, like Jimmy Dean in the police station in "Rebel Without a Cause", when Vitto showed up one afternoon with his head shaved and a huge lump/cut on his skull, making him look like a concentration camp victim. He'd been attacked by some home-invasion thug in his flat and again his savings robbed from under his mattress. He mistook my sympathetic hysteria for callous laughing at him and ran up Roslyn Street weeping, Lorenzo having to fetch him back. From that day he never went on night shift again, only daylight would get him to the Piccolo, and thus the good old "Nights of Cabiria" at the Piccolo wound down.

When he let it be known that he longed to go back to Europe in 1994 to visit his old family and home it was me who put in the hard work, hiring the venue, (Les Girls), lining up the acts, creating the posters and pasting them up, and organizing the show on the night, me being one of the acts, and getting him $2000 for his trip. It hurt when he not only claimed it wasn't enough money, it really cut me to the bone when many years later he announced from a stage in Redfern that it was Elizabeth Burton who organized the show for him. I don't want any medals or gold cups, let him keep them all, and while I think he's an amusing character who has put in an inordinately long time sealed in a concrete box shouting "helllos" and expletives from the doorway, I don't see him as a saintly Mother Theresa looking after all the down and out, though he does look a bit like her.

I've been bashed up there 7 times, no kidding, once actually knocked out and dropped to that "strange attractor" spot in the middle of the cafe with Vitto screeching like a mother hen and trying to protect me under his wings. I've also received 7 awards because of the help I've received from Vitto and the Cafe's patrons in putting on my shows and distributing my art by handing out my flyers and posters, thus I have a lot of appreciation for the joint, I wasn't completely left off the dance card. Lately it's been Eulalie and her family that have got me back in there with their honest friendship. And the tussle with Vitto is ongoing. The other day I called him "Mary Poppins" and he flipped, saying he hated Julie Andrews and I'm a cunt. Like, who hates Julie Andrews?

Vitto's an amazing guy made up of angel and devil, like most of us, the human condition we all share. It hurts to hear him lionize a mob of fame-whores who wouldn't piss on him if he demanded a golden shower. I was there the day in the Noughties when Cardinal Pell was brought in by Father Syn from the Catholic church down the street. Pell's eyes popped when he clapped them on me like he'd seen Lucifer, then he turned his back on me and was introduced to Vitto. The old devil held out his hand and Vitto kissed his ring, like a good, somewhat deranged, lapsed Catholic, (I was reminded of the hallucinatory scene from "Rosemary's Baby"). Smugly satisfied he'd received obeisance from the queen of Roslyn street the monstar retreated with nary a look my way and after he'd gone in a puff of smoke I rounded on Vitto and hissed, "How could you kiss that man's ring, you silly old queen?" 

"What can I do? I believe in God, and yet I don't, at the same time. I'm terribly conflicted.!" 

"Hmmmm... that sums you up," I thought. "We're all in the same boat only with different leaks!"

At the Cafe of the Fool's Nemesis.

At the Café of the Fool’s Nemesis.

Arthur stared into space, stoned, lost to his surroundings, lost in thought. Where had it all gone wrong? Was it when he was born into his low, working class station? When his father beat him too many times about the head? Or was it when he hit puberty and found his sexuality aberrant and his personality disordered? Was it when he crash-landed in Sydney, choosing the wrong city to operate from, a city rigidly class conscious, shallow and cruel? No matter, he couldn’t afford regrets; he was determined to let go of his grudges as it would only drive him further into madness and dysfunction.

He snapped to attention, aware a garrulous fool was asking him a question, hoping to impress him with a rambling story about what a hipster he was. Arthur knew he didn’t really rate in the guy’s estimation when, in the middle of his reply, his vacuous companion looked over his shoulder to see if anyone more glamorous had come through the door of the Piccolo Bar Cafe. Artie gave up, Hell indeed was the need for other people, and they didn’t give a fuck, wasting one’s time, gazing fixedly into their own narcissistic projections; he wondered why he bothered, no one seemed to have anything really interesting to say, at least not to him. And what of import could he communicate?

Can a few words in the right place save someone’s life, or change History, by inspiring a different course of action and thus defying fate? He cynically didn’t think so. He knew he wouldn’t have listened if someone had said to him not long after his arrival in this convict city, “Leave Sydney now, it’s not the city for you, go overseas, you’d stand a better chance of being recognized as a happening artist!” He had persevered with Sydney for forty years as he felt a burning desire to prove something to the nation that had bred and fucked him. He ordered a café latte from Vitto, the grumpy Italian barista, waiter and carnie barker for this Café on Freakshow Alley. With melancholy he then thought of Godfry and his shocking story, whose fate not even Mother Mary could’ve averted, with all her pious prayers and wise emanations.

Arthur and Vitto agreed that Godfry was one of the best looking, hunkiest of men they’d ever clapped eyes on, good-natured and masculine, alluring and athletic. Arthur remembered the night he’d sat at this very table with young Godfry, smoking a joint in bonhomie, before the shit came down. If only he’d spoken up and said what he truly thought, he might have helped avoid a lot of angst. If nobody ever really listens, what could a poor poof do? Godfry had inherited the Cafe Bread and Circuses from his Uncle Ozzie but he was only nineteen and had grander ambitions, too young and silly to take charge of a Second Reality hotspot. Whereupon his father, Joe Podesta, stood in the breach and tried to run the Cafe for him, keeping old Vittorio on as front man and star attraction.

Joe was dying slowly from prostate cancer and was in no fit state to handle or humor the rag-tag, freaky crew that frequented the Kitty-Litter Café. He particularly hated drug dealers and addicts, loudly bemoaning the Welfare State that supported them, forever trying to rouse the dazed Kings Cross Businessmen’s Association into cleaning up Roslyn Street, wherein the Cafe was positioned, ejecting the suspect denizens lurking in its doorways. Joe’s own daughter had been a long-time heroin user and had dragged him to the end of his tether; after all her wheedling and stealing he could only ban her from his presence, and blame drugs for all that was wrong with the world. His rancor built until he took to carrying a gun and waving it at would be drug interlopers, frothing at the mouth, scaring them off, for awhile, and scaring most of his faint-hearted customers as well.

All the excitement was doing poor Joe in; arse on fire he called in the cavalry and hired a Security Firm to visit the Cafe three-hourly to check all was quiet on the battle-front. Whenever trouble exploded, the Security Guards came after the event, making of themselves an added nuisance by glowering at the innocent potheads cowering over their coffees. Joe badgered the Police into harassing the area’s vagrants off the scene, any Bohemian type got questioned and searched, and the Café regulars couldn’t talk their subversive bullshit or smoke their ganja in a relaxed and civilized manner.

As a last resort, when some down and out junkie proved particularly tenacious at clinging to a table or shooting up in the dungeon-toilets, he called in his burly son, Godfry, to beat the shit out of the recalcitrant sod. There was much muttering and moaning of shock-horror from his peacenik patrons who had to witness the degrading spectacle of humans reduced to punching bags. The Café was devolving into a zombie-plagued wasteland, not like the Golden days when Ozzie ran everything smoothly and the place was a haven for artistes and intellectuals.

The mutinous mutterings against Joe wound down and the regulars stuck to their perches, for they belonged nowhere else. Vitto endured every calamitous brouhaha, ignoring the blandishments and threats thrown his way by the never-ending stream of seductive hoods, coping with Joe’s cranky peccadilloes and deaf to the cacophony of abuse and demands from the Café’s patrons. Joe had been a Security Guard himself for twenty years and dreamed of his son going one rung higher and becoming a Policeman, the epitome of a respectable career in his eyes.

Godfry should have settled for the Sacred Weed Cafe; with pot dealing on the side it was a hip, viable business; but why be a small time ganja crim, he thought, when you could jump into the big-time and get a Doctorate in Crookedness simply by joining the Police Force. He was smart enough to realize he could amass greater wealth under the cover of a Cop, a legalized, protected criminal as it were. Thus Godfry and his father’s dreams vaguely coincided, though Joe would turn into stone if he knew the eventual outcome.

That night when they sat at the table together, as he passed the joint, Godfry told Arthur that he was applying to the Police Academy to be a Cop. Arthur should have strongly emphasized, “No, don’t do it! You’ll make your family miserable, destroy your youth and bring on ruination for all. Everyone will hate you and disown you. You are inviting disaster and damnation!” Instead Arthur said nothing, he just mouthed platitudes like “Everyone’s gotta do what they gotta do” and “Que sera sera, whatever will be will be”, toking on the spliff, smiling enigmatically, for he hated Pigs and hoped never to know one. What to do? Godfry had a date with his Kismet.

While most people derided Joe as a mean old dork who wouldn’t even give Vitto a Christmas bonus, Arthur liked him, for he was a stalwart old bastard, straight forward and upright, gruffly naïve for all his conservative, narrow-minded views. Poor Honest Joe died of cancer within the year and Godfry went on to become an outstanding Police Officer who tried to corner the franchise on party drugs for the inner-city ravers, running his whole operation from the Bondi Junction Police Station.

His partner was a steroid-addicted fellow cop by the name of Johnny Stompano, not too smart, but as an over-muscled body-builder he could stomp on anyone who got in their way. Together they hustled the Sydney-city clubs and ware-house raves, the gyms and beach-side cafes, selling Ecstasy tablets, marihuana, Acid, Speed, cocaine and steroids by the plane-load, and, devil may care, they sampled too much of their own wares. It all got away from them, blew up in their faces, and try-hard Old Joe rolled over in his grave.

Urban Myth would have it that Godfry’s courier, a naïve French guy, also sampled the goods he was carrying, taking copious amounts of Ecstasy and Acid on a three-day binge, till in the end he didn’t know which planet he was on. He tried to do a runner with all the contraband but Godfry and partner were on the trail and, after an all night drug binge also unhinged them, they badly spun out and would’ve done in Queen Elizabeth if she’d crossed their path. The Frechman’s room-mate stupidly rushed to the Bondi Police Station and blabbed to them he was worried about his mate who was running amok on the beach with a knife. This was the info Godfry was waiting for and, rounding up a posses of pigs to back him up, they blundered down to Bondi Beach to confront him and stop him from ruining the drug-running scam. They had worked themselves up into a tizzy and there was no way they were going to let this French wanker rip them off.

They cornered the tripping Frenchman at dawn on the famous beach; he blathered on idiotically about the drugs and their bastardry and was about to give the game away to anybody who had ears to listen, slashing a butter-knife at the demonic cops advancing upon him. While most of the cops from the station must’ve known about the illicit business, they kept their mouths shut and, as usual, closed ranks and let Godfry do what he will. He wanted his drugs back and he wanted the Frenchie to shut the fuck up! But the guy kept on babbling, waving the knife in their faces, he was in Lala-land with the fairies, and ogres were about to devour him. And Godfry was just as dizzy.

A few joggers passing by watched as the pressure mounted, Godfry and Johnny the Stomper both shaking their Service revolvers at the Frenchman, screaming for him to put down his weapon. The group hysteria ballooned, the maniac tripper jerked about like a robot in shock, the Cop’s fury flared white-hot, and the onlookers screeched. Godfry was drug-addled himself, lost in the heat of the moment, there was no way out, the fucker wouldn’t shut his goddamned, thieving mouth and chill out! “Rave! Rave! Gobble gobble! Gook gook!” gabbled the Frenchman.

“Blam! Blam! Blam!” They shot him dead.

The ensuing scandal shook the Halls of Piggery to their dungeons. While Godfry was hauled over the coals and indicted for murder, his partner fled to New Zealand where he eventually hung himself in his hotel room from the shame of it all. The outrageous details of their drug business were revealed at the Inquest, and it was mooted that their tentacles of corruption spread far and wide in the Emerald City. Johnny Stompano committed suicide over the mortification he had caused his good Italian family but he should’ve braved it out because after many years of investigation and sub-trials, like every other cop ever accused of anything, Godfry got acquitted of manslaughter.

As a Police Officer who had suffered a stressful situation in the line of duty, he was allowed to get away with it, cops being masters of mayhem and deceit. To this day his name is whispered ingloriously among the cognoscenti of deadbeat Café society and the stupid mug must hang his head in regret that he never took on the Dumb Luck Café where he could’ve led a laid back life, Prince of the Potheads, lording it over the hordes of damp-squids and bandage-queens slurping at their coffees.

If only Arthur had tried to talk him out of the Pig idea, but he couldn’t have influenced such a destiny, he was hard put to organize his own affairs; waking life for him was like a dream in which he tried to wrest control and find direction while a hurricane raged about his head. Swimming in a torrent of chaos, distracted, it was a miracle he stayed afloat and it was a hell of a job to get focused. All was in flux, the Café shimmering, its quantum particles colliding, scintillating, as if he was experiencing the flashback of a psychedelic hallucination, life-forms rushing by like in a time-lapsed film, the light strobing, darker, fainter, darker, fainter, until the Café Time Machine disappeared and Arthur passed out, too stoned to care anymore.

Before cranky, upright Joe Podesta died, fed up with all the malicious dramas, he tried to sell the Lifeboat For Losers Café but there were no takers, it was too much trouble and quackery for most businessmen’s taste. In fear that he’d have no reason for living if he was booted from his galley-post, Vitto mortgaged his apartment to raise the money Joe hankered for and thus, in his old age, Vitto had finally become the owner of the establishment he’d slaved in for forty years.

Vitto had humored, outwitted and cajoled the druggies for the longest time and they were unable to drag him down easily, and while the Ship of Fools Café felt like it was sinking into a morass of self-indulgent mind-obliteration, it was full steam ahead as far as the Old Queen Vitto was concerned. Night after calamitous night, Arthur jived to all the Café’s shamanic gigs with Vitto as the old Berdache, nights like a cave-man’s séance attracting restless spirits with a never-ending variation on absurdity, a freak-show wherein Vitto was the Mother of all Monsters. Movie stars, non-stars and monstars patronized the Vampyres’ Crypt Café over the years, Vitto welcoming them in like a camp Count Yorga, and if he were asked who was the Crown Prince of Monsters he would unreservedly shriek “Arthur Farthing!” and cross himself, for he was still a good Catholic, lapses notwithstanding, and Arthur was a child of Lucifer.

Arthur had worked hard to become the accomplished terror he was, he’d studied under Grand Masters in Divine Foolishness, and nobody could crack a ribald triple entendre, a salacious witticism, a scathing curse, faster than he. He waxed ecstatic taking the piss, calling Vitto Mother Theresa or Grandma Moses, mocking his mythic saintliness. He often had Vitto lamenting his victimization because he couldn’t get the joke, he had no sense of humor about himself, moaning like a mock-turtle, “Oh why don’t you cunts leave me fucking alone? Why are you always putting shit on me!” Long before other accomplished cabaret artists used the “Hole in the Wall Theatre” to portray its generic red-light history Arthur had treated the Café as if it were a twisted stand-up comedy club with Vitto as the straight man, and he milked the silly old poof for every laugh he could get. The passing crowd lapped it up like it was a bent Laurel and Hardy born again show.

Vitto loved to waffle on, making grandiloquent pronouncements about obscure, meaningless Hollywood movies and Arthur would tear him to shreds by making up ridiculous titles like “Splendor in the Arse” starring Arnie Shwartzbugger and Dolly Farton. The bad joke would suck the tizzy old queen in for awhile, mulling over the conjured-up, sordid movie scenarios, then he would suddenly flash that his third leg was being pulled and he would hiss, “Is nothing sacred in your fucking universe, Arthur?” Vitto loved to dish out the crap but couldn’t take it, so it was with mischievous pleasure that Arthur constantly teased the old Fairy, and anyone else who wanted to join in the banter.

To Arthur, Reality was a Divine Comedy of Horrors; laughter made the sadness bearable, if he didn’t laugh, he would cry, like Jimmie Dean at the police station, Beauty could only laugh in the face of the Beast. The very mention of that long dead film-star would suck Vitto into movie histrionics further, mooning and ballyhooing, as if he were drowning in a bottomless muck-pit of Hollywood detritus. Movies, shmovies, he went on and on about them like a scratched gramophone record, lamenting the passing of the “Golden Years”, “They don’t make stars like they used to” and “Where has all the glamour gone?” He was a fan of Mussolini, pre-World War Two in his mindset and he couldn’t swing with the pop culture of today. The rest of the peanut gallery joined in on the litany to the gods of the silver screen and Arthur found plenty of dumb opinions to crack apart with bad jokes.

Arthur felt fearless, he had been through a thousand levels of Heaven and Hell, been called every fag-arsehole under the sun, sat with the mighty and the humble, won a few accolades and many kicks in the arse, and nothing seemed to really faze him anymore. Life was short and shy boys got left without a dance. Toking down deep on his joint, Arthur reminisced into his cup of café latte on how it had been a long, bloody hard road to attain his kind of resilience, confidence and humor. He’d lived through much to become a punk freak and was determined to make subversive use of it, for the sacred cow of celebrity-mad Sydney needing badly to be satirized. Ever the horny satyr he determined to be the satirist to do it. And though its gutters were the toughest to surf, even if it took fifty years, he would make of Sydney a breakfast of champions.