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.
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!"
