Took well over a year for this piece to find a home, so never give up on work you think is worth submitting.

My latest published story.

Grumblebum’s Balls Of Fate

This re-worked version of an earlier story has just been published on CafeLit.

https://www.cafelitmagazine.uk/

This piece was published on StereoStories .

Marysville Hotel, Victoria. 1977

By the time I met the Australian rock legend Johnny O’Keefe in 1977, I was working as a roadie for a middle-of-the-road pub band. They played the classic hits that suburban and country audiences wanted to hear. Hardly rock and roll heaven but it was work. The band’s career highlight came when they were booked to back the legendary Johnny O’Keefe at the Marysville pub.

As the band travelled to Marysville, everyone was excited to be working with a household name, albeit someone who had long been considered a has-been. Johnny had presented the TV shows Six O’Clock Rock and Sing Sing Sing in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was more of my older sister’s era but everyone knew about Johnny and his music, as well as his psychiatric issues, his car crashes and his battles with drugs and alcohol. The tsunami of the Mersey sound and US West Coast rock swept over him in the mid-60s and his career never recovered.

As the band was setting up, Johnny’s manager arrived and, handing out sheet music and a running list, said there would be no rehearsals or sound check. I remember him using the phrase “it’s not rocket science”. Which was just as well because the lead guitarist was the only one who could read music and he would signal and mouth the chord and key changes as needed during the show.

The place was packed, including a large contingent of men with slicked-down ducktail haircuts and women with wide skirts supported by half a dozen starched white petticoats. In country towns history lives.

The band had worked their way through their usual sets and now it was time for Johnny. The only spotlight the pub had was trained on him as he made his entrance, resplendent in his tailored red suit. Our lead guitarist intoned: “Ladies and gentlemen, the king of Australian rock and roll, Mr Johnny O’Keefe!” and the crowd rose as one as he launched into a strangely stiff and unwild version of The Wild One.

As he progressed through all the old hits like She’s My Baby, I’m Counting on You, Move Baby Move and She Wears My Ring, I could sense an uneasiness in the crowd. Like me, they seemed to be thinking “Well, he’s here but he isn’t” but they were tempering their disappointment out of respect for The King and what the tickets had cost them.

There was the usual fake finish and the crowd played their part in demanding more. He was going to finish with his famous call-and-response hit, Shout, allowing the audience to vocalise their devotion.

And that was when disaster struck for me and for Johnny. He was half-way through the famous opening sustained holler of ‘We-e-e-e-e-e-e-ll’ when his microphone died.

With no time to find the fault, I ran to the stage, grabbed the protesting lead guitarist’s microphone and trailed the lead out to Johnny, who was standing motionless and impassive in the middle of the floor, staring a thousand yards into the distance. As I handed the microphone to him, scarlet from head to toe, I said lamely ‘Sorry, Johnny’. As I looked into his vacant and unresponsive eyes he mumbled ‘That’s alright, mate’.

I scrambled back to my desk, praying to the God of Roadies that everything would work out and it did. “W-e-e-e-e-e-ll, you know you make me wannna shout …..”

After the standing ovation and the refusal of more encores, Johnny’s manager bundled him into a car and they sped off into the night. Within a year, in 1978, Johnny was dead from a drug overdose, at the age of 43. And the Marysville pub burnt down in the Black Saturday fires of 2009. But they’ll both be alive as long as I live.

This story won the Longer Flash Fiction section (up to 500 words) of the Andrew Siderius Memorial Writing Contest, run by Friday Flash Fiction in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Judges’ comments included:

‘We especially enjoyed Doug’s descriptive language, such as “mustard-gassed appetite” and “the Hades of the wok.” It isn’t often that a reader laughs out loud when reading and visualizing a story. We found that “Currying Disflavour” was not just well-written but hilarious.’

Here’s the story (and for once this story is actually true).

Currying Disflavour

In my impending dotage (and you can stop that sniggering in the back row), I’ve discovered cooking and a penchant for adventure. I found a recipe for squid stir-fry and imagined a song of praise from my goodly spouse. ‘Perfectly cooked squid, on an eclectic bed of seasonal vegetables, conjuring the exotic flavours and aromas of Asia’ a pretentious restaurant menu would have said.

The recipe read ‘green curry paste’ but what would they know; one paste is as good as another, I thought, (ever the egalitarian). With what I imagined was a chefly flourish I enhanced my imagined masterpiece with a large blob of chilli paste, hurled straight into the Hades of the wok.

Instantly, I was alerted to the error of my ways by a nose like a running tap and a total shut-down of my lungs (except for the coughing bit). My wife rushed to my rescue, either concerned about my paroxysms or what I might be coughing into the evening meal, but, alas, she was swiftly felled by the same symptoms.

Every door and window open onto the evening chill, ceiling fans gyrating dangerously at speeds hitherto unknown and the Chernobyl wok banished to the nether regions of the back yard, we averted asphyxiation.

My previously baked sausage rolls sated what was left of our mustard-gassed appetite. They tasted a lot like humble pie.

This piece was published in an anthology of 90 pieces called ‘The Tyranny of Bacon’  published by Truth Serum Press under their Pure Slush label.  I have obviously taken some liberties with the theme.

There’s Bacon and there’s Bacon. In fact, a whole shedload of Bacons dot the British historical landscape. One of their claims to fame was their propensity to promise to pay for things with money they didn’t have and marrying to obtain other people’s money. In that sense, bringing home a Bacon then did not bring forth rejoicing like it does today. It is rumoured that the clan had a certain tendency to bed-hopping and that the lineage may have included more bastards than a loan sharks convention.

But let us repair to more modern times and that artistic enfant terrible, Francis Bacon. If I may digress momentarily, Francis’ grandfather, Anthony, in the best Bacon tradition, emerged from a debtor’s prison to seek out investors to support the obviously insane idea of building a British colony in South Australia.

That obviously planted a seed in the minds of some of the family tree, to the extent that Francis’ father, ‘Eddy’ Bacon was born in Adelaide to a British father and an Australian mother and his siblings continue to have roots in Australia.  However Eddy reverted to type and married a British coal heiress, scuttled off ‘home’ and they spawned the said Francis and three other progeny.

Poor Francis had a largely miserable childhood, mostly as a result of his father’s abhorrence of anything smacking of femininity or homosexuality in his son. At one point he had a stable hand attempt to whip this stain out of Francis’ system. Suffice to say he was unsuccessful.

Francis ran away to London as a young man, surviving on an allowance from his mother. It would seem his only pursuits for many years were drinking and gambling. But then he discovered art and gradually art discovered him and his artistic excrescences made him wealthy in his own lifetime, that rarest of achievements, and it became de rigeur to bring home a Bacon.

Of course after his death in 1992, the monetary value of his works soared and one has sold for over $140 million. The artistic value of his twisted and depressing world view remains the same i.e. a con job of monumental proportions.

It would seem that the apple never falls far from the tree in the Bacon dynasty. Wouldn’t it be fitting if these massive profits were returned to the descendants of those their family ripped off over the years? Pigs might fly.