This Rooster's Cooked!
If I hadnt seen him today, this one would have slipped through the cracks. Less of a story...More of a character study in debauchery.
Hit play if you, or anyone within earshot, aren't offended by the liberal use of profanities peppered throughout the recording.
PART 1: Meet Macca the Monged out Man from Melton
Chapter 1. The Fugitive’s Hip
Macca’s been gone for a few weeks now, vanished like smoke from a finished bong. He spent a couple of months with us, reason being that he busted his hip from a fence-leap gone wrong. He’d been trying to outrun the boys in blue, a desperate, clumsy dance to avoid getting hauled in to the station. They’d slapped him with a laundry list of alleged offences – a stolen bicycle or two, a couple of fiery words aimed at his ex-girlfriend, and a stack of those fiddly intervention order breaches that snag you like burrs in a dog’s tail. Initially, I tried to pick at the threads of his story, thinking there was a good yarn tangled in there because everyone in here has a story to share. But after a couple of goes, I almost gave up, because Macca’s mind? It was a paddock stripped bare. Decades of smack, crack, booze, bongs, and whatever other poison he could get his grubby hands on had hollowed him out, left his thoughts rattling like loose change in a tin.
Chapter 2. The Melton Bogan Ballet
He was a reamed-out looking freak, Macca, the living, breathing embodiment of the Melton bogan. Strung out like a broken guitar string, scrawny as a starved possum, eyes beady as a startled sparrow, teeth that looked like they’d fought a losing battle with a brick wall, and a bony chicken-neck that jutted out when he spoke. His speech was a high-pitched squeak, always seasoned with a generous shake of ‘fucks’ or ‘fuckin’s’. The first time our paths crossed, he was doing a wonky jig on crutches, breathlessly telling me, “Fuckin’ yeah, I should be in a fuckin’ wheelchair too, but fuck, the dumb fucks fuckin’ gave me these fuckin’ crutches! I’ve fucked me fuckin’ hip runnin’ from the fuckin’ pigs, and after the fuckin’ operation, the cunts said I shouldn’t even be on me fuckin’ feet. Fuckin’... anyway, where’s the fuckin’ nurses... I need me fuckin’ pain relief for fuck’s sake!”
That tinny, nasal twang of his turned the ‘fuckin’s’ into something else entirely – a crow calling, a sound like ‘faarkin,’ ‘farkeen,’ or ‘fuccin,’ depending on which way the wind of his mood blew. His head had a permanent bob, a restless, chicken-like jerk, and he couldn’t sit still for two seconds. With each ‘fuck’ that tumbled out, he’d flap his arms like a chook and stretch his neck, clucking like a frantic chicken with a bad case of Tourette’s Syndrome.
Chapter 3. Colouring In and Consequences
The physio, sweet Caroline, looked like she’d seen a ghost when she saw him walking so soon after his hip replacement. She rushed him a wheelchair, an old steel and leather chariot that kept him off his brittle bones. At forty years old, he was a young fella for such a worn-out frame, his insides crumbling from the years of drug abuse. He’d allegedly kicked in the back door of his ex-girlfriend’s place – that’s what landed him here – but he looked so frail, you wouldn’t think he could kick shit off a stick, let alone a sturdy door. We fattened him up before he left, a proper garbage guts, he’d Hoover up anything we didn’t want. His grand plan? To beef up by doing a hundred thousand push-ups. The problem, of course, was a memory like a sieve – the tally was always lost, the count forever restarting. So, the fitness dream died, replaced by a new, more manageable mission: colouring in. He’d colour in as many pictures as his jittery fingers could manage, and it was a revelation. It helped immensely with his ADHD, kept him off his feet, and stopped him hassling the nurses for more pain relief. Bunking in with Rob, Rick, and Giovanni, Macca would often do their heads in at night with his endless tales of petty thievery and drug debauchery – unless, that is, he had his colouring book to keep his simple mind humming. It wasn’t the tales themselves that drove them bonkers so much as the relentless, unceasing use and abuse of that single, four-letter word: ‘fuck.’
Despite all this, there was something about Macca that won people over. His cellmates might’ve rolled their eyes when he launched into another rambling story, but they’d still sit and listen. The screws treated him decent. Even the other blokes in the unit had a soft spot for him – maybe it was that he was so bloody harmless, or maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, Macca had a weird kind of charm that cut through the frustration. You couldn’t help but like the silly bastard.
But there was more to Macca’s story than chicken-neck bobs and colouring books...
Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion punters….if there's a moral to the story, then it's in Part 2 innit.