Welcome to Story Club Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  Logies

  BEN JENKINS

  A Well-founded Suspicion of Bathroom Doors

  ANNABEL CRABB

  500 Ruined My Marriage

  DAVID MARR

  Because Figs Are Very Expensive

  SUSIE YOUSSEF

  These Are the Places in Belgium

  MARK SUTTON

  The Mermaid

  CASSIE WORKMAN

  Rooted

  RICHARD GLOVER

  No Strategy

  JESSICA TUCKWELL

  Christmas

  ROB CARLTON

  He Shall Be Named Hammerstein

  KATE MULVANY

  Pants Off, Red Dirt

  ALLAN CLARKE

  Do You Not Know How To Lie?

  CATHY WILCOX

  Hungry Jack’s Robbery

  CAMERON JAMES

  Inconsistencies with the Presentation of the Pasta Special

  REBECCA HUNTLEY

  The Gay, Fat, Sad Trilogy

  DAVID CUNNINGHAM

  The Chairs Are Gone

  JESSICA DETTMANN

  Kenny

  JAMES VALENTINE

  Nursing Juliet

  NIKKI BRITTON

  Stop, Warhammer Time!

  JORDAN RASKOPOULOS

  Waiting for Lester

  PHIL SPENCER

  Rock Stars

  JACQUELINE MALEY

  Kill Your Dinner

  EDDIE SHARP

  Fruity Lexia

  OSHER GÜNSBERG

  Don’t Leave

  CAIT HARRIS

  Original Prankster

  ALEX LEE

  It’s Rare

  BENEDICT HARDIE

  A Chatty Girl

  DEBRA OSWALD

  Unisex

  LEWIS HOBBA

  The Midweek New Year’s Eve

  JONATHAN HOLMES

  The Night Was Warm

  RHYS NICHOLSON

  Stakeout

  KATE MCCLYMONT

  No Booze

  TOBY SCHMITZ

  Tequila

  ZOE NORTON LODGE

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Introduction copyright © Zoe Norton Lodge and Ben Jenkins 2018

  Introduction

  Story Club: It was an idea we had because we wanted to make an alternative to stand-up for funny writers who didn’t have many opportunities to perform. What it became was something so much more than that. And, frankly, we can’t believe it’s still around. Like a lovely old Labrador with an excellent constitution, Story Club just keeps going and, in our opinion, it just gets better and better.

  Originally, a stage populated by our mates and attended by our parents, the lovely old Story Club chair has now seated poets, activists, journalists, politicians, authors, playwrights, filmmakers, Olympians, broadcasters, actors, critics, commentators and everything in between. Our storytellers come from all over the place, are of different ages and backgrounds and all bring something special to this night that we’re so, so proud to curate.

  It’s been a decade since we first put on this night – and it’s a thrill to sit back and watch it grow up. First and foremost a comedy night, our exceptionally brave and generous storytellers have taken it to places we never could have imagined. These days on any given night you may cry, hurl yourself out of your seat in rapturous applause and just laugh till you pee. And this is a huge credit to our audience – no matter how dark or raw, they go with our storytellers every step of the way.

  Huge thanks go to everyone at Giant Dwarf, the home of Story Club. Craig Reucassel and Julian Morrow are what we call our Story Dads. Along with the phenomenal Nikita Agzarian, they saw what we were trying to do back at uni and leant their considerable resources and talents to help us evolve it into something so much bigger and better. With their help, Story Club has moved to a 300- seat theatre, become a TV show and a podcast.

  There are people in this volume who have been with us from the very start. Alex Lee, David Cunningham, Mark Sutton, Phil Spencer, Eddie Sharp and Cait Harris all told stories for us for free beers and the attention of whichever undergraduates had managed to stick around that evening. We’re thrilled, and not a little surprised, that they’ve stayed with us for so long. Alongside them are all the amazing new people we get to meet each month as we watch our Story Club family grow so big it really deserves its own reality TV show.

  So what we’ve tried to do here is take that night – a room full of people packed tight, clutching beers and wines and leaning forwards in their seats, listening to someone spin a story, and laugh or gasp or cringe along – and decant it into a book you can hold in your hands, take with you on the bus, curl up with in bed or leave by the loo. (Where and when you have your own private Story Club is frankly none of our business.)

  Of course, after a decade of storytelling every month, making this tiny selection was almost impossible. This book is a mere scoop of water from an ocean of stories. If it whets your appetite, please feast upon the Story Club podcast, where there is a veritable treasure trove of stories waiting for you to devour.

  Stories are how we make sense of the world and, to that end, this volume features people trying to make sense of foiled robberies, disastrous live-to-air broadcasts, conniving siblings and very close cousins, marriages falling apart, children growing up, the lies we tell strangers for no reason and how anything – even a rock’n’roll instrumental from the 1950s – can remind us that one day we’ll die.

  So in the meantime, take a seat, grab a drink and settle in. Welcome to Story Club.

  Love,

  Ben and Zoe

  BEN JENKINS

  Ben is a writer and comedian who’s worked in TV, radio, print and also on the information super highway, or ‘internet’. In 2011, he took a semester off his arts degree to work as a researcher for The Chaser and, since then, has worked on- and off-screen with them on more than half a dozen TV shows. The arts degree remains unfinished. His work has been published in Going Down Swinging, People of Letters and The Best Australian Comedy Writing, as well as this very book that you’re holding now. Ben co-created Story Club with Zoe Norton Lodge when they were housemates in 2009, mainly as a ruse to get free beer at the university bar. It got out of hand.

  ‘Logies’ copyright © Ben Jenkins 2018

  Logies

  by BEN JENKINS

  This story was originally performed at the event Big Mistake. Huge.

  Back in 1957, Noam Chomsky wanted to show how a sentence could be grammatically correct but entirely nonsensical, and to demonstrate this he chose the phrase:

  Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

  A perfectly fine sentence with real words arranged in the correct order but, outside a kind of poetry, it makes no concrete sense. Now, over sixty years have passed since Chomsky put that in a textbook and so it’s possible it’s time for a revamp. And to that end, may I suggest the opening line to this story.

  In 2015, I was kicked out of the Logies for being too drunk.

  As a sentence, it’s got everything you want. Subject, predicate – verbs, nouns, adjectives and conjunctions, all in agreement – and yet the mind reels trying to parse it. Too drunk for the Logies is like being too dead for a funeral. It doesn’t even work as a question. ‘Can you be too drunk for the Logies?’ has the same logical structure of the paradox ‘Can God create a stone so heavy he could not lift it?’ You could go mad trying to figure it out. And yet. And yet, in 2015 a man of sound mind told me I was too drunk to keep being at the Logies and would have to go home, and what’s more remarkable is that he was right.

  I’ve had a difficult relationship with alcohol for nearly all
of my adult life. I don’t think that makes me an alcoholic, although I have noticed that people who really like drinking tend to also excel at moving the goalposts of what an alcoholic is. Never mind that I’m sure it’s clearly defined in any number of books – alcoholism is best categorised by those closest to it as ‘about two orders of magnitude worse than whatever it is I’m currently doing’. For example, I saw a guy the other day who was so drunk he’d pissed himself on a bus. Have I ever done that? Well at the risk of turning this piece into a forum for outrageous boasting – no, I’ve never been so drunk I’ve pissed myself on a bus. But that said, I can’t shake the feeling that were I ever to be so drunk I pissed myself on a bus, I would quite easily be able to tell myself, ‘Well, that’s not great, but shitting myself in a zeppelin is where I really need to start worrying.’

  Anyway, we arrived at the Logies in a limo. This was a thrill. And if you, like me prior to this incident, have never been in a limo before, you need to imagine quite a long car. If you’ve imagined quite a long car, you’re already halfway into the limousine experience. The length of the car, in fact, makes conversation with the person from whom you’re sitting across quite difficult. You’re a good five feet apart and so one characteristic of a trip in a limousine is, and this surprised me, a lot of yelling.

  When we arrived out the front of the Logies, there was a large crowd of tweens, pushed up against the barricades that lined the red carpet.

  Now, one of the other problems with being in a limousine – aside from the yelling – is it’s quite easy to get into the mindset that you are in some way famous, and the people outside the limousine share a similar problem, in that they also assume whoever is in a limousine, especially a limousine pulling up to the Logies, Australian television’s night of nights, will be famous.

  If you are under the impression that an ABC personality on a consumer affairs show, the average age of whose viewership rounds up to ‘deceased’ – if you believe this is the sort of person tweens will queue up out the front of Crown Casino on a chilly afternoon to catch a glimpse of – please allow me to unburden you of this assumption.

  Nothing will disabuse you of the notion you are in any way famed more thoroughly than walking the good one hundred metres of that particular red carpet in something somehow quieter than silence. In fact, the only noise I heard the whole time walking into the Logies was my own voice, apologising to the glaring teens, who gave no response.

  To return to alcohol for a moment. The precise problem – and this is what I’ve gleaned over dozens of hours of therapy on the issue – is that being drunk is extremely nice. Not zeppelin-shitting, Logies-barringly drunk. In fact, I don’t know a single person who enjoys that situation. The sort of drunk I mean is around four beers deep on a Sunday afternoon in a leafy courtyard drunk. It’s interesting that this state is sometimes described as ‘buzzed’, when the defining feature of this mode of being is, to me, a complete absence of background noise. It’s a state of presentness, of acute awareness of the current moment, no inclination or desire to get lost in thoughts about the past or the future, just being wonderfully there. If you’ve been to a therapist in the past four years, you’ll know that this is essentially mindfulness. A way of ‘paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally’.

  Now, I’ll acknowledge the bestselling self-help program I’m tentatively calling ‘Drink yourself mindful’ is not without its kinks, and I will come to these in time.

  One thing you probably don’t pick up from the broadcast of the Logies is that it is insanely loud. Whenever you see a cut away to a table of people during a speech and they are not talking, they are either the only people in the room listening to what’s happening on stage or they’ve just spliced in footage from a different, less rude awards show. The reason everyone talks is something you probably can pick up from the broadcast, and that’s that the Logies are incredibly boring. And so people talk. They talk loudly and then I assume the network uses a machine from NASA to eliminate the sound of the rude celebrities from the broadcast.

  Anyway here’s how it goes: you talk over all the speeches and hope it’s not one about someone being dead and all the while your glass is filled by waiters who come and go swift as tho they were the first buds of spring and if you are not careful and are already a bit predisposed to excess in the drinks department then you will become incredibly hammered and then, when you go to the loo you will return to find that your table has moved. And you’ll think to yourself, well, hold on just a minute, has this entire awards show been at some sort of revolving restaurant and I’ve not been made aware of it? Of course, you won’t realise, it’s far too simple for you to realise at that moment, that the room hasn’t moved but you’ve entered through a different door than the one you exited from – you’ve moved, the room has stayed put as all good rooms are meant to do – and it will be too late.

  And this is probably where my drinking as mindfulness scheme falls down. Because while effective at bringing you into the present moment and allowing you to step away from your thoughts, after a while that separation between you and your thoughts becomes a little too wide. You and your thoughts are sitting opposite one another in a limousine. It’s unsustainable. The thought ‘maybe we should switch to water’ or ‘gosh, walking seems a bit of a punish’ or ‘is it possible you were just quite rude to Baby John Burgess?’ – these are thoughts that are worth engaging with.

  By the time I’d got back I’d already complained to three baffled waitstaff about the revolving restaurant situation and sat at the wrong table twice. When I arrived at the correct table, I reached for a bottle of wine and immediately knocked it over. The issue – and I remember this very clearly – is that to grab a wine bottle, you first open your hand and then close it. I’d got these steps out of order, meaning I essentially punched a wine bottle then opened my hand. The next thing I remember is being asked very nicely to leave the ballroom and thinking, well, this is both fair enough and something of a nadir.

  On the way home I sobered up remarkably fast, because – and put this on my tombstone – there’s something about knowing you’ve been less classy than Toadfish from Neighbours that really hits you like an ice bath. It’s a Berocca for the soul.

  That difficult relationship has probably got less difficult over the years. Part of that is growing up, and part of that is learning from semantically impossible situations like being too drunk for the Logies. There aren’t any piss-soaked bus rides in my immediate future, nor zeppelins befouled, but do know I can’t get too complacent. There’s always going to be the propensity to reach for the next drink or top up the wine, a thought that’s pale and sickly and dormant but ever present. A colourless green idea, sleeping furiously.

  ANNABEL CRABB

  Annabel is an author, TV presenter, journalist and leading political commentator. She began her career in 1997 at The Advertiser (Adelaide) and moved on to cover politics for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, where she was a columnist and sketchwriter. From 2004 to 2007, Annabel was London correspondent for the Fairfax Sunday editions. At the end of 2009, Annabel joined the ABC, where she has contributed to and hosted many shows, including the highly acclaimed Kitchen Cabinet.

  ‘A Well-founded Suspicion of Bathroom Doors’ copyright © Annabel Crabb 2018

  A Well-founded Suspicion of Bathroom Doors

  by ANNABEL CRABB

  This story was originally performed at the event The Impending Sense of Doom

  Of all the existential terrors periodically burped up by the human condition, the fear of becoming stuck in a toilet is one that encompasses a rare and perfect blend of comedy and mortality.

  The comedy is obvious. Toilets are funny, as are bottoms and most of their activities, and the excretory function is a universal leveller, capturing prince and pauper alike in the compulsive hilarity of its daily routine.

  But those democratic rhythms remind us inexorably of another great inevitability of life, which is why deat
h and toilets hang pretty closely together on the human ideas spectrum.

  In some cases, of course, the connection is a literal one.

  For Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison, distinguished musical careers and significant respective stints as the world’s coolest person can never quite erase the ignominy of having popped their clogs while on the can. King Edmund II got his nickname ‘Edmund Ironsides’ in April 1016 when he fought and defeated the famously vicious King Cnut the Great of Denmark. But all the valour in the world could not protect him when, later that year, he was stabbed in the anus by a Viking hiding in the royal toilet. He died either of horrific internal injuries or embarrassment; history is silent on this point. King George II, Catherine the Great – both overcome while in the smallest room. Even Evelyn Waugh, bless him.

  Enough people have died on the dunny to make the prospect of being stuck in one feel legitimately perilous.

  Last week, an old friend of mine, Will Mackerras, sent a chatty message to me and a couple of friends on Facebook. I haven’t seen Will for years, but we used to be part of a Tuesday night West Wing viewing club in Canberra. It was nice to hear from him. And the pleasure with which I read his message was only slightly dampened by the realisation that he had only got around to writing it because he was locked in his own toilet with just an iPhone for company.

  Over the space of an hour or two, he sent regular updates on his own confinement, interspersed with photographs of his environment.

  8.05 pm: One housemate home! I’ll wait for him to come closer and then call out.

  8.09 pm: Actually they have both come home, but they are faffing about in the kitchen. If I yelled out loudly they would hear me, but it seems strangely undignified.

  8.11 pm: They are now trying to break in.

  8.16 pm: I am now standing the maximum distance possible from the door as they are applying very great force to it and it seems dangerous to be on the other side.

  (A photo is appended, verifying the narrator’s claim to be standing quite far from the door.)