Janis and Saint Christopher

By James McKenzie

Rebel radio host Scott Parker gets into a fight at a media conference and the Christian Lobby stages a protest about the morality of same-sex marriage when they learn about his husband's outdoor sex park. Aging flower power queen Janis Joplin gets sucked into the drama after she performs a concert at the sex park and reflects on her life since she survived a heroin overdose in 1970. Set in Saint Christopher in 2013, an Australian city settled by the French, Janis and Saint Christopher explores confronting social issues laced with dark comedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483503639

James McKenzie

James A. McKenzie is a Michigan native, raised in Montrose, and currently residing in Haslett. The father of three children, he has enjoyed coaching their sports teams. An alumnus of Michigan State University, he trained as an engineer and is a skilled metal model maker by profession, able to create items that do not exist at present. If it can be imagined, he can make it. In addition to writing, his interests include sports and he has been a season ticketholder of Michigan State's women's basketball for years.

Book preview

9781483503639

Scott Parker was a lithe, blonde, activist broadcaster.

His neck hung a silver Saint Christopher medallion for protection. Until today.

He lost it this morning when he gardened at his husband's outdoor sex park and although he scoured the bushes and shrubs to find it, he couldn't. He wondered if that was why his life went belly-show that day.

Maybe if he still had an iconic link to the patron saint of his hometown, he wouldn't have been hit in the head? It was a God-forsaken whack.

Whether you thought he deserved it or was wronged depended on the media you absorbed.

He shouldn't have been there when it happened because he was late. He reached security just after a line of public servants arrived and he should have waited until they were processed.

Instead, he jumped the queue, flashed his journalist's pass at the security contractor and said, I'm a radio journalist and I'm running really late for the Premier's media conference, so can you please let me in?

Security nodded and let him through without doing the paperwork for a visitor's pass, so Scott Parker arrived at the media conference on time.

*

Michael Slider was in the middle of the queue when he saw Scott flash his pass and clear. He was annoyed security didn't even look at it.

Damn that new security firm we hired after the change of government, he thought.

He'd dealt with that irritant journalist from People Powered Radio before. He was outraged he had to wait while someone who purported to be a journalist could push through.

Incensed and entitled, Slider barged to the front of the queue and told security what he thought.

I'm sorry, sir, but everyone has to be processed.

Except if you say you're a journalist. He could have been a terrorist with explosives in that bag and you let him in. You didn't even record his name. That's a flagrant breach of the rules.

I'm sorry, sir. I shouldn't have done that, sir, but you still have to queue to be processed.

Look, I'm a Minister of the Republic. Let me in.

The security contractor looked anxiously passed him.

Of course, sir. Just fill this out.

Slider completed the paperwork and turned around to see a camera man record him. Reporter Susie Toasta stood nearby.

Shit, he thought.

*

Susie Toasta, with her long blonde hair, has feral chicken eyes when she grills an interviewee and her viewers love it. She works for Channel Thirteen, a national broadcaster, and she's its pinnacle of brand recognition.

Her viewers have heard, Susie Toasta, National News, so many times over the last twenty odd years, it's become a staple. Her little nip here and tuck there just add to the legend of her media longevity.

And right now, she's caught a politician use his authority to jump a queue.

Slidergate, she thought.

*

Slider hurried through the security turnstiles.

She's gotta be processed too, he thought.

But Susie Toasta and her crew were right behind him. Security had waved them through.

Keep rolling, she muttered.

Slider walked fast, without making it seem a bolt.

He entered the government's media auditorium and powered forward, just as Scott scratched his arse and moved his right leg back when he asked the new Premier a question.

You said you'd fix the problems but public transport and crime are worse under your government. Why did you mislead the voters?

Slider brushed Scott's calf and kept walking towards a corner.

Scott turned around when he felt the brush and crashed into Susie Toasta's camera man's very heavy camera. You fucking dog.

Susie Toasta's camera man punched Scott in the face.

*

Janis Joplin survived a smack overdose in October, 1970, at a motel in Los Angeles, after she returned from the studio one night. She'd recorded her album Pearl all day and made a happy birthday message for John Lennon after she did Mercedes Benz in one take.

Her manager found her on the floor of her motel room and she was hospitalised and went into rehab. She studied Buddhism during her rehabilitation.

Her producers finished Pearl without her and her track Buried Alive In The Blues went to the record press without her vocals.

When she was well, she toured North America and Europe to promote the album before she had a hiatus and left the rock and roll big time.

She moved to Austin and owned and ran a live music bar called Minx.

Willie Nelson became a regular there and Janis sang backing vocals on his album Shotgun Willie.

She insisted he simply credit her as JJ.

She turned the bar into a women-only performers' venue one night a week, the first in Texas.

She returned to tours in 1979 but had no real commercial success until she covered Helen Reddy's I Am Woman in 1985 and topped the US charts.

Her career got its second wind and she was one of the stars at the first Farm Aid concert after Johnny Cougar and Willie begged her to perform.

Nancy Reagan tried to kiss her cheek back stage but Janis took a polite step back. The Washington Post published a photo of the moment.

She discovered the talents of Melissa Ethridge at her bar in the late 80s and encouraged record label executives to give Ethridge a contract after a gig there. Later they toured North America together.

She met the Clintons in 1991 after a concert in Little Rock and was invited to dinner at their Governor's Mansion the next night. They became great friends and she sang at Clinton's second inauguration.

She came out publicly as a lesbian in 1999, during a probing Barbara Walters interview on American Sixty Minutes.

She became a queer icon overnight and that prompted her to make a guest appearance on Will and Grace in 2000 as Will's lesbian aunt.

That year, she famously sat on Dave Letterman's lap during a Late Show interview. She wore a t-shirt printed with the words Horny Dyke. Rolling Stone put her on their cover wearing the t-shirt.

Within weeks, British band The Prodigy remixed vocals from her song Summertime into one of their tracks and cracked the UK top five.

That northern winter, she reluctantly recorded a duet with Evan Dando from the Lemonheads.

She toured Russia with the Lemonheads the next summer and their bus was fired at by Chechen rebels.

Vladimir Putin offered her permanent Russian residency if she agreed to be Russia's contestant at Eurovision. She declined.

She denounced Bush's pending war in Iraq in early 2003 and spent a month in Baghdad as a human shield.

After she returned to America, she was given a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys.

She made world headlines again in 2004 when she addressed a same-sex marriage rally in Ottawa, days before the Canadian Parliament's vote on the issue. The city's mayor gave her the keys to the city.

2008 was difficult. All the stars backed Obama but she was torn by her loyalty to Hillary, who attended a fundraiser at Minx.

She publicly backed Obama, with Hillary's blessing, after he won the Democrats' nomination.

She made a guest appearance on Glee in 2010. It evoked a rumour, spurred by the Fox Network for publicity, that she and Jane Lynch had a clandestine affair. It was bollocks and she attended Lynch's wedding in Massachusetts.

Now it was 2013 and she was in Saint Christopher, at the bottom of Australia.

She liked the heat but the weather in this town was about to go loco.

It was eight pm and ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit, the gauge in her native Texas. She had no idea the temperature was about to drop abruptly.

She strolled along de Bruni Avenue, named after the explorer who claimed this section of the continent for France in 1793. It was an escape from the dead bore of her hotel room.

That's what I hate about touring, the hotels, she thought. Especially if you're not a real boozer any more. Sometimes she missed rock and roll laced with straight Southern Comfort.

She meandered and noticed the bars were still open. That's refreshing, she thought.

Over three decades ago, when she was last here, all the pubs closed by eight pm. She found the place boring and stilted then and not worth the exorbitant plane time it took to arrive.

And you couldn't get a drink on Sundays, the day you needed one the most. But like big cities in Texas, Australia had loosened up.

The air began to cool dramatically.

She rushed towards her hotel in the Beautemps Mall, named after the first European botanist to survey the region.

She was freezing, in wintry weather that came from no where during the height of summer.

Mark Twain wrote the coldest winter he ever experienced was a summer in her old hometown, San Francisco. But not even it's like this, she thought.

She'd reached the end of her Hilton Hotels' tour the day before.

Her best gig was in Dampier, the capital of Dutch-speaking New Hollandia, in the continent's west.

She liked the diversity of this sparsely populated land, where they spoke German in the northern nation of New Farderland, English in the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria, and French in the island nation of Fresne to the South.

It became colder. The wind accelerated with the scent of rain but she couldn't feel a drop.

She hurried past a statue of Captain Arthur Phillip, the English explorer who led a brief insurgency against the French, before England negotiated a Louisiana-style purchase of the south-eastern corner of the continent.

It was heavenly to have a holiday alone at the age of seventy. She had an open-ended ticket home to Texas and she hadn't planned anything, except for a gig tomorrow night at an activist hub radio station.

She hurried through the Hilton's entrance.

In her dead hotel room, she picked up a local tabloid and saw a picture of a skinny guy with a radio recorder being whacked on the head by a giant fella with a tv camera.

Ouch, roared the headline.

The hit guy looked so pained.

Poor kid, Janis thought.

*

Ryan Morris was a brunette bear with rugby legs, brown carpet hair on his chest, and eyes that varied from blue to green.

He'd loved plants since he could walk and grew up on a tomato plantation alongside the New Seigne River, near Australia's border with Dampier in north-western Victoria.

After completing high school there, he moved to Saint Christopher to study Agriculture but ended up managing a gay bar after he finished University. He'd won a 'bear' chest competition there.

He met Scott Parker at a marriage equality rally, when Scott spontaneously needed a partner to participate in a mass same-sex marriage ceremony.

They legally married three years later, when same-sex marriage became law in Australia during the dying days of the Rudd Government.

Now he tended his sex park. He loved the green and red parrots in his park. Years ago, they were only seen free in the city if they escaped from domestic cages. But since the droughts, they had increasingly migrated to suburbia for nourishment.

It was morning and they danced and sang in three huge gum trees on the park's edge. Breakfast time, Ryan thought, His round, bearded face beamed. Scott called him Moon Face when he smiled.

Three droughts in seventeen years had changed the ecosystem. Strict water restrictions were enforced and many people only flushed their toilets when they shat.

Yet despite the necessity to conserve water, many Australians were still bonded to their water guzzling, European gardens and many lurched from the ground in frizzled despair. If they lived at all.

Ryan wasn't one of those Europhiles. He'd made his park a native oasis.

Excuse me. Mr Morris?

Ryan swung around and his eyes clipped a Jacaranda bush.

Ouch, he blurted and saw the blurred image of a blonde woman with a camera crew. Susie?

That's right. She flicked a hair extension.

He wiped his watery eyes. This is a surprise.

Really? I'm here to ask you questions about your sex park.

*

Twenty-four years ago, straight after high school, Susie Toasta landed a cadetship at Channel Thirteen and soon became the darling of the Six O'Clock News. She quickly climbed the ranks to become a senior reporter.

After she won a Walkley Award for a story about children's exposure to asbestos at primary schools, she was seconded to the US to anchor a news program on CBS, under the provision that her husband be her camera man.

She'd met Brian Steally at the Australian Film Industry Awards years earlier and they were married after a short engagement.

He'd worked as a camera man on the final two Mad Max films and was hired by Thirteen for his knack for making Susie look awesome.

Susie believed it was natural justice that he follow her to America and he joined her in New York City, behind the camera.

When they returned to Saint Christopher, she was offered the Six O'Clock News anchor but refused it because she loved being on the road, breaking news and telling the country how she saw it. Soon the station plugged its national bulletin with 'Susie knows best'. Her ego loved it.

The only drawback was she had to rescue Brian. He could be a thug in a scrum and the only aspect that saved him after several incursions was the threat that Susie would defect. Because of that threat, Thirteen was holding its line after the Parker incident. Publicly, it defended him but privately executives expressed their misgivings to Susie.

She needed a distraction, a sympathy winner, so she worked behind the scenes to put the heat on Scott and Ryan about the sex park. It was working. She'd reignited the debate about the morals of the homosexual lifestyle.

The city's morning tabloid ran a poll that said eighty-seven per cent of its readers wanted it closed.

Commercial talkback radio went sick about the place.

The television networks weren't happy about it either.

Even Saint Christopher's broadsheet had run a compelling, front page story, thanks to Susie's handy work.

She'd moved Brian out of the spotlight.

Screw Parker, she thought. She didn't care the case was pending. She knew she wouldn't get done for sub judice contempt. They won't even try, she thought.

She picked up the broadsheet. She was about to re-read its story but tossed it and used her remote to activate her dvd player. Her story was the benchmark.

Her perky red lips pleased her when she saw them on the screen. She'd had more collagen pumped in. Deadly puckers, she thought.

On screen, she stood outside a sign that said Brunswick Park.

Religion Australia will protest outside the sex park owned by the husband of controversial radio presenter Scott Parker, Susie said into the camera.

The shot shifted to a stunned Ryan, taken by surprise by Susie and her crew.

Owner Ryan Morris has run the sex park for three months. Men pay $20 to have sex in the outdoors and are provided with condoms and lubrication sachets on entry.

It's a safe space for men to have sex in a leafy, outdoor environment, Ryan said on camera.

They don't need to worry about poofder bashers or anything like that. There's a real market for this service and it keeps people safe.

The scene shifted to Susie outside the Health Department.

But Health Department figures show HIV is rising, with a ten per cent increase reported in Australia in 2012, she said. Government sources say they want to close venues that are transmission points.

Brian interrupted her self-congratulatory gaze.

I wouldn't look so smug if I were you. Maybe you played right into their hands and gave them the publicity they wanted?

She turned the television off and pulled the right side of her hair extensions. Her Botoxed face grimaced slightly. What, you think he's got eyes in the back of his head and saw you and Slider coming?

Brian stuck his chest out. His recorder's metallic. Maybe he could see our reflections.

While you punched him in the face and got international coverage? It doesn't get that good, except by chance. You didn't plan to belt him.

Brian smirked. True.

He paused and moved close to her. He sensed an opportunity. You got international coverage too, babe.

She flicked her hair and let him kiss her. Well, I'm used to that.

He knew he was in. It had