Doghouse Blues 2: Cult of the disenfranchised hero Roger Fraser dexterously handles more demanding dramas with good humour, but still winds up doing penance in the doghouse.

Doghouse Blues 2: Humor/Satire

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BLURB: Doghouse Blues 2

Roger Fraser, the ever optimistic but perpetually put upon investment banking stock analyst-trouble shooter and occasional rugby player has more work and domestic issues to challenge his sensibilities. He skilfully manoeuvres from one demanding situation to the next, barely managing to extinguish the callous flames of fate seeming to constantly blight his endeavours and bite at his flesh.

During his excursions into shocking social scandals and battling with egotistical megalomaniacs, he endlessly verges on disaster, but somehow always manages to survive. Roger pokes irreverent fun at the new Establishment, single-handedly takes on female dragons, prevails against rampaging supermarket shoppers and trades wisecracks with a Brummy vicar, but invariably finds himself tethered to the doghouse, singing the blues.

EXCERPT: Doghouse Blues 2

As part of a company-wide initiative to go after the hindmost strands of EU investment in Ireland before the Euro crashed down and disintegrated, VP Worldwide Manufacturing Investments, Milton Crossman, also known as Mad Milton, a mover and shaker from The Firm’s New York HQ was coming to London. Reputedly as tough as a rhino’s hide, Crossman had a reputation as a bare-knuckle, backstreet, squabble-buster and a Rambo incarnate one-man, killing machine when it came to closing deals in the stock market trading zone. Acclaimed to be a super-badass, he’d been rejected for a role in The Sopranos, after commenting everyone from New Jersey played around like pussies compared to those hailing from Brooklyn, and hard man James Gandolfini’s portrayal of mobster Tony Soprano resembled Donald Duck playing Donald Trump.

To those in the know, and not in the slightest influenced by rose-tinted politicians’ pronouncements, the days of the Euro, a piece of politically constructed expediency without economic foundation, were numbered. Unless German taxpayers could be persuaded to fund the government excesses of most of their co-Euro members, inevitably those countries with toxic sovereign debt would default on their gigantic loans. Before the fatal catastrophe happened, there were still opportunities for investors, Ireland specifically receiving a massive cash injection, principally from the World Bank and the EU, to be channelled to the markets through the banks.

Dan Lebowski recommended to Mad Milton he made Roger Fraser part of the Ireland team, Crossman telephoning the stock analyst while still in the Big Apple on the pretext of discussing the endeavour, but really, he wanted a favour.

“Lebowski gave you a glowing reference after his visit to London a few months ago to size up the global futures forecast,” Crossman praised after initial introductions.

“Yes, I got to know Dan quite well.”

“We’ll talk about my mission in detail when we meet, but er…there is a spectacle I’d appreciate you setting up in advance.”

“Oh, what?”

‘“I’ve always wanted to go to your Houses of Parliament, to see the founding father of American democracy in action. Can you get me in?”

“I can get you into a PQT session” Fraser advised.

“PQT,” Crossman echoed. “Hell, it’s the very picture of a woman’s complaint!”

“Yes, a lot of people get it mixed up with PMS. Often its impact is much the same.”

“So, what is this PQT, Roger?”

“Prime Minister’s Question Time. It’s the best show in town. Much better than anything in West End theatre, maybe even Broadway. I’m sure you’ll be absorbed.”

“Wow, some build up. Can’t wait for it.”

Albeit usually useless to the fringe of chronic ineptitude, remarkably, Fraser arranged for passes through his intellect-limited, everything must be dumbed down to my level, local MP, enabling Milton Crossman to fulfil his Houses of Parliament ambition, with the stock analyst come trouble-shooter acting as his host.

~ * ~

Tasked by Henry Jacques with working out a stratagem for meeting with various business partners and potential clients in Dublin, Fraser screened all the bases. Moreover, Toby Chalcroft declared his individual set of instructions to Fraser, saying in spite of the attractiveness of the investment possibility, caution was needed because, as he put it, ‘The bog trotters are very capable of pulling the wool. Don’t get fooled by their lilting voices, protestations Ireland is a poor country, and they’re babes in the wood when it comes to investment mechanisms.’ Having former business tastes of the Emerald Isle, he squarely knew what Top Cat referred to.

Extra to Fraser, Ricky Henshaw formed The Firm’s English cohort along with Bradley Purnell, a kind of young gofer from Bembridge’s suite, still wet behind the ears and naive to the borderline of wanting to give him a slap. Also the Ayatollah’s nephew, any wrangle apropos his inclusion on the team became negated. ‘This trip will give Bradley exposure to the mechanics of investment banking,’ Bembridge told Henshaw and Fraser, really meaning, he’s going with you, so let’s have no arguments.

Still rampant in the financial services industry worldwide, notably in the upper-middle management to board executive stratums, nepotism had become the channel for the less naturally gifted to find their way into the ranks of power and responsibility. Never ceasing to surprise Fraser just how many young women, or come to that young men he met during the course of his duties, betided as someone’s little darling or son and heir, he had stationed the custom as de factopractice. Those with unassailable abilities for making money presupposed the talent to be in the genes and thereby inherited by succeeding generations. Attempting to preserve family kudos and reputation, the self-serving nepotism apparatus came into play as a means to artificially inflate the skills-deficient offspring’s position. Often, it eventuated to be a massive fantasy, the family member under survey about as useful as a spare prick at a wedding.

Largely falling into this category, whilst willing, Purnell neither fitted the part for customer facing obligations; to many seasoned campaigners, half the battle, significantly in 1-0-1 meetings, nor possessed the nous to really take in the intricacies and subtleties of investment banking, much less the idiosyncrasies of money markets. Gaining a degree in accountancy from one of the lesser halls of knowledge, cosmetically elevated to university status by President Blair to realise his fifty percent of all young people should go to university codswallop, Purnell materialised at The Firm pumped up for duty.

As Fraser specified to attendees at the A-level business studies supplementary evening classes, a higher education qualification only represented the first rung on a very tall fulfilment ladder. Merely a stepping stone, it enabled those attaining the required grades in examination excellence to be awarded a first degree, and thereby the mandate to join the real world of business. Some made the transition very well, seamlessly blending in and quickly finding their feet. Others faltered, unable to cross the boundary between lecture theatre theory and business convention. Sadly, Purnell fell into this latter group.

Soon finding his inadequate antenna abided insensitive to receiving ‘Money never sleeps’ feeds to quote Gordon Gekko, some unkind observers declared, ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.’ Consequently, he fled to his Uncle Luther’s office, finding sanctuary in the post of glorified office boy.

Despite all his short-comings, Fraser had a soft spot for him, perceiving Bembridge’s sister might have coerced him into giving her son a chance that he probably didn’t want anyway, but acquiesced to his mother’s desires.

Because the opening held pan-European wide status, The Firm’s German organisation in Frankfurt insisted they were part of the Dublin bound team, meaning Obergruppenfûhrer Heinrich Metzer, Director of Manufacturing Investments for the German-speaking parts of Europe, an ex-professor in psychopharmacology at Heidelberg University before joining The Firm in 2002, qualified as one of Fraser’s cardinal preoccupations. Not the most discreet of gentlemen, Metzer inclined to bluster without first engaging his brain in delicate involvements, his sensibilities failing to register slippery climates as they developed, or more seriously, he crossed the line causing waves with his, no nonsense, ‘we’re doing it the German way’ approach.

When it came to the undiluted intolerance of anything he attested flew in the face of the approved agenda, and therefore needed irrevocable deletion from the record, Heiny baby could even give Charlotte a run for her money. Though less than fifty, Metzer had an old-school background commencing from the cradle, very old school when it came to hierarchical respect and operational disciplines. Gathering his team together in Frankfurt, the Obergruppenfûhrer invariably veered to the brink of saying, ‘Und I vont to hear von click, ven you stand to attention as I enter.’

A terror even by The Firm’s New York paradigms, his intolerant reputation bordering on the tyrannical went before him. Discerning even a semi-veiled quail of criticism apposite to his methods, he could give offending subordinates nightmares for weeks on end, ultimately spelling an end to their careers at The Firm. Accordingly, most people were exhaustively careful not to incur his rage. If under bouts of extreme anger, Luther Bembridge possessed the capability to metamorphose into a dangerous lizard, his intent to devour those annoying him, Metzer had evolved into just as hazardous a beast to do battle with, and withdraw unscathed. Many envisaged that beyond the realms of his executive suite in downtown Frankfurt, lay a torture chamber. In their popular imagination, Metzer took tremendous delight in meticulously dissecting those having the misfortune to be selected for rectal scrutiny experiments, resultant from incurring his displeasure.

Some claimed he descended from one of Hitler’s elite clique, his forefathers having managed to reinvent themselves and elude detection by British Nazi hunters after World War Two. Convenient folklore, it became an attempt to give rationality to Heiny’s vicious nature. In truth, he might have read Mein Kampf, and in the darkest recesses of his creepy Bavarian schloss, dressed up as an SS officer replete with the Iron Cross to re-enact scenes from The Night Porterand Cabaret, but beyond those unproven narcissistic fantasies, his sadistic disposition and often brutal temperament came from within. Vaunting a clinical deportment, he never raised his voice, lost control, or let slip emotion; things he deemed to be weaknesses and thereby strictly avoided. Transfixing people as if by levitation, his menace really came from the way he peered at them, and the subsequent grisly, teeth-grinding tone of whatever he imparted to make his victims quiver into jelly.

Metzer believed in doing it by numbers. Rotate the wheel in the prescribed manner, and out will pop the investment. Stipulating the methodology be adopted by his investment fund team without exchange, since inauguration, unmistakably it had delivered the goods in Metzer’s assigned territory, the big cheese at Frankfurt sanctioning dispersal of his method-driven drill to other revenue-bearing departments. Whence, it became rolled out and implemented across all the German-speaking countries, echoing a Panzer division let loose to subdue and quell all resistance.

KEYWORDS

satire, contemporary, black humor

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