Alfred had lived his life exceptionally aware of his exceptionality. That he stood out. Marked out. Different.
But not for anything that he could be proud of particularly.
Alfred was a Dickhead. Not in the traditional sense – meaning a person who is annoying, rude or essentially obnoxious in the traditional Australian colloquial tongue.
He was a historical dickhead. He had dickhead lineage. His last name was literally Dick-head. Which was an unfortunate bit of plumage that haunted him in every aspect of his life; from the moment he woke to the last desperate sigh onto his pillow at night.
When the roll was called out in the morning at school, he would cop sniggers and guffaws. He’d even had teachers refuse to address him, convinced that it was an elaborate joke.
Sometimes Alfred felt like a joke.
He would have blonde-haired boys with aquiline noses yell out his name from across the tuckshop line, or from under their Florsheim boots after they had tripped Alfred over onto his decidedly more bulbous nose on the basketball court.
His grandmother would spout the story that the name came from a lauded ancestor – Richard “Dick” Griswalda, who was the head of the local chapter of the Boot-Mender’s Society – a prominent social society in 1500s Cardiff responsible for many of the men’s-only social gatherings and cheerfully-enforced institutional racism at that time. But Alfred knew better.
He knew that he simply came from a long line of dickheads. It was obvious.
His father, Heronimos, was a well-known dickhead; in name of course but also in temperament. He was the local council member for Dickery, and he was, while being necessarily popular enough to warrant reelection for the past twenty years, well known for his tacit support of the electorate’s millionaires and prominent businesspeople at the expense of just about anyone with a blue collar job, a lower income or who he deemed unhygienic for reasons that seemed to change with his mood. He had been publicly flagellated in the media several times for clumsy extra-marital affairs, taking a bribe from a prominent entrepreneur in the penis-sheathing industry inexplicably and uncommercially attempting to make paper condoms a thing, and for various utterances of bigoted viewpoints about left-handed people being naturally deviant and generally untrustworthy. But since he had always run unopposed, (the residents of Dickery were notoriously not civic-minded and often drunk) these grievances never stopped him getting back into power.
His grandfather Bertrand, while not publicly awful, was nonetheless a prodigious dickhead in his private affairs, including the capricious ways in which he chose to discipline his children (like confiscating their bicycle seats, or forcing them to skip school to listen to 6 hours straight of Rodney Dangerfield in the backyard shed), and treat his wife, who he cheated on religiously. A pathological gambler; he was known to find a bet so irresistible even to the point of famously placing a wager on the colour of the garbage collector’s slacks. He reportedly placed $4,000 on chanteuse blue, causing many to speculate that he didn’t actually love gambling – he simply loved losing. Confusingly, he was also an innovative and talented businessman, running several supermarkets and Dickery’s only brothel catering to men with foot fetishes; which was why society gave him the necessary social grace to carry out his more serious acts of dickheadery with limited consequence. Money was either feast or famine in the Dickhead house; for as impressive Bertrand was at generating hard currency, his ability to subsequently lose it at a withering pace and on ridiculous things was simply outstanding.
Whether or not becoming a dickhead was genetic or a result of living with such a crass and easily lampooned surname was a problem Alfred hadn’t been able to solve yet, but he was hoping there wasn’t something in his DNA that forced the issue. He had always wanted to live a life as whatever the opposite of a dickhead was. He wasn’t fussy, either. He didn’t have aspirations of power and glory – or money over and above what he needed to get by.
He liked birds, scrabble and Dungeons and Dragons. He was well aware that no matter which order he combined those things, he wouldn’t logically be able to find a way to support himself financially. He would have to find something that he didn’t necessarily love as a job, if he wanted a family, and to have little Dickheads of his own one day. He knew he did – but he might consider being the first in a long line of Dickheads to take the considerably evolved and modern approach and allow his children to take his wife’s last name.
Unfortunately – in love as in life – fate seems to have a sense of humour, though it’s unclear in Alfred’s case who was laughing. Because on September 29th, 2025, Alfred met the love of his life. His soulmate, in fact.
And her name? Angela. Angela Ringstinger.
Joe Greathead 