Jacko (3 page)

—You'd know, son. Painful operation?

—Had worse, said Bob Sondquist in a flat, urgent, unboastful way. He held up the little mike.

—God bless technology. Are you married, Bob? asked Jacko, the bush vaudevillian. Handy little implement for a spouse, that one. Turn your husband on and off!

But Bob was a straight man.

—My wife departed this life a year after Sunny went missing.

The kettle hooted and Bob switched it off and made the coffee. Through Dannie's microwave dish on the truck far below, Bob Sondquist's deft coffee making reached the morning's millions. He handed a mug to Jacko, who savoured it on behalf of the caffeine-hungry populations of the Atlantic shores.

Bob Sondquist said, I thought I was a goner with this voice box problem, and something happened to make me realize I hadn't done enough about her. I'd gone to Missing Persons and filled out all the papers, but that wasn't enough. And they're useless anyhow. But when I face my wife in the next life, I want to be able to look her squarely in the face and say I tried everything I knew. So CBS was everything I knew.

In his head, Jacko could hear Durkin telling Dannie and himself that this was good stuff.

—Sadly, said Jacko, they're not in business for humanity's sake, Mr Sondquist. Neither are we, but we let you know that upfront. No pretensions with us, Bob. But at least we're here, and the others aren't. Do you have a picture of your daughter?

Sondquist said, In the other room, Mr Emptor.

The cameraman made urgent and peevish circles with his left hand, and Durkin said tenderly in Jacko's ear that they were crossing back to the studio. Jacko told the camera that he would just have his coffee while Mr Sondquist went and got the picture, and that they would come back to Bob Sondquist's apartment soon.

—Over to you Phil, said Jacko sweetly, giving control of the show back to the studio presenter, the so-called
anchorman
, Phil Maloney.

My wife slept while I watched this from my cherished apartment above Tower Records, on the corner of East Fourth and Broadway. Somewhat like Bob Sondquist, till recently I had not been a morning television watcher. I believed that, like liquor, the flippancy of the medium could only be decently resorted to after sunset, and could only be justified even then by a day of keen endeavours. But Jacko, my friend and a study of mine, had told me the night before that he was going up into the blue-grey air in his cherrypicker.

They have probably never constructed a human august enough
not
to be somehow flattered by being made privy to the smallest video secret. Michael Bickham, the great modernist writer back in Sydney might, perhaps, be proof against such silliness. There would of course also be literary theorists and deconstructionists at NYU who would have contempt for Jacko's high jinks. Yet perhaps they secretly watched him. For the figures showed that some of them must. At least some of the tenured giants of English, History, German, Political Science and Biochemistry must have liked and secretly watched Jacko a lot.

Jacko had been confiding in me shortly after midnight in a restaurant named Le Zinc in Duane Street. I, typically having little resistance to the centripetal pull of Jacko's hectic taste for brotherhood, regularly stayed up with him longer than I should.

And like the rest of his family, Jacko had an heroic liver. A metabolism, he both boasted and complained, which could have been depended upon to de-nature uranium. In Burren Waters there were visible signs of the Emptors' facility with booze. Fifty yards from the back door of their kitchen lay a pyramid of whisky, rum, beer, port and red and white wine bottles begun by Jacko's Liverpudlian grandfather Laurie Emptor in 1927 when he took the Burren Waters cattle leasehold. I knew too that Jacko's father Stammer Jack drank heinous quantities of dark, sugary Queensland rum, Red Mill and Bundaberg.

New York is a fatal city, therefore, for someone with antecedents like Jacko's. Everywhere the atmospheric bar – from the authentic squalid to the squalid chic to the period-varnished-and-mirrored to the unutterably chi-chi and the unconscionable – and never the responsibility afterwards of driving home two hundred miles from the Brahma Breeders Ball in Hector, as Stammer Jack and his wife Chloe had to do, barefoot in evening dress. Once, rolling their Landrover on the way and waiting with bloodied faces and a last bottle of rum for dawn, they were stuck until some blacks up from the Tanami Desert came along and gleefully helped them get their vehicle upright again so that they could drive home for a steak and eggs breakfast.

In the season in which Jacko proposed to go up in the cherrypicker, and told me about it the night before in Le Zinc, he was under the sort of pressure Laurence Emptor and Stammer Jack had never experienced: to slim down, to present a better image for the young, to look lither. Grandfather Laurie and Stammer Jack had, in any case, lived a more aerobic and strenuous life in the saddle, though Stammer Jack had recently become lazier and begun to muster his cattle by helicopter.

Jacko had never been a gifted horseman, had never wanted to be. To judge from his childhood photographs, he had been a hefty and even soft boy. He had developed muscles exercising with a trainer who came to his loft in Tribeca, but still he readily gained weight. As a distant ambition he spoke of giving up booze, but on a daily basis he relished the bars of Soho and Tribeca, as – I confess – did I. We had become accustomed to drinking together either at mid-to-late afternoon or late at night in some bar or other on that blighted and magical isle. Sometimes we did both sessions on the one day.

I was twenty years older than Jacko, and the angels of abstention were certainly sending their messages to me. So, though I too loved New York for the fact that I could ride or walk home so easily uptown to East Fourth, always counting in the normal footpad perils, I knew I had to stop these boyish sessions soon, because they were endangering my chemistry. But the end of drinking with Jacko would need to be the beginning of spiritual exercises: the examination of what to make of my career; of my sometimes minuscule, sometimes flaring, never consistent literary fame; of my howling failures; of my generous spouse; and of the occasional eccentric voices (none of them from my homeland, Australia) who said I might one day be worth a Nobel. I knew I would not reach a
modus vivendi
with all that until I gave up at least spirits and possibly wine. And doing so seemed as remote and unlikely as the chastity and penance of Egyptian saints of the sixth century.

In Le Zinc, Jacko and I were, in part, drinking for all the drinking we wouldn't be able to do in the future.

My wife Maureen, who came from an Australian working class family and so was forgiving of long night boozing, had excused herself and already gone home. Jacko's young wife, sipping at white wine, leniently attended him too, although according to Jacko's confidences to me, she made subtle attempts to improve him. It seemed to be Jacko's greatest fear: that women tried – of their nature – to improve men.

Jacko and I were, in fact, the worst sort of inebriates: the kind who did not suffer adequately – at least in the morning-after sense – for their misuse of themselves. To watch Jacko ascend by cherrypicker in the morning, I was no more bleary-eyed than many a sober citizen. Jacko himself was nimble enough to survive the device, and to handle Bob Sondquist exactly as Durkin's and Dannie's instincts and broadcasting policies dictated.

Jacko's wife was only twenty-three and – according even to his friends – more than he deserved: the beautiful snow-white Norman child of Northern Italian migrants to Australia, both of them accomplished musicians. They occasionally turned up on Jacko's doorstep when they came to New York with Musica Viva – separately, however, for they were long divorced.

The first good thing I noticed about Jacko's wife was that she did not regard television with any particular seriousness. But she seemed quietly to relish Jacko's tricks just the same.

—A cherrypicker, she had said earlier. That's the go!

And the word
go
, as uttered by Lucy's lovely, symmetric lips, would resonate with Australian vowels ancient as
The Man from Snowy River
, evocative of
The Drover's Wife
. The Australian vowel, which had waited basking like a lizard on the Australian littoral, to insinuate itself into the mouths of immigrant children.

—That's the go, Jacko, she was always saying in public.

This did not seem too strenuous, reforming or disapproving to me. But to hear Jacko speak sometimes, you would have thought she spent all her time trying to reconstitute him.

Jacko's mother, Chloe, loved Mrs Jacko, Lucy (short for Luciana), and sometimes called her on the radio telephone from Burren Waters and asked her when was she going to leave that pisspot of a son of hers.

Sometimes at dawn Lucy went out with Jacko and the camera crew, and stood around in the snow, or else in the harshness of a summer's sunrise, as he performed his stunts. I had an image of her dancing away from the camera but not succeeding in escaping it one Christmas morning, when Jacko delivered snow to a hapless and perhaps over-decorated household in Queens. She seemed to know that a sylph had no place in Jacko's act. Occasionally she made what seemed to me lightly mocking remarks about Dannie, upon whose ‘a' she laid a particular weight of nasal mockery. She seemed easy, however, with the idea that the sort of sharp-edged, pretty young women who came ravening up out of communications courses in Syracuse and Brown and Ann Arbor would be enchanted by Jacko's loud good cheer and by his widespread stardom in the matter of hard-talking entry.

I admit that none of these perceptions of mine necessarily counted for much: in private she may have outlaid fearsome energies on amending Jacko. It was simply that her public demeanour in bars and in restaurants, or when you visited their own home as she cooked with Jacko, or as she emerged ill-rested from their bedroom to greet you for breakfast on a Sunday morning after one of Jacko's all night Soho adventures, never showed the faintest trace of bitterness.

There might, at such a time, be small blue triangles under her clear eyes. Too many cigarettes had put them there – she came of a generation of Australian schoolgirls who nearly all smoked, even though only a fragment of the boys did. Sometimes we'd discussed what that fact meant about Australia and boys and girls. I had for example been writing something for the
New York Times Color Magazine
on the question of whether Australia's reputation as a South Africa for women was well founded. I tried to encompass anecdotal material from my own daughter's history and from Lucy Emptor's related experience. And I thought of other Australian women, of the great barefooted matriarch of Burren Waters, Chloe Emptor, dam of Jacko whose sire was Stammer Jack. It was an invidious situation, of course, writing such a piece: I was like a German trying to prove I liked Jews; an Israeli trying to prove that Palestinians were often treated with every courtesy.

But that's another story.

Mrs Jacko – Lucy Emptor – was rarely seen to have had enough sleep or enough oxygen, but she was of an age where it didn't make a dent in her splendour. This wife who – according to Jacko's confiding word – harried him in secret, smiled girlishly in bars at midnight and said, A cherrypicker. That's the go.

In a way that made the heart turn over.

I couldn't see any of it as wifely tyranny, but was always assured by Jacko that it was.

Jacko and the despised cameraman helped themselves to more of Bob Sondquist's coffee. After the cold ordeal of their rise to the fourteenth floor, it was very sweet. They took the coffee back to the living room, for Jacko wanted more gesturing room for when they went live again. Bob Sondquist followed them indirectly, having gone away to collect the framed picture he now carried in his right hand. He made as if to show the picture to Jacko, but Jacko was
cinema verité
incarnate and told him to hang onto it until they were
on
.

—Jesus, mate, this is ripper coffee.

Jacko noticed Bob Sondquist turned his daughter's framed picture in his hands, as if any given inch of the frame were too hot to touch for more than an instant.

When – at Fartfeatures' command and at Durkin's voice in his ear – Jacko was back on, he said, Okay Mr Sondquist, show us all this face of your daughter's which is beneath the attention of more reputable networks.

The photograph Bob Sondquist displayed to the camera that morning was of an oval-faced, athletic looking girl of eighteen years or so. Her status as a lost woman caused the photograph to make its own demands on Jacko at the spot and on me at the Broadway corner of East Fourth. The fact she was long gone meant she couldn't be written off as an average visage.

In part her father's daughter, she carried her father's face but in a different form. It seemed full of an edgy goodwill. You could not imagine her at any age greeting the dawn cherrypicker with the composure her father had shown at his window. She looked competent somehow, like a child who ironed her own clothes. Jacko thought of that face as good at softball, which he had, in the past, gingered up his viewers by calling
a neutered version of cricket
. All in all, if you didn't have honest Bob Sondquist's word, you wouldn't have thought it the credible face of a lost woman.

Bob Sondquist said in his monotone, straight into the lens, Has anybody seen my daughter?

Hearing this simple, electronically burred appeal, what Jacko thought of as a strange rash of compassion prickled his flesh and caused him to shiver inside his overcoat. For there was a lingering reflex, a frontier side to his nature, the side he exploited for the sake of hooking an audience yet which he believed falsely he had grown out of. His body
was
taken now, at the sight of Sunny Sondquist, by a biochemical impulse to send out horsemen searching, to use the mustering helicopter flown by Stammer Jack's mad friend, the American named Boomer, who had once flown with Air America and who could fly for miles at barely ten feet of altitude above Burren Waters' pasturage. A brief image of Sunny Sondquist lost out amongst the grey sand, grevillea, rubberbush, perishing for water, seized the screens at the forefront of his brain, his own rebel television.