Jacko: The Great Intruder

by Thomas Keneally

  Dannie would be undercutting shots from the building opposite so that people would see that Jacko Emptor stopped at nothing.

  He said, We hang beyond the window glass of an apparently intelligent and communicative male New Yorker. Let’s talk to him eh. Let’s give her a burl.

  New Yorkers were growing accustomed to Jacko’s argot, to the idiom of Stammer Jack’s unutterably remote cattle duchy. Give her a burl was a modest item from Jacko’s Australian lexicon.

  Jacko turned to the window. He never wore quite as demented a smile as when he was asking for entry. He knocked on the glass by the man’s right shoulder. The man nodded a little and looked at him. Indeed, a muscular fellow who wore a T-shirt in a way which made you think of ageing Marine NCOs. America was full of such military types, yet you never spotted an equivalent back home in Oz.

  This fellow – a tough, stricken man, Jacko thought, rat-tat-tatting merrily away with kid gloves supplied by Barney’s of Seventh Avenue in return for a mention in the credits.

  The aged, tough man regarded Jacko’s gloved knuckles without prejudice. Jacko leaned towards the inset glass and roared, Good morning, Sir! I’m Jacko Emptor from the Vixen Six Network, making my first airborne attempt at penetrating an American household. Are you a tolerant man, sir? Would you be willing to open your window and admit us to your home?

  It was the astounding moment of consent. The man moved warily to open the window lock. Not, however, with the sort of wariness which had causes outside his own body – causes such as that a lunatic in a cherrypicker, a lunatic wearing earmuffs and a porkpie hat, was hammering on your glass. It was more the wariness caused by, say, a boil on the back of the neck.

  And there was the problem now that the window opened out sideways. Jacko and the cameraman and cable handler had to crouch so that it would clear their heads. Jacko played this for comedy, but in the way he had learned: that he did not have to overdo things; that his large, meaty face, his reliably startled eyes, and his silly combination of hat and earmuffs could be depended upon for their own fair efficacy.

  When he was a boy he would have tried too hard and people would have disliked him for it. Now he was a man and had put aside the things of boys: he had discovered timing.

  His joy in being aware that some twenty-five million people in the eastern United States were now saying to their spouses, He’s a lunatic, that Jacko Emptor!, was nothing beside his intimate joy when the man opened up his window.

  The wind seemed to have grown in force, in its intent to tear big Jacko away from the gritty, kindly, exposed sill of the husky man in the T-shirt. Jacko nonetheless managed to roar, What a decent feller!

  Barely breathing, he launched himself over the balustrade of the cherrypicker bucket. Employing a strong grip, the man in the T-shirt helped him. Higher than any star above Stammer Jack’s and Chloe Emptor’s cattle station, their son Jacko committed himself ecstatically to the grip of a stranger. It took a lot of wriggling of the hips to get into the man’s apartment, a lot of stomach-grinding endeavour, a lot of damage to the fabric of his overcoat, but at no point did Jacko feel terror.

  No sooner inside and standing than Jacko had to turn, panting, to receive the camera. But in the act of turning, he learned things he considered, in their way, prodigious. On an early version of a colour television set, which sat in the far corner, Jacko had seen himself enter the dimness of the man’s living room. Proof if he needed it that others were parties to his spoliation of hearths. The furniture was of the kind that Jacko had first seen in a June Allyson/James Stewart film set on a Cold War air-force base: one ovoid coffee table, another boomerang-shaped. Both had thin, angled metal legs. The chairs had floral cushions and angular arms and lightly varnished legs. The very look of them evoked images in Jacko’s mind of James Stewart’s sober, brave, magisterial visage, of June’s prehensilely aggrieved lips as her husband took off in a bomber from some desert airstrip to be democracy’s sentinel and to crash-land in the Arctic.

  There were stores where this sort of thing would be valued, what Jacko thought of as old people’s Florida furniture. The big buy of 1955 washed up here to the fourteenth floor, on winter’s high tide.

  Fartfeatures was more than ready to throw his camera in at Jacko. Jacko kept one eye on the ancident television set to see that Dannie let this camera’s jiggling images of hectic entry go out to the viewer. For stealth, cunning and intrusion were nothing without these confused, jolting, blurred images. A cat burglar saw the world this way. Dannie refused to make the naive choice of the smoother images from Camera Two on the roof across the road.

  As the despised cameraman tumbled in, Jacko handed back the camera, looked at its aimed eye, spread his arms and sang, We’re in! The cable handler had also arrived, making the most athletic entry of the three of them, and was uncoiling cable out of the cherrypicker and into the living room, to give the camera the chance to roam. He pulled the window all but shut to keep the vicious air out.

  In his ear, Jacko heard Durkin state that that was it. Dannie might have cut it there even if the studio hadn’t told her. The belief was people would hang on in celebration of Jacko Emptor’s one-hundred-and-forty-foot-high success and deliverance. They would want to know, above all, who this husky and impassive old man was.

  Shivering, Fartfeatures said, Okay. We’re dead.

  —Oh mate, said Jacko to the man in the T-shirt, you wouldn’t have any coffee, would you?

  Jacko’s host put his hand to his throat. A robot’s voice, very mechanical, electronically spiky and utterly without intonation, answered.

  —I can get you some, it said. Can’t drink it myself.

  Had you been there, and been more interested in Jacko than the cameraman was, you would have thought, Yes, this is an utterly characteristic Jacko smile. It was broad as the yawn of a mastiff on the – for now – untransmitted and therefore unselfconscious dial of Jacko. Jacko – discoverer of new rooms, empowerer of new voices, and native of wide and silent Burren Waters, two hundred miles west of Hector in the remote Northern Territory.

  Jacko and the cameraman, attended at some distance by the cable puller who was now running cable across the floor, amongst the archaic furniture, all followed their host into the hallway and so into the narrow kitchen. There was just enough room here for the three of them. The man bent to a cupboard and found a can of coffee.

  —How long since you had the op. eh? Jacko asked. You know, the operation.

  The man straightened himself. His hand went to his throat, where Jacko noticed now a small black hole. The fellow had in his fingers a minute microphone which he must, between speeches, conceal in his fist. Every sentence was a deliberate exercise. The fellow hadn’t been catatonic at all. He had been concentrating on his breath and the muscles of his diaphragm.

  The man said, Six weeks back. I wrote to you a week after the surgeon first pulled the cords. I’m grateful you came.

  —Wrote to us?

  —Yeah, said the monotone squawk. CBS news.

  —Oh shit, mate. We’re not CBS news. We’re Vixen Six. You know, Basil Sutherland.

  The man squared his aged NCO shoulders.

  —I wondered why you’d come in a cherrypicker, the man conceded in his unearthly diction.

  Jacko said, Haven’t you heard of Basil Sutherland? The biggest bastard ever to come out of Australia. Aside from me eh.

  The man raised his hand and said, I don’t watch much morning television.

  —A proud boast, mate. And I don’t blame you. Makes hair grow on the palms of your hands. Why’d you write to the news?

  The cameraman said, We’re going live again on ten.

  —What’s your name? Jacko asked the man in a hurried murmur.

  —Sondquist, said the man, again raising his hand. Bob.

  He had put the electric kettle on and was spooning coffee into a glass plunger. Did he not know that they were going live, or did he not care? The despised cameraman said they were live on the count of tw
o, and tried to dominate Jacko and the man with two strokes of his index finger.

  For going live, Jacko cranked up his old, ingenuous Australian smile, a cliché in its own terms, but fresh news on this coastline.

  —We’re in Mr Bob Sondquist’s kitchen, built in the ’40s or ’50s, I’d say. The era before we average fellers took up cooking and turned it into a fancy activity. As far as I can tell, Bob was expecting us to be someone else with more pretensions. This is a common experience for Vixen Six. He thought we were CBS news, to whom he’s apparently written. Why them, Bob?

  Bob stood up straight and faced Jacko and resonated.

  —I wrote to them about my daughter, Sunny.

  There was a little scar tissue on Bob’s throat. But apart from that you could rarely see the aperture, and – given Bob’s deft hand movements – barely catch sight of the mechanical device. Jacko did not choose to rush the issue of the daughter Bob had just raised. Never a linear man, he wanted to know all about Bob’s means of talk.

  —And Bob, you lost your oesophagus, did you, mate?

  —It was the larynx I believe, said Bob.

  —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.