Jacko (42 page)

For the first time since I'd known him, Jacko covered his eyes from daylight with both his hands. This I found prodigiously affecting, and I reached out and held him by the inner elbow – a large gesture from one Australian male to another.

—They've joined the injunction with a damages writ for three million dollars against me and eight million against Hubert. It's legal opportunism, but it could work. If the injunction sticks tomorrow, I'll have to file for Chapter Eleven bankruptcy. And I won't last more than a month as a bloody popular idol.

—They can't win, I stated in a flush of brotherly conviction. Surely.

—Well, we'll see eh. If they don't, we'll come back here tomorrow night or the next and have a total shit-heap of a party, I tell you that.

The idea of escaping the damages writ and reassuming his godhead made his eyes glitter in a way that had very little to do – I believed – with egotism as such, and more to do with the childlike intentions of mischief which had first brought him to New York and carried him over thresholds. I asked him if there was anything I could do, as if in some sense I could be a buffer against the sometime shame and modern day expediency of Chapter Eleven.

He looked at me, weighing me.

—You're going to stick around till the bloody last. Is that it?

—Well, I confessed to him, I'm a novelist. I'm certainly going to be an interested observer, which is as close to friendship as a novelist would want to claim.

—Bloody good, he said. Let's get really pissed.

His eye was moving along the bottles on the lower shelf by the Odeon's mirrors. The bottles which said Black Bush and Laphroaig and Calvados and Metaxa.

—No, I said. No. I've got my class.

He held up his hand.

—Listen, mate, I understand.

The next morning the story of the injunction was in the
New York Times
and on morning television. Even
Morning Manhattan
ran it.

I went downtown by the subway from West Fourth Street and though, through my brushes with the media, I thought I knew what to expect, I was astounded by the crowds of journalists and camera crews in the corridor leading to the courtroom where the injunction hearing was taking place. The courtroom gallery was already full – men and women with the intense grains of the street in their faces and wearing old bits of clothing, and young, lost-looking men with halitosis who had a folder with everything ever written about Jacko in it. For this is the truth of stardom, temporary or transcendent: only the demented, the manic, the lost, have time to tend the altar.

I found half of a seat amongst them all. I stood with them as the judge entered, a hard-nosed looking fellow of about fifty years.

The case opened with the calling of the chief executive officer of Silverarts. He argued that the contract Silverarts had with Jacko entitled them to be contacted if Jacko envisaged availing himself of the windows of opportunity. That contact had never been made.

The man then indicated Silverarts' plans for Jacko, plans for a gradual acceleration of career which would have pitched him at a level of stardom far in advance of the mere game show notoriety which Hubert Greenspan had planned for him. While Silverarts worked on production plans for Jacko Emptor, it had, after all, consistently continued to pay Jacko Emptor a monthly fee for the past two years. The concept of that fee was that Mr Emptor would keep Silverarts apprised of his intentions and of other offers.

I saw Greenspan and Tracey in court. Greenspan laughed briefly in Tracey's direction, or perhaps into the breast pocket of his Zegna suit, at Silverarts' low estimation of game shows and their renown for quality.

Greenspan's lawyers then did a powerful, probing job on the president of Silverarts: taking him through the option agreement, clause by clause; getting him to identify the windows of opportunity; trying to have him contradict himself on the matter of the liberties Jacko was thereby entitled to. By the end of a morning of this I was feeling hopeful for Jacko.

But Jacko's agent, called to the stand just after noon, was a grievous disappointment to the Greenspan-Jacko camp. I had met him before at parties at Jacko's place. He was a thin, ageless man, a competitor in half and full marathons. Silverarts' lawyers did not have to wait long for him to utter the decisive sentence.

—I reminded him of the existence of the option agreement, as was my duty as an agent. And I told him that he needed to be very careful about the Silverarts agreement and his duties under it.

—But did you advise him to go with Greenspan?

—I said ultimately it was up to him.

—But is it true that you had him sign an indemnity agreement, exempting you from liability?

The agent said yes, it was so. He had the indemnity agreement with him. He produced it. Throughout the court you could hear Jacko saying, Oh Jesus, as if this were something he had forgotten. You could hear Greenspan snorting.

Greenspan's lawyers, joined in action with Jacko's, argued that it was a nuisance suit, that Silverarts' agreement with Jacko was of dubious legality and violated his constitutional rights to enter contracts. The president of Silverarts could not produce any convincing documentation – other than a few speculative letters – for his claim that Silverarts was actively working on a project involving Jacko. The idea that Jacko had somehow damaged
them
by working for Greenspan was fatuous, and their injunction writ was opportunistic and meant to create the basis for a damages settlement.

The judge sent us all to lunch. In the corridor, I stood on the edge of the sizeable group which included Jacko and Greenspan.

—You didn't tell me you signed an indemnity, Greenspan marginally complained.

—I did it to set the bugger's mind at rest, said Jacko.

I was aware of the curious bewilderment in Jacko's eyes. There was still that much of Burren Waters in him: he did not expect to suffer for technicalities.

Greenspan said, I wish you'd told me.

Tracey looked at the distempered wall and pursed the corners of her mouth. Jacko's agent appeared and walked smoothly past, but Greenspan detained him by the elbow.

—Do you generally sell out on your clients like that?

The man pulled himself free and shrugged.

—I can only lead my clients to water. I can't be expected to drown with them.

Greenspan told the agent, I've put five million dollars development and promotion into Jacko. I wonder about your intentions.

—That's your prerogative, said Jacko's agent. It's all speculative at the end of the day, isn't it?

—Oh hell, said Jacko, but it was more in despair than in fury.

—If I can manage it, Greenspan told the agent, I'll ensure that before the end of this year you're wearing your anus like a necklace.

—Are you threatening me, Mr Greenspan?

—Well, as they say, I hope it's more than a threat.

—It's a big industry, said the agent.

He turned his eyes to Jacko.

—Jacko, I'm sorry it hasn't worked out.

—Bloody hell, said Jacko, nearly beyond protest.

By mid-afternoon the judge granted the injunction against the screening of Jacko's show. Jacko was not to participate in any game shows, other than those produced by Silverarts, for the next three years. He was free to go on making his living through doorknocks and current affairs.

That night, when those who had not heard the news tuned in to see Jacko, they found a re-run of a comedy show instead. Jacko drank vodka in the Odeon with me and a young lawyer, and his new segment producer on
Morning Manhattan
, Angela, whom I had met briefly at the start of the summer. She was a robust looking young woman from Wisconsin who had gone to Rutgers on a swimming scholarship. Her manner was not unlike Lucy's – very country, not New York gritty.

At one point in the evening when Jacko and I both stood at the urinals, Jacko said, Jesus, couldn't be permitted, could it? Jacko Emptor, wealthy
and
a star. Just couldn't be permitted. Would've fucked the universe some way or other.

Back at the table Angela, his new producer, said, Better watch it, Jacko. You might be wiped out for the morning.

—Are you doing a show tomorrow morning? I asked Jacko.

Jacko put his head in his hands and then laid his brow down on the table.

—As per contract, he told me. To keep the bread and butter on the table. I think it would be a good morning for the Bronx. Despair within, despair without.

He turned to the young country girl.

—Will you come home with me and make sure I get up?

Angela reached out and put her hand on his wrist but didn't say yes or no. She didn't want word to get back to her mother perhaps, or maybe she intended to get him to his door and then leave him to sleep until the wake-up call.

Next Jacko turned to me.

—Then you'll come out too in the morning eh?

—But why me?

—Solidarity with the bloody downtrodden, said Jacko. Besides, you stay in that apartment of yours all day and keep writing, and you'll be mad as a cut snake.

—Like television people perhaps? I suggested.

—All jokes aside, he said. You're my fucking sage.

—I'm your fucking stooge, I said.

And Jacko said a garbled Biblical-sounding verse he may have heard when he came down from Burren Waters to Sydney to go to boarding school at the age of fourteen.

—So shall the wise man appear foolish … Eh? Eh?

—You've got that bit right, Jacko.

I had the embarrassment still ahead of me of arriving home having drunk too much in a bar in which, yet again, I was the oldest person, and then of admitting that I would rise before dawn at Jacko's bidding.

—This is madness, I said.

I was no closer than I had been before our estrangement to working out why I obeyed Jacko or why I wanted to.

As I have already confessed, I was by now used to the process of waking with the night's sins not quite burned away in the blood. There is first the sense of having awakened in hell, beyond the ambit of Divine Grace and mother love. Then the stirred and abused brain begins to coruscate with the unabsorbed residue of the night's alcohol, and a curious, fatuous, reviving energy sets in, which will leave you stark-eyed by mid-morning yet strangely equipped for the flippant demands of dawn.

The limo picked me up first. It was the hour when cities are still and pensive, the night's crimes behind and the day not yet marred. At five-fifteen berserk thoroughfares like Houston and West Broadway were vacant except for the trucks bringing the countryside's bounty into the city.

At Thomas Street, one mere ring of the bell brought Jacko suited, coated, in his porkpie to the car. He was accompanied by his producer. I deliberately did not look to see if Angela was wearing the same clothes as last night under her coat. She was such a pleasant girl, and I might one day get into a situation where I needed to claim ignorance in front of Chloe or Lucy. She packed Jacko functionally into the back with me, and checked if she had brought everything Jacko needed downstairs. This neo-Lucy was foolish if she thought she had a chance with Jacko. Someone should be
in loco parentis
to tell her, but please God not me, not this morning.

On the one hand, I assured myself, she seemed a smart enough girl to work it out herself. But on the other, Lucy hadn't, not until great grief had been done.

—I appreciate you being here, cobber, Jacko told me. I know your missus doesn't approve of me any more.

Most polite Manhattanites, even honorary ones like me, avoided the Bronx. It was a mystery you did not want to enquire into. Stories returned from there and fantastically lodged in the pages of the
New York Times
or the
Post
or
News
. Brave documentary teams kitted up and plunged into it. Safe in numbers, people went to the baseball there, to see the Yankees, but skittered home as soon as the result was clear. It was the Third World just across the Triboro Bridge, inhabited by a race named the underclass. As Livingstone had disappeared in Kenya, Manhattanites could disappear in the Bronx. There had been novels about the mishaps which could befall the best people who mistakenly took an exit here.

This morning Jacko and Angela and I were taking one by design. We ran all too briskly at this hour along the FDR and made the crossing, in fact, at the 138th Street Bridge. We found ourselves almost at once in the Grand Concourse, a superb nineteenth-century
faubourg
, designed a hundred years past in the belief that the Bronx would ever flourish as a centre of bourgeois urbanity.

No street on Manhattan stood up beside the Grand Concourse. Park Avenue was a boring conduit by comparison, Fifth too narrow. We took a turn at a shopping centre with steel and mesh chain shutters, and turned again into a narrow street of old apartment buildings. Here burnt-out cars sat hunched in the gutters, and black-lipped windows spoke of someone's dangerous fury.

—Jesus, said Jacko. You could rent a few blokes from Actors Equity, put 'em in camouflage, give 'em Armalites and do a documentary on Belfast up here.

—We might do that, conceded Angela, but her smile was tight and she was watchful.

With another right turn and then a left, and a few other little dodges, the driver soon had us lost in streets where apartment blocks had given way to houses, which stood in their own gardens of litter and weeds. The front car seat, set in the garden as a form of
al fresco
settee, was one of the area's favourite items.

We were pleased to see the microwave truck with
Vixen Six
marked on it and the technicians standing by its back door drinking coffee with good old Clayton.

Our car drew up.

—You got a gun, driver? Jacko asked the chauffeur.

—Better believe it, sir.

—Good to know, said Jacko.

We got out and Jacko and Angela had a conference with Clayton.