Jacko Read Online Free

mike.
    â€”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.
    â€”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.
    â€”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.
    â€”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.