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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