boat reached an English pier. "I'm here in London on
a secret mission," they quoted him as saying. So the newsmen,
installing Jack in the same hierarchy where they placed royalty,
heroes, and movie stars, created him anew as they enshrined him. They
invented a version of him with each story they wrote, added to his
evil luster by imagining crimes for him to commit, embellishing his
history, humanizing him, defining him through their own fantasies and
projections. This voyage had the effect of taking Jack Diamond away
from himself, of making him a product of the collective imagination.
Jack had imagined his fame all his life and now it was imagining him.
A year hence he would be saying that "publicity helps the punk"
to another set of newsmen, aware how pernicious a commodity it could
be. But now he was an addict, a grotesquely needy man, parched for
glory, famished for public love, dying for the chance at last to be
everybody's wicked pet.
He called the stateroom press conference to a halt
after fifteen minutes and said he had to get dressed. The newsmen
waited and he joined them on deck, clad now in his blue pinstriped
suit, his wide-brimmed white felt hat, seven-and-a-half-B black
wingtips, his purple tie, and his Knight Templar pin in his lapel.
"Hello, boys," he said, "what else do
you want from me?"
They talked for another quarter hour and asked, among
other things, about that lapel pin; and a story goes with that.
When we talked after the press left, Jack told me
that Charlie Northrup was why he was in the Masons. Back in the Bronx
in the mid-twenties Jack was playing cards in the back room of his
garish Theatrical Club, orange and black decor, and Charlie was
sitting in. For no reason he could remember, Jack wondered out loud
what a jack was, the picture card. Charlie told him the symbolic
meaning of a knave among kings and queens, and Jack liked the whole
idea.
Charlie talked about the Masons and their symbols,
and it was like the dawn of a new era for Jack. He pumped Charlie for
more, then talked him into proposing him as a candidate in the order.
He went through in a whoosh and obviously with attention to all the
arcane mumbo jumbo he had to memorize. The Masonic books I inherited
from him were well marked and annotated in the margins, in his
handwriting.
Alongside one section on
an old Templar rite of initiation, a Christly pilgrimage through red,
blue, black, and then the final white veils of the temple, Jack had
noted: "Good stuff. Sounds like one of my dreams."
* * *
Just after meeting the British press Jack complained
to me of itching hands, small red dots which gave up a clear fluid
when squeezed. The broken pustules then burned like dots of acid. A
passenger shot off three of his toes at skeet and blamed Jack for
hexing the weapon. Then the Minneapolis librarian cut her wrists, but
chose against death and summoned help. Her condition became common
knowledge on the ship.
I saw Jack on deck alone
after that, toying with a rosary, the first time I knew he carried
one. He was not praying—only staring at it, strung like webbing
through his fingers, as if it were a strange, incomprehensible
object.
* * *
The night we were steaming toward Plymouth, a steward
came to Jack's room with a message from the captain that the British
authorities had definitely proclaimed Jack persona
non grata . Stay out, you bum. The message
jolted him, for it suddenly put our destination in jeopardy. What
would Belgium do? And Germany?
Jack came to my stateroom and said he wanted to go up
on deck and talk, that he didn't trust the walls. So we walked in the
sea-sweetened night along the main deck where a few night walkers
took the air, most memorably a rheumatic old aristocratic woman with
a belief in the curative power of voyaging that was so religious she
left her deckchair only during storms and meals, and to sleep and, I
presume, to pee. She chewed tobacco and had a small pewter spittoon
alongside her chair which she
a secret mission," they quoted him as saying. So the newsmen,
installing Jack in the same hierarchy where they placed royalty,
heroes, and movie stars, created him anew as they enshrined him. They
invented a version of him with each story they wrote, added to his
evil luster by imagining crimes for him to commit, embellishing his
history, humanizing him, defining him through their own fantasies and
projections. This voyage had the effect of taking Jack Diamond away
from himself, of making him a product of the collective imagination.
Jack had imagined his fame all his life and now it was imagining him.
A year hence he would be saying that "publicity helps the punk"
to another set of newsmen, aware how pernicious a commodity it could
be. But now he was an addict, a grotesquely needy man, parched for
glory, famished for public love, dying for the chance at last to be
everybody's wicked pet.
He called the stateroom press conference to a halt
after fifteen minutes and said he had to get dressed. The newsmen
waited and he joined them on deck, clad now in his blue pinstriped
suit, his wide-brimmed white felt hat, seven-and-a-half-B black
wingtips, his purple tie, and his Knight Templar pin in his lapel.
"Hello, boys," he said, "what else do
you want from me?"
They talked for another quarter hour and asked, among
other things, about that lapel pin; and a story goes with that.
When we talked after the press left, Jack told me
that Charlie Northrup was why he was in the Masons. Back in the Bronx
in the mid-twenties Jack was playing cards in the back room of his
garish Theatrical Club, orange and black decor, and Charlie was
sitting in. For no reason he could remember, Jack wondered out loud
what a jack was, the picture card. Charlie told him the symbolic
meaning of a knave among kings and queens, and Jack liked the whole
idea.
Charlie talked about the Masons and their symbols,
and it was like the dawn of a new era for Jack. He pumped Charlie for
more, then talked him into proposing him as a candidate in the order.
He went through in a whoosh and obviously with attention to all the
arcane mumbo jumbo he had to memorize. The Masonic books I inherited
from him were well marked and annotated in the margins, in his
handwriting.
Alongside one section on
an old Templar rite of initiation, a Christly pilgrimage through red,
blue, black, and then the final white veils of the temple, Jack had
noted: "Good stuff. Sounds like one of my dreams."
* * *
Just after meeting the British press Jack complained
to me of itching hands, small red dots which gave up a clear fluid
when squeezed. The broken pustules then burned like dots of acid. A
passenger shot off three of his toes at skeet and blamed Jack for
hexing the weapon. Then the Minneapolis librarian cut her wrists, but
chose against death and summoned help. Her condition became common
knowledge on the ship.
I saw Jack on deck alone
after that, toying with a rosary, the first time I knew he carried
one. He was not praying—only staring at it, strung like webbing
through his fingers, as if it were a strange, incomprehensible
object.
* * *
The night we were steaming toward Plymouth, a steward
came to Jack's room with a message from the captain that the British
authorities had definitely proclaimed Jack persona
non grata . Stay out, you bum. The message
jolted him, for it suddenly put our destination in jeopardy. What
would Belgium do? And Germany?
Jack came to my stateroom and said he wanted to go up
on deck and talk, that he didn't trust the walls. So we walked in the
sea-sweetened night along the main deck where a few night walkers
took the air, most memorably a rheumatic old aristocratic woman with
a belief in the curative power of voyaging that was so religious she
left her deckchair only during storms and meals, and to sleep and, I
presume, to pee. She chewed tobacco and had a small pewter spittoon
alongside her chair which she
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