Gilliamesque. Terry Gilliam

if I was willing to accept a collect call, I would generously say ‘Yes’, and the company running the box would inadvertently pick up the tab. It was a black day for American students when the telephone companies got wise to that little scam.

      Happily, working for Help! kept me too busy to rack up many hours of solitary reflection. Given that Harvey mostly operated from his home out in Mount Vernon, my job was mainly to oversee the day-to-day running of the magazine’s office with the head of production, Harry Chester. Essentially, I was Kurtzman’s representative on earth, and it was my job to deal with pretty much anything that came up. I also spent a lot of time in the city library, because we were always looking for engravings and paintings that we could put silly captions on. All the stuff Private Eye still does now – that started in Help!

      On the rare occasions when I actually had enough money to buy a drink, New York City’s strict laws ensured that I was usually asked for ID to prove I was over twenty-one. Such was my desperation to get served that I even resorted to a goatee. Alcohol hadn’t been a big thing for me when I was in college. I never liked the taste of beer and was good at resisting peer pressure by telling people who tried to bully me into getting drunk – ‘C’mon Terry, bolt it down’ – to go fuck themselves. But my sophisticated new metropolitan lifestyle required the occasional alcoholic beverage, and I was damned if I was going to be ‘carded’ every time I ordered one.

      I’d arrived in New York in the autumn without anything other than California clothes, and then winter hit. My blood had thinned down considerably since my Minnesotan childhood, and my excitement at how like Humphrey Bogart I was going to look in my first trench-coat quickly turned to chattering teeth as the icy wind whipped through the thin cotton. At one point I even got hold of a sun-lamp in a doomed bid to restore some California colour, and somehow managed to burn my closed eyelids. The logic of the situation was clear: the next time I used it, I kept my eyes open. Oh the pain! I woke up in the middle of the night totally blind, unable to prise open my eyelids. It was like someone had poured a beach into my eyes.

      It’s always been my default setting to think that the way I see the world is just normal, and all the other people are cooler, smarter and hipper than me. In New York in 1962–3, this was incontrovertibly true, and not just of Bob Dylan – who had Suze Rotolo to keep him warm as the two of them walked down a snowy Jones Street in Greenwich Village on the cover of his second album. Not only was I impressed by everyone, but I also knew I looked – and sounded – way too young to be in the responsible position of Assistant Editor, so I’d put on a deeper voice when I spoke to people on the phone, and then say, ‘I’ll send someone round’, before going to pick up the delivery myself . . . ‘You got a package for Mr Gilliam at Help! magazine?’