He is proud of having been a youthful deckhand on an Arctic salvage boat and a roustabout in the Alberta oilfields.
But the senator with the biggest legislative muscle on Capitol Hill is a Rabelaisian roustabout who hasn't had a new idea since the 1960s.
He was, in fact, the "down-under" counterpart of the wharf labourer, or roustabout, on the Mississippi River.
Mosley revisited the setting of 1950s Los Angeles in the mystery Fearless Jones (2001), introducing timorous bookseller Paris Minton and his roustabout sidekick, the titular Jones.
Working his way from circus roustabout to manager, Coup, in 1872, persuaded P.T. Barnum to end his retirement and join him in starting the circus that later became "The Greatest Show on Earth".
And we are taunted with details of the "feckless, vain and ineffective" sleep-deprived, party-hardy roustabout who nominally runs Italy, not to mention the must-read narrative of a wedding in Dagestan in which "dramatically paunchy men" dance "with two scantily clad Russian women who looked far from home" while one guest "brought the happy couple 'a five-kilo lump of gold' as his wedding present".
Meanwhile, one of the roustabout members of the drilling crew had nudged the piece of rubber tubing, which had fallen to the ground.
Weeks later we are in a second crash as a blown tire forces the car to swirl and whirl across Wilbraham Road in Whalley Range, in a playful roustabout with death, leaving the car about-face in someone's garden.
But the hands, after their taste of roustabout money, had followed the dollar away from Wyoming.
The Times, as if covering a summit meeting or a Presidential campaign, started grouping its stories under a running head, "The Simpson Case," and on one Friday a subhead deplored "a swelling media circus" — the journalistic equivalent of a roustabout tut-tutting the clowns.
