Barron felt the wheels turning. Cat’s riffing out straight S.J.C. party line, with a neat little Jack Barron tie-in, too neat. Got put in his head real professional-like, but he doesn’t know it, thinks it’s his own scam, in the air, is all. Rumor-mill stuff, all right: whispers in drunken barroom voices, on street corners, discos, real spontaneous-looking, just stuff everyone hears around. And ten to one it all comes from Evers, Mississippi…And I oughta know, I invented the schtick way back when.
Yeah, Barron thought, as he picked up on the moment hanging in the air, the four of them looking to him with life-death desperation in their eyes, vacuum-eyes of Brackett Audience Count estimated hundred million people, planted story, but a good one ’cause it hit a nerve, Luke and Morris are right, death is like the issue. Face of death, we’re all just people, do anything (lie, kill, form Foundation for Human Immortality, sell out to Bennie Howards) to stay alive just one more second, ’cause when you’re dead, morality bullshit dies with you. Only two-party system on issue of life and death: Death Party and Life Party. Gut-level Presidential campaign: S.J.C.-Republican-Jack Barron Party of life eternal versus Howards-Democratic Party of death by the numbers.
Jesus H. Christ on a Harley! Barron thought as it hit his gut-reality for the very first time—I actually could make the old college try for President!
“Well, like I’m with you in principle,” Barron said, with horrid awareness of his words as possible projected instrument of history (stuff history!) public statement from the Man Who thrust unwillingly into electric-contact reality social-conscience reality (goddamned silly-ass Berkeley bullshit is all!) he needed like an extra rectum. “But from where I sit, the whole Public Freezer schtick’s nowheresville. Don’t you see what you’re bucking? Bucking Benedict Howards and like billions in frozen assets, bucking the Democratic Party that’s elected every president but two for over half a century, bucking Teddy the Pretender and his ghosts, and bucking the Republicans too—they don’t want Public Freezing, just a piece of the action for their own fat cats, is all, and they’re still rolling in bread. So what’s that leave on the other side, the S.J.C. and my big mouth, and a few hundred fruitcakes parading around with picket signs? Big fucking deal!”
“Hey, you’re beautiful, man!” the Wolfman said sincerely. “You got more people listen to you than any cat in the country, and you don’t dig your own power, so groovy. You’re the coolest head around, is what you are, sitting up there with those sons of bitches, bigger than any of ’em and not playing that game, still keeping your cool. Cat we can trust. Shit, you’re beautiful, man.”
“He’s right,” the blonde chick said. “Don’t you dig? You got the power like the rest of the bastards, but you’re the only one didn’t get it on a pile of dead bodies, so you can use it the way it should be used, for people…”
“Don’t you see, Jack?” Sara asked, staring hungrily at him with those old Berkeley eyes. “Power…Remember how we talked in the old days about power, what we’d do when we got it? Sure you remember all that bullshit. But don’t you see, it doesn’t have to be bullshit anymore. We’ve got you, and you’ve got the power. You weren’t afraid to lay yourself on the line in the old days, when it accomplished nothing, and now you can do it again, but this time it’ll matter.”
“Power!” Barron snapped. “None of you know shit from shinola about power! Look around you, take a good look, and you’ll see Howards and Teddy and Morris—that’s power. They’re people, dig, people, is all, but, baby, they’re junkies. All of ’em power-junkies. That’s what power does to you, a fucking monkey on your back—just like junk. First shot’s free, kiddies, but after that you’ve gotta go out and cop more and more and more to feed the monkey. I’m a beautiful cat, eh? I’ll take you outside and show you fifty former beautiful cats you wouldn’t piss on because, baby, they’re junkies. And a junkie don’t give a shit about anything but junk. Power and smack—it’s all the same junk.”
“Luke Greene’s a junkie?” Sara said quietly.
“Bet your sweet ass he is! There he is, stuck in the Mississippi boonies, the poor lonely fucker, surrounded by sycophants and plain ordinary schmucks, hating every minute of it, hating himself, hating manipulating people…All that race-put-down come-on—only it’s real. He hates himself for being a nigger, thinks of himself as a nigger surrounded by niggers. Luke Greene—there was a beautiful cat, my best friend, and now look at him, hating himself, hating everything, nothing but a big throbbing vein to feed the power-monkey on his back. You wanna see me like that, Sara?”
The silence was so thick you could cut it with a knife. What brought that on? Barron wondered. Jeez, what’s in this grass, maybe it is loaded with opium junk…Junk…Yeah, maybe that’s it, man, once you really were a power-junkie, in the old days, just a bag now and then to keep the monkey quiet. Wasn’t that why you got yourself the show in the first place, biggest jolt of power-junk you ever had? Worked funny, didn’t it, O.D.’d you, got you off it? And now you got everyone shaking the stuff under your nose, feel that hunger so hot you can taste it, and everyone telling you go ahead, shoot up, you can’t get hooked again sonny, you’re a beautiful cat!
And that’s where all this is at, he knew. Whole Village is a power-junk supermarket for old Jack Barron, and that’s why you dug this party idea, baby, you smelled the shit like an old junkie, couldn’t keep away. One fix, and you’re hooked.
Not this time, Sara. Too much to lose, Bug Jack Barron, maybe a free shot at forever. Throw that away for a surge of Presidential bullshit Samson-smash junk? Would you? Would anyone? Gonna be a junkie, be an immortality-junkie—at least that monkey gives as good as it gets.
Screw this whole scene! Barron thought bitterly. Truth, justice, you a beautiful cat bullshit—no different from the rest, all want my bod for your own bags.
I’m tired of it all, Machiavellian motherfuckers, Howards, Luke, Morris, all losers; maybe you too, Sara, who knows? Goddamn paranoid nightmare! Show you all Jack Barron’s his own man, nobody’s flunky. I’ll get what I want, one way or another, and on my own fucking terms!
Wonder who did this stuff? Sara Westerfeld thought behind her shield of purposeful cynicism against Jack-reality as the elevator door opened, revealing the entrance foyer to his little-boy treehouse-penthouse and the crude, not-quite-making-it kinesthop mural on the wall (should be whole kinesthop wall around the hallway entrance, really suck in all those chicks he’s supposed to be balling, she thought professionally).
Jack smiled a little-boy smile, hair all curls like fresh from pillow years flaking away dig my pad baby smile of first meeting first love first lay in dingy Berkeley attic. She reached out and pinched his ass—still firm cute ass-flesh felt the about-to-be-fucked-for-the-first-time thrill of the unfolding unknown.
He put his arm around her waist, led her past doors down a dark hallway toward a vast space she could kinesthetically sense beyond, paused suddenly, yanked her off her feet into arms around shoulder hand firm under her ass caressing divide, and she went with it, arms around him, face nuzzled into wild curls roughness around his neck as he laughed, said: “I never got to carry you over any threshold, baby, so better late than never.”
She giggled with semi-sincere, go-with-it-it’s-his-bag pleasure, said: “Darling, there are times when you’re so beautifully square.”
He carried her forward (she could feel muscles deliciously tight straining against her), paused at the brink of something (she could see stars, night-treeshapes across bulking distance), fiddled with some panel on the wall and…
Flames leapt up billowing orange from huge firepit in the center of a vast scarlet-carpeted room, dancing ruby shadows across chairs, pillow-piles, furniture, huge gizmo electronic wall consoles to a California patio beyond, rubber-trees against the naked sky scintillating firelight glow from the faceted-dome skylight-ceiling reflecting sparks into the dead New York sky, and she saw they were on a deck-balcony above the huge living room as rock-montage music began to play from s
omewhere and color-organ spectral flashes swirling with the music spun acid-reality magic in the air, and she felt him quiver against her, waiting for a reaction to his externalized head like a cornucopia before her—or just as like some silly-ass Hollywood set.
She hugged him silently, unsure of the truth of her reactions: so like Jack, magic, cop-out, phony, extravagant, bullshit, and yet…and yet…
Yet it’s real, real fantasy playpen, no interior-decorated-calculated baloney, straight from Jack’s head to reality, with nothing in between. It’s him, it’s his dream—Berkeley, Los Angeles, California candy-store window, unafraid naked garish conscious-subconscious Jack Barron day-dream, sugar-plum reality that money had made real.
Sara felt herself teetering on the brink of a dangerous truth: Who was really the cop-out, Jack who went and got what he needed to make his dream real, molding a Jack Barron reality to the shape of his dreams, or me, shaping dreams to the size of mundane reality (takes balls to be garish ’cause garishness is your bag)? A hero’s a man with the courage to live in his dreams.
“How’s that grab you, baby?” he said, carrying her down to the lush-carpeted surface, setting her on her feet, staring into her eyes, giving the question pregnant ego-involvement intensity.
I don’t know how it grabs me she thought vertiginously. Your bag, not mine, little-boy stuff, like tin soldiers, silly Hollywood crap. But you dig it, I dig you, and, Jack darling, it’s real. “It’s you, Jack,” she said quite truthfully.
“You think it’s a lot of silly bullshit,” he said. “I can see it in your eyes.”
“No!” she said loudly, impulsively, aware that she meant it only after she said it. “It’s just…I’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s like…like seeing your head, I mean, the inside of your head, out there. It’s so…naked, I mean it’s the nakedest room I’ve ever seen. Like you had a magic wand and just waved it and everything that you wanted in your head suddenly was. I won’t con you, Jack, you know it’s not my bag out there, it’s yours, and if I was waving the wand, it’d be all different. But the idea of waving the wand in the first place—that’s such a pure groove! I dig this place because it’s you, exactly what you wanted to make it. It’s a whole new bag, a whole new idea to me—wanting something like this, a dream, and having the power to make it reality. I…I…I’m not sure what I feel.”
He smiled a knowing smile, kissed her lightly, and said, “There’s hope for you after all, Sara. You’re getting a taste of it, Sara, a taste of where the world’s really at. It’s all out there, every dream, everything anyone wants. But you don’t get it by talking about it or dropping acid and wishing. You gotta get out there in the nitty-gritty and grab it, take as much of what’s out there as what’s inside you can get you. That’s reality. Not what’s inside or what’s outside, but how much of what’s inside you can make real. If that’s copping out—getting your hands dirty—well, then I’d rather be a cop-out than a one-eyed cat forever peeping in a seafood store. Wouldn’t you? Is being hungry all your life really being true to yourself?”
Jack Barron, she thought. Jack Barron. Jack Barron. JACK BARRON. Christ, it’s hard to think of him as anything but JACK BARRON in great big red capital letters. Hate him, love him, cop-out comic-book-monster hero lover, whatever he is, it’s impossible to keep your cool around him. Jack’s Jack, makes his own rules no one else can even follow, lies become truth becomes cop-out becomes psychedelic vision—reality becomes lover becomes power becomes rock-bottom honesty, comes on like acid-flash white-out reversal-images; foreground-background indeterminate interface of dynamic instability, and what he is is the paradox interface itself—not figure, not ground, but the standing-wave-pattern between. JACK BARRON.
And she knew fear, knowing he was something greater than herself, something hyperreal, encompassing her reality as a facet of himself, only one facet; knew fear that he saw through her like through glass, saw lizard-man Howards pushing them together in chessboard gambit from bone-white windowless temple of power. And she knew guilt at her own cop-out, holding within her Howards’ plan within her plan, playing the very same game she put Howards down for. But Jack himself had given her the path from guilt to resolution—reality, truth—is how much of what’s inside you that you can make real. And she knew hunger for him, for his body-reality love, for inside-head dreams made real, not for a moment or a year or a century, but forever. Forever. She knew hunger, and knew she had never hungered like this before.
But she also knew a feeling that filled her with soul-jeopardy dread: guile. She felt the serpent-shaped slithering word within her, holding a piece of her back in cool rock lairs coil in reptile coil, waiting basilisk cold centuries ready to pounce; knew she was faced with an order of decision-reality she had not believed existed—life eternal with Jack forever knight in soft-flesh armor against a million years of wormeaten nothingness. Knew in her hands was the darkness-power of life versus death for her, for Jack…for how many millions? And she knew with infinite sadness that at age thirty-five she was no longer girl Sara Westerfeld, but woman Sara Westerfeld, playing adult-deadly game with man Jack Barron for the highest stakes of all, for the right to think of herself really as Sara Barron in great big red capital letters forever. Sara BARRON. SARA BARRON.
“Let me show you something that’s us,” he said, taking her hand. “A dream made real we can both dig together.” And led her across the red carpet to a small door. “Remember, Sara?” He opened the door to the bedroom, and she stepped inside—and saw and felt. And remembered.
Oh, she remembered! She remembered sun-warmed grass against her back pushed to rich wet earth by him open sighing flash of stars glowing blue-black skylight above bed open to the stars tropical night-smells heard Acapulco breakers in the taped surfsounds that came on at the touch of his hand; patio foliage outlined against the dusk-glow of Brooklyn against sunset clawing through leaf-frond windows of Los Angeles bedroom his face blue and stubbly arms sleeping around her. Ivy-walled bedstead of Berkeley attic first-time thrill gray wood texture of college-fuck walls. Saw plastigrass carpet, console in bedstead, surfsound recording, sliding panels, scenery, props—the backside of a dream.
Her dream.
She turned toward him, and he was smiling, fey, knowing buddha-eyes like scalpels, the conscious creator of her midnight-tears dream.
Do I love him, or hate him? She wondered if she’d ever know, if it mattered, for no other man so knew her, no other man gave off that dangerous heat. She could hate him and love him in her innermost being (where love and hate might be the same thing)—beside JACK BARRON (in flaming capital letters) who else could be real?
“Jack…” she croaked, crying and laughing, flinging herself at him, her self—bundle of hate, love, thirty-five years of girlhood—open, reservations forgotten. Poor fool lizardman Howards, thinking he can use me against Jack Barron—a handful of sand thrown against the sea.
She was on the bed under him without remembering moving, swimming in tides of total sensation, a balloon of diffused nerve-endings living the moment on her sentient skin. And he was…
Exploding within her, imploding around her, filling her, gorging her with electrical being, blunt lance of pleasure around which she surrounded, caressing it, feeling it, digging it, taking it in. Feeling him gasping in spiraling spasms, feeling molecule by molecule wet scorching osmosis, him-her symbiotic flashing interface where skin touched skin, she screamed with his throat as he flashed through her, and time jumped a long beat of unbearable pleasure and she soared in a dream of Islamic heaven—slow-grinding orgasm for ten million years.
Opening her eyes, she saw his closed and dreaming. Jack! Jack! she thought. I’m a phony, a liar. I came here like some damned Mexican whore. And she teetered on the edge of telling him all—Benedict Howards using her, and she using him.
But she felt his weight on her, the touch of his skin, his hair tickling her nipples, and the thought of his body lying in humus, dead, gone and forgotten, tied her be
lly and tongue in constricted knots. She remembered that she stood between him and oblivion. If she were brave a little longer, held it back for a while, all that was Jack, all that was between them, never had to die.
Oh, Jack, Jack! she wanted to shout but didn’t, someone like you should never die!
8
“Deathbed at go” the promptboard flashed, and Jack Barron, clocking Vince’s smart-ass Sicilian-type grin, was sure Gelardi had to have Mafiosa blood in him somewhere even though he claimed to be strictly Napolitan. The promptboard flashed “45 Seconds,” and Barron shuddered as the last seconds of the opening commercial reeled by—schtick was a bunch of diplomats relaxing around the old conference table with good old Acapulco Golds. Ain’t as funny as it looks, he thought, vips run the world like they’re stoned half the time anyway, and for the other half things are worse. Wonder what Bennie Howards would be like high? Well, maybe tonight all hundred million Brackett Count chilluns gonna see—they say adrenalin’s like a psychedelic, and before I’m through tonight, Bennie’s gonna go on an adrenalin bummer he won’t believe.
Bug Jack Barron Page 12
