Bug Jack Barron

by Norman Spinrad

  Greene turned to him and Barron felt remorse and shame sugar-coating years of unfaced gut-anger, felt himself go out to this man, black man is where it’s at, was his friend had stood beside him in streets of danger, balled Sara before he had and made him like it, butting his poor black head against white stone walls ten million years’ thick, knowing he was a nigger, always knowing there was a line beyond which he could never pass, knowing he was a power-junkie, knowing what he was and how it had been done to him and why, and still a man, is all, a man, as Lukas Greene smiled a brittle bitter-but-triumphant smile and said: “This is the man who said the worst moment in the world is when you decide to sell out and no one’s buying?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What’s it mean?” Greene snapped. “It means you’re full of shit and we both know it! Any man could sit there knowing he had nothing to gain from it and say a thing like that to a friend, and knowing damn well that I know you’re right, that everything I’ve ever done down here is pissing into a hurricane…that’s a man I’d follow, a man I did follow once, a man every black man in America’d follow, and we both know it. Damn it, Jack, you are the closest thing to a black shade going. Goddamn it, why won’t you admit it? You’re a hero down here, a hero in the Village and Harlem and Strip City, in every fucking ghetto in the country, because you’re the one cat that crawled up from the gutter to the big time without copping out, with your brains and your mouth and not on a ladder of dead bodies. That’s your image, man, you made it, and whether it’s true or not, don’t mean squat because people want to believe it, and you dig having them believe it—and the name of that game, Claude, is politics.”

  Thinking of his name in triplicate on Benedict Howards’ paper, Barron said, “That, Rastus, is what I call horseshit. If I’m the Hero of the People, it sure don’t say very much for the People…Hell, I’m tired of all this. I came down here to talk to that Franklin cat, not debate the ethical structure of the Universe. You located him?”

  “Got his address and phone number. I’ll send a car for him. He lives pretty close to town. You’ll stay at my digs, natch, you can talk to him in private there.”

  Barron clocked the shiny Government Buildings looming before him, then looked back out the rear window at the sprawling black pustule of shantytown Evers festering behind.

  Gotta walk the street again, he thought. Don’t know why, but I gotta do it. Show Luke, Sara, Howards, Franklin too, show ’em all. That’s where the real show is, back there in the shithole, out there in the audience, nitty-gritty Brackett Audience Count estimated hundred million people are out there in the gutter…Jack Barron returns to the People. Sara’d cream in her pants, and why not?

  “No, man,” he said. “I’m just not up to doing the Bwana schtick. I’m gonna meet the cat on his own turf. I see him out there.”

  14

  Night streets. Yeah, night streets of Harlem, Watts, Fulton, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East-East Village, Evers, all the same, hot heavy crowded and sullen with odors of greasy cooking dirt drunk-piss pot junk and cheap whore-perfume; oil-on-steel sounds of quiet, too quiet in shantytown side-streets, the hollow frenzy of Saturday night (it’s always Saturday night) on King Street, Evers’ main drag. The Street, The Street running down Lenox Avenue to Bedford to Fulton to King Street, night on The Street same in any city with interchangeable parts of mass-produced Black America like cheapjack copies of the real thing turned out by Japanese sweatshops; whores junkies jds bars Lenox Avenue strip joints Fulton jazz cellars Bedford hockshops furtive street-light pushers winos. King Street miasma, a Desolation Row of daisy-chain memories coast to coast made Jack Barron feel like a pale white predator moving on his toes down the black jungle trail of King Street—the Shade, the Man, hunter and the hunted.

  Bet your ass there’s no “Black Shades” out here, Barron thought, feeling a thousand liquid Negro eyes on the back of his neck clocking the lone shade moving down their street, their turf—hey, what’s that shade doin’ here, he the Man? (Every shade moving down Bedford, Lenox, Fulton, King, The Street marked as The Man by the gray tin badge of his skin.) But ain’t that what you really are betting, Barron, your living-color ass is all, out here in the nitty gritty, black nitty gritty, where the word came from in the first place?

  Hey, what you doing here, White Boy? street signs junkies sloe-eyed black women forward-panther-sloping bucks polishing their cool-eyed gaze like New York P.R.s honing up their switchblades seemed to ask. Go walk this street, and tell yourself America don’t have a race problem—Civil Rights is all, wars and whores on poverty is all, never had no race problem here man, not in the good old U.S.A. Slavery maybe, lynchings maybe, riots maybe, endemic small-scale revolution maybe, wouldn’t want one to marry my sister maybe, degenerate black motherfuckers maybe, send ’em all back to the jungle maybe, but them’s all social problems, see, we got no race problem in Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.

  Send ’em back to the jungle, yeah! Barron thought wryly. Somebody say send ’em back? Walk in Harlem, Fulton, Evers, man, and you stop worrying about sending people back to the jungle, too uptight watching the jungle come back to people.

  ’Course there’s something to be said for the jungle, Barron thought, clocking the alive, desperate faces, jazz of the streets moving nice and easy in a liquid sulky beat, sensual relief of a junkie making his score, smirking mating-dance bridal-bargain between a tall thin cat and a little A-head-eyed whore. It’s nitty and it’s gritty and it’s all here you happen to be black, in Strip City, the Village, H-A, you happen to be cool. But if you’re a square old shade with no jungle inside you at all, never walked down MacDougal at 5 a.m., never from door to East Side Puerto Rican door, never felt the heat, never saw The Man out there waiting—then, baby, when you hear those tom-toms wailing from Evers Harlem East Village tribal jungles, better pour another stinger, rub on the old citronella, and fit a new clip in your carbine, ’cause the natives are restless tonight.

  That why you’re trotting down this here jungle trail to meet Franklin in The Clearing instead of playing Big Bwana and summoning the cat to the District Officer Governor’s Mansion gin and tonic carefully guarded by loyal askaris? So you got no eyes to play Bwana—Tarzan of the Jungle’s the name of the game.

  Yeah, maybe. Maybe it’s all a crock of shit, but maybe you gotta give that jungle inside a little transfusion once in a while, score on a street corner, fight in a bar, see the wrong end of a knife, keep the old juices flowing. All them Bwanas out there, they don’t, except every ten years or so—and then they call it a war.

  Up the block was an opaque-windowed barfront, green-paint-on-dirty-glass palm fronds under a tinfoil moon in a dead-black sky, green grime-subdued neon sign flashing “The Clearing.” And outside maybe twenty bucks goofing, cats too down and out not to get bounced from inside. Right outside the doorway like an honor guard of junkies—native kraal and Mr. Henry George Franklin waiting for him inside.

  Look dangerous, man, Barron told himself, feeling old remembered instincts hunching him forward in his funky black jacket, picking up neon flickerings in the pits of his hardened, tense-muscled eyes. Way you gotta play it on this ground, no black shades here—just Us and The Man.

  Feeling the tension-interface before him bulging inward against the clot of black men guarding the door, eyes straight ahead never looking to the side to acknowledge the sullen-stare question the back of his neck knew was there—Hey what you doin’ here, you shade mother you?—Barron threaded through them, neither intruding on turf nor giving ground. And like a bubble bursting through layers of oily tropical waters, was through, and inside.

  A big barn of a room (scars patterning the flakey-paint ceiling where the barroom, amoeba-like, had absorbed shops or apartments by knocking down walls) sunk down a half-flight from the entrance, down three stairs into the cellar, huge slash-pop green poster-fronds painted halfway up the dim grimy-white walls like chartreuse flame in the junkie-funky fluorescent light that turne
d the sea of black faces to ashy washed-out blue-gray.

  The far side of the room was a long bar with a black plastic bartop over some phony ersatz wood; no bar stools, only beertaps visible, and behind the bar no bottles, no mirror, just a crude phallic mural of warriors black and pagan around a tribal fire. Not a mirror in the entire room.

  Below him, the floor of the bar somehow reminded Barron of the New York Stock Exchange: a sea of tables, no more than three or four chairs to each, more people milling about in the aisles than seated, black brokers with beer bottles and shot glasses quoting the latest market averages runner-to-runner: schmeck down three-quarters, pussy up a half, drunk-rolling unchanged, desperation up all the way in strictly a bullish market.

  Barron stood above the tangle trying to spot Franklin before stepping down into The Clearing, the turf, choked with invisibly-bruised black bodies, gut-knowing he had better show a non-Man reason for being there real quick. Sullen eyes began to turn upward, measuring him as he stood there like so much meat—one shade? Hard-up junkie? Flush dumb John out for a piece of black tail? The Man? Is this shade mother The Man? Down here in black man’s country, where The Man’s a nigger? Federal heat? Barron felt the paranoia rising, a thousand eyes sharpening their knives…gotta make a move quick!

  “Hey, ol’ Jack Barron—” a hoarse barroom shout from a two-man table at the far corner where the bar met the wall. Barron saw Henry George Franklin, alone with a bottle and two glasses, bleering at him through the thick blue smoke, waving a vague hand from a fawn-colored sportjac sleeve. “Hey, ol’ Jack, over here!”

  Barron felt an electric thrill as he sensed his name flashing like a running mouse through the crowd. No shouts, no mumbling, just a sudden series of dampening drops in the general noise level jumping around the room like a silence-ghost, leaving knots of black men, dark-skinned women, staring up at him in its wake; then a general turning toward him, a couple of shouts, a quick tension-moment when nobody moved that came as fast as it went. And then a tall, willowy, New-York-street-face Negro standing just below him flashed him an ironic, brother-hippy smile, pulled a pair of black shades out of a jacket pocket and put them on.

  And the man next to him did likewise. And the man next to him. In waves. In spreading circles. Then a rustle of glass and clothing and plastic and three-quarters of the people in the room were wearing black shades, staring up at him with obsidian plastic-framed sightless eyes as if waiting for some countersign while the moment continued to hang.

  More of Luke’s mind-fuck games? Barron wondered. Guy that started it a plant? Luke’s having me followed? Or…or could it be real?

  He fished into his jacket pocket (did I put them there on purpose?), pulled out the pair of black sunglasses Greene had given him, put them on, stepped down to the floor of the bar room.

  And abruptly the wheeling and dealing resumed, and it was like Jack Barron wasn’t there, like he was invisible, like he was black as the best of them—the ultimate compliment, but cool and distant as the top of Mount Everest. Like he was…a black shade. And he knew dead-certain Luke hadn’t engineered this one; it was too cool, too choreographed, too underplayed, too yeah, to be anything but a gut-reaction. The Black Shade…

  Barron made his way across the crowded barroom—with no more than a nod or two in his direction, a smile here and there (cool, real cool, from the womb of cool)—to the table where Henry George Franklin nodded to him, poured him a shot of Jack Daniels even as he sat down.

  Barron fingered the drink, then sipped it as he studied Franklin’s seamy, puffed face, stubble on the verge of becoming a beard, liver-brown bloodshot eyes, yellowed teeth in a slack wet mouth, and stinking like a brewery: face of Brackett Count estimated hundred million losers behind the glass interface of the black shades.

  “Y’came, ol’ shade Jack Barron,” Franklin said half-affrontedly, “now ain’t that a bitch! Big important shade TV star in a place like this.”

  “I’ve been thrown out of crummier holes flat on my ass,” Barron said, one-of-the-boys-wise, tossing down the drink half for the flash half for the gesture.

  Franklin studied him thoughtfully, his eyes no less opaque than the shades Barron still was wearing, finally said: “Maybe you jus’ have,” and poured each of them another drink.

  “Yessir,” he said, “good ol’ Jack Daniels. No more corn out of Mason jars for ol’ Henry George…nossir, nothin’ but bottled-in-bond for me and my fancy shade guest. Yeah, ol’ Jack, fifty thousand dollars, that buys a lot of good whiskey and bad women…” And he bolted down another drink.

  “Let’s talk about that money, Henry,” Barron said, noticing strange hostile looks flickering across the faces of men who happened to glance sideways at the table, dirty looks seemed directed at Franklin the Negro, instead of Barron the shade. “The man who gave it to you must’ve given you some name.”

  “Suppose he did,” Franklin muttered, pouring yet another drink. “Don’t rightly remember, and besides, ol’ Jack, who cares? Like I say, he was just some crazy rich man’s fancy shade messenger-boy, wouldn’t be using his real name, now would he? Not for goin’ around buying people’s kids. That’s gotta be some kinda crime, don’t it?”

  “Did it ever occur to you that it might be a crime to sell your daughter?” Barron asked.

  “Look, ol’ Jack, let’s talk man to man, okay?” Franklin said, waving a maudlin thumb in Barron’s face, “Y’got jus’ two kinds of people, lotsa different names, maybe, but only two kinds of people—them as got somethin’ to lose, and them as got nothin’ to lose. Shade what can go around handing out satchelfuls of money, that’s gotta be someone’s got somethin’ to lose, got reason to worry ’bout legal or not legal, ’cause he plays it cool and The Man’s on his side, unless he does something real stupid. But a dirt-poor nigger with nothin’ but a crumbly ol’ shack, few acres of no-good land he don’t even own and a seven-year-old daughter t’feed, he got nothin’ but nothin’ to lose, why should he care ’bout legal? Law’s against him day he’s born till the day he dies, ’cause he’s black, ’cause he’s poor, ’cause he’s been in and out of jail a few times for havin’ too much to drink, gettin’ in a couple fights, stealin’ a little here and there to keep his belly from growling…When you broke, you take chances.”

  “So you sold your own flesh and blood just like that,” Barron said. “Like you were a fucking slave trader, is all! I don’t understand you, Franklin, and I don’t know if I want to.”

  Franklin bolted down his drink, poured another, stared into the brown liquid, said: “Black shade they call you, tha’s a good one…’cause there jus’ ain’t no such thing. Jus’ like that, the man says. Ain’t no jus’ like that, either. Try being black, try havin’ nothin’ at all for forty-three years, try living on Food Stamps and tinned peanut butter, savin’ up enough money in a month to get drunk one night to forget you is nothin’ got nothin’ never’ll habe nothin’, and knowing that little girl eats up half what money you got never gonna be nothin’ better than you, dirt-poor nigger maybe married off in a few years to another dirt-poor nigger and off your back, you lucky, and then some crazy shade drives up to your place when you had a little corn to begin with, feeds you a whole bottle of whiskey, then throws a satchelful of hundred dollar bills at you and all he wants is…” Franklin began to shake, sobbed once, downed the drink, poured another, and drank that too.

  “Look, Mr. Barron,” he said, “I told you everything I know. Maybe I’m not a good man, maybe I’m a bad man—piece of shit I sometimes think. But I want her back! Don’t want some crazy shade to have her! All right, all right, I did wrong, did real wrong, couldn’t help myself. I want her back! Y’gotta help me, man. I’ll give back the money if I gotta, but I want her back…I ain’t much, but I’m her poppa. She ain’t much, but she’s all I got. Y’gotta help me get her back.”

  “Okay, okay,” Jack Barron said as Franklin’s watery, bloodshot, livery eyes pinned him, eyes of a man who’d done wrong and knew it, but didn’t q
uite know why, guarded eyes of a man who didn’t see himself as a criminal or a louse but a loser, congenital black-skin-predestined loser, stupid, ignorant mark taken in some con game, based, as they all were, on his desperation, on the difference between being a spade and being a shade, eyes that accused Barron, himself, his daughter, the child-buyer, the nature of the universe, saying: “It’s not my fault I’m a shit, it’s what you made me, all of you, it’s what I’ve been born.”

  “I’m on your side,” Barron said. “Yeah, comes nitty-gritty time, gotta be on your side whether I like it or not. I don’t know what I can do, but whatever it is, I’ll do it, right now, tonight. Okay? Show you what happens when you bug Jack Barron. We’re gonna go straight to the Governor’s Mansion, and I’ll have Luke Greene put every fuzz in the state on it, run you through the files on every kook in the country. Come on, let’s split.”

  Henry George Franklin stared at him in stupefied, disbelieving awe. “You mean it, man! You really mean it? Ol’ Jack, you ain’t jus’ putting me on, you gonna take me up there to see the Governor, top nigger what runs the whole state? You gonna tell him what to do?”