A sudden flash of insight as Carrie directed her demands to nitty-gritty primary limp and pouting organ, bugged ego-extension of him in her smooth cool hands cradling, wheedling, finally stimulating cold reflex hard-on as he felt blood, attention, desire flow mechanically into it—no chick since Sara had done as much time in the sack as Carrie Donaldson, steady couple-times-a-week cool detached lay for months and months, static, strictly belly-to-belly nonrelationship had bugged him with network-orders, head unattached to warm-flesh cunt. But now, with Carrie’s cool blown the way he thought he had wanted it, Barron saw that the cool itself was why he kept screwing Carrie—sanity-contrast to an endless string of image-fucking Wednesday-night honey-haired Saras. And now she was a member of Bug Jack Barron goddamned vacuum-eyed fan club, giving him Wednesday-night-style-déjà vu head, wet-dream Sara dream on-her-knees dream eating-kick-’em-in-the-ass world-famous Presidential timber so dumb bitch thinks Jack Barron, wet-dream wish-fulfillment déjà vu Carrie, like all the others déjà vu masturbation-ghosts, not the real thing, one more flesh-and-hair ersatz, not Sara, no longer Carrie. And not Sara. Not ever Sara.
His betraying organ stiff and hard, his mind cold, cold light-years distant and nothing but nothing inbetween, Barron rose to his feet, haughty-ironic Great Man hands-on-hips statue, held the immobile mock-heroic posture as warm undulating lips, caressing tongue, frantic rolling half-closed eyes sent waves of hot thick pleasure through thighs, balls, mindless pulsing independent organ: pleasure-waves that stopped stone-cold dead at his waist.
Enjoy, enjoy, Carrie baby, he thought, feeling the spasm building through ten thousand miles of electric circuit insulation. Make it good, old hot-mouthed Carrie, ’cause it’s the last action you’ll ever get from Jack Barron.
Staring into the naked orange flames of the firepit, naked flesh, naked Carrie Donaldson on the bare rug in exhausted, sated semisleep beside him, Jack Barron felt a carapace of image-history-skin encysting him like steel walls of a TV set, a creature imprisoned in the electronic circuitry of his own head perceiving through promptboard vidphone fleshless electronic speed of light ersatz senses, separated from the girl beside him by the phosphor-dot impenetrable glass TV screen Great Wall of China of his own image.
First time I remember being blown feeling like wet put-down ugliness, he brooded. Ugly, he told himself, is a thing you feel—truth is ugly when it’s a weapon, lie is beautiful when an act of love ugly when it’s one-sided fuck is beautiful when it’s simple, mutual, nobullshit balling, ugly when chick gets her kicks off you that really isn’t there, is why you feel like a rotten lump of shit, man. Getting blown Sara go down being dug by woman’s a pure gas; being sucked off, image-statue living lie, someone else’s lie being eaten (Let me eat you, let me eat you, baby!) is a dirty act of plastic cannibalism, her dirtiness, not mine.
Whole world’s full of plastic cannibals feeding their own little bags off meals of my goddamned image-flesh, eating Jack Barron ghost that isn’t there. And now Morris and my so-called friend Luke are hot to package my living-color bod into TV dinners, sell to hundred million viewer-voter cannibals for thirty pieces of power silver.
Anyone sells my body, he thought, it’ll be me, the real thing to Howards for life eternal in the flesh, not to Luke or Morris for an asterisk losing candidate gravemarker in a history book nobody reads. But something’s happening there too, and you don’t quite know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? Howards-Morris-Luke daisy-chain of power-wheeler-dealers at each other’s throats, all with eyes for Jack Barron as a spare set of false fangs. Too much action in too scary a league to be pure coincidence, something’s up, big glob of shit about to hit National fan, and no one ready to give the straight scam to Jack Barron.
Well, we’ll see about that on Wednesday night, Bennie Howards, see how much cool you keep in Bug Jack Barron hotseat, after all, man, you’re now playing poker with goddamned Presidential timber hotshot, gonna have to lay all your cards on the table to stay in that bullshit game, Bennie-baby. Yeah, you’re in the catbird-seat man, like top trick in a high-class whorehouse, you are—
The vidphone chime interrupted his Germanic self-pity petulance, and good riddance, Jack Barron thought as the familiar stimulus triggered ironic Jack digging vidphone Jack Barron conditioned cynical response. Even money it’s Teddy the Pretender himself, he thought wryly, every other power-junkie around’s tried to score off dealer Jack Barron already.
But the honey-blonde, big dark-brown-eyed (mind’s eye supplying living color to black and white vidphone image) face on the vidphone screen blew his cool to the far side of the moon as he made the connection and the best he could do was to stammer: “Sara…”
“Hello, Jack,” said Sara Westerfeld.
Barron felt a moment of empty, aware-of-his-bare-ass-nakedness blank numbness, sensed the same helpless vacuum behind Sara’s frightened-deer eyes, searched for cue to a reaction-pattern on the blank promptboard in his mind, heard his irony-armored voice saying, “Sadism or masochism, what’s on your acid-soaked mind, baby?”
“It’s been a long time,” Sara began, and Barron, frantically scrabbling for a protocol-reaction-pattern to the ghost of a thousand body-to-body aching memory nights, fell on the inanity like a starving man on a slice of moldy bread.
“No shit?” he said. “I thought you went out to cop some pot six years ago. Get stuck in traffic, Sara?”
“Do you have to, Jack?” she pleaded helplessly with her eyes. “Do we have to chop each other to pieces?”
“We don’t have to do anything,” he said, felt bitterness rising. “You called me, I didn’t call you. I’d never call you. What in hell can I possibly say to you? What can you say to me? You stoned? You freaking out? Whose head are you playing with now, yours or mine?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for everything. Hang up if you want to. Who could blame you? I…I want to see you, Jack, I want to talk to you. I…”
“You got a TV, turn it on Wednesday night, and you can see me. Pick up a vidphone and call the monkey block, make it good, and Vince’ll put you on the air. What’s this all about? It’s been six years, Sara, six fucking years, and now you say ‘Hello, Jack,’ and expect me to come running? Where did you leave your head, Sara?”
“Please…” she said, with the iron defense of soft-woman defenselessness. “You think this is easy for me? I—” (A blankness, a panic seemed to move like a cloud across the sky of her eyes; she hesitated, then began to talk faster and faster.) “I saw your last show, by accident, I admit, but I saw something there I thought was dead. Saw flashes, just flashes in all that bullshit, but they were flashes of you. I mean the real you, like flickering, but it was there, and it was you, and every time it flashed through it went through me like a knife. And, God help me, I couldn’t help loving you, all alone there inside that TV set, all alone inside, flashing between the real Jack and the cop-out Jack, not knowing which was real, and I didn’t know which was real—the Jack I loved, or the Jack I hated and I loved you, and I hated you, and I knew I still had a piece of you inside me, couldn’t get rid of it, and…and…”
“You were stoned, weren’t you?” Barron said with intentional cynical cruelty. “Acid, wasn’t it?”
Again that hesitation, like a slot-machine mechanism behind her eyes, before she spoke. “I…yes, it was a trip. Maybe…maybe that was it, seeing your show with new eyes, old eyes, like old-new eyes, I mean part of me was back in Berkeley, and part of me was with you that last time, and part of me was inside that TV set with you, and…I’ve got to see you, got to know whether it was the acid or…”
“So now I’m a goddamned zonk!” Barron snapped. “Like a kaleidoscope or one of your old Dylan records, something to freak out to. Did you bring yourself off? See colored lights? I don’t want to be any part of your bum trips—not even by proxy. You’re turning my stomach, calling me up like this, stoned out of your mind. Forget it, baby. Go ride the Staten Island Ferry and pick up a horny sailor and fuck with his head, because I�
�m not about to let you play acid games with mine, not any more. Not ever again.”
“I’m not stoned now, Jack,” she said quietly. “I’m straight, maybe straighter than I’ve ever been in my life. We all go through changes. I watched you go through yours, and I couldn’t take it. Now I think I’ve gone through one of my own, a big one. It happens like that sometimes, six years of things just happening to you but not really getting through to your head, and then something, acid plus something, maybe something silly and meaningless triggers the big flash, and suddenly all those six years come through all the way at once and you feel them, feel the years before too, and all the possible futures, all in a moment, and nothing’s happened in that moment that anyone else can see, but you’re just not the same you anymore. There’s a gap, a discontinuity, and you know you can’t go back to being what you’ve been but you don’t yet know what you are.
“And only you can tell me, Jack. I’ve got no present now, and you’re my past, and maybe—if I’m not just finally flipping out—if you still want me, my future too. I see another side of you now. I see that you can see things I don’t, and now I’m not so certain that they’re all bad. Help me, Jack. If you ever loved me, please help me now.”
“Sara—” Sara, you crazy bitch, don’t do this to me, put me on, stretch me out like piano wire, play arpeggios on my skull, Ping-Pong with my balls, Barron thought, trying desperately to hug his cynicism-shield to him against the tide washing over him tide of Berkeley cool love-stained sheets tongue in his ear hourglass comfort-shape unseen by his side to lean on warm breezes cool bougainvillea-fragrant California nights in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Acapulco breathing pot-smoke-musk mouth to mouth in rumpled snuggle-beds close to the blood years innocent tomorrow the world years lost years, six years lost and gone and buried in the bodies of Wednesday-night image-balling blondes, and the song of those years that she sang with her off-key beautiful girl-voices sad, wistful, in happy laughing times, prescient sadness of Christmas future song:
“Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing…?
When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn…?”
And when will you ever learn, Jack Barron? In your guts, you know she’s nuts; but in your heart…In your heart is an empty Sara-sized hole, not Carrie, not Wednesday-night déjà vu, not anyone but Sara can ever fill if you live million years geological ages promise of Benedict Howards…You’re a Sara-junkie, nothing you can do about it, baby, she’s the only dealer in town.
“Jack…say something, Jack…”
“Do I have to?” he said—soft surrender to the ghost of hope that would not die. I can do it. I can do it, he told himself. I’m kick-’em-in-the-ass Jack Barron can handle Senators, vips, Howards, Morris, Luke, big-league curve-ball artists; Jack Barron afraid to play the big game, love game (game is all!) for only woman I ever love? I’ll help you, baby, give you the boost to nitty-gritty reality. You and me in Bug Jack Barron twenty-third story penthouse catbird-seat home, fill the rooms with your taste-smell-feel song of home. All for you, Sara, where you should’ve been all these years. And if it was really acid that opened your eyes, then three big ones for Crazy Tim Leary.
“When can I see you?” he asked.
“As soon as you can get here.”
“I’ll be down in forty-five minutes,” Jack Barron said. “God, oh, God, how I’ve missed you!”
“I missed you too,” she said, and he thought he could see her eyes misting.
“Forty-five minutes,” he said, then broke the connection, rose, turning for bedroom clothes and shoes and car keys.
And stood there nose to nose with naked, white-faced Carrie Donaldson, her breasts limp and drooping like wilted hospital flowers.
“Don’t say it,” she said in her office-secretary voice. “Don’t say anything, Mr. Barron. It’s all been said, hasn’t it? All explained nice and neat. And I thought it was just because you were too…too big and important and filled with your work to have room to care about…I thought if I made you comfortable, made it easy, no hang-ups, no bullshit, call me when you want me, warm your bed whenever it got cold, then someday maybe you’d wake up nice and easy, slowlike, and see that…that…But I was wrong, I misjudged you…I wonder what it’s like to be loved the way you love her. Way the world is, I wonder if I’ll ever get to know…”
“Carrie, I didn’t…I couldn’t…I thought the network…”
“The network! I may be a lot of nasty things, Jack Barron, but, as I just heard someone else say, I’m nobody’s whore!” she shouted. “Sure I was supposed to keep an eye on you, but you don’t think that…” She began to tremble, tears formed in her eyes and she tilted her head back to hide them, making her look proud, gutsy.
Oh, Christ, what a blind shit you are, Jack Barron! he thought as she stood there, taller in his eyes than she had ever been, and yet he still felt nothing for her, never had, couldn’t even fake a moment of it now. “Why didn’t you say something?” was all he could say.
“Would it have mattered? You know it wouldn’t. You’ve always been too hung on her to look at me or any other woman and see anyone that counted. And at least this way…you’ve been a good lay, Jack Barron. Too bad…Too bad I’ll never be able to bring myself to touch you again.”
And all he could throw to her was a tiny morsel as he went to the bedroom to dress and allowed her the dignity of crying alone.
7
Crossing Fourteenth Street is like crossing the panel-dividers between different style comic strips, Jack Barron thought as he inched the Jag down Saturday-jammed Seventh Avenue. Like going from Mary Worth Rex Morgan Man Against Fear style reality into Terry and the Pirates (old-style pre-Mao Chopstick Joe, Dragon Lady, Chinese-river-pirate schtick) Krazy Kat Captain Cool freak-out, surreal Dali comic strip of the Village, sprawling Istanbul-involuted (river to river, Fourteenth to Canal) Barbary Coast ghetto of the mind.
Reaching Fourth Street, Barron impulsively made a left across traffic, then a right into the turgid river of cars clogging MacDougal—Money Street, Anything Goes Sin City Tourist Vacuum Cleaner Street, chief cloaca for outside square-type bread, lifeline of economic sewage into the closed river to river ghetto that the powers that be had carrot-and-sticked the Village into becoming.
And once again we see the sweaty palm of the ’70s still heavy on the land, thought Barron as the traffic inched at a foot a second toward Bleecker, past souvenir stands, bare-box strip joints, state-licensed acid parlors, furtive street-corner schmeck dealers, local action fading Slum Goddess tourist trade whores, through a solid miasma of grease-fried-sausage smells, pot-musk, drunken-sailor piss, open air toilet aroma of packaged disaster—The pathetic, faded Grand Old Lady Greenwich Village reduced to peddling her twat to passing strangers.
If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em (unspoken motto of the days after Lyndon). Nice cooled reservation for every tribe in America: give them niggers Mississippi and them pothead long-haired acid freaks the Village and Fulton and Strip City, and the old fuckers Sun-City-St.-Petersburg-subsidized graveyard waiting rooms. All on the reservation, safe in their own bags, and out of the way. And a nice little tourist-trade we can cash in on on the side: See Niggerland, Stoneland, Senior-Citizenland, see America First, see America and die.
Turning left on to Bleecker, Barron found himself overwhelmed by sadness—meeting a love of his youth in a Mexican whorehouse blowing for wooden nickels, and brother can you spare a dime.
“Where have all the flowers gone
Long time passing…”
Sara…Sara…Another hooker on the string of image-pimp vampires, a prop in the streets of an open-air cathouse Disneyland-Hippyland turnstile madness…
“It’s Jack Barron.”
“Hey, Jack.”
Shit, I’ve been spotted! Barron thought, picking up on the ironic paradox of disgust-satisfaction inside him, as a red-headed nicely-stacked chick in kinesthop-patterned leotards (electric blue snakes slithering-flashing ever twatward
—Sara design?) shouted his name with banally-worshipful eyes, and eyes turned, faces turned, street traffic momentarily clotted in a small eddy of rubberneck stares.
“Yeah, it is! It’s Jack Barron!”
A moment of panic, as sidewalks on both sides of Bleecker bulged gutterward with realos and touristas, arms waving, shouting, ripples spreading toward the corner of MacDougal behind him up Bleecker ahead of him, as locals and tourists, come there for the action, seized on the shouting in their desperate boredom, joined in the waving, harmonized in the shouting, indifferent, oblivious to the source of it all—just hungry for the center of where whatever was at.
But as the Jag inched eastward through the frozen traffic, Barron saw buttons above boobs on jackets under beards—red-on-blue kinesthop flash patterns like hot-vacuum eyes of Wednesday-night Saras on his body like hands waking images of Berkeley, Los Angeles, Meridian marches Baby Bolshevik eyes that no longer were young, staring at him like some plastiglow Jesus, hero to something he no longer believed. His own name mocked him from a freak-show marquee: “Bug Jack Barron” the kinesthop buttons said.
Yeah, baby, dig your ever-loving public! “Bug Jack Barron”—rating-vitamin saying started right here in home to which there’s no returning; streets of the past, youth-dream yours for the taking, but all of it bullshit and none of it real.
But caught by the rhythm, heat of warm bodies, sound-smell of his own name in the air, Barron waved, smiled, copped-out on himself like a fucking Hollywood premier.
The traffic finally sped up as the Jag passed Thompson faces became phosphor-dot blurs on a TV screen, sounds became just dopplered background noises. And when he turned on to West Broadway, headed to Houston, the main east-west thoroughfare out of the scene, he found he was sweating—like bolt upright in bed at the end of a crazy wet dream.
What made me do that? Jack Barron thought as he felt the motion-breeze of the open Jag cool him as he headed east toward First Avenue. Now who’s playing with Jack Barron’s head—the master mind-fucker himself, is all. Who you putting on, man? Should’ve been straight down Seventh to Houston and nowhere near Clown Alley with all that idiot traffic, knew they would spot you, is all. Jack Barron fan club: every loser in Village, junkies in San Fran, hard-luck chicks wherever you are Berkeley, Strip City, street scene stretching block after block, one big where it all was at from Commercial Street to MacDougal to Haight to Sunset, wallowing in bullshit ghosts of glory, Wednesday-night-digging the boy who made good from the bag.
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