Barron made a left on to First Avenue, and his mood changed with the street: First Avenue, nitty-gritty insiders’ main drag. Ricky-ticky bars, coffee-houses, discos, galleries, zonk shops in lower stories of renovated Ukrainian Polack buildings, street and street-mood where ghosts of the future rubbed tight neon-asses with uptight descendants of Slav-Jew-P.R. ghetto-specters of the past.
Yeah, Barron thought, this is where the action is; bordertown paranoiasville, semicheap apartments, folk-shops of the new stoned ghetto in building by building guerilla warfare with the dregs of old-style rent-control slumlord Great Society slum-scene of the dying past—Flower People pushing as hard to get in as wave of immigrants since God-knows-when pushed to get out.
The ass is always greener, Barron thought. Village days, Berkeley was the place; Berkeley days, Strip City, and back to here in goddamned Coast-to-Coast incestuous daisy-chain, Hey, which way to the action, man? And, baby, when you’re a loser the action’s always somewhere else. So why not the other side of the glass-tit, Bug-Jack-Barron-land in electric-circuit contact with places of power, acid dreams of revolution, hundred million Brackett Count insiders’ secret: kick-’em-in-the-ass Jack Barron cutting up vips’ one of us, man. That cat’s on our side.
Truth, isn’t it? Barron thought. Reasons of my own, rating-type reasons, I am on their side, the side of every hung-up person in the whole wide universe, phosphor-dot image of the sounds of freedom flashing “Enemy to those who make him an enemy; friend to those who have no friend.” Boston Blackie, is all.
So what bugs you so much about them buttons?
Who, why, where do they come from? is the nitty-gritty question. Luke or Morris or both already screwing around with trial-balloon free samples of prospective image-meat TV dinners, or just harmless zonk?
Shit, man, you know why you’re bugged. Sara dragging your million-dollar ass down on to her turf. One lousy phone call, and into the car into the Village into past fast as fat little Michelins will carry you; pearl-diving in sewage, dumb ’60s song, but right where it’s at:
“Slum Goddess from the Lower East Side
Slum Goddess, gonna make her my bride…
The first time that I balled her I went outa my mind…”
Oh, you so right, baby! So here I am, dragging my dick along First Avenue, right back in the whole dumb scene I kissed good-bye six years ago. Sara, you stoned when I get there, I’m gonna beat the piss out of you, so help me.
But as he parked the Jag on the corner of First Avenue and Ninth Street he wondered who was really gonna beat the piss out of whom.
Sara’s apartment was on the third story of a five-story renovated walk-up (like progress; in the old days anyone you went to see in the East Village always lived on the fifth floor), and you could tell it was hers by the door: it and the surrounding wall area were painted in a continuous door-outline-blurring kinesthop pattern—undulating free-form black and chartreuse concentric bullseye striping that created the illusion of a tunnel expanding past the doorframe, converging circle-in-circle in uneven circle on a weirdly off-center yellow doorknob-buzzer, the focus of the pattern strangely placed near the top of the door.
Barron paused, staring at the gold doorknob, feeling himself caught in the pattern, humming hoops of bright-green leaping out from the flat black background like an electric charge neon tunnel around him, sucking him inward like Sara’s smooth legs around his waist extended into the environment, pulling attention to gilded goody—open me! Open me! Let me suck you in, baby!—the kinesthop pattern said.
Barron couldn’t help smiling, knowing it wasn’t his wish-fulfillment bag at all, but goddamn Sara knows exactly what she’s doing with stuff like this—making entrance to her pad a cunt to the world. Dig the paint, man, it’s old, starting to flake at the edges; this thing was here long before she called you. Remember where that’s at, and don’t blow your cool.
He reached out, pressed the ivory bellybutton in the center of the doorknob, heard taped Chinese J. Arthur Rank gong from within, footsteps on muted carpet—and Sara opened the door. She stood in the doorway, framed by a single wine-colored spotlight, dark hallway behind her long loose hair bloody-gold to her shoulders, in a black silk kimono flowing over her naked breasts, hips, like oil, nipples low and taut through the cloth, stomach-legs convergence, imagined soft-flesh triangle hinted by heavy folds of black sheen.
Déjà vu irony of entrance to his penthouse, remembering own come-into-my-parlor come-on, his own seduction-environment and from who he had learned the kinesthop hypnotic technique, Barron laughed, said: “Way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, way to the crotch is through the eyeballs, eh, Sara?”
“Same old Jack,” she said, with an unexpected sly smile that caught him off balance, sucked him into brittle-laughing-sad-pathetic-brave eyes, through levels of illusions, inside joke on the universe between them, spark of old love Jack-and-Sara destiny’s darlings hard-edged Berkeley Los Angeles mystics, their innocent cynicism a sword against the night. “Magic’s lost on you; I forgot that rune you wear against necromancy.”
“Thank you, J.R.R. Tolkien,” he said, stepping inside and closing the door behind him in a protocol-control gesture. “Someplace we can sit in this cave of the winds?” he said, suppressing gland-reaction images battering his cool, wanting to grab her as she hung there before him. Keep your cool, he told himself.
She smiled, led him through the velvet hall-blackness-shadows dancing (black wash over kinesthop patterns, he thought, image of Bug Jack Barron set backdrop; we play the same games, only stakes are different), into a straw-mat-floored studio room, low primary-colored geometric-precision Japanese furniture hard-edged in the neutral, off-white pseudolantern overhead light, thousand-years-distant in cool squares and rectangles from ricky-ticky neon-baroque Village streets. He squatted on a red plush pillow before a black-lacquered table, smiled at the TV sitting arrogantly on it like a Yankee Imperialismo in oriental sheets.
She sat down beside him, opened a blue box on the table, took out two cigarettes, handed him one. He dug the trademark, snapped, “No grass, baby. Straight talk, and I mean straight, both of us, or I leave.”
“Your sponsor, Acapulco Golds,” she said, fingering the joint coyly. “What would the network think?”
“Cut the shit, Sara.”
“All right, Jack,” she said, suddenly empty in open little-girl confusion (as if I’m the one that started this). “I was hoping you’d…you’d write the script for this scene. That was always your bag, not mine.”
“My bag? Look, baby, this has been your orbit straight from ground zero. You called me, remember? You asked me to see you, I didn’t drag my dick down here to…”
“Didn’t you, Jack?” she said quietly.
And he looked into her pool-dark eyes that knew holes with no bottoms inside, his locked on hers locked on his like X-Ray cameras facing each other in feedback circuitry between them gut to gut belly to belly big dark eyes eating him up saying: I know you know I know we know we know we know—endless feedback of pitiless scalpels of knowledge.
“All right, Sara,” he said in soft surrender to grammar of mutually understood feedback truth. “I forgot who I was talking to. Been a long time; I forgot that anyone was ever that deep inside of me. Wanted to. Wanted to forget I knew you knew how I still feel about you. It’s a bum trip to remember that you walked out on me—and me still loving you when you went.”
“What kind of bullshit is that?” she snapped with a defensive pout, but with a hurt-eyes reality behind it. “I didn’t leave, you threw me out.”
“I threw you out…?” Barron started to shout, heard his voice rising into ancient traditional six-years-buried argument she never understood, into pointless, useless brick-wall noncommunication…endless, endless hassle. And called his cool back. “You never understood, Sara, you could never get it through your head. No one threw you out. You kept issuing ultimatums, and I finally got pissed enough to call you on one of them, and you
split.”
“You made me go,” she insisted. “You made it impossible for me to stay. I couldn’t take it, and you wouldn’t change. You threw me out like a used condom.”
“Now we get to the nitty-gritty,” he said, “and straight from your own mouth. You didn’t want the real me, the way I really was. And when I refused to play Baby Bolshevik games and started living in the real world, you couldn’t cut the action and come out of your grass-lined hole, and when I wouldn’t crawl back in with you, you split. And this by you is being thrown out?”
Waiting for the expected endless-replay snapback, Barron saw the familiar breaking-up-days hurt eyes quivering-lips mask form on her face…and dissolve suddenly into open near-tears.
“No,” she said, as if reminding herself of some New Year’s resolution. “This is now, not six years ago. And I don’t want to fight, don’t want to win any arguments. Last time out I thought I won, and you thought you won…and we both really lost. Can’t you see that, Jack? You threw me out, I left you…words, words, words. When did we stop trying to dig each other and start making points? That’s what I felt when…”
She hesitated strangely, something weirdly cold seemed to flicker across her eyes before she went on: “When I saw your show on acid, the you that I loved was still there, was always there. But this other you—making points, always making points—with Hennering and Luke and Yarborough, same as you were always making points on me at the end…That’s you too, Jack. It always was, always will be, and once I loved that too in you, when your enemies were our enemies…remember? Remember Berkeley and the night you put together the S.J.C.? Not Luke, not the others but you bringing it all together, making points for a reason, and the way you stopped that riot with just your face and your voice? And watching you pick the Foundation to pieces, the way you used to pick me to pieces but the way you picked that fascist bastard to pieces, and got the show in the first place too, oh, that was Jack Barron, all Jack Barron, the Jack Barron that was meant to be. And I thought that maybe you hadn’t changed, maybe it was me, that I stopped trying to understand, somehow, afraid of power, afraid of safe dreams becoming reality, afraid of the responsibility of being a winner’s woman, afraid of the real sharks in the real ocean. If you were a cop-out, I was a coward, putting you down instead of trying to understand.
“Oh, Jack, you’re the only man I ever really loved, only man I ever respected, and I still don’t understand you, maybe I never will. But if you’ll have me, I’ll spend the rest of my life trying. I love you, I love you. Don’t say a word, fuck me, fuck me, darling, fuck my brains out, I’m tired of thinking, I just want to feel.” And she fell against him, arms around him, breasts warm and wriggling, thrust her tongue to the hilt unbidden through his still-tight lips.
He shuddered in quivering, helpless he-she role reversal as inverted déjà vu flashes mocked him, her eyes bottomless, open as she kissed him, Wednesday-night-vacuum-leaching-eyes of endless string of surrogate Saras becoming real Jack-and-Sara Sara, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Acapulco, night-breezes Sara becoming wet-dream California of the mind Sara becoming every Sara that never was in false memory banks of forlorn longing, becoming Saras past, Saras future, flashing positive-negative white-out black-out reality-fantasy in and out of past and wet-dream-future time with the rhythm of her liquid thrusting tongue.
Vacuum in the personality-center behind the windows of his eyes, his hands moved like disbelieving robots pulling aside the black kimono sheen, and her body naked against him—brown freckle in contact with left nipple mole above border of red-gold triangle secret second navel, tongue moving sweet spittle in long-remembered trail along the curve of his cheekbone, hot wetness moving in ear encircled by lips of bougainvillea musk breathing fingers dancing down belly smoothing his thigh in primeval rhythm—filled the void with Sara-flesh reality, image-ghosts fleeing down timelines as his hands closed on the massive breast present. Sara! Sara! It’s you, and it’s real!
I’m Jack and you’re Sara, is all that matters—and he pulled her face to him as she rolled him off the pillow, naked under him on the straw-matted floor. Moaning into him as he kissed her tongue on tongue mouths moving in slow pelvic rhythm her hands at his ass kneading and urging, shoving him down between legs spread-eagled encircling caressing, mouth free now and screaming orgasmic rhythm: “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me…” And…
And…
And it just wasn’t there. Spent totally in the night filled with Carrie, in morning-after image-eyed return event—six years of desire-images come to a moment of reality, and in that moment of all moments it just wasn’t there!
He felt the cold moment of super-Freudian disaster spiraling around him—then Jack seeing Jack with maniac laughter. What the fuck does it matter, it’s me that counts, not my dick, got nothing to prove cockwise in this arena. I love her, is all, and she’s here.
He slid his face down her belly, skin to chin-stubble, buried it in musky coarse-haired dampness, lips to wet lips tasting her body as her thighs gripped his cheeks his tongue went inside her rolling and coaxing with love and wry self-frustration, thrusting and moving in pelvic simulation as she rocked against him in asymptotic rhythm and went off in great groaning spasms.
Resting his chin on the bone of her pelvis, he smiled at her face across the luffing sail of her belly, breasts awry like puppy-dog mountains, her eyes met his across pink continents of skin-to-skin pleasure…
“Jack…” she sighed. “Oh, thank you, thank you…” Then she looked down at him with a fey knowing smile. “That’s the best you could do this early in the day? Just out of curiosity, what was her name?”
“Whose name?” he grinned in mock innocence.
“Miss Last Night. I sure hope there was one, wouldn’t want to think you were…”
“Give me about an hour to recuperate, and I’ll answer your question,” he said, moving up her body to face to face languor.
She laughed and kissed him quick, dry lips sated, but he felt the hunger there still his to command, taste of her still in him, and he felt it stirring through cotton layers of fatigue as she reached down to stroke it.
“Still in there fighting, just where I left it,” she said. And years melted away, and he knew she was back. “Take it slow and easy, we’ve got time,” she said, hugging him to her. And with a strange-style shudder he had never felt before, said: “All the time in the world.”
Haven’t done this since they made grass legal, Jack Barron mused as the hand-rolled as in days of street-corner dealer yore joint passed around the mystic circle—himself, Sara, some cat named Sime who was obviously after Sara’s ass, a chick calling herself Leeta or something (ironed-blonde Psychedelic Church alcolyte), and a hairy type known only as the Wolfman. Barron sucked deep, getting into the anachronistic nostalgia bag, husbanding whiffs of smoke as if the stuff still cost twenty bucks an ounce, still was illegal.
“Wow,” he said, drawing out the word in approved early ’60s style. “Don’t let the word get out, but this stuff has a bigger kick to it than Acapulco Golds.”
Sara laughed. “It should; there’s some opium in it.”
Barron smiled, felt a sardonic detachment from the others squatting on the straw-matted floor. From old head days, he knew there couldn’t be more than a taste of opium in the shit; you’d have to smoke about a pound of the grass to even get a buzz off O. But that’s not where it’s at, he thought, kick’s in the idea of opium because the stuff’s still illegal; you can buy pot in any candy store. So bring back images of danger with a couple pinches of O—pushers in the streets pay-envelopes police lock fuzz in the hall, Good Old Bad Old Days, where spice of the opium’s at. And maybe there isn’t any opium, just bullshit, what’s the difference, charge is the same.
“Hey,” said the Wolfman, “you hung on Acapulco Golds too? Funny how any old head that’s really been around a while digs Acapulco Golds. And we all know how long you’ve been around, Jack.” The last walking a thin line between genuine innocent affection
and sycophant put-on.
Hearing the Wolfman voice the question he was always asking himself, Barron suddenly dug why Acapulco Golds were overwhelming best-seller in the Village, Fulton, Strip City ghettos, among old-time nostalgia-head potheads: my sponsor, is all. They’re sure getting their money’s worth out of Bug Jack Barron; smoke Acapulco Golds and you’re smoking Jack Barron, act of patriotism for Wolfman, for psychedelic-ghetto types, True Believers in Dylan-haired (gotta get a haircut, starting to itch) Berkeley bad boy, our boy kick-’em-in-the-ass myth.
He passed the joint to Sara, saw her drag a deep tight bread times drag, wondered why he hadn’t bitched about this pot-party scene, so patently a show-the-flag Jack Barron-returns-to-the-people schtick, had looked forward to it, need for…need for…?
“Hey, man,” the Wolfman said, “those stories going ’round about you and the Foundation true?”
“What stories?” Barron asked, and the whiff of a very professional rumor-mill (Luke’s rumor-mill already?) hung in the air.
The Wolfman took the joint from Sara, dragged, held smoke in his lungs and talked through it in old-time pothead screen-door croak. “Say you’re out for Bennie Howards. For blood. Last show a real gas. Public freezer. Man you—” The Wolfman spasmed, coughed smoke in talk-inhale conflict resolution, then immediately continued, loud, and gesticulating in new-found lung-freedom. “Yeah, the word is that you’re in with the Public Freezer cats, playing it real cool till you got the Foundation set up for the kill, and then Pow! down on the fuckers with both feet, split things wide open, and then everyone’s got a chance at living forever, not just the usual fat-cat fascist bastards, but like people, dig? Like we’re all people, dig? One thing you glom on to when you’re born, no matter what you do later, like whether you pile up bread or not, or how long you wear your hair, or whether you got a nine-to-fiver or just like make it, whether you’re white or black or purple, dig? Yeah, like this death-kick is laid on everyone soon as they’re born. I mean, one boat we’re all in together—people, see? Like they got Medicare for everyone ’cause they finally dug that you shouldn’t die just because you’re wasted. Well, ain’t Freezing just one more medical-type thing to beat the death-kick? So it should be free for everyone, like the rest of it. Like people. I’m people, you’re people, Bennie Howards’ people. We’re all people, and we all should have the same odds to live, dig?”
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