Bug Jack Barron

13

Evers, Mississippi, Jack Barren thought as the plane’s wheels contacted the runway. Jeez, it’s been a long time since I was down here, Luke’s original inauguration as Boy Governor (wasn’t it?), all those familiar faces from Berkeley and New York and Los Angeles—every Baby Bolshevik with the black skin entrance-fee zoomed in on Evers like narco-fuzz on a junk party when Mississippi finally went black. Only there wasn’t no Evers then, that’s right, was part of Luke’s original platform: “A New Capital for the New Mississippi.”

Yeah, just like any other Banana Republic, hundred million bucks to build a fancy new Capital, and five years later Luke’s yelling for Federal subsidy of the state budget, Mississippi’s so broke, and fat chance of that! Bread and circuses, is how the SJC took over Mississippi—long on circuses, that is, and short on bread. Way it’ll stay too, unless…

Watch it, Barron! he told himself as the plane taxied toward the spanking-new gull-winged airport terminal (everything in Evers wasn’t made out of old tin packing crates, Coke sign garbage was strictly World’s Fair stuff). Don’t even think about that kind of crap down here, with Luke close enough to play with your live-in-person head. Got enough to handle with Howards & Co without playing Napoleon.

As the plane approached the terminal building, Barron saw a funky-looking crowd milling around between the planes and the building; maybe a couple thousand ragged-looking Evers-slum-type down-and-out Negroes waving dozens of signs he couldn’t quite make out, TV cameras clustered around a late-model Cad limousine, gaggle of reporters and photographers… But the screwy thing was that in the wan, gray, morning overcast every man and woman in the crowd was wearing dark sunglasses.

The plane rolled to a stop, the main door opened as an old-fashioned debarkation ramp was wheeled up for some reason, then there was some kind of commotion at the door between a stewardess and someone outside. Two Mississippi State Policemen, dressed and swaggering like every redneck Southern cop Barron had ever been but black as the proverbial ace of spades, stepped into the plane and sauntered heavily down the aisle, obviously digging the uptighting effect they were having on the white passengers, stopped in front of his seat.

“Mr Barron,” the taller one said with gross formality, “please come with us.”

“Hey, what is this,” Barron said, “some kind of bust? You crazy? You know who I am? Wait till Governor Greene—”

The shorter cop laughed fraternally. “Don’t get uptight, man (obviously an import, Barron thought,)” he said. “The bossman knows all about it. No bust, just the old red carpet treatment for the Black Shade.”

Oh, no! Barron thought as he got to his feet and followed the cops down the aisle past grumbling passengers who obviously were being held on the plane till he debarked. He couldn’t have! Not on twelve hours’ notice! Not even Luke could’ve set it up that fast… not unless he was all ready and waiting, just in case. Rastus, you conniving son of a bitch! Limousine, cops, crowd, TV cameras… No, no, this can’t be happening! Jesus H. Christ!

But the moment he stepped out on to the ramp in the cool morning air, flashbulbs began to blind him and the motely crowd began what was patently a carefully-rehearsed chant:

“Bug Jack Barron! Bug Jack Barron! Bug Jack Barron!”

Squinting against the intermittent scintillance of the flashbulbs, Barron could now make out the signs the crowd was waving—full color posters of himself with the kinesthop-under-black-wash background he used on the show screaming “Bug Jack Barron” in red slash lettering; black and white photos of himself with “Jack Barron” in white letters across the bottom; white placards with oval featureless white head-outlines wearing opaque black sunglasses and no lettering at all he couldn’t figure out.

“Bug Jack Barron! Bug Jack Barron! Bug Jack Barron!”

As he trotted down the ramp he saw Luke waiting for him at the bottom in a gaggle of flunkies. Luke wore a big button in each lapel—and he was also wearing shades. All his flunkies were wearing shades too, dark shades, black—

“She-yit,” Barron groaned as he reached the bottom of the ramp. Black Shades. The Black Shade! That slick motherfucker!

“Welcome to the New Mississippi,” Luke said with a great shit-eating smirk as Barron stood nose to nose with him in a sea of flashbulbs, read the buttons on each label: “Bug Jack Barron” in red letters over blue kinesthop pattern (so that’s where those buttons in the Village came from after all) in the left lapel, and in the right, the black on white head-outline wearing black glasses, but this time with the legend “The Black Shade.”

“You mother—”

“Cool it, man, You’re on the air,” Luke whispered as he reached into a pocket, pulled out a pair of… black shades, and before Barron could make a move to stop him, jammed the sunglasses on his head, grinned, draped an arm over his shoulders as flashbulbs popped like manic fireflies and hot TV lights bathed the whole silly scene. And the crowd, on cue, began to chant: “The Black Shade! The Black Shade!”

Then someone shoved a microphone between him and Luke, and Barron felt forced to smile back, mumble, “I’m glad to be here’; had the urge to kick Luke smack in the balls. Smart-ass black bastard! Why did I tell him in advance I was coming, should’ve snuck into this loonie bin wearing a goddamn false beard. This crap’ll be spread all over the country, and I can’t stop it, friends like these, who needs enemies?

And now Luke was making a goddamned speech, his arm still draped around Barron’s shoulders: “It’s not often we see a shade down here we can welcome as a true brother, the black man in this country doesn’t have many white brothers. But this cat standing here with me’s not really a white man even if he is a shade. He’s a Founding Father of the Social Justice Coalition, paid his dues in the most dangerous battles of the Civil Rights Movement, my oldest and closest personal friend, the man everyone in America, black or white, looks to every Wednesday night to give a voice to those who have no voice, a friend to those who have no friend, a real soul brother. He’s not black, but he’s not white either; he’s a zebra—black with white stripes, white with black stripes, you pays your money, and you takes your choice. Fellow Mississippians, The Black Shade—Jack Barron!”

“Show biz all the way, eh Luke?” Barron muttered, sotto voce.

Greene kicked his ankle. “Come on, schmuck, don’t screw me up,” he whispered under the ragged roar of the crowd. “When’s the last time you got an intro like that! Make nice, Claude, come on, don’t make us both look like idiots. You can kick me in the belly later.”

Now what? Barron wondered. Tell ’em all to get stuffed, cool all this crap once and for all before it gets started? But he felt the old-friend weight of Luke’s arm across his shoulders (Can’t knife my old buddy even if he deserves it. Some buddy you are, Luke), looked out over the crowd, pale black ghost-shapes through the dark glasses, saw mouths open for real yelling for every pain of being dirt-poor-black in white man’s country, saw déjà vu crowds in Meridian, Selma, a hundred sullen Southern towns yelling in anguish surrounded by rednecks dogs cops prods hoses, Luke behind him, Sara’s worshipful eyes on him in streets of danger, remembered the warmth of close to the blood Baby Bolshevik black and white together and all that jazz, marches, laying his life on the line every time he opened his mouth, felt the heat coming off this big-league real live Governor’s arm around his shoulders crowd so thick you could cut it, crying anguish, chanting put-on Madison Avenue hope, sold-out black losers, always sold out, conned, cheated, used, fed to the fishes, and whatever fetid game Luke’s playing with all this… shit they really mean it, not a game to these poor fuckers, it’s the real nitty-gritty, and how can I give ’em one more kick in the balls when even Luke’s using ’em?

“The Black Shade! The Black Shade!”

“Thank you… thank you,” Barron said into the mike some black hand was holding under his chin, heard his voice in tinny reverberation, hidden behind his shades like a TV screen interface shield, almost like a session of Bug Jack Barron.

“Don’t really know what to say. I never expected anything like this (giving Luke a real hard kick on his smart-ass ankle), and I don’t really understand it. I mean, I’m not a candidate for anything, like certain other cats got their arm around my shoulder.”

He flashed his best one-of-the-boys smile. “All I can really say is that all those signs saying ‘Jack Barron, the Black Shade’ is the nicest thing anyone ever said about me. Even if it’s not really true, it’s something to live up to, not just for me, but for the whole country. That’s where it should be at, everywhere in the United States—black shades and white Negroes, Americans, all of us, is all, and none of us, black or white, should ever even have to think about it. That’s the America we all want, and I guess a black shade is what you’re stuck with till we get it, until this country has grown up enough to become a zebra—and I hate to contradict the Governor here, but that’s a nocolor animal with black and white stripes.”

“Snap them galluses!” Luke whispered into his ear as the crowd broke into cheers. “Still the same old Jack Barron underneath all that mung. Knew I could count on you.”

Son of a bitch, Barron thought, should’ve told ’em all where it’s really at. Should’ve told ’em how they were being used, how you using me to play with their heads, Luke. Yeah (he admitted sourly to himself as the crowd continued to cheer, waving signs flashing flashbulbs kinesthop buttons national TV coverage hot white spotlight on the sound of his name on desperate lips getting to him, turning him on in spite of himself, turning on Berkeley Baby Bolshevik Jack-and-Sara other crowds other times memories of blood rushing behind his ears, the sound of his voice made flesh—and won’t this hype the ratings), and use them on my head, too.

“You can count on me to give you a good, swift, on-camera boot in the testes, you don’t get me out of here and do it fast,” Barron said tautly, half-aware (admit it, man, it does get to you) he was also threatening himself.

Luke laughed an infuriating knowing laugh, like two buddies meeting again on the street outside after a trip to a low-class whorehouse. His arm still resting on Barren’s shoulder, he led him to the limousine whistling “Hail to the Chief” in hideous off-key, shaking his head from side to side.

Aw, take it and stick it, Barron thought as a flunky opened the car door. But for some quixotic reason he didn’t take off the shades till he was inside.

“All right, Lothar, what’s the big idea?” Jack Barron said as the car began to roll, sealed off in the rear compartment of the air-conditioned limousine with Luke like a rolling Bug Jack Barron studio through the streets of Evers—knocked-together packing-crate slums immediately outside the World’s Fair Gothic airport like some unreal Rio hillside TV documentary favella, antiseptic and safe behind the electric-circuit insulated monitor-screens of the car’s sealed windows.

Luke measured him with his big, cool, snide eyes. “The Big Idea is all,” he said. “I already told you, didn’t I? I’m gonna play with your head till you agree to run for President. Simple as that, Clive. We need you, and we’re gonna get you.”

“Just like that?” Barron said, pissed, but at the same time admiring Luke’s unabashed amoral honesty. “Fact that I got no qualifications to be President, that don’t mean squat to you?”

“I said we need you to run for President,” Luke said as the car continued to pass through some of the ghastliest slums Barron had ever seen: crazy-quilt shacks of old grayed wood and tin Coke signs windowed randomly in mad Dali patterns; mountains of uncanned garbage in the sidewalkless streets dull-eyed black World War II Dondi street urchins liquid lounging street hoods hopeless fourteen-year-old whores junkies nodding on heaps of rusting metal, made Harlem, Watts, Bedford-Stuyvesant, look like Scarsdale. Scarsville, Barron thought. Huge purple cancer-scar across the fifty-dollar-pants-hidden backside of America. Stag-film of despair-pornography across the TV screen car windows, living-color image documentary losers.

“We need a candidate, a man who can win,” Luke was saying as Barron dug him with his ears while image-faces of hollow hope gray hands waving as the vip car went by, “Bug Jack Barron” and “Black Shade” buttons pinned on rags seared through the window-glass interface into the back of his eyes. “And that’s you, man. Don’t tell me you have no eyes to run. I saw you out there, saw you sucking it up, way you rapped it out right off the top of your head just like in the old days, same old Jack Barron. Getting the taste of it back, aren’t you, Jack?” And Luke stared at him with knowing, sardonic, laughing pusher-eyes.

That’s what you are, Luke, Barron thought, pusher is all. Power-junk dealer’d hook his own grandmother to feed his monkey. That’s a big power-monkey on your back, Luke, fucking gorilla’s bigger than you are.

“Not the taste, Luke,” he said, “just the smell. Nobody can smell out junk better than a reformed junkie, but you’re not gonna get me to taste it, not again, not ever. ‘Come on, man, let’s just split a friendly little bag for old times’ sake, you won’t get hooked, and this one’s for free.’ I spent too many years beating my brains out in the political junk bag. Yeah, there’s a real surge in seeing people with your name pinned on ’em hanging on your words, real big charge, but it’s never enough, you gotta have more and more and more and that power-monkey gets bigger and bigger till there’s nothing left of you. And you forget why you got started in the first place. You stop caring, stop feeling, stop really trying to help people, start using ’em… I’ll take show biz over politics any time—nice white-collar job keeps your hands clean.”

Now the car turned into a wider street, main drag of Evers slum Lenox Avenue disaster of all the world, hock shops open air butchers’ fly-carpeted meat in electric-green dresses wasted angry men shuffling outside endless makeshift bars, and a crowd coalesced and disintegrated in waves on the boredom-choked street as the car passed by, yelling waving sunglasses, kinesthop flashes from Bug Jack Barron buttons, and a guttural animal sound shaking through the car’s windows—“Black Shade! Black Shade!”—fading through the rear window like a bow-wave passing to sullen ugly boredom as the big Cadillac passed and left them behind.

“Look out there,” Luke said, “look at those people screaming your name. They want you, Jack, you. Thousands of ’em, millions of ’em, and they’re looking to you, they want you to lead them, and all you have to do is say the word.”

And Barron heard the envy behind Luke’s voice. His people, Barron thought, but he knows they’re not enough, not strong enough, not enough of ’em to ride alone to the Big Time. They’ve taken him as far as a black man can go. The monkeys keep getting bigger, but there’s no way to get more junk to feed him, is there Luke? Shade connection’s what you need, good old Jack Barron, the power-junkie’s friend.

Ahead of the car, as if behind an invisible Gardol shield against tooth decay, the slum ended, and way away over a sanitized empty grass lawn Barron saw a soaring cluster of real Space Age buildings—the Capital, the Governor’s Mansion, office buildings—the Capital, the Governor’s Mansion, office buildings for carpetbagging black Baby Bolshevik parasites—the clean, sharp shapes of made-it: a polyethylene-wrapped Promised Land shimmering just across the invisible Jordan, Jordan River ten thousand miles wide twice as deep as time.

From deep inside him, the words erupted, from the sullen streets of a hundred Southern towns, Jack and Sara close to the blood streets in Berkeley dreams of self-anointed knighthood, Boy Wonder savage-innocence speaking through ten years of electric circuit insulation with the voice of the man:

“You look out there, Luke! Take a real good look for a change! Look in front of you and dig all those fancy buildings cost Christ-knows how much, dig that fucking cave of the winds Governor’s Mansion, rent-paid plantation house, Massah Luke, and all them fancy outbuildings. Feel that two-hundred-dollar suit you’re wearing, taste the word ‘Governor’ in your mouth, clock this car and your uniformed flunkies, and everyone calls you ‘Governor’ or maybe ‘Bwana’ wherever you go. Got it made, don’t you, you and your boys. King of the Mountain—Kingfish, is all.”

He half-shoved Greene around, pointing his face out the rear window at the festering neo-African slums quickly falling behind.

“When’s the last time you walked those streets without a bodyguard?” Barron said. “I’m the cat that forgot what he was? You were out there with me, Luke, remember? Or don’t you have the balls to remember anymore? That’s what those fancy buildings come from, big shiny toys built on nothing more than a pile of shit! But you don’t have to smell the shit anymore, do you? Take a couple drags of that old power-junk, you don’t even have to know it’s there. But it is there, and shit always stinks like shit. Look at those buildings in front of you, and look at that cesspool behind you, and, baby, you’re digging exactly where the politics bag is at—nice shiny false-front hot-air fairy castles built on nothing more than a pile of shit. Clock it sometime when the wind changes—you’re fat and happy in your plantation house only because those poor bastards are stuck in their dungheap. Politics! You can tie it in fancy ribbons, but you can’t hide the smell.”

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 now?

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