Bug Jack Barron

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 freakout, 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 towards 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.

Sara… Sara… Another hooker on the string of image-pimp vampires, a prop in the streets of an open-air cathouse Disney-land-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 twat-ward—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 corners 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 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-dreams 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 mindfucker 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.

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-PR 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 aways 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 the past fast as fat little Michelins will carry you; pearl-diving in sewage, dumb ’60s song, but right where it’s at:

Oh, you so right, baby! So here I am, dragging my dick along First Avenue, right back in the whole dumb scene I kissed goodbye 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 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…?” Barren 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, Barren 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 SJC? 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 Barren, all Jack Barren, the Jack Barren 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 blackout 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 (iron-blonde Psychedelic Church acolyte), 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 as 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?”

Barron felt the wheels turning. Cat’s riffing out straight SJC 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, mortality bullshit dies with you. Only two-party system on issue of life and death: Death Party and Life Party. Gut-level Presidential campaign: SJC-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 SJC 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, OD’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 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 muzzled 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-tree-shapes 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 somewhere 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 peeing 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 lizardman 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 external with Jack forever knight in soft-flesh armor against a million years of worm-eaten 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 he 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 lances 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 belly 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!