Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

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.

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.