Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

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…”