Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

“For crissakes, Jack, tell me!” Sara said excitedly. “What’s this all about?”

Jack grimaced, handed her the vidphone. “Go ahead, Machiavelli,” he said with a peculiar weariness. “You do it, at least you’ll be able to keep a straight face. Tell the little lady what it’s all about.”

“You mean you haven’t told…?” Luke said incredulously. “Sara, us movers and shapers gonna make this cretin you’re balling the next President of the United States, is all.”

Jack snatched back the vidphone before she could answer, before she could do anything but gape at him as if he were some mystical avatar suddenly revealed in his full glory by a flash of psychedelic light. Yes! Yes! she thought, where in the world is there a bigger man than Jack, and who can stand against him if he stands naked, the whole total Berkeley-knight-in-soft-flesh-armor JACK BARRON in front of those hundred million people? They’ve got to want him; all he’s gotta do is show the world Jack.

“I got a one-syllable word for you too, Luke, and it’s even shorter,” Jack said. “The word is no. If nominated, I shall not run, if elected, I shall not serve, and all that Sherman jazz. Okay, let’s say you can get me a Republican and SJC nomination. Let’s say the Pretender gets himself killed, like Hennering, and I end up running against some obvious Howards’ stooge and everyone is stoned on Election Day, so I win. What then? I don’t know shit from shinola about being President and what’s more I’ve got no eyes to learn. It’s just not my bag.”

No sweat,” Luke said smoothly. “You’ll have plenty of political geniuses like yours truly to run things for—”

“Look Svengali, I’m nobody’s front-man, not even yours, and I never will be, and don’t you forget it! Think I’m so stupid I don’t know where it’s at? You and Morris want an image-candidate, an Eisenhower, a Reagan, a fucking-mindless-celebrity mouthpiece, is all, someone you can package and sell like soap. And the answer is no. You so buddy-buddy with Morris, why don’t you run yourself?”

“This is a vidphone, isn’t it?” Luke said bitterly. “Take a good look at the color of my face and say that again, shade.”

“Sorry, Luke, I’m really sorry,” Jack said with that instant belly-radar reflex-reaction that always seemed to tell him when he had drawn blood, intentional or otherwise, with that inner vulnerable little-boy empathy Sara had always loved behind the kick-’em-in-the-ass exterior, drawing immediately back.

“You know me, man,” Jack said earnestly. “I really don’t notice your color until it smacks me in the face. I’m not giving you some bullshit come-on. Anyway, I really meant it—you’re the man should be President, not me. It’s your bag, not mine. You’ve worked all these years in that direction even though you knew… what you were up against, and I’ve been off in an entirely different bag, the show biz scene… Which is yet another good reason for my saying no. Who am I to waltz on to your turf and make like top dog? You try and get yourself a phone-in show, and I’ll be out to stomp you dead. Let’s be friends, but let’s each of us stick to his own line of evil.”

Sara caught a glimpse of poor wounded Luke (hung up over it even in Berkeley days, she thought. Number one type cat always number two, being black and too hip not to know it was where it would always be at), smiling it away (how brave to be black and still be a man she remembered how contained, hard-edged he had been, even in bed), and saying real cool like Luke-cool:

“You know you’re right, Clyde. I always knowed I was a better man than you, never thought you’d finally up and admit it. (And Sara, through body-remembered senses knew the triple-level—reality-put-onreality—of Luke’s sarcasm.) But the hard fact is that you can do it and I can’t, because you’re a shade and I’m a nigger—it’s as simple as that, and I don’t hold it against you. But that’s why I have to do it through you, why we all have to do it through you. What’s the SJC but a collection of coons, Flower People, Baby Bolsheviks, and just plain losers, think I kid myself? You’re the only big-league shade we got going, only cat that can ring in that Republican bread and support. You could be a fucking chimpanzee and we’d have to go with—’cause you’re the only ape can win.”

Sara felt a pang of the old remembered thing for Luke with the balls to say the truth and the brains to say it right, and though, anyone paled beside Jack, for her, she felt a warm snug satisfaction at the memory of how once she had been able to give Lukas Greene some small balm for that ever-open black wound.

“Sorry Luke,” Jack said. “The answer’s still no. And you can tell Morris to forget it too. There’s no point in even thinking about it any more. N.O. No!”

“Okay, B’rer Rabbit, I won’t throw you into the briar patch,” said Luke. “Not today. But I’m telling you right now, I’m gonna stall Morris as long as I can till I can get you to change your mind.”

“You won’t,” Jack said flatly.

“Sara,” Luke said, “you tell this prick where it’s at. Maybe you can get through that concrete skull of his. I’m tired, chillun, gonna go lynch me a brace of rednecks or something, y’know, relax. You listen to that chick of yours, Jack. She knows you better than you know yourself, knows the best part of you, part you still seem to be stranger to. Listen to her, will you, stupid? Later.”

And he broke the connection, and Jack put away the vidphone, and they were staring at each other—the old contest of silence game; who would yell first?

“Jack I—”

“Do I have to hear it from you too, Sara? Does everyone have to tell me what a fucking cop-out I am? Goddamned broken record! You and Luke… you think Luke really knows what’s coming off? You so sure you do?”

“But, Jack, President. . .” The word was an enormity in her mouth, choking off the impossible thoughts of what it implied.

“President, horseshit! A fucking pipe dream! You saw the show. Howards got a fifty-billion-dollar slush fund, and whether he can legally spend it or not the muscle’s still there. Bennie Howards is gonna pick the next President, and you better believe it. I let them talk me into that crap, and I have the privilege of losing—not only the Presidency, but the show too… and maybe a whole lot more. For what, a chance to shoot my mouth off? They pay me to do that every week as it is.”

“But, Jack (Can’t he see himself as I see him?), you could do it. You’re—”

“It’s groovy to know your chick thinks you’re a little tin god. That, and fifteen hundred bucks’ll pay the rent for a month on this pad. What’ll we do if I blow everything by kamikazeing into Howards, open a cathouse, with you as door prize?”

“But—”

Again the vidphone chime interrupted. “If this is Morris, I’m gonna tell him to go—”

She saw his face change abruptly to a mask of cold calculation, and a cold chill came over her as she looked at the vidphone screen over his shoulder and found herself staring at the gray lizardman deathmask, fear-mask of life-and-death power of the man who had brought them together again for reasons of his own, the terrible windowless white face of Benedict Howards.

“You imbecile! You double-crossing smart ass—” Howards was screaming; Sara could feel hot-leather reptile-stench emotions of fear, rage, hate, carrion teeth all but reaching out of the screen, windowless white teeth around a forked rattlesnake tongue spitting venom at Jack’s throat. The sight of a man of such hideous power, a man who held the secret that could destroy her, destroy Jack and Sara Barron again and forever, in such a black mindless rage, terrified her and she felt like a bird before a cobra indeed.