Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

“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.”

Night streets. Yeah, night streets of Harlem, Watts, Fulton, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East-East Village, Evers all the same, hot heavy crowded and sullen with odors of greasy cooking dirt drunk-piss pot junk and cheap whore-perfume; oil-on-steel sounds of quiet, too quiet in shantytown side-streets, the hollow frenzy of Saturday night (it’s always Saturday night) on King Street, Evers’ main drag. The Street, The Street running down Lenox Avenue to Bedford to Fulton to King Street, night on The Street same in any city with interchangeable parts of mass-produced Black America like cheapjack copies of the real thing turned out by Japanese sweatshops; whores junkies jds bars Lenox Avenue strip joints Fulton jazz cellars Bedford hockshops furtive street-light pushers winos. King Street miasma, a Desolation Row of daisy-chain memories coast to coast made Jack Barron feel like a pale white predator moving on his toes down the black jungle trail of King Street—the Shade, the Man, hunter and the hunted.

Bet your ass there’s no “Black Shades” out here, Barron thought, feeling a thousand liquid Negro eyes on the back of his neck clocking the lone shade moving down their street, their turf—hey, what’s that shade doin’ here, he the Man? (Every shade moving down Bedford, Lenox, Fulton, King, The Street marked as The Man by the gray tin badge of his skin.) But ain’t that what you really are betting, Barron, your living-color ass is all, out here in the nitty-gritty, black nitty gritty, where the word came from in the first place?

Hey, what you doing here, White Boy? street signs junkies sloe-eyed black women forward-panther-sloping bucks polishing their cool-eyed gaze like New York PRs honing up their switchblades seemed to ask. Go walk this street, and tell yourself America don’t have a race problem—Civil Rights is all, wars and whores on poverty, is all, never had no race problem here man, not in the good old USA. Slavery maybe, lynchings maybe, riots maybe, endemic small-scale revolution maybe, wouldn’t want one to marry my sister maybe, degenerate black motherfuckers maybe, send ’em all back to the jungle maybe, but them’s all social problems, see, we got no race problem in Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.

Send ’em back to the jungle, yeah! Barron thought wryly. Somebody say send ’em back? Walk in Harlem, Fulton, Evers, man, and you stop worrying about sending people back to the jungle, too uptight watching the jungle come back to people.

“Course there’s something to be said for the jungle, Barron thought, clocking the alive, desperate faces, jazz of the streets moving nice and easy in a liquid sulky beat, sensual relief of a junkie making his score, smirking mating-dance bridal-bargain between a tall thin cat and a little A-head-eyed whore. It’s nitty and it’s gritty and it’s all here you happen to be black, in Strip City, the Village, H-A, you happen to be cool. But if you’re a square old shade with no jungle inside you at all, never walked down MacDougal at 5 a.m., never from door to East Side Puerto Rican door, never felt the heat, never saw The Man out there waiting—then, baby, when you hear those tom-toms wailing from Evers Harlem East Village tribal jungles, better pour another stinger, rub on the old citronella, and fit a new clip in your carbine, ’cause the natives are restless tonight.

That why you’re trotting down this here jungle trail to meet Franklin in The Clearing instead of playing Big Bwana and summoning the cat to the District Officer Governor’s Mansion gin and tonic carefully guarded by loyal askari? So you got no eyes to play Bwana—Tarzan of the Jungle’s the name of the game.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe it’s all a crock of shit, but maybe you gotta give that jungle inside a little transfusion once in a while, score on a street corner, fight in a bar, see the wrong end of a knife, keep the old juices flowing. All of them Bwanas out there, they don’t, except every ten years or so—and then they call it a war.

Up the block was an opaque-windowed barfront, green-paint-on-dirty-glass palm fronds under a tinfoil moon in a dead-black sky, green grime-subdued neon sign flashing “ The Clearing. ” And outside maybe twenty bucks goofing, cats too down and out not to get bounced from inside. Right outside the doorway like an honor guard of junkies—native kraal and Mr Henry George Franklin waiting for him inside.

Look dangerous, man, Barron told himself, feeling old remembered instincts hunching him forward in his funky black jacket, picking up neon flickerings in the pits of his hardened, tense-muscled eyes. Way you gotta play it on this ground, no black shades here—just Us and The Man.

Feeling the tension-interface before him bulging inward against the clot of black men guarding the door, eyes straight ahead never looking to the side to acknowledge the sullen-stare question the back of his neck knew was there—Hey what you doin’ here, you shade mother you?

Barron threaded through them, neither intruding on turf nor giving ground. And like a bubble bursting through layers of oily tropical waters, was through, and inside.

A big barn of a room (scars patterning the flakey-paint ceiling where the barroom, amoeba-like, had absorbed shops or apartments by knocking down walls) sunk down a half-flight from the entrance, down three stairs into the cellar, huge slash-pop green poster-fronds painted halfway up the dim grimy-white walls like chartreuse flame in the junkie-funky fluorescent light that turned the sea of black faces to ashy washed-out blue-gray.