Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

His hands on the wheel seemingly sensing every crack in the pavement as the car tore down the highway, Barron felt a strange déjà vu Berkeley attic Jack-and-Sara exhilaration, realized it was nothing but hate had made the Baby Bolshevik bag go ’round. Yeah, just where it was at, we hated everything that wasn’t the way we wanted it to be. Our strength and our weakness—we knew just how to react, black versus white, to everything. Anything wasn’t totally right was totally wrong, and you could hate it, had to hate it knowing Us Anointed were on the Side of the Angels, everything against us was on the side of wrong. Not to hate, we called a cop-out. Never trust anyone past thirty—’cause when a boy becomes a man he stops seeing that sharp hateline between right and wrong, and if you stay in the Movement then, you’re an opportunistic phony, a fucking politician… a hag-ridden Lukas Greene.

There’s your definition of politics, grown men playing kid games, hate-games, to get same simple kicks I get off Bug Jack Barron, living-color, man-up-front, self-image is all. And that’s cool. But the real difference between show biz and politics is nothing fancier than hate. Think you could understand that, Luke? You’re the cop-out, not me, playing the politics-hate game, dead Berkeley-game you can’t even feel.

Yeah, but there’s something about hate that comes on like junk—thinking about it, you know it’s a loser, but oh how good that dirty old surge feels! Gives you something certain to build your whole schmear around—go get what you want, and feel it in your gut. Pure dumb groove to nail Benedict Howards’ head to the old barn door…

Driving the car at a reckless speed which demanded full physical commitment, the wheel alive and deadly in his hands as the flat land flashed by, Barron grooved on the heady feel of life-and-death riding on his reflexes, his consciousness not trapped in a point behind his eyes but diffused through his hands and through prosthetic metal linkages to the car body and wheels.

Through electric circuit feedback loops, he anticipated the parallel kick of total total commitment reaching out through satellite-network-vidphone senses to the coast-to-coast hundred million Brackett Count audience, to Luke, Morris, SJC, Republicans hot for his bod, all integrated by amplified-power circuitry into his electronically-extended Bug Jack Barron being, alive in a new way, jaw to jaw with death (with Howards as with the highway), in total war of total commitment for total revenge, and immortality, the most total of stakes.

I’ll do you a show, Howards, you’ll never believe. I’ll chop you to pieces, and be alive and immortal when you’re nothing but a lingering bad taste in a hundred million mouths, fried to a crisp in the electric chair, you Frankenstein ax-murderer you!

He eased off the throttle as he felt the heat of the moment pass through him leaving him a wash of post-adrenalin warmth behind. You’re out of your mind, you know that, man? Only schmucks and Sicilians hate like that…

Yeah, he thought, clinging to the memory of total hate, but a cool head should know how to use even his own glands.

“My mammy told me about these here Smoke-Filled Rooms, but this is getting ridiculous,” Lukas Greene said. The smoke level in the conference room, air-conditioned though it was, was beginning to get rather impressive as Sherwood Kaplan lit another of those godawful mentholated filtertipped (’They get you high and keep you kool’) Kools Supremes, and Deke Masterson rolled another Bull Durham (where in hell they still making that stuff, Greene wondered) tobacco cigarette, and Morris’ cigar smoldered wetly in the cut-glass ashtray opposite Greene, at what in his mind was the foot of the square table, like the rotten green cock of a decomposing corpse.

Now that, thought Greene, is what we call in the trade symbolism—the GOP is indeed a slowly-decomposing corpse, and green or no, Greg Morris is certainly a rotten prick. But at least a rotten prick I got in the old bag.

“I zuppose you are all vundering vhy I zummoned you here tonight?” Greene said in a thick Lugosi accent. Morris scowled at him primly, but he didn’t count now—Kaplan and Masterson were the real targets for tonight—and Woody’s petulant, aging-cherub face cracked a faggoty false smile. But Deke was still a pudgy-faced black sphinx.

“Cut the crap, Luke,” Masterson said in that cultivatedly-gravelly voice of his. “You dragged us here to sell us on Jack Barron; we all know that. Where in hell is your so-called Black Shade?”

“Jack’ll be down any minute,” Greene said, “but you’ve got it ass-forward, Deke, the problem isn’t selling you on Jack, but selling Jack on running. Try and remember that when he gets here.”

“What is this shit?” Kaplan said with ill-concealed jealousy. “Running Jack for President’s crazy enough, and playing footsie with that (he pointed the Kool at Morris, ostentatiously wrinkled his nose, but Morris, pro all the way, put him down the way you put down Woody the best, by ignoring him), makes it lunacy in spades and now you’re telling us that that goddamned phony’s gotta be treated like some fucking virgin prima donna?”

“Let’s get right down to the uglies,” Greene said, “so we don’t end up washing our dirty linen when Jack’s here. President or no President, you and Deke have one very good reason to play ball with me, and Governor Morris already knows who that reason is…”

“Russ Deacon,” Masterson said as if it were a dirty word.

Kaplan grimaced. And Greene thought, yeah, poor old Russ gotta be the boy that gets the shaft. Deke and Russ been at each other’s throats since they been in Congress over whether the State SJC Chairman should be black or white, Deke’s boy or Russ’s, whether Harlem or the Village should run the New York SJC show, and up till now, with all our New York shade money men in Russ’s corner, Deke hasn’t had a prayer of throwing Russ out, and, oh, how he knows it.

“That’s right, our soul-brother, Representative Russell Deacon,” Greene said. “Now you know I got nothing personal against Russ at all, but I want Barron for President, and the two of you, added to what I’ve already got lined up, can swing all the votes I need on the National Council, so if I gotta deliver Russ’s head on a silver platter to get ’em, it’s Deacon for dessert.”

“I’m listening,” said Kaplan. “But how do you expect to get Deacon out of the way?”

“ I can’t,” said Greene. “That’s just the point: I can’t, but Jack Barron can. Look, Woody, Deacon’s got the Village, and the way things are set up now, that means the New York SJC. You got Strip City, and except for some noise from the Bay, that means the California SJC. A Mexican stand-off. But with Deacon out of the way you’d be the Grand High Poobah of Hip, just like you always wanted. You’d control all the East Coast hippy action and California besides.”

“What’s the point?” said Masterson. “This is a broken record. Why knife each other in front of the good Governor of California?”

Greene smiled as Morris sat there silently with amused contempt on his broad face. Which is cool, Greene thought.

“Okay, in words of one syllable,” Greene said. “The three of us want different things. If we play ball with each other, we all get ’em. Deke, with Woody in control of the Village SJC instead of Deacon, the New York SJC’d be your baby ’cause he’s off in Strip City running that show, and with a blackstate SJC that cuts the floor right out from under Malcolm Shabazz and his back-to-Africa phonies been bugging you in the bargain. You can afford Woody as hippy-faction leader ’cause he’s three thousand miles away and he’s got no eyes to run New York, better him than Deacon, right? And Woody, it’s no skin off your teeth to have Deke run New York so long as there’s only one Grand High Poobah of the Hippies. And me, well, you know how thick I am with Jack, he wins, I’m the black power behind the Shade house throne. (Morris smirked. That’s cool, Greene thought, let him.) So those are the stakes. Now, ask yourself, fellas, guess who’s a bigger magic name in the Village than Russell Deacon?”