Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

“Fair?” Hennering practically shrieked as the promptboard flashed “2 minutes.” “ Fair? Look, of course it can’t be fair! What’s fair about death? Some men can live forever and others die and are gone forever, and there can’t be anything fair about that. The nation is attacked, and some men are drafted to fight and die while others stay home and make money off it. That’s not a fair choice either. But it has to be made, because if it isn’t then the whole country goes under. Life isn’t fair. If you try to be fair to everyone, then everyone dies and no one lives—that’s being strictly fair, but it’s also being crazy… Should we turn back the clock and make it that way again…? Does that make sense to you, Mr Barron?”

Barron reeled for a moment. The man’s flipping, he thought. He’s in shock, what’s he babbling about? Ask the fucker a simple question he can say a simple no to and cool things and get back Sartre existential nausea why can’t he puke his being and nothingness on some shrink? He saw the promptboard flash “60 seconds.” Christ, just a minute to cool it!

“The point’s well taken,” Barron said, “but the question at hand’s not all that philosophical, Senator. Does the Foundation for Human Immortality avoid Freezing financially qualified Negroes?”

“Negroes?” Hennering muttered; then, like a fuzzy picture suddenly clicking back into focus, he became earnest, firm, authoritative. “Of course not. The Foundation isn’t interested in a client’s race—couldn’t care less. One thing about the Foundation that America can be sure of is that it does not practice racial discrimination. I stand behind that statement with my thirty-year record on Civil Rights, a record that some men may have equaled but that no man has bettered. The Foundation is color-blind.” Hennering’s eyes seemed to go vague again. “If that’s what you mean by fair…” he said. “But—”

Barron crossed his legs as the promptboard flashed “30 seconds,” and his face filled the entire screen. Enough of that shit, Teddy-boy, you finally spat it out, saved the bacon, balanced show for God, Motherhood, and the FCC (not to mention Bennie Howards) can put their switchblades back in their pockets, tell the rest to your shrink.

“Thank you, Senator Hennering,” Barron said. “Well, America, you’ve heard all sides of it, and now you’ve got to make up your own minds, not me or the Governor, or the Senator can do that for you. Take it from there, folks, and plug yourself in next Wednesday night for a new disaster, history made, no time-delay live before your eyes, history made by you and for you every week of the year when you… Bug Jack Barron.”

Jack Barron emerged from the closed environment of the studio—with its camera, set, vidphones, promptboard, foot-buttons, monitor, all compressed into a twenty by fifteen by eight foot pocket universe—like a man suddenly brought down from a drunk or a high or an adrenalin-stress situation into a different, and, for the moment of adjustment, not quite as vivid reality.

Barron knew this; knew it so well that he had constructed a fantasy-image to concretize the essentially nonverbal Wednesday night psychedelic moment into the normal stream of memory: The inside of the studio was actually the inside of a hundred million television sets. There was a creature bearing his name that lived in there (seeing out through monitor eyes, hearing with vidphone ears, monitoring its internal condition through promptboard kinesthetic senses, shifting image-gears with the foot-buttons, ordering, threatening, granting grace all through the circuitry and satellites of that great gestalt of electronic integration, the network, into which he was wired, the masterswitch in the circuit) for one hour a week, a creature indeed, designed and built by him like a Frankenstein android, a creature of his will but only a segment of his total personality.

Emerging from the studio was a birth and a death: kick-’em-in-the-ass, plugged-in-image-of-power, phosphor-dot Jack Barron died then, cut off from his electronic senses and circuitries of power; and soft-flesh, bellyhunger, woman-hunger, scratch-itch Jack Barron, the kid, the Boy Desperado, Jack-and-Sara (cool it!) Jack was born again.

Barron left the studio, walked up the corridor, opened a door, and entered the monkey block directly behind the control booth. He nodded to the boys who were stretching their muscles and swapping horror stories behind the three tiers of vidphone-packed decks, and was about to open the control booth door when Vince Gelardi stepped through it himself.

“Right in the old groove tonight, baby,” Gelardi said. They loved it in Peoria and other traditional show biz flak.”

“In the old groove?” Barron snapped with put-on uptightness, knowing it had gone over like gangbusters while avoiding the kamikaze plunge off the cliff. “In the old groove? You crazy guinea, you almost got me knocked off the air, is all! If I weren’t brilliant twinkletoes boy wonder Jack Barron, you and me and this whole silly monkey block would be out pounding the pavement tomorrow.”

“I was under the impression I was working Bug Jack Barron, the show with something to offend everyone, not old Parish Priest reruns,” Gelardi drawled. “We’re supposed to be like controversial, aren’t we?”

“You said the word, Vince, and the word is like controversial,” Barron said, now at least half-serious, he realized. “We pick on cripples, heartless bullies with feet of clay, if we feel real fancy we take on some big-mouthed dum-dum like Shabazz or Withers. We do not stick flaming swords into the tender hides of tigers with big FCC network-sponsor teeth like Bennie Howards. We tweak the tigers’ tails every once in a while to collect merit badges, but we don’t tie their tails around our waists and beat said tigers with bull-whips.”

“Aw, horseshit. I knew how you’d play it, knew how it’d come out, and you know I knew,” Gelardi said goodnaturedly. “Which is to say, with Bennie Howards getting no worse than a mild ulcer twinge, and that’s why I fed you Johnson. I knew you’d make points, but not belly-wound points. You’re my idol, Jack, you know that.”

Barron laughed. “And I suppose you knew that Teddy Hennering had suddenly contracted brain-rot, I suppose?” he said, immensely pleased with his fancy footwork in retrospect.

Gelardi shrugged. “So even the great Vince Gelardi’s not perfect,” he said. “Seemed more like an attack of conscience, though, to me.”

“There’s a difference?” Barron asked archly. “If there is, it doesn’t matter, ’cause the results are always the same. And speaking of results, did Howards’ secretary leave her number with you?”

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” Gelardi replied, and Barron saw (aw, well!) that he meant it.

“Vince, m’boy,” he said, W.C. Fieldswise, “an esteemed acquaintance of mine, upon reading in a learned journal that one out of fifty women propositioned cold on street corners was willing, tested this theory on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. He received a severe battering with umbrellas, purses, and other painful rigid objects for his trouble. However, m’boy, he also got laid.”

Sycophant laughter drifted to Barron’s ears from the boys in the monkey block. “What?” he huffed, still in the Fields bag. “I hear them mocking my words of wisdom? For shame, for shame. No doubt ’twas louts such as those who forced Socrates to quaff the hemlock.”

“I see, as per your usual Wednesday night bag, you’re feeling randy,” Gelardi said.

“Randy?” Barron replied, unable-unwilling to shuck the Fields schtick. “Who is the wench, and is she worth feeling?” Dropping Fields, Barron said, “And so saying, he exits stage left and is off into the night.” He nodded to Gelardi, bowed to the boys in the monkey block, and was—off into the night.