Norman Spinrad: Bug Jack Barron

Dedicated, in gratitude, to

Michael Moorcock

and to the Milford Mafia

“Split boys, will you?” drawled Lukas Greene, waving his black hand (and for that nasty little moment, for some reason, thinking of it as black) at the two men (perversely seeing them for the tired moment as niggers) in the Mississippi State Police (coon to the right) and Mississippi National Guard (schvug to the left) uniforms.

“Yessur, Governor Greene,” the two men said in unison. (And Greene’s ear, caught in what he could outside viewpoint see as the dumb mindless masochistic moment, heard it as “Yassah Massah.”)

“Tote dat barge,” Governor Greene said to the door when it had closed behind them. What the hell’s wrong with me today, Greene thought irritably. That damned Shabazz. That dumb trouble-making nig—

There was that word again, and that was where the whole thing was at. Malcolm Shabazz, Prophet of the United Black Muslim Movement, Chairman of the National Council of Black Nationalist Leaders, Recipient of the Mao Peace Prize, and Kingfish of the Mystic Knights of the Sea was neither more nor less than a nigger. He was everything the shades saw when they heard the word nigger: Peking-loving ignorant dick-dragging black-oozing ape-like savage. And that cunning son of a bitch Malcolm knew it and played on it, making himself a focus of mad white hate, the purposeful prime target of a garbage-throwing screaming Wallacite loonies, feeding on the hate, growing on it, absorbing it, saying to the shades, “I’m a big black mother, and I hate your fucking guts, and China is the Future, and my dick is bigger than yours, and China is the Future, and my twenty million bucks like me in this country, a billion in People’s China and four billion in the world who hate you like I hate you, die you shade mother!”

As the Bohemian Boil-Sucker observed to the chick who farted in his face. Greene thought, it’s people like you, Malcolm, who make this job disgusting.

Greene swiveled in his chair, and stared at the little TV perched on the desk across from the in-out basket. Instinctively he reached for the pack of Acapulco Golds sitting on the pristine desk top, then thought better of it. Much as he needed a good lungful of pot at this moment on this day, it was not a smart move for anyone who was where anything was at to be under the influence of anything on a Wednesday night. He glanced surreptitiously at the dead screen of his vidphone. The screen might very well come alive during the next hour with the sardonically smiling face of good old Jack Barren.

“Jack Barron,” Lukas Greene sighed aloud. Jack Barron. Even a friend couldn’t afford to be stoned if he got a public call from Jack. Not in front of a hundred million people he couldn’t.

But then it had never paid, even in the old Jack-and-Sara days, to give an edge to Jack Barron. What’s-his-name—whoever remembers anymore?—made the mistake of letting Jack guest on his Birch grill for one night, and Jack grew all over him like a fucking fungus.

And then—no more what’s-his-name. Just a camera, a couple vidphones, and good old Jack Barron.

If only… Green thought, the same old familiar Wednesday night “if only” thought… if only Jack were still one of us. With Jack on our side the SJC would have a fighting chance to break through and beat the Pretender. If only…

If only Jack weren’t such a cop-out. If only he had kept some of what we all seemed to lose in the 70s. But what had Jack said (and oh, was he right; and don’t I know it!), “Luke,” Jack Barron had said, and Greene remembered every word Jack could always stick a phrase in your head like a Bester mnemonic jingle, “it sure is a bad moment when you decide to sell out. But a worse moment, the worst moment in the world is when you decide to sell out and nobody’s buying.”

And how do you answer that? Greene thought. How do you answer that, when you’ve parlayed a picket sign, a big mouth, and a black skin into the Governor’s Mansion in Evers, Mississippi? How do you answer Jack, you black shade you white nigger you?

Lukas Greene laughed a bitter little laugh. The name of the show had to be an inside joke, a real inside joke, inside Jack’s hairy little head, is all…

Because (since he had waved bye-bye to Sara) who in hell could really… bug Jack Barron?

Not a night to be alone, Sara Westerfeld unwittingly found herself thinking under the sardonic blind gaze of the dead glass eye of the portable TV which suddenly seemed to have infiltrated itself into her consciousness in her living room, where Don and Linda and Mike and the Wolfman stood unknowing guard against loneliness-ghosts of Wednesday nights past, and she against her will realized (and realized against her will that she always realized) that it had been a long time (don’t think of the exact date; you know the exact date; don’t think of it) since she had spent a Wednesday night with fewer than three people around her.

Better to play games with Don Sime (will I - won’t I—is tonight the night—or will I ever?) than to sit alone the way I maybe want to, with the dead glass eye daring me to turn it on. Better still just to sit here and dig the Wolfman rapping with half an ear and let the broken record of his harmless talking-just-to-hear-himself talk bullshit turn off my mind, turn off memory, and let me drift in the droning not-really-Wednesday now…

“Dig, so I say, man why ain’t there a check for me?” the Wolfman was saying, pulling at his scraggly muttonchops. “I’m a human being, ain’t I?

“Know what the fucker says?” the Wolfman whined with a great display of wounded dignity Sara could not tell was put on or not. “Says, ‘Jim, you’re too young for Social Security, too old for AID, and you ain’t never worked ten weeks in a row to qualify for Unemployment. In fact you are a bum in hip clothing, is what you are.’ ”

The Wolfman paused. And now Sara saw a strange thing happen to his face as the supercilious mood left it revealed as superciliousness by its passing—and she saw what the others in the pseudo-Japanese room also saw, that for once the Wolfman was grotesquely pitiably earnest.

“What kind of shit is that,” the Wolfman said stridently, and the joint he was holding slid from his fingers and fell unheeded, burning the black-lacquered coffee table.

“Screw it, will you, Wolfman, and pick up that Pall Mall you dropped on the table,” Don said, trying to act like the Defender of Hearth and Home in front of Sara, make his dumb little points with her in her own apartment.

“Screw yourself, Sime,” the Wolfman said. “I’m talking about like real injustice. People like you, people like me—”

“Aw—” Don began, and the moment stood still for Sara, knowing what he was going to say, the three words, the exact cynical intonation, having been flayed by those words dozens of times a week for years, wincing, dying a little each time she heard those three last words, knowing that Don Sime would now never ball her, not with a billion screaming Chinese holding her down, not ever. Sooner would she make it with a gila monster or Benedict Howards than give herself to a man who said those three words on a Wednesday night between 8 and 9 p.m., and by the little death induce the grand mal déjà vu, images on his face on the television screen carefully tousled over his face on the long-ago blue-flowered pillow carelessly neat his beard blue and stubbly…

Don Sime, unheeding (and, she saw, an unheeding, rotten swine by his thoughtless reflex reaction), nevertheless said the three magic words, the outsider’s inside expression that shriveled to death for an instant the insides of Sara.