For a hot moment Jack Barron forgot Carrie, wide-eyed, naked, power-adoring beside him; forgot economic sponsor-network squeezing-power of GOP, forgot Bug Jack Barron, was back in Berkeley Los Angeles red-hot Baby-Bolshevik Sara beside him close to the blood-innocent-fury days.
“And if I accept—and if I’m elected,” he said coldly, “think I’d really make a good little Republican President?”
“That’s our problem,” Morris said. “We both know you’re no politician, but neither was Eisenhower. You’ll have plenty of the right advisors, men of substance and experience to run the government for you. You won’t have to worry about—”
“I’m nobody’s whore, and don’t you forget it!” Barron shouted. “You don’t sell Jack Barron like soap, then toss him aside like a used condom when you’ve gotten what you came for. You can take your goddam nomination and shove it up your ass! You’re right, I’m no politician, and if you want the reason, look in a mirror sometime if you’ve got a strong enough stomach. You’re lower than a Mexican bordertown pimp; you’d have to stand on top the Empire State Building to reach a cockroach’s balls. You and your kind are vermin, lice, clots in the bloodstream of humanity. You’re not fit to clean my toilet bowl. I’m an entertainer, not a whore. Value given for value received. You’re the last of the dinosaurs, Morris, and it’ll be a pleasure to watch you sink screaming into the tarpits where you belong.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Morris practically snake-hissed. “You don’t talk to me like that, and get away with it! You play my game, or I’ll destroy you, lean on your sponsors, pressure the—”
Jack Baron laughed a harsh, false, tension-release laugh. Every schmuck in the country thinks he’s got more going than poor old Jack Barron, he thought. Howards, Morris—matched pair of cretins.
“You’re pathetic, you know that, Morris?” he said, “Know why? Because I’ve got this whole call on tape, that’s why. Your fat face and your big mouth, all ready to run on Bug Jack Barron any time I find you—shall we say, tiresome? You’ve taken your cock out in front of cameras, and I can play it back to a hundred million people any time I want to. You’re naked, Morris, bare-ass naked! I get a hint, or even just a vibration that you’re making waves in my direction, and, baby, I lower the boom. Go stick your tongue out at babies, Morris, you’re wasting your time trying to scare me.”
“Think it over,” Morris said, suddenly forcing himself back into a tone of sweet-pimp reason. “You’re letting the chance of a lifetime go—”
“Ah, fuck off!” Barron said, as he broke the connection, shut off the recorder.
“Jack…” Carrie Donaldson sighed, throwing arms around his waist, wilting to her knees, lips sucking him in naked-lap, wish-fulfilment fantasy Carrie blowing him, her mind blown network orders blown cool blown going down on bossman mindfucker, raped by simple Bug Jack Barron style vip putdown session. But now Barron saw it for the silly-ass goddamned inverted Sara-fantasy it was: Carrie-Sara turned on all the way by Bug Jack Barron scene, turned off the genuine article. Last thing I want now, he thought, pulling away from her, is to be blown by a wet-dream ghost.
“Later, baby,” he said, “that lox just turned me off.” And on impulse (Bug Jack Barron subliminal walk-that-line balancing-act impulse, he thought wryly even as he dialed) he dialed the unlisted home vidphone number of Lukas Greene.
Greene’s angular black face bleared at him on the vidphone screen over a coffee cup, the master bedroom of the Governor’s Mansion vaguely opulent in the background. “It’s you, eh, Claude,” Greene said, glancing at something off-camera. “Jack Barron—at this hour?”
“Come on, Lothar,” said Barron, “you know I’m a clean liver.”
“Percy,” Greene said, “I’ve seen cleaner livers smothered in onions in Harlem greasy-spoons. Speaking of which—where the hell’s my breakfast?” And almost immediately a white-clad Negro flitted briefly across the screen carrying a breakfast tray, set it down on the bed, and disappeared silently into the woodwork.
“Beauregard,” Barron said grinning, “gotta hand it to you Southern gentlemen types. Really got them darkies trained right, don’t you?”
Greene nibbled a slice of bacon, dabbed at egg yolk with a roll, said: “You Commie nigger-loving Northern Liberal faggots is just jealous of Southern-style gracious living. We loves our darkies down here. We just loves ’em, and they loves us; any that don’t, why we just hang ’em from a sour-apple tree. Hey, why you bugging an important man like me at this hour, shade? It ain’t Wednesday night, and we’re not on the air—I hope.”
“Guess who I just got a call from?” Barron said, clocking how Carrie was even more zonked out at the nitty-gritty race-humor between shade Jack Barron and the black Governor of Mississippi.
“The ghost of Dylan? Teddy the Pretender?”
“Would you believe Daddy Warbucks?” said Jack Barron.
“Huh?”
“Greg Morris,” said Barron. “Amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? Would you believe you’re talking to the next President of the United States?”
Greene took a long drink of coffee. “A little early for you to be stoned, isn’t it?” he said seriously.
“Straight poop, Kingfish,” Barron answered. “Morris offered me the Republican Presidential nomination.”
“Come on, man, stop putting me on, and come to the punchline already.”
“I’m not kidding,” said Barron, “it’s for real, Luke. The schmuck thinks I could get the SJC to nominate me too, put together a fusion ticket, and we could all go out and zap the Pretender.”
“I still think you’re putting me on,” said Greene. “You, a Republican and the SJC in bed with those Neanderthals? Either you’re putting me on, or the good Governor of California’s finally gone around the bend. How could the Republicans and the SJC possibly get together on anything?”
“Morris seems to think opposition to the Freezer Bill’s a big enough common issue to brush everything else under the rug,” Barron said. “The fusion ticket doesn’t run on any common platform, way he sees it, it just runs against Bennie Howards. Loopy, eh, Rastus?”
Barron felt a long loud silence as Greene sipped coffee, eyes becoming cold, hard, calculating, saw Carrie, still looking at him hungrily, shift her eyes to stare at the vidphone image of Luke, smelt flesh-wood of Carrie, image-wood of Luke burning. Doesn’t anyone have a sense of humor left but me?
“This is for real, isn’t it, Jack?” Lukas Greene at last said quietly.
“For chrissakes, Luke—”
“Hold on, Vladimir,” said Greene. “I’m getting a flash. You. Bug Jack Barron. Republican bread—and they are still flush. You know, it could work. It just might work. Bennie Howards as bogey-man, we wouldn’t really have to run you against Teddy. Yeah, we just ignore the Pretender, link the Democrats with the Foundation, and we’ve got your show to do it with. A Social Justice President