“Come on, man, what planet did you say you came from?” Barron said, the joke no longer funny. Crazy Luke thinks he’s back in Berkeley wet-dream power-fantasy delusion of grandeur. “You can’t be that dumb, Morris just wants to use the SJC to elect a Republican President, and if he does, he’ll feed all you overgrown Baby Bolsheviks to the fishes. He just wants a fusion figurehead image to lurk behind, is all.”
“Sure,” agreed Greene, “but that figurehead is good old Jack Barron. Even Morris knows what a cop-out you are, so he thinks you’d be a tame flunky. But I know you better, Adolph. Comes nitty-gritty time, I think you’ll remember who you once were. I may be crazy, but I’d be willing to trust you that far. I think the National Council would too, after I got through working on their heads. You get that Republican nomination, and I can get you the SJC nomination. Maybe I am talking to the next President. What did you tell Morris?”
“What do you think I told him?” Barron snapped. “I told him to go fuck himself. You gone around the bend too, Rastus?”
Greene frowned. “You and your big mouth,” he said.
“Hmmm… Morris has got to know where you’re at for openers, so maybe you haven’t gone and blown it. You got that call on tape?” Greene smiled knowingly. “Sure you have. Claude, I know how your head works. How about blipping me the audio?”
“Forget it, Luke,” Barron said. “This is your line of evil, not mine, not anymore. I’m not selling out to Morris or to you either. I sell out to anyone it’s to—” Barron caught himself short; name he was about to say was Bennie Howards. Yeah, he thought, you sell out at all, risk blowing the show, you damn well do it for the big forever boodle and not a half-assed pipedream… Hey wait… . All these silly-ass politicians can maybe give me an extra ace up my sleeve in a poker game with Howards. Why not?
“Come on man,” Greene cajoled, “humor me. Blip me the call. You got your jollies out of it, let me get mine. Nothing else, maybe we can use it against whoever the Republicans—do come up with. That doesn’t hurt you, does it, oh noble hero Jack Barron? Might even boost your ratings.”
“Since you’re twisting my arm, I’ll blip it to you on one condition,” said Barron. “Unless I give you the go-ahead—and I won’t—you keep it strictly private. Just between you and me. Okay?”
“Beggars can’t be choosy,” Greene said. “I’ll set my recorder for the blip.” He did something off camera. “Fire when ready, Gridley.”
Barron took the tape reel off his recorder, placed it on the input spool of the blipper built into his wall complex, fed it into the blipper. “Ready at this end,” he said.
“Blip away,” said Lukas Greene.
Barron pressed the blip button; the blipper compressed the sound of the phone conversation into about ninety seconds of high-pitched chipmunk gabble over the vidphone circuit to Greene’s recorder in Mississippi, to be fed into a deblipping circuit, give Luke his Machiavellian eat-your-heart-out-baby jollies.
“Got it,” Greene said. “Unless you have any more Earth-shaking revelations, Claude, I think I better tend to the business of the state of Mississippi. Later.”
That hot to hear it, eh, Rastus? Barron thought. “I never deprive a maroon of his simple-minded pleasures. Later, Lothar,” he said, broke the connection.
“Jack…” Carrie snaked across the rug arms around his chest wide eyes visions of larger than life sugar-plums of power tickets to circles where it’s at, magic image-musk goddamned eyes why always those goddamned fever-coated eyes same eyes every bitch knows my name sees my dick, gets eyes like fucking vacuum cleaners suck-me-dry eyes for living-color latest Brackett Count hundred million Americans Jack Barron. Now you too, Carrie Donaldson, cool network-programmed secretary-robot with red-hot cunt don’t buy bargain-basement Bug Jack Barron image-bullshit too close to home, but let schmuck Morris, crazy Luke whistle “Hail to the Chief,” and it’s welcome to the club, Carrie, baby.
Hey what’s with you man? Barron asked himself as Carrie Donaldson worried his lips with her moist, frantic tongue. Ten minutes ago you wanted action you’re getting right now—Carrie’s mind totally blown fucked out whited out overscrewed in all mental orifices—and you played it for this, is why you riffed with Morris in the first place. Well, isn’t it?
A sudden flash of insight as Carrie directed her demands to nitty-gritty primary limp and pouting organ, bugged ego-extension of him in her smooth cool hands cradling, wheedling, finally stimulating cold reflex hard-on as he felt blood, attention, desire flow mechanically into it—no chick since Sara had done as much time in the sack as Carrie Donaldson, steady couple-times-a-week cool detached lay for months and months, static strictly belly-to-belly nonrelationship had bugged him with network-orders, head unattached to warm-flesh cunt. But now, with Carrie’s cool blown the way he thought he had wanted it, Barron saw that the cool itself was why he kept screwing Carrie—sanity-contrast to an endless string of image-fucking Wednesday-night honey-haired Saras. And now she was a member of Bug Jack Barron goddamned vacuum-eyed fan club, giving him Wednesday-night-style déjà vu head wet-dream Sara dream on-her-knees dream eating-kick-’em-in-the-ass world-famous Presidential timber so dumb bitch thinks Jack Barron wet-dream wish-fulfilment déjà vu Carrie, like all the others déjà vu masturbation-ghosts, not the real thing, one more flesh-and-hair ersatz, not Sara, no longer Carrie. And not Sara. Not ever Sara.
His betraying organ stiff and hard, his mind cold, cold light-years distant and nothing but nothing inbetween, Barron rose to his feet, haughty-ironic Great Man hands-on-hips statue, held the immobile mock-heroic posture as warm undulating lips, caressing tongue, frantic rolling half-closed eyes sent waves of hot thick pleasure through thighs, balls, mindless pulsing independent organ: pleasure-waves that stopped stone-cold dead at his waist.
Enjoy, enjoy, Carrie baby, he thought, feeling the spasm building through ten thousand miles of electric circuit insulation. Make it good, old hot-mouthed Carrie, ’cause it’s the last action you’ll ever get from Jack Barron.
Staring into the naked orange flames of the firepit, naked flesh, naked Carrie Donaldson on the bare rug in exhausted, sated semi-sleep beside him, Jack Barron felt a carapace of image-history-skin encysting him like steel walls of a TV set, a creature imprisoned in the electronic circuitry of his own head perceiving through promptboard vidphone fleshless electronic speed of light ersatz senses, separated from the girl beside him by the phosphor-dot impenetrable glass TV screen Great Wall of China of his own image.
First time I remember being blown feeling like wet putdown ugliness, he brooded. Ugly, he told himself, is a thing you feel—truth is ugly when it’s a weapon, lie is beautiful when an act of love ugly when it’s one-sided fuck is beautiful when it’s simple, mutual, nobullshit balling, ugly when chick gets her kicks off you that really isn’t there, is why you feel like a rotten lump of shit, man. Getting blown Sara go down being dug by woman’s a pure gas; being sucked off, image-statue living lie, someone else’s lie being eaten (Let me eat you, let me eat you, baby!) is a dirty act of plastic cannibalism, her dirtiness, not mine.
Whole world’s full of plastic cannibals feeding their own little bags off meals of my goddamned image-flesh, eating Jack Barron ghost that isn’t there. And now Morris and my so-called friend Luke are hot to package my living-color bod into TV dinners, sell to hundred million viewer-voter cannibals for thirty pieces of power silver.