What made me do that? Jack Barron thought as he felt the motion-breeze of the open Jag cool him as he headed east toward First Avenue. Now who’s playing with Jack Barron’s head—the master mindfucker himself, is all. Who you putting on, man? Should’ve been straight down Seventh to Houston and nowhere near Clown Alley with all that idiot traffic, knew they would spot you, is all. Jack Barron fan club: every loser in Village, junkies in San Fran, hard-luck chicks wherever you are Berkeley, Strip City, street scene stretching block after block, one big where it all was at from Commercial Street to MacDougal to Haight to Sunset, wallowing in bullshit ghosts of glory, Wednesday-night-digging the boy who made good from the bag.
Barron made a left on to First Avenue, and his mood changed with the street: First Avenue, nitty-gritty insiders’ main drag. Ricky-ticky bars, coffee-houses, discos, galleries, zonk shops in lower stories of renovated Ukrainian Polack buildings, street and street-mood where ghosts of the future rubbed tight neon-asses with uptight descendants of Slav-Jew-PR ghetto-specters of the past.
Yeah, Barron thought, this is where the action is; bordertown paranoiasville, semicheap apartments, folk-shops of the new stoned ghetto in building by building guerilla warfare with the dregs of old-style rent-control slumlord Great Society slum-scene of the dying past—Flower People pushing as hard to get in as wave of immigrants since God-knows-when pushed to get out.
The ass is aways greener, Barron thought. Village days, Berkeley was the place; Berkeley days, Strip City, and back to here in goddamned Coast-to-Coast incestuous daisy-chain, Hey, which way to the action, man? And, baby, when you’re a loser the action’s always somewhere else. So why not the other side of the glass-tit, Bug-Jack-Barron-land in electric-circuit contact with places of power, acid dreams of revolution, hundred million Brackett Count insiders’ secret: kick-’em-in-the-ass Jack Barron cutting up vips’ one of us, man. That cat’s on our side.
Truth, isn’t it? Barron thought. Reasons of my own, rating-type reasons, I am on their side, the side of every hung-up person in the whole wide universe, phosphor-dot image of the sounds of freedom flashing “Enemy to those who make him an enemy; friend to those who have no friend.” Boston Blackie, is all.
So what bugs you so much about them buttons?
Who, why, where do they come from? is the nitty-gritty question. Luke or Morris or both already screwing around with trial-balloon free samples of prospective image-meat TV dinners, or just harmless zonk?
Shit, man, you know why you’re bugged. Sara dragging your million-dollar ass down on to her turf. One lousy phone call, and into the car into the Village into the past fast as fat little Michelins will carry you; pearl-diving in sewage, dumb ’60s song, but right where it’s at:
Oh, you so right, baby! So here I am, dragging my dick along First Avenue, right back in the whole dumb scene I kissed goodbye six years ago. Sara, you stoned when I get there, I’m gonna beat the piss out of you, so help me.
But as he parked the Jag on the corner of First Avenue and Ninth Street he wondered who was really gonna beat the piss out of whom.
Sara’s apartment was on the third story of a five-story renovated walk-up (like progress; in the old days anyone you went to see in the East Village always lived on the fifth floor), and you could tell it was hers by the door: it and the surrounding wall area were painted in a continuous door-outline-blurring kinesthop pattern—undulating free-form black and chartreuse concentric bullseye striping that created the illusion of a tunnel expanding past the doorframe, converging circle-in-circle in uneven circle on a weirdly off-center yellow doorknob-buzzer, the focus of the pattern strangely placed near the top of the door.
Barron paused, staring at the gold doorknob, feeling himself caught in the pattern, humming hoops of bright-green leaping out from the flat black background like an electric charge neon tunnel around him, sucking him inward like Sara’s smooth legs around his waist extended into the environment, pulling attention to gilded goody -open me! Open me! Let me suck you in, baby!—the kinesthop pattern said.
Barron couldn’t help smiling, knowing it wasn’t his wish-fulfillment bag at all, but goddamn Sara knows exactly what she’s doing with stuff like this—making entrance to her pad a cunt to the world. Dig the paint, man, it’s old, starting to flake at the edges; this thing was here long before she called you. Remember where that’s at, and don’t blow your cool.
He reached out, pressed the ivory bellybutton in the center of the doorknob, heard taped Chinese J Arthur Rank gong from within, footsteps on muted carpet—and Sara opened the door. She stood in the doorway, framed by a single wine-colored spotlight, dark hallway behind her long loose hair bloody-gold to her shoulders, in a black silk kimono flowing over her naked breasts, hips, like oil, nipples low and taut through the cloth, stomach-legs convergence, imagined soft-flesh triangle hinted by heavy folds of black sheen.
déjà vu irony of entrance to his penthouse, remembering own come-into-my-parlor come-on, his own seduction-environment and from who he had learned the kinesthop hypnotic technique, Barron laughed, said: “Way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, way to the crotch is through the eyeballs, eh, Sara?”
“Same old Jack,” she said, with an unexpected sly smile that caught him off balance, sucked him into brittle-laughing-sad-pathetic-brave eyes, through levels of illusions, inside joke on the universe between them, spark of old love Jack-and-Sara destiny’s darlings hard-edged Berkeley Los Angeles mystics, their innocent cynicism a sword against the night. “Magic’s lost on you; I forgot that rune you wear against necromancy.”
“Thank you, J.R.R. Tolkien,” he said, stepping inside and closing the door behind him in a protocol-control gesture. “Someplace we can sit in this cave of winds?” he said, suppressing gland-reaction images battering his cool, wanting to grab her as she hung there before him. Keep your cool, he told himself.
She smiled, led him through the velvet hall-blackness-shadows dancing (black wash over kinesthop patterns, he thought, image of Bug Jack Barron set backdrop; we play the same games, only stakes are different), into a straw-mat-floored studio room, low primary-colored geometric-precision Japanese furniture hard-edged in the neutral, off-white pseudolantern overhead light, thousand-years-distant in cool squares and rectangles from ricky-ticky neon-baroque Village streets. He squatted on a red plush pillow before a black-lacquered table, smiled at the TV sitting arrogantly on it like a Yankee Imperialismo in oriental sheets.
She sat down beside him, opened a blue box on the table, took out two cigarettes, handed him one. He dug the trademark, snapped, “No grass baby. Straight talk, and I mean straight, both of us, or I leave.”
“Your sponsor, Acapulco Golds,” she said fingering the joint coyly. “What would the network think?”
“Cut the shit, Sara.”
“All right, Jack,” she said, suddenly empty in open little-girl confusion (as if I’m the one that started this). “I was hoping you’d… you’d write the script for this scene. That was always your bag, not mine.”
“My bag? Look, baby, this has been your orbit straight from ground zero. You called me, remember? You asked me to see you, I didn’t drag my dick down here to…”