Barron foot-signaled Gelardi to give him the full screen wind-up. Something’s going on here, he thought. Something bigger than… bigger than…? Anyway, too big to thrash out on the air. Good timing, as usual.
“Well that’s about it, folks,” he said, “we’re out of time. Been quite an hour, eh? And if this whole thing’s still bugging you, then next Wednesday night you just pick up that vidphone and dial Area Code 212, 969-6969, and we’ll be off to the races again with another hour of Bug Jack Barron.”
And they were rolling the wrap-up commercial, and he was off the air.
“He wants to—”
“No!” Jack Barron said evenly as Gelardi’s voice spoke over the intercom circuit. “I don’t talk to Howards now for no reasons under no conditions.”
Gelardi made hair-pulling motions behind the glass wall of the control booth. “I’ve never heard any of your victims this pissed,” he said. “You’ve gotta get this fruitcake off the line before he melts every circuit in the joint. Such language!”
Barron felt the old talked-out satisfying fatigue come over him as he got up out of the hotseat and thought, as usual, about going somewhere and picking up a chick and fucking her brains—and then, like a new burst of energy, he remembered. Them days is gone forever! Home to Sara, and Sara there! Changes, changes, and good ones for a change this time round.
“Come on, Jack, for chrissakes, cool Howards already!” Gelardi whined.
Who the fuck wants him cooled? Barron thought. Something happened during those last few minutes, I hit something real tender, and he almost spilled some mighty important beans—and not because he kept his cool. Let him stew a while. I want him hot and raving when we get down to nitty-gritty—and no witnesses, Vince, baby.
“Give him my home phone number,” Barron said. “If that doesn’t cool him, tell him to fuck off. In fact why don’t you give him my number and tell him to fuck off anyway? Tell him… tell him Mohammed can damn well come to the mountain.”
“But man, all we need is Howards—”
“Let me do the worrying, Vince, Boy. Wonder Jack Barren’s still in the catbird-seat.”
As vip Bennie Howards will soon find out.
9
Jack… Jack, maybe I never understood, Sara Westerfeld thought as she stood on the breakfast deck overlooking the penthouse living room, listening to the May shower rattle against the skylight facets and to the faint hum of the elevator rising to the entrance foyer. How long’s it been like this! she wondered. This sure wasn’t what he was doing with Bug Jack Barron when he threw me out… or when I left him. Maybe he’s been right all along, maybe I did leave him by copping-out, refusing to dig where his head was really at?
As she heard the elevator door open, his footsteps down the hall, the pressure of his being moving like a shock wave down the narrow passage, impinging on unknown kinesthetic senses, Sara felt on the edge of a new-style awareness of man-woman contrast that cut far deeper than what was revealed when pants came down.
Power’s a man’s bag, she realized. Any chick that digs power, really feels where it’s at, almost always turns out to be some kind of dyke in the end. Power’s somehow cock-connected; woman’s hung-up on power, she’s hungup on not having a cock, understands power only if she’s thinking like someone who does. Power’s even got its own man-style time-sense: man can wait, scheme, plan years-ahead-guile-waiting games, accumulate power on the sly, then use it for good—if the man’s good deep inside like Jack—like a good fuck good cat can bring a frigid chick along, cooling himself, holding back when he has to, until he’s finally got her ready to come. Man kind of love, man kind of delayed-timing thinking, calculated quanta of emotion and only when the time’s right, and not like woman needs to feel everything totally the moment it happens—good, evil, love, hate, prick inside her. Like a man digs fucking a woman, woman digs being fucked. Is that all that came between us, Jack? Me thinking like an always-now woman, you thinking future time man-thoughts?
And then he was standing before her, wet curls framing eyes glistening with afterglow-fatigue of a hundred remembered battles in Berkeley, Los Angeles, now at last New York, the lines in his face like timelines from past dreams to present-planned reality, mosaic of love in four-dimensional space-time manflesh, she saw the boy still living behind the face of the man, saw in memory’s eye the man that had grown behind the soft-flesh shining armor of the boy she had tasted in action-swirling streets and bedrooms, loved the boy and his dream, and the man and his past, and the JACK BARRON (in flaming capital letters) of past-present-future mortal lovers-against-the-night combats—oh, this is a man.
She kissed him quick but deep with her tongue; bubbling over, she pulled away from his mouth, still in an arm-on-shoulders mutual embrace, said: “Jack, Jack I watched you on television, I mean really watched you, really saw for the very first time what you were doing. You were magnificent, you were everything I always knew you would be the first day I met you in Berkeley, but better—better than anything I could’ve imagined—because then I was a girl, and you were a boy, and today you were a man, and I… Well, maybe at the advanced age of thirty-five I’m leaving adolescence and I’m ready to try loving you the way a woman should love a man.”
“That’s… uh… groovy,” he said, and now she thrilled even at the way he was preoccupied, the old Berkeley distant-focus preoccupation, thinking through her, above her, warm exciting man-thoughts enveloping her in him were the moments she had always loved him most.
“Groovy, and I dig what you’re saying—I mean about us. But the show… look, Sara, there are things I’ve got to tell you. I mean, don’t think I’m back in the silly old Baby Bolshevik bag. I suppose it looked that way to a lot of people, and there were moments when I… but I don’t do things without a reason, and there are things going on that—”
“I know, Jack,” she said. “You don’t even have to tell me. It stands out all over you. You’re involved in something big, something important, the kind of thing you were always meant to do. Something real like you used to—”
“It’s not what you think, not what anyone thinks,” he muttered, brows furrowed at some hidden contrapuntal train of thought. “I don’t even know the whole story myself. But I feel something, can smell it… something so big, so… I’m afraid to even think about it until I—”
The vidphone chime interrupted. “Already… ?” Jack muttered, and he bolted down the stairs, across the carpet to the wall consoles, made the vidphone connection, and sprawled on the floor, as she followed a few steps behind.
“What’s shaking with you, Rastus?” he was saying as she sat down beside him, saw that the face on the vidphone screen was good old Luke Greene, and remembered good days screwing around with Luke before she met Jack.
“Never mind me, Huey,” Luke said. “What’s shaking with you, lot of people are asking?”
Jack picked up the vidphone, pointed the camera at Sara. Hello, Luke,” she said, “it’s been a long time.”
He smiled back at her, long-gone no-hang-ups ancient-history-love pure friendship smile. “Well hello, Sara,” he said “you and Jack…?”
“You know it, Kingfish,” Jack said, turning the vidphone camera back on himself. “We’re back together, and this time it’s for keeps.”