“You can count on me to give you a good, swift, on-camera boot in the testes, you don’t get me out of here and do it fast,” Barron said tautly, half-aware (admit it, man, it does get to you) he was also threatening himself.
Luke laughed an infuriating knowing laugh, like two buddies meeting again on the street outside after a trip to a low-class whorehouse. His arm still resting on Barren’s shoulder, he led him to the limousine whistling “Hail to the Chief” in hideous off-key, shaking his head from side to side.
Aw, take it and stick it, Barron thought as a flunky opened the car door. But for some quixotic reason he didn’t take off the shades till he was inside.
“All right, Lothar, what’s the big idea?” Jack Barron said as the car began to roll, sealed off in the rear compartment of the air-conditioned limousine with Luke like a rolling Bug Jack Barron studio through the streets of Evers—knocked-together packing-crate slums immediately outside the World’s Fair Gothic airport like some unreal Rio hillside TV documentary favella, antiseptic and safe behind the electric-circuit insulated monitor-screens of the car’s sealed windows.
Luke measured him with his big, cool, snide eyes. “The Big Idea is all,” he said. “I already told you, didn’t I? I’m gonna play with your head till you agree to run for President. Simple as that, Clive. We need you, and we’re gonna get you.”
“Just like that?” Barron said, pissed, but at the same time admiring Luke’s unabashed amoral honesty. “Fact that I got no qualifications to be President, that don’t mean squat to you?”
“I said we need you to run for President,” Luke said as the car continued to pass through some of the ghastliest slums Barron had ever seen: crazy-quilt shacks of old grayed wood and tin Coke signs windowed randomly in mad Dali patterns; mountains of uncanned garbage in the sidewalkless streets dull-eyed black World War II Dondi street urchins liquid lounging street hoods hopeless fourteen-year-old whores junkies nodding on heaps of rusting metal, made Harlem, Watts, Bedford-Stuyvesant, look like Scarsdale. Scarsville, Barron thought. Huge purple cancer-scar across the fifty-dollar-pants-hidden backside of America. Stag-film of despair-pornography across the TV screen car windows, living-color image documentary losers.
“We need a candidate, a man who can win,” Luke was saying as Barron dug him with his ears while image-faces of hollow hope gray hands waving as the vip car went by, “Bug Jack Barron” and “Black Shade” buttons pinned on rags seared through the window-glass interface into the back of his eyes. “And that’s you, man. Don’t tell me you have no eyes to run. I saw you out there, saw you sucking it up, way you rapped it out right off the top of your head just like in the old days, same old Jack Barron. Getting the taste of it back, aren’t you, Jack?” And Luke stared at him with knowing, sardonic, laughing pusher-eyes.
That’s what you are, Luke, Barron thought, pusher is all. Power-junk dealer’d hook his own grandmother to feed his monkey. That’s a big power-monkey on your back, Luke, fucking gorilla’s bigger than you are.
“Not the taste, Luke,” he said, “just the smell. Nobody can smell out junk better than a reformed junkie, but you’re not gonna get me to taste it, not again, not ever. ‘Come on, man, let’s just split a friendly little bag for old times’ sake, you won’t get hooked, and this one’s for free.’ I spent too many years beating my brains out in the political junk bag. Yeah, there’s a real surge in seeing people with your name pinned on ’em hanging on your words, real big charge, but it’s never enough, you gotta have more and more and more and that power-monkey gets bigger and bigger till there’s nothing left of you. And you forget why you got started in the first place. You stop caring, stop feeling, stop really trying to help people, start using ’em… I’ll take show biz over politics any time—nice white-collar job keeps your hands clean.”
Now the car turned into a wider street, main drag of Evers slum Lenox Avenue disaster of all the world, hock shops open air butchers’ fly-carpeted meat in electric-green dresses wasted angry men shuffling outside endless makeshift bars, and a crowd coalesced and disintegrated in waves on the boredom-choked street as the car passed by, yelling waving sunglasses, kinesthop flashes from Bug Jack Barron buttons, and a guttural animal sound shaking through the car’s windows—“Black Shade! Black Shade!”—fading through the rear window like a bow-wave passing to sullen ugly boredom as the big Cadillac passed and left them behind.
“Look out there,” Luke said, “look at those people screaming your name. They want you, Jack, you. Thousands of ’em, millions of ’em, and they’re looking to you, they want you to lead them, and all you have to do is say the word.”
And Barron heard the envy behind Luke’s voice. His people, Barron thought, but he knows they’re not enough, not strong enough, not enough of ’em to ride alone to the Big Time. They’ve taken him as far as a black man can go. The monkeys keep getting bigger, but there’s no way to get more junk to feed him, is there Luke? Shade connection’s what you need, good old Jack Barron, the power-junkie’s friend.
Ahead of the car, as if behind an invisible Gardol shield against tooth decay, the slum ended, and way away over a sanitized empty grass lawn Barron saw a soaring cluster of real Space Age buildings—the Capital, the Governor’s Mansion, office buildings—the Capital, the Governor’s Mansion, office buildings for carpetbagging black Baby Bolshevik parasites—the clean, sharp shapes of made-it: a polyethylene-wrapped Promised Land shimmering just across the invisible Jordan, Jordan River ten thousand miles wide twice as deep as time.
From deep inside him, the words erupted, from the sullen streets of a hundred Southern towns, Jack and Sara close to the blood streets in Berkeley dreams of self-anointed knighthood, Boy Wonder savage-innocence speaking through ten years of electric circuit insulation with the voice of the man:
“You look out there, Luke! Take a real good look for a change! Look in front of you and dig all those fancy buildings cost Christ-knows how much, dig that fucking cave of the winds Governor’s Mansion, rent-paid plantation house, Massah Luke, and all them fancy outbuildings. Feel that two-hundred-dollar suit you’re wearing, taste the word ‘Governor’ in your mouth, clock this car and your uniformed flunkies, and everyone calls you ‘Governor’ or maybe ‘Bwana’ wherever you go. Got it made, don’t you, you and your boys. King of the Mountain—Kingfish, is all.”
He half-shoved Greene around, pointing his face out the rear window at the festering neo-African slums quickly falling behind.
“When’s the last time you walked those streets without a bodyguard?” Barron said. “I’m the cat that forgot what he was? You were out there with me, Luke, remember? Or don’t you have the balls to remember anymore? That’s what those fancy buildings come from, big shiny toys built on nothing more than a pile of shit! But you don’t have to smell the shit anymore, do you? Take a couple drags of that old power-junk, you don’t even have to know it’s there. But it is there, and shit always stinks like shit. Look at those buildings in front of you, and look at that cesspool behind you, and, baby, you’re digging exactly where the politics bag is at—nice shiny false-front hot-air fairy castles built on nothing more than a pile of shit. Clock it sometime when the wind changes—you’re fat and happy in your plantation house only because those poor bastards are stuck in their dungheap. Politics! You can tie it in fancy ribbons, but you can’t hide the smell.”