"Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

good old Jack Barren.
'Jack Barron,' Lukas Greene sighed aloud. Jack Barron. Even a friend
couldn't afford to be stoned if he got a public call from Jack. Not in front
of a hundred million people he couldn't.
But then it had never paid, even in the old Jack-and-Sara days, to give
an edge to Jack Barron. What's-his-name — whoever remembers
anymore? — made the mistake of letting Jack guest on his Birch grill for
one night, and Jack grew all over him like a fucking fungus.
And then — no more what's-his-name. Just a camera, a couple
vidphones, and good old Jack Barron.
If only . . . Green thought, the same old familiar Wednesday night 'if
only' thought ... if only Jack were still one of us. With Jack on our side the
SJC would have a fighting chance to break through and beat the
Pretender. If only . . .
If only Jack weren't such a cop-out. If only he had kept some of what we
all seemed to lose in the 70s. But what had Jack said (and oh, was he
right; and don't I know it!), 'Luke,' Jack Barron had said, and Greene
remembered every word Jack could always stick a phrase in your head like
a Bester mnemonic jingle, 'it sure is a bad moment when you decide to sell
out. But a worse moment, the worst moment in the world is when you
decide to sell out and nobody's buying.'
And how do you answer that? Greene thought. How do you answer that,
when you've parlayed a picket sign, a big mouth, and a black skin into the
Governor's Mansion in Evers, Mississippi? How do you answer Jack, you
black shade you white nigger you?
Lukas Greene laughed a bitter little laugh. The name of the show had to
be an inside joke, a real inside joke, inside Jack's hairy little head, is all ...
Because (since he had waved bye-bye to Sara) who in hell could really . .
. bug Jack Barron?



Not a night to be alone, Sara Westerfeld unwittingly found herself
thinking under the sardonic blind gaze of the dead glass eye of the
portable TV which suddenly seemed to have infiltrated itself into her
consciousness in her living room, where Don and Linda and Mike and the
Wolfman stood unknowing guard against loneliness-ghosts of Wednesday
nights past, and she against her will realized (and realized against her will
that she always realized) that it had been a long time (don't think of the
exact date; you know the exact date; don't think of it) since she had spent
a Wednesday night with fewer than three people around her.
Better to play games with Don Sime (will I - won't I — is tonight the
night — or will I ever?) than to sit alone the way I maybe want to, with the
dead glass eye daring me to turn it on. Better still just to sit here and dig
the Wolfman rapping with half an ear and let the broken record of his
harmless talking-just-to-hear-himself talk bullshit turn off my mind, turn
off memory, and let me drift in the droning not-really-Wednesday now . . .
'Dig, so I say, man why ain't there a check for me?' the Wolfman was
saying, pulling at his scraggly muttonchops. 'I'm a human being, ain't I?
'Know what the fucker says?' the Wolfman whined with a great display