'The thing is, Don, while Jay is concerned, naturally, he is far from being intimidated. Which I'm sure you can appreciate from listening to his show. Or,' Jeris said with a derisive snort, 'are you the NPR type? The travails of poets in Egypt and all that elitist crap?'
'I've heard Plankton's show,' I said, and glanced at the digital clock above Jeris's computer terminal. When was the next train back to Albany? Was it noon or one o'clock? Noon would be cutting it close, one o'clock no problem. Just pick up a deli sandwich, go back to 'The Oblong Box'-Karla Jay? Robb Forman Dew?-and be back in Albany by mid-afternoon, never again to lay eyes on these people.
'I know you're gay,' Jeris said next. 'And I just want you to know, that's no problem for us.' 'Praise be.'
'That on-air shit is just… Jay can't stand political correctness. You gotta admit, Don, that's fair enough.'
I said, 'What if I chased these new FFF guys down and then I decided to join them in making the J-Bird's life a living hell? Which, by the way, is how you described it on the phone yesterday.'
'That's because of the threats, not the juvenile pranksterism. The note with the last mailing said things were gonna get worse. And today things did.'
'But maybe these people-whoever they are-maybe they'll convince me that the J-Bird deserves all the grief he's getting from them. That he deserves that and worse.
That all the adolescent fag-baiting on the show encourages bullies and bashers, and it's not only dumb and tedious, but dangerous too. Maybe I'll find the FFF, and they'll recruit me, and I'll come after the J-Bird, and you'll rue the day you ever brought me into this. Then what?'
'Then,' Jeris said, blowing a smoke ring, 'I'd have to ask for our money back. What is your fee scale, anyway? Can we afford you? This isn't Albany, with all that lobbyist funny money sloshing around.'
I told him what my normal fee was, mentally calculating an extra twenty-five percent and adding it in.
'That's outside our budget,' Jeris said, and he suggested a figure twenty-five percent lower than what I'd told him. I shrugged, and he said, 'We'll work something out.'
'Jerry, you said on the phone yesterday that if I could locate the FFF people, you wouldn't necessarily want to prosecute them; you'd just want to talk to them. This makes me wonder. It reminds me of the Blount case twenty years ago, when the parents of Billy Blount hired me to bring their wanted-for-murder son back to Albany and turn him over, not to the police, but to them. As it happened, these people were as duplicitous as anybody I've ever done business with. They were the abysmal dregs.'
'Nah, we'll play it straight with you,' Jeris said, waving away doubt with his cigar.
'We don't want to chop these guys' balls off, we just want to work something out with them so they'll get off Jay's case. They want us to can Leo Moyle, and we're not gonna do that. But we can talk to them, I'm sure of it. Jay thinks it would be fun to put them on the air.'
'Moyle is the resident gay-baiter?'
'Leo is kind of a loose cannon, yeah. But that's what's so great about him. He lends the show an element of danger. I don't go along with half of what he comes out with, and speaking candidly, neither does Jay. But you gotta have an un-PC presence on any show today, or your show is gonna be shit-canned faster than you can say Phil Donahue. Leo stays; that's a given. But can we talk to these FFFers, maybe give them their fifteen minutes, let them promote the glories of cocksucking or whatever? I think we can work it out. Anyway, let's track them down and see exactly what it is that we've got to work with here.'
It all sounded unlikely to me-as unlikely as LBJ inviting the Chicago Seven in for bourbon and branch water and a tete-a-tete with Bob McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I said, 'Doesn't Plankton put only people he likes on the show? People he basically agrees with, or at least gets along with? The show's not Crossfire or The McLaughlin Group. He's never been interested in a cross section of viewpoints before, as far as I'm aware.'
'Not true,' Jeris said, through an expanding toxic cloud. 'Jay likes badass people if they're real, no matter where they're coming from politically or whatever. Especially if they're funny badass real. Funny and not phony are what Jay looks for and what our listeners tune in for. These FFFers are deeply sincere, apparently, and they're crude as shit, for chrissakes, so… no, there's no problem with them getting on the air.
We'd do a pre-interview, naturally, to make sure they can express themselves verbally as effectively as they send fecal matter through the US Postal Service.'
'They sent actual shit? Not a joke-shop rendition?' 'Some kind of animal turds,'
Jeris said, opening a folder next to his computer and handing me several sheets of paper. 'NYPD has the stuff at a lab for analysis. Here's a list of what's come in to us so far, and photocopies of the notes that came with it.'
The first page, a word-processor printout, contained a list of dates and notations for each date. For June 2, the notation was Asswipe for the homophobic asshole and, in paren-theses, Rover break-in. The other dates, beginning with June 9 and ending on July 7, were followed by these notations: brains for the brainless; charms for the charmless; douche for the douche bag; excrement for the execrable; fat for the fathead.
I said, 'What does 'Rover break-in' mean?'
'They hit Jay's Range Rover,' Jeris said. 'This was the first incident. They broke into the Rover while it was parked outside Jay's agent's house in Westchester and filled it with unrolled toilet paper.'
'Clean toilet paper?'
'Mercifully. They left a note that said, 'Asswipe for the homophobic asshole, from the Forces of Free Faggotry.' '
'Did the local cops investigate?'
'This was in Mamaroneck, and the local constables did what they could, apparently, but they came up empty. A major party was on in the house, and it might have been a little noisy in the neighborhood. So nobody saw or heard anything. We can't figure how they could have known Jay was going to be at a party that night at Mark Krentzman's house, so we think the FFFers must have followed Jay up from the city.'
'I suppose,' I said, 'that as soon as Plankton saw the intended victim of the prank was designated an 'asshole,' he understood right away that his being the target was no case of mistaken identity.'
Showing no indication of being either insulted or amused, Jeris said, 'A lot of people can't stand Jay. We all know that. You take on the PC crowd, trouble's gonna come boogalooing your way. It's a given. These are the most humorless people on earth.'
'Except for the hilarious FFF, of course. You said Plankton thinks they're funny. But this stuff isn't funny. It's just dopey and crude.'
Jeris blew smoke and shrugged.
What were Jeris and the J-Bird up to? None of this added up. Unless, of course, Plankton, Jeris, and their gang truly saw the adolescent-boy antics of the neo-FFF as representing their own level of thinking and style of expression-spreading noxious materials through the mails or over the airwaves, literally or metaphorically-and considered their harassers as a special variety of brothers under the skin. 'Guys,' of a sort, that they could talk to, do business with, lob crass, jolly insults back and forth with. But that sounded either too naive for the J-Bird's crew or maybe not naive enough. Jeris seemed less spontaneous than calculating on other matters, so why not on this one too?
I said, 'Then after the toilet-paper episode, foul substances began showing up in the mail?'
'Cow brains, animal turds, a pound of rancid lard stuffed in a freezer bag. Also some unknown fluid in a jar that we didn't really want to find out what it was. In the middle of all this, on June sixteenth, we received the first real communication we'd had from these people besides the descriptive labels. And that's the letter telling us what the FFF is, and how they're gonna wipe out homophobia, et cetera, et cetera, and they'll leave us alone if we dump Leo. The letter was hard to decipher because it had some kind of gummy orange candy smeared all over it.'
'Lucky Charms for the unlucky charmless?'
'That was it. You've got a copy of the note right there, minus the gumdrops.'
The letter, also typed on a word processor and dated June 16, had no signature. It read:
J-Bird You are now operating under the watchful eye of the Forces of Free Faggotry. We intend to rid the US airwaves of homophobia. Your show is first. If you want us to leave you alone, eliminate Leo and all other traces of homophobia from your show. Reason has no effect on people like you. But other means will. We have only gotten started. It's a long alphabet. If you make it to Z and think you are home free, think again. We'll just start over.
So act now.
I flipped to the final page, a copy of a note that arrived the day before, July 13. It said only:
For your own good, wait no longer. Meet our demands or someone will be hurt.
