Tongue tied

Chapter 2

A big FFF had been spray-painted in red on the main doors of the Thirtieth Street office building that housed the radio station where the J-Bird's show originated.

When I arrived, just after 10:30, two NYPD cruisers were double-parked out front, along with an ambulance, flashers flashing. The 10 A.M. news on the J-Bird station had reported that a tear-gas canister had been lobbed into the J-Bird's studio by a man dis-guised as a police officer, and in the confusion the man had escaped. Plankton and his on- and off-air staff had quickly fled the studio, been treated by paramedics who soon arrived on the scene, and avoided serious injury. Gas for the gaseous, I thought.

A security guard in the lobby stopped me and said no one was being allowed access to the sixth floor of the building. But my New York State private investigator's ID coupled with a phone call to Plankton's office got me into the elevator, which was operated by another armed security officer. It smelled of tear gas, sharp and sour.

Two uniformed city cops stood in the small lobby of the station. One of them consulted with the receptionist-her name tag read "Flonderee"-who made a call into the inner recesses. Soon a portly balding man of forty or so, not much over five feet, wearing khakis, Top-Siders, and a navy blue golf shirt emerged, and I said, "Hi, I'm Don Strachey. Are you the J-Bird?"

No, he said, he was Jay Plankton's producer, Horace "Call me Jerry" Jeris. He led me down a long corridor, away from an open window where an industrial-size fan was ven-tilating the place, which still reeked.

"Lemme bring you up to speed before Jay pops in," Jeris said, ushering me into an office modest in its size and appointments for a man of Jeris's position in America's cultural life. "Jay'll be glad to see you after this latest fuck-all. You heard what happened?"

"I was listening on the train. And I can smell it." "I didn't take a direct hit myself, but the guys in the studio did. You ever been teargassed, Don? It's a bitch."

"I was once. After I got back from the Johnson-Nixon-Kissinger war, which I helped out with in a small way, I joined other people with similar experiences in publicly pointing out that we'd had a serious change of heart about the whole thing. For our trouble, we were gassed." "No shit?"

"Although the home-front war didn't compare with the real thing. Don't get me wrong."

Jeris opened up a humidor on his desk and offered me a cigar the size of a Yule log. I didn't stammer out, "I would rather inhale the tear-gas fumes than the stench from that grotesque stomach pump," but just said no thanks. Jeris embarked upon the ritual of the cigar, and I seated myself in a canvas director's chair with The J-Bird stitched across the back.

"Now you've got an idea what we're up against," Jeris said. "When these FFF jerk-offs started out, they were pains in the ass, but it wasn't like they were actually gonna hurt anybody. They mailed us turds and cow brains and crap, and Jay even thought some of it was funny. But now we're into this shit. Jay hates to do it, but it looks like he's gonna have to have a bodyguard to actually follow him around. He's got good security in his building, and we thought we were safe here at the station too, but today we really got fucked over by these crud."

I said, "That's not what you have in mind for me, I guess. My expertise is limited in security work, and I don't do it."

"Nah. It's your connections with these FFF guys we're interested in. It's this NYPD detective, Lyle Barner, who says he knew you when he was a cop in Albany. He says you tracked down a gay kid after his asshole parents put him in the bin, and it was the FFF that helped him escape."

"The chronology's a little off," I said. "But I did use the FFF to locate a young man named Billy Blount, who was wanted on a phony murder charge. This was twenty years ago, though, and I'd find it hard to believe that any of the FFF are still around.

They broke up as a group even before I met one of them in Denver, around seventy-nine. My guess is, the Forces of Free Faggotry gang that's giving Plankton a hard time is another outfit entirely. They probably heard about the old FFF and picked up on the name. I doubt that an old radical group's name can be copyrighted."

Jeris examined the smoldering cigar thoughtfully. The stench from the thing was awful. Cigars had once held a romance for me; they evoked happy childhood memories of trips from central New Jersey to Phillies or Yankees games on a Pennsylvania Railroad smoker with my dad and his cronies. But that was long ago, and now it was all I could do to keep from saying, "Jerry, since you're smoking that cigar, do you mind if I drop my pants, bend over, and light farts while we're chatting?"

Instead, I said, "Doesn't the NYPD have any leads at all? If the harassment has been going on steadily for weeks, they must have more to go on than anything I'm likely to come up with from my brief, now-stale contact with the FFF."

"Yeah, you'd think they'd be on top of it by now," Jeris said. "And Jay has plenty of fans in the department, so it isn't like they're blowing us off. But until today the FFF pretty much mailed in all the shit-and I do mean shit-so there wasn't any physical evidence that was traceable. I'd show you some of the disgusting doo-doo they sent Jay, but the cops have it all. Call Lyle Barner, and he'll give you the tour." "Well, I wouldn't mind catching up with Lyle." "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.

Your regular listeners – The FFF

I said, "You're really going to put these people on the air? They sound demented.

However worthy the FFF's aims, they sound a little… way out there."

"S'okay by us," Jeris said mildly. "We're not Jerry Springer, but we're not Oprah either. Edge is a big part of what Jay is about. We'll do it by phone so we don't have to nail the chairs to the floor. It won't feed the starving in Africa, but it'll be great radio. It'll be real."

"What if these FFF guys won't cooperate?" I asked. "They sound to me like true believers who are fixated on one thing, which is purging J-Bird's show of juvenile fag-baiting, and that's the one thing that's least likely to happen."

"Hey, who knows?" Jeris said brightly. "Maybe the J-Bird is a closeted gay, and he'll take this opportunity to come out of the closet and shit-can Leo on the air. I told you Jay likes to push the envelope."

As Jeris said this, the door to the corridor opened, and a big, potbellied man in shades and with a head of Brillo-pad hair stood there. In unmistakable tones, he said, "Are you the gay gumshoe from Albany? Christ, you're not even wearing a dress."

I got up, walked over to the J-Bird, lifted his shades off his ample red nose, and said,

"Isn't there something you'd like to talk to me about, Jay? You look as though you've been weeping."