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."
Chapter 3
Soon Jeris and the J-Bird were both going at it, and I was obliged to get up and open a window. Jeris had no objection, but Plankton called me a wuss. I'd have mewed out something about the high risks among cigar smokers of mouth, throat, and larynx cancer, but these guys weren't about health, or even survival; they were about
"edge."
This was an impulse I understood. In the seventies and early eighties I had escaped HIV only through the dumbest luck, although gleeful coupling with another human being still seemed a far worthier way to risk one's life than voluntarily inhaling a substance that would lead the average well-trained firefighter to reach for oxygen. Comparing notes in these areas with Jeris and the J-Bird, however, felt as though it might not be productive, so I stuck to the topic of my possible employment.
"Jerry tells me you'd like to put the FFF on the air," I told Plankton, who was lounging on the office couch, his cowboy-booted feet on the coffee table. He had the cigar in one beefy hand, a can of Sprite in the other, and he still had the shades on. He wore baggy khakis and a beige sports shirt, garb Al Gore's most recent wardrobe adviser might have selected, generating catcalls among the J-Bird set.
"It remains to be seen," Plankton snarled, "whether they'll go on the show or whether I'll have them put away in effing Leavenworth. After today, they probably ought to have their sorry butts kicked from here to Bridgeport. Just put us in touch with them, and then we'll see what happens next. We don't have to look at their ugly faces. Christ, just the idea of sitting down across from these perverts makes me want to lose my breakfast."
"If you want me to work for you," I said, "don't call gay people perverts in my presence. Don't say it on the air either when I'm listening to the show. And since you won't know when I'm listening and when I'm not, you might want to err on the side of caution."
"Jesus!" Plankton spat out, shaking his head. "Is dealing with you and your oh-I'm-so-sensitive, limp-wristed, politically correct horseshit what I'm going to have to put up with in order to get these sickos off my back? They threatened me, you know. They physically threatened me. I'm doing them an effing favor bringing you into it instead of the goddamn FBI."
Jeris said, "How would you like us to refer to the FFF" people, Don? Do you want us to call them 'homosexual gentlemen'?"
Plankton said, "Or how about 'Froot Loops'?" Were they testing me, or provoking me, or what? I supposed there was nothing calculated, or even rational, about this routine at all. It was just the way they talked to other men. They didn't know any other way. Or, they were capable of nonhostile, noninflammatory, straightforward conversation, but-with me-only one-on-one. When they were together, they had to lay on a barrage of "guy" talk in order to keep their heterosexual credentials from being questioned, however subtly or obliquely, and this seemed to mean nearly as much to them as life itself.
I said, "If I take you on as a client, every time you say something that irritates me, there's going to be a surcharge on my normal fee of two percent. You work it out. Or, I can walk out the door now and you can take your chances that the New York cops will collar the FFF people before they send you another load of dogshit, or worse."
"Llama," Plankton interrupted.
"Llama?"
"I was just on the phone with that police dick, Lyle Barner. He said the turds they sent us-'excrement for the execrable'-were tested somewhere, and they're llama crap."
"These guys must be Aztecs," Jeris said, his geography off by several thousand miles.
"I loved 'excrement for the execrable,'" Plankton said, and laughed. "I wish I'd thought of that one myself."
"You will," Jeris said, and they both chuckled.
"You should be on the radio too," I told Jeris. "You're almost as funny as Jay is." They both haw-hawed at this; now I was getting into the J-Bird spirit. I asked Plankton,
"What else did you learn from Lyle Barner that's new?"
Plankton drew on his cigar and blew smoke, and I wondered if I was going to be able to keep my Amtrak cherry Danish down. "Nada," he said. "Barner's on his way over here to talk to us about the tear-gas attack, and he says he wants you to stick around so he can talk to you."
"Did the fake cop who lobbed the canister leave a note?" I asked.
"Just the usual wiseass label, in an envelope he dropped on Flonderee's desk. This one said, 'Gas for the gaseous.'"
"I could have written it myself. It's the phrase I thought of when I heard about the teargas incident. I'd just been listening to your show, and it was the first thought that came into my head."
"You're an effing genius," Plankton said. I couldn't see his bloodshot eyes through the shades, but a couple of gray-black brushpiles of eyebrow shot up. "Since you're so smart, why don't you tell us what the H incident is going to be? What do you think, Don? Will it be… what? Hay for the heinous?"
"How about 'Hogs for the hogs-breathed'?" Jeris said. "Or 'Hemorrhoids for the hemorrhoidal'?"
Laughing and coughing up a merry storm, Plankton sputtered out, "What about