This was the radio with earphones that Timmy used when he lounged on the deck behind our Crow Street house in Albany on warm summer Friday evenings to listen to the concerts broadcast from Tanglewood. He used the earphones because, he said, the neighbors might not be as crazy about Schumann as he was. In his consideration for others, an admirable anachronism was Callahan. Of course, he also relied on the earphones to mask the sounds of neighbors with stereos who were more in tune with the times than he was, and of the carrying-on around our kitchen table whenever I could lure in the elderly lesbian couple who lived two doors down the street for a raucous game of hearts.

"Gore is ridiculous, just ridiculous, and that… that smirking, no-good weasel Bush is no better…" The J-Bird was in hyperrant, his famous barroom-loudmouth-at-2-A.M. slurred snarl at full throttle. "I might not vote at all. I might just… leave the country before I pull the switch for either one of those two… sorry losers."

To the approving chortles of his studio buddies-the newsreader, the sports reporter, and two other attendants whose roles were murkier-Plankton fumed on. He had supported John McCain and Bill Bradley in the spring primaries, and the J-Bird was beside himself with frustration over the electorate's having been left to choose between the two unworthies, George Bush and Al Gore. That the policy ideas of McCain, a conservative on every subject except campaign finance, and of Bradley, the largely unreconstructed liberal, were diametrically opposed was of no concern to Plankton, who seemed to judge people not by their ideas, or even their behavior necessarily, but by their degree of "guyness."

Guyness to the J-Bird mainly meant a style built around hurling insults, usually involving physical characteristics, at people who enjoyed the abuse-or at people who didn't like it at all and when they said so could be called "politically correct" whiners. People like Bradley, who didn't necessarily relish this form of discourse but good-naturedly went along with it, were okay guys too. It helped that Bradley was tall. Short was bad and fat even worse. Despite the antigay tone of the show-one of the hangers-on crooned and lisped whenever the subject came up-the weird obsession with weight and body shape on the J-Bird show was reminiscent of a bevy of West Hollywood gym queens. It was one of the show's odder inconsistencies.

On this Friday morning, the J-Bird blustered on about the deficiencies of George W.

Bush-who affected guyness but who was such a privileged brat that his guyness was inauthentic and therefore beneath contempt-and of Al Gore, who was regarded as plastic and slippery and not nearly rough-hewn enough, despite his having been to war and back, an opportunity for guyness that the J-Bird had chosen to forgo.

"Having to pick between these two sniveling pipsqueaks sucks, it just sucks!" the J-Bird sputtered on. "And Nader- he's no better. That priss, that whiner. Although at least he's got some guts. He did take on… back in the sixties… who was it? Was it Chrysler?"

"It was General Motors," the newsreader put in.

"General Motors, then."

"Rear-end collisions on the… what was it? The Cor-vair? The Pinto?"

"A pinto's not a car; it's a bean," the J-Bird said.

"The musical fruit."

"Like Elton John," came another voice, one of the J-Bird's Greek chorus.

"What?" The J-Bird didn't get it at first.

"Elton John, the musical fruit." More chuckles all around.

"Is he running for president? He couldn't be any worse than the pathetic bozos we have to pick from now."

"I do tholemnly thwear, Mary, that I will uphold the Conthituthun

… "

This brought cackles, and I had just about decided to skip the meeting with Plankton, have a pleasant lunch in the park, and board the next train back to Albany, when the laughter on the radio suddenly stopped.

"Hey, what the eff…!" It was Plankton's voice, but then it was gone too, and a commercial came on for a New Jersey Toyota dealer. This was followed by a short silence, then a second ad, and a third. Then the J-Bird returned briefly-from another studio, he said-to announce that the rest of the day's show would be a recording of an earlier show, and he would explain it all the following Monday. It was hard to understand all of the J-Bird's words, for he seemed to be choking.

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."