“No more will American citizens get away with going to a mall and wandering around in and out of stores but buying no more than a Coke or a Mars Bar. His credit card records will tell the tale: he did not spend as he should at Xmas.”
“For almost a century now,” he concluded, “it has been clear that Christ was born and died so that retail sales would go up in the fourth quarter. This is why we think of ourselves as a Christian nation.”
FORTY-ONE
(From LUKE’S TRUE UNBELIEVABLE REPORT OF THE INVASION OF THE FFS, pp. 189–194)
Unfortunately, Louie-Twoie’s evil influence on the innocent Morton boys wasn’t limited to inciting them to commit individual crimes. Typing into Lucas’s iPad or getting out sentences that the boys could understand, LT soon had the boys moving onto bigger things. He began preaching the value of doing things for the hell of it, and the two boys took to it like salmon to an uphill stream.
The boys actually claimed that it was the weather that made them do it. They’d been going to school for more than six winter weeks when in mid-February there was suddenly a warm day. After eight days of cloudy and cold, the sun was out and temperatures in the spring-like high sixties. Lucas claimed that if it had been cloudy and cold again it might never have happened.
At about two o’clock when Jimmy’s teacher was taking her usual afternoon break, Jimmy’s third-grade class, following the plan Jimmy had whispered to most of them earlier, got up and left the room. They marched next door and invaded the fourth-grade classroom. Jimmy told the fourth-graders and their teacher that there was a school-wide meeting about to take place out on the front lawn. The teacher was unsure what to do, but her students weren’t. They followed Jimmy and the third-graders out of the room and down the hall. There they met Lucas’s sixth-grade class pouring out of their room past a frantic middle-aged woman trying to stop them. When Lucas and his classmates met half of the eighth-grade class on their way to a science lab, Lucas told them that everyone was taking a spring break and they should join them. Most of them did.
Within five minutes, five different classes, more than a hundred and thirty kids, were out of the school and heading across the lawn toward the main road into town, with a lot of them shouting and waving at the students still in their classrooms to join them. Those that saw them go decided to take a recess too.
Of course the teachers and principal, trained in the art of keeping students in line, tried to stop the mass exodus, but there were hundreds of children and not many teachers. Worse they hadn’t been given permission to carry guns and thus weren’t able to shoot at the escaping students. Of course many US schools now let their teachers carry guns, but the Greenport School was clearly behind the times.
Close to two hundred students crossed Route 25—backing up traffic in both directions for five minutes or so—and then headed down 6th Street toward the water. Some teachers were hurrying along beside them trying to get their charges to go back to school, but the kids didn’t seem to notice. When people came out onto their porches to look at them, the students urged them to join up. A lot of them did, and, of course, more responsible adults called 911.
The school recess finally reached the public beach that lies on Peconic Bay, which was almost deserted when they arrived. The crowd had now more than doubled—it was the largest crowd in the beach’s history. In February.
When Jimmy and Lucas came to the water’s edge, their classmates clustered around them. The two brothers looked at each other, smiled uncertainly, and then waded out into the water. Both boys said later the water was so cold they wanted to turn and run back, but they pretended it was fine and kept walking. Within a few seconds, with Jimmy and Lucas wading steadily out into the water, a whole bunch of boys and girls abruptly raced into the water, five or six of them splashing past Jimmy and Lucas and throwing themselves into the bay and swimming. Jimmy, laughing, threw himself into the bay and began swimming too. Lucas screamed and dove into the water. Other kids were screaming too. And laughing.
A few of them turned and waded quickly back onto the dry beach, but most of them buried themselves in the water or splashed some of the newcomers. Some settled for just screaming. Some teachers tried to pull a few of their students out, but since they had to wade into the water to get to them, it looked to some people like the teachers were joining the swim-in. Several of the adults that had joined the parade happily decided to join the party. Most of them took off their shoes and socks and any nice shirts or pants before wading in. Probably that’s how the idea of going into the water in just underwear got started.
In an article in the Riverhead paper the next day it said that more than two hundred kids and adults went swimming in the month of February in Peconic Bay, a few of them only in their underwear. And another couple of hundred were watching, most of them laughing or applauding. And most everyone had fun. Two or three had MP3 players and boomed out loud rock music. A lot of people began dancing, most all of them with clothes on.
Everyone seemed to be having a good time. Even Principal Coughlan was laughing with one of the teachers. The police cars and fire engine and ambulance that showed up didn’t seem to know what to do, so a few members of the fire department joined the dancing and the chief himself took a swan dive off the end of the dock. He got a lot of cheers. The policemen however kept their cool: they stood around looking stern. Although Sheriff Coombs spent most of his time laughing with one of the pretty teachers.
The only member of the public the ambulance crew found to take care of was Mrs. Blugg, a first-grade teacher, who was in her sixties. She collapsed after swimming and doing a lot of dancing. The Riverhead newspaper said that when they got her to the Eastern Long Island Hospital, she was pronounced alive at arrival. She didn’t die in the hospital and was released the next day, claiming temporary insanity.
There was a lot of that going around that day. “Mass hysteria,” was the way the newspaper described it. The next day over the school PA system the principal announced that it had been “contagious mass hysteria,” and warned the students that if they did it again they would be suspended and would have to spend their time at the beach.
But when Jimmy and Lucas were being interviewed by the reporter, Jimmy said what most of those who had participated thought: “It was fun.”
Jimmy and Lucas were both suspended from school for two weeks, but didn’t seem to mind. The authorities knew both boys had been hanging around with Louie-Twoie, and witnesses claimed they saw at least two small FFs at the beach that day. Since a game of dodgeball was played in the water with one of the FFs as the ball, it was pretty clear that FFs were involved. The Suffolk County Police ordered that all local FFs were to be rounded up, X-rayed, and interrogated, and they would have been if any had been successfully chased down. The closest the cops got to catching one of them was when an FF—Jimmy claims it was LT—leapt into a patrol car in the shape of a raccoon or skunk and kissed the patrolman on the lips. The cop got off four shots, but the skunk got away.
FORTY-TWO
(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 311–317)
As the weeks went by, I was loving all the fun and funny things the FFs were coming up with throughout the world. Every day Lucas and Jimmy told me stories about how the FFs were becoming big hits among humans. An FF rock band named Three Blind Mice had produced a hit that had reached number three in the charts, whatever that means. In any case, it was popular. The song was called “Love Me, Baby, I’m Not Anyone.” Seems the FFs were pretending to long for a human friend. A million teenage girls indicated they were ready to be friendly.
And FFs were becoming hits in other areas too. One of them had become a basketball star, with rubber legs, incredible speed, a vertical jump of twenty feet, and ninety percent shooting accuracy—scouts thought he sometimes missed on purpose. His name was Boomerang and he started in the spring as a star in the Italian league. But when NBA scouts heard about a player who averaged ninety percent of his team’s points and was leading t
hem to an unbeaten season, they were desperate to sign him up. A few owners worried that since he was an alien it might be illegal for them to play him, but others knew that if the league had come to accept blacks, the civil rights laws would force them to accept aliens. In two pre-season games against LeBron James and the Cavaliers, Boomerang scored 130 points, held LeBron to a total of nine points in the two games and stole the ball from him twenty times.
That was it. The owners recognized a losing development when they saw one: it was decreed that no non-mammalian human could play in the NBA. For similar reasons, all professional sports began to ban the FFs.
Which is a shame. You should have seen an FF named Wow leap up thirty feet at Fenway Park and take a home run away from some great player I’d never heard of.
But the FFs were doing a lot of other stuff that was upsetting the big shots even more. For one thing, they seemed to be concentrating their stealing on lobbyists, shutting many of them down. An unpaid lobbyist doesn’t tend to work too hard. For another, often when a corporation gave bonuses to its execs, the FFs would steal it from the exec’s account before the poor exec had bought a single new yacht. And even worse they gave all the money to soup kitchens, free clinics, church charities, and other subversive sorts of organizations.
And they were even having an effect on our Eternal War in the Middle East. Our military seemed to be getting to the point that our war-making policies had been aimed at for almost twenty years: we were now fighting just about everyone: Sunnis, Shiites, Alamites, Druzes, Turks, Iranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Lebanese. Even the Israelis were getting nervous. There was no longer any concern about collateral damage since everyone on the ground was our enemy. But the FFs were making American drones useless. It seems the drones were blowing up a lot more sand than Arabs. A couple of American warships had lost their propellers. And the cruise missiles fired from our warships were killing a lot of sea life rather than Arabs. Only a few of our aircraft seemed to have had their computers hacked, so the poor US military wasn’t exactly unarmed. But it felt that way to the generals.
But the stuff I liked best of all were the Forthehelluvit events that the FFs were inspiring, described by the media as “spontaneous combustions,” “infantile rebellions,” “group insurrections,” and “Protean-induced hallucinations,” and by Lucas and Jimmy as “freaky fun-times.” Although our local Greenport Freaky Fun-Time Swim-In only got publicity in the local North Fork papers, other such events began to get national press.
All over the world people suddenly left their homes, places of work, schools, and occupations, and, as a group, did something seemingly purposeless: began to play music, danced, hiked, swam, went bar-hopping, had “kiss-ins” or “hug-ins” or “write-ins,” invented games, invaded schools, government offices, banks, hotels, restaurants, football stadiums, and acted in ridiculous ways that disrupted normal life. The biggest of these spontaneous combustions was the “Jones Beach Happening” where a hundred fifty thousand people had fun at rock concerts, dance-ins, kiss-ins, demolition derbies in the parking lot, nude volleyball, and a half-dozen other activities that annoyed everyone except those involved.
The group insurrection that received even more publicity was the “Battery Park Swim-In and Rock Concert” that attracted only twenty thousand people but most all of them worked on Wall Street and had taken off with the markets still open—a major crime in the financial world. However, my favorite was the “Walmart Rebellion” in which more than a hundred thousand employees at hundreds of stores abandoned their positions and began partying in the parking lots. The bosses naturally thought of firing everyone, but thought better of it when they heard several employees say that “Being fired would be a promotion.”
Of course, the candidates still running for president in March had trouble handling this issue. A lot of people seemed to like the Forthehelluvit events, but most of the candidates, especially the Republicans, were against both the aliens and fun. They were the party of law and order and discipline and hard work. And they felt they had to be against the Forthehelluvit events because the candidates that the Proteans were supporting, all independents, were all in favor of them. In fact many of the political rallies of the Proteanistas turned into spontaneous street parties. Their first candidate for president, a former mayor of Utica, New York, insisted that booze was served at all his rallies and that they all ended with music and dancing. Speeches by candidates were limited to ten minutes and hecklers were limited to three.
* * *
Watching all this I was happy as a lark.
But how do we know larks are happy? Just because they sing? But most all birds sing. Have you ever seen a lark smile? Or laugh? I bet they have their problems just like you and me.
So let’s say instead that all that spring I was happy as a me.
Until I got arrested and thrown in jail.
* * *
In late March my driver picked me up at our old farmhouse to take me into APE headquarters for my two-day stint turning swords into ploughshares. Or anyway Humvees into dump trucks. I had turned down Harry Barnes’ offer of a limo and instead was being driven into Manhattan by my happy-go-lucky Mexican driver in a Ford Focus. Didn’t want my friends on the North Fork to think I was getting a big head.
I never got there.
I knew something was up when a state police car pulled up beside us lights flashing, and signaled my driver to pull over to the side of the road. Ever since I’d known him my driver had broken all records for slow driving on the L I Expressway. I hadn’t the faintest idea what was happening. We were actually pulled over onto the only really wide shoulder on the entire expressway.
The state trooper pulled in behind us, and, as they always do, took two weeks to get out of his car and come up and say “hello.”
Finally, he climbed out of his vehicle and moved with the deliberation of a walking mountain toward our little Focus. He stopped at the driver’s side and raised a gun and pointed it in at me.
It suddenly occurred to me that I was about to be assassinated. I felt a bolt of fear I hadn’t experienced since the last time a Vietnamese peasant had tried to kill me.
Just then there was a screech of brakes and a car swept in to stop in front of us. Three men surged out of the car and ran up to my side of the Focus. They were all dressed in neat suits and looked to me like either Feds or insurance salesman. The biggest one, a guy of at least six foot six and weighing in at two hundred and eighty pounds, banged on my passenger-side window. I lowered it.
“You’re under arrest, Mr. Morton,” the giant says.
Nope. Not an insurance salesman.
“Me!?” says I, filled with moral outrage at being discovered to have committed crimes, and filled with relief that I wasn’t about to be assassinated but was only going to be sent to prison for fifty years.
“What have I done wrong? I’ve been an upstanding citizen ever since I got married. I can’t think of a single crime I’ve committed.” Actually, I could think of sixty-seven, but I’m not big on confessing.
“You’re under arrest for impersonating a drug dealer,” says Hulk Hogan, “for money laundering, for aiding and abetting an alien terrorist getting into and out of Iraq, for insider trading in your trading account with Ameritrade, for destroying shareholder value in American Protective Equipment, for faking death and initiating a false insurance claim, for aiding and abetting a known bank robber, and child neglect.”
“Is that all you’ve got!?”
“The Government means to prosecute you to the full extent of the law.”
“I’d expect no less from the Government,” says I. “But what’s this about child neglect?”
“Your two boys were seen unaccompanied by any adult at the Jones Beach For-the-Hell-of-it Be-in. There were two hundred thousand people there.”
“And five thousand of them were unaccompanied kids!”
“The fact that other parents were negligent does not mean that you can avoid responsibility for you
r own failure as a parent. Our government is gravely concerned for all children.”
“Yeah, except for those who live in Arab lands and Africa.”
“Will you come peacefully, Mr. Morton?”
“Sure. Got nothing important on my agenda today. Where we going?”
“To Manhattan Police Headquarters.”
“Hey, that’s great,” says I, opening the passenger-side door and struggling to get up and out. “The last time I visited there was back in sixty-eight. Got me for assaulting a police officer. I was running away with a hundred other hippies and was going so fast I ran up the back of some overweight cop and knocked him down. The police station was nice enough, but the cops broke two of my ribs when I fell down some stairs. Hope they’ve improved the banister.”
“Put him in cuffs, Jim,” the mammoth says to one of the other suits.
“Gentle. I’m a helpless old man.”
“Careful not to break both his arms, Jim.”
* * *
Actually, the police station was not the same as back in sixty-eight. And it was different too from the one I stayed at in the fall of sixty-six. And from the one in the fall of sixty-seven. On the other hand, one booking is pretty much the same as the next. I was fingerprinted and had some perp photos taken that made me look seventy-two years old.
They took me before a judge who knew what he was going to do before I even showed up. He convicted me on all counts, and sentenced me to 2,800 years in solitary confinement at Guantanamo. Well, not quite that, but he ordered me held without bail. The bail hearing was to be in four days with the DA asking bail to be set at a million dollars.
They let me make a phone call, and I got to talk for three minutes with Lita. Told her I’d had a wonderful drive down the Long Island Expressway and met a nice man who made the Incredible Hulk look like Bambi, and I was in jail with bail set at a million dollars—high for child neglect, but children are our most precious assets. She managed to get my general drift and arranged to see me the next day.