If the cops had been uneasy before, they were now scared. And the poor NRA guys were even more confused than the cops. They’d marched into a situation where cops were confronting citizens, but citizens who looked like the sort of citizens who didn’t like the NRA. Whose side should they be on?
I heard what sounded like a gunshot. Then two or three more gunshots. The whole line of policemen began to fire their weapons. Tear gas was shot into the crowd. The tar gun teams began hosing people with tar. The men in the armored vehicles began blasting noisily away with what was later claimed were rubber bullets, although later the bullets weren’t rubber.
The NRA guys had never before confronted a situation like this, but when fired upon an NRA guy or gal does not say “Hey, what’s the matter?” or “Can’t we talk about this?” He shoots.
Sounded like a hundred fire crackers going off all at once.
When the cops and the NRA began shooting at each other I panicked. Actually just about everyone anywhere near the gunfire panicked. As bullets flew all around, it seemed that many people opted to lie down for a while. Or forever.
A SWAT team riding in two armored vehicles suddenly steamed in on 79th Street from the east, it later being reported that they didn’t squash more than three Tea Party people on their way, although once on Park Avenue they were able to up that count. Karen and Althea were trying to drag me and the boys toward Central Park, and any macho desire I had to be a courageous stud faded completely when I saw the SWAT team guys blasting away into the crowd. Never have I been so happy to be dragged away from my stupid machismo than I was that day. I grabbed Jimmy’s hand and began to run.
At my age, running is not one of my strong suits. In fact it’s not even one of my suits. With a hip replacement and arthritic knees, when I go from a walk to what is intended to be a run, the pain bells go ringing in both knees and my lower back. Muscles that haven’t been used for five or six years scream as loud as they can that they don’t want to participate in this ridiculous project (running). After about four or five what can charitably be called “strides,” my whole body grinds to a halt and I can barely walk. But that afternoon I ran. For almost an entire block. Jimmy could barely keep up.
And I claim I don’t fear death.
SIXTY-THREE
(From LUKE’S TRUE UNBELIEVABLE REPORT OF THE INVASION OF THE FFS, pp. 316–321)
By nine o’clock that night the standoff was in place. There were close to a million people in Central Park, most of them south of 79th Street. Police, SWAT teams or National Guard units had stationed themselves on all four sides of the park. Drones and helicopters circled overhead.
Earlier, hundreds of those marchers fired on by the police had turned destructive. Most riots take place in slums or ghettos, not on Park Avenue. The Powers That Be don’t really mind if some dumb Korean grocery store or Big Boys or KFC or black-owned liquor store gets robbed or burned down, but antique shops, art galleries, tea rooms, fancy dress shops, Citibank branches: now you’re talking actual property. The governor called out the National Guard and declared martial law.
* * *
Harry Barnes and his human and FF friends had somehow gotten into the park thousands and thousands of tents, sleeping bags, blankets, tarps, porta-potties, and an incredible amount of food. They’d ordered over twenty thousand pizzas to be delivered to the park from more than two hundred pizza parlors. They’d ordered ten giant water trucks to come into the park. The authorities hadn’t yet been able to close off all traffic into the park, although when they heard that pizza delivery trucks were causing a major traffic jam at the East 72nd Street entrance, they ordered a crackdown: no more vehicles permitted to enter. But it was more than four hours before they had enough men to enforce the order, and even then many cars and trucks continued driving into the park over lawns and through shrubbery.
Inside the park, there were over a thousand armed members of the NRA who, having seen dozens of their members shot and many killed, were not in a friendly mood. They were determined to resist the authorities should they be attacked.
However, most everyone else in the park, not having been directly involved in the Park Avenue mini-war, was concentrating on having fun. They were taking no thought for the morrow. A few people felt it might be nice to go home, but weren’t too enthusiastic about having to go through a line of police whose inability to control their trigger fingers made leaving and still staying alive a bit iffy.
Nevertheless, it’s estimated that twenty thousand people, mostly old folks or parents with young children, or friends or relatives of those killed or wounded, left the park that evening and night. Unfortunately for the Powers That Be, more than forty thousand people found a way to sneak into the park, people from all over the country. Groups were chartering planes to get to New York City and Central Park. Planeloads flew in from London and one from Paris that Molière had organized with his French friends.
And the world was paying attention. Almost a hundred and eighty people had been killed that afternoon, as well as fifteen policemen—although three of the police had been killed by friendly fire. As many as a thousand people were in hospital, either from gunshot wounds or from getting trampled. Fifteen of the dead were children, and another three-dozen kids were in hospital. Another thirty or so of the dead were older men and women. Two elderly women were among those squashed by armored vehicles. Almost half of those in hospital were women. All this was not good PR for the latest “I Love New York” campaign. Or for the NYPD. Or for the Powers That Be.
In eleven major cities throughout the world other Fun-Ins were taking place, with violence limited to heart attacks, motorcycle accidents, and severe indigestion. Most of the world thought that the Fun-Ins were great, that the “Manhattan Massacre” was just another example of “Only in America.”
That afternoon and evening the people in Central Park began organizing themselves for survival. Tarps were set up around and under trees or up against walls. Various groups occupied several of the buildings in and around the Central Park Zoo and all the other small buildings in Central Park Nation’s area of the park. The Meadow was now home to over three thousand tents, some quite large. Other open areas had more tents. Off to one side of the Meadow more than fifty people, led for some strange reason by Beer-Lovers of America, began digging latrines and erecting outhouses. These were to supplement the hundreds of porta-potties already in place. Various people opened restaurants, probably better called food distribution areas, in the several restaurants already in the Park, in three places in the Central Park Zoo buildings, and in open areas where they cooked over open fires. Several women from Sink Oil Companies, Not Oil Wells along with a gang from Gays Against Marriage in General, got together to gather all the firewood they could. There was a bit of an argument when the Gays wanted to chainsaw down a mostly dead maple tree. The environmentalists at first were absolutely against killing a still living tree, and only when the Gays agreed to plant four new trees in the same spot did they give in.
There was a lot of hot air exchanged in Central Park that night. The Forthehelluvit people kept trying to break up the arguments with games and music or kiss-ins or dance-ins, and in most cases it worked. The one thing most groups agreed on was to stay in Central Park as long as they could.
And all that afternoon and evening games were being played—soccer, touch football, baseball, long jump contests, races around one of the lakes, and other games made up on the spot. The biggest hit was Capture the Flag, played with more than three hundred players on each side. Ended up in total chaos.
Only a few showers were available because late that evening the Powers That Be had cut off much of the water to the park. People were forced to use the three lakes they had access to—The Pond, The Lake, and a third big pond named Conservatory Water. Only city bureaucrats could have come up with three such unimaginative names for lovely lakes. However, it could have been worse: nowadays, to earn money, the city would probably name them “Walmart Pond,” “Bank
of America Lake,” and “Ripkin, Blatts, Funnel, and Kegs Body of Water.”
It turns out that bathing to get clean often means a drastic reduction of clothing, and soon there was a lot of nude swimming and, it being dark, a lot of pleasant hanky-panky.
That night hundreds of musicians got together to play music, mostly rock, and within a half hour thousands of people were rocking and dancing and singing and generally not suffering much.
There were probably two hundred campfires around the park and at least one big bonfire, although several environmental groups succeeded in getting it put out as a waste of valuable wood. The campfires were used both for pleasure and for cooking. With pizza deliveries now on the slow side (only a hundred got through the blockade after ten P.M.), the Central Park Nationers were forced to eat several thousand hamburgers and Kentucky Fried Chicken pieces dropped from the sky that night. The Nation had also been bombed with four thousand cans of Campbell’s Vegetable Soup, which at the rate people were eating it, would last into the next century.
Twenty cases of champagne and four crates of caviar had somehow been brought in by Republicans for America. The fact that these people were still part of the Nation despite being against what ninety percent of the other citizens of the Nation stood for was appreciated by all. The fact that more than a dozen women from the Nurses Association of the Northeast had befriended them probably improved their morale and their willingness to stick around and roll with the punches. And with the nurses.
Of course there was considerable sexual action that night. Not only did the Republicans of America and the Nurses Association of the Northeast find common ground (usually inside tents), but so did Tea Party members, mostly guys, and Citizens For Sound Science Against The Pollution of Our Earth, a poorly funded but militant group of mostly women.
Women for Women members, passionately interested in equal pay for women for equal work, and for the elimination of all old bald white men from the top of all corporations, somehow hooked up with Revolutionaries for Gradual Change. They probably hoped to convert them to being Revolutionaries for a Bit Faster Change. Actually the Women for Women platform didn’t call for the elimination of all old white guys from being CEOs. It only decreed that the number of old white guys as CEOs in Fortune 500 companies couldn’t exceed the percentage of old white guys in the general population, which, it seems, is only eight percent. If all went well with the Women for Women platform, four hundred and sixty of the five hundred CEOS of the Fortune 500 companies would have to resign.
And there were of course orgies. You can’t get close to a million people together with not much to do except drink and dance and smoke dope and write political manifestos without some creative type suggesting an orgy. So some did, and it was an idea not always dismissed.
SIXTY-FOUR
(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 420–427)
Lita finally got to us and spent the first half hour hugging Lucas and Jimmy until Lucas threatened to join the NRA if she didn’t let him breathe. We were lucky to get a tent just big enough to hold us, our boys, three FFs, and Althea and Karen. That first night it rained a bit and we ended up having ten people in our tent, our six, two gals from Sink Oil Companies, Not Oil Wells, and two guys carrying an “FFs Go Home!” poster.
Actually they were part of the Tea Party group that had been gassed and shot at and run over by armored vehicles back on Park Avenue. That, and talking with Louie-Twoie, and learning that the tents and everything had mostly been brought in by the FFs, meant that by the morning these guys had changed their sign: it now read “FFs Can Stay!”
The next morning drones and army helicopters were flying over the park. About two o’clock two larger planes appeared, and just when people began to think we were about to be bombed, the big planes began dropping huge bundles, which fell slowly to the earth when parachutes opened. The good guys had arranged another food drop.
By noon the Powers That Be seemed to have decided not to try to get us out of the park yet, probably hoping rain or boredom or fear would eventually get us to go home and watch TV.
’Course it wasn’t working out that way. The people in the park had smartphones and iPads and a dozen other kinds of doohickeys that let us know that people all over the world were looking to the Central Park Nation for guidance. Made us determined to stay.
Karen, Molière, and our two boys spent most of that afternoon playing in half a dozen games that would form, be played, and dissolve. FFs and humans played together and once or twice even formed teams playing against each other. I think the FFs usually let the humans win.
The leaders of twenty or so protest movements got together in the early evening to write a manifesto. Considering how much booze, pot, other dope and fatigue were involved in creating this document, and how little time we all had to work on it, the result turned out pretty good. We could only agree on fifteen demands of the twenty we wanted to come up with, but these were all interesting. Most were a bit too serious for my taste, but Americans don’t respect anything unless it’s serious.
SIXTY-FIVE
(From LUKE’S TRUE UNBELIEVABLE REPORT OF THE INVASION OF THE FFS, pp. 338–340. Being the first incomplete draft of the CENTRAL PARK NATION MANIFESTO.)
We the People of the Central Park Nation, having gathered peaceably together to have fun and to protest against our government’s abuses of authority and failure to perform any actions except those that make matters worse, do hereby make the following fifteen demands:
1. Every living American over the age of eighteen shall be legally required to vote and be given every opportunity to vote. No state law shall abrogate this basic duty and right.
2. No human being and no legal entity shall be permitted to spend more than a total of ten thousand dollars in any year promoting political candidates or political messages, and all such spending shall become part of the public record.
3. The pay of all company executives shall not exceed the average pay of its workers by more than thirty times. No bonuses shall be paid to any employee unless the same percentage bonus is paid to every employee in the company.
4. All local police forces shall have a racial composition proportional to the racial composition of the community in which they serve.
5. Women shall have equal pay for equal work. No white man over the age of fifty shall be named as a CEO of a Fortune 500 company until fifty percent of the CEOs in the Fortune 500 are women.
6. Every human being in the United States not presently a citizen, whether here legally or illegally, shall have the right to apply for citizenship for him or herself and his or her children. Each shall be given a hearing within thirty days of so applying. The boards hearing these petitions for citizenship shall consist of judges and others whose racial and gender compositions reflect the racial and gender compositions of the nation as a whole.
7. Beginning immediately, the United States military shall cease building any new bases on foreign soil and shall reduce such bases by one quarter each year for the next four years until their number has been reduced from over one thousand to no more than eighty.
8. All hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies, drug manufacturers, and educational institutions shall by law become not-for-profit entities.
9. The Federal Government shall within two years disable and dismantle ninety-nine percent of its nuclear arsenal and shall insist that any other nation receiving any American aid disable and dismantle ninety-nine percent of their nuclear arsenals.
10. Beer shall be named the national drink of the United States of America.
11. All military action of the United States against any nation or group of people now taking place anywhere in the world must cease within thirty days and shall not resume until such action or actions receive the agreement by two-thirds majorities of both the House and Senate.
12. All subsidies to American oil and coal companies shall cease, and a tax of ten percent levied on every well head, every truck
load of coal, and every barrel of oil sold.
13. The Federal Government shall immediately develop plans to reduce within two years by at least one trillion dollars expenditures for the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, and the CIA, and shall transfer the funds thus saved to building hospitals, clinics, and schools, repairing and building roads, railroads, bridges, water systems, electric grids, and for paying for free education for all through four years of college.
14. The minimum wage in every company doing business in the United States shall be three percent of the highest compensation (salary and bonuses) being received by the highest paid executive in the company, but in any case no lower than twenty dollars per hour.
15. Every citizen shall be requested to do something at least once a day for the hell of it.
SIXTY-SIX
(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 440–447)
Late that evening we had a party. We were all sitting in front of a campfire outside our tent; Lita, Karen, Molière, and I leaning back against the side of the tent, Sheriff Coombs, Lucas, and Jimmy cooking marshmallows over the fire, and the other FFs scattered all around. Sheriff Coombs had hooked up with us after marching with the Eastern Long Island branch of the NRA. We could see other campfires, a lot of dancing, and people moving with flashlights. Music was blasting away all around us.
We drank and chatted and joked and generally acted silly, as people often do after they’ve been shot at, had a lot of fun, and drunk a bit of booze. The talk turned serious when Molière and Lita began to talk about the fifteen FFs who were planning to zap themselves back to Ickieville the next afternoon. Molière and Gibberish told us it was dangerous—that about one time out of ten when FFs tried to go from one universe to another they simply disappeared forever.