Though the protest march had the blessing of the outgoing Lockheed Martin Administration and also the good wishes of anyone who ever wanted to get a vote again in the state of New York, the incoming Raytheon Adminstration had politely asked LM spokesman, Brock Myrol, to move the thing to the Bronx, please, we don’t need that fracas around here, I’ve got Knicks tickets and my wife isn’t coming, and Brock had, with delicacy, informed his peers at LM that the choice was only really theirs if they chose the Bronx option. Brock had been let to know that were the expected three-hundred thousand protesters to actually march down Broadway during Tuesday’s business hours, as they were threatening to do, beginning at 34th Street and ending in Battery Park, the Raytheon Administration (though not officially in office they held a great amount of sway) would respond with flooding the protest with over four-thousand photographers, which would have been on top of the aerial photographs being taken by the four dozen helicopters, their blades seeming to spin in slow motion when reflected in the skyscrapers, and, they warned, to call in the National Guards of New Jersey, Delaware and Connecticut to help with the arrests. A long dormant asylum on Roosevelt Island, among many others, had made the Administration’s list of possible detention centers, and one Raytheon executive had been overheard longing for the days of the Blackwell Island prison. Brock, while he had enough dirt on his hands for all of us, had also seen enough detention centers that he hadn’t been able to sleep with his wife nor any of his mistresses since he’d been briefed on the Raytheon Administration’s plan of action should the protest happen in Manhattan, and with this weight upon him, knowing that so many of his mistreses and their sisters were planning on attending the rally, Brock did something he would do only one other time in his life and leaked information that he really wasn’t supposed to leak to a journalist working for the Times, who wasn’t interested in the story but did know of a fellow, did the Times, that might find a few hundred words worth a dollar or two. The long way around finally being that the protest’s organizers were contacted anonymously and told indisputably about the creepy Raytheon plan and how the Bronx was the best way to go for everyone, sincerely. The organizers, brazen and courageous, refused to change venues and even threatened a sit-down protest on Broadway, Tuesday and Wednesday, featuring all the protesters handcuffed together in a messy line to stretch from Houston Street to Albany, which would have pissed off the NYPD, especially, since they’d have to perform all the bothersome handcuff dismantling and then cuffing everyone again with their own, the NYPD’s, cuffs. Eventually the point became moot when the mayor brought in a horde of security guards three days before the march, really just mercenary ex-policeman from New Jersey, to help the NYPD arrest anyone carrying a sign on Broadway for the three days before and three after the march, which made an unfortunate week for the people who stood on the street wearing advertising signs for neighborhood businesses, seven of whom were arrested two days before the march, all but one released within hours, the one, José José, had been, much to his current chagrin, in the midst of a largely unprofitable marijuana trade while he stood on the street twelve hours a day, wearing a sign and passing out flyers, and had been interrogated for a few hours and kicked around for a few more so that when he came onto the television for the 10:00 news that night (in footage never reaired by any of the Networks and difficult to find in more than just crummy two second clips on webpages that never stayed up long, seemingly no one having a copy of the footage anymore, as though the television could take back what it had put out) he had swollen eyes and lots of other scars and damages and he confessed to selling drugs and organizing the peace protest on Broadway scheduled for two days from then in a bizarre monologue peppered with what sounded like painful throat-clearing and the awful image of José José squinting through his bruised face to apparently make out the words on the offscreen teleprompter, eventually spitting out, ‘If you ast mee, potest is goo’ inna Bonx,’ after which the screen went black and kind of burped a belt of static from its base and every person in the US watching network television at the time collectively held their breath for the two and-a-half seconds of black screen before a Coke commerical, already in progress, cut in, and everyone breathed again. Brock Myrol, having lunch the next day with spokesmen for the networks, finalizing the finer details of Lockheed Martin’s final Administrative Address to the American People, was told by the dick from NBC that the whole thing had been staged, concerning the José José thing the night before, right down to the static burp and the in-progress Coke commercial, the mayor having suggested the tactic when he realized, waking up on the couch late one night, chest covered with chip crumbs, the television on and broadcasting a soda commericial, that being thrown in the middle of a television commerical, as vapid as they were, was a surge of noise and color and distraction enough to immediately begin the process of softening the footage’s impact on the viewers. This had been the mayor’s Plan B, to show the fellow apologizing for the drugs and the protesting and then cutting to the Coke ad, the mayor only pencilling it into his notes after an advisor noted that the man might lose his nerve or flip his shit on the television, and they had better come up with a proper out before it took them off guard. Plan A, which all the Networks, LM and Raytheon had approved of without a single note of dissent, had been to let José José mumble awhile on the air until even the executives were embarrassed for him and then to go to the evening’s Sports report, all of which was running along just as they’d envisioned when the mayor’s mother had called her son to ask if the man on the television had really been hurt by her city’s police force, her son’s police force, tell me it isn’t so, Mayor Thomas Washington Quincy Franklin, she’d pleaded. The mayor had assented that no, it was definitely not her, his, or their police force that had made the man look so bloodied and could you hold a sec, Mom?, calling the emergency NBC number and getting the José José monologue pulled and Plan B implemented in an impressive nine seconds once his call had been answered on the big red phone at NBC HQ, the viewer’s just all-over, common sense reaction to seeing a man, stuttering through obviously scripted English phrases, bruised and hurt and being paraded in front of his citizen peers as though he were stuck in the stocks in the town square, the reaction being far more horrified, disgusted, shocked and terrified than either administration or any network had foreseen, somehow, prompting not a few research papers on the personality types involved in the scandal, none of them, however, being published in anything larger than Handout, an entertaining but more than often banal and stereotypical ‘zine’ printed by Charity Case, a group of artists in Brooklyn, never making a run of more than twenty-five copies before funds ran out, so pretty much only read, these research papers, by family members and close friends of their authors and of Charity Case. After the airing of José José’s confession the march’s organizers didn’t wait to be contacted before moving the march’s location, figuring no one wanted to leave the house, much less march under helicopters on Broadway.
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