by Chris Kenry
The account of the ceremony I heard later went something like this: At precisely ten o’clock, a harried Tina pushed the play button on her cassette recorder and started the all-too-familiar strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.” Then Salvatore, Millie, Sharise, and Antonio and Victor, dressed in blue caps and gowns, all filed through the crowds of reporters and cameramen and into the small microbusiness classroom. They took their places to the right of the oak podium in chairs that had been arranged at the front of the class. To their left, on the other side of the podium, sat Tina and the invited speakers. As the music droned on, they all glanced timidly at the huge assemblage of strangers, although none of them was surprised to see it.
“That short one with the Farrah Fawcett hair and the five-inch fuck-me pumps went first,” Andre said, narrating the details later that afternoon. Tina took her place behind the podium and explained the program and its origins, its goal of helping people get off welfare by teaching them the skills of being an entrepreneur. She then praised us all as hardworking and intelligent, and said she hoped we each achieved the success for which we had worked so hard.
The governor was next, but his uneasiness was evidenced by the sweat on his brow and his stilted speech. He praised the program as a sign that the welfare state as we knew it was near an end, and pointed to us as the next wave of pioneers. He praised us for having the courage, strength, and intelligence to better ourselves, and said that by doing so, we bettered our community as well.
Then, in a storm of flashbulbs, to which she was largely oblivious, Sister Melanie was introduced and led to the podium. Small and diminutive in her black sweater and dark glasses, but with a booming voice that shook the asbestos from the ceiling tiles, she congratulated each and every one of us for our accomplishments, and for breaking free from the chains of welfare. For regaining dignity, self-respect, and independence. We were shining examples, she said, of how welfare can and should work: as a tool to help people improve, as a stepping stone to get us across the river of adversity.
“You have all taken a handout and made it stand out!”
And with that, Tina pushed play again, and rose to help Sister Melanie hand out the diplomas.
It was only after the ceremony, as she was being carted to her plane at the airport, that Sister Melanie had any comment about me. She said only that I was “misguided,” and that it was unfortunate that this “incident” had drawn attention away from such a noble program.
“But I will certainly pray for him,” she said, “to get back on the right track.”
27
Scandal Is Legally Very Entertaining, Really
There is a legend that when the first kangaroo was brought to Britain from Australia, there had been so much advance hype about the curious creature that a large crowd had amassed at the dock to witness its disembarkment. As it was led hopping from the boat, leashed and collared, there was such a riotous push forward to catch a glimpse of it that the poor kangaroo was crushed to death.
As we pulled up to police headquarters that evening for the formal surrender that Burl and Jay and MacNamara had orchestrated, I felt a frightening kinship with the unfortunate marsupial. I was not crushed to death, but I was unpleasantly squashed and jostled and could scarcely believe that all those people were there to see me. There were so many reporters that it was difficult even to open the car door, and in truth, I was afraid to. Eventually we were able to emerge and I clung tightly to Jay’s hand in front, and Ray’s hand in back, and together we moved away from the car and wove our way through the mass of cameras and microphones and shouting people ...
“Jack! Give us a statement!”
“Jack! What does your father have to say about all this?”
“Jack! Jack! Jack! Over here! Is it true you sold drugs?”
“What about the Asian slaves?”
... and into the equally crowded and echoing lobby of the station. We were led behind a wall of hand-holding policemen, through which the cameras and microphones poked like hungry animals, and were promptly handcuffed and read our Miranda rights by a very handsome vice officer. Then we were led away for the hours of tedious processing that lay ahead.
At the arraignment, we were both formally charged with pandering and prostitution. We plead not guilty, and our bail was set at three thousand dollars each, which Hole, having heard about all the trouble on the five-o’clock news, promptly paid, and we were out by midnight. The crowds of reporters were smaller then, since the newspapers already had their pictures for the morning editions, but the four local TV news stations had trucks set up outside, and when the well-coiffed reporters saw us exit the building they quickly ditched their cups of coffee and made straight for us, cameramen in tow.
“Jack! Answer a few questions? What does your father have to say? Is it true he helped finance your business and referred clients to you?”
“Mr. Thompson! Wait! Is it true that Frank Glory is the one who set your bail? What’s your relationship with Mr. Glory?”
“Jack! Just one question! Is it true that John Elway was one of your customers?”
Although the temptation to answer that last question in the affirmative was powerful, I thought better of it and quickly ducked into Burl’s large Mercedes for the drive to Ray’s house. There we were greeted by another mob camped out on the lawn. Burl parked as close as he could to the house, and Ray and I threw open the car door and ran the gauntlet to the porch. We made it inside, but the door didn’t lock, so we barricaded it with a table from Ray’s studio. Upstairs it was safe, but it was hardly quiet, as a group of persistent—and evidently drunk—reporters who were camped out on the lawn below called up to us throughout the night, like unrequited lovers, “Jaaack, just one little statement. Just one comment. Puleeeaaassse.”
The next day we were in all the local papers, but, considering all the lights, cameras, and action, I expected much more. In truth, the headlines were less than screaming:
GAY PROSTITUTION RING OPERATES TWO BLOCKS FROM CAPITOL, STATE REPRESENTATIVES FINGERED AS CLIENTS.
SON OF THOMPSON COMMUNICATIONS CEO CHARGED WITH RUNNING GAY PROSTITUTION RING.
WELFARE MONEY USED TO FINANCE GAY BORDELLO. LOCAL BUSINESSMAN’S SON CHARGED.
In spite of all their tenacious hounding, what the reporters chose to tell was surprisingly timid.
Unfortunately, there is no real tabloid press in Denver—or at least none that would consider themselves as such. The two “serious” dailies are more concerned with Broncos coverage, above all else, and that their articles can be easily read and enjoyed by even those readers with severe mental retardation. Well, I am not a Bronco, and, damn it, I did not have any Broncos that I could expose as clients, but I did think my story was interesting and at least worthy of the front page. However, the gay-sex angle was a little too left of center and filthy for Ward and June to digest with their morning coffee, so I was relegated to page three in one paper and to the “Local News” section in the other, and there were hardly any pictures!
Thank God that wasn’t the case nationally, or even internationally. We were hot news on either coast, and in Canada and Europe. Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, People, L’Express, George, Paris Match, the National Enquirer, Stern, Hello!, the Mirror, and of course all of the gay papers and magazines—all my dearest old friends—were now yowling for interviews with me! At that point I was more than willing to talk, but, in a horrible example of poetic justice, by the time they got to me I was under strict orders from Burl and Jay to speak to no one, out of fear of incriminating myself. All inquiries were sadly directed to my attorneys. All comments would have to wait until after the trial. Predictably, things quieted down.
The day after the surrender we immediately set to work on our defense. My brother and Burl hired consultants and paralegals and researchers and did a wonderful job without actually having to resort to lying. Extreme exaggeration, yes, but actual lying, no. They decided to portray me as someone who had been pushed into prostitution by extre
me economic hardship. Paul would be resurrected for the trial and lauded as a loving, nurturing partner, only to be brutally smashed by the light-rail again as a sympathy ploy for me, his poor, unskilled widow. His loving partner for whom he had neglected to provide. Alone and horribly in debt, I was pushed out into the world, unprepared.
I did not especially like this pathetic image of myself, but could not deny that it was somewhat accurate.
At the trial, months later, Jay brought out large, colorful bar graphs to illustrate the enormity of my debt, eliciting shocked gasps from the jurors and the courtroom. He then pulled out another graph that showed the astounding statistics on personal bankruptcy filings, and implied that most people in my situation would surely have gone that route.
“But not my brother,” he said, as he addressed the jury in his closing arguments. “He’s not one to roll over and admit defeat. He’s a fighter. If there’s one thing our father taught us, it’s to pay our debts—and that’s just what Jack did. Now, you may not approve of his methods, but you cannot deny the honor due him for repaying his debts. For not taking the easy way out. For being a fighter. And remember, while he was earning money and repaying his personal debt, he was also paying his debt to society in the form of taxes. Although what he was doing may have been illegal, he was reporting all of the income he made from it and paying the taxes he owed. And he required all of his colleagues to do the same. There was no money laundering, as the prosecution has implied. There was no money exchanged under the table. There was, from a financial standpoint, nothing underhanded about it at all!”
He finished by saying that clearly the shame I would have to endure, the scarlet letter I would be forced to wear for the rest of my life, was punishment enough, and he asked for leniency, especially since it was my first time in court for anything other than a speeding ticket.
While the judge was giving final instructions to the jury, Ray, who was seated directly behind me, leaned forward and tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and he handed me a small piece of paper that he’d folded in the shape of a crane. I took it, unfolded it, and read the following:
Savvy
Intelligent
Lawyer’s
Verbal
Eloquence
Resonates!
And resonate it did! In the end victory fell on us! Or sort of. I was found guilty of pandering and prostitution—indeed, Jay had admitted as much in the course of the trial—but was found innocent of money laundering and tax evasion. I was given a suspended sentence, fined two thousand dollars, and required to complete one hundred hours of community service—which I did by lecturing on safe sex to several student groups and by tutoring students in the next class of the microbusiness program.
Ray’s trial was a bit more complicated. He was portrayed by Jay as a victim of the system—a child who had fallen through the cracks and who never had a role model to teach him right from wrong. He was struggling to make himself legitimate, Jay said, as a man, as an artist, but he was hampered by his pesky drug addiction—evidence of which could be seen in his prior conviction for heroin possession and the evidence of marijuana use found in his most recent urinalysis. He was clearly crying out for help and should not be punished for that!
At this point I passed my own, less artfully folded note up to Ray.
Stoner
Isn’t
Legal.
Vice
Earns
Rehab.
And I was right. He was found guilty and was sentenced to a month of rehab at a mountain treatment center called Fresh Beginnings. After that, there was a month of in-house detention, monitored by an ankle bracelet, and one hundred hours of community service, which he completed by teaching art classes to underprivileged children.
Johnny’s involvement, as much as we tried, could not be concealed, and he was eventually deported. But there is a silver lining to this cloud. Jay, under Burl’s sage guidance, employed several foot-dragging tactics, even going so far as having Johnny fire him at one point, and hire another lawyer to delay things even more, all with the goal of buying him enough time to finish his studies and graduate, which he did, with honors. He wrote me a postcard, some months after his departure, from Singapore, where he had found a job as a structural engineer on a new skyscraper.
“I work very hard now,” he wrote, “sometimes fourteen hours a day! It is making me crazy. Soon I will undoubtedly be fishing in the swimming pool.”
As for the other guys, most of them took the plea bargains offered them and got off with first-time slaps on the wrist and small fines. Only Marvin, ever in search of drama with which to decorate his existence, persisted in demanding a jury trial. His hopes for an elaborate courtroom production were cruelly thwarted, however, when the prosecutor, without explanation, suddenly dropped all charges.
The gallery, finished for months, had languished, empty, while we focused on our legal problems. We had managed to keep up the mortgage and loan payments, but could now see the bottom of the cash barrel, and neither Ray nor I had done any paying work for six months. Now that we were out of legal trouble and able to speak freely to the press, MacNamara was feverishly scheduling the talk-show appearances and the guest lectures and the book deals that would occupy so much of our time in the following months. But all that arranging took time, and Ray and I needed to generate money immediately if we wanted to get the gallery up and running, let alone make the mortgage payment and pay our legal bills. At Andre’s suggestion, we decided to throw a huge opening party, and to auction off everything that we could think of that had anything to do with Harden Up Inc.
“Girl, just leave everything to me,” Andre said, and I felt safe in doing so because he was obviously enthused about it and was unquestionably the most qualified to undertake the endeavor. Without any hesitation I put all of the planning—the guest list, the food, the music—in his hands. I was a little wary when he presented me with a bill for eleven hundred dollars to cover the invitations, most of which were being sent to celebrities on his fantasy guest list, which he had assembled by flipping through the pages of Vanity Fair, W, People, George, and Details, but to my surprise, many of them called or sent cards, and quite a few of them actually came.
At the party there was no buffet, since Andre had foreseen that the gallery would hardly contain all the guests, and that people would be spilling out onto the sidewalk. For that reason he employed a group of large-pectoraled waiters to mill around shirtless carrying glasses of champagne and trays of hors d’oeuvres. There were cocktail weenies and marinated button mushrooms, bananas dipped in chocolate and tiny jam tarts. It was a tremendous success.
Antonio and Victor had done a wonderful job on the renovation, and the former one-room warehouse was divided into three separate exhibition halls. In the smallest of these we displayed enlarged lithographs of the ads we’d created, our logo prominently displayed at the bottom. These were signed by both the photographer and the subject, and sold for seventy-five dollars unframed or two hundred and fifty dollars framed.
In the next gallery, Ray had set up his Christmas displays. The large doggy nativity scene was at the center of the room, with the other pieces scattered around the edges. In one corner he set up a card table displaying all of his Christmas cards, at which Josh was installed to take orders for boxes of twenty (forty-five dollars), but he ended up taking at least as many orders, if not more, for the poodle angels, (five hundred dollars), and to this day, almost two years later, Ray is still selling them (although they are considerably easier to find now that we live in their natural habitat).
In the third and largest gallery, we displayed a collection of paintings we had made especially for the auction. These rather unique works of art, executed during the six months we were awaiting trial, Ray and I had painted using ... well, I’m not quite sure how to explain this, but we painted them using our penises instead of brushes. We had spent a few days stretching canvases and thinking up subject matter, and then, over the course o
f about a month, we would execute a painting whenever the muse was, uh, aroused, so to speak. Of course most of them had sexual innuendo as their subject matter, and so there were lots of paintings of architectural columns and obelisks, and several portraits of Freud, always with a giant cigar. We did a large canvas of Moby Dick and another of Free Willy, and several pieces with religious themes—St. Peter at the pearly gates, Mary Magdalene, etc. The jewelry paintings—cocktail rings, pearl necklaces—sold very well, as did the colorful series of candy suckers. All of the paintings were somewhat crudely painted and looked like a child had done them, but every last one sold that night, and in the end they brought in enough money to make four mortgage payments.
But the bawdiness didn’t stop there. We also sold signed articles of underclothing, and, of course, T-shirts emblazoned with our logo on the front and the word Subcontractor on the back, since the issue of subcontractor versus employee had been a rather contentious one during our trial.
The rest was predictable. You’ve heard it before with different characters and you’ll inevitably hear it again: circus talk-show appearances, tabloid cover stories linking me romantically with several celebrities, an appearance on Politically Incorrect ... I never dreamed it would all get so out of control. What could I have been thinking?