The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Now the family must watch as the greenmonkey enters the little baby again. The goldmonkeys see the penis of the greenmonkey grow and grow. This time his huge penis grows and grows to be thicker and wider than the baby herself, and longer. This little baby is impaled like a tiny pigeon by an elephant. Soon the greenmonkey exhibits overwhelming shivers and agitations. The greenmonkey’s penis is so engorged that even though it is about to explode it won’t detumesce completely back to normal for days or weeks.

  The little baby is dead, of course. How could it not be? The little baby is dead but not only from this act. Greenmonkey semen contains a component that is inhospitable to the goldmonkey system. It has something in it that can fell trees, make them die. This component, call it a poison, call it Vel, call it a virus, call it Absalom or Ishmael, one drop of it alone, its pre-ejaculate alone, would have killed Little She without the heaving heavy greenmonkey falling on top of her and smothering her at the same time that his huge engorged unrelenting penis erupted inside her so mightily. The greenmonkey starts walking clumsily, the dead little girl still impaled on his penis. But she is slipping off and his penis is slithering out, releasing not only her but an awful lot of his semen, which comes gushing out onto the ground. It is like he is pissing semen. The pool from this semen, which will penetrate the earth and kill the roots of trees for generations to come so that there will be no more trees growing on this spot, or plant life, only dried arid sandstone, and eventually some of those erovonous deciduous maltreasons, forms a Rubicon the goldmonkeys won’t cross. They stare at it as if it contains radioactive magnetic fields keeping them at bay, which in a sense it does. These goldmonkeys are seeing something in the wash of that ejaculate which says Do not cross this line.

  The greenmonkey fucker bends and starts to lick Little She clean and then bites off her tiny hand. Which he swallows. How does he know to do that? To take a bite. Only a bite. They always take only a bite of their victim’s body. Then he runs away. Greenmonkeys always run away. He doesn’t walk. He runs. He runs away.

  But he’s eaten some of her. Whatever was hers now is his. That is, his ejaculate poisoned her and now he’s eaten her. No, he can’t poison himself back. That would be too logical.

  The goldmonkeys all gather now and take their dead-now once-upon-a-time and they sit around her for several days. Then they too eat her up, as is the custom. Who knows where it came from or how they remember to do it each time. Who knows how to really study memory? So long ago. And as they eat her up, other monkeys, goldmonkeys and blackmonkeys and brownmonkeys and spotted monkeys and striped monkeys and every-which-way-except-greenmonkeys, come from all over this jungle that in not so many centuries will be called the Everglades, Florida, U.S.A., and they stand around in a circle and they jerk off. First they take a tiny bite of the dead baby goldmonkey. That little bite is for them an act of hospitality or acknowledgment of bereavement, like the passing of food at a wake or like eating the Host at Mass. Then they start rubbing themselves with pieces of her bloody flesh, as if they were using soap or unguent or perfume or holy water, which we’ll learn to use ourselves one day as invitations of welcome to each other. And then they start playing with themselves, masturbating themselves. All in a group! One big group made up of lots of little groups, going back and forth, changing around, switching partners, tasting each other, a big buffet, a cafeteria, all kinds of foods, boys with girls and girls with boys and boys with boys and girls with girls, yep, a big buffet. And they do all this for days, for weeks, in some groupings I have witnessed, for month after month, and once—yes—for over one whole year. What else do monkeys have but time?

  Why don’t all the goldmonkeys die from eating the little one, so doused and infused with poison greenmonkey semen? Some of them will. They’ll just fall over and their group will move on. The dead ones will be eaten by others. There’s never enough food. To be shit out. There’s always plenty of shit.

  But many of them will be fine. Poisoned they may be, but most of them will just keep having sex and die of old age. We haven’t figured that one out yet. Wonder if we ever will.

  Sex is what holds the living together. In a group. In a family. Their glue. They fuck all the time, from the minute they get up, night and day, with their little ones often hanging on to them while they do it. Go to any zoo. Take a look. It’s their main activity. For a while. They know what it means to feel good. They know that to get together and do this sort of thing makes them feel better than before they do it. We do the same thing! Touch your hard dick or your cunt when it’s almost ready to pop and tell me it doesn’t feel good.

  You want to know why boys and men jerk off so much, often only with each other? They got genes inside them that got to get out. If the ladies won’t let them near them, which for long periods of certain seasons they will not, then their genes inside them hurt to get out. This need for release is a powerful force. They’ve got to release their gism and that’s why fidelity is such an ass-backward concept. Sure it’s nice. But you die off being faithful. Yes you do. The faithful ones stop fucking fast enough. Their genes stop fighting for release. And pretty much no matter what, one day sadness comes and you don’t want to fuck anymore and your line goes thin and then dries out.

  Yes, evolution’s sad.

  Time tells you everything if you know how to look at your watch.

  Listen to me! In this very way, in these very ways, was entry of one living organism facilitated by another living organism into another, entry of an organism so invisible it will take every one of all the trillion years before it will be identified, even though it has lived these many eons of monkey years and is still alive and healthy to this day.

  Most of the goldmonkey population ended in a Finnealizestung, an inability to stop fucking, a perpetual orgy that terminates only in death. It’s a German concept. Figures. If evolution doesn’t get you one way it gets you another. Stopping fucking kills the line off and too much fucking kills the line off. That’s what Pishky and Biggott wrote about in the book that got them heaved out of Yaddah, tenure or no. Have to watch out what we teach, teachers do. Yep, fuckers can fuck each other to death. Just like I hear all them faggots are doing now. In the case of faggots, I hope so. I hope they are doing that to themselves big-time. I hate faggots. In the case of my monkeys, I try not to look but of course I do. It’s hard not to look when you love monkeys as much as I do. Although God knows I am looking with great energy for the cause of The Underlying Condition, and trying to be the Christian who can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this plague was started by queers, and I don’t mean monkey queers, even if they are monkey queers. Maybe you’d call this a conflict of interest. Science is full of them. Just like the rest of the world.

  One thing. Don’t listen to epidemiologists. Bledd-Wrench is one, no matter what she calls herself. Epidemiology is the science of racism. Government invented epidemiology to protect the rich whities. It demands a yardstick that measures and separates people out only by the bad things they’ve done, or that happened to them, and then tries to isolate them from everyone else, who are suddenly defined as healthy. No such thing as healthy. Really isn’t. Important point. Bet you don’t remember it. Everyone’s sick in one way or another. Yep, bet you forget that. We’re all sickies.

  Even if the host is dead, poison lives. Poisons live.

  Poisons live forever. The two biggest mouths of the moment aren’t telling you this.

  But rest assured, eat shit we all have done. How long our journey through life takes depends on which shit we’ve eaten. In this resides the secret of life and death. When man arrives, monkeys want to be his friend. But man eats them. Which is not a good thing for man to have done. Or do.

  There must come a moment when each of us accepts that we are carriers of death. Try getting that into The New York Truth. Try getting that into the literature. Funny expression, “into the literature.” As if we must be Tolstoys to be heard. Truth. All fuckers fuck each other to death. Carriers. We’re all carri
ers. Secret to life. Secret to death. No big secret.

  Prove me wrong.

  Remember this: most of our genes had evolved before we separated from the apes and we thus share 99.5 percent of our evolutionary history with the chimpanzees. Mind you, we also share 70 percent of our genetic material with sea sponges. There you have it.

  * * *

  STOP PRESS:

  Forget what you’ve heard about human beings having descended from the apes. We didn’t descend from the apes. We are apes. Metaphorically and factually, Homo sapiens is one of the five surviving species of great apes, along with chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. We shared a common ancestor with two of these apes—bonobos and chimps—just five million years ago.

  (Ryan and Jetha, Sex at Dawn, 2010)

  ENTER VELMA DIMLEY

  When it is pointed out to Dr. Dripper by Velma Dimley, the intrepid science reporter for The New York Truth, at the 7th Annual Conference for Primates and Judaism (not so farfetched as it may seem, but not right now), that his monkeys sound like they’re gay, Dr. Dripper, looking from side to side, and behind him, and up to heaven, replies hoarsely: “It’s a bind, let me tell you. It’s not so black and white, you know!” He has tears in his eyes. “Male monkeys hang out together because females are out fucking like crazy. Hilda Chimp fucked with sixty-eight males in the last three days. That’s why males stick together. Fags can call it homosexual. I call it self-protection! Who’s got a strong enough sense of self to withstand the competition of sixty-eight other dicks?”

  “That doesn’t sound like competition to me. It sounds like it’s about having enough patience to stand in line.” Velma looks up from, as always, taking copious notes.

  “No, sir. No, sirree. How big are your boyfriend’s balls?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Then you ain’t getting laid much, I expect.”

  “What’s the size of balls got to do with it?”

  “The bigger the balls, the hungrier the sperm. Chimps have got gigantic balls, so they got to relieve themselves or it hurts something awful. You never heard of ‘lover’s nuts’? If they got no women, what’s left but their fellow chimp?”

  “That does not sound very scientific.” She stops her note taking. She slams her pad closed.

  “You still think there’s such a thing as scientific? After all I have said and written? Guess you’re not one of the hundred and sixty-three people who bought my book.”

  Dr. Dripper looks very tired. He is ready to return into the mist of the palma negrita overarchers, another favorite tree that has survived the centuries in his part of the Everglades. He starts to leave the auditorium.

  But then he comes back for another word with Velma, and with those at every conference who always gather around her in admiring worship, picking up her words like edible crumbs. She is, after all, and will remain, Velma Dimley of The New York Truth.

  Bosco gets these final words out with difficulty because he is still in tears. “You’re going to say that UC comes from my poor monkeys. And my poor monkeys will be besmirched forever. I know what besmirched feels like. It can ruin your whole life. What do I think it all means? I think it means you don’t know enough yet to besmirch anything. My ex-wife, Francine ‘My Poopsie’ Punic, now so generously funded by the University of Southern Jewry, of course is saying just what you want to hear. That Dr. Dripper’s fairy monkeys started it all. And Ms. Velma Dimley of The New York Truth is here gathering the quotes and making up the story. And Bosco, and Bosco’s monkeys, are besmirched.”

  His eyes are scrunched so tightly that one wonders how he can see as he walks past us all, and out.

  QUESTIONS ON THE TABLE

  First of all, how do you do?

  I am very fine, thank you very much.

  I am your Underlying Condition.

  I am happy to meet you.

  I would like to start our relationship by asking the following two questions, which I hope are mature and intelligent and well-phrased:

  Do you really think that a monkey eating a monkey thousands of years ago is enough to start an end-of-it-all plague that will embrace a world as big as this one? That is my first question.

  Think carefully before you answer, please.

  My second question is this: Do you really think it’s possible to single out the murderer and the murder weapon, that mysteries and medicine share such narrative similarities?

  You really don’t have to answer any of this now. I will find you. We will stay in touch.

  These were the years of my early hardship you are writing about. I was still trying to find my voice.

  But who was there to hear me? I was only still a kid.

  Can you hear me, even now?

  Well, let me tell you something.

  I was in those monkeys.

  How much you wanna bet?

  Let me ask you one last question:

  Why should you be the only ones to seek immortality?

  INTRODUCING DAME LADY HERMIA BLEDD-WRENCH

  With a good deal more to say than the usually taciturn Dr. Dripper is Dame Lady Hermia Bledd-Wrench, whom Fred has known since his days in London, where he fell in love with her spirit, her zest for life, and her unquenchable quest for knowledge. Her many-titled name, which she delights in flaunting, she explains thusly: “Because I am prominent and have achieved, I have been honored by my Queen and am entitled to be called Dame Hermia Bledd. Because I married a knight, I am also Lady Hermia Wrench. But obviously I prefer to be recognized for my own name and not that of a husband. So in order to be deferential to both entitlements (being Lady Wrench was no easy gig), I am Dame Lady Hermia Bledd-Wrench, to be called all of which I am aware is absurd. But I enjoy being absurd. I revel in being absurd. The world is absurd and I am at home in the world, as most people are not. Without shocks people tend to fall asleep. I choose to think one of my missions is to wake them up.

  “Of course I am never as shocking as I want to be. England allows one to go only so far, which is why I moved to America.

  “For you see, I believe totally in the concept of Evil.

  “It is important that America learns about Evil.

  “You are the fount from which all atrocities flow.”

  Dame Lady Hermia is a professor on the faculty of the Sir John Greeting Institute of Worldwide Medical Knowledge of All Peoples, in London, as well as its American outpost, the Lady Jane Greeting Institute of Worldwide Medical Knowledge of All Peoples, in Nearodell, South Carolina. She earned firsts from Oxford and Cambridge in the Philosophy of Medicine and History, and in the Anthropology of Science, and she is a pioneer in the field of what is now known as Unknown Law, which she teaches at Yaddah. England prizes itself on such jacks-of-all-trades, polymaths they are often called, although rarely accepting them when they are women, another reason for her transferring her energies stateside. “I also have scads of honorary degrees. Honoraria flock to one like gnats in summer if you are prominent. So few people measure up anymore that the few of us who do are like rare birds that must be found and fed while we still fly. All of this is like armor: it’s all very heavy but one feels protected, especially here, in your country, where such effluvia is impressive.”

  She has always been known in England for Guess What?, her exceedingly popular fifteen-minute (and very funny) radio program on the BBC, where she talks about whatever she wants to, which she still maintains is “human nature.” It brought her fame, fortune, and her DBE. Fred, during his London years, many of which found him quite depressed, tried never to miss it. It cheered him then and she does the same for him now. She still records her fifteen minutes every day, “seven days a week, we never sleep, from here, the enemy terrain, where I now, as your people succinctly put it, hang out.”

  Her great text, known and used to this day in academies around the world and into its umpteenth edition, is The Evil That Men Do: Plagues and People I Have Known and You Should, Too.

  And her husband, Sir
Wally Wrench? “I left him in Britain with all the other boring men.”

  A REJOINDER TO BOSCO, A PLEA TO FRED, AND THEN SOME, FROM “A BIGGEST MOUTH OF THE MOMENT,” DAME LADY HERMIA

  I must register a few words of protest.

  First of all, I hope you can see how much Dr. Bosco Dripper, D.V.M., hates women. I hope you can see that. Louis Leakey, the great paleoanthropologist, believed that women would be best suited to studying primates in the wilderness, in the jungles, because we have greater patience and greater sensitivity to the social nuances of what we would be able to observe. It was he who made it possible for women to get going in this field, no thanks to Bosco Dripper and Yaddah. Jane Goodall had no scientific training and was almost childlike in her sensitivity to the particularity of what she was observing. She followed her chimps over much terrain and over long periods of time. While Bosco joins her in his gift for knowing one from another, not that he gives her her due, or any woman her due, he cannot approach Jane in fully perceiving the close bonds between mothers and their children.

  For many years little attention was paid to primate relationships with human beings, as if such relationships did not exist. It was Jane who showed us how much apes could teach us about ourselves. Later observations by Dorothy Cheney et al. would focus attention on baboons’ ability to manage and sustain rather intricate relationships in large groups of up to 150 members. Bosco says it can be very stressful to be a male, because to have sex with a female depends on just where the male is in the female pecking order, so to speak, and because the female is better at keeping things in check. It really must be pointed out and underscored and double-underscored what a misogynist he is. No wonder Francine flew his coop. No wonder all those women members of the Primate Society cast him out and asunder.