The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  I continue to confer with sundry medical and municipal authorities and to walk the streets. I study the eruptions on the bodies of those willing to reveal themselves to me. Fourteen more deaths in only several days elicit another private convocation of these medical fellows. A gentleman has just been pulled out of the river behind the Peabody house, his throat twisted from some last gasping for air. He was a gentleman known to these doctors.

  Again we meet late at night at what now passes for the central infirmary, claimed like so much in this town by Franklin to have been started by himself, that many-sheeted moaning room in a large warehouse basement. The dead gentleman is laid out on a table, naked for all to see his tortured body. The fear in this place is palpable. “He is one of us,” one doctor says, “from Upper Bucks. Dr. Carlisle. Tom. What if we are somehow the ones at fault? Some say the fault is ours for our great ignorance. Doctors are not trusted as it is.”

  And they all turn to me.

  I say what little I am able.

  “Are you asking me if it is a plague of the pox? I do not know. Are you asking me if an end can be put to the current outbreak? I know not. Are you asking me if it is fair to lock up the infected, for now, for life? No, that is not fair. But it is reasonable, though this conclusion must come from your own deliberations. I will say that I think it will do but little to stop the culprit. If this culprit is some new pox, it is out there and it is going to stay out there for far longer than we all shall live. The only safe course is for everyone in the world to stop mingling. I think this unlikely even if any of us knew how to bring it about. All in all I do not think I can tell you anything beyond what your common sense should by now have considered.

  “Yet I ask you to reconsider. It is always what is most obvious that we blame and often what is least obvious that is at fault. I extend an invitation to you to come walking with me around your Philadelphia. Let us go at dawn tomorrow, when all is quiet, and watch the day begin.”

  The doctors show interest. Perhaps there is something to reconsider.

  “Doctor, please! We must first take a vote.” The voice is not one but several, soon joined by others.

  Their vote is unanimous. A quarantine of all infected persons, and suspected infected persons, and all persons suspected of being prone to infection because of their “known habits of life” is to be placed into effect tomorrow noon.

  Benjamin Franklin, who rarely misses a meeting of anything, nods approvingly. Dr. Rush—he who thinks that Negroes are black because they have a kind of leprosy—agrees as well.

  At dawn the group of doctors, with the addition of a few civic authorities and local dignitaries and the curious who have heard, accompany me on my tour. It is a long walk out here and many have come by horse and a carriage or two.

  “Here, gentlemen, is the source of your plague. It has been here some several months’ time. I believe that your first cases date from the very same.”

  “Where? Where? Where?” Everyone rushes about, wondering where to look. They step across puddles and small pools and dark-colored streams. Boots are caked with mud and shit, if their walk out here had not already accomplished the same.

  Atop a platform, so elevated it is almost out of sight and certainly almost out of focus for the elderly, to the accompaniment of loud drumbeats and trumpet screeches, is what in the dawn’s early light appears to be a skeleton moving, swaying. From the same height comes a loud voice through a horn.

  “Friends of Dr. Hogarth Hooker! Good citizens of Philadelphia! Pray silence whilst you attend on this performance arranged especially for you!”

  More drums and horns and then the skeleton falls forward, as if pushed into falling forward, and drops toward a tiny pool of water encased in a wooden frame on the ground. As it falls and twists, the skeleton is seen to be a human being, arms and legs now tumbling out from a carapace painted with white bones. Screams of alarm erupt among the spectators. “It is alive!” And then, “But there is not water enough in the tub!” The body lands, and splashes what little water is in the tub out, and now this tub is empty, save for flesh and bones disintegrated, splintered and splattered into specks and spots and pieces and drops of blood that fly out over the crowd. “Stand back! Stand away!” I cry in warning and many move to do just so. But far from running from this hailstorm, many others scream and rush forward, reaching for pieces of bloody flesh, grabbing them, clutching them, folding them into handkerchiefs and sticking these into pockets and sacks, “as mementoes of this spectacle”! Drops and rivulets of blood spatter many faces. Many tongues automatically lick the blood away.

  “There. There is another source of our plague.” I point to the licking, darting tongues.

  “But what you are showing us has nothing to do with the intercourse of … coupling,” protest several of the younger doctors.

  “How has such a demonstration of death been allowed?” asks an angry Dr. Rush. “Mr. Franklin, do you know?”

  “I do not, sir, and I resent your accusatory tone. How have you not heard of this yourself, as you claim to serve so many patients everywhere?”

  I hasten to regain their attention as I answer the young doctors’ protest. “Indeed. While I do believe there is syphilis in your town—it would be a rare town that did not have some—I do not believe that the whorehouses and their customers are the only cause of all your moaning deaths. Do you know how many dead bodies are catapulted from that parapet each day? And who they are? And where they hail from?”

  The dozen or so bodies that are hurled from on high six times a day into the evening come from a local gravedigger credited with creating this act. Wandering around behind the scene, I watched the gravedigger haul each body up from a pit with a pulley till it reached the sky. I discovered that all the dead bodies were male. Studying the stacks of waiting corpses, I noted that some of their necks were twisted from gasping for breath, with mouths caked with blood, some limbs and torsos mutilated by ropes and whips and knives. Some penises had been severed and some tongues removed. These men had been tortured somewhere first. “Where did you obtain these corpses?” I asked the gravedigger, when I found him delivering more. “They do not look like they have been exhumed from the earth.” He would not answer me. “From many watery graves,” he finally replies when I put a coin in his hand. Mrs. Peabody, the mistress of both of the whorehouses, most vehemently denied the dead to be her customers. “Had I so many visitors I would be rich!”

  Although Mr. Darcus Borstal gave a letter to me with his two bottles, I must confess to only remembering it after being asked, and not too politely, to continue my journeys elsewhere. Briefly, I was not believed. Dead diseased bodies hauled from the De-La-Ware to poison the town? “Do not test our patience any longer.” I was given neither an honorarium nor a parting gift. Indeed, no one of these many doctors would even shake my hand.

  The letter from Mr. Borstal read,

  “Dear Dr. Hog, I saw you with my Ben, walking and talking. He no longer walks and talks with me. I love him like I love starlight and moonlight and he took my love and took it and took it, and now he takes it no more. He gave me dripping cock. My Ben has a dripping cock and sores and pus and now I have them, too. He said I gave it to him. In Paris he took me to the doctor, who sliced mine off. ‘We must see if this will cure us,’ my Ben said to me. ‘And if it will now go away.’ But it is my Ben who goes away. Now I have fits and monsters in my eyes. I sleep and wake up mad and crazy. I see bears and lions and tigers growling at me, ready to eat me up. Then men come to throw me out of Ben’s. They tie me up and throw me in a room with locks and bars and many other men tied and shackled, pus and scabs and whip marks o’er their bodies like a second skin. I ask for Ben. Bring me my friend Ben. Bring me my friend Ben, who taught me so much of what I know. Bring me Ben, who took me from Boston to London and Paris, promising me the moon and starlight. The men laugh and laugh and laugh. I kill the man with the keys who comes to feed me at night. I break my ropes and choke him to death with my bare hand
s. I run and run. I see my Ben. He points me out to a guard man with a gun who is with him. I run and hide. I come to the fairground and I become friends with the circus men. They are hushies too. The king of England threw them out of his country, my country too. They are crazy and dizzy with spells like me. Some are very mad like me. Some scream. Some bite and hit. The maddest ones are hauled up and fall down from up high. Some even happily jump, screaming out in laughter. Some are pushed. By the time you read this I will be dead or crazy or both. Please remember me. Panther.”

  I leave Philadelphia, distraught, disgusted, and sorely disappointed in myself for not having stopped the despair. By the time I depart, some three hundred men and some one hundred women are dead, and the fairground show is still performing, but now to crowds of people, often mobs.

  * * *

  Yes, the bodies thrown from above were all diseased with me. A most unusual way to dispose of my partners, but they were useful for my propagation nevertheless. No one, I am grateful to say, comprehends any of this. Dr. Hooker is certainly trying his best to make me clear, but once again, thank goodness, the natural ignorance of The American People, as you now call yourselves, allows me to continue to live and breathe and grow. Like all the grand and learned men gathered here in this town to make a country come into being, I believe I have a future.

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S REAL ALMANAC

  Hog tried to tell them and nobody listened. Disappointed mightily, he set out for the long trip that produced the journal that was to be his life’s work, wondering what hell his country would become. To this day you can never erase a history that found Rush bleeding people to death and Carthwaite insisting that syphilis and gonorrhea are caused by the same thing—two leading doctors with their heads screwed on wrong. This is the home where purging through poisonous enemas, “powder-nostrums” (inhalations of fine white powder thought to cure catarrh but causing cancer), are for far too many years the standard of care and the backbone of its knowledge. A city, and by extension the country that houses it, doesn’t live down facts like these, not for a long time. That “city of brotherly love” becomes much too quickly one of those places—of which this country will never-endingly have so many—that is old before it’s young. It remains stubborn and rigid and unable to keep up with the times. No words can express the sadness of the uselessness descending on this city that is America’s biggest, and which, this uselessness, continues to this day. Yes, it becomes our new country’s first center for the study of medicine, but surprise surprise, it turns out to be a wretched place for medical progress. Baltimore and Washington and Boston and, finally, New York take its place.

  Many blame Ben Franklin for this lacklusterness. “He gave us too much hope,” they say of Ben, when in fact he gave us much too little. “Common sense,” which he was so fond of calling up, is not hope.

  Why were and are The American People so completely in awe of Franklin, whose continuing unblemished adoration has always been perplexing to me? Why do we always fall for the head and ignore the slop pail when he was afflicted with what even one of his most gushing biographers, that miss-the-boat guy previously mentioned, Edmund S. Morgan, calls “a prolonged fit of political blindness”?

  For most of his adult years, certainly the years of his greatest physical and mental energy, he attempted, with a relentless determination that is incomprehensible, to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony. He hated the Penn family, to whom the king had given the huge grant of land. In the face of major opposition, Ben stayed fervently intent on royalizing his state. He didn’t care that such an upheaval could easily endanger the fragile new liberties of the colonists. For Ben, the British monarchy came first, long after anyone else stateside stopped giving a fart for the king or his goddamned country. It was a strange and inept stand, even traitorous. “America” had already been here for more than one hundred years, and he wants it to go back to its ice age. The guy had lost his marbles. Nobody talks about this to this day. They don’t talk about a lot of things about Benjamin Franklin.

  By the time he returned to Philadelphia, when Hogarth met him, he had been away from home a long time. The worshipful attendance paid upon his every belch and fart in England and France was less in evidence. A lot of the younger crowd didn’t know him at all.

  He was having such a good time in England hobnobbing with the titled and the rich that he was reluctant to return to America even when his wife, Deborah, informed him she was dying, had not long left, and begged him to come back so she could see him one more time. He dithered and dallied, so she died alone, in 1744, while Franklin was in London. She had not seen him for some twelve years, during which he sired a couple of illegitimate sons.

  Amusingly, if you can find any humor in this, he did not like or get along with John Adams, another patriot of the era who is also the object of unbridled adoration. The dislike was mutual. John thought Ben vastly overrated. Ben said of John “that he means well for his Country, is always an honest Man, often a Wise One, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his Senses.”

  No one yet has the goods on John Adams, but Benjamin Franklin not only abandoned a wife, had illegitimate children, disinherited his son, and was one of America’s earliest published writers and purveyors of pornography, but he had a black man murdered for loving him.

  So, in fact, this man did not offer hope. He will prove prescient, though: “I believe … that this [the form of government envisaged and guaranteed by this new Constitution he helped to birth] can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

  The bile inside him gives him this insight. Washington didn’t believe the new country would work out either, saying that “it would not last twenty years.”

  How is it that two hushmarkeds have such morbid insights into our future?

  Ms. Stacy Schiff, in her book on Franklin in Paris, A Great Improvisation, reports, “he made regular late-afternoon visits to a white, canvas-covered barge that floated on the Seine opposite the Tuileries. Pot-de-Vin’s bathhouse was not Paris’s most luxurious establishment, and Franklin was surely unaware that it was the city’s premier gay bathhouse.” Every day? And he didn’t notice all the naked men cruising on the river? Oh, please, Stacy dear. She suggests that Franklin needed a place where he could confer with his spies. Oh, pretty please. This bathhouse stuff is of monstrous historical importance. Schiff has a case of what YRH calls Ron Chernowitis, of Doris Kearns Goodwinism, denying a truth writ so large she should choke on it.

  To say that Benjamin Franklin was not a nice man is putting it mildly. To the list of his personal failings mentioned earlier let us add some more.

  He hated women. He brutally fucked them. He probably passed on syphilis or gonorrhea to all those “cousins” in Philadelphia when he came back from France with his dripping cock. Yes, he was a pig of a womanizer. But what he really liked when he’d had one too many were his evenings of being fucked by black men.

  Grace writes, “History is sad, Freddie. It can tie up the tongue forever and render a vocabulary mute. I am, of course, in receipt of a cranky epistle from Our Lady of the Discontented, the bleeding Bledd-Wrench. ‘I am distressed to note that Mr. Lemish believes Benjamin Franklin to have been a homosexual.’ Etc. Fuck her.”

  Hog was on to something. He just didn’t know it. I quote from a report from 1846 in London, where similar conditions existed along the Thames, an equally foul waterway filled with floating humans: “Whenever animal and vegetable substances are undergoing the process of decomposition, poisonous matters are evolved akin to ammonia which, mixing with the air, corrupt it, and render it injurious to health and fatal to life. If provision is not made for the immediate removal of these poisons, they are carried by the air to the lungs, the thin delicate membranes of which they pierce, and thus pass directly into the current of the blood’s circulation. The consequences are often death within the space of a few h
ours, or even minutes.”

  THE PENIS AND THE RECTUM: SOME THOUGHTS OF DR. HOGARTH HOOKER FROM MY BOOK OF FLESHLY THOUGHTS

  Where comes the knowledge from, how gets it into our fibers, how to use these parts of us for events other than waste and exit? From a wretched wounded sailor, I hold now in my hand, halfway around the world from whence they were once whole, tiny pieces of flimsy flesh that would be rotten were it not for their being soaked in gin and pearce. Each day I look at them. What do I hope to perceive? As from some crystal ball am I to be the recipient of some omens locked up within these tiny bits from cock and cunt? How talked they into this tiny vial of glass?

  When did man first know that rubbing his thing brought pleasure? Adam must have discovered that fact, and told Eve, who rubbed herself and discovered likewise. Then they learned how to fit their pleasures into one. Stick the stick into the hole. “But I have two holes,” she one day must have said. So the hole in front and the hole in back must have been a field of choices for the stick of Adam. Did this make man, from his beginning, feel somehow less? Did woman tease man: You have only one hole and I cannot use it because I do not possess one of your ridiculous sticks? And laugh at man in a haughty and superior way?

  But wait. What about the mouth? Surely this qualifies as a hole? So that would give her three holes to his two. For by now they must have discovered that to taste each other with their mouths is pleasurable also. That still leaves man lacking by one.

  But he has a cock. A cock is better than a hole. It is big and strong, indeed like a stick. Her pleasured parts are all inside of her. You can see a cock. Is it this advantage, more than any others, that gives this self-assumed supremacy on his part, to the man?

  As for the rectum used for fucking, I wager it is the shit coming out that Adam and Eve found most strange. I believe the rectum to have nerves of pleasure, but then comes the shit. “Surely, Adam, comes this odor from this stuff that pleases not my nose at all.” “But, dear Eve, perhaps it is important that it comes to view, that it falls from inside of us, that it comes each and every day, as if God wishes us to know that He is with us each day.”