by Larry Kramer
“I would not ordinarily go so close to where I live,” Hiram said, “but these people are a particular annoyance to me because they are so many different colors. They should be white. They must fuck each other every which way to produce such unnatural results. It is not as God intended.”
“I am amazed you speak of God,” I ventured. “Surely He would not approve of your activities.”
“He would. He certainly would.”
“What is your heritage, sir, if I may ask?”
“You may. You certainly may. I am of strong British stock, sir, through and through.”
He had prepared small packets of his poison powder, which he deposited covertly as we talked and walked. In a water tank. In a large vat of sauerkraut heating up. In the horse trough, in the many large bowls of fruit punch laid out here and there. He performed his handiwork with skill. When I cautioned him that he might be witnessed, he replied, “No matter, there are many chefs walking around adding last-minute ingredients to their stews.” Again his jolly laugh. “And we shall be off and gone before the height of the festivities. But I must work out a better plan for ridding the bigger places, like New Orleans itself. Yes, I will enjoy that.”
As we were leaving, an old woman fell down dead in a fit. People started screaming and rushed about in growing fear as more and more fell down and were seen to die so quickly, struck in spasm and choking to death. The children, of course, went even faster. One little girl, a beaming blond-haired child, was offering me a candy when she suddenly expired.
Yes, I watched him do all this.
I wanted to kill him on the spot but I was not finished with him yet. He still had more to teach me.
We went back to his decrepit house and I made him fuck me. It was not easy, because his shriveled cock was lazy, too, nestled as it was in awful-smelling britches. I sucked it hard. I made myself make his penis hard so he could fuck me and I could continue my experiment. Surely this man must be infected with something that would transmit itself to me.
“That was good,” he said when we finally finished. “It has been a long time since the last one. You must come around more often. Where are you staying?”
Instead of answering, I coaxed him to show me where he worked and tell me if there was anything else I should know about his powder.
“Yes, it is more than just the pus of sick animals. It is shit and piss from them, of course, and from me, too, and rancid remains of food. Everything I can lay my hands on that is putrid I throw into my stew. There are no secret ingredients. It is all things nature and God give to the world to use as we see fit. Here, take some home for yourself.” Then came that awful laugh as he filled my hands with the tiny packages of his poison.
Suddenly he had his own spasm and fits of choking and fell down dead.
That was when I knew I was infected with something.
Or was I?
I took Margatula Abagale and went home to Ontuit.
THE LAST DAYS OF HOGARTH HOOKER
I have traveled many years now. I claim I did it to learn, for knowledge and experience. Perhaps some of it was too extreme, but men who push themselves to the extreme to learn are building this country and I considered I was doing the same.
No man knows what to do with his cock. Most men do nothing with it. “I do not pleasure myself,” I was told many times when I asked. No man looks upon his penis as his friend. In fact, I think for most, his penis is his enemy. Men too afraid of sex? Men being afraid of women? Men being afraid of men? Quite possibly it is all three and Hooker preachers have been smart enough to make strong meat of this. I would like to locate that aphrodisiac but I look back and see that my investigations were just the reverse: I tried to locate what poisons were in play, so that what happened in Philadelphia could not happen elsewhere, and in trying to poison my own body I could discover how to mend it. I wonder how presumptuous all this was, and whether had I been God-fearing I would have been any more miserable than I am now. I don’t think I have much time left within me to change horses in so late a stream.
I do know that men do not know what to do with their thoughts, so they don’t even try.
That is what I discovered.
How many years and how many questions and answers has it taken me to adduce this? It all seems so obvious now. How many miles did I walk to locate only this?
I have aged much since Philadelphia. There I was a smart upstart, a fresh young man who thought he knew all the answers.
My brain is clogged up. I know not what to do with my own cock, much less the one in this bottle here. What have I to show for all my wanderings?
In all this time Ontuit has not changed much. It is still quiet and small. My servants and slaves are all still here. My Hooker cousins have tended my land carefully. My hateful father, Ezra Jr., still is hateful and still hates me and considers my life unworthy. My kindly brother Lucid looks at me with imploring eyes. Please tell me what has happened to you, I can see he wants to ask me. I wonder why he doesn’t come right out and ask. But now I know he is no different a man than all I’ve seen. We are all lost, like every Hooker has said.
I believe I am slowly going mad. That is what can come to the man who has not found his place in the world.
I experiment with tubes and herbs and barks and plants and roots and all that kind of stuff that since the beginning of time people seeking to unlock the strange forces of the universe have believed they must explore.
I keep staring at my little glass bottles that hold the sailor’s severed penis and the piece of his wife’s cunt and the tit pus from Lester Noggins and my most recent powder from Hiram Punic. I no longer harbor excitement about the future or a goal of great deeds to be done. I hold no belief that tomorrow will be anything different from today. Thinking like this makes me sad. Soon I never leave my rooms. After a while my own wife scarcely misses me.
I still have come down with no illness.
And no experiment I have tried in my laboratory and on myself and with my blood and spit and shit and piss has revealed anything to me.
A young Negro serving girl cuts herself while moving my glass slides in my laboratory. This girl and I have fucked. She wishes to fuck yet again. We do so. Enormous heavings now come suddenly upon the girl. She is groaning and crying out in passion and lust and trying to scratch my eyes out with her nails. She is so overcome with shuddering from my cock going in and out that I can barely keep inside her. The thrashings of her body are so harshly violent that were Tom Hooker still around he would cry out, as I hear him do, for he is always with me, “The Devil is inside her!”
I do not release my semen into her. Instead I withdraw and collect it swiftly in a bottle of its own. When every inch of her flesh breaks out into sores, and these sores void great amounts of pus, and this pus forms new scabs all over her like some second, reptile skin, I scrape everything I can from her surface, from her skin and her cunt and inside her mouth, and I mix all this together, and mix my semen with it too.
The young girl dies screaming so loudly the entire town can hear. She is by now so encrusted in a hard outer coating of scab that when lifted to her coffin she is as heavy as a tree.
When my serving girl smeared my head with her pus, taking it from between her legs upon her fingers and running these fingers over my forehead and cheeks and the very lips I kissed her with, as if she were etching some pattern or design upon me, I thought her paint was poison. And yet I live!
I still do not fall sick. I wait for it. It does not come. One year, two years, three, I wait, fully expecting the killer inside me to claim me. I study myself thoroughly every day, every inch of my flesh that I can grab or see. I strain my urine through the finest sieves and study its clarity. I boil it to see what it reduces to. I spread my stools in the sun to bake. Nothing happens when I feed the results to any animal on my farm. I cause my blood to be introduced into pigs. One pig dies, but an animal who feeds on garbage is not fair evidence, particularly when the other pigs live.
But what is fair evidence? That is what haunts me. How do I come to be healthy when I suspect I should be otherwise? I have no answer, except that the serving girl died.
And what am I looking for? Something that kills people or something that makes penises hard?
I have poured enough poison into myself that I must have found the cure to something.
I have two concoctions now. The powder from Hiram Punic and the mixture from my slave and my semen. The first I know can kill. The second I have yet to try. I mix the two and consume them.
I go to my wife’s bed and body. I return to sex with my servants. Three die, two serving girls and one houseboy. All three die with thick scabs covering their bodies like armor.
One day, Margatula Abagale, who has not shown any signs of illness, begins thrashing and retching, her vomit purple with the blood that heaves out of her in buckets. Before she dies she says to me, “My life was not happy with you but I loved you anyway.”
And still I am not sick! What is in me that I escape? Why am I protected? How? Why am I exempt? Which of my many acts has granted to me an … immunity? Can such a deadly poison yet feel so safe inside a host that it wants to stay there, and arranges to stay there, rather than kill its master and be forced to find another or die itself?
It is when I hear this thought that I know I must end my own life. I am a killer and I must stop living because of it, lest the poison live on.
Once upon a time I was called brilliant. What has this brilliant man done with his life? Why have I never journeyed out again? I have walked no more than several miles since my trip until now this day. How long must I wait for something that never comes?
I am fifty now, but I am as an eighty-year-old man. I am as an eighty-year-old man who in his head is still the young boy running up Beecher’s Hill. I want the energy to ignite my old age one more time. I seek an everlasting erection!
I crave to discover what this End of the World that Borstal the shit shoveler spoke of is like.
I break open his bottles and extract the shriveled pieces of flesh. I break open the bottles and packets with my other potions. I mix it all together and swallow it.
I eat you because there is nothing interesting left to eat. Why do I now think that these remains might contain within them the qualities necessary to fashion anything? Because diseases are caused by something. Some iota of something. Some sop of something that soaks up the qualities of the disease. The hungers of the disease. If the disease be a disease of sex, of fucking, why could not the iota be this quality liquefied or transfixed or reduced or quartered out, or isolated? If this is so, then how to isolate it further, bring it forth, and make it what it wants to be, which either is its passionate extension or its cure?
HIS BROTHER LUCID TELLS ABOUT HOG’S ENDING
He dies in March 1815. He is fifty years old.
He dies a crazy man, demented beyond anything yet seen by the community of religionists and relations still willing to surround him, no strangers to the sight of crazy men in throes of one kind or another. Hog dies by his own hand. His nails have grown into talons. He rips out his own heart. He wanted us all to see it, and we did.
I watch from the doorway. As does my son, Lucid Hooker, Jr., born this very year and held in his father’s arms. We are all with Hog when his body finally explodes into a million pieces.
In the family Bible he entered these words: “Strange deaths I have seen and in a most quiet fashion tasted. Neighbors I have partnered with. And with my pigs and dogs and sheep and roosters. Local dens of witches and men with masked heads and all of us eating neath the full moon strange dark earthly roots. Strangers naked coupling unendingly till dawn.”
Also inside this Bible are pages and pages of scribbles, formulas, lists of strange ingredients and theories. It would take another crazy man to make sense of them.
REACTIONS TO HOG’S ENDING
DR. SISTER GRACE: Hog was one fucked-up, mixed-up cookie. Or was he? Could a smart doctor have been anything else in those days? Or was he suffering from the same Hooker Hubris that I suffer as well?
DAME LADY HERMIA: Man is capable of as much atrocity as he has imagination, though he be reaching for the moon and stars.
* * *
I needed him dead, can’t you see? He was getting closer and closer … to me.
I am proud that I was able to kill him at last. It took me too long, I agree, but I was learning how to get better control of my hosts.
He had infected many, of course. Which was very helpful.
And no one was able to see any of this, which was also very helpful.
STATE OF THE (AT LAST) UNION
Because we are now united, more or less, scandals of sex and bribery and corruption and of people in high places fighting increasingly bitter battles over new beginnings, new rules, new ways to make a new country and a new buck (although this term is not in use yet) begin to arouse attention. Day by day more men are seen to want more things and find more ways to try to get them. And day by day more other men come face to face with the harsh stone walls of impossibility. The Haves and the Have-Nots now enter our history as definitive categories, not just as random tales from out of the wilderness, tales of good luck or bad.
Now commences the passionate, angry, divisive, contentious, exciting America that in these regards will always be with us. From now on nothing will ever be completely boring, those long stretches of time when nothing happens will be less. That’s what a growing population does for you (3,929,214 according to the first U.S. census in 1790). If you’re bored from now on, it’s your own fault.
Everyone has ideas and desires, but few yet have enough of what will come later in our growth: ambition—the hungry need for fame and power, achievement and success, on the part of the many and not just the few. People are still a bit too polite, or too timid, or just plain frightened. Or there aren’t enough “role models” yet.
Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Burr, these have been the big three, interacting effectively until Mr. Burr shoots Mr. Hamilton, the beloved of George Washington, dead. Is this an omen for the new America? Mr. Burr is wellborn and well connected and wealthy and educated. Mr. Hamilton is the poor boy from the sticks. It is Mr. Burr who is having the incestuous relationship with his own daughter. Mr. Hamilton’s male lover was long ago shot dead for being a hushmarked. Is this an omen for the new America? Or which of these are omens for the new America? Dare we now say “all,” as in All-American?
The American People grow in number from some 5,300,000 in 1800 to around 8,750,000 in 1817. “Probably no great people ever grew more mature in so short a time,” writes Henry Adams in his History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison. Of course, what we didn’t know then, there were, around the world, around and about, already some one billion people.
Mature? Were we once upon a time mature?
Annual sales of western land increase from one hundred thousand acres to half a million as tens of thousands move westward in the decade or so after 1800, occupying more land than in the 150 years of colonial history. A middle class is materializing. By 1810, 24 million copies of newspapers a year are printed annually as reading becomes a necessity.
As more land is cleared preachers are still springing up everywhere. In 1811 alone some three million people go to revivalist camp meetings. Religion still rules everything, of course, certainly everything to do with the body. Yaddah’s professors teach that reptiles are descended from the ones on Noah’s ark, and the “medical” building at the College of William and Mary has a roof that leaks on opened cadavers; medicine and science are only subdivisions under God and obviously very far down on His list of Greatest Hits.
Medical knowledge is still crude at best. It’s hard to teach much when nothing much is known. This has been said before. It bears repeating. Little energy appears to be expended to rectify this lack of knowledge. Ignorance is bliss. If we’re sick, we’re sick. Doctors, of whom there are still too few, do not se
em to be questers. The story of Hogarth Hooker has made the rounds. A doctor is not the respected man he’ll become. He is still barely one step up from what we would call a quack.
One thing, though: there is a dawning awareness that the body has its own rules and regulations, requests and requirements. You can’t eat just anything, for instance. Eaters begin to stay away from stuff that gives them discomfort. There is something called “health” that people wish for in their prayers. That’s new. It connotes a sense of possibility. Feeling good, or at least a little better, might just happen, because so much else is happening. The blissful state of possibility is rooting itself, hard and firm. Indeed, it is not giving anything away to state that The American People will never lose this belief in the possible.
Little is known about blood beyond the obvious fact that something red flows through us. What is in it, what can be done with it—this is still some time away. It is thought that to lose too much of it is not good and when too much is escaping it must be stanched. But it is thought that to lose some of it when one is sick is good. Go figure. Bleeding people, still in order to drain off the “bad humors” thought to cause every problem, is even more prescribed for relief. Several times in the last century blood from a sheep has been put into a human. It doesn’t work. When blood from one person is given to another person, the recipient dies. Philadelphia’s first medical school, founded in 1765, and Yaddah’s, in 1782, have not progressed much past bleeding people to death. Oh, Yaddah killed a few monkeys and then sheep but then they didn’t know what to do.
As for information about particular organs like the heart or liver, these are still strange and foreign countries and completely misunderstood. Attempted transplants of animal hearts into dying humans are certainly imagined and crazy surgeons try heart transplants all over. A doctor in New Hampshire is finally shot dead by his neighbors after trying unsuccessfully thirty-eight times to perform this operation in the village of Manchester. If doctors are quacks, surgeons are butchers.
