The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Feeling worse follows most “cures.” Despite centuries of observation that diseases can be transferred from person to person, and that feeling bad can be transferred from man to man, precautions continue not to be observed. If someone had said to a man, “Keep your mouth away from that woman’s polly,” an earlier word for pussy, he would likely have said, “I like the taste,” or “Mind your own business,” an expression more and more coming into general use as there are more and more people to butt in.

  Nobody writes about sex. Doctors don’t talk to their patients about sex. Yes, this medical silence started then and has been faithfully observed ever since. And couples don’t talk to each other about sex. There is such an overwhelming lack of talk about sex that one wonders if feeling good from sex doesn’t really last all that long.

  Chains of whorehouses continue to proliferate. Whorehouses are great businesses because if men don’t want to talk about sex there are plenty of them wanting to perform it. The good feeling may not last all that long among these men either, but that only increases the hunger. Jew Louie, in the records of her Washington house, lists one “Robert Ackenace” as a regular who visits each morning and evening for the twelve years she’s in business. “I wish there was more like him,” Jew Louie writes, understandably. “He says he would come more often if he could make his work that way.”

  Indeed, this particular holy grail will become the holy grail that men rush after for fortunes, and that will eventually be the cause of—well, we shall see.

  A FIRST HELLO

  The overlooking or complete ignoring of hemophilia as anything of concern well into the twentieth century will have a historic and tragic effect on the history of The Underlying Condition. Will Fred Lemish be alone in believing this led to the plague of UC itself? Let us begin to follow it more closely.

  The transmission of hemophilia from mothers to sons is described in 1803 by Dr. John Conrad Otto, a Philadelphia physician who writes an account of “a hemorrhagic disposition existing in certain families.” Hemorrhagic means “bleeding.” It is he who names them “bleeders.” He determines that this particular bleeding condition is hereditary and affects mostly males. He manages to trace it back through three generations to a woman who settled in Plymouth, New Hampshire, in 1720. It is astounding research and there is little information of how he achieved it. Dr. Otto was then an apprentice to Dr. Benjamin Rush.

  The word hemophilia itself is first used at the University of Zurich in 1828 by one Friedrich Hopff, a student, to describe inherited blood disorders. A report from a surgeon, Samuel Lane, in The Lancet in 1840, described his control of this bleeding by administering fresh blood from another boy with severe hemophilia. While this, too, was an amazing discovery, a lack of understanding of blood groups and basic transfusion methods prevented further development.

  Excessive and unexplained bleeding has been seen since ancient times. Dr. Israel Jerusalem writes, “In the Talmud it is written about the mother: ‘If she circumcised her first child and he died, and a second one also died, she must not circumcise her third child.’ This is because the excessive bleeding from the circumcision pointed to the mother. Women from the beginning get the raw deal.”

  A VERY GREAT UNREQUITED LOVE

  The country is ours now, more and more of it. Jefferson buys even more, and then determines to send out an expedition to tell him what his new Louisiana Purchase looks like. The land included in the purchase comprises around 23 percent of the territory of the United States today. Can we get from the Mississippi to the Pacific by water? Jefferson wonders. Surely there must be a river running through us. He will be mightily disappointed to learn there isn’t.

  Meriwether Lewis and William Clark co-captain the expedition. It departs in 1804 and comes to an end in 1806. Lewis, a lifelong bachelor for whom the company of other men is more congenial than real life, is a heavy drinker, a manic-depressive, and very much in love with Clark, whom he personally chooses to accompany him. This love will eventually destroy him. He will become a complete and lost drunk, and he will commit suicide when the expedition is over and he is permanently deprived of Clark’s presence.

  But only after their magnificent journey is completed and America learns what America is and will be. Oh, it is a mighty journey, a mighty achievement, from coast to coast, finding places on a map that they are drawing as they traverse them. Lewis and Clark and their expedition are the first white men to see so much of us.

  Clark, the perfect second in command, is insensitive to Lewis’s love, and to the love of York, his mammoth black slave, who is indentured to him as his father was to Clark’s father. What is it about this ordinary plodding explorer that excites lifelong passionate devotion from his two closest male companions?

  Lewis and Clark set forth with their party, nearly four dozen young men (there is disagreement about the exact number and whether it should include York and the Shoshone Indian woman Sacagawea, who shows up with her infant son). They are “robust young Backwoodsmen of Character healthy hardy young men, recommended,” as Clark describes them all, between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-three. As piece by piece they uncover and witness the pristine voluptuousness of a wilderness still unpopulated save by animals and Indians, whose willing women are offered as gifts along with the syphilis they carry, these men and their leaders are passionate about their challenging endeavor. Many of them are having sex with each other as well; their leader is particularly unable to do anything with any of this passion but get drunk and lash out with his own particular frustrations at his men. In their close quarters they hike yet more miles into the heart of America, none of them to talk of certain feelings, or write about them, so that it is left to any deft historian with sense and insight (are there any such?) to read between the lines and point out what should have been obvious to anyone who grew up on a farm or in a large family in the woods. Or to anyone at all.

  What is it about historians such as Stephen Ambrose, who in his much-overpraised biography of Meriwether Lewis, Undaunted Courage, leaves the most courageous courage out? How can any sentient person read anything about Lewis without realizing the man was gay? Not a little bit, not just sometimes, but totally and wholly gay? We’ll encounter a similar obtuseness on the part of Abraham Lincoln’s many blind biographers, as we already have with George Washington’s worshippers. How is it that “learned” tomes are written about the syphilis rampant among soldiers with no one figuring out that they are getting it from each other??

  No wonder hushmarkeds have been granted no place in their histories.

  God save us from the heterosexual historian!

  IDAHO

  The men of the Lewis and Clark expedition are thought to be the first white men to gaze upon this peculiar state, so let this be our introduction to it. It is 1805. Much of what we’ll encounter in our history of Idaho will be unpleasant, and will happen much later and much farther north, in the aggressively rugged uplands, in the overpined mountains that glower and guard some of the most remote and impassable territory in our whole United States. The Idaho Territory will be bigger than all of New England. If ever our wilderness is frightening, it’s here. It’s almost as if it belongs to another country. Perhaps in view of what will happen here, it would have been better if it did. But no, it had to happen in America.

  For now, a deserter from the Lewis and Clark expedition breaks off and heads into this unfriendly state. He is part Seneck and part southern hillbilly. His name is Partekla. He has been the victim of one of Meriwether Lewis’s cruel whiplashings. It was common for a soldier to be lashed by Lewis to within an inch of his life when he got out of hand. Partekla was often ordered to masturbate a very drunk Lewis and was brutally punished afterward. Along with a Chinook squaw the expedition has been given as a gift, Partekla bolts off into the night and they walk and walk until it seems they are at the edge of the earth where the forest gods live. Here they build a cabin and he stakes his land and names it Partekla, a place that, as indicated, will
play much too important a part in this history.

  FEBRUARY 12, 1809

  Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln are born on the same day.

  THE HOOKER ARCHIVES, CONT.

  Fred has warned me that my narration of this part is a shit pie in the face of Her Damehood, who has claimed the whole history of medicine for her tinny pie pan. I think, though, in this case, and Fred has succumbed to my reasoning, because I am the Hooker archivist who has all the papers about our earliest days, that I’ve got squatter’s rights on certain topics. Anyway, really, when you come right down to it, all this shit was Hooker born and bred.

  To trace, to follow, to try to understand the history of disease in America is, most importantly, to study, from this point on, and carefully, indeed assiduously, in the most determined way, the history of the National Institute of Tumor Science, a pimple sewer. The official history of NITS will not mention that it was in its beginnings the Hooker Home for the Syphilitic. The official history of NITS will not mention that these beginnings caused the massacre at Fruit Island. Both of these occurrences are just too fucking juicy, lewd, lascivious, and disgusting for Hermia or any other would-be chronicler to get their polite bite plates around and properly masticate.

  Let me tell you it was not easy resurrecting this shit (in any sense of my favorite word). I am a scientist, not a historian, not a linguist, not a lot of things (which she says that she is). It has been no easy task becoming as proficient in Seneck as I am, say, in microbiology. I have no interest in Indians, all men of all races and of all castes being horrid. I was not particularly interested in human waste, either, though I came to surmise this by-product of ours is an important component of what we must come to terms with if we are going to end a plague, and besides, it pays my rent. “Shit as a Surrogate Marker,” the title of an earlier and overlooked paper of mine, could very well be the overall and encompassing title for any major study of The Underlying Condition. Shit is a surrogate marker. I have much left to teach you as I continue to study it myself.

  From this country’s birth, wouldn’t you just fucking know that neither branch of the new Congress sees fit to consider, even casually or marginally, anything pertaining to the actual health of the country’s new citizens? But because so many soldiers and sailors are returning from sojourns diseased in some way and contagious as well, their lack of health becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. In 1794, Alexander Hamilton, almost as an afterthought, and unofficially, sets up a “Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Health Service.” He co-opts a clerk in his Treasury Department into collecting twenty cents per month from the wages of each soldier and seaman to cover the cost of keeping the boys in shape. It is an unsatisfactory arrangement, not only because no one is using any of these services, whatever they frigging are (it’s been impossible to find out; were they actual clinics with doctors?), but because sailors, particularly, object to paying for them. Shipowners, even if only managing vessels owned by the government, which is often news to a government that doesn’t know what in the fucking hell it owns, object because they don’t like the government butting in, even though, per Alex, this is not officially the government. So sailors, and let’s just concentrate on the sailors, keep getting sick. According to Fred, the young fellow who had enjoyed a brief fling in New York with Alex had died, causing Alex to set this thing up in the first place. Those accumulating twenty-cent payments in no time flat prove not nearly enough to cover such services, as the various contracted establishments are billing a government that knows nothing about any of this (not to mention that the contracted establishments aren’t performing these services anyway). Well, you can see that it is and will remain for quite some time one big frigging seafaring mess, with no idiot in charge.

  Much to everyone’s surprise, it is discovered that Dr. Hogarth Hooker’s will—quite generously—stipulates the establishment of a Hooker Home “wherein men and women with diseases of the sexual tracts are to be studied, solely and for no other purpose”—i.e., solely to find out whatever it was that Hog had thought killed them. His shares of Massachusetts Farm Supply are by now worth a bundle. Interestingly enough, Hamilton had tried to define the Sailors’ Health Service as “created to coupe up all pox’d heads and render them away into a home until they are cured.”

  But what the fuck means “diseases of the sexual tracts”? Syphilis is the only one any of the Hooker family can think of, and they’re not so pleased to see the messy assortment of houses and outbuildings, a mad scientist’s laboratories, that Hog also left behind. Nothing would have gone forward had not Hog got his wishes into his own lawyer’s hands.

  Other Hooker lawyers are going at it, as best as possible, to sidestep the embarrassing and the inconvenient. When it opens, the Hooker Home bills itself as a “safe haven to tend those who suffer from illnesses God sent to punish man for his willful waywardness.” No doubt a Hooker conference call came up with this one. There was, of course, much discussion about whether, with God’s imprimatur or not, the damned place should be opened at all, but piety plays its trump card and God wins. Once a goddamned Hooker, always a goddamned Hooker. So the Hooker Home finally opens in Ontuit, not all that far from the cursed church old Tom Hooker preached from in the first place. When word gets out in town, no one wants it around. “Every clap-ridden pervert from anywhere will be traipsing to Ontuit!” Lots of encouraging and Christian letters like that in the archives, winding up with too many vomitus versions of “How could you!”

  How do we cut to the chase? For a bunch more years, new cases, gradually increasing in number, come and go each day into and out of the Hogarth Home, sailors, whores, orphaned children, the abscessed, the poxed, the near-dead, and, yes, the dead, delivered in their coffins. The treatment, God knows what it was, is free. Had Hermatros been around he, too, would have recognized many a parasite. Bugs from the four corners of the globe are visiting Ontuit, Massachusetts, with impressive free-floating aloha abandon. They’ve also come to stay. Thus is more and more shit of all natures and nations added to the wagonloads Ezra Jr., now in charge of Massachusetts Farm Supply, carts out into the world.

  A bit of genealogy to keep ourselves going: Ezra Sr., who was Thomas Hooker’s grandson, had the original idea of collecting shit. His only son, Ezra Jr., turned the idea into a company, Massachusetts Farm Supply, with shares of stock. It made a shitload of money. It wasn’t easy for Ezra Jr. to live in Ontuit and see what his own crazy son had got up to since his return. It wasn’t easy for Ezra Jr. to take care of said crazy son and watch his body blow up in smithereens. Ezra Jr., what with a crazy dead son and a business collecting shit and a home for the syphilitic, is understandably now cracking under the strain.

  Who is the mother of all these Hookers? As is often the case with early America, she is never mentioned. What a strange fact to report. How can a whole family of fucking Hookers be motherless? No wonder women always felt like shit. Oh, Tom, Tom, what a fucking awful drum you started beating.

  The clap, the pox, syphilis, these terms are interchangeable. Over the centuries syphilis is called the “French disease” in Italy and Germany, and the “Italian disease” in France; the Dutch call it the “Spanish disease,” the Russians call it the “Polish disease,” the Turks call it the “Christian disease,” and the Tahitians call it the “British disease.” It is called “great pox” in order to distinguish it from smallpox. Americans just call it the pox. Whatever it’s called, it’s all over the fucking place and Ezra Jr. begs his other son, Hogarth’s younger brother, Lucid Sr., to help him, please.

  Lucid Sr. is a good man, a bit on the timid side, who fears God mightily as Hookers are meant to do. He bathes the sick who come to the home and tries to make them rest, which isn’t easy when they are out of their asshole minds. His son, Lucid Jr., won’t go near any of it, neither the shit nor the pox, and shortly after his wife dies birthing their son, Lucid III, Lucid Jr. runs away in the night. I don’t think he was ever found. Lucid Sr., now having lost both a brother and a son
, is close to destroying himself. He lacks any skill to keep anyone, it seems, alive. Why, he begs his father, in all our Hookers, has no one pleaded with God “to teach us what all this is! Will not somebody come here to teach us?” Fucking A!

  It is Lucid III who will introduce us to Dr. Maurice Punic, Sr. I believe it was Dr. Maurice Punic, Sr., who found him.

  Dr. Maurice Punic, Sr., like all the Punics in Fred’s history, just appears. Not everyone has a history that fucking fatal fate allows to be known. Dr. Maurice Punic, Sr., will be the first official director of the Hooker Home. “Teach us what all this is” is what he says he aims to do. To collect all the syphilitics in America is a kicky-wicky kind of calling, ambitious in the extreme. Many discreet placements in publications such as Police Round-Up, Soldiers’ and Sailor’s Life, The Happy Traveler, ask, “Are you the victim of a disease from coupling?” and direct those caring to respond in the affirmative to Dr. Punic in Ontuit, where the good people, finding it increasingly impossible to walk on their overcrowded sidewalks, will soon cry out, Enough, you shitheads! Enough!

  Dr. Maurice Punic, Sr., writes in his journal: “New York saw a cheap way to deal with one of its biggest problems and leaped at the opportunity for Hooker to house all of its clap-ridden. The House of Sores, I hear we’re called. No sooner does a bump of pus appear in Manhattan than it’s shipped to Ontuit. We are so overburdened that I grow frightened.”