The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

He sends long memoranda to various government offices, never knowing quite which one to write to or even which ones are there. It’s an era when the concept of federal government is solidifying, but Washington remains such a disorganized crapshoot that power does not congeal, as it must to hatch results, or even a reply. He has sick patients, Dr. Punic writes to them. He needs help, he writes to them. His sick patients’ bowels are working nonstop, he writes to them. Washington still doesn’t answer. Who is there, then or now, who will respond to an unknown doctor in a Massachusetts village who’s complaining about syphilis and shit?

  And yet, coming into focus in this wretched genealogy of honking, barking, spewing, puking goddam germs is a cesspool about to combust.

  Our fucking Hooker archives fucking runneth over. And I am sore ashamed.

  I wish to fill in some gaps about my Hooker family. More of this might have been presented further forward but I didn’t want to. Piece it together as you will. I’m still trying to do the same.

  My father, Lucid Hooker VI, was one of New England’s most active sadists. My mother was addicted to cocaine. They died when I was fourteen. He was often called in by the police for questioning whenever they found some mutilated young woman’s body; he’d show up wearing his preacher’s frock (there is still a congregation in Boston with “a Hooker pulpit,” meaning no one else can hold it or rant opinions from it), view the remains, invoke a curse against the devil, “lest he triumph,” and return home to stick his penis into another corpse (for indeed it had been he who’d done the mutilating). He had a lot of free time on his hands: no one much ever came to his church—Puritanism might be the ethos to which this country answers, but actually worshipping it in an edifice has always, like hula hoops, been an inconsistent trend. Though not as rich as he wanted to be, he was nevertheless very rich, perhaps the first of the Hookers to have such unlimited wealth. Ezra Jr.’s Massachusetts Farm Supply, now called Boston’s First, had become prodigiously profitable. We all own parts of it. Every bowel movement from Plymouth Rock to the New York border flushes a few pennies into a Hooker bowl. One share of stock purchased for a dollar in 1801 is worth one million shares each worth one hundred dollars today. And it is all still privately held, not a small amount by myself and a larger amount, unfortunately, by the weasel brothers Table, to whom we are in no other way related. When the Boston cops got too close, we moved to Masturbov Gardens. Pop had got a gig as “staff spiritual adviser” at NITS. NITS had long ago subsumed the Hooker Homes.

  I wish I could say that I had the vaguest notion of what my father was all about. I’ve skidded lightly over this sadist shit, as if I were talking about daisies in green pastures. Very little is written about the effects of the grotesque on the very young. Kids see much more than adults ever want to remember. I can see my father fucking strange women on a floor, and I’m certain I’ve been psychically wounded by it no end of ways, but I hardly knew the man and he paid no attention to me, and I had some sort of survivor’s instinct that kept me going with my self-preservation intact, along with ambition, intelligence, and a sense of right and wrong. You’d say: “God knows how,” and I’d say: “So what? I’m here. And I’ve had a pretty decent life.” Sure he was a shit. But he was like going to a scary movie. I had bad dreams for a while. No, I’m not being blasé or naïve, or even a bad feminist. Some people are blessed with better psyches or poorer eyesight than others.

  No, I never saw him mutilate a woman. That I only heard about. That would have made a difference, I’m sure. Hearing about it and seeing it should produce some hatred. Mother Superior uses a word to end all conversations she senses can come to no resolution: “Interesting,” she says. “Next!”

  A personal drama had a great deal to do with my path. When I am twenty-two, a fellow sister, Annunciata Rose, kisses me on the lips. The kiss is a wet one and saliva drips from her lips and onto mine. I worship Annunciata. She is beautiful as I am not: in her habit and poise and intelligence and honesty and directness she is every nun I wanted to be. When she embraces me and kisses me, I know this is why I became a nun. I embrace her back and I feel our tongues touching together, tasting each other’s saliva instinctively. I know that this is why I was called to become a Sister of Christ. I know this is the way of my world.

  Sister Annunciata Rose is in the last stage of a fit of a disease called mismitosis, some kind of perverted cell division. She is on her way to the next set of symptoms, which are drooling spasms. She will shortly lose her mind. And I, some eight years later, will lose my arm.

  This is when I truly fall in love with her: when she gets really sick.

  Annunciata! This is physical love I am talking about. Lust! Licking pussy! Licking pussy after lights out and sleeping in another woman’s arms. Oh, the warmth and ecstasy that Annunciata slathers me with. It makes all that Bride of Christ shit, all that married-to-Jesus shit utterly irrelevant. One love feeds the other. Our only common ground, in genes as well as human hearts, is desperate loneliness. I am the cute new girl and mighty are the flurries of intensity to discover who will get Grace. Well, Sister Annunciata gets Grace. Six feet tall and big-boned, let me tell you she was one big girl. To lie underneath her, to have her lie on top of you, was, whether you were hungry or not, a physical feast. Is there ever, ever, anything like the taste of first flesh with your eyes closed?

  Then this big beautiful buffalo starts walking around the nunnery mad as Ophelia. She screams out blasphemies in the middle of her catechism and when all of us sit at silent supper she starts slugging other nuns, just hauling off and slugging them. I take her off to one of the Hooker residences, the gorgeous summerhouse in North East Harbor, Maine. It is the single most beautiful place in the world where I know for a fact that I was happy, for a bit. For a month Nunce calms down and I let her love me so intensely my body still shivers. You know how your body feels after you’ve made love and made love and made love some more? You feel weak in the most outstanding way. I can feel it still. Then she starts that drooling shit. And she dies in my arms. And it is mismitosis. What happens to old diseases? Where have all the years gone? They have gone with Annunciata. And my arm. She died, that big gorgeous buffalo, and it was she who taught me to find love in myself for myself and to face up to the fact that my religion is no theological jackpot that I or anyone else with a brain is ever going to win.

  The one thing she taught me is that old diseases never completely fade away and disappear. They just come back again and again and usually under different names. This, of course, opens many a Pandora’s box. There is no dogma without sniveling unbelievers. But it’s what I know and have always known instinctively, almost like hearing voices inside me crying out from earlier centuries: “What I’m enduring has been gone through before and before and before.” Of course, that is what Catholicism is all about, which is why it’s so comforting to so many like me. I know that hearing voices is a sign of a crazy person. Well, I say that there has never been an important discovery in any field where voices are not heard. You show me a sane scientist and I’ll show you a scientist who will never discover shit.

  Mismitosis is not seen much anymore but it was thought to be something like rabies—transmitted usually by animals in fits, which of course was totally incorrect. Through many centuries of plagues and lesser poisonings that devour flesh, it has not been until quite recently—with the arrival of the ability to calibrate various blood chemistries facilitated by my discovery of Vel—that we have had an accurate measurement for bodily poison. Most diseases have always been described as caused by some sort of poison that has entered—somehow—the body. In the old days fits accompanied illnesses more often than not. Contagion is a relative term. One person’s infection is another person’s death. What can kill a horse can overlook a mouse. The nature of poison is ephemeral and complex, and if not always subtle, not always brutal either. Many are those attempts at murder that go afoul because of incorrect dosage, or unknown protective immunities, or an unsympathetic knowledge and sense of,
feeling for, the nature of this poison. Thus, many that have come to be called “poisons” are often only those potions and powders that always work: the arsenics of this world that are “so brutally frank that they brook and harbor no gainsaying,” as Dr. Lydgate Hill, the famous eighteenth-century ernthologist, has written. “If one only had a decent familiarity with the nature of poison, its very nature, then one could use poison and not kill. Then we could have little oars that guide the voyage but do not sink the ship. Then we could have slightly bigger dippers that topple the mast but do not fell the fleet. That way lies cure and help and life, not death.” This quotation is from Hill’s Terrestrial Infirmities: Poison as a Way of Life.

  The entire medical system of the entire world is now based, quite comfortably, and quite incorrectly, and quite tragically, on the testing of blood.

  BLOOD CAN BE FULL OF SHIT!

  My Vel confirmed this.

  That, unfortunately, is my conclusion, so far, of my life’s work. (I’m not dead yet, but no matter.) It has taken me some fifty years to find it out. I couldn’t believe it when I discovered it. It’s Israel and his goddamn glause that made me see that blood is only blood. That the world’s foremost expert on blood should, almost in a deathbed confession, tell the world that blood isn’t worth everything as a marker, as a tool, as the guaranteed lifesaver everyone believed, as anything other than some sort of water that runs through our veins, not as a nurturer but as a conveyor belt, is pretty important news to anyone who’s interested, which I hope is just about every doctor and researcher and scientist and person who goes into a hospital. However, I know better. My truth will lie right here as dead as Lydgate Hill.

  There are poisons that are undetectable in the blood.

  There are poisons that are undetectable in shit.

  And, goddammit, I am going to sort this out before I croak. And I think this UC shit will take me there.

  You can measure blood until you are blue in the face but you may be missing the root cause of the disease, any disease. Poison is not always represented in blood. That’s why a Vel test is so important. It cannot tell you where the poison is or what it’s doing, but it can tell you if you have poison in you or not and how much of it there is. There is no other test like this. And as life proceeds further toward new centuries on earth, it’s become medically evident, statistically irrefutable, and alarmingly relevant that more and more people are testing positive for Vel. This is a state of affairs as frightening as the fact there’s no information to tell you about what you can do when you discover that a Vel test indicates you’re positive for poison. All of this parallels distinctly this woebegone Underlying Condition.

  I was taught it’s the Lord’s question, Alone, to answer: why people remain alive at all. Well, I wanted to answer the question myself. Still do. I suspect most scientists are the same. It’s amazing there haven’t been more plagues than there have been, and it’s amazing that we’re still here, and I want to fucking know why. One thing I do know is that it doesn’t have anything to do with the fucking indomitability of the fucking human spirit. My cousin says it’s either good luck or bad luck. I think the secret to life is nerve. You really have to be able to say, Go fuck yourself. Humanism? Forget it.

  After Nunce’s death, I began to speak another language. As you’ve seen. And will continue to see as I catch a second breath.

  THE MASSACRE AT FRUIT ISLAND

  My name is Lucid Hooker and I am the third Lucid Hooker. Lucid Hooker III is what my Bible calls me. This is how I got to Fruit Island by way of Sagg.

  How did I come here? Why do I stay?

  He desired our home in Ontuit, our “patient load,” he called them, did Dr. Maurice Punic, Sr., the father. He offered us $500 hard cash for title, name, and bodies, which was not stingy. Old bent-over Ezra was glad enough to relieve our family from this burden, this “diabolikel disablement,” and which burden was enjoined upon our family by Hogarth’s will. “I have done it from respect for the dead, for the love of Christ, but no more. I no longer hear any call but that of weariness over the putridness of man. No more, I say, no more!” So spoke Ezra when he approved the sale.

  Ezra, like all of us, was wallowing in shame and guilt. Shit. Hogarth. Syphilitics. What had Hookers come to? I was glad to get away from home and him and them and that! Moreover, since Uncle Hogarth held my infant hands and kissed my lips goodbye in death, I feared I had been exposed and was facing a fate like his unless it suited the Lord to send a cure. Toward this end I was happy to join with Dr. Maurice Punic, Sr., to save my self and soul. I had the chance to leave with Dr. Punic, to travel on a boat far from the stench of the Hookers, and I grabbed at it like food for the hungry frightened child I was.

  It is painful to be adult now, to see how enchained I was from so early an age. A bondage caught so young is like a body buried alive in a tomb.

  Yes, I am the living dead, and my record of these years will prove it. I do not want to live beyond the completion of this crude journal of a cruel and fantastical history. I shall die before its receipt into the world as Truth.

  As helper in Ontuit, I saw that there was puke and shit most everywhere, and it was left to me to cart it all away, to the bay itself, which was soon brown and black in color. Massachusetts Waste would have none of it.

  Uncle Hog left us all his notes. Acres of gardens are our yards and my childhood playground, made up of herbs and plants from everywhere around the globe that he had read or heard or dreamed about. He grew them all. Forks of plantain, stalks of Nervil, roots of ashforth, wormwood of Labe, pages of these magic names, sounding so of the far-away, we try them all, our local Dr. Pleasants and I, but in the end so useless. There came a time where there was naught but the voidings and ghastly stomach cramps and violent wretchings of dozens upon dozens unable to hold anything inside them. Many lost their minds, their words nonsensical and their eyeballs rolling backward. Was it blameworthy or in any way un-Christian that I longed to leave? Dr. Pleasants could not look me in the eye when I sought his opinion, and I could see he would be leaving himself. “There is a limit, lad, beyond which even the good Lord cannot push us further.”

  I wanted to leave for other reasons much more private. I knew that with the Hookers I could find but woe. Each uncle and cousin seemed more bereft of sense. Uncle Hogarth had pushed Hooker patience too far. I feared I was also carrying inside me the poisons of my ancestors and the sins of which I could never be free, so strong their pull, so intractable their power to drive me to perform acts of “human kind” and “charity.”

  How many years of this I can’t remember since each day was as awful as the next. Thomas Hooker was indeed punishing us for Uncle Hog.

  Dr. Maurice Punic, Sr., looks me up and down. He betakes me into another room and makes me undress for him to see my nakedness. Then he nods yes. “I will include you in my purchase.” I don’t know why I feel relief.

  Lucid Jr., and his grandfather Ezra Jr., open wine to celebrate. They speak of Dr. Punic as “our reward for Grace.” “I am free,” I say to myself as we help lead the inmates to the harbor, now stinking too, where we board a boat that will take us down the coast and across the Sound to yet another new world, Dr. Punic’s, a new world in a place called Sagg, where the Sailors’ Institute has a big house for us paid from Mr. Hamilton’s twenty cents per sailor all these years. The Hooker Home in Ontuit is no more. Long live the future Hooker Home in Sagg. Dr. Punic hands me a glass of rum “to drink to tomorrow and all that will come of it.” It is my first glass of hard liquor and I am soon drunk. I am so very young when all this starts, when I leave home at just on fifteen years.

  Dr. Punic says he will apprentice me to be a doctor. “Wellness is possible,” he tells me, and I am most excited and impressed. He sounds like a man possessed, so intense is he in his feelings. I cannot tell you even now his origin or native place. Punics have been here forever, he says. Why then does his tongue twist strangely on many words? He sounds most foreign to me. But he promis
es to teach me everything he knows. I have prayed for so long for God to save me. I feared this could never be.

  We leave before dawn, because no one wishes the world outside to know of our departure or our destination. There are no faces of friends from my lifetime to wave goodbye and Godspeed. I say a prayer that health and well-being will return to this benighted place with our departure.

  On crossing o’er the water my gut wretches up more than I believe can be inside me. Finally comes blood, from my mouth and from my end; but I should not say finally because my innards spew forth still more: yellow bile and green water and I think the very linings of my being. Dr. Punic stands in his long yellow rubber coat and watches me from an upper deck. He offers no aid. When finally my heavings and evacuations stop, with my rear end hanging over portside, and I stand up and let the whipping wind and rain wash me off as best they can, he nods and comes to me and tells me that God has cleansed me for the days ahead. Now I am ready, he says. I nod back, wanting to believe him. Indeed I do believe him.

  We arrive in Sagg with one hundred of the poxed from home, fifty more than we’d housed, but word had already got around and other poxed showed up just as we sailed. We are to live in a large house situated on the bay, already prepared under the supervision of Dr. Punic’s, son, Dr. Maurice Punic, Jr. They are doubles of each other in height and weight and quiet demeanor, distinguishable only by the years that line the elder’s face. Their hair is black, their eyes are gray, their skin a palest white. They do not know how to talk in loud tones. To hear them I must lean up close. They are somber men, which loans them depth so they give off an air of trust. Around the house the Punics tour, Junior pointing out this and that to Senior, so that it becomes clear that Senior has not been here before. Father nods to son, pleased with what he sees. I do not especially notice that Dr. Punic Jr. is no more than twenty-five years to my fifteen, because the paleness of his skin renders him older. There are many bedrooms but four at least must berth together.