The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  It was a good thing he left when he did. There was massive conscription into the army, no matter where you were, the Union or the Confederacy or Croatia or Timbuktu. On his way west he had to dodge skirmishes of this civil war. His English was poor, and he never knew which side was doing what to whom. All the way west he was stepping over dead bodies in abandoned fields or standing on hills looking down on bands of children manning cannons pointed at other children. What were they fighting for? What were they fighting against? What was the prize? It all seemed to have something to do with people who had black skin and whether you could own them or not. Like many Middle Europeans who regarded colored skin as exotic, he couldn’t conceive that so many white people would kill each other because of it. No, he would say, it must be something else. They must really be angry about something else. This slavery business must be hiding something deeper. “More deep.” He got caught and thrown into makeshift prisons in Pennsylvania and Kansas. He was evidently freed because he refused to speak English and they figured he wasn’t an American. Nobody else in the prison was either, so far as his ear could tell, but they were all lined up and shot because they’d tried to talk English and he talked gibberish, like a child playing foreigner would make up and spew out, and it saved him.

  Over the years he wrote down bits in the secret ledger he kept of his illicit businesses, which all had to do with sex. He wrote, and he was very rich by this time, hugely rich, that he hated America, every second he’d been here, he hated a place that did precious little to help good men and women honestly feed the families every religion was pressuring everyone so endlessly to bear. He wrote that this was why he’d found no difficulty in breaking a law, any law, all laws, gladly. “This hypocrisy was America, is America, and will always be America,” he wrote in that ledger, more than once.

  He wrote that he had seen in prison men covered with sores, on their arms and legs and trunks, men whose mouths were pocked and swollen with disease, men whose semen was black or green or speckled with blood. He said men were so hungry for sexual release they didn’t care when or where or who saw them do whatever—masturbating, screwing each other, taking each other in their mouths, fucking stray dogs. When they were intimate with each other, though, they would call each other endearing names like “Little Lamb.” He was very touched by these scenes. American men seemed so hard the rest of the time. Even if one man came before another there was much solicitation on both sides to see that the other had been satisfied enough. These were the only instances of tenderness Turvey encountered until he set up his women and saw how they, too, tended each other. But the women needed no sexual excitement in order to care.

  He’d seen men with men in Croatia plenty, which was not what was surprising to him; what was surprising was how much men in the growing cities needed sex, so much so that when they didn’t have women they might do anything at all with and to each other. And when they had their women in view, they would scorn and ridicule and often beat and maim their former love mates, denying their coupling had ever taken place. Yes, this was more hypocrisy for Turvey, but it gave him the idea for how to get started on his fortune.

  I said he sold women. That was before the whorehouses. I wasn’t around until the whorehouses but I want to give you plenty of front-and-center information so when I make my entrance later you can understand me, which I want you to do, Abe, so badly, because I can’t, not right now at any rate, and I need you to.

  Men needed wives most of all. That’s what Turvey learned in prison. They didn’t want them. They needed them. They needed them to have their release, and the law and God said they couldn’t have that release unless there was an official piece of paper entitling the bearers to have sexual intercourse legally. “That’s all it was,” Turvey wrote. “Why can’t people realize that’s all it says?” All this civilization built on the piece of paper. A piece of paper! which says the law is love. But all he’d heard every man in prison say was fuck. “That’s where and when I learned the difference between love and sex. The difference between a piece of paper and truth. The difference between truth and lies. Hypocrisy!” Hypocrisy was a word, once he learned it, he used a lot.

  Before he left Kansas he posted a broadside outside a grocery store. He was in a town called Nordick; it wasn’t very big, a few hundred people or so. He said he was looking for single women to take west, where he guaranteed them husbands. Ten women showed up at the Pony Express depot, suitcases all packed. He hadn’t the vaguest notion how to find those husbands, how to do anything he’d said he would do, or even how much to charge them for their new wives. He just had a hunch men out west needed women.

  Of course he was right. Getting them together was “damn good fun.” The women were all ages and shapes and sizes. He evidently sampled not a few of them on the journey. One of them got pregnant. When the baby was born, after he’d sold her, she sent it to him in a box, dead, killed by her own hand, she said, lest she be reminded of its father, who had delivered her into a slavery she’d never imagined possible for a white woman. In the beginning he got a few hundred for most of them, more for the beautiful ones. He mainly sold them at an auction in Fairchild, Nevada, a central mining town where women were indeed scarce. When he came to open one of his houses there a few years later, it was the most beautiful one—Torrence, she called herself by then—who became his madam. She’d shot the husband dead three months after the piece of paper. Whatever her motive, it must have been good enough because she was acquitted at what passed for a trial, by a magistrate who came through town every few months on horseback and rendered judgment, and whom she said she’d fucked for her freedom.

  Turvey made twenty or thirty more trips and sold maybe five hundred women. “I made several hundred thousand dollars,” a startlingly large amount of money in those days. “I wasn’t proud of it,” he wrote. “I wasn’t ashamed of it either. Maybe that don’t make sense to some. But it does to me.”

  Turvey hit Colorado on his way back east to buy another lot of stock. He decided he was tired of traveling. Over the past years there had been numerous gold rushes, beginning in 1859 at the Comstock Lode, so by now many places west of the Rockies were filled with hungry men. “I understood hungry men.” Denver, which was one of the first places folks seemed to arrive at, was rowdy and young, a place men wanted to get to on their journeys, a goal: “Let’s go to Denver and have us some fun!” When he hit Denver and heard all this, Turvey knew what kind of fun was going to swell his fortune.

  Why did he do it? He hated prostitution. In Croatia his own mother had been taken into prostitution as a young wife. Hosta. Hosta Hartinckwarjender. Hosta was literally grabbed away from her husband and imprisoned in a whorehouse for a number of years. Only when she had lost her looks was she released. By then she’d evidently given birth to several dozen children who were put to death immediately by the madam; when she got out, her husband, Turvey’s father, had died, and all her half dozen children, except for her last born before entering the whorehouse, Turvey, had grown up and moved on, to where she didn’t know.

  Turvey had waited for his momma. She came back to their tiny town in northern Croatia and there she found Turvey, alone, carving wood and planting potatoes, and he held her close and told her how much he had missed her, and bathed her and found her some of her former clothes, and showed her all the money he’d managed to save up from his carvings. He told her they were going to live in the New World. No sooner had they hit New York than Hosta met a man on the street and walked off with him. Turvey was in a boardinghouse checking to see if they had any cheap rooms. He never saw her again. He said that’s when he stopped talking much to anybody. He walked the streets of New York. He walked to Philadelphia, but he felt crowded there, too. Then to Scranton and Allentown, where the mines were. Mines he recognized. Croatia had mines and he’d worked them and he went down inside the earth once more, which evidently gave him some sort of comfort in his misery. Yes, he sent for the remnants of his family when he got rich in Denver,
but there was only one son who responded, perhaps the only one who survived, Horace Sr., my father’s father, who got the letter when it arrived in Pennsylvania some fifteen years later, and who answered the summons. Horace Sr. must have been a lot like the Turvey who waited at home in Croatia, through thick and thin, plague and famine, death after death, for his parent to return from somewhere.

  By the time Horace Sr. arrived, Turvey was living in a hundred-room mansion and was richer than God. Every single room was filled to overflowing with Things. Big Things. Paintings with scenes that needed whole walls to hang on. Furniture that also stretched from wall to wall. It wasn’t awful taste that was out of control, just acquisitiveness nurtured by a life of being hungry, by the sheer need to purchase, the way starving beggars scratch for as much food as their fingers can hold and eat too much when they get it. You know how rich men can never have enough? Like that. The son looked questioningly at the father, and the father took him by the hand and drove him in the buggy downtown to a whorehouse. Horace laughed out loud when he found out what his father had done to make his fortune. I should say here, because I realize I haven’t, that Turvey was perhaps all of thirty years old by now; Horace was sixteen. That’s how much life had been packed into lives then. Turvey had been all of fourteen when he fathered his last lot of kids; he must have started fathering them when he was no more than eleven or twelve. He was fifteen when he shepherded his first lot of women out west to sell. And now he’d been in the whorehouse business for fifteen years. It’s hard for us to imagine how young people were when they did things in those days. They probably figured they might not be around for long. We wait forever now, don’t we? Well, perhaps not you, Abe.

  “This here’s mine,” the father said to the son in that first whorehouse. Before the son could respond, he was led back to the buggy and driven to the northern outskirts of town and deposited dab in the middle of another bustling house of hookers and food and drink and ragtime piano and noise, lots of lusty noise. “This here’s mine,” the father said again.

  This little tour went on for several days, around and around the territory, to over two dozen houses, the last one so far out in the wilderness that Horace thought he must be in Canada or Mexico. Turvey asked him, “Now do you understand how rich we are? Do you got any qualms about becoming my partner in this particular business?” And Horace roared again. “Hell, no. I can’t wait,” he said.

  And he couldn’t. He later claimed to have screwed every single one of the hookers in all the two dozen houses. “I had to try them all out, just like any businessman should know his wares. I had to taste them and judge their quality.” He decided he wanted a new name, so he and Turvey somehow settled on Hardware. Horace Hardware. I’ve always thought they were making a bad joke about the women, all of them getting such hard wear. But no, you can sniff the original name in it. The girls all loved Horace, as they loved Turvey. You’ve got to realize these places were an important part of society. They were places where men could have fun, and most of the women were having fun too, more fun than they’d be having most anywhere else. I asked Horace how and where he and Turvey found so many women. “There were a lot of girls down on their luck everywhere. Husbands dead. Killed by Indians. Never came back from some war. There were always little wars one place or another. Men they was engaged to never met them at the train. Poor girls who just wanted to eat. Bored girls who couldn’t wait to get out of their boring little towns. Lookers who wanted to be admired. Dames who genuinely liked to get screwed. And don’t forget: all of them, I don’t care what they said, were looking for a husband who would set them up in a house with a hundred rooms. A few of them found that, and so the hope was always kept alive.”

  Guilt and God still lay outside and down the street. But they were coming. Church groups were starting up, and different moralities were taking hold and growing tentacles, and all those sermons about damnation from the East were not so softly beginning to be heard across the land. Turvey ignored them all.

  When I was a little girl, my father, Horace Jr., had one hundred whorehouses. He could have had more, but he said he’d stop when he reached one hundred and he did. I used to play in them. Grandfather Horace still collected all the money himself. He was driven around by his bodyguards, and one by one he went to his houses, and was handed the bags of cash, and stashed them in banks, a different one for each house, in case any bank went bust. He took all the ledgers home and stayed up all night studying them and verifying how much each girl had turned. If a madam cheated she was fired on the spot, and if a girl wasn’t popular he found some other work for her, in the kitchen or the laundry or as a maid, if she wanted it. It must have been a prodigious task, going to one hundred locations; hundreds of miles separated them; but he did it all himself, and like a father confessor he heard all the complaints the girls didn’t want to tell their madam. They trusted him, and he never, so far as I know, let them down. He loved his women and he was happy to pay them. Honest work for honest wages, he said, and he believed it.

  Turvey died from some disease that sounded like syphilis or elephantiasis. His whole sex area … His genitals and testicles all swelled up to enormous size, and then sort of got rancid and infected, until he was pretty much one huge pus-filled sore. The doctor was repelled. He’d never seen anything like it. He didn’t know what to do and no one he talked to knew what to do. Turvey’s stare frightened many a man, and that was part of how he held power so long without getting in trouble with the law, with politicians, with any group or religion. He claimed he never paid anybody off. It’s not hard to believe that this fear alone gave him such power, so that even his own doctor was so afraid of him he couldn’t tell him properly that he was dying.

  Remember, don’t forget, that Turvey never stopped hating America, and really, if you think about it, hating women, for it was his mother who abandoned him, and in America, and whorehouses and hookers were just about the most vengeful thing he could think of to get even. He loved his girls, but he never forgot what they were. God knows what made Horace Sr. always cheerful. It was probably that he’d starved for so long and then been led to El Dorado and told, “It’s yours.” That would make anyone happy. Sometimes I wonder if certain traits just skip a generation. My father was just as filled with bile as Great-grandfather Turvey, although he loved his girls as his forebears had.

  This is how Turvey died: he was punctured with a huge needle so all the pus and poison and bad bile inside him that had puffed him up could drain out. The doctor said he recommended it to keep him alive. The doctor said he never thought it would kill him. But Turvey knew it would, and it did.

  I guess that’s all I want to tell you for now. I need a break. You’ll see why.

  AN AGE OF HATE

  It is both appalling and perfectly understandable how and why a wretched human being like Andrew Johnson becomes president of the United States following Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.

  The Age of Hate is what a sympathetic supporter named his book about Johnson, which claims him as the good guy and the wronged one, against mountains of evidence to the contrary. He was a pig, a bad man in office at an especially wrong time, when The American People, all 35 million of them, desperately needed better. Instead they got a man who led us in every wrong direction.

  Johnson was indeed poor, very poor, “the poorest of any man who ever reached the White House,” writes the Columbia historian Eric Foner in The Reader’s Companion to the American Presidency. Johnson gloried in telling you that he rose from the dirt, to become a tailor, to become a president.

  Here is a brief sampling of pertinent clips from Foner’s essay.

  The first president ever impeached … one of the least successful American chief executives … he owned five slaves … Johnson defended slavery against the abolitionists … he did not believe blacks had any role to play in Reconstruction … indeed he harbored deeply racist sentiments toward the former slaves … Johnson would insist that blacks possessed less “capacity fo
r government than any other race of people,” and when left to themselves showed a “constant tendency to relapse into barbarism” … the terms Johnson laid down for the South’s readmission were amazingly lenient, especially for a man who had spoken so insistently of punishing treason … he ordered the return of abandoned plantation lands to their former owners when parcels had already been divided among blacks in Virginia, South Carolina, and Louisiana … Government had no obligation to assist the former slaves … clothing blacks with the privileges of citizenship discriminated against white people … Clearly Johnson envisioned no sweeping social revolution as a sequel to emancipation. He compared himself to Jesus Christ and at one point suggested that divine intervention had removed Lincoln to elevate Johnson to the White House. He believed that “the people of the South, poor, quiet, unoffending, harmless, are to be trodden under foot to protect the niggers…”

  This then is the president of The American People after Abraham Lincoln. It is as if Lincoln never lived, which is obviously how a good portion of The American People want it to be.

  BLOOD AND SHIT

  With dead bodies piled everywhere across the landscape, problems with blood begin to assert themselves. It’s all over the place. You can’t get away from it. It’s on the ground, in the dirt and mud, on bushes and tree bark, on doorsteps and porches and building doorways. It is on furniture and floors and on beds and linens, should there be any of this last item left after years of bandaging. It’s on clothing, everywhere and everyone’s. Animals carry it from their snoots to their assholes. They roll in it, eat it, shit it out.