by Larry Kramer
* * *
Horace Jr., my father, wasn’t much of a talker either, and he was filled with hate as well. But his targets weren’t so specific as Turvey’s. Horace Jr. didn’t think much about his country or his town; he hated himself. He didn’t want to run this business, and maybe that was to his credit, except it wasn’t for moral reasons that he wanted out. He had no compunctions about enslaving women or providing sex. No, he wanted freedom. He had the wanderlust, but his wife, my mother, Urvah—she was a Disciple of Lovejoy—enchained him with even more women he couldn’t be free of. She made him marry half a dozen more. They all bore his kids. That house of a hundred rooms was pretty filled up, one way or another, by the time Urvah and her brood of Lovejoys got through with their moving in. I have no notion how many siblings I have. All this was against the law in Colorado and one day the law said No! and Urvah packed everyone up and went further west to where they came from. Horace and I stayed. Urvah tried to take me and I wouldn’t go. Like Turvey, like Horace Sr., I’m the one kid who doesn’t follow the rest.
I don’t know how it all got so mixed up in both our heads. Perhaps because he was used to having so much sex with so many women, women who were at his disposal in the eyes of some church somewhere, a church that was sanctioned by a God he believed in as much as he believed in any god—perhaps because of all that, something said to him, Reach out your hand and take your daughter. And something inside of me said, Reach out your hand and take him back.
And I did reach my hand out and take his into mine, and hold on to it, not letting go.
I was smart. I loved being smart. I loved knowing all the answers to all the questions any teacher asked. I loved doing my homework and reading any book I could find. I loved being the only child. No, Poppa wasn’t the most talkative man in the world, but we were all alone, just the two of us, and I was really lady of the house. I was ten years old when Momma left. I was eleven when she sent her first emissary to kidnap me and take me to Utah. The kidnapping almost worked, too. After that, Poppa saw to it I was properly guarded all the time. There were thick bars on my bedroom windows, and all kinds of trick traps all over the place. He took me out of regular school and hired me private teachers, and my classroom was in what he said was the safest place he knew of: one of his whorehouses. He moved me around from house to house; even I didn’t know which week or day I’d have my lessons where. The net result was that not only did I get a thorough education and one to be grateful for, but I know whorehouses inside out, and women, too, let me tell you.
In the end I came to cry for most of these women. I came to love them, almost all of them, even the mean bitches. All those “whore with a heart of gold” stories told since the beginning of time—clichés come from truths. Every single woman was there because she felt she didn’t have a rightful place anywhere else. The law doesn’t protect women. Men don’t protect women. Oh, they think they do! But it’s only some male dream of dominance and it flits away in a breeze. These women, hundreds of them over the years, gave me more love than I’ll ever have again. And I saw firsthand courage as great or greater than that displayed by any soldier on any battlefield, and more consistent too. Some went away, but they’d come back, if not to hook then to do anything that would allow them to stay inside the house. The house was safe. Hardwares from the beginning had made it safe. And this safety inside brought them together. I can’t find the words to describe this feeling they all shared. Even though many of them hated each other’s guts, each of them would fight like a tiger for each of her sisters against any impropriety from the outside world. I never saw such tenderness as when the girls tended someone who was sick or ready to give birth, or had to part with the baby after nursing, or was heartsick in love and ill used by a man who didn’t care, which few of them did. I think it was because the act was so … loaded with implicit bravery—I mean, giving your body and being invaded by strangers for a fee is a violent striptease, of soul and flesh, a kind of nakedness and vulnerability that no one who doesn’t do it can ever fully comprehend—that I came to have so much respect for all of them.
And I came to have respect for my poppa, who held it all together. This was his empire, as much as Mr. Rockefeller’s oil and Mr. Vanderbilt’s railways and Mr. Ford’s automobiles. He was probably richer, too, though you won’t see Horace Hardware, Jr., written up in any financial histories. Poppa was God the Father to these girls. He never let them down, which was how he earned their worship. He was always on their side. There wasn’t a man, even if he might be right in an altercation, with whom Poppa would publicly side over one of his girls. Oh, I was proud of him! Wherever I was I ran to hold his hand the minute he showed up. And I reported to him, not about anything new I was learning from my schoolbooks, but about house news, who had said something so funny we’d all laughed for the entire day, or who had received a letter from the outside world and what was in it.
* * *
The telling is becoming increasingly difficult for her. Abe sees this and tries to comfort her; but she pushes away the arms trying to encircle her and warm her. “I am going to do this my way, calmly and without hysterics. You are my test case,” she says, moving away from him. “When I see Dr. Derektor I am going to be able to look him straight in the eyes and say, ‘I told Abe this whole story, the whole harsh and unlovely lovely story, and I didn’t cry one stinking lousy second. I did it like an adult.’”
“It’s OK to cry” is all he can get out before she puts her hand over his mouth to quiet him so she can proceed.
* * *
I said he violated me, my father. Yes, he did. He took me to bed as soon as I made up my mind that’s exactly what I wanted from him. All the other girls had their special men, and Poppa was my special man, and it made complete sense to me that I would do with Poppa what they did with their favorites. Maidie and Ruta and … I guess most of the girls saw it coming and watched with caution and care. It wasn’t that they thought it was wrong—there’s very little that’s “wrong” in a whorehouse or a whore’s history: a body is a body and it’s used in many different ways by many different people. Maybe God comes along for some and says such-and-such, but God is a superimposed morality that’s got little to do with the here and now inside a whorehouse. No, they weren’t concerned for the wrong, only for the potential hurt. They were forever protecting each other from hurt. Because the potential for hurt, for everyone, not just a little girl, is enormous. Tears are shed just as air is breathed and scent put on to cover the smell of sweat.
They saw I wanted it to happen. I wanted the physical love of my father. To me it was the most natural, sensible development in the world. He was the boss and I was one of his girls, the highest placed of his girls. I don’t know if he saw it coming like they all saw it coming. I suspect one of the tougher ones—Alice or Pearla, Stutie, Matilda, there were quite a few who had the nerve to stand up to him, now that I think of it—pointed out to him what was happening and told him to give it some thought before he gave it some action, but he continued to let me hold his hand tightly when he showed up, and to let me dress older than my age when he took me out to a fancy restaurant downtown or to go shopping at the Emporium, where I could choose anything, anything, I desired. Can you see what a magical childhood I had?
* * *
Abe can’t, but he says nothing. He thinks only of screams from upstairs rooms, and of blood, endless blood, and of what can happen when the wrong men and women chain themselves to each other for lifetimes of hell.
Doris isn’t really looking to him for an answer. Her story has taken her to another time and place; she isn’t with him; she is back in her father’s arms.
* * *
I am twelve years old. That’s not too early. (You weren’t all that much older, with me.) I choose my birthday night as the night I will lure Poppa to my bed. He’s given me a huge party, in the afternoon, on the lawn, hundreds of people from everywhere. The mayor is there. The sheriff. The governor of Colorado. An emissary from the p
resident himself! My poppa invites all the important political people and I wonder if they know that the beautiful women they’re mingling with, each in a new dress I’ve asked Poppa to buy them for my party, are all his lovely whores! They must know! I want them all to know!
Because this beautiful party is for me I am in heaven. I am one of my father’s women. Oh, I know what their fortune is. To be on loan for the afternoon. To serve men, to be at their beck and call, and to be faceless, to be without a last name. It seems more important to me than ever that I be their savior, that I give them a last name and restore their pride. I don’t know if I can explain it. I just know I’ve been given things that can prove useful to all of us, and that it’s my responsibility to do all this, though I don’t have a notion beyond bedding down the power that possesses all of us. That’s the first step, and I know on my twelfth birthday that I want it to be this very night, for there can never be a night that completes a day on which I’ve been so happy and felt so pretty. I know how all the girls prepare their men, how if they’re nervous, or worried, the answer is always champagne. I see to it that my father is champagned and ready, when everyone has gone, to carry his tired little daughter back to her suite and lay her down on her canopied bed. That’s when I open my eyes and look at him, as a lover and not as a father. I reach up and brush his lips with mine. He grabs me in an embrace so hungry and so forceful that I know he wants all this, too. He comes into my bed and he stays in that bed with me for five years, until I come east to Baltimore and go to college there and meet you on the street, staring at me with the kind of hunger I understand.
* * *
Just letting all this out of her system again (the first time was for Dr. Derektor) makes her feel there is a certain comprehensibility to her story—that it can make sense, that it does make sense if she looks hard enough inside it, that she hasn’t done anything wrong, and that, indeed, she can even find within it a pridefulness and courage and nobility.
Only … only … she is the only one who takes these qualities away from her experience. Abe doesn’t say a thing.
SHMUEL
In 1910 a doctor opens a practice in Washington specializing in what are then referred to as … well, they aren’t discussed out loud, so there probably isn’t a descriptive name that’s taken hold yet. Nervous disorders is too modern and vapors is too yesterday.
Freud has come to America on that famous visit to Clark University in Worcester in 1909; many of his disciples are now in place, mostly in New York, where else? Washington, as usual, is behind the times when it comes to taking care of personal business. Dr. Shmuel Derektor is Washington’s lone pioneer. He studied with Freud in Vienna and went to visit him in Worcester, where he received the great man’s permission to don his mantle in D.C.
Most people don’t even know that emotional problems which are all in the mind exist. Exactly, Dr. Shmuel Derektor responds. Pioneers must proselytize, if not with facts then with convincing evidence of some sort via the cathartic guidance of words.
“There have always been illnesses whose symptoms are mental, not physical. For centuries doctors have been aware that not all maladies stem from physical ills. So why has it taken so long for someone to come along with help? Particularly here in Washington, where in some areas modern work is actually under way. The National Institute of Tumor Science is a good example. But then tumors are more specific and visible than diseases of the spirit. Is it, then, as if these inside-the-head things are not to be cured? Precisely how to treat the nonphysical has always been in dispute. You cannot just direct an X-ray at it and zap it from existence. But now, these new ‘psychiatrists,’ or ‘psychoanalysts,’ which is what I call myself, we doctors of the mind, now we are beginning to say that yes, that is exactly what you do to get better, zap the neurosis, for that is what the problem is called, with an X-ray, only in this case the X-ray is not radiation but words. Jokes are made about us and those who visit us are suspect. We are distrusted men. No, Mr. Abraham Masturbov, even though I know your intentions are honorable, I cannot discuss with you the problems of my patient. No, do not hate me. I am too weak and powerless to be hated. Why is that? I don’t know why. Didn’t our forebears, for centuries, lock helpless people up, or drown them in tubs, or shoot them full of poisons? But I am contradicting myself. Which is, of course, the essence of my treatment.”
* * *
Abe is undeterred. First he finds them a bigger apartment. She isn’t ready for the fancy mansion yet. Then he buys another parcel of land, which he quickly turns over for a profit. In this area he can do no wrong. Each potentially profitable deal is like a hunk of raw meat hanging in front of a voracious tiger named Abe. He is going to have more and more, and buy more and more, pieces of earth and devour this city. He is going to be so hugely rich that the word rich will no longer have any meaning for him, it will be so paltry in comparison. Money will make him feel good in a way that nothing else can. He fucks the land as he fucked every woman he could find looking for Doris. The old rich Jews smile. They smell a winner, for weren’t they once like Abe themselves? They want to make deals with him. He scorns them. He only makes deals with himself. “In all my years of practicing law,” Lucas told me, “I have never seen such hunger and determination for the absolute control of real estate and its nonstop acquisition. Do I think he would have amassed such wealth without Doris? I asked her once. She laughed and said of course Abe would have been Abe. But I know a softness to Abe, the softness she came to see and indeed rely on every day. They say that behind every powerful man there’s a strong and influential woman. Doris certainly was and remains that to him.”
Yes, Abe asks Doris to marry him. She says no. She must first finish her “analysis” with Dr. Derektor. She has much to analyze. She does not want it to stop. Finally, by the time the war comes along, she feels she is analyzed. She asks Abe for enough money to buy a big house in the best neighborhood in town. Yes, he tells her, it’s time they bought a huge house in the Northwest and what she wants sounds perfect, with acres of gardens behind high walls protecting it from the outside world, though with a terrace overlooking all of town. Here they could live an idyll. He asks her again to marry him. He buys all the land surrounding the house so they can be in a completely private paradise. She asks him to put it all in her name. Everything. He gladly does so; in fact, it isn’t such a bad idea, for the taxes, which the government is learning about and he senses will learn a great deal more. She is touched by his compliance with her requests. He does not tell her that he is selling her his own house.
And then she tells him that she is going to open a whorehouse. Here. In this new house. Her family has been in whorehouses for almost a hundred years by now.
Then she tells him that she and he are never to marry.
* * *
After the sessions with Doris, Dr. Derektor is overwhelmed by so many emotions. When she at last finishes telling him her story, he asks for some time off. She runs to him, tugs at his jacket, begs him to tell her for once what he is thinking, what comes into his mind! Finally he turns to her and raises his fist to threaten … what? God? The gods? Freud himself?
“Please, please,” he says in a voice that whispers in its uncertainty, “I must think, I must consult, I must…” Dr. Freud and his many writings have somehow not prepared him for the stories of Doris and Abe.
For weeks he cancels his appointments with her. At first she thinks she will fall apart for good. He has been her life preserver. She fell apart and he put her back together. As his daily absences continue, she wonders if she’ll break down again. She doesn’t. Instead, she grows stronger, so strong as to become, she realizes, enormously proud of herself. In fact, it’s not so long before she has no desire to see Dr. Derektor ever again. When he finally contacts her, not even with the courtesy of a phone call, just a curt note stating that he is prepared to resume their daily meetings at three, she tosses it in a wastebasket, and thinks no more about it.
* * *
So
there you have the beginning of what will sarcastically be called the Sexopolis Case.
THANATOPSIS
Well, we have not exactly been paying much attention to health and hospitals and disease and plagues, have we? Or have we been paying too much attention to them, only not knowing it?
Dame Lady Hermia Bledd-Wrench contributes the following from her growing arsenal of irrefutable evidence of the evil that is afoot:
I was certainly too young to remember any of this. But that I was alive by the mid-1920s while this was going on has caused my blood to boil today. So many of intellect and caring had no inkling that any of this was going on!
Between 1912 and 1932 there are not only three major International Eugenics Conferences but a plethora of smaller ones. Eugenics is all the rage for People Who Want to Do Something for Humanity. (Am I beginning to sound too much like you, Frederick?) The Mary Harrimans, mother and daughter, are indefatigable with the generosity of their bottomless pockets, along with those of Mr. Rockefeller, who has taken a special interest in funding all things German.
American eugenicists have longed for twins to advance their research. Mr. Rockefeller funds this, and research on twins in Germany explodes, with Americans in this field crying out in alarm that “Germany is beating us at our own game.” By now John D. Rockefeller and his foundation have donated almost $4 million to hundreds of German researchers to investigate what he does not see advancing fast enough in his own country. One of Mr. Rockefeller’s favorite beneficiaries, that Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, evidently a beloved eugenicist in both countries, who, even after all his hideous deeds, lives until a ripe old age in Munich and is even given distinguished medical and scientific awards, predicts that his work would yield “a total solution to the Jewish problem.” Verschuer’s longtime assistant is Josef Mengele, whose own new assistant will shortly be Gottmarr Grodzo. When eugenics will be declared, at last, a crime against humanity, those guilty will cite in their defense the “progressive” California sterilization statutes in operation since 1909 and subsequently expanded under the “leadership” of Jeshua Brinestalker.
