The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  He had found nothing wrong with her. Why does she keep returning to see him?

  At eighteen years of age, Israel had received the Marcus Dridge Award for studying menoma in Chile, in the Iwacky Indians, a small tribe living high in the Andes Mountains where it is very cold and often freezing. He takes a leave of absence from Mater Nostra to go there and observe and record much that could eliminate their scourge. Diseases come and go. They ravage tribes and tributaries, Babel and Berlin. Entire populations and cultures disappear just like that and soon no one can even remember the name of whatever it was that killed them or who they were.

  There is little money in poor Chile to carry out Israel’s recommendations, most of them having to do with personal hygiene—don’t shit where you eat, that sort of thing—and the Iwacky disappear from the face of history. These are Israel’s first on-the-job lessons: you could find the cure to almost anything but rarely the wherewithal to pay for it. It’s cheaper to let people die than to save them and anyway there are always more people.

  Underneath the Iwacky menoma (a menoma is a like a fedema, only with a crusted surface) there is something usually purple, though it does not look like blood itself. Can there be different kinds of blood? How can that be?

  His study is written up in The New England Journal of Primitive Peoples, an important journal that makes him feel good.

  Yes, he wants to taste more fame. While he is young. You can’t traipse through the freezing heights of the world when you are sixty asking Indians to open their mouths and say ah.

  You have to discover while you’re young!

  He discovers something else among the Iwacky. Young boys. Rather, they discover him. The cultural and anthropological heritage peculiar to this tribe, so high above the world, insists on a rite of passage involving gentle indoctrination to sex through anal penetration by an older man. Like in ancient Greece, male youths are required to bond with elders of their own sex. Indeed, young boys push themselves on older men sexually in their eagerness to be initiated. It is considered rude to refuse them. There has been nothing in Israel’s life to compare with his Iwacky experiences.

  Next, Israel is given some money by Greeting to study the sexual customs of “naïve” populations never seen before by white men. He has been provided with a supply of the company’s ampules, informing him that they “boost energy in distant and foreign climates and at unusual altitudes.” He is asked to distribute them liberally and to note any reactions. He is appalled by what he does note and withdraws the ampules, causing a riot among the first and only tribe, the Hares in Melanesia, to receive them.

  The young Hares (pronounced Hare-eeze) boys also foist themselves on older men sexually, and again it is the custom to allow it, not to be rude and refuse to initiate them. So again he allows it. He does not let himself consider how much he is enjoying these encounters.

  He also discovers the cause of a strange disease that is killing these people. The Hares call it “ga-unh-laa-ooze,” which Israel takes to be “glause.” He had seen it too among the Iwacky but it had not registered, no doubt because it had yet to become as widespread as here. He believes it comes from their eating the brains and the penises of their dead, something they do as a token of great respect. It is horrible to witness the physical devastation that accompanies these deaths. He has never seen anything like it. He tells them to stop. They do not stop. They call this disease “utz.”

  I am a scientist now researching how boys become men. If they are approaching me and offering, how can I as a scientist not experience it, not research it? But I will not eat the brains and penises. Would a scientist purposely infect himself with a poison he is studying in his research? Perhaps the scientist should infect himself, if he believes enough in what he is doing.

  His writing is getting better. Maggie Mead will call Israel Jerusalem a hero for his observations when she reads his paper in The New England Journal of Indigenous Naïve Populations. “Your journal article is beautifully conceived and written,” she says.

  It is for his observations about the appearance of glause and utz that years later, when he is an old man, he will receive the Nobel Prize.

  When he is nineteen he almost receives recognition for tracking down turbow in the Atlas Mountains, among a Moroccan tribe that eats berries and plants mixed with mud and the flesh of mountain goats, the combination of which is found to contain high Mesirow titers of raw aluminora (the Iwacky also had high Mesirow titers) and an equally unhealthy level of gorge wahs. (Gorge wah is the mineral of the moment. Have you had your gorge wahs today? It is the vitamin rage of 1927.) But this tribe won’t change their mud. The entire tribe, the Angastingees, dies, in a sudden plaguelike sweep. He writes a definitive report of their demise, also for the NEJINP.

  Israel always keeps notes. Travel harbors many strange and valuable sights if one is only able to see them. The consumption of poisoned brains and penises during burial rituals is more prevalent over a wider range of indigenous naïve populations than he imagined. Dementia, severe memory loss, raving sexual appetites, fingernails that drop off—it is a peculiar mixed bag of symptoms, upwinding in hysterical deaths preceded by gasping and enormous bodily heaves. The agonies can take many years. Native medicines don’t work. The brains of the kids, who are the main eaters, are peculiarly heavy, he notes about an autopsy, as if something inside them has solidified. He is reminded of Mercy Hooker’s rocklike nose. He also notes that he, who has eaten only mud and goat, is still alive.

  YOUR ROVING HISTORIAN

  It is sweet to note that from all his mountain schlepping, Israel was a real hunk à la Indiana Jones, well prepared to search out germs and poisons anywhere in the world.

  ISRAEL LEARNS MORE ON HIS JOURNEYS

  I share with you now the discoveries of a young acquaintance, Mike Quinn, who was excommunicated by the Disciples of Lovejoy religion for telling the world this important new information about our joint field of interest. It is cited in Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans by Dr. D. Michael Quinn, University of Illinois Press.

  In South America, in Peru, in the tribe of Cashinahua Indians, it is customary for males to greet each other by squeezing softly each other’s penis. They sit side by side when they talk to each other, holding each other’s penis.

  In New Guinea young boys are initiated into sucking an elder’s penis and swallowing all the semen if they want to grow up big and live a long life. The boys do this on every willing man they can find until they are twenty, when they marry women, whom they have avoided up till then.

  Among these tribes, and others in Melanesia, anal intercourse is believed to be necessary for boys’ physical development. Disciples of Lovejoy missionaries, most of whom are men, who converted these tribes by the thousands and participate in these initiations, discover this.

  In East Africa boys leave their parents and move to villages inhabited entirely by other young men.

  In the South Pacific men-men marriages are common; even if they also marry women, the male partner is preeminent and permanent. When Lovejoy missionaries try to stop this, they are asked to leave and not return.

  Among the Lovejoy missionaries writing about his experiences is Charles Warren Stoddard, a Disciple whose passionate prose describing his many love affairs with the boys and men in the various tribes he is sent to convert is to affect Samuel Clemens when he reads these reports as published in the Overland Monthly out of San Francisco. Asleep in a bed “big enough for a Lovejoy, the naked teenager “never let loose his hold on me … His sleek figure, supple and graceful in repose, was the embodiment of free, untrammeled youth … If it is a question how long a man may withstand the seductions of nature, and the consolations and conveniences of the state of nature, I have solved it in one case; for I was as natural as possible in about three days.”

  Charles Warren Stoddard will also be excommunicated by the Disciples of Lovejoy and become the lifelong friend and a continuing lover of Samuel Clemens.

  T
OO MUCH TOO SOON AND NOT ENOUGH TOO LATE

  Noggalichee Oba, a young man visiting Birkenstat, Illinois, from the Zoltar River basin in the Upper Vedurnas region of his country, still called, but not for much longer, Upper Volta, in (still called, but not for much longer) French West Africa, cuts his finger off on Saturday afternoon, July 4, 1931, while slicing pork sausages in an effort to help make the communal spaghetti sauce at the annual Fourth of July retreat of the All Nations on High Southern Baptist Redemption, to which church Oba claims a fealty in Africa. Unfortunately, he is a deaf-mute and is unable to make anyone understand where his finger is before he’s rushed by an ambulance to the emergency room of what is no more than a clinic, where he dies. Some two hundred people eat the pasta. The next day, as a special holiday event “to introduce us to our community responsibilities,” American Red Blood arrives to solicit donations, something new being tried out by the Cook County Hospital in nearby Chicago. Three hundred and eighty-three of the four hundred in attendance roll up their sleeves and give their pints of blood, which are collected in glass bottles. The blood is then rushed by American Red Blood to Herbert Hoover Field for an emergency flight to Rio Grande Tita (on the Del Rio–Paso Dobles Fault on the Texas border with Mexico). Noggalichee Oba, finger or no finger, is dead from something or other. His cadaver scabbed in twenty-four hours into a medley of purples that had not been originally noticed because his skin was so very black.

  It is pathetic how no president considers health, medicine, well-being worthy of espousing. One after another of them is too busy somewhere else, overseas more than likely after Teddy starts that trend. He promoted segregation and believed in Negro inferiority. Taft had hated the job and was out to lunch on many things (in 1910 he declined to give his support for a national laboratory devoted to the research of cancer, already very noticeably on its destructive march; it would be 1937 before FDR would set up a National Cancer Institute, which would not be joined to NITS until 1944, and still Congress wouldn’t give it any money despite more alarming increases of its incidence; in 1950 The New York Truth would still not allow the use of the word breast or cancer in its pages). Wilson is called great by many for thinking in United Nations–y terms, unsuccessfully, but even after he had his secret stroke, his government was busy elsewhere, notably with the aftermath of World War I, which certainly brought more than its share of health problems to The American People, not that anyone paid them much attention. Great discoveries are made, but only bit by bit, as coordinated research across boundaries, even across the street, is not anything anyone considers doing. In the case of blood itself, other countries are way ahead of us, even Russia, in trying out new approaches on how to use it, how to keep it. The history of American interest in its physical self is appalling in its minginess, its out-to-lunchedness. Why is this? There really is no person visible on any horizon to put this question to. NITS itself has such a turnover of staff on every level that nothing can be undertaken for fear who’s in charge won’t be there tomorrow, which he probably won’t be. In 1918, when Rep. Tobias Arndt from South Dakota inquires why NITS is in such disarray especially during a war, he’s forced to write the same letter of inquiry twenty-six times because one after another is returned to him stamped “No longer a NITS employee.” He brings this up on the House floor and a committee is formed to investigate. There is no record of any further action by or history of this committee. This is true of a lot of committees. Congressmen are learning this effective tactic for looking busy without having to follow through: form a committee. When Woodrow Wilson has that stroke, Mrs. Wilson imports her doctor from Virginia and overrules all his advice anyway. She jokes that since she was a descendant of Pocahontas she knew more about taking care of men. No one remembers enough about Pocahontas to correct her and anyway Edith kept the old boy alive while she ran the country from the White House, and then for three years afterward, so she was obviously someone one had to contend with. To this day no one knows how much work Woodrow actually did. Shades of Hamilton doing so much of Washington’s and no one knowing it.

  From here on it’s like a bad newsreel. The administration of Warren Harding, a handsome man who is from a small Ohio town called Blooming Grove, harbors more scandal and corruption than’s been witnessed so far. He wound up president and took a mistress who bore him a daughter. The Ku Klux Klan continues to grow in numbers and, as mentioned, five million of them march through Washington in their white hooded robes and with their crosses in 1925. Harding dies in office after only two years from an embolism. The feelings of his nonentity successor, Calvin Coolidge, are simple: “Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.” Prohibition comes and takes away the main pleasure increasing numbers of new immigrants require to keep them in their place. When the out of control Teapot Dome scandal erupts, what with all those valuable oil leases given by Harding to cronies in his cabinet, it’s probably just as well he has that heart attack and dies. Neither his embolism nor the death of Coolidge’s own much-loved son at sixteen from blood poisoning fuel money for NITS to pay attention to public health. “The chief business of the American people is business” is another favorite expression from Silent Cal, who honestly thought that the United States had attained “a state of contentment seldom ever seen.”

  Comes 1929 and the Great Depression to bear out the folly of these guys. Once again we have to wonder what it is about The American People that, time after time, we elect these men to—in essence and fact, in their ignorance and unsuitability—do their best to destroy us. De Tocqueville was right: the masses will destroy each other. Ben Franklin was right: democracy will not work. During these years from 1909 to 1929 there are some 257 epidemics claiming some three-million-plus lives. Twelve of these can be classified as plagues. Increasingly during and after the war the number of syphilis cases surpasses any ever recorded or known to mankind. Nowhere is this reported or indeed made much of. Whatever that relatively new Sailors’ Home on Staten Island is dealing with is a big secret. (By the way, a historian will finally come along and prove syphilis is an American disease, started on Hispaniola from where Columbus took it out into the world. So what? Who cares? The historian’s name is also lost to history.) There will, in these twenty years, be fifty-four different directors of NITS. These names are lost to history for the very reason that when NITS finally puts its house in some sort of vague order, new officialdom will be so ashamed of the old order that they will literally destroy many of the records that detailed it. So much for the much-heralded inclusiveness of that Library of All Libraries at NITS.

  THE THIRTIES ARE STUPID AND SILLY. AND MESSY.

  Everything is getting messier. A little out of focus. The country is getting stranger. It has always been strange. Where have you been? Nobody has really noticed. And it has always been messy. No one noticed that either. What house is always neat? But up till now nobody has minded much that everything is a little messy. Dirty. Unclean. Soap isn’t everyone’s Eleventh Commandment. People are accustomed to everyone and everything being smelly. Women don’t shave under their arms yet. People take baths once a week, if that.

  The economic news continues to be bad. New lows are achieved each minute of each day. The claws of the Great Depression are still causing men to jump from buildings. They also disappear in other ways. They don’t come home at night. Mothers tell their children, “We must thank God Daddy comes home from work.” When they come home from school to an empty house, children kneel down and pray for Daddy’s return from the office. Children don’t understand the nature of the new awfulness except that it has something to do with money, which Mommy and Daddy don’t have any more of. This is a difficult concept to grasp. “But why?” brings unsatisfactory answers. “Because the president is doing a bad job” comes to be an answer that’s acceptable. Bad jobs are understood by everyone. President Hoover’s doing a bad job. Everyone comes to hate President Hoover. Everyone knows everything is awful. Everyone doesn’t know how to go on.

  Every official indica
tor—and the Treasury tries to create a number of them designed to prove to The American People that nothing’s as bad as it’s being made to sound—still sounds awful. Parabolas have curved back on themselves and off the chart. Several are in the cellar. The new Heindinger Marker goes up and down so fast it makes people who monitor it dizzy. Hoover goes on the radio and tries to explain that this up-and-downness of the Heindinger “is a good sign, a healthy sign. If it stayed flat, or only went up, or only went down, we would be in severe economic trouble.” But since not so many people are eating two much less three squares a day, severe economic trouble is not only already a guest in the house but the man who came to dinner. Treasury executives sit around big tables and discuss new ways to tell the people that, as the president says over and over, “the economy is essentially healthy.” Some commentators, like the young Alsop brothers, Joseph and Stewart, ask in one of the many newspapers that publish them, “Is this not the first time that the American people no longer believe in their elected officials?” (Joseph is gay. When he retires in 1974, their column is believed to be the longest-running nationally syndicated opinion column, appearing three times a week in three hundred newspapers. Joseph never lifted a finger to help anything gay, and there were, as we shall see, lots of gay goings-on that could have used his finger.) But as always there are other commentators who differ with the Alsops, like Hudson Pacific, who writes for The San Francisco Goldmine that “The American People has never believed an American president since George Washington.”

  By the time Hoover leaves office in 1933, the Depression is worse than ever. America has become a nation of transients. Almost a million hitchhikers, hoboes, and bums roam the country, some 200,000 of them adolescents. Women dress in men’s clothing to avoid trouble and molestation. But then, women are now doing a lot of things, in any way they can, like being breadwinners when those daddies truly don’t come home. In the years 1932–1933, 57,908 men all across America take their own lives. It was no longer just a New York thing.