by Larry Kramer
What has any of this got to do with glause?
YOUR ROVING HISTORIAN FILLS US IN ON SOME IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT AN UNIMPORTANT PRESIDENT
According to The Secret Sex Lives of the Presidents by Marmora Hecht, Ph.D., Herbert Hoover required colored women to wash his clothes. He demanded that these women be matronly and maternal. He required them to wash his clothes while he still wore them. He would stand in a huge tub and they would stand beside him, two or three of them, and they would pour warm water over his head and take their big bars of soap and rub his clothing up and down. It is an unusual way to have an orgasm but not so harmless an unusual way as might on the surface appear. After each such washing the women would be sent away and punished. Hoover would do the punishing. He would summon Hevander Stadtdotter (Dr. Hecht finally provides us with this man’s first name!), who had found the women for him, paying them each two dollars in advance. Both men would take them to a field in the remote Franeeda countryside where they would hang the women from tree branches until they were dead. Stadtdotter was a tall and very strong man. He could string up even the heaviest of the women without too much effort, but Hoover liked to help. He liked to kick away the stool supporting their feet. When the women had choked to death, President Hoover would break down in tears and Hevander would take him in an embrace and comfort him. Then they would sit down and eat some sandwiches and drink some beer from the picnic basket the White House kitchen sent along. Hoover never said out loud that he felt sorry for the poor but he did say to one dangling woman that the economy was sound and everything would get even better for everyone soon and she might mention this in Heaven on his behalf.
This is a man who does not see in what misery his people are living now, all across America. The stock market has crashed. Fifty-one hundred banks have already failed. He would not pay benefits to the unemployed. “It will damage their characters.” His wife urged the Girl Scouts to do volunteer work to help out. Soldiers were still waiting for payments for service during World War I. What did he do wrong? The answer is another question: “What did he do right?” Waiting in the wings, Franklin D. Roosevelt is outraged. “There is nothing inside the man but jelly.” FDR becomes president in 1933 at the same time Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany.
Stadtdotter disappeared when the colored neighborhoods became suspicious that his regular reappearances presaged the nonreappearance of a woman from their midst. He was captured and tortured with hot pokers in an underground chamber beneath the new Felindus Max Graves Cathedral of Our Holy People, after which he was torn limb from limb and roasted into cinders in the church’s big new oven. (It is a very small “cathedral” and it will be outside Fred’s bedroom window.)
When the ashes were taken from the oven, Felindus Max Graves said a prayer over them.
“These are white ashes. These are the ashes of hate. These are the last bits and pieces of someone who hated us. In his hate he performed such acts as our God would not permit us to tolerate. Our God is not his God. That is our sad secret. Our God is not the God of any white man who performs on our people such acts as this man performed. Let us pray for our dead sisters. Let us not pray for the soul of this white man whom our God consigns to Hell. O God, in the name of the only white man we revere, Abraham Lincoln, we have burned up this murderer of our women.”
The ashes are then given to Madame Dretta, who has a special formula for a paste she sells as a foundation for colored women’s makeup. “White men’s bones are good for this,” Madame Dretta says. “They’re hard and they don’t yield. You can pile layers of the thickest gunk on top of your black face and my stuff holds its grip.” Madame Dretta becomes very rich and lives in a big house out on Sixteenth Street not far from the Masturbov mansion. As she lives with a white woman, the neighbors’ lawyers cannot get her evicted, although they certainly try.
After Stadtdotter’s disappearance, gossip comes from the White House servants about Herbert Hoover’s roving taste. Always trust the valet and not the historians. It is said that he is able to let his hair down publicly only at the annual two-week Bohemian Grove encampment on the Russian River, which he calls “the greatest men’s party on earth.”
Bohemian Grove is where all the old rich queens of America’s ruling elite go to get drunk, dress up in drag, feel up the giant redwoods and each other, and somehow get their rocks off without women. From its founding in the 1870s, it attracts many a president, including Herbert Hoover’s distant cousin, Richard Nixon, another poster boy for sexual repression. In the 1950s, Nixon is seen perpetually in the company of his friend Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, a Florida businessman, in Key Biscayne, where they share a villa in its hotel, and without Bebe’s ex-wife, who claims their marriage was never consummated, and without Pat and the girls. When the two first meet, Bebe tells a mutual acquaintance that Nixon’s “a guy who doesn’t know how to talk, doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t chase women, doesn’t know how to play golf, doesn’t know how to play tennis … he can’t even fish,” but soon enough they are so close that people begin speculating about the nature of their relationship, which lasts for forty-four years. Many decades later, on the Watergate Tapes, President Nixon is heard to say, “The Bohemian Grove I attend from time to time is the most faggy goddamn thing you can imagine. The San Francisco crowd, it’s just terrible. I can’t even shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.”
Stadtdotter could and did before his disappearance. He was there with “the Nixon party.”
GLAUSE?
With her husband, without her husband, Evvilleena parties on. It does appear that she hasn’t got anything else to do. Free feeds bring in crowds of freeloaders. There are always plenty of hungry, dry-mouthed somebody-or-others with big-enough crotches lurking in oversized diplomatic pants. She grabs their crotches. She sticks her hand right in there. She goes for the balls. But she goes to bed alone. It’s assumed she’s rejected. It never occurs to anyone that she just likes to get smashed and grab dicks and maybe get fucked in a closet because she doesn’t like to muss her bed. Yes, she feels sorry for herself in her loneliness. No town is nice to be lonely in. With so many men with such disdain for women, Washington is especially bad even if you speak English, which she doesn’t really.
She’s in love with Israel Jerusalem. He’s twenty-five; she’s somewhere way over sixty. She is slender and blond, with coy, flirting eyes that try to pretend they’re a young girl’s. She has a proud long neck that’s always choked with pearls. Israel has stooped posture and tiny owl spectacles and those heavy tweed suits, no matter what the season. “You musht shvitsz profushely in your privatsh,” she once ventures. His feet are huge, wide, and long; they are beginning their lifelong habit of always hurting; soon he’s taking off his shoes and padding around the halls of Mount Thymun in the soft slippers old men wear.
While he again explores her body carefully with his huge soft hands (these are still the days when the eye is a doctor’s most important diagnostic tool) she chatters on to him about her parties, about her crotches (a few choice items from her arsenal: “I am shurtain she padz with falshies”; “Kleine, Kleine”; “Hiss government should know wass ich know”), about her loneliness, “which only you can cure.”
She is not shy about her goal.
“I am a rich woman with no one to share my riches with.”
“I look at you and you never look back to me. Shame!”
“Israel! I want you for mine! Why are you giving me hard times!”
She told him that late at night, in the dark, in her bed alone, she asked herself if there was any way in this world that he could love her back. “It happenss. It happensss! You did not answer me.” That was when she went away for longer than usual and now she’s back. She can see his expression. He’s not happy with her.
He’s never seen her looking so poorly. She always had a pride that buoyed her spirits, a grace that gave her glamour. Now she is too thin and her makeup is too thick. Her spine seems no longer to sup
port her correctly.
“My subconscious says to me: Why?”
She won’t look him in the eye. Her confidence is waning.
“I have not been feeling well for a while now. I was feeling wonderful. For some time. Euphoric. I felt better and better. I was planning to come and surprise you.”
Where are all her sshushes?
He waits for her to say more.
“Your office is still too small for such a smart man.”
“It is big enough.”
He is holding her hands and looking at the purple spots that the last time he saw her were only dots. Up her arm there are more of them, some quite raised and bumpy, of a deep purple color, like some Victorian shade of ink. Yes, he recognizes them.
Without his asking she stands and slips off the white robe. She stares into space as she does so, like someone who already knows the worst, or is preparing for execution. He prays she will not jump him.
He writes in his medical notes: “She stands naked before me. Her breasts have been removed. The scars are still healing: bold black stitches like two jagged zippers slashing her chest. On her trunk are clusters of small raised purple bumps. She bows her head. My eyes fall farther downward.
“There is a penis of sorts, and some kind of sack sagging behind it, weighted down.”
His reflexes take over instinctively: Israel’s fingers feel all the many spots, one after another, darting from here to there as fast as his eye locates one more, kneeling down to face it head-on, jumping up to reach a farther one, turning her around, poking, sticking, prodding, until his fingers are sore. Some spots are hard, some seem soft, as if there’s swelling beneath them, something liquescent.
Finally he takes the penis in his hand. It is a cold thing, and quite large.
He’s heard talk and read for years about sex switches. People masquerading as something else is not new. But what she has done, this is new. He feels the testicles. One is hard like a marble; the other one feels pliable. Could they indeed be real testicles? To judge from her wincing when he presses them even lightly, they just might be. One of them at least, the pliable one.
Now she looks at him. He hasn’t the vaguest notion what to say. What is this over her eyebrow? Another swelling. Also soft. Also malleable. It is a raised fedema.
Israel takes a syringe and extracts some liquid from the fedema and excuses himself. “I must study this liquid under the microscope. Please to wait.”
As he walks from his office Evvilleena Stadtdotter cries out, “Israel, I did this for you!”
“I walk quickly to the Feutra Lab. The Feutra is an old machine, so no one is around. All rush to use the Moneckulir, which I have no desire to master. The Moneckulir is another fraudulent German technical ‘wonder’ to bankrupt hospitals. It counts faster but I distrust the results. I release drops of her liquid on a slide and place it beneath the Feutra’s Quotrum, which I set at a cervicular heft of twelve. Slowly something comes into view. What is it? What is it? These moments thrill me; I prefer laboratories and test tubes and microscopes to people. So why aren’t I with these all the time? Do I run away from all exciting things?”
As he waits for the smear to expose itself fully he waits for his unconscious to talk to him. There is all this new stuff with the unconscious. He is becoming friendly with his unconscious. He has been reading Freud, who is beginning to be talked about more and more, and learning about an inner self he never knew existed. “Herr Freud writes beautifully. I can actually hear his pure precision that can only come in the German language. English is too … squishy, like loose stools. Perhaps there is such a thing as a good German! Well, Dr. Freud is Austrian. Freud is very rational. With such an outpouring, such a plenitude of newness! The unconscious. The subconscious. The id. The ego. The … Where am I? What says the smear? What is the thread between the smear and … Mercy Hooker? I do not want to think about mutilated Frau Evvilleena Stadtdotter. What am I to do with her? Him? It? Will the blood tell me what to do? A dim image is swirling in the back of my skull, trying to focus itself. Why is it taking so long? Please, God, will one day someone who is not a German invent something faster than the Feutra? Word is beginning to filter through and I am not listening to those words like I am not listening to my unconscious that could tell me why Mercy Hooker.”
“I want to win awards,” he also writes in his journal. “Not when I am old and hardly able to schlepp across a podium to mumble a few gracious words to a gathering of faces whose names I can no longer remember. If I fail, will I rationalize? Freud wrote about die Rationalisierung. Die Rationalisierung seems to be something mature to do when it’s too late to do anything else. As if to say, I did not do better because the world is so imperfect it’s impossible for it to change. What a strange thing for an ambitious Jew to write. Perhaps I am not ambitious enough.”
This Quotrum is taking forever!
One hour later the Quotrum is still counting. Why is this blood so dense? He cannot leave Evvilleena much longer.
Glause.
He doesn’t want to go back to that office. Israel doesn’t know how to deal with crazies. (Washington has too many of them.) Is not the world—anywhere—organized in a more coherent scheme of things? I must read Dr. Freud more swiftly!
Glause.
His pace quickens, not to get to Evvilleena but to his files. Which are in the office. With her. For me? She did what for me? Yes, he does not want to go back into this office. But he goes.
He is about to say, I think I have a clue; there is something the Iwacky called … glause …
She is entirely purple. One big spot on the floor. The purplenesses have all coalesced into one consuming blotch. She is dead.
“Also, her penis has fallen off. She is holding it in her hand. There is blood coming from her crotch. Did she pull it off? No. There is a bloodied scalpel near her. My God. Like some Iwacky.
“There is a note on the floor. Beside the penis. ‘I thought you wanted to love another man.’”
He is sick to his stomach. He vomits. He cannot stop retching. His vomit meets her blood in pools.
He never forgets the sight of blood and vomit circling the hand holding the mangled penis. The mass of fibrous fictitious flesh fashioned into a male member. He later studies it. Part of it is human skin and muscle; the rest is surgical meshing wired and soldered firmly together. There are people who will do anything to you if you have the money and can find them.
“Why did she think I’m something I’m not?”
“Where did she get this done to her?”
Had these questions been answered, or at least raised more publicly at this time of Israel’s asking them, might they have stopped a plague?
Was Evvilleena Stadtdotter the first case in Washington, or anywhere in America, or anywhere in the world, of The Underlying Condition, on June 25, 1933, almost fifty years before the plague of UC is finally named UC? Of course not! Was Mercy Hooker some eight years earlier? Of course not! Was Israel a conduit between them? There is much history yet to learn.
Glause.
“I hear the word glause in my ears and in my sleep and in my nightmares, and I sees a grisly mutilated counterfeit penis. Last night I had the shivers. There, in The Secret and Its Parabola, were the words ‘If it is inside, it will come outside, but only if the dredge is willing to dig up its fulcrum.’ I wrote them down. I wrote down the voices I hear also. ‘Vasvistuvenu haroror nay vintna ovedembar goi lin fu.’ What language is this? I think maybe for this moment I am having some breakdown of communication with all these new parts of me Dr. Freud says I have.”
Can he find sustenance, a reason to go on, somewhere in all this?
MORE FROM ISRAEL’S NOTEBOOKS
There is something wrong with her blood. (This I need a Quotrom to tell me!) It is not yielding. What do I mean by yielding? I am making it sound like bread and yeast. Well, blood can be like that. Its secrets must be raised out of its depths. The Quotrum isn’t working, isn’t doing this. And I do not t
hink it is the Quotrum’s fault. I study my Mercy notes. Mercy’s blood, too, had not yielded. At first.
I saved liquid in bottles. I noticed its smell was awful. Like rotten eggs. Like a particularly gaseous bowel movement.
Some numbers are finally appearing on the Quotrum. I discover they are slightly different from Mercy’s. Evvilleena’s are higher. None of this is helpful or reveals to me anything useful. In neither case, of course, are the numbers what they should be in normal people.
Evvilleena is dead on my floor. This is unfortunate, because the hospital does not have good arrangements for the removal of deads. You cannot just wheel them out with a sheet over them, because people in the corridor faint. So she is staying there for a while. On my floor. Until the early a.m. shift. That is how they do it. I try to tell them this is exceptionally unsanitary. We are together, Evvilleena and Israel. I almost hear her say, At last I have you.
I pick the penis up off my lab table with big forceps. I must have squeezed too hard, because suddenly there is a squirt and squish and there is blood all over the place. My hands, my clothes are covered. What is this? What is this!
I do not even think of possible contaging. I fall on my knees and look at Evvilleena’s crotch. It is bloody and now drying, the brutalized flesh, so that it looks like … like what? Like tomatoes in the sun too long in Italy. And it stinks to high hell. Underneath whatever surgery was done to this Evvilleena to make a man of her I see some residual labia! This area is greatly engorged. Just like Mercy was swollen! What is in their blood to do this? To both of them? With Evvilleena I perhaps make a guess it is because of some infection from the operations, perhaps something tropical. I do not know what country she gets butchered in, but no haser who does this for a living is clean wherever he is.
Then I remember what I don’t remember, something about Mercy’s crotch. There were tiny purple dots all around her crotch, like a rash. They were so tiny I remember thinking she was having a reaction to something, like to medicine or drugs. The rich use lots of drugs.
