The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  As I poke around in Evvilleena’s privates, now with a small flashlight—yes, yes! I find purple spots there, too. They are not so easy to find because her whole body has turned purple, but there they are, tiny raised bumps, hard on the outside, soft on the inside.

  Now I am getting into tricky water because I did not do a thorough study of Mercy’s crotch. I didn’t have to. I discovered she was bleeding because of those spiked ivory penises and I stopped her bleeding and she went home and took heroin for a few years and died. Heroin? No, I think that is not useful to me. It could have been a bad dose, but that would not cause skewed numbers.

  After washing as best I can I go on my hands and knees and scrape Evvilleena’s crotch with my Rohl blade and smear the skin and flesh and blood onto more slides. This time I go to my own tiny lab. I have here my favorite tricks. I take some diluted solution of Abner, which is something I learned about in Palestine. Abner is one part alcohol and one part fizemidine, and this, sprinkled on the slide, tells me poison is present. (Of all the doctors in the world, only doctors in Palestine do this trick. Why is that? It is so much faster and so much less messy and complicated than using Divosidol. But then Greeting makes much money from Divosidol. You make Abner for two cents.) The stuff from her crotch is, I would guess, 90 percent poison. The woman is dead, not from slicing off her phony schmuck, but from some poison in her.

  It must be some poison she herself is manufacturing. What else could it be! Mercy must have had the same poison in her. Only not so much as to kill her.

  Now I must go back a little to those spiked ivory penises of Mercy’s. I still have some of her dried blood on some slides, so of course I do the Abner business immediately. Her blood is full of poison, but not more than 50 percent, I would guess. Is that 40 percent difference why Mercy lives until the heroin kills her and Evvilleena krechs immediately on my floor?

  I wonder: Can this poison come from sex? Were these women poisoned by having sex? How did I even think this thought? How can I investigate it, and prove it scientifically?

  That would mean this comes from what the man inserts into these women.

  I sit in my tiny lab. I look out the window at some meshuggener statue in some pretty garden in the moonlight.

  “From the distance comes the rest that will protect you.”

  This is from the Vishnah. It is not helpful. Lately I read all the time Dr. Freud and not so much from my religious heritage. Dr. Freud teaches there are no accidents, so I am recalling this passage for a reason, from out of my subconscious and into the light. It is like a remembered dream. There is a reason, both for the dream and for the remembering, for the dredge digging up the fulcrum.

  “From the distance comes the rest that will protect you.”

  Rest? I do not wish to rest. If anything I am throbbing with excitement. I have so much energy even though it must be the middle of the night and I don’t want to rest at all.

  But wait. “Rest” is meaning different things. Rest is also meaning “the other part.”

  Throbbing? Why am I using this word? This is a strange word to come into my head. What does it mean, Dr. Freud, throbbing?

  I am having an erection. My penis is very hard and it is, yes, throbbing. It is like another part of me that I am hearing from and it is telling me that it wants to get out from its captivity. Why now? What has been working inside me to make my penis hard? I have been dealing with the poison of two dead women. One of them I had some sort of sex with on the floor. That is the last time my penis was erect and the last time semen came from me.

  I am always frightened of my penis. It’s always seemed to be another person. How can it be that a man in his mid-twenties looks upon his penis, if not as his enemy, certainly not as the friend it is to most men? It is a war. Not a war with anger, a war with stalemates, with stand-offs. I leave you alone if you leave me alone. You don’t cross my borders, I let you live in peace.

  Hands off!

  I stare out at the garden, the Mathilde Eiker Schmuck Memorial Garden. In the moonlight, the grass looks almost black, like a velvet blanket on the lawn. Snow begins falling gently, creating a lovely sight. I am happy here in America. I say this out loud. I am surprised by the thought and surprised I allow myself to say it out loud. Why are the thought and the thinker two different things? They are one and the same! A whole!

  I find myself unbuttoning my fly and burying my hand through layers of shirt, undershirt, underpants, until it finds the center of the warmth. It is bigger. It feels so warm and nice. That everything is all right, that there is such harmony in the snow scene of nature outside and the warmth I feel for myself inside, brings tears to my eyes. Hello, hello. Hello to you. The soft, bushy blond hair. The smooth skin on my flanks. The strength of the thing as it pops out to say hello to the night and to its master, now massaging it gently and in a friendly manner in the New World. Hello. We are friends, yes? You become so big! You are happy in this New World also?

  We do this nice and slow. So it will feel nice for a long time. I stop every so often, just in case. Then I decide it would be nice not to have my clothing on. To be naked in the night, and free. The room is too hot as it is. So much heat in this New World. I giggle. When have you giggled last, Israel, eh? I cannot in truth remember. I cannot.

  I feel my naked body in space. Now, freed, my penis is even bigger, sticking out like some signpost pointing a direction. Why have I not been aware that mine is of a noble proportion? My giggle turns into a laugh.

  I’ve looked at myself so little!

  “Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! Through me forbidden voices, Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil, Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.”

  With Mr. Freud I am reading Mr. Walt Whitman. How can he say so much as he does in print? In America is anything possible? I don’t think so. Then I begin to masturbate in earnest. I send down some spit to help. I learn this trick from the Iwacky youths. How can a grown man not have remembered how somewhere along the road of life to spit on his dick brings more pleasure when beating off? Well, whatever the reason, I have not remembered it. And now I do. It is filled with life! It, too, wants to stay alive!

  Finally it’s time. I am ready to explode. I sit down in the middle of the floor, cross-legged—like an Indian!—and I place beside me several glass slides for the Quotrum. My wonderful ejaculation that spurts up to my face, to slide down my chest, so white it’s like that silly marble statue outside, along with my happy tears of gratitude.

  I want to lie back and enjoy the after-waves of tremors still shivering through this skinny body. I am a scientist! I must know what is in this stuff, this semen.

  Under the Quotrum, my semen quickly reveals abnormally high titers of sindel and abnormally low measurements of fane. I am still unclothed and though a moment ago I’d felt cool and refreshed, suddenly I begin to sweat. Low drittal fane is not good and not bad. But combined with sindel it is an indicator that a poison is loose in the body. I prick my finger, rub a drop of my blood on a slide, and put it under the Quotrum. Right away something is wrong. The huge apparatus indicates it is going to take a long time to count something unusual. My sweat is now profuse. I dress myself while the counting proceeds. My heart is racing. While the soft click of the Quotrum’s abnometer registers higher and higher readings, I rub my pricked finger onto the marble slab where I mix my tinctures. I squeeze out a big blob of blood. I find my jar of Abner and douse my blood with it. I smear another slide with this mess and rush to my old faithful friend, the small microscope given to me by the shul in Hortz bei Todstadt, as a good luck present when I went off to Misch Fehl in Palestine. Even by a rough calculation I suspect my blood contains something that shouldn’t be there. When the Quotrum finally finishes its own calculations, and I look into the microscope, my semen and my blood both are revealed to be at least 50 percent poison. My blode count is off the meter.

  I am going crazy. Insid
e me, I am very sick. I am almost too frightened to consider what is obvious before my eyes: that somehow I have been infected by either Mercy or Evvilleena. But how? Did I cut myself when I investigated Mercy’s insides? A small prick from one of those spikes? When Evvilleena and I were on the floor and she kissed me and licked me, did she transmit something? And then her penis exploded all over me. Is touching blood enough?

  I must not be so frightened. I must get hold of myself. I am a scientist. I am a doctor. I am here to place my intelligence and instincts in the service of humanity. I am here to save people. If I am to be sick from this, then that is part of the highest sacrifice God can require.

  So, now I am friends with God again. Where is Dr. Freud? What is Dr. Freud saying about any of this? At this moment, perhaps God is talking louder.

  Now I stand tall and become the research scientist. I utilize every strength I can call on to repress my fears.

  I make slides of my blood and Mercy’s blood, and of my blood and Evvilleena’s blood.

  I discover that in both cases the poisons have canceled each other out.

  What does this mean? I thinks it means that although I have been infected by either Mercy or Evvilleena, or both, something in my own blood has neutralized the invading poison and protected me from death.

  My body is beginning to feel ill. I am dizzy.

  From what?

  I make a cut in my arm. I place a slide on which I have smeared some of Evvilleena’s blood against my open flesh. I choose Evvilleena’s and not Mercy’s because I believe Mercy has less poison and my exposure to Evvilleena is more recent.

  Then I sit down on the floor again, cross-legged like an Indian again. I want to see if I will live or die.

  * * *

  I am worried about this Dr. Israel Jerusalem. He is sniffing too close. One of these days he could find me. I go weeks at a time feeling very under the weather, without killing anyone. I am thinking that there must be something really smart that I can do to get ahead in this world.

  ADMIRING GRACE

  This is when I came as close to loving a fucking man as I ever would.

  By exposing himself to the poison in Mrs. Fake Prick Stadtdotter’s blood, Dr. Israel Jerusalem has unknowingly vaccinated himself against the plague that is yet to come. But that he exposed himself—on purpose—to what he was researching, well, the heroism inherent in this action simply took my breath away when he told me about it and it still does. I know of few scientists so willing to go this far in their fight for knowledge. I sure as fucking shit wouldn’t. (Although after Partekla some will say I already have. And they would be right.)

  At this point, we are unable to guess which of those two grotesque women infected him. Or if anything placed him in danger of contagion. When he recovers from the fever that lays him low for a few weeks and perplexes the entire staff, he longs to try the same experiment on another human, but of course the fucking ass-dragging medical review boards, something already in place to make all our lives miserable, would not allow this.

  Science often smacks of parody or silliness when it can prove to be neither one shitty thing nor another shitty thing. This will not be the last example of the ridiculous parading as the truth it is. Or the truth parading as the ridiculous. This is one reason I cuss so fucking goddamned much. Life is profane and should be honored as such.

  DAME LADY HERMIA PECKS AWAY AT HER INVESTIGATION: EVIL IS COMING CLOSER

  In 1934, Reinhard Heydrich, who in a few short years will become notorious as the architect of Hitler’s plan for the Final Solution of the Jews, prepares and delivers a number of policy papers concerning the Jews and “other unwanted populations.” “It is the aim of the State Police to encourage immigration of Jews and homosexuals out of Germany and to discourage in every way possible any desire to remain in Germany … Activities of these people should be restricted in order to force them to abandon the idea of remaining in Germany.”

  Little attention is paid to an ancillary report prepared and delivered by Jeshua Brinestalker in various locales around America, outlining an equally stringent plan to go hand in hand with Heydrich’s, to rid the world of homosexuals. “It must be made known to this undesirable element that they too are unwelcome from this time forward and their determination to remain will be dealt with in the harshest terms. It must be made known that they are being identified and their whereabouts identified.” There are many German-American associations of one kind or another, and Jeshua tries to visit as many as he can. Many Germans feel conflicted over this determination by “foreign elements” to dictate their moralities; these are the ones who now feel American; but there are of course German Americans who do hate Jews and homosexuals.

  Membership rolls in German-American organizations begin to decline rapidly. No matter which their bent, these members realize that it is no longer any time to be a German in America, no matter what. So this pushes Jeshua’s activities underground, unlike in Germany and his other client countries.

  YRH FINDS MORE SHIT

  Brief mention was made of a Dr. Gobesh Table, a Moroccan Jew who opened a small hotel in a remote part of Florida around the time of the Civil War. He was interested in trying to convert human shit into food. By the 1930s, Hi and Meyer Table have opened two “family-style” hotels in rural New Jersey, on Lake Windham, an hour or so from New York. Presumably this is the same family, as the name is a bit unusual, but the New Jersey brothers claim no knowledge of any Moroccan ancestry. What they do claim is an ancestral arrival in America long enough ago to entitle them to membership in the Society of Early Americans, which would welcome them but for their Jewish religion, a rebuff that will increasingly annoy the Table women, who, the richer they will get, the grander. In any event, there certainly is a dark cast to the pigmentation of the skin coloring of all direct Table descendants to this day.

  Hi and Meyer run the two adjoining hotels, which cater to Jewish families seeking inexpensive holiday accommodations and decent food, cooked by their mother, Nettie. There is a third brother, Nookie, the strange one, and of course his mother’s favorite.

  Since childhood, Nookie has been inordinately interested in dirt, the earth. Everything goes into the earth. It is the earth, the very soil, that we build on and in, the earth that absorbs our eliminations and those of our animals, the earth in which we grow our food. What amazing thing dirt must be to accommodate so many contributions. But what can it give back to us? Nookie wonders. Surely there is something valuable it can give back to us, beyond its ability to grow our food. Nookie wants to know the secrets of dirt. In this he follows in the footsteps of the early Hookers that Grace told us about.

  At ten, Nookie begins to perform what he calls “screening the soil,” which is just what it sounds like: he takes a screen from one of the hotel windows and sifts dirt through it, rubbing it with his palms to get as much through the mesh as he can. What remains is usually nothing more than pebbles and worms and bugs, but sometimes there is thicker dirt, dirt with more clay in it, for instance, or thinner dirt, like grains of sand. He begins to see that there are different grades of soil. He wonders if there is anything to these different grades. Over the next few years he classifies some dozen consistencies. He feeds each of these to the cows and chickens, the cats and dogs, and observes the effects. They come down with occasional maladies, usually diarrhea or its reverse, constipation. Nettie begins to worry about the increasing frequency of these bowel malfunctionings all over the backyard, but before she knows it, Nookie dies from something the family doctor cannot identify. His vomit looks like crimson mud dirt, and he is covered with purple scabs.

  Hi and Meyer come across their brother’s notes. Evidently he had been testing a “cure-all” on the farm animals. His notes indicate that various weak and faltering animals all “sprang back to life” after he fed them his “cure-all.”

  He had written down his recipe. It involves nothing more than taking mud from the edge of the lake, putting it into a bottle with some water,
and spooning it into the animals. The edge of the lake has been a favorite spot for household pets and farm animals to unload. Hi and Meyer gather up some mud and try the elixir on an ailing calf, and indeed it does work. They try it on an elderly horse, which springs into a gallop. After a number of like experiments the brothers begin to peddle Nookie’s No-Nonsense Animal Cure-All. To their surprise, it grows into a substantial success, so much so that they lose interest in the hospitality business and close the hotels.

  The success of their product comes to the attention of Clarence Meekly Dridge II. He has its contents studied. Interesting. He is not unaware of the ingredients contained in Dridge Flakes, which is made by the company that his adopted father started. He determines to copy Nookie’s No-Nonsense Cure-All for human consumption. After all, he reasons, if it’s good for the animals it will be good for the people.

  The resultant elixir, Virulea, is released in the Midwest in 1935. If mortality records for this year and in these states were to be studied, it would be revealed that they record 725 deaths from an unknown cause believed to be related to “the ingestion of an unnamed ‘patent medicine’ manufactured and distributed by ‘The New Home of Well-Being,’” which, upon further investigation, would be discovered to be owned by Greeting, which, when the number of dead human consumers of Virulea surpasses several thousand, quietly removes the product from the marketplace. However, Nookie’s Animal Cure-All continues to be sold to the agricultural market, and continues to be an important part of the Table family’s increasing wealth. As the Tables are unaware of the Greeting Virulea, Hi and Meyer begin thinking about their own version of Nookie’s for humans. They buy two more hotels—these are on the edge of the Everglades—where even higher effluvial deposits of ancient shit are stacked up and packed down along the shores than in New Jersey. One of these Tables, probably Meyer because Hi isn’t very smart, knows what he’s doing. Gobesh Table is not heard from again.