The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Flo will never know she played an important role in the history of a plague. She dies in 1943, speaking English rather well. She is pushed into the Mediterranean from the back terrace of the Grand Casino in Monte Carlo, a death any good sissy will recognize as not dissimilar to Moira Shearer’s in The Red Shoes. Moira’s, however, was a suicide. Flo (it is still hard to think of her as Florence) will leave an illegitimate baby daughter, and it is suspected that it is this baby’s father who does the pushing. But let’s say so long to her now, and thank you from a one-day-to-be-grateful-but-won’t-be nation.

  Now I think I am relieved of this religious obligation to explain my sisters and am free to go back to cussing my fucking twat off. What a relief. I felt like a constipated nun.

  SHMUEL

  Dr. Israel Jerusalem goes each day to Dr. Shmuel Derektor, the psychoanalyst. Israel had written directly to Dr. Freud: “As one doctor to another I must tell you that my dreams are of disease and plague and a cataclysmic overwhelming of the earth. It will happen. I do not think I am delusional. Experiments in my laboratory indicate that, should certain forces spin out of control, and there is no reason whatsoever to believe they will not—indeed, it is my estimation that certain activities cannot be controlled—then the result will be a plague of monumental severity.”

  Dr. Freud sends Israel Dr. Derektor’s address and scribbles beneath it:

  “Gehst du, schnell!”

  Later Israel receives a short note in that unmistakably firm, bold, and noble hand:

  “May your prognosis for the New World be not so gloomy! Although, certainly, the Old one has always been in great trouble. Have you started with Dr. Derektor yet? You must not waste time.”

  And then he writes in big letters, underscored:

  “Zeit ist kostbar!” Time is precious.

  Dr. Freud’s methods are not taking root in America as quickly as he would like. He had been here in 1909 and found it very hurtful and unwelcoming. “Why are you so slow, you Americans?” Freud writes to Dr. Derektor. “You take too long. Get them in and out!” A psychoanalysis in Vienna takes only months. Dr. Freud gets bored easily. “I require a fast turnover to stay awake.” Also, the Germans are just across the border. There is need for faster speed in manufacturing mensches.

  “But not so many people in America know they are sick in the head,” Shmuel jokes. “Thus ‘Tell me what comes into your head’ is stretched longer and longer with each patient. A doctor has to eat.”

  Dr. Derektor has become Dr. Freud’s Man in Washington. Shmuel, a roly-poly, tallish, bouncy, well-dressed man (he particularly favors snappy patterned socks) with bad posture and a smiling face is a happy person: he believes he’s found the secret of life. Twice. Once in Judaism and once in Sigmund Freud. There’s no point in even broaching with Shmuel the black cloud of a possible conflict of interest between Freud and Jewish teachings. Both are interested in freedom of the soul and spirit and that is that. Neither of them has been in Hortz bei Todstadt.

  Israel knows that in his own files he has written down enough bits and pieces of information to formulate “an important piece of work,” of the kind Dr. Derektor keeps pushing him to birth. But it is as if he cannot break through to what he wants to say—that he has seen glause before as a young doctor in the Andes and he is now seeing it again. He does not want to unleash this awful truth to the world, not even to Shmuel. If he was called crazy before, now he would be called an idiot. Or worse. He could lose his license for spreading false fears. He knows how nasty doctors can be about each other.

  On the couch, in Free Association, he relives to Shmuel every bad dream of his life. He vomits out poisons even he didn’t know he has. He cries for pains he does not believe hurt him anymore. And still … And yet … His chains of bondage are not loosed.

  Israel realizes down deep that he is not becoming the doctor his brains and abilities, skills, perceptions, should have made him by now. His early successes have been forgotten by the world. No one points to him in corridors or at conferences as one of Schmuck’s famous doctors, who are being treated more and more like movie stars. He is now some kind of joke, padding around the corridors. He is known as the famous doctor who never became famous.

  “Who is telling you no? What is your place? To be a second-rater?”

  Shmuel is afraid he says too much. Freud said shut up and listen, otherwise how comes the transference, that first and only rule of this modern catechism, wherein you take out on me what you have been unable to take out on others?

  He continues. “To be a puny? To be a mealy-mouthed follower when you are a leader!”

  Israel looks up to Shmuel as a savior. This can be dangerous, Shmuel knows. Savior is a dangerous word to Jews.

  Shmuel reins himself in and sits back in his armchair, slipcovered with thick-waled hunter-green corduroy, the fabric of a rich boys’ youth he never experienced, and awaits the words from Israel’s kishkas that he knows are in there. Jewish men always have trouble shitting.

  Israel says nothing for a while. “Sigmund said there is nothing that exists without cause, no mental state or act, just as there is no physical state in the universe without its cause. Am I just and forever a tortured Jew who has seen in every possible way how horrible man can be to his fellow man and that is that? How do I not let this stand in my way?”

  So he is back at square one. Again he has checkmated his very self.

  Finally, finally (despite the fact that hardly a night has passed in which he has not dreamed of purple spots, purple germs, purple people), and then only because Shmuel has dared him to put up or shut up, Israel disappears from view for several months and writes a short paper, “The Appearance of Glause.” It is all about Mercy Hooker and Evvilleena Stadtdotter and the many perplexing questions their cases raise. Shmuel is impressed. “This is very interesting,” he says. So Israel gets his treatise published. It is his first really important scientific publication in the New World. Of course he does not give himself credit for having done anything at all.

  “What does it take to make you like yourself even a little bit?” Shmuel asks him, nodding his head both sagely and sadly. “This paper is seminal.”

  Thus, mention of glause first appears in print in The Washington Titlement, a journal distributed among doctors and scientists who do not work for the government and are concerned that the government doctors and scientists increasingly being brought to Washington will upset the balance of power between what is beginning to be known as “the private sector” and what gives every sign of becoming as entrenched and possibly dangerous a bureaucracy as any government agency. The Titlement is a peculiar journal: it is difficult to figure out which side it’s on. But whatever it is, here is where Dr. Israel Jerusalem’s seminal piece of work appears.

  VAMPING TILL READY

  I had never heard of him or the goddamn glause. The Titlement article, long and a pain in the ass to read, is in an almost incomprehensible jargon. But interesting. If wrongheaded. But written by a good mind at work. Fedema liquid is a false trail. He obviously can’t see that, this Dr. Jerusalem. I’d already discovered that in my own experiments. This Jew is too simplistic, which Jews always were and are. And he doesn’t keep up with the goddamn fucking shitty literature. He should have known of my work, which I published in The New England Journal of Blood. I wonder where he went to medical school. His name is unfamiliar to me. Should I have known who he is? I sense from his writing that his mind works somewhat like mine. Though, of course, he is not as smart as I am. They never fucking are.

  The fedema could be just an infection, maybe from somebody giving the patient a sock in the stomach. Did nobody follow up on Nu’s work? Do I have to do fucking everything? You could make a case for mismitosis, which I certainly recall from my own lonely and hurtful experience with this disease when I was very young. Yes, what about mismitosis, I find myself asking myself. I still cannot think about mismitosis without a few slobby tears.

  I want to cry for my own nev
er-ending possibilities. I can cure the world of everything! I know I can! I must! We must not let the Jewish men of the world take over!

  Don’t be greedy, Grace.

  My fat body is shivering. Israel’s article, and the rereading of my notes on mismitosis, are telling me loud and clear that there is a Nobel, certainly a Pituitary, in all this, somewhere, and that I know more about it than Israel. He doesn’t know where he is going.

  I will beat this Jew!

  Dr. Jerusalem and Grace must meet.

  FROM YOUR ROVING HISTORIAN, BURGEONING SCIENTIST

  After Israel’s article appears, Dr. Sister Grace Hooker asks for and receives from him a pus sample from Evvilleena Stadtdotter’s fedema and a blood sample from Mercy Hooker. Yes, amazingly, Mercy was a distant cousin. Grace dimly recalls meeting at a Hooker family reunion. Grace was a toddler and Mercy was a teenager and quite beautiful. Grace remembers that, her beauty. Her laboratory, or rather one of her laboratories (at this point in time she supervises only three active working labs, scattered over Mater Nostra Dolorosa Medical Center; “Mother Superior promised me she would consolidate me, but she never has”), is one of the few places capable of doing a Kreitsch (a sort of test tube high colonic) on dangerous fluids. A Kreitsch (as against an Abner or “one of those beet/quinine jobs”) isolates poison. Mercy, Evvilleena, and the three nuns all had a similar poison. Maybe also Israel.

  Aren’t I getting good at this?

  So Israel and Grace, both sniffing around like two dogs nosing the crust of frozen earth, are, along with Flo, who’s about to be dead shortly, at a standstill. Without knowing it each is waiting for the other. And, as always, important discoveries have to be replicated by others using other means before the world can really say wow! In other words, Grace, or Israel, could say two plus two equals four, counting on fingers, but in science you can’t say, Yes, that is true! until some stranger somewhere else also says two plus two equals four, counting on toes. And there’s another war coming. And scientists all over the world have other things on their mind.

  So while we have glause and shit on the table, we don’t really have the table.

  After getting off to such a fine start, with purple spots and subliminal voices screaming to be heard—“Glause, Glause, Glause!”—Dr. Israel Jerusalem has allowed his attention to be swayed by … who knows what? Building a practice? Forcing himself—for self-protection, indeed his survival there—to become more involved in the administrative problems of Isidore Schmuck? Fear from having actually done something identified by Shmuel as important? Whatever, Israel pursues not the many interesting leads fate has so generously poured over his head like cold water, almost handing him an engraved invitation: in this lies greatness—take it or leave it.

  Currently he’s leaving it. It is not so unusual in psychoanalysis that when something has been achieved the very fear of success shuts things down for a while. There is nothing to be done but to sit it out and hope something will open the door again.

  People die because other people take too long. And when they look back, there’s no sensible reason for it. And this is not yet driving the world as nuts as it should.

  In years to come, Dr. Hoakus Benois-Frucht of the Table Medical Center in New York will testify as follows before the first (or is it the second or third?) (Ruester for the first; Trish for the second; Vertle for the third) Presidential Commission on The Underlying Condition: “Glause was only the herpes of the thirties, some minor disturbance that swept through the sexually active population. No one remembers it now. It came and went. Only a few hundred died. Israel Jerusalem was nuts.”

  Like the famous scientist he is, Dr. Benois-Frucht conveniently fails to mention that all these discoveries of Dr. Israel Jerusalem’s—that glause was a sexual disease, that glause was contagious, that glause killed people—were revolutionary discoveries that might have staved off an eventual plague had anyone paid attention to them. Israel told the world all this. It’s all there, on the record, published in the Titlement, if you can find any old issues of the Titlement. Nothing happened. No fellow scientist got on the phone and said, “Good work, Jerusalem!” No one even called to say, “You’re full of shit.” Nobody noticed. The world did not listen.

  ISRAEL WRITES TO YRH FROM THE FEDERAL PENITENTIARY IN GARTH, ALASKA, AUGUST 1990

  Dear Fred,

  I don’t know what I expected. I thought perhaps my article in the Titlement would provoke somebody wanting to corroborate my work. Or prove me crazy. There are lots of doctors and scientists who like especially to prove others crazy. There were plenty of people at Schmuck who did not like me, and here was a golden opportunity for them.

  What I really hoped was that someone with money would come forward. I missed my chance for Stadtdotter’s money.

  Nobody wanted me.

  I tried. I went to every rich old lady I could find. I pursued every patient I ever took care of. My practice was growing. You do not have Mercy Hooker and Evvilleena Stadtdotter for patients without word getting around. Rich people are crazier than other people. They believe more in the impossible. Poor patients don’t believe. Poor people most of the time don’t even hope. Poor patients expect to die. Rich patients think each new doctor has the secret of eternal life. That is why they flock to the doctors of crazy people like them. They think that Mercy and Evvilleena found out something with this Israel. Even if both die, that seems to make no difference.

  But the rich patients don’t last long. They don’t like me. They come to me once or twice. They see this funny Jewish man with no nice smooth style, with no bedside manner, with no jokes to make them smile. With no magic pills they must take every fifteen minutes on the half hour before drinking two tablespoons of his special elixir. They wonder what Mercy and Evvilleena ever saw in Israel. They go home and next time they go to the new doctor they’ve heard about who took care of Missy Mellon or Vera Vanderbilt or Sissy Astor or Prissy Loeb or Helen Hayes’s mother.

  Yours truly,

  Israel Jerusalem, M.D.

  GRODZO VISITS AMERICA

  On November 9, 1937, Gottfried Grodzo makes a speech, in German, in the small and predominantly German town of Inventa, in Northeast Washington. He delivers the same speech several days later to the German population in Milwaukee, a much bigger crowd.

  I would not like to be a homosexual in America after we, and we hope you, attend to our duties. They must be driven to the forests with the animals they resemble. They must be expelled from all areas of our lives, from our schools, from all public places, from their work. They must be eliminated from participation in all aspects of the economy. They must be excluded from all trades, crafts, agencies, from managing firms and management of any enterprise. They must be stigmatized in every way possible, placing them removed from the ranks of society as the pariahs they are, degrading them at will, placing them outside the universe of moral obligation so we can degrade them more. They must be ripped out of their existence on American soil by the roots. They must be excluded from using public transport, from appearing in public as shoppers, patrons at the movies, or visitors to the beach. They must be refused driving licenses lest they drive even further into your midst.

  Then, once and for all, we must face up to the necessity of exterminating them, so that the eventual result will be the factual and final end of homosexuality in the world, its absolute annihilation, once and for all and forever. If we do not accomplish this riddance of these infectiously diseased vermin then we ourselves are in danger of perishing from this homosexual infection that I predict will come to them.

  It is an extraordinary outburst, an extraordinary statement. Judging from the size of the crowd assembled to hear him in Milwaukee (“in excess of five hundred,” the press reports), and from the “exceedingly frenzied response,” the feelings he is expressing “must be releasing an enormous amount of pent-up hate.”

  He actually does not like himself for saying all these things. He has been sent over by the commandant of the reg
iment of Brown Shirts that he’s been required to join in exchange for his appointment to study with several famous doctors at home, doctors involved in secret experiments that interest him. More and more, that is how things are working now at home. You have to give in order to get. He is known to be a good public speaker, he speaks perfect English, he is good-looking, and unknown hands wrote his speech for him. He would get a free trip to America. So why not? He is surprised his reception is so thunderously positive. Somehow he did not expect that from America.

  BLOOD MARCHES ON

  The first blood bank in the United States finally opens at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago on January 15, 1937.

  The award-winning medical writer Laurie Garrett tells us, “Blood is made up of a solid part and a liquid part. The solid part is composed of red blood cells, white cells, and platelets, each with their respective function of transporting oxygen, fighting infection, and aiding coagulation.

  “In the late 1930’s, evidence begins to link hemophilia to a defect in the plasma, the liquid portion of the blood.

  “Plasma is composed of proteins, salts, sugars, and water. Fourteen different plasma proteins have been found to effect clotting. These are referred to as clotting factors. Seventeen recognized disorders (coagulopathies) result from deficiencies of these clotting factors.”