The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Even though she can hardly speak English, I understand her gibberish, but only her daughter can penetrate her Russo-Yiddish. In many fruitless attempts to teach her how to speak English, her excuse is always “I wait things get better.” As a kid I wonder if this means she’s going home to Russia if things don’t. Since she steadfastly refuses to learn America’s language, I assume what she spoke in Russia is the language of her mind, where she can think her thoughts in words she need not struggle to translate. If there are genetic origins for personality characteristics, I think this is how I begin to live inside my own head. I see Grandma Libby do it. No one is listening, she seems to say; it doesn’t matter: talk to yourself.

  She teaches me this lesson and she leaves us. Grandpa Herschel, her own unsmiling husband, has a heart attack and they move west to Los Angeles, where his doctor promises more heart attacks won’t happen. Uncle Hyman, my least favorite uncle, drives them there and changes all their names from Wishenwart to Wishen. Herschel is Libby’s third cousin. He took her from Russia to a new world and a new life in a strange country and a strange city in the East; now he is taking her to a strange city in the West. On their departure she envelops me in her arms. It’s one of the first times in my life I remember crying. Suddenly, Grandpa tries to tell us all goodbye. His words are a salad of Russian and Yiddish and German and Polish—Herschel must never have known where he was, he’d been on the move all his life, escaping this and that with never much to pack. We understand him to say he’s sad to be leaving, sad to be moving on, yet praying that we will all meet yet again, if not in the promised Jerusalem (he resents his son-in-law for having that name), at least in Southern California. Such remarkable thoughts from such a remarkably silent man. He’s been about as welcoming and as scary to me as Grandma Zilka.

  Her departing words to me? My grandmother, in whose embrace I am crying, says softly, with more words than I have ever heard her string together in English before, that no one will ever understand me, and that because of this I will be alone, but that it must not make me sad, because I will view everything—the entire world and all that happens in it—with a third eye.

  The strangeness of this thought stays with me, and when, some thirty years later, Herschel long dead and Libby brought back years earlier by her children to be put in this home, she says the same thing to me again, I bob my head up and down like a Jew in a synagogue, in agreement with the word of the Lord. She is one hundred years old now, and withered beyond recognition, in a crib, mewling and wetting her pants, and seeming not to know any of the family of faces, Lucas’s and Stephen’s kids and even some of their kids, that lean over her, smiling down, trying to cheer her up, elicit some flicker of familiarity from their beloved Nana, as they try not to vomit from the smell of urine, farts, runny shit, the putrid odor of her advanced senility. She simply will not let go of life. She knows nothing and no one and she will not let go. She is in an old people’s home that has taken every last cent of her money, for this tiny crib, for no nurse to come and clean her up, for the chance to be surrounded by a sea of the similarly cribbed and drooling. The sounds of screaming, in all registers, is like a zoo, and I can still hear it, particularly late at night when I’m scared of death.

  But when I lean over, she smiles and says, “Hello, Danny,” as if she’s come to take care of me and I am her willing charge. She stretches her hand out for the young child to take, for safety, as we cross a street.

  On that day, the day she dies, she becomes fluent. She talks smoothly in English about places she’s never been, Phoenicia and Alexandria and Thrace and Mesopotamia, places perhaps from some bold children’s tales of ancient times that her own mother told her. She holds my hand between her palms, which are as soft and white as Mary in Michelangelo’s Pietà, and she presses my own palms with her thumbs, her hundred-year-old thumbs, as if to punctuate her thoughts, as if her jabbings can metamorphose instinct into words into truth as she brings forth her English sentences just for me.

  “Nothing is so sad, not even dying, as the dying of love. You suffer too much the bad, so you can turn around and make it right. You think, like your mother, that you must play the savior. But you are an artist, and you dream, all your life I have seen your eyes dreaming, and for this you will be punished, because there is no room for dreamers. The world must always punish the creator and deny his powers. As the son denies his mother to find another to take her place.

  “Your mother is a frightened woman. Her husband is confused in his sex. Men have never been our family’s strong point. We women are too strong for them. You, my Daniel, will grow into strength you cannot dream you even have. There is too much blood and war and survival in our past lives for you to fall down, become a victim to … I do not know what to call it—punishment, everything in this world comes to punishment, a never-ending plague. That is this New World as it was the Old World, my mother Russia. We run and run.”

  The gurgling and the slobbering return. She cries out like a baby and then she is quiet, letting go.

  How did she sense so much? With her own third eye? I don’t understand until I’m helping you write this history of the plague, Fred. There are the facts and there are the opinions and then there is the truth, the true places few can see, that only the special few are cursed with seeing. For why else make Tiresias blind and Cassandra unbelieved?

  I wrote down her words as fast as I could leave her bedside and find pencil and paper. It’s only now, when I’m a lot closer to death myself, that I realize her prophecy is rather hopeless.

  You will be very strong, she also says, and you will not allow yourself to be punished.

  Well, perhaps it’s not quite so hopeless.

  She also says: You will not be loved until you are old.

  * * *

  The buildings of Masturbov Gardens are all connected underground by basements tunneling into each other, dark, sinewy, cement-encrusted bunker pathways apt to veer unexpectedly right and left, lit only by tiny bulbs that remain dead for weeks until tardy maintenance men brave these frightening nether routes. On particularly nasty days, when youngsters are instructed to “play indoors,” it’s possible to start at Mordecai Avenue, where my family lives, in the very first section of the Gardens completed, and journey entirely underground, building by building, all the way to Doris Drive, the farthest point, which takes twice as long to walk to out of doors.

  In these tunnels Claudia Webb dares me to play You Show Me Yours and I’ll Show You Mine. She does and I do, and it’s enormously exciting—the act, not the vision, because in some bulb’s last flickering glow, in that brief moment before terror at what we’ve done propels us both to hike up our drawers, I think I’ve failed to see hers. What I see is smooth and slit and penisless. No, I mustn’t have seen hers at all.

  But she’s seen mine. She’s managed to get a good look, stooping and inspecting me so closely that I get increasingly worried I’m deficient. Has she seen others that are better? Has she seen Mordy’s, or Dodo’s? Arnold’s? If she’s seen Mordy’s I’ll die. I can’t compete with Abe’s son, the heir to all these buildings and the “probably millions” of dollars Rivka says Abe’s worth. Rivka and Philip have made it clear that money buys the world.

  Claudia reaches out, her fingers coming close to touch. I’m frozen with apprehension. Just then we hear a sound and Claudia runs away.

  I run with her. Up, out, into the wet gray daylight of the miserable outdoors. Our lungs gasp for fresh air and we grab each other and hold on to each other, as if we’ve seen a ghost.

  Unexpectedly, unpredictably, Claudia tugs me. “Come on,” she orders me.

  She leads me back down into the tunnels, into that maze beneath our homes, I hardly seeing, stumbling behind her through these concrete caverns. When she finds a place that suits her, a slim indentation in a wall, just enough to hide us, she gives another order.

  “Drop your pants.”

  I obey her immediately. I not only drop them, I step out of them.


  “Those, too.”

  I forsake my underpants.

  “Keep your eyes closed” is her next command.

  The cool air around my crotch is thrilling. I scrunch my eyes up tight, though I peek and see her kneeling in front of me, studying me. Again. She touches nothing. She just looks.

  “Turn to the side.”

  And I turn, profiled for her ceaseless observation.

  Finally she stands. We face each other. I wait for her to speak. Have I passed her test?

  “I did it,” she says.

  “Did what?”

  “I didn’t run away.”

  What has this to do with my penis?

  “I did what I wanted to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Look at a cock.”

  “Look at a what?”

  “Where have you been all your life?”

  “You mean my schlang?”

  She laughs out loud and the sound booms in the underground caves.

  “Did you like it?” I demand sharply. Why is she teasing me?

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  I am overwhelmed with disappointment.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I haven’t seen anybody else’s. I’m experimenting on you. You can see me … my cunt. Do you want to?

  I nod in the affirmative, if apprehensively. I’m not certain what a cunt is, but I have a good idea.

  “Ask.”

  “Pretty please may I see your … cunt?”

  She lifts the skirt of her pinafore and yanks down her pink panties and takes my hand and rubs it softly over her smooth vagina. Our breathing seems thunderous.

  Then I sink to my knees and study her as she studied me. At first I find the sight upsetting: yes, it does look like she’s been amputated. But then I’m overcome with the sense that she is different and this difference is eloquent and poignant: she’s vulnerable in a way I’m not and I want to protect her. Of course I can’t put any of this into words. But I feel … tender toward her. She’s sharing her difference, which is not so much less than mine as more mysterious. I feel so … obvious. So up front and out there. Why does it make me want to protect her? Is this love? Claudia, were you my first love? My knees aren’t getting sore at all. I look up at her. She’s smiling down on me.

  I bend forward to kiss her vagina. And I stay there, my lips brushing hers back and forth. Then I kiss harder, more fully, as if these lips are kissing me back. I lay my cheek against the slit. Her smell is sweet and I think of Hershey’s kisses, which I love. Then I gently touch it with my tongue. She shudders and instinctively I pull my tongue away and put my arms around her legs and lay my head against her crotch. My tongue can still feel the memory, her softness, yes, but also her slash and cleft and the dividedness of her body into halves. Is one half in touch with the other?

  I want to taste more.

  I stick my tongue into her. How do I know to do this? A greedy hungry child who’ll eat anything? When he catches me raiding the icebox and ravenously stuffing myself with cold baked beans and leftover chocolate pudding, Philip always yells at me, “You’ll put anything into your mouth!”

  I hear her say “oooh” in a strange way, a sound from deep in her throat. Suddenly everything we’re doing makes me sad. It comes from nowhere, this sadness. Why has it come? I feel different. And that I don’t belong here. I can be no home for her or she for me. I miss my twin brother, I want to tell him about this. Why is he here with me now? And why isn’t he? And why am I thinking any of this?

  Claudia kneels down beside me. Does she sense my mood? She holds my head in her hands and looks me in the eyes and kisses me on my lips. It’s lovely. I’m back with her again. I feel good inside again. I wonder again if what’s stirring inside me is love. Then—what is she doing?—her hand is in my crotch. “You’re supposed to get stiff and hard.” There’s that determined bossy tone, her command spoken with such authority. Her fingers are poking at my tiny bobbing thing. “My mother says you’re supposed to get stiff and hard. My father does. Sometimes. She says she plays with him when he doesn’t.” She’s playing with me and I’m becoming what she and her mother talked about. I smile in pride. Do my mother and father talk about these things? Much less do them?

  Then she pushes her body against mine. She leans into me and I fall backward and she’s on top of me, keeping her skirt up with her hands, her body pushing and pushing against mine. “You’re supposed to go into me,” she orders. We’re lying on the cold harsh floor now. I’m getting dizzy. Her hand is down on my penis again. “Your penis isn’t hard at all. You’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing at all.”

  I try harder to comply with these increasingly strange new marching orders. I summon all the energy I can and try to direct it to my cock, like when squeezing hard aids recalcitrant bowel movements. I pump and thrust and push and grunt. I grunt so hard I worry something will come out of my bottom. But it’s no use. I know it will be no use. It is no use at all. How I know, or why, I don’t know, beyond some unconscious fear that destiny is all. This time it’s me who runs back up to the daylight. I think I hear her laughing behind me in the dark.

  * * *

  I want to say more about Claudia, Fred. Her presence hovers over these early years of my life with unnatural weight.

  In less charitable moments I’ve called her evil; now I look more to myself to wonder how I ever saw her that way, and why.

  I could almost say I’ve loved her all these years—it’s almost sixty years by now—but I stop short of saying this because it sounds as sentimental as it is, a homosexual claiming to pine for the young girl from his youth, the particular homosexual having been a young boy and young man and older man who’s had much trouble with love, with finding it, with keeping it, with knowing it when it’s there.

  I know that in her own way Claudia loved me, perhaps more than she loved anyone else, perhaps instead of anyone else, perhaps only me and no one else (no, that suits my role in this drama too much). Would I have been so impractical as to continue so long in her thrall without some return in kind? I did dream that we might live together in some attempt at partnership.

  I know—and this is my heartbreaking realization, one reason I must write about her is to get some sadness out of my system, even though I’ve long since learned there’s very little in life that’s cathartic—that she learned an even sadder lesson of our age: once you’ve actually partaken of fantasies, from that moment on there’s little chance realities will ever be the same. I don’t believe there is one fantasy that Claudia did not live out in her years, or one that she didn’t tell me about and I didn’t experience vicariously, usually to the detriment of my own heart and soul.

  My goodness, what heady stuff.

  I’ve come painfully to realize that she never believed, as I did—and, God help me, still do—in the touching innocence of romantic love that we’ve been brainwashed, by every conceivable coercive device from mothers to media, into longing for and aspiring to. I wanted her to have that, if not from me, then someone. And of course I failed. As did Lucas, whom she did love and who wouldn’t leave his wife for her. And it was for this she took Stephen away, to punish him for all the Jerusalems’ failures. Stephen to this day is still a mess.

  So no, I can’t let go of her, even now. Indeed, she is even more the symbol of what I wish would change about the world, of why the world always looks the other way, time of plague or no.

  She always said I was the silly Jew who must invent hope, and if not hope, then anger to destroy. “I insist I am a complete pragmatist” was her answer to all my protestations. I replied, “I watched you grow from a young girl who seemed to hold so much promise into a woman without imagination, expectations, hopes, or dreams.” She answered, always, “Precisely my definition of the complete and modern woman.” The irony is that she had more contentment in life than I’ll ever have with all my quests and dreams. How do I know? How could she get contentment out of that? Well, sh
e was that perverse. She said she’d already lived her life, which she called a life of loss; she said she wished I’d get to work on mine and bring it to some sort of conclusion: the death of dreams.

  “I will never not believe in dreams!”

  “How can you dream now!” she often asked me, long before the plague.

  I’m sorry, Fred, that she never met your Edward, who finally came along to disprove all she said and stood for.

  She went to live and work with Doris Hardware. It was a pleasant sunny morning in spring.

  Claudia walks the few miles from her house off Military Road. She locks the door and casually drops the key to her home of ten years down a gutter, not even waiting to hear it plink against the bottom. She isn’t concerned with what’s in that house any longer, who will pay the bills, or what will happen to her MG convertible illegally parked in front. Another gutter, plink goes the MG key. Now she carries nothing, not even a handbag holding phone numbers or cash. She carries only herself and the light summer clothes she’s wearing—a navy-blue skirt of rough cotton, a pale pink blouse that makes her skin look whiter than it is, and a pair of squeaky sandals from a trip to Mexico we took together. Her hair, which is jet black, is cut short around her round face. She always looks like a very pleasant person, except for her eyes, which either look through you or are sad, though she doesn’t seem to know this, or care. It’s as if she’s never with you. Which, for some, certainly the likes of Stephen, makes you want her more.

  She is not a woman given to memories. Each moment is each moment. Oh, she remembers things when asked. “What happened to you in San Antonio when you were nineteen?” and she recalls quite precisely, sounding like a footnote in a history book or an entry in a particularly dispassionate diary: “That was when I was in love with Chipper. Reems.” Then she goes on to say how they went to Houston and had a fight on top of that revolving monument erected to commemorate a world’s fair. “I warned him I was going to leave him. He somehow got himself outside the tower, on the roof, and threatened to jump off. I left him there.” “Did he jump?!” “I have no idea. I never heard that he did.” And that’s the end of the entry as far as she’s concerned.