The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  “Because you’re perfect.”

  “I’m not perfect.”

  Then she won’t talk about anything sexual or personal anymore. We have our lunch in that musty, seductive study and talk about other things. After lunch, we’re sitting on that plaid sofa, and I lay her back and unbutton the pinafore she’s changed into and look at her body. We have watched each other bud. I’m shaking with fear and stage fright: what I’m doing now feels different. I know what men are supposed to do to women. Which I think I want to do to her. She is suddenly very … alien. I know I’m looking at a perfect body: her long arms, her breasts like the ones in paintings and on statues in art galleries, the dark hair between her legs. I lean over and kiss that. It smells sweet, perhaps of soap, a smell I can remember still and perhaps remembered from when she was smooth and there was only that slit so perversely different and divisive. She lies there. Her eyes are closed. My boldness makes me bolder. I begin to kiss her all over. “I enjoy your kissing me,” she says, opening her eyes and looking at me. We both see the bulge in my bathing suit. “I told you no,” she says. “I don’t want to,” I say, looking down at my penis, my hand on it. “I think I could, but I don’t want to.” “I don’t want you to,” she says; “I told you that. I told you I don’t want us ever to do that to each other. What does it take to make you listen to me?” Then she lays me back, and she takes off my bathing suit, and she looks at me, then kisses me all over, as I have done to her. She goes nowhere near my penis, which stands up like a flagpole, too ungraciously inelegant for this touching scene. When she finishes, she says, “Please remember how my kissing you all over felt, because it will have to last you a lifetime. No one else will ever have so many of my kisses.”

  “Why not?”

  “You do insist on asking unanswerable questions. If you give people what they want and what you want … you don’t get anything. You’ll always be the giver. I don’t want to be the giver. The trouble is that I don’t want to be the taker either. I still have to figure that one out. When I do, I’ll tell you.”

  I don’t have the vaguest notion what she’s talking about.

  I don’t think I’m being frugal in relating these events. Yes, I know that I’ve related them chaotically. Yes, I know there’s a feeling of something missing. But that is Claudia exactly.

  “Sex is like heroin,” she once said to me. “For some people it’s an addiction. Sexual obsession. I’m not one of those. You are. And I can’t satisfy you.”

  “I am not obsessive about sex! What are you talking about!”

  “I don’t think people can change.”

  “Stop saying that!”

  “They just have to learn to accept themselves.”

  I vehemently protest that people can indeed change if they want to change, that it’s just hard work, but worth it, and that nothing important ever comes easily. And I still have no idea what she’s talking about. Or how I already knew how to answer her as I did. My sexual obsession?

  “Where in the world did you get all that?” I almost explode.

  “It just makes sense! You wait and see!”

  “See what!”

  “In many things, in all important things, I think we have no choice.”

  “Stop saying things like that!”

  And so it goes. She pooh-poohs me and I pooh-pooh her and then we get angry and then she reaches out and puts her hand on my crotch that’s frightened of her and then we don’t make love and then I go home and she leaves town again and who knows where she’s gone to now.

  And I stay home, wondering why I didn’t take her in my arms and possess her so fiercely she had no other choice but to love me back.

  But if confronted with this question she would reply, “But Daniel, I already do love you back.”

  So these are a few scenes with Claudia, out of their proper historical order as memories are. The underground tunnel in Masturbov Gardens I followed her into—neither of us came out of it the same.

  * * *

  “Mommy, what’s a penis really?”

  Rivka and I are carrying heavy bags of groceries up the steep and winding hill from the Safeway. It’s the summer before Pearl Harbor. Many unknown things are in the atmosphere. You just know it and feel it. Life seems off balance, strangely imprecise.

  Surely, with a father and two brothers—no, three—somewhere along the way I must have noticed a penis. Or two. Or three. Or four. And wondered. No. Not wondered. Known. Why is it important that Rivka tell me? Was I looking for some common sense after Claudia? Or verification? “Why didn’t you or Daddy ever tell me?”

  Rivka doesn’t bat an eye. “It is the male sexual organ,” she explains in her schoolteacher voice, the one she uses when she tries to instill facts in me. “It is what you urinate with and when you are a man you will use it to insert yourself into a woman’s sexual organ, which is called the vagina, and which is not at all like your penis but is flat and with an opening, like an envelope—or my pocketbook—in order to receive you.” We don’t miss a step in our heaving up the hill, which is suddenly steeper, and the summer day more sweltering. No, not for one second does she cease her riveting discourse, and I feel myself sweating inside my underpants, mysterious driblets dripping and sticking my little penis to the cloth. I didn’t know that daring the gods or tempting the fates made your crotch behave so markedly.

  “This insertion, which requires that the man’s penis is erect…”

  Erect? Is that the same as hard?

  “… will result in the deposit of male seed, or semen, into what is called the uterus, and if it is the proper time of month, conception will occur, resulting in pregnancy and, nine months later, a child.”

  My little penis?

  I am stunned by her forthrightness, and what certainly sounds like an honesty not witnessed since David’s disappearance somehow changed the rules. She who once held and cuddled me, she who once made me feel safe, is now telling me about erect penises. Her words provoke a hundred further questions. I sneak a look at her but she’s looking straight ahead, as if all she’d told me was the time of day. The silence continues. Am I meant to respond? Will I disappoint her if I don’t? I fill the air with lots of panting and heaving as we work our way to the top of the hill with our formidable loads.

  “What do you mean, the proper time of month?”

  She then tells me about menstruation and sperm swimming upstream to fertilize eggs. Eggs? Like the eggs I hate that she makes me eat for breakfast? I’m way more unsettled than enlightened. Usually, when we discuss “current events” or right and wrong, she asks me, “Do you understand?” She’s not asking me now.

  Instead, I ask her, “What are we having for dinner?”

  She answers that one too, and we are home.

  * * *

  There’s a war creeping up on us, isn’t there? When its rages finally start perking more violently into our consciousnesses, it will seem like it’s been here all along. And like everyone was already working on it beforehand, weren’t they? People slip into rhythms fast. Many parents are doing “important things.” Express buses now run daily into the District.

  All the fathers in Masturbov Gardens now want to be seen doing something important downtown. Their sons and daughters, my playmates, endow them with important-sounding jobs. New families are moving in all the time to ride those express buses. And the rental billboards posted at the very District Line, which once promised One Hundred Acres of Heaven, now announce, “Live Where the Important People Live!” Both Rivka and Philip remark how “important” everyone now looks. She says it’s because people now have a purpose in life, “like I do.”

  If food will soon be rationed all over the country, if people will have Victory Gardens and be eating carrot and beet tops and kale, and pour their rendered fats into tin cans for surrender to the butcher, how come we in Washington will be able to eat so well and suffer so little, especially in comparison with the little boys and girls our parents now start telling us about who
are starving overseas?

  Where is David? Is he eating properly?

  Like the mysterious “war effort” no one precisely defines, not the newspapers or the radio or our teachers in school, not Philip or Rivka, though they are both apparently busy working for it, life appears to move onward unquestioningly.

  Something’s happening. Isn’t it? Somewhere?

  But I don’t remember people asking, What’s really happening?

  We’re all playing Follow the Leader, aren’t we, and rather well.

  * * *

  My uncle Hyman is a traveling salesman, of books more legally salable than the one I discover while secretly investigating his suitcase. He’s also the first “free man” I know, someone who is his own boss and goes from city to city anytime he wants to. Philip hates him, and I don’t like him either.

  He looks sly and greasy. He never looks you in the eye. He smells of body odor and endless cigars. He has a waxed mustache, of a kind seen in old movies on villains and untrustworthy French lovers: pointy and itchy for those like me who are forced to kiss him. “Kiss your uncle Hyman hello.” Yuck. Hello, Uncle Hyman. His mustache sits over a narrow mouth, a pursed slit when closed and a maw of tobacco-stained teeth when not. Does he know he’s so repulsive? He must! (And if he knows, how does he live with it?) He doesn’t have any friends he ever talks about. He never has a girlfriend. He wears elevator shoes with heels so high they pitch him forward, and he’s still a shorty. And his hair! So gloppy with grease, from a jar labeled Lilac, though certainly unlike any lilacs that bloom in Masturbov Gardens, stinky, with a cloying sweetness. Oh, everything about Uncle Hyman is so disgusting, how can we be related?

  Uncle Hyman arrives regularly in Masturbov Gardens twice a year.

  “Why doesn’t your cheapskate brother spring for a hotel?” Philip twice a year complains.

  “He’s my brother! I want him here with me!”

  This exchange transpires in loud whispers as Hyman heaves his suitcase onto David’s twin bed.

  He gives us our gifts. Philip receives something like an old accounting text; he can never fathom the workings of a mind that gives him, in 1942, a book copyrighted in 1927 and as out-of-date as auction bridge. “The man is so cheap he’s nuts.”

  And for me, similarly archaic works in biology or chemistry or math, their publications all preceding my birth. Perhaps he’s giving us something valuable, perhaps he knows something we don’t, that if we hold on to the books for years and years they might be worth untold dollars, like the Gutenberg or a first edition of Proust, to those devoted to collecting such earlier examples of knowledge.

  But I soon discover these are not the books. How I come to ransack, at every opportunity, every outpost of the unknown (Uncle Hyman’s suitcase is by no means an isolated gold mine), I’ll never know. Are lonely children always nosy children? How far does “nosy” extend before “trespassing” or “against the law” is more descriptive of the act? To this day I dislike anyone who isn’t filled with questions. How can people not be curious? What’s wrong with being nosy? I’ve discovered that most people, when confronted, will tell you almost anything. Why are questions rarely asked? Why are people always so infernally polite? What do you gain by being so polite? Certainly not knowledge. I fervently believe that truly interesting information must most often be excavated and extracted rudely. Given half a chance, I still investigate drawers and desktops, closets and shelves, suitcases, old trunks and packing cases, cartons, coat pockets, refrigerators, cupboards, no matter where. I am a scavenger of other people’s secrets. These are much more important caches than the places we usually turn to for “truth.”

  I don’t think I would have become a doctor but for Uncle Hyman.

  I am lying in bed. Lucas, who comes home late if at all, has been moved back to his own twin bed with smelly Stephen. Uncle Hyman’s suitcase lies where David would. Mom and Hyman go for a walk. It’s a nice night. Pop’s listening to a ball game. Pop never comes in here. So what am I waiting for?

  My heart thumps like a kettledrum. I am stealthily opening Pandora’s box.

  What’s making me do it? I hate Uncle Hyman. All the more reason!

  I press the two lock releases and they jump to attention. I swing the two halves of the giant suitcase apart and they lie back, awaiting me. I gently raise the top layers of clothing. Item by item, layer by layer, my delicate excavation reaches the bottom of side one. Nothing. Onward.

  I flip over the dividing panel. Socks and handkerchiefs and underwear. What’s this? “Sold for the prevention of disease only.” Prophylactics. Yes, I have seen one. I even put one on, one night when I was babysitting for the Droods. Mickey Drood’s bottom drawer was filled with them. I had to figure out what it was for. I figured it out. Of course it fell off. But it was exciting anyway and I looked forward to growing into one. What’s this? Phooey. More books. But these are slim and slickly shiny. I open one up. Photographs. I suck in my breath.

  Here, before my eyes, on my very brother’s bed (or should I say on my very brothers’ bed), my hands are holding pictures of every imaginable combination performing every conceivable act. Here are thin pamphlets of naked men and women. Here are naked women and women. Here are naked white people and naked black people and naked Oriental people. Here is a naked woman with a German shepherd. With an erection. In her. Here are group scenes. Here are children with other children just as naked of pubic evidence as I was. Here are naked children and naked adults. And here (almost a relief at last?) are naked men and naked men.

  So this is what it looks like.

  How do I know this is home?

  I feel all fluttery inside like the time I was in a play awaiting my entrance offstage. I feel giddier by the moment, positively dizzy. As I turn from page to page of the several volumes devoted to my sex, I feel faint in my head and stalwart in my underpants. A throbbing turns to a surge. The men are good-looking. One of them reminds me of Lucas, and another’s chest hair is just like Stephen’s. Everyone’s penis is hard and thick and huge. I have never seen penises like these. Certainly not on anyone in this household when I’ve covertly peeked. Some of the penises have skin on their ends that looks strange, and anatomically new to me. Oh, God, am I somehow deficient here as well?

  Some of the men are playing with their penises with their hands and/or playing with the penises of others. Some of them are in a circle, each holding on to the penis of a neighbor. That looks like fun, although their faces are all unsmiling and stern. One of the men has his penis in another’s mouth. One of them has his penis in another’s rectum! The picture I like best is of two men just holding each other tight and kissing. Something in my pajama pants explodes. (I wear my underpants under my pajama bottoms. Why?)

  I never felt like this before! I throb and tingle. But the strangeness of it suddenly scares me more than the wonderfulness of it makes me feel so good. I yank down both bottoms. I must look at my small thing to see if it’s still there after such a throbbing. I am relieved to see it is. What are those sounds from the front of the apartment? They’re back! They’re back and Uncle Hyman is coming to bed!

  I jam the books back into the suitcase and the suitcase back to its closed position. I jump into my bed and pull up the covers and turn off the light and scrunch my eyes closed just as the door opens and I smell Uncle Hyman come in and walk near and what is he doing now? Have I successfully covered my tracks? Have I left evidence at the scene of the crime? I hear him heave the suitcase down to the floor and take off his clothes and sink into bed. Soon he’s snoring. I guess everything’s all right. I guess wrong.

  Uncle Hyman offers to take me on his round of Washington bookstores. I have nothing else to do. Summer vacation is boring. His accounts are all dusty ground floor and basement secondhand places in the poorer neighborhoods, off the beaten track, with high stacks of old books, long aisles between them, and dim lighting. I am left to wander while he takes orders for his “special line” on the occult and how to perform ca
rd tricks and recognize the value of old coins. First one store, then another; there is little difference between them; I come to recognize similar stock, the same old bestsellers trying to find a home again.

  Each store also has unmarked sections for sex.

  How swiftly I find them. No matter how small the type, SEX jumps out from the spines. I pause nonchalantly, pretending to look at some neighbor, health or diet or eugenics (whatever that is), my fingers inching closer to pounce on something that says, Take me! I come to recognize that the books with titles like A Manual for Modern Marriage, What Every New Bride Should Know—I discover that marriage stuff always has drawings of men’s “sexual organs”—The Bachelor’s Handbook, Sex and Today’s Man are the ones I want. Homosexuality. That’s what it’s called. The Bachelor’s Handbook tells me so. Now I know its name from what are called “Case Histories.” Young boys having sex in a school dormitory is a Case History. Old men locked up in institutions for playing with young boys outside of school dormitories is a Case History. I sniff the odor of disapproval. The whiff—hell, the stench. How quickly I adapt to it. The insatiable hunger of the voyeur is stronger than the stench of societal condemnation.

  Driving home from his last stop, Uncle Hyman puts his hand on my knee.

  What is this greasy, smelly uncle doing? Now his hand is in my crotch! Now he’s trying to unbutton my fly! What am I supposed to do? I’m terrified.

  My windbreaker is on the seat between us. I push his hand away and pull it over my lap.

  “What don’t you want me to see?” he asks.

  I don’t answer. I can’t answer.

  “Let me see,” he says matter-of-factly, trying to pull the jacket away. “Men shouldn’t be ashamed to let other men see them.”

  He pulls it off. I pull it back.

  “Did you enjoy my picture books?”

  His hand, now under the windbreaker, has succeeded in unbuttoning. He’s poking for my penis. His fingers are darting around, seeking, then finding it. I’m having what I don’t know is one of my first grown-up erections and I wish I wasn’t. He’s driving, looking straight at the road. We aren’t on the way home at all. We’re on some country road. We must be way over in Virginia. “Do you like this? Doesn’t it feel good? I’m going to keep doing it because your little cock that you don’t want me to see is hard. That means you like what I’m doing to it. I wish somebody had done this to me when I was your age. Nobody enjoyed me while I was young and cute. In a few seconds your little cock might squirt white gism all over my hand. You’re going to shake because it feels so good. There it is. Keep it coming, Danny boy. Keep shaking. Learn how to make it last and last. Now, isn’t that the most wonderful feeling in the world?”