The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  I think the writer is saying things in this letter that should be told to important people, but I don’t know anyone except Brecky and I’m sure not telling him this. I’m not supposed to be reading it. I’m sitting at Heidi’s desk and she’ll be back from lunch any minute.

  The letter frightens me, not only because I’m Jewish but because, in knowing Mordy, and now Alexei, I’ve learned, like the man who wrote this letter, what it’s like to feel for other men. I’ve learned, starting with Uncle Hyman, that I’m marked with a double curse. Life will be even more complicated than it already is.

  By the time I know the whole story behind this letter (which I will learn from Claudia)—that the Mr. Osteroff who wrote it was Alexei’s uncle, not his father (he owned Osteroff’s Chevrolet and his own son was in Phi Pi Psi with Stephen), and that he was also his lover—Heidi will have married someone else just as handsome as Alexei, who has committed suicide because Mr. Osteroff reappears one day after the war is over with another man. Mr. Osteroff had also been among the rank of Röhm’s lovers and was brought to Germany at Röhm’s suggestion and Hitler’s request to discuss American distribution of the new Volkswagen “bug” that Hitler believed would be all the rage worldwide. Hitler kept him on ice in camps so that he could use his automotive services when the war was over.

  I forgot to mention Ianthe Strode. She is very impressive. She’s like one of the movie actresses I love most, Eve Arden, Rosalind Russell, Bette Davis, Joan Blondell, Thelma Ritter, the tough ladies who make us both laugh. She smiles at me all the time and I think we could be friends. Minna told me Ianthe is very wellborn (as with Rivka, there’s always a “very” when Minna describes people) and is related to the president even though she’s a Republican. Her father was vice president of the United States, I forget whose.

  DORIS HARDWARE CALLS THEM AS SHE SEES THEM

  On this anniversary, I write this for our records and for anyone who may come to be in my place.

  Do you know what it’s like to run a whorehouse? A comfortable, elegant whorehouse that has already served the nation’s capital for some dozen years, with not a whit of trouble, and is now booming in wartime as never before?

  Do you understand what happens to a man when he gets the need on? When whatever he’s doing—and it may be the most overwhelmingly important national need, a treaty awaiting drafting, due on the president’s desk the next morning, or approval for the launching of a troopship or secret spy negotiations—his cock says, You’ve got to take care of me first.

  It’s not difficult to find good whores, especially today when girls want to leave home because wartime makes them restless. Good beautiful whores. Good beautiful loyal whores. Good beautiful loyal trustworthy whores. I used to hate the word whore. Now I consider it distinguished. Women have disappointed me much more than whores.

  When word got across the country and around the world that my house was a good place to be, women began knocking on my door daily, inquiring.

  I always interview them myself, in my study, where everything is unthreatening floral patterns. People feel safe around flowers. I’ve interviewed thousands and kept their names and my reactions to them in my secret files. If you don’t think that’s been some valuable network over the years … Well, anyway, I mostly hire on the spot if I feel the right feeling, whether I need them or not. It’s a huge house and there’s always room for one more.

  So what’s there to understand about providing vaginas for the pricks of Washington? Are Washington pricks different from any other city’s pricks? Is anything different required for my cunts? I don’t like to use language like this, but that’s how most men think of sex, as something involving cunts and cocks. Wives are for the romantic fantasies that are never realized, and are just there to torture both sides. I provide the cunts and they get erections here that they can’t get at home. They don’t think of anything here as involving love or kisses or affection, which is what I’m convinced women want from men: wells of affection, tons of love, barrels of kisses, gobs of sentiment, but no sex. Wives don’t like to be fucked. Which is just as well because my fuckers can usually only get it up for cunts.

  So one of the things I look for in a good whore is a woman who doesn’t want or need wells of affection. But she can’t be a glacial woman, because most men don’t want to fuck a complete iceberg (though I’ve met a few who do).

  What makes a woman uncaring to the degree I require? “Uncaring” is not quite correct. A good whore cares. I mean, perhaps, disattached in some primal interior region, perhaps if only for self-protection, which is OK, fine, really. How can I tell this with enough precision? For the whore has needs too, and madams who have come and gone unsuccessfully in the History of Whorehouses have come a cropper on just this shoal: a whore has needs too, and you cannot deny them or ignore them. You may not wish to act on them, but as in any good relationship, they must be discussed.

  Actually, it all has very little to do with wanting to get fucked or enjoying getting fucked. It has little to do with actual fucking period, just as licking an envelope has little to do with the writing of the letter sealed inside it.

  Do these women get pleasure from pleasing? Some do, some don’t. Abandonment. If I had to search for one word to pinpoint what I endeavor to sense empathetically from the woman across from me, that’s it. The ability to let go.

  To let go of many things. The past. The future. Even, in a sense, the present, the outside world. To let go of romantic notions. To let go of worldly responsibility. To let go of the outside world. To some this is a consummation devoutly to be wish’d.

  Because romantic notions are breast-fed and force-fed into us every day of our lives from birth, it’s not easy to let go of many of them, much less all.

  The whores of literature, of movies, of novels—these aren’t the whores I want. When any of them show up, I can tell immediately. They’re like cheap chocolate creams that you spit out because they aren’t caramels or nougats, the more long-lasting ones you really want. You send them away immediately. You don’t put them in the active file. (Though you always keep them in a file. Names on lists are precious treasures. You never know when you’ll need your lists to fight back with.) These girls are pining for husbands or children, believing they can find love, believing in love in the first place. My girls don’t want any of these things. They never believe they can find love.

  Which isn’t to say that some of them haven’t found it. But nonexpectation is everything.

  Abandonment of body to sexual pleasure? I’ve never made up my mind on this one. Whether it’s a plus or a minus. Yes, some of my girls like sex a lot. Some like it too much. Some have favorite diversions that are usefully salable. But rarely is sex, or what they do, or their customers, their main interest. Like many good employees who work hard at their jobs, when they’re finished for the day, they’re finished for the day, or in our case, night.

  How can I sense when a woman can let go? Especially in this society of ours, with so many rules and regulations and parameters, a society where women particularly are forced into molds invented by others, invented by men, invented by men long ago?

  I know this isn’t a very scholarly answer, but I just can. And I’m here very successfully to prove it.

  Once I found the following in a magazine article and I clipped it out because it said what I thought: “I seek the courtesan who neither loves her customers nor expects them to love her; yet she waits for them and enacts the drama of love. Neither the artificial love nor the payment she receives truly satisfies her. I realized that all human beings are like courtesans, trying to get the world to enjoy us. But the payment is invariably inadequate, and we’re always dissatisfied. Thus I learned to live with dignity and self-respect without expecting fulfillment from this world. The only place I will find it is within.”

  That’s the kind of abandonment I seek.

  Abe, of course, doesn’t understand a bit of this. That’s why I never talk about it with him. He’s as bad a
s the whores I never hire. He believes in love. Even after everything I’ve put him through. He will never understand that I do love him. It’s just not the love he wants. Men!

  * * *

  I think events are moving along quite nicely, thank you.

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY

  Mordy Masturbov was actually born in Masturbov Gardens, even though the place wasn’t quite ready to open for business. Doris moved into a large three-bedroom apartment on what she named Mordecai Place, a quiet cul-de-sac, furnished especially for her lying-in, and here she gave birth to the baby boy and nursed him quietly for a while, holding him closely and dearly and touchingly in her arms, looking down at him as if she’d brought something truly inestimable into her life and, God knows, not knowing what in the hell to do with it, before returning to her other life. She did break down and allow Abe to marry her. Yes, she wanted her son to have a decent and uncomplicated birth certificate. He was then sent to that house on Sixteenth Street, the house his father grew up in and now lives in again, the house with the big gargoyles and caryatids with enormous breasts—where he would be brought up by many a nanny, with a rare visit from Granny Yvonne. Yes, as in some never-ending grim fairy tale Yvonne is still upstairs in that turret’s tower.

  Doris never comes to Sixteenth Street. Mordy is brought to meet her at outings to parks, the zoo, the movies. He calls her Doris. Sometimes Abe comes along. At this point, who knows what his parents have told him, about … anything?

  The big tits on the columns always make Abe smile. No woman will live with him for long in this place. Although he’ll never give up on Doris, he’s auditioned a few live-in contenders. “Blanche, Ruba, Sally, Demetria, Allynda, that’s only five and there were six before I was twelve. Vi, right. And then Hortencia, Nulla, Flo, Garah…” As a kid Mordy shows off by counting them on his fingers. He remembers them all, but he doesn’t remember their faces. Mordy takes pictures of this ornamentation with his little Kodak Brownie. At six he knows where to point his camera. He knows because the big breasts excite him. In the rain one night he takes out his tiny penis and massages it with the rainwater as he looks up at the columnar women with those huge breasts and closed eyes and placid unchanging expressions on their carved implacable faces. Yvonne watches him from above and goes to Abraham, with whom she will confer when something upsets her. It looks like Mordy’s starting young. All those adult picture books Abe’s put in the kid’s rooms must be having an effect. Abe is pleased by his son’s excitement.

  Abe fucks nameless women on the floors of unoccupied rooms in this house and in empty apartments in Masturbov Gardens. He makes a lot of noise when he fucks, unusual for a man so quiet all other times. Mordy comes to recognize these noises, the slurps and screams and heaves and groans and even farts that come from behind closed doors. Abe stuffs his big paw of a hand over the women’s mouths if he hears so much as the beginning of an “I love you” forming on their lips. Mostly they don’t hang around after he comes. He shows them out right away, jamming a fifty into their hands, he still naked, bits of dripping semen congealing on his cock. As for the two or three who sweat it out and manage to move in for a while, he never fucks them once they’re there. They have to listen to his grunting intimacies with others, or they find out about the crazy old lady in the attic, or worse, they run into her in a hallway and are subjected to her Yiddish curses. They move out soon enough. “Yeah, I know I’m not nice about any of this,” Abe tells Lucas Jerusalem, with whom he spends a great deal of time. He likes Lucas. Lucas is the son he wishes he had. He doesn’t dislike Mordy, he just likes Lucas more, and Mordy knows it. Strangely, it doesn’t bother him. Mordy will always have this dissociative streak. The only thing he’ll love obsessively, and from which he’ll draw all the return of love he requires, will be Sexopolis and anything to do with it, which will come unfortunately to include one Velvalee Peltz.

  Abe remembers his father bathing him, playing with his penis, studying it carefully, in the huge bathtub in the same oak-paneled room that’s always cold no matter how hot the furnace. One day Abe takes the boy’s tiny penis in his own hand and says, “I promise you that this is the most wonderful thing in life. Your penis will bring you great pleasure. And that pleasure will cost you pain deeper than any other you’ve experienced. I know that doesn’t make sense. But you’ll find out soon enough.”

  Doris won’t sleep with Abe, won’t live with him, won’t have another kid with him, won’t go on vacation with him, but she’ll talk to him as many times a day or night as he wants. Doris has been the biggest heartbreak he ever wants to know. He thinks of her every time he fucks. Erections come only with her image in front of him. When he thinks of the whorehouse he gets sick to his stomach. “We do have a life together,” she answers to his pleadings. “There isn’t anyone else, if that’s what you’re afraid of.” As it was for Herman, life on the only level that matters becomes unavailable to his son. As with Herman, the only thing Abe really understands is money. Nothing else in his entire life will grow. When the war comes Abe thinks of joining up. He has no patriotism, only a desire not to have to answer inquiries as to why he isn’t in uniform. He tells the truth. He has a son to raise and a crazy mother in his attic. So he’s rejected for active duty.

  Abe’s only son takes too long to become a man. He’s twelve, then twelve and a half, then twelve and three-quarters, and still no pubic hair. Yes, the penis itself is growing noticeably larger, but there’s no hair. Abe’s hair came before he was twelve. Herman told him it was because they had bathed in the same water. So what’s delaying Mordy? At twelve Abe had taken him to a Swiss doctor who said there’s nothing abnormal. Mordy’s scared by the doctor’s poking in his groin and that he seems to have a problem important enough for a medical consultation, and in a foreign country and a foreign language, too. His sleepless nights begin. Early each morning he throws back the covers. At twelve and three-quarters he’s still bare. At St. Anselm’s he’d seen that all the others have started. Many have even finished! He dreads each shower with his classmates. He feels like a puppy who’s punished when he can’t control his wee-wee.

  Abe knows he’s too impatient. He knows the damn hair will grow soon enough. Why is he behaving so? He wants to love this son. What else has he got to show for all his love for Doris? So what has pubic hair got to do with any of this? Abe couldn’t tell you. Fathers are meant to worry about their sons. So he’s worrying.

  Abe hurts for Mordy. He’s hungry for Mordy’s adulthood. He wants to show him what awaits him, teach him what his own father never taught him. So with or without the hair, he supplies Mordy with more sexual lessons: books and toys and unguents and photographs. Mordy studies them all quietly. He learns what a dildo is, and about the bevy of items for self-mortification, and well, lots of other things. Never does the son ask the father for an explanation, and never does the father offer one. He’d never needed a book. All he needed was his schlang and a hole. He sees that the world has changed. Doris showed him that.

  How does he prepare his son for his mother? How do you tell a son such a thing? She wants to take Mordy and show him around as her father did for her, but Abe puts his foot down on this one. “Do we have to tell him everything in the world?” he asks her. So nothing’s been said yet (often the worst course of action when something’s so complicated, so problematic), especially now that the boy’s first pubic hair’s arrived, and on his thirteenth birthday. He does rush to show his father, and Abe does beam and make the obvious joke, “Today you are a man.”

  Doris decides to violate Abe’s wishes. On this thirteenth birthday, when he, like Daniel, will not be bar mitzvahed by his own choice and his parents’ deferral on this matter, Doris comes to the house on Sixteenth Street and asks the boy if he would like to join her for a ride in her new convertible. She drives him to her house and parks outside it.