The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  “I think it’s time for you to know certain things. For one, I’m your mother, which I assume you’ve figured out. For another, I own and manage this whorehouse that I’m now going to show you. And last, I want you to take to heart this thought: that no matter what has happened or will ever happen, I love you and have loved you and will always love you, and that what your father and I have worked out, in our own no doubt misguided but honest attempt to take all of each other’s needs into consideration, has probably not been the best way to raise a son. Whew. Yes, that was a long sentence. Both of our families are filled with long histories of attempts at establishing homesteads in unwelcoming locations. Abe and I have survived. You must survive as well. That’s an order. From your mother.” And she bends over and kisses him as best she can on the cheek closer to her. He nuzzles his head into the crook of her neck. “Good. Now, come on. Let’s go take a look. I was younger than you when my poppa gave me a similar tour. I inherited this calling from him and this is yours someday if you want it.”

  One by one, the girls, nicely dressed and on their best behavior, and all lined up as if visiting royalty were making a state visit, shake Mordy’s hand. He is overwhelmed with the beauty of these women, and, yes, warmed by their smiles in a way he’s not yet associated with women, or sex, or anything, really. It is all very much “Howdy do.” One or two of them refer to him as “young man,” which also sounds comforting to him. Doris leads him through the house. He’s shown all their rooms, neat and with flowers and sun pouring in the windows where the drapery and blinds are open, for a change.

  She also shows him her office, where she interviews and keeps her ledgers, and the locked room where she’s got all those names. Then she shows him a little room she’d made, filled with all kinds of mementoes of the old days in Denver, of Turvey, Horace, Horace Jr., tintypes of them and of lots of the girls, whose faces and names she could remember. She’s overcome with good feelings for all of them, and “that life which you could lead as Denver grew to become strong.” As he paged through albums and looked at framed celebrations where the girls were all lined up like the class photos on the walls of St. Anselm’s, he told her, “You miss it.”

  “I miss something,” she finally answered, taking his hand. “Life is about missing and trying to find. I just want you to know I think all of this is good and, yes, healthy. It’s hard to maintain all of that when no one else does.”

  “I’ll help you,” he cries out impulsively, and she breaks into laughter and, again, some tears. She hasn’t been this teary in God knows when. She’s glad she did what she’s done today. She’d thought about it long enough. Yesterday she’d received word that Urvah, that mother that she never really knew, had died in Utah, surrounded by 17 children and 105 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, none of whom she’d known, her family, her blood relatives. It all didn’t make any sense.

  And then they all go into the dining room, where a birthday cake is waiting for its candles to be lit. Doris lights them. They all sing Mordy “Happy Birthday.”

  Yes, he does have tears in his eyes. He looks at them all as they all smile at him. He looks at his mother, as she has tears herself. No one, it would appear, has in any way succumbed to the macabre nature of the moment.

  Doris then drives him home and comes into that house and faces Abe, who’s waiting there, a frown upon his face.

  “So now you know?” He looks at them both.

  “Poppa, I’m happy I know because at least these are answers to questions I don’t want to have anymore. Don’t be upset. How is what she showed me any different from the roomful of books and toys and … stuff you give me?”

  They go out to dinner at Fairmount, the Jewish country club built on land he sold it. It’s a daring thing to do, and Abe sees that Doris’s eyes are flashing triumphantly. He hasn’t seen this in … he can’t remember the last time. She is making him smile again. So they all try hard to enjoy this new familial togetherness. Doris asks Mordy lots of questions about his school and his studies and his interests. He thinks of telling them about Claudia and his notions that he’s tried to spell out to her himself. He suspects they’d both approve, so he tries.

  “There is a girl that I love a lot. But she’s not having any of me. I write her long letters that she doesn’t answer. But she will!”

  And they all laugh.

  Abe knows that fellow diners are looking at them in their own wonderment. Doris knows that a number of men in this room know who she is. It seems to Abe that she’s actually sitting taller, her face radiant, perhaps with relief, or perhaps with something else. Has she been reading Socrates: courage is the ability to know what should be feared and what should not? Has she been smitten by Roosevelt’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”? Or Mr. Churchill going on about “This was their finest hour”? Abe’s become quite the reader. What else is there to do?

  So be it, at least for now.

  Mordy’s happy to find a mother as welcoming as Doris. They go out together and more and more Abe joins them. Do they all each begin to smile at the absurdity of it all? Mordy begins to get better grades in school. It could not have been this easy, Abe says to himself after Doris comes home to Sixteenth Street one night and they sleep in each other’s arms. Easy? What is he talking about? She’s not slept with him in twenty, twenty-five years? They don’t fuck. They both have the sense to know that’s not what this moment’s about. “We are taunting fate too much,” he said to Doris as they left the country club. She only stood up taller. “Perhaps it is time to fight certain fights with more … audacity,” she answered. “This is not a city for audacity,” he said, so that even Mordy could hear.

  Mordy had those perplexing few months with Daniel Jerusalem. Daniel tried to help him in some commiserating fashion. They were both going through bad patches. Mordy sensed that Daniel didn’t understand what sex is about and that what he needs from Daniel isn’t what Daniel needs from him but what he, Mordy, needs from Claudia. And he’s still convinced Daniel’s getting it from Claudia. Mordy went along with Daniel for a while. Why not? He’d read about homosexuality and it sounded like fun; he can see where it’s useful as part of a repertoire. But Daniel moons and moans so. Daniel goes to great lengths to prove to Mordy he cares. It shouldn’t take that much work. How can Claudia be interested in Daniel?

  Of course the hair comes. With it comes his discovery that sex is even more complicated than he thought. He will sort out the complications.

  Mordy’s first experience with a girl, like Daniel’s, is with Claudia, at just about the same time.

  One day Mordy finally says to her, “I want to talk to you. No, I want to kiss you. No, I want to see your body. No, I want to hold you and hold you.”

  “So many nos to make a yes, Mordecai,” she answers, like a teasing siren in some sophisticated movie.

  He wants to ask her what that means, but he decides to concentrate on his desires. The dark tunnels that connect all of Masturbov Gardens are cool in the hot weather. To get Claudia down into one of these snaking tunnels and screw her on the cement floor—Daniel’s experience, as “revealed” by Arnold Botts after Mordy bribed him with five dollars—holds no romantic appeal for him. Mordy wants his passion to be gentle. He’s read enough pornography where cruelty and bad manners are paramount, and he hated its coldness. He’s heard enough doors slammed by his father’s departing visitors after the sound effects, the heaves and the thuds when Abe throws the occasional fuck down on the floor. The son desires a different kind of performance. It hurts him enough that Daniel, according to Arnold, has already … known Claudia … completely. He isn’t jealous. He just wants Claudia himself.

  Down into the tunnels they go after all, and in the dim light he pulls her into his arms with no finesse. She smiles. Like so many of them, he talks better than he performs, but she lets his hands find their way to her white panties and caress her wherever they land. Finally she shows him what he’s searching for and then studies his penis wi
th great interest. “I think it will look very nice.” He’s throbbing and he starts to masturbate and she watches quietly for a few moments before taking his hand to stop him. “The mystery is better,” she says, and he doesn’t understand this either.

  “I want you, I want you,” he moans, echoing sentences he’s read. He tells her she’s meant to receive him, that he has in his pocket the necessary protection (although during a dress rehearsal it looks so big he’s afraid he might fall out of it), and he asks her if this is her first time. She lets him go on with his not uninteresting chatter, deciding to let him think what he thinks. It makes little difference to her. Finally she says, “I’m not a tease. I’ve done it before, but I’m not going to do it with you, and I don’t wish to discuss why. It has nothing to do with you, or how I feel about you. Please don’t ask any more questions.”

  When she disappears, he’s forced to think about her more than he sees her. He writes her long letters like this one, but when he mails them she’s no longer there.

  Claudia, I want so much for you. For me. For us. For this wonderful act called love. How joyous it is for two people to come together, this flying-high, this two-yet-oneness that takes us to the top of a mountain and lets us float into our own heaven, ours alone.

  But we shouldn’t have to do it in a place that’s cold and nasty and dark and underground. We shouldn’t have to hide it.

  I think what I’m driving at is something more universal, more philosophical. Hey, I’m a philosopher, telling you my philosophy! What do you think?

  We have to invent a whole new attitude about sex itself! We have to begin to see it as fun, and everyone has to feel free doing it. If they don’t, they’re just entering a prison, like the other prisons they enter every day.

  I don’t think sex is fun for most people. It sure isn’t for my father as far as I can tell.

  I want every man and woman to feel wonderful before, during, and after making love, just as you and I, Claudia Webb and Mordecai Masturbov, would feel. Oh, if you would only make love with me!

  I make a promise to you, here and now, Claudia, my first love: I promise to bring this new philosophy into reality. I’ll preach it and write about it and scream it from the rooftops. FUCKING IS FUCKING FANTASTIC! AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT! I’ll tell the world! That’s what all the great philosophers do!

  These letters—and he’ll write many more—will turn out to be his first attempts to formulate what will become Sexopolis. He thinks about his new philosophy all the time.

  War? What war?

  YIDS, FAIRIES, WHORES, AND SEXOPOLIS

  It’s not the time to proclaim that one is Jewish. This doesn’t trouble Stephen, but Lucas feels shame “for all the hiding.” His own Rabbi Grusskopf has told him about the 232 rabbis stranded in France on their way to America when their travel visas are invalidated by the State Department. Appeals to Cordell Hull, with his secretly Jewish wife, and to his assistant, Sumner Welles, with his own secrets, and to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, also Jewish, bring naught in the way of help for the stranded rabbis. Their plight is leaked to Drew Pearson, a columnist more courageous than others, and a public hullabaloo transpires before the State Department validates the rabbis’ visas, by which time they’ve all been sent to their deaths.

  “What do you care about a bunch of foreign rabbis?” Stephen asks his brother.

  “How can you even ask me such a dumb question?”

  Rabbi Grusskopf also tells Lucas about the 129 homosexual Jews reported by one of his congregants to have been “gobbled up and spit out somewhere south of Dresden.” This sad tale, of course, is never written about. For some reason Lucas tells Daniel, who nods and frowns and doesn’t respond.

  Stephen and Mordy become friends through Phi Pi Psi, a fraternity of rich Jewish high school boys, most of whom go to private schools. Stephen accepts their offer, even though Lucas declines.”It would be like trying to be something we aren’t,” he tells Stephen. “We live in Masturbov Gardens and they live on Brandywine and streets like that. You know how many buses it takes to get there.”

  An outing takes half a dozen Phi Pi’s to a whorehouse, in fact to Doris Hardware’s whorehouse. Six teenagers go into a suite. Stephen is forced to strip down in front of the others. There’s a Norman Rockwell on the wall: Mom icing a cake in the kitchen, soldier son arriving at the front door, home for his wedding, which is being rehearsed in the parlor. Stephen stares at the soldier; he does not take his eyes off the soldier as the six boys stand naked trying not to look at one another.

  For the first time, Stephen has a body, which he hates, adored. Three girls cannot be getting such joy from this hairy body, which they roll against, over and over, declaring their pleasure. The other boys are looking at him peculiarly. And there’s his new friend Mordy mounting and performing as if he’s been doing it since birth. At the height of orgasm one of his “brothers” reaches out a hand and Stephen takes it and finds the exchange strangely moving.

  The guys perform and perform with the women. After Stephen’s fifth orgasm completes itself and what little semen is left inside him dribbles onto the faces of the girls, their tongues licking it up, the boys from Phi Pi Psi clap in admiration, Mordy emitting a soft “Wow!” Then all the boys shower together, and are joined by the girls in a huge tub, “a plunge,” one of them calls it, all their bodies once again intertwining. Stephen feels the male flesh of his friends encroaching on him; he feels hands reaching out to run their fingers through the thickets on his body that had always embarrassed him so. He thought he looked like an ape. Mordy submerges in the tub and looks at all the genitals. A few of the guys are hard again, the girls adeptly coaxing them. “You guys are a treat. You wouldn’t believe who we have to pretend to like the rest of the time.”

  Mordy exclaims to Stephen, “We should be able to do anything we want! Without guilt. With pleasure. Do you feel good?”

  “I feel wonderful,” Stephen answers. “I feel wonderful.”

  In the steam room, Mordy and Stephen are alone. Mordy outlines his philosophy for him.

  “I want to start a revolution.”

  “What kind of revolution?”

  “A sexual revolution.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I just told you.”

  “Tell me again!”

  “We should all feel free and great doing what we want to do. We shouldn’t feel bad. We should feel wonderful. Always.”

  And so it’s in the steam room of a whorehouse owned by his father and run by his mother, in the continuing years of another world war, that Mordy Masturbov describes his plans for Sexopolis to Stephen Jerusalem, who in a few years will become his lawyer. Sexopolis will become Mordy’s own war against the world.

  Stephen hates coming home as Lucas hates coming home. Rivka doesn’t miss them. Philip doesn’t miss them. After a while it seems almost natural to Rivka that they’re not there. David takes all the worry time she can spare. She harbors the thought that Lucas and Stephen are actually being considerate, relieving her of their presence. She wonders when Daniel will be leaving, too. She doesn’t even know he wants to become a doctor. When she finds out she worries how they can pay for it.

  Lucas does tell Daniel where he goes. Abe is taking him to the ball game. Abe is taking him fishing on Chesapeake Bay. Abe is taking him to a movie. Abe lets him stay over too, after Abe takes him out for a really great dinner. “Abe thinks I’ll be a great lawyer and he’ll give me business. Abe is a really great guy.”

  “Do you see Mordy ever?” Daniel asks.

  “Sure. He’s sort of quiet. He doesn’t like ball games or fishing. We ask him to come with us. Abe wants him to be more than he seems to want to be. Didn’t you two used to be good friends? What happened?”

  “I don’t know. Ask him.”

  With Lucas at Yaddah, and Stephen at Franeeda State, and David in a concentration camp, three out of three of Daniel’s brothers have left him.

  Rivka wonders why i
t falls to her to be privy to so many strange things. She is told constantly by her boss, Miss Theodora von Lutz, that “the war is a stern master.” Rivka repeats it like a mantra that will help her get through each day with patriotism. What is peeking through the letters, directives, and now actual cables, international pieces of paper from Geneva? Why, she even has a code name; she, Rivka Wishenwart Jerusalem, now actually has a code name: Verdingy? Verdingy doesn’t sound very reassuring, it sounds a little flippant, but at least it’s distinctive, or so she thought until she’s contacted by a Verdingy II in Halo, Idaho, and a Verdingy III in Washington itself. She tries to talk to Miss von Lutz about this but she is shushed, as she somehow knows she will be. This is not Rivka’s idea of “fighting for the war effort” (Mrs. Roosevelt always makes it sound so noble), with these silly names. Whatever is she doing? Well, she has no idea. Boxes come packed in dry ice from Halo or Washington, or even from Geneva, Switzerland, itself, and Miss von Lutz sends someone to pick them up. Boxes or communications, all labeled “via Hykoryville,” which is where Rivka is, and addressed from “Hooker Partekla” are sent out to “Puttsig Geneva” and boxes from “Odorstrasse Washington” are sent to “Puttsig Partekla,” and there have been several to and from Hooker Partekla to Odorstrasse. They are all always picked up or delivered by a uniformed armed courier from Perseus Air Freight Services. Hykoryville seems to be some sort of halfway drop-off point, and she wonders why things can’t be sent directly. Every once in a while something must have broken inside, because the packages are stained with blood. Miss von Lutz has warned her, “Don’t touch it unless you wear the special gloves. Don’t let anyone else touch it unless they wear the special gloves. If it arrives damaged, you must immediately dispose of it in the furnace, burn it up, posthaste! You do have the special gloves, don’t you? You do leave the furnace burning at all times, don’t you?” Had she not dealt with bloodmobile blood almost every day since before the war even started? She’s certainly touched enough bloody things accidentally broken or spilled without wearing special gloves or burning anything up. It’s hard not to have the notion that something is going on. She misses her bloodmobile. She misses running Home Service. She misses taking care of people, having contact with people, having sad stories to tell Daniel when she gets home. But Miss von Lutz ordered her to cease all patient contact. Many people still call with cries for help. She no longer goes home at night believing she’s done some good for America.