The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  A fire is burning somewhere near. Loud music drowns speeches out. Men are now tossing little boxes from the stage while other men pass through the crowd giving them out. People grab for them, desperate for their contents. Soon the tiny ampules all fall like snow, hands and arms snatching them. More and more people fall to the ground fucking, sliding in the vomit. No one notices that the moon is now in the ceiling. The sounds of fucking are louder than any noise of burning wood or falling timbers.

  “My friends!” The man who has been pointed out to me as “that greatest of great men, Horatio Dridge,” is trying to address the crowd, with “my great friend” Clarence Meekly by his side. “We have come to tell you that Greeting-Dridge is waiting for your return.” Many years later I will learn that Horatio Dridge has been dead some fifty years at this time and Clarence Meekly would have been some hundred years old and that many products send their “founders” and their “inventors” out on the road to pretend they’re still alive, as if this will sell more product.

  Men stand transfixed before each other, not accustomed to seeing each other naked. They see themselves in front of each other everywhere. Suddenly some of them are choking and gagging on each other’s private parts. Then more of them. The few women start cheering them on.

  That night I learned that passion can spread like fire itself, all kinds of passions. Most of the men have already had orgasms, but more sniffs keep their erections going. Then they must realize what they’ve been doing they’ve been doing with another man. They turn on Horatio. Their hands are sticky with semen, their shoes dripping with vomit. They start calling him hateful names. They hate him because he and his “pansy” friend beside him are “perverts,” doing the things all of them have just done. They hate him so much that they rip him to shreds in seconds, pieces of him thrown in all directions, but mostly into the flames.

  The roaring of the fire is joined by the screams of those noticing it at last and too late. The building collapses. Almost everyone perishes in that fire.

  But not me. And not Joe. Joe is not letting me go so easily.

  SHIT PAST A CERTAIN AGE NO LONGER SMELLS

  After Dr. Nesta Trout also announces in The New England Journal of Digestion that the Table Family Hotel is built on a foundation of historic shit, the government immediately forbids the hotel to take in paying guests, which is just as well because business was awful. The Gulf Coast hasn’t been “discovered” yet, and the hotel is dying. Hi and Meyer are able to force the United States to pay them as if their hotel is filled as long as the government embargoes their shit. They also receive from the government $23,000 each and every month. When, under the Alien and Enemy Reciprocity Act, they receive the government’s check for some $4 million, Hi and Meyer burn the place down, collect the insurance, and move back north and start buying hotels in New York City.

  THIS IS WHERE I WAS TAKEN

  Mr. Hoover came to see me this morning. He said he was happy to see me. He said he wanted me to stay here. He said I’d be safe here.

  I asked him why all this was happening to me.

  Mr. Hoover said something like, “I am the possessor of many details about the illicit sexual activities of every person in the public limelight, and I’m very proud of it. This information helps me protect America. You will help me, as your father helps me.”

  He said that Amos would come for me when it’s time.

  Then he said, just as he said when we met, “Let me see your body, boy.” I showed it to him, and he shook his head in sadness, nodded, and left.

  Strangely, I am allowed into the daily schedule of this place, which is mammoth. I have a room instead of a cell. At least a hundred young men show up for meals. I come to realize that not all of them are being done to in the same ways, even though we all seem to live in the same small rooms, which are left unlocked. In the shower I see wounded bodies, but the wounds appear to have healed. Perhaps there’s no torture here. Sometimes soldiers come up to me and ask where I got my scars.

  I hear people talk about what’s happening to them. They’re receiving injections, or blood tests, or tests of strength, of endurance, of intelligence, of “social skills.” They’re being done to in many similar ways to Mungel, some of them, the constant jerking off to study their semen, saving their shit and piss, being circumcised if they’re not already, and new stuff, like having hair implanted into their chests if they don’t have any. All of Brinestalker’s lot are given shots to make them have more body hair. Some of the very effeminate men are having their rectums sewed up so they can’t be fucked, and their shit is rerouted into bags outside their bodies. They are all in pain and more and more they are no longer willing patients. When they become too noticeable and their pain too loud, they are not heard from anymore.

  I recognize little bits and pieces of Mungel-inspired “research.” Sometimes I think I see Grodzo in the distance. Quite frankly, I miss him holding me. I realize he made Mungel easier to endure. Then I realize it is Grodzo, here. And he turns his face away when he sees me looking at him. It hurts that Grodzo is treating me this way.

  Once again, everyone is getting done to, except me. A German doctor, Oderstrasse, is in charge of the shots and taking blood. I assume he’s a Nazi. I see a woman with one arm supervising the collection of shit from patients. She is familiar to me. When I think it is from Masturbov Gardens I begin to think I am having fantasies or delusions or they are doctoring my food, which everyone believes is being done to them.

  One day Brinestalker appears with Amos, who immediately tries to take me in his arms as if we last saw each other yesterday. I won’t let him.

  “David, how glad I am to see you!” he says anyway.

  He and Brinestalker take me below. I’ve heard rumors about “below.”

  I haven’t seen Brinestalker since I first was in Berlin and he and Amos and my father were sharing a house on the Wannsee. We had all been in bed together. Amos, this man Brinestalker, and my father. We had pillow fights and we fell asleep all tangled up. Why are the two coming to see me here and now? Surely not to begin again where we all left off. And where is Philip?

  “Where is my father?”

  “This is no time for questions,” Amos answers.

  “When will that time come?” I find the courage to ask him. He doesn’t answer, but I see him frown.

  We walk down into a vast dungeon in the earth. It’s lit by lights so bright they hurt my eyes. Nurses and orderlies are busy tending to bodies in endless rows of cots neatly lined up into the distance. If they are not completely encased in bandages, their inhabitants are hideous to look at, all misshapen and moaning. The bodies completely bandaged are the scariest because you can see arms and legs struggling to get out. Suddenly there is a piercing scream and “Schline! Nurse Schline! Calling Nurse Lota Schline!” is heard from a loudspeaker. Nurse Schline appears, a tiny Oriental woman carrying a doctor’s bag filled with tubes and needles. “These are the brain-dead,” Amos says, referring to the cots of completely bandaged patients. Nurse Schline is busily injecting a bunch of them, rushing from one to another, unsnapping their openings and ramming a needle down into something. “They are vegetables. We call them the potato sacks. They would be dead if Dr. Dye hadn’t sought them for our research.”

  I become bold.

  “What would they be dead from?”

  “That is a naïve question coming from you. Some experiments work, but most do not.”

  “What are they trying to find out here? I don’t see any twins. What is Dr. Grodzo doing here? Why are you showing me any of this?”

  “He is doing vital and top-secret research with Dr. Stuartgene Dye, another brilliant scientist. Nurse Schline is Japanese and has recently joined us. She is also very brilliant and would be called ‘Doctor’ but for it being forbidden to women to become doctors where she studied, in Manchuria.”

  When Nurse Schline discovers a man is dead, she raises an arm and orderlies come to remove the body. This room smells of death, a sme
ll I know.

  “What can you possibly learn from these men who are almost dead?”

  Brinestalker tells me. “Each body is being used to incubate a virus. And while each virus is the same, each virus is not the same, according to Dr. Oderstrasse.”

  Amos looks at him sharply, as if to say, Why are you telling him so much?

  “The boy is right, Amos. It is time to answer some questions for him.”

  Amos snaps back, “I will be the judge of that.”

  “Why are you showing me all of this?” I ask.

  Now it is Brinestalker who snaps back. “So that you might be grateful that you’re alive. Many of us risked our lives to get you here.”

  * * *

  I am free to walk freely from one part to another, though no one actually tells me so. I just start doing it and no one stops me. I attend Brinestalker’s peculiar classes and watch his troops losing interest by the day. Sex can be exciting for only so long, it seems, and “manly lust” cannot be whipped up on demand as Brinestalker apparently thinks, with his films of hairy young men with their big penises waving. I can even visit Nurse Schline’s clinic, where I try to talk to some of the men until she tells me not to. “They cannot hear you,” she says, nodding sadly. As in Mungel, I am left alone, as if I’m meant to be an observer. Underneath the bandages I will soon recognize faces from Brinestalker’s classes and soldiers who’d been condemned to hard labor by General Heidrich. I see dead bodies pulled out of their sacks of bandage, some so hairy they look like faceless apes.

  At first I’m not permitted to visit Dr. Dye. His section is off-limits. Then Grodzo himself comes and takes me there. He leads me by the hand, but he won’t talk to me. But he holds my hand tightly, like he used to do. It’s the only physical warmth and connection I’ve had since Amos held me at the film studio. I want Grodzo to take me in his arms and hold me. I want to pound on his chest with my fists and scream at him, “Why am I being treated this way!”

  Bodies are laid out on tables. Dr. Dye and his assistants poke at them. Dr. Dye says to me, “I understand you are accustomed to such sights. This is how we learn. More than anything else it is important that we learn. There is always so much to learn. There is never enough time in our onward march to beat the devil. Do you believe in the devil? By now, you should. The devil is very interesting. He haunts these walls as completely as God haunts all the churches in the world.” His eyes blaze like Grodzo’s did when he was teaching me in Mungel. When I try to pull my hand back from Grodzo, he just grabs it back.

  One night someone my own age comes into my room.

  “My name is Warren. I would like to make love to you.” He takes off his hospital gown and stands tall and proud, almost as if at attention. I realize he is displaying his body, which is covered with hair. “I am a new man now. I would like to try out my new manhood with you.” Without any response from me, he lies down beside me. He takes my penis and his penis and starts massaging them both. Neither of us becomes hard. Warren starts to cry.

  “It won’t work anymore!” And he runs away. I hear guards outside capture him for having somehow escaped from his room to mine. I hear his high-pitched screams, suddenly silenced by someone covering his mouth. Or perhaps killing him. Yes, I remember similar things.

  Another night Amos comes to my room. He’s heard about my questioning of Nurse Schline.

  “Nurse Schline’s first name is Lota or Lothar. She or he is not at this moment male or female. She is here to become a he. Brinestalker has ordered Grodzo to supervise sex changes on those of his young men who resist his best efforts to curb their rampant effeminacy. Grodzo is not happy about this assignment. He did not come to America to supervise sex changes. Brinestalker actually slapped his face in front of me. And then he threatened him. ‘Perhaps we should have a discussion with your Guarantor.’ Anyway, Nurse Schline is a different case. She must become a man in order to return to her homeland and become a doctor. The Japanese are involved in historic germ warfare discoveries and he must be able to steal those for us.”

  The next day Grodzo goes to Nurse Schline and takes her hand in his. “You must know that even with all we learned in Germany, this operation is far from perfect. We can give you a top without difficulty. We cannot give you the bottom with any effectiveness. Is that good enough for you?” She nods yes. “I can fake it!” Smiling at her use of American slang, he adds, “You know that Dr. Dye is against this because he doesn’t want to lose you?”

  And then, just as at Mungel, Grodzo turns to continue to teach me. “Schline worked in Japan for Unit 731 led by Dr. Shiro Ishii, who is their Dr. Mengele, and therefore she’s brought with her much we can learn. The Japanese perfected a system of infecting hundreds of thousands via viral diseases, much more effective and less expensive than gas chambers. Quite frankly, all their different experiments on how people can and do and don’t infect each other are more horrifying than ours ever were. Ishii would not let her perform duties by his side. She’s furious with him and has sworn vengeance to go back and show him! And the Japanese are further ahead with their monkeys than our Dr. Bosco Dripper.”

  “Have you heard from my father?”

  Amos doesn’t answer.

  “I don’t want to stay here anymore. Can you let me go?”

  “No. I cannot let you go until your time to be let go has arrived. I don’t know when that will be.”

  “Who is deciding these things for me? What are you doing here? You ran a film studio.”

  Amos finally says something.

  “My best friends in all this world have been your father and Brinestalker. I have sent communications to your father telling him about Brinestalker and requesting your father’s advice and help because Brinestalker’s doing such strange things. I’ve also told him that I have you here with me. He hasn’t answered. It is up to him to provide you with the answers. I can’t let you go until he comes to get you. When the three of us were together, he was the only one who could calm me down and keep Briney in check.”

  Once upon a time in another lifetime I asked Grodzo why Mengele and Hitler focused that hatred on Jews. He shrugged. “Why not? They are as good as any, and there are more of them than homosexuals and gypsies, which they throw in just for good measure, just in case.”

  “Just in case what?”

  “In case people condemn the Jewish extermination. Then Hitler can say to them, But I have rid you of your hated homosexuals, too. Is that not worth something to you, at least a few Jews?”

  I asked him how he knows who’s a homosexual. By his own admission no one could really tell what a homosexual looked like at Mungel.

  “What difference does it make? A certain number of them have to be. That is just good science. How else does one eliminate?”

  I suddenly thought I’d never get out of here alive. Brinestalker had said as much. “We’re showing this to you for you to be grateful you’re alive and to know that your father is an ungrateful son of a bitch.”

  I do not want to stay here one more minute.

  Several days later an armed guard marches me to a door and shoves me out into the freezing winter, tossing heavy clothing and a backpack after me.

  In the backpack I discover matches, a road map, two hundred dollars, and a note from Grodzo saying, “I thought we might be safe here. I was wrong. Good luck in reaching your home.”

  FROM MY HISTORY OF EVIL

  What David witnessed was just that old tip of an iceberg. Stuartgene can legally not only admit patients but keep them incarcerated, all under provisions established by the Department of Food and Drug Supervision (FADS) that allow for “the testing of treatments which in the estimation of the Director and his staff might lead to the betterment of the health of The American People.” There are also in existence various provisions of the Wartime Powers Act that allow activities like this.

  Stuartgene is in charge of a program that is “treating” hundreds of (early UC?) patients. Is he, and it, intentionally infecting young me
n with what he knows to be (a) lethal new disease(s)? Yes, he is. But Dr. Dye knows he’s on to something, that he’s got something, he just doesn’t know what yet. But he will claim that he’s seeking certain historic breakthroughs in virology, the study of which is still relatively unknown. So whether it’s intentional or not that he’s also going to kill a lot of young men in this research, an outcome that many of his superiors here and there and round and about would be happy to sanction, that’s the effect of what he’s doing. He’s using questionable “potions”—for want of a better description of all the pills and infusions and lavages and enemas and unguents and nostrums being stuffed and injected and coerced into all his charges—provided to him by Brinestalker, Levy, Coro, Kokoh, Feltrin, Sasauer, Grodzo, and, yes, Dr. Sister Grace. Partekla is a godsend for them and for all the projects they’re still working on.

  Yes, Partekla is a busy place indeed. On a regular schedule dead bodies are laid out in a surrounding field and Aalvaar’s prisoners dig their graves and bury them.

  Something should be pointed out. I have been struggling mightily to make the case that what went on “over there” started over here. Now comes Partekla, which is meant additionally to be the equivalent of what various people over here know not only about what Hitler had been doing over there, but what indeed has been going on in other countries—for instance, in Japan, and in Manchuria, where the Russians conducted experiments that started the great bubonic plague that eliminated 250,000 Mongols in 1941 when an infected prisoner of war escaped. Who would want so many Americans made near-to-death? If you were running a drug company and had a drug you believed in mightily, wouldn’t you be desirous of the largest possible “patient load” to test it on? It was Brinestalker’s father, Jeshua, who as head of Bayerische AG during World War I conceived of such a notion. And put it into operation too. Many more men died in World War I than were killed on the battlefields from drugs tested in this way.