The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Each country has its own little posse of guinea pigs, and each country somehow manages to know about the existence of this work in the others. The whole category comes to be known as “germ warfare.” Since the subtext of germ warfare is kill or be killed, no country wants to fall behind. Cooperating they may be, and to steal all they can.

  And lest we forget, all of this experimentation is conducted quite righteously, embedded as it is in concrete already poured by eugenicists since the turn of the century. Why, had not even John Harvey Kellogg himself, whom we still eat every morning, proclaimed to The American People at his 1914 Race Betterment Conference that the United States was already home to some 500,000 lunatics, 80,000 criminals, 100,000 paupers, 90,000 idiots, 90,000 epileptics, mental defectives comprising at least 10 percent of the population?

  Partekla is home to many an experiment. Some of them are even well-meaning.

  Fred, we’ve lost Grace in the bowels of that place.

  IN WHICH DANIEL JERUSALEM TELLS FRED MORE ABOUT SEXOPOLIS AND MORDY MASTURBOV, AND HIS UNCLE HYMAN

  Philip and Rivka still won’t say David’s name out loud. How long can this go on? As if this isn’t enough to still be dealing with, good old reliably repellent Uncle Hyman comes back on “home leave” from serving as a medical orderly, to stay with us, apparently looking for sympathy for all that he’s going through. He’d been summoned home by his wife, who cabled the army that his daughter was dying, but when he went to their home they no longer lived there. Ironically, I guess, he was assigned to a VD clinic in Germany and took great relish in describing grotesque symptoms over dinner. What sympathy he gets is from my mother, who describes a few cases with hideous deformities on her own, all news to me. He certainly must have heard Philip announce loudly, “Over my dead body.” All he gets from me is a kick in the groin that night when he attempts a return visit. So he takes off in the morning to “pick up a flight back to my theater of operations.”

  He had sold a lot of dirty books and pictures, but now they’re from Belgium and France. The etchings and the photogaphs are remarkable in quality but the people in them still aren’t very attractive. What they’re doing is so perverse that even he can’t believe his sales are so robust. I know because he actually showed them to me, “so you can leave my suitcase alone,” trying to reach for my penis to see if it’s hard, which it became when I kicked him in the groin. Why does it get hard for someone I don’t like? He will continue peddling his merchandise for the rest of his very long life. Over the years the people will get better-looking, and so will the animals.

  Somewhere along the line Hyman had married a Canadian girl named Ora. It’s a dreadful marriage. Three quick children make matters worse. Hyman spent as much time on the road as he could and was grateful when the war came along. Ora asks for a divorce and he gives it to her. He lies about how much he’s worth. He never sees her or their three children again. My source for much of this is my aunt Fran, a really cool woman who hates him too, but has to see him because she’s married to Rivka’s and Hyman’s brother who’s his partner in a bookstore. “He tried to get Murray to carry his filth in the store and I said then I’d finally have a reason to murder him.”

  It isn’t long before Hyman’s biggest customer is Mordecai Masturbov, who takes great interest in the dirty books, which he finds in one of those downtown Washington secondhand bookstores on Ninth Street to which my uncle had taken me. “I never saw such excellent and imaginative photographs covering the whole range of perversities,” Mordy would tell me years later. He said that Hyman was my uncle. I asked my childhood buddy if he ever considered that the overwhelming success of his Sexopolis was a major contributing factor to the spread of UC. “But I wanted to utilize this stuff in Sexopolis. Sexopolis must always be a total inspiration. Your uncle was helping me to feed the world’s mind and my imagination. That can only be healthy.” Hyman will be proud to help Mordy, who will henceforth always list him on the masthead as a “Contributing Editor (Photography) and among Our Honored and Beloved Sexopolis Family Members.” Evidently Mordy set it up for the magazine to sell Hyman’s photos without anyone knowing where they came from; it made my uncle a millionaire. According to Aunt Fran. No wonder Ora was looking to get him.

  When I do come to see Mordy again (and I’m woefully out of sequence here), I wonder what I once saw in him that made me love him so, this tired middle-aged businessman’s once-gorgeous marble skin now pallid. “I work too hard,” he says almost apologetically when he sees me studying him, “but you look great.” And then he flashes me a smile, of a kind he never gave me when we were kids. And yes, that did it, we fucked again. There is something so plaintive and touching about an old love’s body come back into your arms. It’s hard to disguise the facts of life, we’re older; but there are the memories of two youngsters out in the fields under the moon, holding each other for the first time, that come back, that never go away. Today’s fuck had been as unsatisfying.

  “Let’s stay in touch,” he said as I was leaving. “Write me something racy about your world and I’ll run it if it doesn’t frighten my readers.” He grins at his joke.

  “Did you ever actually watch a German shepherd fuck a woman?” I ask him, referring to a photo that Uncle Hyman published to look like an etching.

  He pauses, then says, “I even let the dog fuck me once,” and then gives me a bigger smile when he sees I’m shocked. “Only joking, Danny. Where’s your sense of humor?” and I swear I would have hopped back into bed with him again. But he was checking his watch. “This guy from New York wants me to buy him out. He owns a faggot modeling agency named One Touch of Penis.” He laughed and with the fraternal slap on the back gently ushered me out.

  By then Sexopolis is bigger and more powerful than ever, each issue pushing the boundaries of taste, further and further. Bare tits are no longer enough. Bare beaver takes over the roost, with men’s admiring faces hovering nearer and nearer. Mordy’s increasingly florid prose in the accompanying text borders on the lascivious, but he has a rare gift for making things sound amusingly juicy and comforting, just the ticket, first for our returning soldiers, now home again and bored, and then for The American People, increasingly the latter. Mordy does try to make all the far-out sexual activities Sexopolis hints at, or even trumpets, sound like good clean fun. The overwhelming number of letters published from satisfied customers (“You have changed my life!”) attest to Mordy’s success. Give us more, give us more, they implore almost plaintively.

  I come to believe that Sexopolis will create a sexual revolution; I want to say will create it more or less by itself. Sorry to jump so far ahead of our time line, but this sexual revolution does have its seeds of origin in the era we’ve arrived at, a country waiting for the boys to come home. Mordy hasn’t stopped thinking about his baby for a single minute. He’s made mock-ups, he’s written reams of prose, he’s sought photos of sexual activities from Uncle Hyman and all the sources and catalogues and countries and creeps he could locate. He’s carried interviews with sexologists, both respectable and not so. At times his issues seem overwhelmed by the variety of human possibilities. He is amazed, as he will put it to me, by “the myriad mishegas that flesh is heir to.” Mishegas is a Yiddish word for “craziness.” It’s a word his father occasionally uses when they meet to discuss Abe’s business, and Abe’s hope, fast dying, that Mordy might consider taking it over. Yes, I read every issue. Knowing that they contain his heart and soul is of never-ending amazement to me. How could it not be? If he’s the progenitor of the sexual revolution—and Fred will come to claim him emphatically to be such—I was his first trick.

  I didn’t know then that he’d shared all his dreams with Stephen and that indeed my brother would not only be his lawyer but his silent partner. By then my brothers both had graduated from law school, Lucas from Yaddah and Stephen from Franeeda State. All through the war, they’d both been waiting and worrying and wondering when they’d be drafted. They didn’t know that Mr. Sam Sport
had seen to it that they wouldn’t be. They didn’t know Mr. Sam Sport, much less why he’d do such a thing for them, and for Mordy, too.

  STATE OF THE UNION: FRED GIVES IT A SHOT

  Hermia, Grace, Ianthe, Daniel, I appreciate all your communications and concerns about the way I’m fashioning this history. I’m old enough to remember these unfocused years we’re up to, confusing years for all of us. I’m glad to note that you have each held on to your sanity, or should I say balance, better than I appear to you to be doing. I’m sorry if I upset anyone. I’m sorry that I upset myself. How do I not do that? I don’t know.

  This has always been a country where we keep trying to tell ourselves that nothing’s wrong that can’t be fixed, when of course everything’s wrong, and it’s always been wrong, and no, it can’t be fixed. I’m still not accustomed to being quite as angry as I’m becoming. From all my shrinks I’ve learned that managing anger is a gift. Some days I have it. Some days I don’t. I’m hoping to get it up and running full-time as soon as I can.

  World War II is over. War makes even less sense when it’s over. War’s a very heterosexual thing. It’s a funny thought to have had so young, but I had it. I’m aware of this when Rena regales me with all her Red Blood war stories. I now know she’s talking about other issues that don’t include or concern me. American Red Blood isn’t concerned about gay anything, and my mother works for ARB.

  I don’t have many friends in Masturbov Gardens. A number of fathers have been killed in the war. Some of the mothers remarried and moved away with their kids. My father hits me when I say I don’t want to go to Yaddah. I don’t know why hitting is his favorite sport. When Daniel tells me what Philip had done to him I figure all fathers take swipes at their sons. I learned how to hit him back. The first time I did this he was shocked and hauled off with a big one, which hurt so much I lunged forward and bit his hand. It just came instinctively. He bled and I thought, That did it, I’ll be exiled for life. He looked at his bloody mitt and started to cry. That I didn’t expect. In fact, he started bawling. He went into the toilet and put on a couple of Band-Aids and he came back into the living room and he swatted me hard again across my face. And I punched him hard in his belly, so he doubled up and fell on the floor. I could detail more choreography of our fights because this was just the beginning, and anyway Daniel’s father and my father were behaving the same way. Rena was never home, of course. So I had to learn not to be home alone with him, because he wouldn’t do it in front of her. Or so I thought. But soon he would and did and she screamed out at him, “What are you doing?” And he yelled back at her, “What does it look like I’m doing. He’s your son and I want you to see it because I do it to him a lot and he deserves it because he’s a sissy.” Then she started bawling herself amid many sobs of how she couldn’t take it anymore and she was going to leave him. And this would make him cry again and beg her, “Please don’t leave me.”

  That’s what it was like and it never varied much and both Mom and I stayed at home in Masturbov Gardens with him and nobody left anybody because nobody knew how to leave for good or where to go, and it goes on like this until it will become time for me to go to college. I haven’t told you about my covert experiences with fellow high school guys. I had them, and they had me, and after we did it they’d make fun of me in front of others, as if they hadn’t been part of it too. Nope, I didn’t have many friends in Masturbov Gardens.

  I would get into Yaddah not because of my brains but because my father and brother had gone there and a few uncles on both sides and they gave me a scholarship. Seth, my brother, told me I’d have a hard time there, which I would. I would try to kill myself there, after which Seth sent me to my first psychiatrist, thus beginning a lifelong enterprise of trying to figure out who I was and am and am meant to be.

  So the end of the war led to the postwar years led to my going to Yaddah and the start of my own war in that outside world that I’d never seen. It was an awful childhood, but when Daniel tells me about his and David’s, mine doesn’t seem as bad.

  The American People also didn’t really know where we’d been either, and of course no one knew where they were going, although many claimed they did. We were told we’d won a war, which more and more made me say (rather boldly, if I may say so), Oh, yeah, who says? It never occurred to anyone that we’d lose. I was not going to lose, no sir!

  Did you know that the most common cause of rejection for military service was defective teeth? That’s the kind of helpful stuff the papers were full of.

  I’ve read a lot about postwar prosperity, as if all the wounded jump right back into civvies and the playing field is level and everyone has a chance. As if there’s enough for everyone of everything, now that we’re all back in the same place. Or almost everyone. There is no accurate determination of how many American lives were lost. Troll and Hibernate weigh in first with 800,000, a figure quickly “adjusted” by the Bureau of War Statistics to 500,000, which is quickly pooh-poohed by the National Veterans Association, which insists on 1,000,000, as if it could come out so nice and even. But no one’s bothered to refute any of them, mainly because there’s no way they can be checked. How could we not know how many of our kids we’d sent off to die? It would be in 1950 before it’s finally calculated that America is poorer by 793,560 war casualties. That’s the “official figure,” from the Gurney Institute of Numbers, now part of MIT, having been siphoned off from the Bureau of Wartime Statistics, now out of business.

  As Mr. DuPont tells us, progress is our most important product. GI Bills for this and that, start-up loans for this and that, education, a job, a house. Yes, yes, as Mr. Carl Sandburg tells us, The People, Yes. On paper and in the papers it all sounds swell, but a number of the potential beneficiaries are dead, and hence are unavailable to substantiate the statistical good news that Harry Truman, with his Midwestern down-homeyness, is successfully peddling as fact. We should be proud of ourselves! We won! America won! The American People won! And among those who do come back are too many who won’t or don’t or can’t rev up, no matter what’s added to the gas. A lot of them come back and kill themselves or someone else. The suicide rates for 1945–52 are among the highest ever estimated for any “civilized” country, and the number of murdered women also breaks all records. To this day these figures are still classified by the Bureau of War Statistics. Harry doesn’t tell us any of this. With that kindly face and haberdashery demeanor as comforting as macaroni and cheese (another cozy item, like “home front”), people trust him, even after he drops a couple of bombs that “usher in” (a quaint phrase redolent of theatergoing that now accompanies all mentions of such horror shows as Hiroshima and Nagasaki) the nuclear age.

  “They didn’t come back like, ‘Oh, we saved democracy; so we’re happy,’” writes the gay playwright Craig Lucas in The Gay and Lesbian Review. “They came back as totally broken people who could barely function. I saw family after family where the mother paid the bills, made the decisions, took care of the children, and was basically the fiber of the family while the guy with an empty shell went off to work every day and drank himself to death!”

  Yes, in one form or another, the wounded are what are flowing back. We can actually see firsthand what the war was really about. Cripples, disfigured men still bandaged somewhere, the worst accompanied by a nurse’s aide. Hospitals everywhere experience heavy loads. Rena takes me with her when she visits the paraplegics. That’s her new Red Blood assignment. She brought home artificial limbs for me to feel and see and Richard went nuts, which made me parade around with them all the more—the fake arms and legs and feet—singing that Andrews Sisters song “The Victory Polka.” NITS still isn’t ready (it’s on its thirty-fourth director) and the half of its medical staff sent overseas comes back just as much basket cases as those they’re meant to treat.

  And all the stories from overseas about jungle this and tropical that and poison everything—what are all these boys coming home bringing with them? “New cures are c
oming every day” is an announcement from the thirty-fifth NITS director, Dr. Horace Merman: “I’ve got all my boys working overtime.” FADS can’t staff up fast enough and its new director, Dr. Elijah Montrose, announces, “Diseases will be eliminated!” The Monument’s happy to quote them both. Penicillin and vaccines and new derivatives of old favorites like sulphur and warjim are reported in all the New England Journal of Whatevers. People believe what they read. A soldier is interviewed from his bed in the North Nerts Wing at Sibley General (where I’d had a broken elbow put in its cast when I was six): “Oh, I caught that in Iwo Jima and I almost died until they gave me this new stuff called warjim and it saved my life.” Who wouldn’t believe a story like that? In six months warjim will be discovered to be worthless and no one’s reporting that. There are lots of these new “wonder drugs” concocted by all our new research scientists. Trajan. Apollo. Elgin. Dolphus. Fedrick. Rheingold. (These are all “lifesavers,” not doctors’ names.) The Merck Handbook of 1946–47 lists pages of them.

  There are rumored to be a lot of military deserters still at large, or unaccounted for. Where did so many go? Were they killed or are they still in hiding? No one writes about this matter, nor is much written about the savage violence that’s erupting in the larger cities because of a huge shortage of trained police officers to keep order.

  Here’s a doozie. Fewer than a third of American families had a close relation fighting overseas. That’s another statistic Harry doesn’t let out. We’re supposed to believe that America is a country where every family suffered. Well, it’s just not true. Fewer than a third? Where was everybody else? It’s another one of those Greatest Stories Never Told. Yes, many guys just changed their name and started up somewhere else. Or they were still lying dead on some battlefield like after the Civil War.