NED: What are you trying to say, Mickey?
MICKEY: You keep trying to make us say things that we don’t want to say! And I don’t think we can afford to make so many enemies before we have enough friends.
NED: We’ll never have enough friends. We have to accept that. And why does what I say mean I don’t like myself? Why is anything I’m saying compared to anything but common sense? When are we going to have this out once and for all? How many cases a week now?
MICKEY: Thirty . . . forty. . .
NED: Reinhard dead, Craig dead, Albert sick, Felix not getting any better . . . Richie Faro just died.
MICKEY: Richie!
NED: That guy Ray Schwartz just committed suicide. Terry’s calling all his friends from under his oxygen tent to say good-bye. Soon we’re going to be blamed for not doing anything to help ourselves. When are we going to admit we might be spreading this? We have simply fucked ourselves silly for years and years, and sometimes we’ve done it in the filthiest places.
TOMMY: Some of us have never been to places like that, Ned.
NED: Well, good for you, Tommy. Maybe you haven’t, but others you’ve been with have, so what’s the difference?
TOMMY: (Holding up his cigarette.) It’s my right to kill myself.
NED: But it is not your right to kill me. This is not a civil-rights issue, this is a contagion issue.
BRUCE: We don’t know that yet, and until they discover the virus, we’re not certain where this is coming from.
NED: We know enough to cool it for a while! And save lives while we do. All it takes is one wrong fuck. That’s not promiscuity—that’s bad luck.
TOMMY: All right, so it’s back to kissing and cuddling and waiting around for Mr. Right—who could be Mr. Wrong. Maybe if they’d let us get married to begin with none of this would have happened at all. I think I’ll call Dr. Ruth.
MICKEY: Will you please stop!
TOMMY: Mick, are you all right?
MICKEY: I don’t think so.
TOMMY: What’s wrong? Tell Tommy.
MICKEY: Why can’t they find the virus?
TOMMY: It takes time.
MICKEY: I can’t take any more theories. I’ve written a column about every single one of them. Repeated infection by a virus, new appearance by a dormant virus, single virus, new virus, old virus, multivirus, partial virus, latent virus, mutant virus, retrovirus . . .
TOMMY: Take it easy, honey.
MICKEY: And we mustn’t forget fucking, sucking, kissing, blood, voodoo, drugs, poppers, needles, Africa, Haiti, Cuba, blacks, amebas, pigs, mosquitoes, monkeys, Uranus!. . . What if it isn’t any of them?
TOMMY: I don’t know.
MICKEY: What if it’s something out of the blue? The Great Plague of London was caused by polluted drinking water from a pump nobody noticed. Maybe it’s a genetic predisposition, or the theory of the herd—only so many of us will get it and then the pool’s used up. What if it’s monogamy? Bruce, you and I could actually be worse off because of constant bombardment of the virus from a single source—our own lovers! Maybe guys who go to the baths regularly have built up the best immunity! I don’t know what to tell anybody. And everybody asks me. I don’t know—who’s right? I don’t know—who’s wrong? I feel so inadequate! How can we tell people to stop when it might turn out to be caused by—I don’t know!
BRUCE: That’s exactly how I feel.
MICKEY: And Ned keeps calling the mayor a prick and Hiram a prick and the Commissioner a prick and the President and the New York Times, and that’s the entire political structure of the entire United States! When are you going to stop your eternal name-calling at every person you see?
BRUCE: That’s exactly how I feel.
MICKEY: But maybe he’s right! And that scares me, too. Neddie, you scare me.
TOMMY: If I were you, I’d get back on that plane to Gregory and Rio immediately.
MICKEY: Who’s going to pay my fare? And now my job, I don’t make much, but it’s enough to let me help out here. Where are all the gay Rockefellers? Do you think the President really wants this to happen? Do you think the CIA really has unleashed germ warfare to kill off all the queers Jerry Falwell doesn’t want? Why should they help us—we’re actually cooperating with them by dying.
NED: Mickey, try and hold on.
MICKEY: To what? I used to love my country. The Native received an anonymous letter describing top-secret Defense Department experiments at Fort Detrick, Maryland, that have produced a virus that can destroy the immune system. Its code name is Firm Hand. They started testing in 1978—on a group of gays. I never used to believe shit like this before. They are going to persecute us! Cancel our health insurance. Test our blood to see if we’re pure. Lock us up. Stone us in the streets. (To NED.) And you think I am killing people?
NED: Mickey, that is not what I—
MICKEY: Yes, you do! I know you do! I’ve spent fifteen years of my life fighting for our right to be free and make love whenever, wherever. . . And you’re telling me that all those years of what being gay stood for is wrong. . . and I’m a murderer. We have been so oppressed! Don’t you remember how it was? Can’t you see how important it is for us to love openly, without hiding and without guilt? We were a bunch of funny-looking fellows who grew up in sheer misery and one day we fell into the orgy rooms and we thought we’d found heaven. And we would teach the world how wonderful heaven can be. We would lead the way. We would be good for something new. Can’t you see that? Can’t you?
TOMMY: I see that. I do, Mickey. Come on—I’m taking you home now.
MICKEY: When I left Hiram’s office I went to the top of the Empire State Building to jump off.
TOMMY: (Going to get MICKEY’s coat.) Mickey, I’m taking you home right now! Let’s go.
MICKEY: You can jump off from there if no one is looking. Ned, I’m not a murderer. All my life I’ve been hated. For one reason or another. For being short. For being Jewish. Jerry Falwell mails out millions of pictures of two men kissing as if that was the most awful sight you could see. Tell everybody we were wrong. And I’m sorry. Someday someone will come along and put the knife in you and say everything you fought for all this time is . . . shit! (He has made a furious, running lunge for NED, but TOMMY catches him and cradles him in his arms.)
BRUCE: Need any help?
TOMMY: Get my coat. (To MICKEY.) You’re just a little tired, that’s all, a little bit yelled out. We’ve got a lot of different styles that don’t quite mesh. We’ve got ourselves a lot of bereavement overload. Tommy’s taking you home.
MICKEY: No, don’t take me home. I’m afraid I might do something. Take me to St. Vincent’s. I’m just afraid.
TOMMY: I’ll take you wherever you want to go. (To BRUCE and NED.) Okay, you two, no more apologizing and no more fucking excuses. You two better start accommodating and talking to each other now. Or we’re in big trouble.
MICKEY: We’re the fighters, aren’t we?
TOMMY: You bet, sweetness. And you’re a hero. Whether you know it or not. You’re our first hero.
(TOMMY and MICKEY leave. There is a long moment of silence.)
NED: We’re all going to go crazy, living this epidemic every minute, while the rest of the world goes on out there, all around us, as if nothing is happening, going on with their own lives and not knowing what it’s like, what we’re going through. We’re living through war, but where they’re living it’s peacetime, and we’re all in the same country.
BRUCE: Do you want to be president?
NED: I just want Felix to live. (A phone on TOMMY’s desk rings.) Hello. Hiram, old buddy, how they hanging? I want to talk to you, too. (He listens, then hangs up softly.) Tommy’s right. All yelled out. You ready?
BRUCE: Yes.
NED: The mayor has found a secret little fund for giving away money. But we’re not allowed to tell anyone where we got it. If word gets out we’ve told, we won’t get it.
BRUCE: How much?
NED: Nine thousand dollars.
&
nbsp; BRUCE: Ned, Albert is dead.
NED: Oh, no.
BRUCE: What’s today?
NED: Wednesday.
BRUCE: He’s been dead a week.
NED: I didn’t know he was so close.
BRUCE: No one did. He wouldn’t tell anyone. Do you know why? Because of me. Because he knows I’m so scared I’m some sort of carrier. This makes three people I’ve been with who are dead. I went to Emma and I begged her: please test me somehow, please tell me if I’m giving this to people. And she said she couldn’t, there isn’t any way they can find out anything because they still don’t know what they’re looking for. Albert, I think I loved him best of all, and he went so fast. His mother wanted him back in Phoenix before he died, this was last week when it was obvious, so I get permission from Emma and bundle him all up and take him to the plane in an ambulance. The pilot wouldn’t take off and I refused to leave the plane—you would have been proud of me—so finally they get another pilot. Then, after we take off, Albert loses his mind, not recognizing me, not knowing where he is or that he’s going home, and then, right there, on the plane, he becomes . . . incontinent. He starts doing it in his pants and all over the seat; shit, piss, everything. I pulled down my suitcase and yanked out whatever clothes were in there and I start mopping him up as best I can, and all these people are staring at us and moving away in droves and . . . I ram all these clothes back in the suitcase and I sit there holding his hand, saying, “Albert, please, no more, hold it in, man, I beg you, just for us, for Bruce and Albert.” And when we got to Phoenix, there’s a police van waiting for us and all the police are in complete protective rubber clothing, they looked like fucking astronauts, and by the time we got to the hospital where his mother had fixed up his room real nice, Albert was dead.
(NED starts toward him.)
Wait. It gets worse. The hospital doctors refused to examine him to put a cause of death on the death certificate, and without a death certificate the undertakers wouldn’t take him away, and neither would the police. Finally, some orderly comes in and stuffs Albert in a heavy-duty GLAD bag and motions us with his finger to follow and he puts him out in the back alley with the garbage. He says, “Hey, man. See what a big favor I’ve done for you, I got him out, I want fifty bucks.” I paid him and then his mother and I carried the bag to her car and we finally found a black undertaker who cremated him for a thousand dollars, no questions asked.
(NED crosses to BRUCE and embraces him; BRUCE puts his arms around NED.)
BRUCE: Would you and Felix mind if I spent the night on your sofa? Just one night. I don’t want to go home.
Scene 12
EMMA sits alone in a spotlight, facing a doctor who stands at a distance, perhaps in the audience. She holds a number of files on her lap, or they are placed in a carrier attached to her wheelchair.
EXAMINING DOCTOR: Dr. Brookner, the government’s position is this. There are several million dollars in the pipeline, five to be exact, for which we have received some fifty-five million dollars’ worth of requests—all the way from a doctor in North Dakota who desires to study the semen of pigs to the health reporter on Long Island who is convinced this is being transmitted by dogs and the reason so many gay men are contracting it is because they have so many dogs.
EMMA: Five million dollars doesn’t seem quite right for some two thousand cases. The government spent twenty million investigating seven deaths from Tylenol. We are now almost into the third year of this epidemic.
EXAMINING DOCTOR: Unfortunately the President has threatened to veto. As you know, he’s gone on record as being unalterably and irrevocably opposed to anything that might be construed as an endorsement of homosexuality. Naturally, this has slowed things down.
EMMA: Naturally. It looks like we’ve got a pretty successful stalemate going on here.
EXAMINING DOCTOR: Well, that’s not what we’re here to discuss today, is it?
EMMA: I don’t think I’m going to enjoy hearing what I think I’m about to hear. But go ahead. At your own peril.
EXAMINING DOCTOR: We have decided to reject your application for funding.
EMMA: Oh? I would like to hear your reasons.
EXAMINING DOCTOR: We felt the direction of your thinking was imprecise and unfocused.
EMMA: Could you be a little more precise?
EXAMINING DOCTOR: I beg your pardon?
EMMA: You don’t know what’s going on any more than I do. My guess is as good as anybody’s. Why are you blocking my efforts?
EXAMINING DOCTOR: Dr. Brookner, since you first became involved with this—and we pay tribute to you as a pioneer, one of the few courageous pioneers—there have been other investigators . . . Quite frankly, it’s no longer just your disease, though you seem to think it is.
EMMA: Oh, I do, do I? And you’re here to take it away from me, is that it? Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret, doctor. You can have it. I didn’t want it in the first place. You think it’s my good fortune to have the privilege of watching young men die? Oh, what’s the use! What am I arguing with you for? You don’t know enough medicine to treat a mouse. You don’t know enough science to study boiled water. How dare you come and judge me?
EXAMINING DOCTOR: We only serve on this panel at the behest of Dr. Joost.
EMMA: Another idiot. And, by the way, a closeted homosexual who is doing everything in his power to sweep this under the rug, and I vowed I’d never say that in public. How does it always happen that all the idiots are always on your team? You guys have all the money, call the shots, shut everybody out, and then operate behind closed doors. I am taking care of more victims of this epidemic than anyone in the world. We have more accumulated test results, more data, more frozen blood samples, more experience! How can you not fund my research or invite me to participate in yours? A promising virus has already been discovered—in France. Why are we being told not to cooperate with the French? Why are you refusing to cooperate with the French? Just so you can steal a Nobel Prize? Your National Institutes of Health received my first request for research money two years ago. It took you one year just to print up application forms. It’s taken you two and a half years from my first reported case just to show up here to take a look. The paltry amount of money you are making us beg for—from the four billion dollars you are given each and every year—won’t come to anyone until only God knows when. Any way you add all this up, it is an unconscionable delay and has never, never existed in any other health emergency during this entire century. While something is being passed around that causes death. We are enduring an epidemic of death. Women have been discovered to have it in Africa—where it is clearly transmitted heterosexually. It is only a question of time. We could all be dead before you do anything. You want my patients? Take them! TAKE THEM! (She starts hurling her folders and papers at him, out into space.) Just do something for them! You’re fucking right I’m imprecise and unfocused. And you are all idiots!
Scene 13
A big empty room, which will be the organization’s new offices. BRUCE is walking around by himself . NED comes in from upstairs.
NED: This is perfect for our new offices. The room upstairs is just as big. And it’s cheap.
BRUCE: How come, do you think?
NED: Didn’t Tommy tell you? After he found it, he ran into the owner in a gay bar who confessed, after a few beers, his best friend is sick. Did you see us on TV picketing the mayor yesterday in all that rain?
BRUCE: Yes.
NED: How’d we look?
BRUCE: All wet.
NED: He’s got four more hours to go. Our letter threatened if he didn’t meet with us by the end of the day we’d escalate the civil disobedience. Mel found this huge straight black guy who trained with Martin Luther King. He’s teaching us how to tie up the bridge and tunnel traffic. Don’t worry—a bunch of us are doing this on our own.
BRUCE: Tommy got the call.
NED: Tommy? Why didn’t you tell me? When did they call?
BRUCE: This
morning.
NED: When’s the meeting?
BRUCE: Tomorrow.
NED: You see. It works! What time?
BRUCE: Eight A.M.
NED: For the mayor I’ll get up early.
BRUCE: We can only bring ten people. Hiram’s orders.
NED: Who’s going?
BRUCE: The Community Council sends two, the Network sends two, the Task Force sends two, we send two, and two patients.
NED: I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty and we can share a cab.
BRUCE: You remember we elected Tommy executive director.
NED: I’m going.
BRUCE: We can only bring two.
NED: You just call Hiram and tell him we’re bringing three.
BRUCE: The list of names has already been phoned in. It’s too late.
NED: So I’ll just go. What are they going to do? Kick me out? Already phoned in? Too late? Why is everything so final? Why is all this being done behind my back? How dare you make this decision without consulting me?
BRUCE: Ned . . .
NED: I wrote that letter, I got sixty gay organizations to sign it, I organized the picketing when the mayor wouldn’t respond, that meeting is mine! It’s happening because of me! It took me twenty-one months to arrange it and, God damn it, I’m going to go!
BRUCE: You’re not the whole organization.
NED: What does that mean? Why didn’t Tommy tell me?
BRUCE: I told him not to.
NED: You what?
BRUCE: I wanted to poll the board.
NED: Behind my back—what kind of betrayal is going on behind my back? I’m on the board, you didn’t poll me. I am going to that meeting representing this organization that I have spent every minute of my life fighting for and that was started in my living room, or I quit!
BRUCE: I told them I didn’t think you’d accept their decision.
NED: (As it sinks in.) You would let me quit? You didn’t have to poll the board. If you wanted to take me, you’d take me. I embarrass you.
BRUCE: Yes, you do. The mayor’s finally meeting with us and we all feel we now have a chance to—
The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays Page 9
