The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  He grabs for Jinx before she can study him like she’s studied everything else. She smells nice. She feels nice. She wraps her arms around his back and her legs around his waist and she feels like a big soft beach ball he’s carrying. She is nicely pale, not brazenly white like he is. Her body looks like it belongs to another time, like a flapper’s perhaps, fragile yet sturdy: breasts small but proportionate to the rest of her; arms flighty and sparrowlike in their dartings and never-restings, her palms running up and down his back, touching his face gently as she looks into his eyes; legs thin but strong, like those of runway models who stride forth best foot forward. Her neck is amazing: very long, as if her head, from which she observes so much, needs a special perch from which to gaze and swivel. Suddenly she stands up on the bed and regally looks down at him.

  “Are you ready to be master of all you survey?” she says at length.

  He’d wondered whether he should be haughty and masterful, or if this would make him look as silly as he felt, his fleshy midsection rolling over the elastic waist of his underpants, his pouch of genitals still docile, inert, like a kid’s pawful of silly putty still waiting for a stick to protrude from it, a flag on the top of Mount Everest. Men’s underpants are in no way as seductive as women’s underpants. He’d been meaning to have sexy ones designed so his readers could buy them. Hell, this isn’t the way his seductions usually transpire. He drops them both to the mattress and sticks his finger in her crotch.

  “Don’t believe much in foreplay, huh? Just off with the rags and smack-dab into it?”

  He rolls off her. He’s certain it has never looked more shriveled. He’s angry with her. It’s her fault.

  “I guess we’re off to a bad start,” she says. “Let’s not tell your mother.” From the foot of the bed she hauls up an afghan comforter of intricate pattern and soft heather colors. When he keeps lying there, looking a bit silly, a bit fragile, a bit petulant, no, a lot petulant, his skin even whiter from the goose bumps some sudden chilliness brings to him, she tucks him under the comforter. “I hope you’re not thinking of bringing out any exotic drugs to get you going. I don’t do drugs or alcohol or whips or chains or Dridgies. I’m a naturally healthy and happy woman.”

  He wonders why, emotionally and physically, he is immobile. Why can’t he speak? He is not supposed to feel for this woman. He should have jumped her by now, should have entered her by now. He might even have had her in and out and finished by now. (No, that wouldn’t make a good story.) But he has to fuck them all, don’t you see, or they’ll go out there and say, Mordy Masturbov’s a lousy lay. (His readers would identify with that.) If he does it quickly he can say, You’re my third of the day. That way they can’t say, Mordy …

  “Are you going to climb into Momma and let’s fuck?”

  He lies on top of her quietly. He puts his hand over her mouth, hoping she’ll understand it just means for her to shut up. He lets her fragrance seep into him. He gets hard. He climbs into her.

  What am I feeling, what am I feeling? is always the thought that runs through his head as he pumps and pumps, as he kisses, caresses, embraces, pinches, licks, sucks, fondles, strokes, and, if he thinks it’s desired, hits, strikes, clobbers, perhaps even ties and binds. He may be young but he’d read all the books Abe left for him. This one wants to kiss and kiss and she emits her sighs of pleasure when he does so, all over her, top and bottom, bottom to top. Kisses are easy for him, and they excite him. He stays harder when kissing. He seems to be enjoying this Jinx Seeley more than some others, but all of them, even Jinx Seeley, remain faceless if his eyes are closed, which they usually are. He says to himself, If I remember her next week, if she pops back into my memory with a good feeling next week, then I’ll know that she’s something a bit more meaningful.

  They never pop back to him.

  Dr. Ludens suggests it might be because he knows nothing about them, that he should engage them in personal conversation. “On the contrary,” Mordy protests, “I know everything about them.” He only sees Dr. Ludens to please his mother, who’s worried he’s too young for what he’s doing.

  “Okay, you did it,” this jinx woman says when they both reach orgasm simultaneously. “Just like it’s supposed to be done. Very textbook. Every guy should do it so good.”

  “It’s usual to be polite and say, ‘Thanks, that was great.’”

  “Who says it wasn’t great?”

  “You’re saying it. Your tone is saying it. You are sounding very facetious.”

  “I don’t know what that word means. It was great, it was great, it was great. It just wasn’t very personal. Tell your psychiatrist it’s not because you don’t know anything about me. It’s because you don’t give anything of yourself.”

  “How do you know I go to a psychiatrist?”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Please what?”

  “It’s the latest thing since the war’s been over. Rich guys got nothing better to do except talk about themselves. And come to hookers like me, of course. I have clients who go every week, or do it by phone. From what I can tell, docs all say the same thing: the problem is that you don’t know anything about the women you’re with. Men are in trouble, dear. The war’s over but you still don’t know what you’ve won.”

  “I’m not in trouble.”

  “Of course you are. And so you should be. Isn’t that why you want to teach the whole world how to fuck better?”

  He wants to ask her right this moment to sign on to Sexopolis as a columnist. She would appeal to younger readers.

  She then proceeds, like some clairvoyant, some astrologer who announces truths, to tell him things that of course he knows and of course would be known by any Perceptive Other who has just fucked with him for forty-five minutes. Still, it frightens him that he could be so nakedly known by another who has merely seen him with his clothes off.

  “Your cock is like a piece of wood, very hard, but brother, if you had any feeling in it throughout all that we did, I’d be surprised. You never have a lick of trouble getting it up and keeping it up, but that’s as far as it goes. Don’t ask me how I know so much about you, how closed and constipated you are, how selfish you are with sharing your insides. Hookers know everything. I’m going to go now. You plumb tuckered me out. Most of the guys are easier to earn the money with. Although now I can splurge on a couple of pieces of pie for dinner. One thing about being a hooker: it saves going on a diet.”

  He nods and gets up and finds himself giving both of them robes and leading her downstairs to a handsome but obviously little-used kitchen where he sits her down on a stool and lays out many kinds of pie and cake and ice cream.

  “Pigging out!” she screams, raising one hand above her head and pinching her nose with the other as if jumping in a pool’s deep end. Both do appear to be having a rather good time of it.

  “I guess I’ll have to go on a diet for a few days,” she says ruefully.

  “We can work it off again.”

  “I don’t think so,” she says seriously. “I don’t want another hammering from that piece of wood. You hurt. Nice little Jewish girls don’t like to get hurt, especially by nice little Jewish boys. Gentile boys is another matter.”

  She’s putting on her clothes, the undies and the soft green dress that ties around her waist, when he pulls her into an adjoining room that is his office, with its Regency mahogany desk and throne of a chair, and next to it, sitting on a Roman column under a glass cover, his very own stock ticker, ticking away. He opens the top drawer of his desk and pulls out a ledger, proudly unfurling its pages of columns and rows with a proprietary smile, as if to say, Look at all I have. Jinx looks on with complete detachment, saying nothing as he actually caresses the glass covering his rapidly accumulating wealth.

  “Don’t,” she says softly. Perhaps he doesn’t hear her.

  “This is what really counts.” His finger locates the column. “Total value of assets owned by Mordecai Masturbov as of this date—”

&nbs
p; “Please don’t.” She covers her ears and goes back to the bedroom. Mordy cries out after her, “If that’s how you feel you can go fuck yourself!” But he follows her, his feet follow her, and as she finishes fixing her face and hair in the mirror he stands in the doorway blocking her exit. “Have dinner with me, honey?”

  “I’m not your honey. I’m your afternoon fuck. That’s all I want to be. I don’t want to know about all your money. I don’t want you trying to impress me as if I have to be bought, which I do, but on an entirely different level. If you follow me.”

  “Yes, you do have to be bought. You’d leave me in a minute if I don’t pay for you.”

  “And you’d send me away in a minute if I didn’t look and act the way I do. That’s our barter and our bargain. Nothing new. Old as time.” She reaches up and runs her hand down the side of his cheek. He refuses to look in her eyes, and she takes her hand away. For a second she feels sorry for him. He still is so very young. Not that she isn’t. He grabs her hand and puts it back against his cheek and pulls her clumsily to him. “I don’t seem to want you to leave. When we made love, I didn’t let myself go, I watched myself, watched to see how hard I got, my eyes all the time peeking to see how you reacted to every single thing I did, hoping your breasts and your … everything would drive the emptiness from my body.”

  “You didn’t look at me one second.”

  This throws him. “I most certainly did. I saw you. I saw you…”

  She isn’t going to let herself cry at his confession. She isn’t certain if it’s real or a speech concocted for any old broad he wants to stay with a little longer. But she knows that’s her problem.

  She pulls herself away and says, “I’m sorry, Mr. Mordecai Masturbov.”

  As always after sex, when the women leave him, while his cock recovers from its soreness (it’s always blazingly sore, as if its feelings come to life only postcoitus), he feels abandoned and alone and discarded. Sex has ballooned more and more into such a huge part of his life. He goes each morning to Dr. Ludens. Mordy trumpets sexual freedom and Sexopolis to her, and to anyone who will listen.

  * * *

  Claudia and Jinx talk about how they feel safer at Doris’s than anywhere. Some of the other girls think they’re nuts. Some feel terrified of men. Some feel terrified of so many men. Some fear that one of them will go crazy in the middle of sex and kill them. Or one of their powerful clients will have them murdered to shut them up. This is Washington, remember. Some of them are worried they’ll get infected with something that doesn’t show up on their monthly blood tests. Some talk about going away, as a group, to live somewhere in the sun. When they make enough money. Which will be never. They make good money, but they spend good money. There’s usually someone or something to send the money to or spend it on. Some of the girls think everything’s just fine. So what if some of the other girls think they’re nuts. Jinx wishes Claudia would open up more when they talk. They’re both still so young to be in a place like this forever, but that’s how it seems to be playing out.

  No, Claudia isn’t good at talking with the other girls. She knows that however she sees things, no one else will understand. A pattern is emerging. She memorized the Kierkegaard maxim “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” which Nutra, the black whore recently hit by a truck and instantly killed, had hanging in a frame over her bed in needlepoint. Claudia has difficulty correlating “freedom” with the fantasies that are requested of her—whippings, penetrations, even slashes that might bleed, being bound and left alone, oh so many acts of humiliation that evidently bring pleasure to the beneficiary. What about to her? She had thought she had never cared. Stephen tells her it’s okay to have fantasies, and okay to act them out, but she worries—she seems to have become a worrier—that she will come to love some man who performs them too adeptly. This perplexes her. She had come into this place to get away from the world and her new world is turning out to be more complicated.

  She is aware that it was only days, nights, after her arrival at Doris’s that these questions came to be more her friends than any friend. She doesn’t understand these thoughts, and there’s no Daniel to tell them to. There hasn’t been for some time. Often she wants to call him, but she doesn’t. He knows where she is. Why doesn’t he call her?

  She thinks of unloading onto Doris. Doris would understand. But Doris is on this kick that what they’re doing is legal and should be recognized as such. Most of the girls look at Doris as if she’s going nuts. Anyway, Doris would say something like “just be careful you don’t fall in love.”

  A gentleman caller is downstairs. An international tycoon of something or other who likes to get pissed on. Claudia always keeps her clients waiting. She’ll douche until she’s so empty that she’ll ache in there, a void. Water will drip down the insides of her legs as he rings her bell, and she’ll make him lick her dry. It sounds so silly that she giggles.

  It is interesting that she thought she would be safe here.

  Claudia still thinks she will be safe, after she’s stayed here long enough.

  So, too, does Jinx.

  That’s why they’ve sort of bonded.

  * * *

  A man walks into a clinic in Ahashueras, Kitonka, South West Africa. There is much bloodshed going on in this German territory. People are murdering each other, more and more.

  This man wants someone to take some blood from him because he hurts. He believes this will take away his pain. It is an old custom in his tribe. You did it in your early America. He says he hurts because everyone in his family was eaten by another family. And they all have eaten many monkeys. This I think you did not do in America, at least as I remember. The nurse takes his blood. He walks away. The nurse gives the blood to that lady with one arm I worry about.

  What is she doing here?

  RICKETS

  In Ahashueras, at this same moment in time, a Western-backed study of rickets is under way. Some children have bones so soft that they can’t stand. The study is financed by the Baxxter-Bissbee-Box Corporation (known as BBB or Threebee), a leading manufacturer of diapers and baby foods and owned anonymously by Greeting-Dridge. Dr. Francine Punic is in charge of this study. She believes that what’s going on has something to do with one of her primates.

  SEXOPOLIS!

  After the first issue of Sexopolis had sold fifty thousand copies Mordy found himself constantly seeking newer methods, newer versions for his libidinous outpourings. He writes about what he thinks are acts required for maximum enjoyment, and then he expands his notes into feature stories. He tries all his ideas out for himself, with one girl after another, as in some Betty Crocker bake-off, to find out which ones are winners.

  Years before, Mordy had been walking in Miami Beach, where Doris had taken him and Abe for a treat. All these tanned men of all ages walking by want something, he realized. They need something. Just as he needed Claudia. They don’t get it. Just like him, again. Even with tans and even in Miami Beach they don’t get it. Even after all their years of hard work and all their millions they don’t get it. There are some things they just don’t know how to get. He will serve them all as well as himself. It’s then that he decided he wouldn’t go to college and that the time was closer for his launch.

  Now that Sexopolis is out there more and more he feels men watching over his shoulder. They’re always waiting for him. They want him, Mordecai Masturbov, to tell them how to get what they can’t get. In hundreds and soon thousands of letters they tell him they’re hanging on his every orgasm, his every quiver of pleasure in that wooden cock of his. We want to know! they say to him. Tell us more! I’ve somehow survived the world and I want to learn before it’s too late! Mordy’s wartime experiences had been more pacific. He’d been too young to serve so he doesn’t talk about it. Sexopolis is what he talks about. It’s his gift to “my fellow returning warriors.”

  And so every month he writes editorials for “my men.” Hang on! Be patient! Believe! Read my magazine! Tell your frien
ds to read my magazine! I will not desert you! You will not be lonely for much longer. Every month Sexopolis sells more copies and Mordy teaches them more acts to perform.

  Now he has everything he dreamed of. And when you print 153 million copies a month worldwide, which he’ll be doing in not too many years, you should realize that you’ve touched a nerve.

  At first it is mailed in brown paper envelopes. Then it brazenly dares to appear on newsstands. You can even open it up at newsstands and look at exposed female genitalia, staring right at you, and some men can actually get an erection standing at newsstands staring right back. That’s right: from coast to coast men browsing at newsstands can get erections staring right back.

  Sexopolis will change the sexual mores of the heterosexual world. As Jinx had tipped him off, winning wars frees up a lot of fellows with a lot of time. At first various censorship restrictions and government edicts and religious denunciations will be troublesome, but they will drop by the wayside after (most often) being kicked in the balls by one Sam Sport with his young sidekick, Dereck Dumster. Heterosexual men who want to fuck are emerging as a powerful force for getting what they want, this sexual freedom to which Sexopolis is leading them. It will be harder and harder to argue with 153 million erections, worldwide, of course.