The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  I took the three hundred aspirin at noon the next day, Saturday, while everyone was out. My reasoning was that I needed to sleep. If I could only sleep I’d be able to study when I woke up. I only wanted to sleep till Tuesday. The exams were on Monday. On Tuesday I’d wake refreshed and explain that I’d been sick but now I was better and could I take the tests next month? Ten aspirin should get me through the day, and then another fifty through the night, and another fifty through the next day. Oh, why not take them all? That’ll do it till Tuesday sure. I shoveled them into my mouth by the handful. Three bottles. I watched myself in the bathroom mirror and I looked calm enough. I’d never heard such quiet. The water I cupped up in my palm was cold and refreshing. I didn’t even use a glass.

  I lay down on my bed waiting for all that aspirin to put me to sleep. But it didn’t. My stomach cramped. I began to get scared I’d done something I shouldn’t have. I called the campus cops and they took me to the emergency room, where doctors stuck a hose down my throat and pumped my stomach. It took a bunch of people to hold me down and I threw up all over them. I offered to pay their cleaning bills before I passed out.

  When I woke up a young psychiatrist was sitting by my bed. “I am not going to leave this room until you tell me why you did it,” he said. “Go fuck yourself,” I said, and went back to sleep till Tuesday.

  Seth was there when I woke up again. They made me give a next of kin before they would pump my stomach. I didn’t want to put down anybody but the doctor said unless I did I would die and the longer I waited, the closer I would come. Seth was wonderful. He didn’t ask me why I did it. He didn’t blame me. He didn’t bawl me out. He just sat there with me for a long time, even before I was fully conscious or able to talk. Then he said he was glad I’d failed, because he would have missed me. That alone made me want to get better.

  Seth was a friend of the dean’s, so I got to take the tests and stay. Daniel Jerusalem helped me study. I did just well enough. Usually Yaddah steered messed-up kids to the army, but I was allowed to stay if I saw a psychiatrist. Which I did, and we talked for three years until I graduated. He said I was a complicated young man. I learned that I hated my parents and I was a homosexual and I was afraid. Of success. Of doing what I wanted to, whatever it was, including being homosexual and being a writer and being in love. I told him I’d known all that before I took the aspirin, and he said I no doubt did.

  Henry, who became a doctor, would have four mental breakdowns and hospitalizations before he committed suicide by sucking gas through a hose sitting in his car in his second ex-wife’s garage when he was sixty. She had divorced him, as had his first wife, because he beat her up. We did have sex once, when we were fifty or so and had hardly seen each other since Yaddah. He just showed up at my New York apartment one night and I opened the door and I knew why he’d come and we went to bed together. It was okay. No, it was very sad, two pudgy middle-aged men holding on to each other briefly. I’d managed to get him to talk a bit before we started. He lived alone in New Hampshire. In fact, in his parents’ old house. On his deathbed his father told him what a disappointment to him Henry had been. “You were supposed to take care of us,” he said. Henry’s medical practice was gone because he fell in love with his male clients and spent so much time with them that he went broke. He had to go to work in the emergency room of the small local hospital. He fell in love with a young man who was cruel to him. He bought a dog who chewed up all his furniture. That night, I tried to get him to stay, but he wouldn’t. It was 3 a.m. when he left to drive back north. He’d done what he had to do, I guess. And then, a few years later, he did what he had to do, again.

  * * *

  One-arm is back. She comes back with a man. She went to parts of Africa where my history is buried. I am more scared.

  DR. JACQUES PEPIN!

  GRACE: Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, this time my fucks are happy fucks. I met the most extraordinary expert on dating the past. His name is Dr. Jacques Pepin. We have sworn each other to secrecy while we each finish fucking with the fucking discoveries that are pouring out of our continuing investigations into the Dark Continent. Until then, I talk only to you, my fucking lab notebook.

  More anon anon.

  * * *

  JACQUES PEPIN: There is no doubt that The Underlying Condition was present in the Kongo in 1959.

  * * *

  BOSCO DRIPPER: In 1963 I was sent a Pan trog. from Africa.

  THE PEN PALS MEET AGAIN

  Fred Lemish and Daniel Jerusalem met up again. In the Yaddah hospital when Daniel was on duty.

  “May I come in, Fred? Masturbov Gardens? I’m in the medical school here now and I saw your name on the hospital intake.”

  Yes, I remember him, each of them thought. Each of them also thought kindly thoughts about the other. Not bad-looking. He looks nice. He’s grown up. That sort of thing.

  “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. I just want you to know that I’d like to help you in any way I can. I’m sorry you felt so awful that you had to try something so extreme, although I very much understand where that can come from. And I am already saying more than I should be saying, professionally, I guess.”

  Fred managed to smile. Daniel managed to smile. They spent about fifteen minutes talking to each other. They talked about Masturbov Gardens, of course, and how much each hated it and couldn’t wait to get out. And Fred said Daniel was lucky he knew what he wanted to be. And Daniel told him he didn’t have to be in such a hurry, he was only a freshman, after all.

  “I think I am the only gay man here. It scares me. I am very lonely.”

  “Now you know you’re not the only one here,” Daniel said.

  Then Daniel sat down beside Fred on the hospital bed and held his hand. And Fred took the hand and kissed it and held it to his cheek. And Daniel bent down and kissed Fred on his lips. And they lay side by side until groggy Fred fell back asleep. There was still a ringing inside his head. But maybe it wasn’t from too much salicylate, which is what a nurse said caused this, but from a bell going off because he’d found someone nice who liked him.

  Yes, it was Daniel who helped Fred to study for his exams and pass them. He drilled him over and over again, and since he’d taken two of the courses himself and passed them with honors, he was just the teacher Fred needed. And during all this, each thought he might be falling in love.

  They are very tentative lovers, fumbling and awkward, uncertain how to do what with what. Neither is experienced in love. Daniel, as we have seen, has certainly dipped his toe in Mordy and been dipped in himself by his wretched uncle Hyman. But as desperately as he wanted Mordy then, well, it is different now, the other person is available and also as alone as he’d been then, and, well, it is all too new and … and … and … And Fred … can’t remember all he’d ever done besides a few ugly faces. Perhaps, Fred, you don’t have to remember everything when you write a history.

  But neither of them was really ready for love. Timing is so important. And a young man studying to be a doctor has so little time. At least that was Daniel’s excuse. He also recognizes in Fred what he knows by now is in himself: that extreme need already mentioned, which can only get in the way. Best to turn everything toward being buddies. And so they do, without knowing quite how they do it, how fast the sparks of potential love turn into friendship and relief from pressures lifted.

  No, no, no! Each had actually said to himself, I didn’t want it to turn into sadness. I want someone to tell me how it’s done. Please, how do homosexuals fall in love and live in this world, a world that doesn’t want you around?

  They won’t see each other for a while, although each of them thought exactly the same thoughts. He liked me. We had nice sex. We learned something nice about homosexuality. It was not cataclysmically ecstatic, not that either would recognize that if it were. What’s wrong with nice? Isn’t nice enough? What went wrong? What was I afraid of? Because I was afraid. How did we come to each other and lose each other and and and
not see each other after so many days and nights of study! I liked him!

  Daniel left New Godding, to continue his education at Table Medical Center in New York. Fred visited him a few times, but it was obvious that he was in the way of Daniel’s work, which took up so many hours of the day and night that when they tried to make love one night, Daniel fell asleep after telling him that a fellow intern was expelled for having sex with another man in their dorms; he’d been “turned in” by one of his straight roommates. And when, back in his room at Yaddah, Fred tried to masturbate thinking of Daniel, he couldn’t keep his erection.

  No, the time wasn’t right. Each tried not to think about it, much.

  Fred spends a lot of time walking around the Yaddah campus, looking on the sly at the faces of others. He doesn’t so much know he’s lost out on someone as he knows he’s still searching for someone he hasn’t found. He hates it here. He does indeed feel he’s the only homosexual in all of Yaddah. Then he is willingly seduced by one of his professors, who gives him his first case of crabs. Several months later the professor tells him he’d best be tested for syphilis, which he himself had come down with. By the time he graduates he knows the names of everyone in his class from looking at their pictures so often in his class book. He knew who went where to prep school and what city they were from, but it didn’t make him any new friends because he wasn’t much good at saying hello, or even looking up from the ground. He went to his classes, wrote his papers, took his exams, saw his shrink, and somehow graduated from the fucking place, but only barely.

  DAVID AT SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY

  Somewhere along the line I stopped having sex. I’d seen such awful things connected with sex that when I had an orgasm I screamed so loud, I scared myself. It was as if I were being punished or reminded, same thing. It hurt too much.

  I’ve read everything I can get my hands on about the many men like me. Men wanting other men, not knowing how to look or ask or love them if and when they found them. All the books say we’re sick. One book tells me to read another, and I do. They all say the same thing.

  I know I have been exposed to a great deal of experience and information. I don’t know how it fits together. Why did my father treat me this way? Where was my twin? In every classic I study here there’s a messenger of warning, of disease, of loneliness, of irresponsibility, of some coming plague, of some denial of humanity. Alone is the biggest group of people in history. Is my twin all alone now, too?

  Have Philip and Amos Standing and Mr. Hoover ruined my life? Was I cooperating? Am I still? How? Shouldn’t I be angry by now? I keep waiting to get angry. Daniel had a temper. Daniel could get furious at Philip and I’ll bet Philip didn’t do anything to him as bad as he did to me.

  Do I hate my father for what he did to me? Do I want to bring about reconciliation with my twin? How do I find a world where humanity is my goal? I never knew such a place. Would I even recognize it?

  Why do people need to do awful things? Why can’t the world get to the other side of revenge? All these classic messengers I’ve been studying never answer this question. They just show that somewhere at the heart of it all is something awful.

  This city is filled with handsome men. Many of them seem to have found another. I get cruised a lot. I’m not very good at saying hello. It still hurts too much.

  DR. HERSCHEL VITABAUM

  EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, HEALTH OF THE WORLD (HOW) GENEVA

  Many things have been happening in Africa. I believe it started many years ago but no one was paying any attention. Very strange illnesses never seen before have been showing up. The Congo River brings from the interior many people including from Germany’s Kamerun colony. I am told that loggers with chain saws are chopping down the forests and that much bush meat is being consumed. Léopoldville is the capital of what is now called Belgian Congo. In 1940 its population was forty-nine thousand. In less than twenty years it is four hundred thousand. Many people develop purple spots. The increase of these strange illnesses parallels the growth of the population. There is little establishment of anything medical or for disease, in any of this part of the world. There is no such thing as a doctor who has been educated decently. I write warnings to doctor contacts in all our participating countries and to my main benefactor, America’s Center of Disease. I hear back from none of them. This is, tragically, not unusual.

  Dr. Sister Grace Hooker and I meet and bond in Léopoldville. She is collecting samples of blood and of feces and urine, from both humans (prostitutes) and chimps. It is a bit difficult for her to get around easily. She is no longer a young woman. Her stalwart determination is inspirational to me. We are on the same what she calls “wavelength.” I will write a report on my site visit and send it back home to COD.

  By chance and good fortune Grace and I meet up with Dr. Jacques Pepin from Canada. He has been studying infectious diseases in sixteen African countries. I forgot that he has been one of HOW’s consultants over the years. He is a microbiologist. He and Grace understand each other. She is overwhelmed with excitement at what he tells us.

  * * *

  Nothing to fear but fear itself, Franklin? What about me? You, personally, had me, you know. Not exactly me, but a cousin of mine, the distinguished M. Guillain-Barré, who found what he calls a syndrome. It fucks up your immune system just like I do. Franklin, you had a fucked-up immune system. Did anyone tell you that before you died? Your people don’t even know what is an immune system.

  BOSCO WEEPS

  In the Everglades alligators eat some of my monkeys. Two alligators die. Three of my monkeys disappear. Three lost chimps and two dead alligators in two weeks. I am uncertain what if anything untoward is happening. There are very few vets smart enough for me to talk to. The Primate Society is going down the drain. Serves them right for kicking me out.

  OOZE IS COMING OUT OF HIS MOUTH AND NOSE

  “They helicoptered Olaf from Ocean City to some hospital in Baltimore. He had collapsed on the dance floor and we thought he was dead. There is no local ambulance and no hospital near here. He lay on the dance floor and we looked down on him and could still see what a beautiful man he was even though ooze is coming out of his mouth and nose. He’s from Norway and was on vacation here. The DJ, they call him Terry DJ, was standing in his booth and looking at us looking down on Olaf. He didn’t stop the music. The music played and played and nobody moved Olaf until the swoosh-swoosh-swoosh of the arriving helicopter was heard and it landed and some medical guys rushed in. Ooze was now coming out of Olaf’s ears too. He is lying in a big puddle of his own ooze. It was ghastly, a dark yellow greenish color. I don’t think I have ever used that word ghastly before. When the men in white came in with their bed on wheels everyone moved farther away automatically. Terry DJ finally stopped the music. As they wheeled Olaf out, you could hear people gasp and stifle cries of their own sudden fear, maybe even despair as in could this ever happen to me. I don’t think I have ever used the word despair either. But what was this really handsome blond man from across the sea telling me? I had just danced with him for hours. We had made love last night and it was wonderful. I had met the man of my dreams. He died in the ambulance. I went with him and I was holding his hand. His oozing turned into some kind of major hemorrhage that the attendants couldn’t stop, and the floor of the ambulance was swirling with this ooze that evidently was so full of some kind of poison that one of the attendants contracted something and died later that week. I wonder how long before this is me.”

  I sent this to The Monument, where I’m a stringer. But it didn’t run. They said it was “too graphic.” I said could they please reconsider because Olaf was going to move here and be my lover. They not only said no, they fired me. My editor said, “All you guys do is dance and fuck and you expect us to feel sorry for you?”

  FRED WANDERS

  I got hired so easily because representatives of the InterNational Press Association turned up at Yaddah just short of graduation, looking for “adventurous you
ng writers.” As Daily Themes was the one course I excelled at, and I didn’t want to get drafted, I grabbed it. It sounded exciting.

  At first I was a reporter on a newspaper in Riddle, Saskatchewan. It was freezing cold and not much happened to write about and the people weren’t very friendly to Americans. I was sent to Alaska, which was worse. They hated everyone who came up from “the mainland.” I got myself transferred, which sent me to a bunch of awful places, The Natal Forward, The Abididan Networker, The Carinso Spear, The Vorwaarts Messenger, The Léopoldville News, The Nairobi News—you’ve heard of none of them. They were tiny rags, published in English in countries where few understood it. The only thing they seemed to have in common was they were always at war with one place or other. Even though my country had not so long ago lived through one, I was amazed how brutal these local skirmishes could be. At first I thought these papers were to serve the few English-speaking inhabitants who found themselves in these distant outposts that were all connected to some mother European power. I wish I could say that writing for such and such a paper in such and such a painfully impoverished and bellicose part of the world was a challenge. It was not. I was not allowed to write about local or international politics or the poverty or anything critical about … well, anything. I could only write “happy stories about America,” none of which I presently knew. I was more like a calendar of events transpiring that most of these populations couldn’t attend or want to go to in the first place. And in each place I found that being a white man made me shunned and unwelcomed. I did not like that feeling.