The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  “But if that’s what it is…”

  “Well, of course, it could be and it couldn’t be.”

  “Half of New York has cats.” Dom Dom was now crying. He’d started dressing Josie because his friend was shivering. Dr. Herky had stepped forward to help, nervously, though also unable to keep his eyes off Josie’s lovely penis.

  “Cats carry diseases,” Dr. Gist said.

  “His cats are very clean!” Dom Dom was now bawling.

  “You must keep a hold on yourself, young man. Did you boys in fact practice anal intercourse?”

  “Half of New York practices anal intercourse.”

  The doctor sighed. “I guess that’s not very scientific either.” Then he warned, “But I predict if Paulus Pewkin and his idiots at COD are heard from they’ll use anal intercourse to string you up. Do you want me to look at your body too?”

  Dom Dom picked up Josie, who felt lighter than ever. He wanted to slug this creep with a stinging retort but all he could think to say was “So Josie’s dying from taking it up the ass from cats?”

  “Initial visit and consultation one hundred dollars,” said Dr. Herky uncertainly. “Where shall we send the bill?”

  “That’s a bit much.”

  “Yes, it is,” the young man agreed. “Dr. Gist is the best.”

  Dom Dom stared at him. “Did I fuck you or did you fuck me?”

  “You fucked me.”

  “Then you’re going to die,” said Dom Dom, leaving the small house. Poor Josie’s body was not going to live through many more doctors.

  Josie died that very morning. Somewhere between the NITS campus and St. Catheter’s Medical Center in Northeast Washington. In Dom Dom’s arms. As Dom Dom was still hoping to find a doctor who could give him a sensible explanation of what was happening to his beloved. Dom Dom himself died a few months later back in New York, not long after he told Fred all of this.

  Dom Dom had carried Josie in his arms to see Fred, too. As noted earlier, matters had not been comfortable for Fred Lemish. Since the appearance of that book in which gay life was so front and center, many did not wish his friendship. You’re giving away our secrets was a constant charge. The gay press had crucified both author and work. So had The New York Truth. People he knew crossed the street to avoid him. No, Fred had not been treated well since that book appeared.

  “You seemed to know everything in that book,” Josie had said, almost accusing him of being ignorant after all. Boo Boo Bronstein had called Fred as well. “I am not feeling well and no one understands why. Do you understand why? You always were Mr. Know-It-All.” And Bella called to tell him that Timmy Purvis was not well. “And neither is yours truly.”

  At least Dr. Homer had Fred up and back on his feet.

  THE NEXT PERSON I KILL IS THEO

  He is in much pain. I go into his room at the clinic and he’s looking straight at me. Even though he isn’t. His eyes are focused on the door like he’s waiting for death to come in. The doctor says he can see. “He just doesn’t want to see.” This is a stupid thing for a doctor to say. Of course he wants to see. How could he not want to see? Nobody would not want to see. The doctor is the one who doesn’t want to see. They are all assholes, doctors. They are all blind. I should kill the doctor while I am at it. He won’t give Theo anything for his pain. He says it’s against the law and if Theo doesn’t like it he should write to the president. So that is three people I have to kill. My Theo and the stupid doctor and me.

  CIRCULAR POSTED IN BRISTOL (CT) POST OFFICE

  Three male bodies, one crudely butchered to death and two dead from consumption of lye, have been found in a patient’s room at the Gardener Clinic, a small facility outside Bristol that serves the small Native American population in this rural area of northern Connecticut. The butchered body was that of Dr. Raygood Brimpton, an attending physician. The young patient, Theodore Scales, and the third body, also of a young man, so far unidentified, consumed the lye. Anyone with information that might prove helpful is requested to contact the Police Department.

  AN ADDRESS TO THE KINSEY INSTITUTE

  DR. VENTNER O’BURGEREE, A PROCTOLOGIST

  We basically defined the polymicrobial etiology of gastrointestinal infections in gay men. What we found was a Pandora’s box. They had everything. They had shigella, salmonella, they had campylobacter, they had herpes, they had chlamydia, they had gonorrhea, they had syphilis, they had warts—and I could go on and on. They had Entamoeba histolytica, Giardia lamblia, and other types of parasites. There was everything in there because of the sexual practices they were engaging in. Large numbers of people were having multiple sex partners and they did not use condoms. It was not uncommon to find a man who had had uncounted numerous sex partners in the previous week. Unbelievable. Never saw anything like it. Turned my stomach, actually. Thought of looking for another job, if this is my future. And it was anonymous sex half the time. That was what was going on in San Francisco and in New York. I was not alone in doing these investigations. Others were also reporting epidemics of intestinal infections in gay men. What are the anal-rectal infections in gay men? Gay men engage in anal-rectal sex, oral-anal sex, and they get contaminated with these fecal organisms, organisms from the intestinal bowel. We are calling it “gay bowel syndrome.” Dr. Pewkin at COD did not believe me when I submitted this report. Yaddah Med did not prepare any of us for this.

  MORE SKINNY FROM ANN FETTNER

  PART TWO

  (Long, but riveting, Ann Fettner, Fred’s expert on viruses, wrote this for The New York Prick. Orvid Guptl said that even edited, it would be the longest piece he’d ever published and The Prick couldn’t afford so many pages. So in fact this never appeared. Part One of Ann’s “skinny” as well as her personal story appears in Volume 1 of The American People.)

  THE FIRST ROLLOUT

  Okay, Fred, here’s more stuff for you from Ann.

  In 1968 the German drug maker Hohenzollernwerke AG figures out how to pasteurize blood to remove poisons interfering with its clotting factors. Germans are good at finding out stuff like this.

  [DAME LADY HERMIA: Also in 1968, Dredd Trish, Jr., graduates from Yaddah along with his “boyfriend” since youth, “Pinky” Birch.]

  Dr. Gordon Grodzo, at Partekla, in 1970, views this German advance. “It will be not difficult to get around Hohenzollern’s patent,” he informs his co-worker at Partekla, Dr. Sister Grace Hooker, whom I personally know to be a selfish uncooperative cunt who won’t share her data with anyone. Boy, did our government get a bargain when they bought a mind like Grodzo’s from the Nazis. Well, it’s now 1971 and still no one has taken up Hohenzollernwerke’s offer of sharing its discovery, i.e., financial partnership of some sort. No one wants to go into partnership with a starving former Nazi company. Greeting-Dridge gets in on this; to this day I cannot discover who did what, but it is apparent that G-D was calling the shots and even had a secret subsidiary (Hohenzollern?). No one at today’s Greeting is able, or willing, to talk about these early years of the development and release of “their” product. This product to treat hemophilia that will be called Factor VIII.

  With, it will later be discovered, 90 percent of its many millions of members already unknowingly infected with whatever it is that is shortly to come gushing down the pike, the World Federation of Bleeding Men and Women (BMW)—hemophilia rarely affects women, but they can be carriers and transmit it to their male offspring—puts out rather tepid requests that all manufacturers of what is now called DridgePlusOne (has anyone ever noticed that Greeting names all its questionable products after poor old Horatio Dridge?), that these pharms make all efforts to ascertain if their product is clean and has been carefully studied and all possible poisons have been killed. BMW is a chickenshit organization out of Chicago that is afraid of offending anyone even though most hemophiliacs already have been infected with hepatitis B (which was discovered and identified in 1967), from taking earlier versions of Greeting’s previous factormetric, called BaxxterDr
idgePlusOne. By 1972 Von Greeting (Von’s his nickname, short for Vonce), the suddenly appearing new president, is ready to roll his newly renamed crap out into the world.

  BaxxterDridge, the subsidiary Von Greeting had set up to make this crap, was the only factormetricator operating in America at this time. No other drug company wants to come near this with a barge pole. Factormetricating involves collecting blood gathered from all over the world and then spinning it and partitioning and reconstituting it into Factor VIII, a clotting factor necessary to hemophiliacs so they won’t bleed to death if they in any way get bruised, etc. We know now that D-G knew then that the blood they had collected from all over the world and were using to manufacture their new product and then exporting same all over the world was indeed poisoned by something. I often wonder if the sudden appearance of Von Greeting had anything to do with any of this.

  How could it not be poisoned? This product was manufactured from blood pooled from thousands, eventually from two thousand to twenty-five thousand donors per vat of blood plasma also from all over the world, including most notably from Haiti, where gangsters were exporting six thousand liters each month to the United States. The New York Truth actually did write about this:

  PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Jan. 26, 1972—Hemo Caribbean, an American-owned company here, is buying blood plasma from impoverished Haitians who need the money and exporting 5,000 to 6,000 liters of it every month to the United States.

  Collectors hired by G-D had long been circling the globe to buy this blood, particularly in places dense with poverty. People rush to sell blood when they are hungry. Brazil, South America in general. India. The Middle East. Africa, it’s a long list. In Haiti you only have to pay them pennies. And also in our country, from prisons. Every major lab has always had contracts with prisons for testing something or other. One doctor in Oklahoma contracts with a number of prisons throughout the south and Midwest for exclusive rights to collect their blood. Greeting was his biggest customer. In San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury “flower children” had become huge “donors.” In the United States alone millions of pints of infected blood are being collected, bought, and sold.

  And so some ten thousand hemophiliacs have unknowingly become infected with the still unidentified UC from taking Greeting’s DridgePlusOneAlpha Factor VIII.

  Von Greeting must have known all this.

  Hell, Boris Baxxter Greeting himself must have known, before he suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from the scene (Laddy, we hardly knew thee) and the place was turned over lock, stock, and poison to Von Greeting, presumably a relative. What is going on here? It is 1973.

  What proof do we have that the blood being used to manufacture DridgePlusOneAlpha was poisoned?

  We know because one hundred and fifty young men hailing from Partekla, Idaho, and calling themselves “Greek Warriors,” all dropped dead from something after receiving at Partekla an injection of “something or other” before somehow escaping and selling their blood at a local storefront for buying same. By the way, in 1973 a law was passed to subsidize the distribution of blood-clotting factors to hemophiliacs. Knowing that this blood had to be tainted because of where it came from, our own government, without demanding that the blood be tested and monitored further, colluded with the thoroughly corrupt blood product industry, and BaxxterGreeting was seeing to it that all hemophiliacs were, in effect, consigned to death. Who got that law passed? You don’t keep pumping blood back into the pipeline when it’s come from such sources. You just don’t. But somebody has.

  “The” announcement by COD in 1981 of what will become UC via our pals at the Science Department of The New York Truth labeled this new outbreak of death as caused and spread by homosexuals. I don’t want to get into this now but between 1975 and 1978 Dr. Dale Mulch, then at NY Harriman Oval (now at NITS), discovered that five women were infected, and for various unknown reasons his research findings were not published then, when he made his discovery and wrote it up and submitted it here and there and around and about and it was totally ignored, indeed not published until a year after the Truth article about the homosexual cases, which will of course be in July 1981. (Mulch now claims his cases were in men!)

  Please pause to think about this for a moment: had Dr. Mulch’s article been published in 1978, or 1979, or 1980, or even the first part of 1981, this plague would not be known irrevocably and so incredibly damagingly (too many adverbs!) as a gay disease. Nor was there any information available here yet of what was going on in Africa, where in Kinshasa, the Congo, in 1929, a black man died of what would eventually be mistakenly thought of as the first case of what would come to be called UC. Or, indeed, in Paris and Brussels, where cases of what would be UC in black women had been seen many years before any American case. What is going on here, again and indeed? Intentional? Bad luck? Dale is a shy guy and he isn’t very precise in detailing what happened, but all evidence points to him being a decent person; he just should have opened his mouth about his discovery of these women. But he didn’t. Why not? Doctors don’t open their mouths much. Why not? G-D meanwhile was on its way to becoming the largest pharmaceutical company in the world. Maybe it already was.

  DR. DALE MULCH: No! No! I made a mistake. They were male.

  GRACE: How can you mistake a woman for a man! What really happened, Dale? You had eleven infected patients by 1981, half of whom were heterosexual or drug injectors. I cannot locate any official announcement by you of these.

  DridgePlusOne is also shortly to be released into worldwide distribution by its foreign manufacturers and licensees: SeineLouvre in France, HeisslicheFrankfortKlippen in Germany, and TwinkelPurple in Japan. These companies are the chief international dealers of blood products for the world at this time. They work with the local Red Crosses and Red Bloods and Stars and Crescents and International Banks for Blood to get the blood out there where and when it’s needed, which is more and more everywhere and all the time. DridgePlusOne will then be sublicensed by Greeting to a bevy of American business beauties, among them Cutter, Hyland, Baxter, and Armour, which was owned by Bayer, all of which are ready and waiting to sell it. It is 1973.

  Since the end of World War II, blood is more and more an international daily necessity. Populations are exploding. More bodies are falling apart everywhere on a second-by-second basis. There are, and have been since the end of World War II, a number of things you can do to clean the blood, but no one wants to do them. What if, in doing such and such, you also did such and such that made it even worse? That’s the argument, anyway, exposing laziness and reluctance (dare one label it inhumanity? Why not; I hereby so label it) to do anything. But even with all the bleeders in the world, this isn’t thought to be a large enough market to be profitable to get so frightened and/or greedy and/or protective about. In fact, nobody really knows how many hemophiliacs there are. BMW (the org. of Bleeders, remember?), like your gay organizations, is not very good at gathering numbers to put forth. (We still don’t know how many gay people there are, and that, in my opinion, is wrongheaded and actually quite tragic.)

  It’s very un-American to criticize American Blood. It’s been a long time since Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale and gals like that, even Daniel’s valiant mother, Rivka Jerusalem, with her bloodmobile. It is 1974.

  Word is already out about that newest DridgePlusOne, subname Alpha. A number of bleeders have been and still are in clinical trials for the stuff. It works on them, and nobody so far has come down with anything visible. There is much excitement. For the first time in history hemophiliacs will have a blood-clotting medicine that will save their lives, maybe indefinitely. For the first time in their lives hemophiliacs will be able to leave their homes and not be afraid they’ll bump into something and bleed to death internally or externally before they get to a hospital. They can now lead a normal life. Hemophiliacs used to die by the time they were eleven years old. Von Greeting is interviewed on 60 Minutes and his face is on the cover of Time. The New Gotham profiles him with an Aved
on photo of him.

  Dr. Stewwinger Foss at Yaddah Medical School, the world expert in hematology, and Dr. Caudilla Hoare of the Association of Red Bloods, have said, “Nonsense,” more or less in unison, when the safety of the blood supply is questioned by anyone. Nobody dares to disagree with Stewwie Foss; he is like some ancient patriarch in the world of blood. He’s royalty when it comes to hematology. If he says the blood supply is safe, it’s safe, even when, as now, it isn’t. I wonder who got to him. He’s too decent a man to lie. So somehow he must believe it. How could he believe it?

  The folks at G-D take a different course. They claim loud and clear that the risk of contracting the suddenly mushrooming cases of hepatitis (which, unknowingly, almost all hemophiliacs already have from earlier infected plasma) is the price hemophiliacs pay to live a longer life. No drug company has ever said anything like this out loud. Von Greeting is obviously a case to be reckoned with. Employees at one of his subsidiaries actually die from what will be called UC from inhaling the vapors emanating from the boiling vats of purchased blood that they are supervising. What kind of man are we dealing with here, this Von Greeting person?

  So, no company in any part of the world is willing to prove this product safe, this product they are getting ready to pump into the veins of hemophiliacs all over the world. But then, no drug company is ever willing to guarantee any product safe. Isn’t that what FADS is for? FADS is supposed to be the main official USA watchdog over anything and everything The American People put into themselves. But Dr. Ekbert Nostrill (another bloody Lovejoy!), for some reason now the acting head of FADS, had in fact already given G-D approval to market DridgePlusOne. So now it can be called DridgePlusOne. “Alpha,” which indicates it is still in an experimental trial and unapproved, is no longer necessary to declare on its label. BMW of course and quite rightly doesn’t trust FADS either. The previous “lifesaver” for bleeders, something that came to be called, would you believe, Away We Go, had been approved after the Second World War; and it knocked off about ten thousand before it was pulled from the shelves. But that was before FADS. Or was it? Who remembers? Who even remembers what Greeting was named then? Because Away We Go was put out by Dridge too. They seem to have changed their name with peculiar regularity. Do companies change their names like some people do, to get away from something uncomfortable, like murder? Ten thousand dead is not an easy past to bury, but they did it and no one was the worse for wear. Except for those ten thousand dead hemophiliacs.