The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  I sure never thought Peter Ruester stood a chance. I have to say that up front. I wrote many columns saying as much. Not only that, I had never heard of any of the bozos gathered around him. Every one of them looked like they had bought themselves out of some kind of trouble and were still doing so.

  When the candidate is as unlikely, and as unacceptable, as Peter Ruester appeared to be, it is best to have your Kaffeeklatsch all bagged and tied way, way, way in advance. The more unelectable the candidate, the tougher the bunch of baggers required, and the more time and money they’ll need. (Who ever heard of Jimmy Peanut or Boy Vertle until they were practically in the White House? They were ready and waiting for a long time too.)

  Peter Ruester had been a washed-up actor reduced to making his living as a TV host and star of The Greeting Half-Hour Hall of Fame (of Tales That Made This Country Great). One week he was a cowboy with a dying herd of cattle and the next week he was captain of a Mississippi riverboat hijacked by gamblers and then he was an Indian brave running for mayor in a colonial New Hampshire village who saved a drowning blind white girl whose father had taught the Indian English. Stuff like that. He was always the hero, so he sort of had a sort-of hero image to throw into any sort-of kitty. The series was never very popular. It appeared only in “scattered situations,” as TV folks call the sticks. It is pretty fair to say that Peter Ruester as a serious candidate for president of the United States was something few of The American People took seriously. Why, he didn’t even have an hour-long program. Let’s face it: when he started running he was a joke.

  But a few people believed in him. Beginning in the early 1960s Peter Ruester constantly traveled around America making speeches to whoever would listen. He was the national spokesperson for Greeting Pharmaceuticals, and they really worked him off the beaten track, where no amount of advertising for their products could reach. I guess that if you speak to enough people—and Peter Ruester spoke and spoke and then spoke some more—a few are going to listen. That’s often all you need to start with. A few people.

  What had he told them all, in all those “scattered situations”? He told them America was the greatest country ever and they weren’t getting their share by our government. He didn’t say it with anger, but with the most disarming smile that any actor ever had. He promised them that if he were elected he’d see to it that they were all taken care of, “and about time, too!”

  Peter Ruester is then elected governor of California by that state’s “scattered situations.”

  His Kaffeeklatschers saw all this and now were ready. Now they have their man. They are greedier than ever for what they believe this country owes them. All leaders and their Kaffeeklatschers believe fervently that they’re overdue for payment on something. The more they already possess, the more they believe they’re still owed. I never met a billionaire who thought he had enough and wasn’t damn certain he’d been robbed somewhere along the way by “the government.” Peter Ruester would take care of them.

  Now, how to get enough of The American People to fall in love with Peter Ruester? No one knew he was an ice cube frozen in some unknowable place unreachable to all. The Kaffeeklatschers pumped in a lot of money, no question. Information on just how much, and from whom specifically, has been impossible to determine. It’s amazingly easy to hide money in America. But we are not about to meet a bunch of humanitarians who want the world to know all the good they’re doing with their fortunes. You do not get rich from helping people. And you get less rich by talking about it. In fact, we’re not going to see much of any of them individually, except for Buster Punic, whom they elect the front man willing to show his face in public. By their own choice they’re going to stay hidden. They’re going to do everything offstage. No fools they.

  They are all generic rich types or prototypes or stereotypes and they’ll all react pretty much as expected. Used cars. Chains of 7-Elevens. Soap opera and TV guides. Savings-and-loan banks. Networks of cut-rate drugstores. Loan sharks. Slum landlords. Scrap merchants. Liquor distributors. Bars all over the country. Loaded wastrels. If I listed their names you wouldn’t remember them or tell one from another.

  Each is rich and each is harsh and they stick together like glue because they have learned the Lewis Powell lessons by heart. Stay in touch. Stick together. These Kaffeeklatschers are going to get a hold on things, the “things” being America, and they are not going to let go. To look at them, and study them, and try to analyze them, you have to say to yourself, these are not top-drawer folks. These are not gentlemen you would be proud to know or even to hang out with. And these are not guys you want to mess with your country. It should be of never-ending amazement what a long run they’re going to pull off. Interestingly, Peter Ruester owed them everything and thanked none of them. Purpura wouldn’t even invite most of them to the White House for dinner.

  In your search for “evil” in the history of this plague, Fred and Hermia, just know that Evil is a tricky and elusive thing. It doesn’t want to stay put in just one place. Now you see it; now you don’t.

  Ten years before Peter Ruester was elected, the Lewis Powell I refer to, a Virginia lawyer, was secretly commissioned, in 1971, by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an independent organization whose mission is to fight for business and free enterprise, to write a confidential plan on how to take back America for “the free enterprise system.” Not democracy. Free enterprise. Nixon was about to tank. Goldwater already had. The women’s movement, black civil rights, student protests, antiwar protests, protests for or against everything “certain people” believed in: abortion, gay rights, equal rights, troublesome unions that never learned their place, everything certain people can think of, was happening all over the country and once and for all had to be stopped. And a group of very rich men had had enough. Nine especially rich families and their foundations started to fight back in a big way, under the insistent goading of Joseph Coors. The Bradley Foundation. The Smith Richardson Foundation. Four Scaife (Mellon) Foundations. The John M. Olin Foundation. Three Koch Family Foundations. The Earhart Foundation. The JM Foundation. The Philip M. McKenna Foundation. A few more of the Coorses. Foundations are great places for rich people to hide their money and from which to spend it.

  I call all these guys a cabal, a group of powerful men working secretly to get their way any way they can. America has made them all immensely rich. So they feel entitled. They will be joined by many more people in business, in industry, and particularly in religion. Every single one of them will feel entitled too.

  This is what Lewis Powell wrote in his famous Memorandum: “Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing only available through joint effort and in the political power available only through united action.” These guys got the message from the get-go. Peter Ruester will be the first real beneficiary of this cabal’s growing strength, power, wealth, and cohesiveness. They’re learning to fight together, no easy feat among so many strong individualists. For instance, just when your plague will be truly springing out of control, this cabal alone would contribute some $650 million to their conservative message campaign against homosexuals. These guys all know each other. This crowd always manages to know each other. Hate, and let’s not kid ourselves, it is hate, hatred of everything they’re not and don’t want to be and don’t want anyone near them to be, is a mighty strong glue. Democracy is not their bag. Yes, the Kaffeeklatschers and the Lewis Powell disciples like what they see in Peter Ruester. As I say, he’ll be their first big test.

  As Bill Moyers will write: “This whole bunch will very successfully take the richest and most liberal nation in the history of civilization and turn it hard right into a classist, racist, homophobic, imperial army of pirates.” Money does buy everything, just like Santa says.

  Lewis Powell, by the way, as his reward, got appointed by Nixon to the Supreme Court, where of course he voted, big-time, against blacks and gays.

/>   Jules Stein had put together all the Kaffeeklatschers. Peter Ruester was a client of Jules’s. Jules Stein had been an eye doctor in Chicago. An eye doctor. Like that guy in The Great Gatsby whose big eyeglasses sign hung swinging unmolested while Jay Gatsby’s world crumbled to bits, Jules had his eyes on lots of prizes and knew how to get them all. Dr. Jules Stein had started out by befriending Al Capone and becoming his buddy. When he went west like Horace Greeley advised everyone to do, he started what became the biggest talent and movie and TV operation in the world. Hitler paid close attention to movie studios. Nobody’s really written about the importance in history of movie studios and their powerful moguls. And how they shaped history, how they affected the way people wanted things. If you did it right, you could actually change how people thought. Nobody’s really written deeply and perceptively about Jules either. Hospitals are named after him. Medical centers. Educational stuff. Noble things. He bought his way into heaven. Jules the Jew, he was called, behind his back, of course. Better be careful talking about him, though, or else old Al’s buddies could still get you plugged. Jules didn’t think much of anything was funny. He was not known as a smiler. Like the Kaffeeklatschers, Jules Stein preferred not to be seen.

  And if Jules asembled these guys together for Peter, it was Lew Wasserman, who worked for Stein, whom Stein had made his chief agent against a world they jointly wanted to rule, own, control, using, of all things, the entertainment industry to do so, and with huge success, who put Peter on his feet to walk the walk. This most powerful agent in Hollywood turned one of his floundering boyish untalented good-looking actors into the governor of California, a very eccentric state, and held his hand all the way to the White House.

  You think all the names you read in the papers of the guys running the world are the guys running the world?

  It will be difficult to hide Buster Punic. His family’s too old and rich and has been around too long. He’s a big show-off. And he wants something out of Peter’s presidency. Buster’s going to be a handful even for the satanic Manny Moose, who will be attorney general, the visible guy who’s running Peter’s show. Manny, by the way, and you’ll be happy to hear it, is aiming to rid the world of Sexopolis magazine, which will shortly be banned for sale from all those 7-Elevens and drugstores. And you’ll be happy to hear that he is also going to eliminate the faggots, “once and for all.” Manny actually said that to me, winking. He didn’t know that my own son is gay, like his own. To “consult” on faggot elimination, Manny’s located this very strange man named Brinestalker, who says he has a way of doing it. I think Manny’s the scum of the earth.

  Peter Ruester wasn’t a completely blank piece of paper. He never said anything he didn’t believe. His message pure and simple and out front and never varying was: “I love America. America is the greatest country there has ever been in all of history.” And they loved him, America did. He wasn’t such a two-bit actor after all.

  And with and after him the deluge.

  He, under whose reign your plague begins, will pass it—the Presidency and the Plague—along in the healthiest of states. But we are getting way ahead of where you are, Fred. Just couldn’t resist.

  I have left one chap out, an unofficial Kaffeeklatscher. The multimillionaire J. Peter Grace. He was involved in Operation Paperclip—a postwar CIA arrangement to remove classified information from dossiers so that former SS members and nine-hundred-plus Nazi scientists could emigrate to the United States. Hundreds of war criminals would find employment within government agencies and at companies such as W. R. Grace’s chemical company, whose president was J. Peter Grace.

  According to Simon Wiesenthal, whose life has been devoted to knowing stuff like this, there will be, by 1984, ninety thousand SS war criminals still alive. That’s quite a few.

  And quite a few will be in America.

  JUNIOR’S LAST DANCE … WITH ME

  DAILY THEMES 101

  YADDAH UNIVERSITY

  PERKY WEINSTEIN

  Junior Ruester and I go dancing at the Cock Ring, a cute gay bar across the street from the Ramrod, another gay bar that’s not so cute, around the corner from Christopher Street, Main Street in the New York gay world, on West Street facing the Hudson River, in Greenwich Village in New York City, in the very same United States that Junior’s father is running to be president of. In front of the Ramrod, on November 20, 1979, a crazy man by the name of Ronald Crumpley, a minister’s son with a submachine gun, fired forty rounds into the crowds of gays, shooting eight and killing two, one of whom was the organist and choirmaster of the local Catholic church. Crumpley was a retired police officer who yelled: “I’ll kill them all—the gays—they ruin everything.” On this very night that Junior and I are dancing, it has been retrospectively determined that Ronald Crumpley was prowling this very vicinity with a loaded gun in his pocket. He even looked in the window of the Cock Ring. Well, this is the neighborhood to do it in—shoot us up, I mean. Gay men are everywhere. Especially very late at night, like right now. Two federal agents already assigned to Junior wait in cars outside, and two are stationed inside watching the dance floor, and for all of them the novelty of guarding this “twerp of a fairy” is already wearing thin. “I thought it would be a hoot,” one says to the other so Junior and I can overhear. “All it is is lotsa late hours and enough smoke to kill ya.” We all laugh. Then one of the feds says, “Well, maybe his pop’ll tell him he shouldn’t do shit like this no more and we can steer clear of this shit.”

  Junior doesn’t call himself Peter Ruester, Jr. That would be too bold, too show-offy, too look-at-me, too uppity, too full of hubris (if he knew what hubris meant, but he didn’t take Greek Tragedy, where Professor Knox taught us about it). He’s shy. That’s why I love him. I like shy guys. Who are cute. Junior is cute. There’s a difference between good-looking and cute. Junior is not good-looking. Most gay guys at Yaddah don’t go for cute, which is maybe why Junior’s unhappy here. Right now he needs people to think he’s good-looking, not cute, because cute means “gay” and the last thing he needs right now is for people to think he’s gay. He’s taking a ballet class, and that’s not going to help either, especially with that father.

  Junior doesn’t know how to talk about any of this, and he still doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up, but he knows he’s not only timid and without ambition but relatively talentless. “I can’t do anything, Perky!” He’s smart enough to know that. Like so many gays, all he has is taste. He can move a chair and make a room. He can lengthen a skirt and make up his mom. But nothing is satisfying him. He doesn’t even want to have sex with me anymore. “I am going to have to stop because I’m about to be in the spotlight,” he said on our way down here tonight when I suggested we cap off these last days of freedom by having one final fuck for old times’ sake, followed by a last dance somewhere hot. He finally agreed to the dance, because he loves to dance. “We’ll just dance in a gay bar. We won’t be gay in a gay bar.” Somehow he can separate out things into compartments. He says he got it from watching his mom. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to have sex with anybody for the rest of my life.”

  Yes, he’s tied in knots, which makes him even sweeter. Although such a confusion, it occurs to me later, is not so dissimilar to the one helping Ronald Crumpley act out his own crossed wires. Junior could never do anything like that, of course. But Junior will wind up putting himself in the same kind of prison for the rest of his life as Ronald Crumpley is going to live in. Well, not quite, but you know what I mean. You can tell I’m writing my thesis on Greek tragedy.

  But at this moment, at least, Junior twirls and jumps and splits to not a little applause. (“Is that who I think it is?”). Another twirl and jump and split. (“No, it can’t really be who we think he is.”) “Having a faggot son annoys my father very very very much.” He’s not only cute and confused, he’s sad, which makes me love him even more.

  “Be careful one of these days you don’t go too far,” his only fema
le friend, Ursula Ule, had warned him. She’s an older woman who he thinks may come in handy. He’s told her to sit tight just in case. Gossip columns are already zeroing in. Marriage to Ursula Ule? His mother says reporters are forever under your bed. “I just wanted to do it all before I got caught!” he moaned as I tried to hold him close at the end of the set. The Secret Service men watch him closely. “I’ve gotta admit the kid’s got guts,” they say so we can hear this too. I think it’s against the law or something for them to actually say anything personal to him directly.

  Here’s what he wrote for Creative Writing 101, Daily Themes. He was thinking, I might try and be a writer.

  Junior Ruester was not ready to become a president’s son, nor was he particularly interested, nor did he either admire or love his father with any conviction. If he thinks of him for too long, he gets frightened. He breaks into a sweat. He sees visions of his father’s long, rope-like penis, which has haunted him since he was a tiny tot. Yes, he thinks too much about his father and he is frightened of him. And of that rope-like penis. Which Peter let him play with when he was that tot and they took showers together or went swimming together naked in their pool. And which scared Junior shitless. Because he didn’t have one like that. And still doesn’t.

  So most of the time he’s still scared shitless. There’s no hope.

  He can pretend to love his pop. He’s good at it by now. He can show affection and concern in public. It’s one of the first lessons he learned from his parents about politics: always show public love and affection and concern for your family. And always smile. And he does. Even as a baby. God knows how he learned such a lesson so early. “Pop tickled my pee-pee.”